Syllabus
Class Schedule
Note: The schedule below remains subject to changes depending on the number of students enrolled in this module. Depending on students’ needs and interests, background and language skills, I may revise some topics and readings throughout the semester. 7 October 2020 Welcome & Introduction - What is and Why is Transnational History? 14 October 2020 Transnational or transnational? OR The problem with borders and containers: Time, Events and Periods – Borders, Spaces, Places 1760s-1840s – The Great Divergence or Why Europe? Enlightenment(s) and Revolution triumphant or Crisis of the Old Regime 21 October 2020 Climates of the Enlightenment OR Into the Anthropocene: Climate
(change), Hunger Crises, Balloons, and a Volcano in Iceland 28 October 2020 NO CLASS 4 November 2020 Interwar Crisis and Opportunities OR Did Prussia have an Atlantic
History? The Partition of Poland-Lithuania, Storms in Havana, and
Baltic Timber 11 November 2020 Slavery Hinterlands: When Silesian Linen met the Caribbean and
Glasgow had a Sugar Rush 18 November 2020 The problem with ‘1789’: French, Atlantic or Global Age of Revolution –
Diffusion or Interconnected? 1850s-1920s – Into Steam and Out of Europe: The mid-century and late-19th century 25 November 2020 Poles in Paris and along the Ruhr, Slovaks in Cleveland: Hungry ’40s, Revolt,
Migration and Exiles 2 December 2020 A World of Commodities, (Indentured) Labour, and Inequalities: Why
Cotton, Whales, Jute, and Guano Matter 9 December 2020 A World of Novelties and Innovations: Internationalism in the Age of
Nationalism. Postcards, Congresses, and the Quest for a Global
Language 16 December 2020 Disease, Germs, Experts, and Infrastructures OR Why the Russian Flu
Killed Regionally and the Spanish Flu Globally 6 January 2021 Looking back and ahead - Concluding Discussion
Reading and Preparation
Note on Reading: For each week there is one to two * marked core reading for ALL to read as I prefer to have a common ground. Beyond that you find a short list of recommended further readings as well as a more general introductory bibliography as well as relevant journals below. 7 October 2020 Welcome & Introduction - What is and Why is Transnational History?
Reading
*Patel, Kiran Klaus. ‘An Emperor without Clothes? The Debate about Transnational History Twenty-five years on’. Revue électronique, 13 June 2017. https://www.histoire-politique.fr/index.php?numero=26&rub=pistes&item=32.
Patel, Kiran Klaus, ‘Transnational History’, EGO European History Online http://www.ieg-ego.eu http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/theories-and-methods/transnational-history
*Rüger, Jan. ‘OXO: Or, the Challenges of Transnational History’. European History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (10 January 2010): 656–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265691410376488. 14 October 2020 Transnational or transnational? OR The problem with borders and containers: Time, Events and Periods – Borders, Spaces, Places
Reading
*Clavin, Patricia. ‘Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in Global, Transnational and International Contexts’, European History Quarterly 40/4 (2010), 624-640.
*Jordanova, Ludmilla J. History in Practice. London: Arnold, 2000, pp. 114-138 (Chapter 5: Periodisation)
Maier, Charles S. ‘Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era’. The American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (1 June 2000): 807–31. https://doi.org/10.2307/2651811. 21 October 2020 Climates of the Enlightenment OR Into the Anthropocene: Climate
(change), Hunger Crises, Balloons, and a Volcano in Iceland
Reading
*Jones, Peter. Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature 1750-1840. First edition. Oxford, Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 2016. (e-book – Chapter 3)
*Malanima, Paolo. ‘Energy Crisis and Growth 1650–1850: The European Deviation in a Comparative Perspective’. Journal of Global History 1, no. 1 (March 2006): 101–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022806000064.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640.
Brázdil, Rudolf, Gaston R. Demarée, Mathias Deutsch, Emmanuel Garnier, Andrea Kiss, Jürg Luterbacher, Neil Macdonald, et al. ‘European Floods during the Winter 1783/1784: Scenarios of an Extreme Event during the “Little Ice Age”’. Theoretical & Applied Climatology 100, no. 1–2 (March 2010): 163–89. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-009-0170-5. 28 October 2020 NO CLASS
Reading
Christopher A. Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111/5 (2006), 1441-1464.
Green, Nancy L. ‘The Trials of Transnationalism: It’s Not as Easy as It Looks’. The Journal of Modern History 89, no. 4 (28 November 2017): 851–74. https://doi.org/10.1086/694392. 4 November 2020 Interwar Crisis and Opportunities OR Did Prussia have an Atlantic
History? The Partition of Poland-Lithuania, Storms in Havana, and
Baltic Timber
Reading
Healy, Róisín. Poland in the Irish Nationalist Imagination, 1772--1922: Anti-Colonialism within Europe. Electronic book. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Johnson, Sherry. ‘El Niño, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Alternative Markets in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1760s-70s’. The William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 3 (2005): 365–410. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491529.
Rothschild, Emma. ‘A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic’. Past & Present, no. 192 (1 August 2006): 67–108. 11 November 2020 Slavery Hinterlands: When Silesian Linen met the Caribbean and
Glasgow had a Sugar Rush
Reading
*Brahm, Felix, and Eve Rosenhaft. Slavery Hinterland. Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680-1850. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2016. (selected chapters)
Fuhrmann, Malte. ‘“Western Perversions” at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Galata‐Pera (1870–1915)’. History and Anthropology 21, no. 2 (1 June 2010): 159–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757201003796617.
Lago, Enrico Dal. ‘Second Slavery, Second Serfdom, and Beyond: The Atlantic Plantation System and the Eastern and Southern European Landed Estate System in Comparative Perspective, 1800–60’. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32, no. 4 (2009): 391–420.
*Raphael-Hernandez, Heike, and Pia Wiegmink. ‘German Entanglements in Transatlantic Slavery: An Introduction’. Atlantic Studies 14, no. 4 (2 October 2017): 419–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2017.1366009.
Ryden, David Beck. ‘Producing a Peculiar Commodity: Jamaican Sugar Production, Slave Life, and Planter Profits on the Eve of Abolition, 1750-1807’. The Journal of Economic History 61, no. 2 (2001): 504–7.
Useful resources http://slaveryimages.org/s/slaveryimages/page/welcome https://www.slavevoyages.org/ 18 November 2020 The problem with ‘1789’: French, Atlantic or Global Age of Revolution –
Diffusion or Interconnected?
Reading
*Armitage, David, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760-1840. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. (selected chapters)
Annotation
Introduction
As a continent, Europe is both a divided and yet deeply interconnected, both within and with the wider world. This is equally valid today as it is in historical perspective over the past 250 years. This survey module introduces late modern European history in global and transnational perspectives over the long nineteenth century. The module builds on recent scholarship on Global History on the nineteenth century (Christopher Baily, Jürgen Osterhammel, Sven Beckert et al). As path-breaking as these works have been over the past years in terms of opening global perspectives and novel ways of studying Europe’s complex and multiple entanglements with the world, they neglect one key aspect: the role and place of east central Europe in the world as well as the multiple ties between eastern and western Europe. The history of Europe remains, largely, written as separate spheres (either along national histories or along Western or Eastern Europe) or along historical regions and areas studies. This module aims at providing not so much solutions and answers but transnational perspectives on late modern European history and on how to write a more multi-sited history of Europe.
Following an introduction and an outline of transnational history, its aims, perspectives, challenges and opportunities more generally, the module addresses two broader chronological periods. First, the period stretching from c. 1760s to the 1840s. Second, the period from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1920s. We will study each period for three to four weeks. The approach to each of the two periods is NOT chronological and thus deliberately NOT a narrative history from A to B (in time). The approach is historiographical, thematic and conceptual. For instance, individual sessions will ask how to conceptualise and geographically widen Atlantic History and, more specifically, Atlantic Slavery towards a history that includes eastern and east central Europe. Other sessions will take the partitions of Poland-Lithuania in the late eighteenth century as a starting point to explain both national as well as regional and international approaches before trying to relate the partitions to broader themes such as territory, territoriality, imperial competition and empire building in east and west. Elsewhere we will ask how internationalism, globalisation, and nationalism interacted and why Esperanto epitomises both a transnational social movement and innovation (among many others) around 1900. Along such sessions it is the aim to think across and beyond nations and empires, as well as across themes that range from climate, to disease, to economy, and infrastructure.
Pedagogically this module is based around lectures as well as group work, text and source reading and discussion. Most sessions will have a lecture component of different length depending on the subject. This is followed by or integrated with text discussion of chapters & articles read prior to class. The overall goal of the module is to introduce students to transnational history along with complementing perspectives such as comparative and global history, to understand the development and emergence of the field over the past 10-15 years, to engage with scholarship in these fields, and to discuss its methods, challenges and pitfalls.