Abstract
Professional history, as it developed in the 19th century in Europe and the United States, was linked to the celebration of state and nation through research in archives organized by state bureaucracies. In this imaginative, learned, and lively book, Diego Olstein shows us many ways that scholars of history have been moving well beyond national frameworks. Historians are not only looking at how national histories are alike and different, but at how they are connected. With great verve and insight this book puts a dozen ways of doing so on display. In telling us about the past achievements of history across borders it contributes mightily to its future. It affords many pleasures. It is a tour through many ways of writing history with an amiable guide; it is an effort to take apart and reassemble a dazzling variety of historical arguments; it is a heroic struggle to bring order out of apparent chaos. It is a book of multiplicities. Toward the end Olstein suggests that one reasonable way to think about doing history globally is to be open to all the other ways.
But there are a lot of ways. This book imposes some order by proposing that there are four fundamental intellectual operations for thinking beyond the container of separate national states and a dozen identifiable clusters of practitioners of these four transnational arts who combine them in various ways.
Comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing (the ‘four C’s’): these are the intellectual tools for thinking history globally, but closer examination shows there are different kinds of comparison and connection and different kinds of concepts and contexts, too. Which means that there are multiple logics displayed in historical arguments. Although it is common to speak of the ‘comparative method’ and the phrase crops up in this book, too, what Olstein really shows is that there are different logics of comparison and indeed he shows this basic point to have been repeatedly rediscovered. Some scholars for example are trying to see if some process, let us say industrialization, repeatedly produces similar demographic or cultural or political change while another makes comparisons in order to identify principles of variation.
But where the story becomes particularly interesting is when you see that these various ways of thinking act in tandem. Whatever your purpose for comparison, you do not get there without conceptualization; you are, for example, going to be calling some kinds of human activity industrialization but not others. And you will find yourself identifying the contexts in which industrialization did or did not take place. Beyond this, even if you do not care, it will not be long before someone asks if separate sites of industrialization are interconnected through material exchanges or the circulation of ideas.
Perhaps these tools for thinking history globally are not so novel after all. Comparison, connection, conceptualization, and contextualization are fundamental aspects of scholarly imagination in the social sciences and their logics are not inherently different whether you are within or across national frontiers. You can compare various features of universities in Pittsburgh, you can look at the Pennsylvania context for thinking about the future of the university at which I am employed, and you can conceptualize what it means to be a partially public university in a privatizing age. So is there some special set of logics in thinking history globally or are we just deploying arguments on a wider geographic scale whose logical structure is not actually different from what historians or other social scientists have always done?
Whatever the answer, this book is replete with comparing, connecting, conceptualizing, and contextualizing, not just because Olstein has a number of splendid examples of historians doing things like comparing Brazil and the United States, connecting the histories of Argentina and England, or conceptualizing some transnational process like globalized capitalism, but also because the logic of the four C’s is vital to the way Olstein makes sense of what historians do. He compares different kinds of history, he connects them to each other, and he conceptualizes what historians are up to. He also seems to be putting the whole enterprise of transnational history in the context of a certain disenchantment with the doings of the states that he sees as having been implicitly or explicitly celebrated by national historians. But Olstein concludes in a tour de force by showing what the perspectives he has delineated separately and together have to tell us about one horrendous example of something states have done, the First World War. In any event, for Olstein, comparison, connection, conceptualization, and contextualization are as much tools that help us see what historians are up to as they are tools for understanding other aspects of human experience.
Olstein identifies a dozen clusters of historical activity to which he attaches labels such as comparative history, historical sociology, international history, global history, big history, and world history, labels that denote both categories and networks. As categories they mark scholarly identities but also suggest networks of interconnection among practitioners. They typically announce themselves via journals one feels one must consult, periodic conferences one ought to attend, professional associations one joins, and labels to put in job ads when recruiting new colleagues.
It is characteristic that Olstein is interested not just in how these dozen clusters distinguish themselves from each other, but in how they might work together to produce new combinations of perspective. And he is not overly concerned about whether all categories and networks have precisely the same markers: for example, not every one actually has its own journal, which raises the question of whether all are equally clearly defined.
I wonder if we could take this interesting analysis further. Is there not only a network of practitioners of, let us say, global history or comparative history but also a web of connection across these categories? To what extent are practitioners of each paying attention to the other? One could imagine starting with their defining journals or particular distinguished practitioners, then going on to study their mutual citation patterns. Could it be, for example, that practitioners of one or another branch of transnational history stand apart from the others and mostly cite each other? At points in the argument, Olstein suggests that the formation of world-system analysis was a catalyst for other ways of thinking history globally. Do we find other transborder historians citing world-system practitioners a lot, even if perhaps only to criticize?
This book is intellectually generous. It welcomes diverse subjects and approaches to the transnational feast. In its accounts of many paths historians have followed, we do not often read that something was a terrible idea. However, at points there are suggestions that criticism of the inadequacies of some approach to history impelled some other approach to assert itself. Complaints about national history helped impel a variety of transnational projects; complaints about mere comparison helped inspire connection. I would like to know more about the role of critique in general, of new ideas grounded in complaint about the old, about how ideas challenge one another.
And not just between but within clusters. One sign of a strong identity would be the carrying on of disagreement among intellectual comrades without abandoning them. Among world-system people, for example, there are significant disagreements about the recuperative capacity of capitalism; other world-system people disagree vehemently about how far back one should date the modern world-system; there are some who see other practitioners’ quantitative analyses as an unfortunate manifestation of ‘positivism’ (not used as a positive term) that is said to be in conflict with the spirit of the enterprise. But they are all debating these things in the same journals and at the same conferences. I hope someone writes volume two and takes up quarrels within these 12 families.
All 12 approaches define themselves by having in some sense gone beyond the individual national states but those states have plainly not gone out of existence while we scholars compare and connect them. How are those states conceived in these various approaches? The world-system people plainly have a theory of the state. By structuring political conflict around control of those states, potential challenges to the transnationally structured inequities of globalized capitalism are recurrently diverted into national politics and nationalist projects. So, for this line of thinking beyond national borders, those borders turn out to be pivotal institutions for understanding the long-term durability of the whole system. What, if anything, do the other approaches have to tell us about the states they are conceptually transcending? Or have the states just disappeared from view in some of them?
And why do there turn out to be precisely 12 clusters, a number suggestive of juries, apostles, and the membership of the French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety? There is no theory offered that would explain this, something that leaves the edifice open to the question of its completeness. Why not add, say, military history or the history of music or medicine as distinguishable fields of border-crossing inquiry with strong identities and networks of practitioners?
Finally, I wonder about the degree to which doing history transnationally has been facilitated by the new electronic technologies that simplify border crossing. Are they perhaps also blurring the boundaries between the primary sources that Olstein tells us have long been the bedrock of national history and the secondary sources that are commonly the stuff from which transnational history is made? Does this technological revolution also open up the doing of history to people who are not so immersed in the delights and frustrations of finding their way around some foreign archivists’ classifying system, that is, to people not trained in and not hired by departments of history? The clusters reveal significant crossing of disciplinary boundaries. Contributors to two of them are more likely to be found in sociology than history departments (historical sociology and world-systems analysis), whereas those that take an extremely long time perspective count archaeologists and natural scientists among their key participants. And I should think an exploration of the role of anthropologists would be rewarding. Think of the role of Eric Wolf in the early days of the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History. Thinking History Globally seems to suggest strongly that moving beyond national boundaries demands moving beyond disciplinary boundaries as well.