Transnational History,by Pierre-Yves Saunier

Reviewed by: Renéo Lukic, Université Laval, Quebec

Professor Pierre-Yves Saunier of Laval University in Canada has played a leading role in defining the field of transnational history, which has seen tremendous growth in recent years. His previous publications include The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19^th Century to the Present Day (2009), which he co-edited with Professor Akira Iriye, and which quickly became an indispensable introduction to the study of transnational history. A few years later, Saunier published Transnational History as part of Palgrave’s Theory and History series. An important and stimulating book, Transnational History has become a sort of manual of transnational history, a “little vade mecum”, as the author names it (12 and 141). Besides being a guide to transnational history, the book also serves as a historiographic introduction to the field, offering an overview of relevant scholarly debates and varieties of practice. The book opens with a tentative definition of transnational history, itself a much disputed issue. For Saunier, transnational history is first an approach, a perspective that underlines “what works between and through units that humans have set up to organize their collective life” (2). It is an approach that focuses on the interconnectedness of peoples and societies; thus, cross-national connections are at the core. Transnational history investigates the entanglements between polities, societies, and communities. Empirical research involving transnational history covers borderland studies, migrations, diasporas, human rights, and the environment among others themes. It differs from global history, which deals with the main problems of global change over time, together with the diverse histories of globalization (3). It also differs from diplomatic, or international, history, which examines the foreign relations between governments and states.

Indeed, according to Saunier and other historians exploring transnational themes, history as a discipline has focused almost exclusively on nation-states and regions (area studies). For far too long, non-state actors and their international networks were left out. Transnational historians call this a “nation-centred” perspective on modern history. Still today nation and state are central subjects of historical investigation, and this trend will likely continue because of the centrality of nation-states in domestic politics and in international relations. The period after 1945 alone witnessed the creation of 121 of the 193 states that existed up to 2006. This proliferation of new states has generated enormous interest in the writing of national histories. Historians writing comparative, global, or transnational history often comment on this propensity for studying national histories as a kind of “tyrannie du national” (139). Within this field, meanwhile, the majority of historians specialize in studying the history of politically and economically influential nations, even when they are comparing states or writing regional histories (118).

Infatuation with national histories further goes hand in hand with “methodological nationalism, a propensity of historians and social scientists to consider the national framework as the only valid unit of observation and understanding” (2 and 69). Transnational historians counter this methodological nationalism with “methodological cosmopolitism”. ¹ The major aim of methodological cosmopolitism is to overcome, conceptually and empirically, the major dualities that dominate national historians’ way of thinking: the global and the local, the national and international, us and them. For transnational historians, units of analysis can be a neighbourhood, or a few villages, or as much as a large oceanic rim (119). Saunier urges historians to “extend their gaze beyond, across and through nations” (2). If a historian studies the influence and reach of, for example, the American Declaration of Independence, Saunier deems that he or she needs to follow it “where it goes, be it Ghana or Venezuela, and not only to post-war Japan” (119).

Saunier dates the beginnings of transnational history as a field and an approach to the nineteenth century, singling out French historian Constantin Pecqueur (1801–1887) as the first to use the adjective “transnational” (17). In the United States, around the same time, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (best known for the frontier thesis) advocated a similar approach. However, it was only after political scientists Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye published a book entitled Transnational Relations and World Politics in 1971 that the transnational approach in terms of “contacts, coalitions and interactions across boundaries” (1971, xii), gained momentum. This is the so-called “transnational turn” as pointed out by Saunier’s colleague Akira Iriye in 2004. ² The transnational turn consisted of the study of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), non-state actors of all kinds, multinational corporations, intergovernmental international organizations (the League of Nations, UN), etc. In the twenty-first century, transnational history became an established subdiscipline of history, serving as a bridge between national, international, and global history. Historians and students of history will find in Saunier’s book an excellent introduction to the field and, more importantly, its practice.