Rethinking Transnational History beyond Connection

This paper will identify and map out some of the dominant tendencies in transnational and global history over the past two decades—and some of the main reservations about it—with an eye towards directions that it might take from here. In particular, it will discuss the defining importance of “connection” and its close cognates (interaction, linkage, circulation, and flow) as subjects of and purposes for transnational history, to connect histories previously imagined to be separate. This practice was to both provide an illuminating backstory to a “globalizing” world, and affirm cosmopolitan values. Such histories reflected and operationalized larger discourses about “globalization” that were dominant at a formative moment in the 1990s. These histories have been enormously generative in launching new research agendas, organizing ambitious historical reconstructions, and bringing forgotten or neglected historical dynamics into view. But due in part to their emergence at a distinctive moment of post-Cold War triumphalism, unipolar U. S. power, and neoliberal hegemony, such work often demonstrated significant blind spots when it came to the unequal and unjust global realities. Indeed, the ascendancy of connectionist transnationalism occurred in part through the partial displacement of earlier, powerful and ongoing critical trajectories of empire history, diaspora history, and political-economic histories that studied connected worlds of the past with an eye to problematizing global realities in the present, as historical, contingent, and changeable. This work has remained a powerful current informing transnational history. But, as prominent scholars have raised questions about transnational history’s value, promoting its continued vitality requires asking fundamental questions about why “transnational” exists, and asking what relationship it might have to critical modes of history-writing that have inspired other fields.