Response to a bunch of articles about borderlands and transnational histories
August 27, 2009
Within the discipline of history, the seemingly never-ending debates over who is allowed to do what kind of history, which methodologies are the most legitimate, and which sub-field holds ownership over which topics are often tiresome and more than occasionally pointless. We are all, in our own ways, historians. Can’t we simply do history and not worry about the slot into which we or our works fit? After all, some of the most groundbreaking books are precisely those that cross over these artificial boundaries. Richard White’s The Middle Ground comes to mind: is it western history? Native American history? Colonial history? Borderlands history? Yes. It is. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis is similarly schizophrenic (in the most positive way). It is at once environmental, cultural, economic, western, frontier, and urban history. What is the sense of trying to tie such works to a single category?
Thus it was with some trepidation that I approached this week’s readings. Since categories themselves are at best marginally helpful, rancorous or even cordial debates over their meaning are surely no better. As Sven Beckert writes, “I am not sure that it is worthwhile spending much time on the finer points of these distinctions…why does it seem that more printed pages have been dedicated to discussion on the need for and methodology of transnational history than to empirical research?”[1] In the end, I think the two fields discussed, borderlands and transnational histories, are essentially self-explanatory. The former involves the study of the areas adjacent to a border of some sort between two or more groupings of humans, however organized. The latter is history that includes two or more nations at some level, and the interactions between and among them. It need not be any more complicated than this, though it can certainly become so if we let it.
I was pleased to find that much of the reading did not limit itself to searches for definitions or the precise construction of categories of study. Rather, the authors were at their best when discussing the need to move beyond the limitations inherent in nationally-oriented studies. Richard White’s piece, in particular, makes a powerful case for the ways in which the idea of the nation has come to dominate virtually all historical narratives within a given nation (often despite the authors’ best intentions). Indeed, that the rise of history as a professional endeavor was inextricably tied to the rise of the modern nation-state is a recurring theme in these readings, and a point I had not previously considered. This, in turn, suggests the sheer bulk of the wall against which these transnationalist and borderlander heads are beating (and perhaps grants greater legitimacy to their need for precise definitions). Yet White also cautions against the wholesale replacement of one limiting framework (the nation) with another (the global). Thomas Bender makes the same point, but as a western historian myself, I will privilege White’s words here: “The real choice is not finding the single historical scale that reflects the world in which we now live, but instead understanding the multiple scales upon which….lives have been lived and how such scales have merged and intersected.”[2] In the end, this seems like a common-sense and extremely necessary adjustment to the profession. For some topics, a national scale may certainly remain the best approach, while others may require different or multiple scales. The trick is to find the best scale or scales for each topic, those that allow the story to be told in the most meaningful and enlightening way. I will end with a half-flippant and half-serious question: didn’t Braudel essentially make this point about fifty years ago?
[1] “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (December, 2006), 1446.
[2] Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (Decemeber, 1999), 986.
