Still, the history of empires beyond intra-imperial approaches and comparisons has remained neglected, an omission this panel seeks to expose. The paradoxical effect has been that empires have often ended up remaining, in their study, nationalized, and their borders not deconstructed in the ways that transnational history has impacted studies of nation-states by deconstructing them as a natural political unit and a category of analysis.

Connected imperial histories present a related but slightly different agenda: Case studies included in the panel are projects about port cities in late imperial China, French Algeria as a ‘cis-imperial’ space, settler-trader conflicts in Civil War-era North America, soil and oil surveying in South America and the Middle East, and decolonization in post-World War II South and East Asia. The panel interrogates but also goes beyond the dominant historiography of the topic concerning British and American imperial history. The common agenda among these topics is insights as well as limitations to study of empires through focus on ‘transimperial’ exchanges, a term that has surfaced only in the last decade or so.

At the outset of the session, participants will present short synopses of their respective projects, and then engage with one another and the audience concerning several common questions, which the chair will identify in the session introduction. How do they define and analyze imperial borders? How do they account for local particularity or nuance in studying multiple imperial regimes and/or anticolonial actors? What were attributes of important actors in their projects, particularly non-state actors, who circulated knowledge and/or objects? How did colonized peoples act or identify in ways that impeded imperial authorities or inspired resistance elsewhere? What did networks, webs, and circuits – concepts that have enabled historians to think about fluidity and reciprocity within empires, as mentioned above – look like in transimperial contexts? How do panel participants handle archival nuances and linguistic differences that affect access to and interpretation of historical evidence?