1

The Rise of Global and

Transnational History
Abstract: This chapter outlines the “historiographic
revolution” since the 1990s, with a focus on the rise of global
history and transnational history. Prior to the late 1980s
and the early 1990s, historical writings had been presented
primarily in the framework of nations or regions: American
history, European history, and the like. During the last 20
years or so, a more global approach has become influential,
along with a stress on transnational actors (e.g. races, non-
state organizations) and themes (e.g. migrations, human
rights). I pay particular attention to international history,
traditionally conceptualized as a study of interrelationships
among states, which has been increasingly put in the context
Copyright © 2012. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.

of, or in juxtaposition with, transnational history.

Iriye, Akira. Global and Transnational History: The Past,

Present, and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833 1

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
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 2 Global and Transnational History

There has been a sea change in the way historians understand, teach, and
write history during the last 25 years or so. This may be more a personal
observation of a historian who has been reading and writing on subjects
and themes in modern history, focusing on international affairs, than a
widely applicable generalization. But all historians, like scholars of other
disciplines, have an obligation to relate their work to that of those who
have preceded them and to locate themselves in the past, present, and
possible future of their fields. As someone who has been studying his-
tory since the 1950s, I feel I have personally witnessed and been involved
in some of the historiographic changes during the last six decades.
The recent historiographic transformation is evident in the frequency
with which words like “global” and “transnational” have come to be used
as part of titles of books and articles. Prior to the 1990s, few historical
publications, if any, had made use of such adjectives, whereas they have
since become common place. Such a phenomenon seems to reflect a sig-
nificant new development in the way in which historians conceptualize
and seek to understand the past, especially in the modern period.
Modern history till recently used to be studied in terms of the nation-
state as the key framework of analysis. The scholarly discipline of history,
after all, began in nineteenth-century Europe, when the nation-state
emerged as the key unit of human activities, political, economic, social,
and at times even cultural. History was a study of how a nation emerged
and developed. Political, constitutional, and legal issues were examined
in close detail, but at the same time, people’s lives, activities, and dreams
were considered a vital part of the national past for, as Hegel asserted,
there was no such thing as history apart from national consciousness.
Such an approach to history spread to countries and people outside the
West as they, too, developed as modern states and engaged in nation-
Copyright © 2012. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.

building tasks.
As an undergraduate (at Haverford College, Pennsylvania), I con-
centrated on British history, studying in close detail the constitutional
developments under the Tudors and Stuarts and writing a senior thesis
on the Anglican clergy in eighteenth-century England. In retrospect this
was essential training for a would-be historian. I learned such basics as
the reading of primary sources, the review of the scholarly literature,
and the writing of a monograph that might potentially be considered for
publication. Above all, my principal teacher (Wallace MacCaffrey) taught
me and my fellow students that the study of British (or, by extension,
any country’s) history was an open book regardless of one’s personal

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 3

background. There were methodologies and generalizations avail-

able to all students and applicable to all countries. This was particularly
encouraging advice to a foreign student like me, whose command of the
English language was less than satisfactory. Having thus been initiated
into the world of history study, I went on to graduate school, at Harvard
University, where I was trained to become a professional historian. My
field of specialization switched from British history to US history as well
as to modern Chinese history, but there was no significant change in
methodology or approach in the transition. History, in particular mod-
ern history that my fellow graduate students and I studied, still consisted
of national histories. In each national history, themes like political unifi-
cation, constitutional and legal developments, economic modernization,
and cultural pursuits (including religion, education, and popular enter-
tainment) were subjects of research, writing, and teaching, all pointing
to the emergence of the nation as it came to exist at a given moment in
time as well as to its subsequent development. Such a perspective may
be termed nation-centrism, or the nation-centered understanding of
modern history. Inevitably, the nation-centered historical study tended
to accentuate the uniqueness of each country’s experiences, ideas, and
institutions. A country’s past was a precious heritage passed on from
generation to generation and constituted the shared memory of all its
citizens. The historian’s task in such a context, we learned, appeared to
consist of exploring that heritage in all its nuances and then to pass it on
to readers. “Exceptionalism” was thus a tendency that frequently charac-
terized the way any nation’s past was studied and understood.
Of course, as would-be scholars of history, we learned that a rich his-
toriographic tradition existed so that one generation of historians would
not just repeat what their predecessors had accomplished. A professional
Copyright © 2012. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.

historian’s task was to make an “original contribution” to the scholarly

literature, such as adding new data, a fresh methodology, or even a con-
troversial perspective on a country’s past.
For those of our generation who were trained as historians during
the 1950s and the early 1960s, several fascinating shifts would occur in
the study of the past, albeit still within the larger framework of national
history. In the case of Chinese history, for instance, for a long time the
country’s “response” (or lack of response) to the West was a standard
framework for understanding its modern experience, but then some
scholars began to emphasize China’s indigenous ideas and institutions
that had prepared it for its modern nationhood. The focus on the nation

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 4 Global and Transnational History

as the unit of analysis remained, however. In US history, political devel-

opments interested most professional historians till the 1960s when a
“social turn” emerged, with scholars emphasizing the need to pay closer
attention than in the past to women, racial minorities, and others who
had not been the primary actors in the political drama. Social historians
were eager to bring these outsiders into their study of the American past.
Women’s history, African-American history, ethnic history, and the like
were among the most interesting subfields of history in the last decades
of the twentieth century. Rather than focusing on the “establishment,”
the new turn sought to incorporate the disenfranchised, the minorities,
and the marginalized as authentic actors in the reconceptualized history
of the American nation. This was still nation-centered history, but with
a greater emphasis on the country’s social groups and local scenes than
on national politics. But the “social turn,” if anything, accentuated the
exceptionalist interpretation of the nation’s past. For, to the extent that
social history encouraged scholars and students to examine the nation’s
history “from the bottom up,” as it was said, minute details and local
developments came to claim their attention as much as, or even more
than, broader themes and larger questions. The attention paid to local
history was an important corrective to nation-centered generalizations,
but it could also keep the historian’s attention narrowly focused. If the
larger national picture was sometimes lost sight of, even more so were
other countries, not to mention the whole world. Without some exami-
nation and knowledge of concurrent developments elsewhere, it was
easy to dwell on the local scene and emphasize its uniqueness. Cultural
studies that gained influence simultaneously with social history may
have accentuated this tendency through its emphasis on the text, i.e. the
authenticity of the spoken or written word grounded on each individual
Copyright © 2012. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.

circumstance. It was very difficult to generalize about written texts or

works of art because circumstances of their creation were all different.
At the same time, the “cultural turn” often implied a shift away from the
study of elites (in the history of art, of literature, of music, and the like)
toward a concern with mass consumption and popular culture. These
phenomena, too, were seen as unique, both to the local scene and to the
nation at large, reflective of national habits of mind, or “mentalities.”
Needless to say, neither in their research nor in teaching, could histo-
rians just deal with one country and entirely ignore other countries or
the wider world. A small number of scholars compared such phenomena
as feudalism and nationalism across national boundaries. This was what

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
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 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 5

came to be called comparative history. However, unlike comparative

literature that grew in a very short period of time (mostly in the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century) into a major field, often with its own
separate department, comparative history was not practiced widely and
often consisted of scholars of different nations’ histories comparing their
notes, so that their nation-centrism remained. It was primarily in the
framework of a country’s foreign relations, or diplomatic history, a genre
that had its venerable beginning in the nineteenth century and persisted
through most decades of the twentieth, that historians were obliged to
familiarize themselves at least with the decision-making processes of a
plurality of sovereign states. This was a field of history that examined
how nations dealt with one another through diplomacy, trade, and at
times through military conflict. Foreign policy was the key framework
of study; each nation had its own definition of national interest, which it
sought to maximize by utilizing all means, through peaceful diplomacy if
possible but through military force if necessary. Since no pair of nations
shared identical interests, there was always a potential conflict between
them, which they sought to reconcile through treaties and agreements.
When they failed to do so, war could result, and when it ended, the new
circumstance compelled the belligerent nations to redefine their inter-
ests, sometimes leading to the establishment of a postwar arrangement.
The process would go on ad infinitum so long as there existed separate
nations.
Diplomatic history, the field in which I wrote my dissertation, required
that the historian develop some knowledge of the countries whose
mutual relations were being examined. That would include multiarchival
research and an intimate knowledge of decision-makers in the countries
involved. (In my own case, the dissertation dealt with international affairs
Copyright © 2012. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.

in the Asia-Pacific region during the 1920s. Subsequently published as

a book, After Imperialism, this was essentially a traditional monograph
in which interstate policies were examined on the basis of published
and personal documents of decision-makers in several countries.1) The
“social turn” in the 1960s and the subsequent decades served to broaden
the scope of inquiry, and diplomatic historians began exploring wider
circles of people as they affected the decision-making processes: public
opinion, party politics, interest groups, and the like. The “cultural turn”
encouraged the study of popular images and perceptions: how people
looked at other nations, what they thought their country stood for, or
how they defined the national interest. Even in such situations, however,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
Created from helsinki-ebooks on 2022-02-09 13:38:32.
 6 Global and Transnational History

the nation remained the key unit of analysis. In the case of US diplo-
matic history, the framework was American foreign relations, whether
“American” meant the decision-makers, public opinion, or both. (It may
also be noted that most studies of US foreign relations remained mono-
archival, based entirely on English-language sources. Even books and
articles on Cold War history tended to be written without reference to
Russian, not to mention Chinese and other language material.)
Diplomatic history, or the history of foreign affairs, increasingly came
to be called “international history” during the 1970s. The International
History Review, established in 1979, became a major organ of the field,
together with Diplomatic History, launched by the Society for Historians
of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) in 1977. While the founding
editors of this latter journal chose to call it “diplomatic history,” the
articles it published frequently discarded this traditional phrase for
others, including “international history.” (This was a term familiar to
British scholars and students, but in the United States and other coun-
tries “history of international relations” was more common.) “American
foreign relations” probably remained the most widely used expression
in college courses dealing with the subject, notably in the United States,
and “international history” may initially have meant no more than
a sum of the foreign relations of all countries, or at least of the major
powers. (I, too, changed the title of the principal courses I taught from
“foreign relations” to “international history” in the mid-1980s.) At least,
the increasing popularity of “international” as against “diplomatic” his-
tory suggested that scholars were becoming interested in going beyond
examining how nations devised their policies and strategies toward one
another and in conceptualizing some sort of a world order in which they
pursued their respected interests.
Copyright © 2012. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.

The field of international history, nevertheless, was still focused on

the nation as the key unit of analysis. In terms of the larger world, the
“great powers” almost always took center stage. This can best be seen in
the fact that major diplomatic and military events continued to deter-
mine the chronology of international history. It was virtually universally
accepted that the world went from the Napoleonic wars and the conse-
quent “Vienna system” (the European order that was established at the
Congress of Vienna in 1815) to the First World War and the “Versailles
system,” defined by the victorious powers at the Paris Peace Conference,
and from there to the Second World War (usually characterized as the
breakdown of the Versailles system, although the Asian part of the global

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
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 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 7

conflict entailed the collapse of the “Washington system” that had defined
regional affairs during the 1920s). But, as virtually every historian noted,
the Second World War somehow led to the US–USSR Cold War, a condi-
tion of “neither peace nor war” and maintained by a system of “bipolarity.”
This was a chronology defined by interrelations among the great Western
powers in which small nations of Europe and virtually all countries and
people in other parts of the globe counted for little. William Keylor’s The
Twentieth-Century World (1983), a widely used and very helpful survey, fol-
lowed such a sequence of events, as did Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers (1987), arguably the best study in the genre of interna-
tional history published before the 1990s.2 The book offered a systematic
analysis of the ways in which the major powers had risen and fallen since
the sixteenth century, a history that traced the emergence and eventual
decline of the Austrian empire, the Dutch empire, France, Britain, and
Germany, until the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the
two superpowers to determine the fate of the world. Kennedy might have
discussed the possibility of the eventual decline, if not the demise, of the
Soviet Union, but in the 1980s such a prediction would have seemed pre-
mature. In any event, the author concluded by speculating on what great
powers in the future might come to challenge the United States: China,
Japan, a united Europe, or some other country? The book caught the
attention not only of historians but of the public at large, especially those
in the United States who were keenly concerned about the their country’s
future position in the world. In examining international history through
an analysis of the relative military and economic strengths of the great
powers, the book typified the nation-centric approach to international
history that prevailed at that time.
The study of imperialism that flourished from the 1960s through the
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1980s may also be fitted into this general historiographic phenomenon.

William Langer’s The Diplomacy of Imperialism (1935) was probably the
best example of diplomatic history writing before the Second World
War.3 As a multiarchival, extensive study of the imperialistic rivalries
from the 1880s through the First World War, it had no equal. And
its scope was global, covering Africa, the Middle-East, Asia and the
Pacific—but curiously not Latin America. Nevertheless, as the title of the
book indicated, Langer was primarily interested in following the ways in
which the great powers of the West, which were by definition empires
with extended colonies all over the world, vied with each other for
greater weight in world politics. This was geopolitics on a grand scale.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
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 8 Global and Transnational History

One studied imperialism as an extreme form of national history as each

country struggled for regional or even global hegemony. (Recall A. J. P.
Taylor’s masterpiece in the old genre: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
published in 1954).4 Even when historians paid attention to domestic
political and social forces that supported, or opposed, imperialism, as
Walter LaFeber and Ernest May, among others, did in their studies of
the US emergence as a colonial power after the Spanish–American War,
their focus was nation-centric.5 While there is little doubt that influential
monographs by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, notably Africa
and the Victorians (1961), as well as those by others who followed in
their wake, helped broaden our understanding of the origins of modern
European imperialism, we should note that they did not alter the basic
focus on decision-makers and their presentation of data in the frame-
work of geopolitical struggles for power.6
When such a nation-centric and the overwhelmingly geopolitical
character of the scholarly literature in international history began to
change is difficult to determine precisely. But it seems clear that by the
1970s, more and more historians were coming to view international rela-
tions not simply in diplomatic and political terms but also in the context
of economic, social, and, of particular importance, cultural develop-
ments. In 1978, I felt comfortable enough to speak, as SHAFR’s outgoing
president, of “international relations as intercultural relations.”7 The idea
that nations were both political entities and cultural communities and
so interact with one another at these two levels did not seem so quaint
by that time. In the late 1960s I had published Across the Pacific, tracing
changes and continuities in the mutual images that Americans, Chinese,
and Japanese had held of one another since their initial encounter (both
actual and virtual) in the nineteenth century.8 I further elaborated on
Copyright © 2012. Palgrave Macmillan UK. All rights reserved.

the “cultural approach” to international history in Pacific Estrangement

(1972) and in a number of essays written in the 1970s, and in 1981 I pub-
lished Power and Culture, a study of the Pacific War (1941–1945).9 By the
dichotomous title I tried to convey the sense that the key Pacific rivals,
Japan and the United States, dealt with one another during the war at two
levels, geopolitical and cultural, and argued that these two levels were
not always congruent. Cultural relations, it seemed to me, often devel-
oped with their own momentum, not just as an appendix to power-level
rivalries. The book was still nation-centric, but such a dual perspective
on international history may have had the potential to develop into a less
geopolitically oriented study of international relations.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
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 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 9

When a more openly transnational approach to the study of inter-

national history emerged is difficult to say, but it seems that some time
during the 1980s the word “transnational” began to be used by a small
number of historians. To cite a personal example, I used the adjective
twice in my presidential address at the 1988 meeting of the American
Historical Association.10 Entitled “The Internationalization of History,”
the presentation reiterated the importance of the cultural dimension
of international relations, but this was by then nothing new. What is
interesting in retrospect is that I seem to have used the adjective “tran-
snational” rather un-self-consciously. If I had been actually trying to
promote a novel, transnational way of studying the past, I would have
entitled the talk “the transnationalization of history.” But I was not aware
at that time that there was a big difference between “international” and
“transnational.” In any event, what I tried to suggest in this presentation
was the need to “denationalize” the study of history in order to explore
“historical themes and conceptions that are meaningful across national
boundaries.” I could have said “transnationalize” rather than “denation-
alize,” but at that time I must not have come across such an expression. I
did mention several examples like “human beings’ relationship to nature,
the definitions of beauty and truth, social justice, freedom against power,
and the struggle to preserve memory” as worthy subjects for historical
inquiry. Above all, I argued that all history was “human history” and
that historians must explore the existence of a “world cultural outlook”
at a given moment in time.
Such ideas, expressed in vaguely global and transnational terms, seem
to indicate that I was taking tentative steps toward global and transna-
tional history but that I was not yet aware how potent a force the new
perspectives would prove to be in the last years of the twentieth century,
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or that there was a sharp contrast between them and not only the tra-
ditional national history but also the existing literature in international
history. In 1992, I published a book entitled The Globalizing of America,
and followed it with China and Japan in the Global Setting in 1993.11 The use
of terms like “global” and “globalizing” suggests that I was beginning to
notice what in retrospect was the growing popularity of such adjectives
in journalistic and scholarly circles, but they did not result in any recon-
ceptualization of the past, at least as far as my own work was concerned.
The former was a survey of US foreign affairs from Woodrow Wilson
to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the latter a brief history of China–Japan
relations from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
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 10 Global and Transnational History

century. Despite such titles, neither book mentioned, let alone analyzing,
the phenomenon that more and more writers were beginning to discuss:
globalization. Initially, I did think of calling the US foreign relations
survey “Globalization of the United States,” but that would have been
the only place in the book where the term “globalization” appeared. This
was not a study of globalization at all. Besides, my editor told me he
was not “comfortable” with the term, perhaps reflecting the still exist-
ing gap between historical study and the scholarly trends in economics,
anthropology, and other disciplines where globalization had become a
subject of scholarly inquiry by the 1980s, if not earlier. A study of history
couched in the framework of globalization would have entailed a serious
confrontation with global forces that transcended national boundaries.
But my work, along with the bulk of studies published by historians in
the early 1990s, was still nation-centric, whether the subject be national,
imperial, or international history. Despite my call for “denationalization”
and for exploration of themes that transcended local boundaries, I was
not exactly practicing what I preached.
By then, on the other hand, a handful of historians were already
engaged in the study of what they called “global history.” They were
becoming keenly aware of developments throughout the world that
transcended and breached national boundaries, such as communica-
tions technology, the growth of multinational enterprises, and popula-
tion movements. And they believed that traditional nation-centered
framework for understanding the past, in particular the recent past and
the contemporary world, was no longer helpful in comprehending such
phenomena. Global history would have to be the way. Arguably the first
systematic exploration of the genre, something akin to a historiographic
declaration of independence, was Conceptualizing Global History edited
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by Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens and published in 1993. In the

introduction to the volume, which contains essays by eleven scholars,
Mazlish pointed to recent global developments and declared, “A new
consciousness is needed to help view these developments . . . A new sub-
field of history . . . must be created.”12 That subfield he would propose to
call “global history”—or, “new global history,” as he would soon come to
prefer to name it. He would distinguish global history from world his-
tory, a field that had existed for a long time as a subject for teaching and
for public edification. In Mazlish’s conception, the new global history
would focus on cross-national phenomena such as economic globaliza-
tion, migrations, environmental issues, and human rights, subjects that

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
Created from helsinki-ebooks on 2022-02-09 13:38:32.
 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 11

had been treated, if at all, in the context of national histories or else of

international relations. But, according to Mazlish and his colleagues,
these were truly global developments so that to confine them into
national or even international frameworks would be inadequate. Thus
from the beginning global history was distinguished from, and posed a
challenge to, the nation-centered historiography. The latter continued to
provide the bulk of research and writings in the general field of history,
but even they increasingly became aware of the new challenge and began
to seek ways to meet it, as will be elaborated upon in chapter 3.
The emergence of global history as an alternative to national history
had the effect of encouraging a number of historians to delineate “tran-
snational history” as yet another subfield. As noted above, the adjectives
“global” and “transnational” had begun to be used by historians by the
late 1980s, so that it is not surprising that some began speaking of tran-
snational history as a subcategory of, or a fresh approach to, the study of
history. The distinction between global history and transnational history,
to be sure, was often tenuous and remains so. In this book, therefore,
these two genres are treated interchangeably. However, if they were
entirely identical, there would be no need to use two different words
where just one should suffice, and so some differences in their objec-
tives and approaches will have to be noted. Most fundamentally, global
history and transnational history share two characteristics. First, they
both look beyond national boundaries and seek to explore interconnec-
tions across borders. Second, they are particularly concerned with issues
and phenomena that are of relevance to the whole of humanity, not just
to a small number of countries or to one region of the world. They are
anxious to confront the conventional wisdom that prioritizes the West
and tends to view world history through themes and chronologies that
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are only, or at least primarily, applicable to Europe and North America.

Scholars of global history and transnational history have continued to
exemplify these two perspectives on the study of modern and contem-
porary history.
Why, then, did some historians begin to identify their work as transna-
tional history rather than global history? In part this was because they
called for a transnational approach to the study of a nation’s past. Some
of the pioneers in this regard, such as Ian Tyrrell, Thomas Bender, and
Frank Ninkovich were historians of the United States, and they began to
argue, already in the 1990s but especially after the turn of the new century,
that the nation’s history had too often been studied in isolation from the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 12 Global and Transnational History

rest of the world and that its past could not be fully understood unless its
political, economic, social, and cultural developments were examined as
an integral part of world history, in particular of humankind’s emerging
hopes and fears in an increasingly interdependent globe.13 Because there
had been a strongly exceptionalist bent in the traditional study of US his-
tory, the writings by these and other scholars had the effect of reminding
their readers and students that a transnational approach to the nation’s
past was the only way to comprehend its legacy. Historians of some
other countries likewise began to accept and apply such a perspective to
their studies. At this level, therefore, transnational history was akin to a
transnational understanding of national history. The nation as the key
unit of analysis still remained.
Others, however, were incorporating non-national entities in their
studies. Perhaps the best example in the 1990s was Samuel Huntington’s
The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1996.14 The author was a political
scientist and perhaps for this reason was bolder than most historians in
asserting that civilizations and not nations were likely to be the principal
actors in the coming century. Although Huntington was forecasting the
future direction of the world, his emphasis on a non-national entity like
a civilization, coming from a prominent scholar of a discipline that had
traditionally focused on the nation as the unit of analysis even more con-
sistently than the study of history, made a profound impact on historians
as well as on others. The assertion that the coming global conflict was
likely to pit Islam and other civilizations against the Christian civilization
of the West sounded novel to those who had been accustomed to think of
world crises in terms of clashes among powers, not religions. Historians
knowledgeable about the Middle-East or Asia, however, were quick
to point out that there was much that Christianity and other religions,
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notably Islam, shared, and that it would be wrong to view the develop-
ment of civilizations in the framework of the West versus the non-West.
They noted, on the contrary, that all regions of the world had developed
through their interactions and intermixing so that there was nothing pure
and unchanging about Christianity or Western civilization, or for that
matter any religion or civilization. One sees here the critique of the tra-
ditional West-centric scholarship that grew more vocal during the 1990s
and constituted part of the historiographic transformation of the decade.
Civilizations and religions, however, were not the only examples
of non-national entities to which historians were increasingly paying
attention. There were other identities of people, including races, tribes,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 13

and ethnic communities that were not interchangeable with nations and
had their own agendas. The traditional historiography had treated such
groups in the context of national affairs, but now they began to be seen as
having their unique histories that were not identical with, or subsumable
under, national histories. Indeed, their past could best be understood if
they were recognized as transnational existences. In a way the emergence
of “whiteness studies” at the turn of the century, unlike “black studies”
that had primarily meant “Afro-American studies,” suggests that race
was beginning to be seen as a subject that should be examined across
national boundaries. Noticeable, too, was a renewed interest on the part
of scholars to consider racism a transnational phenomenon, viewing the
relationship between various races not simply as a national problem.
By the turn of the new century, these and other non-national entities
were beginning to be seen as equally important components of history
as nation-states.
By coincidence, an increasing number of historians were turning their
attention to what political scientists and sociologists had identified as
non-state actors. Eric Hobsbawm’s 1994 publication, The Age of Extremes,
a survey of “the short twentieth century” (from 1914 to 1991), discussed
“transnational firms” or what some called “multinational corporations”
as a key aspect of the “increasingly transnational economy” that had
begun to emerge in the 1960s.15 It may well be that as a historian trained
in Marxist historiography, Hobsbawm had been more aware than most
others of worldwide economic phenomena. Indeed, Marxist theory had
always stressed the cross-border solidarity of capitalists, workers, and
other classes and in that sense been an inspiration to those seeking to
get away from the nation-centric framework of historical study. It must
be noted, at the same time, that as Marxism turned into Leninism, and
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Leninism into Maoism, the classical formulation of global linkages had

often to compete with, and even been superseded by, nationalistic per-
spectives. It would be fair to say, then, that while potentially a pioneering
conception of transnationalism, Marxism did not directly lead to the
transnational historiography of the recent decades.
In any event, multinational enterprises were non-state actors in
that they were not interchangeable with any given state but combined
the capital, labor, and markets of many countries. They were profit
oriented, and in order to increase productivity and market share, they
were increasingly “out-sourcing” their products as well as service.
“Out-sourcing,” sometimes called “off-shore procurement,” was a typical

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/helsinki-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1051795.
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 14 Global and Transnational History

instance of a globalizing economy. Although multinational enterprises

were never completely free of regulations and taxes imposed by states,
they functioned with their own agendas and momentums. Even in a
government-regulated economy such as China’s, they were not identical
with the governmental apparatus and so qualified as non-state actors,
with greater freedom to work for profit than the majority of the popula-
tion who were not involved in such enterprises. It is not surprising that,
just as historians were beginning to take the phenomenon of globaliza-
tion seriously as a theme in recent and current history, they were becom-
ing fascinated by the emerging visibility and influence of multinational
enterprises as non-state actors.
Likewise, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) began to attract
the attention of historians. Political scientists had been studying these
institutions since at least the 1970s, but historians had been rather
slow to turn their attention to them, especially to international non-
governmental organizations (INGOs). To be sure, important historical
studies of peace movements, women’s rights advocacy, educational
exchange programs, and other activities in which private organizations
in various countries had played major roles had been published before
the 1990s, but most of them were thematic treatments and were not trea-
tises on non-state actors as such. Historians of international relations,
in particular, had virtually ignored INGOs. (For that matter, they had
not even incorporated intergovernmental organizations—IGO—such as
the League of Nations and the United Nations into their work except
as arenas in which big-power diplomacy took place.) But the awareness
grew that one could never develop a fuller understanding of world affairs
so long as one focused on individual states and unless both IGOs and
INGOs were brought into the picture. Part of this was because “world
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affairs” involved such issues as environmentalism, prevention of dis-

eases, human rights, and cultural exchange—all transnational subjects in
which NGOs had been seriously interested. To cite a personal example,
when I began collecting data in the early 1990s on international edu-
cational exchange and related programs for the enhancement of what I
called “cultural internationalism,” I was struck with the roles played by
INGOs whose number and scope of activities seemed to have grown
impressively throughout the twentieth century. I eventually published a
small book on the subject (Global Community)16. But I was far from being
alone. A growing number of historians were also beginning to pay atten-
tion to INGOs in their studies of international affairs.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 15

Multinational enterprises, non-governmental organizations, religious

establishments, and many other institutions are all non-national, non-
state entities, and for this reason the term “transnational” may be applied
to them. They exist as separate identities from states and nations, and
they establish connections with one another across national boundaries.
In order to stress that these, along with civilizations, races, and other cat-
egories that are not identifiable with separate nations, the examination
of their history would deserve the term “transnational history.” If global
history considers humans as a universal category of being, concerned
with the question of what it means to be human, transnational history
looks at individuals in various contexts, including nations.
The transnational approach to the study of history, in other words,
does not deny the existence of nations and the roles they play in con-
tributing to defining the world at a given moment in time. The intricate
interrelationship between nations and transnational existences, between
national preoccupations and transnational agendas, or between national
interests and transnational concerns is of fundamental importance to
the study of transnational history. This may be seen in the relationship
between international history and transnational history.
As noted earlier, international history deals with relations among
nations as sovereign entities. World affairs are the sum of all such
interstate relations, and the globe is envisaged as the arena for the
interplay of independent nations. Transnational history, in contrast,
focuses on cross-national connections, whether through individuals,
non-national identities, and non-state actors, or in terms of objectives
shared by people and communities regardless of their nationality. The
globe is seen as being made up of these communities that establish
connections with one another quite apart from interstate relations.
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International and transnational phenomena may sometimes overlap, but

often they come into conflict. For instance, historians have had trouble
understanding why Woodrow Wilson, the leading champion of national
self-determination, rejected the idea of global racial equality, as shown
when he refused to consider an additional statement in the preamble of
the League of Nations charter that would affirm that principle. But we
would be able to understand such a seemingly contradictory stance by
Wilson if we recognized that he was an internationalist but was never
a transnationalist. In other words, his vision of an ideal world was one
in which all people aspiring to national independence would be given
a chance, but never one in which all races were given the same rights.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 16 Global and Transnational History

Wilson had an internationalist vision, but he was a nationalist and an

anti-transnationalist when it came to conceptualizing a globe in which
all races enjoyed equal freedom. History is full of examples of such a dis-
parity between internationalism and transnationalism, a phenomenon
one could only comprehend by introducing the idea of a transnationally
defined world, as against a nation-based international order.
On the other hand, international and transnational affairs can, and
have sometimes come together. Educational and cultural exchange
programs may offer a good example. In most cases, initiatives for pro-
moting understanding by bringing individuals, works of art, or theater
groups into contact across borders come from private sources, such
as educational institutions, museums, and foundations, but official
agencies, too, frequently become involved, as do intergovernmental
organizations. As I tried to document in Cultural Internationalism and
World Order (1997), there was a vigorous engagement with cultural, as
against political, internationalism since the late nineteenth century, and
a large number of national as well as international organizations, both
public and private, played their roles.17 In such instances, it is impossible
to distinguish international and transnational agendas. (I might have
entitled the book “cultural transnationalism and international order,”
which might have better described the coincidence of transnational and
international endeavors in the field of cultural exchange.) Likewise, the
environmental movement can be both international and transnational.
A world conference on the environment may be attended by representa-
tives of both governments and of non-governmental organizations. A
history of environmentalism, then, would have to be understood both
in international and transnational frameworks. These two frameworks
would be difficult to separate, but it would be wrong to merge them into
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one, for that would make it easy to obscure the important roles played
by numerous NGOs and private individuals who dedicate themselves to
the cause. In other words, international history has its own chronology,
and transnational history another. An event such as the UN-sponsored
conference on the natural environment convened in Helsinki in 1972
may have been a minor footnote to the geopolitical story of the Cold
War, but in transnational history, it was a landmark, a defining moment
in the history of environmentalism. In the chronicle of international his-
tory, moreover, the year 1972 may best be remembered as a major turn-
ing point in US relations with the People’s Republic of China, as seen in
President Richard Nixon’s trip to Shanghai in February. In the history of

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Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 The Rise of Global and Transnational History 17

the Cold War, the same year may also be seen as marking a significant
phase in the reduction of tensions, the year when Nixon met with the
Soviet leaders for limiting the two countries’ nuclear arsenals. The tran-
snational significance of the Helsinki conference on the environment
was of a different character and cannot be submerged under the story
of the Cold War. An interesting question would be to explore the con-
nections between these two sets of historic events, one international and
the other transnational. What impact did the US–PRC rapprochement
or the US–USSR détente have on the natural environment and the envi-
ronmental movement? Conversely, can it be said that the transnational
momentum as exemplified by the Helsinki meeting made an impact on
geopolitical developments? The latter interpretation would be possible
if we note that environmental questions have remained serious for all
nations and have compelled the “powers” to seek to find areas of coop-
eration and accommodation even as they may pursue their respective
geopolitical agendas. Through some such inquiries and observations, we
should be able to amplify our understanding of the past and go beyond
standard accounts of historical developments.
A crucial contribution of transnational history, then, would be to
enrich our understanding of both national history and international his-
tory. Global history, of course, serves the same purpose, so that together
the global and transnational perspectives challenge the existing histori-
ography. It is in this sense that we may speak of a major historiographic
transformation since the 1990s.

Notes
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1 Akira Iriye, After Imperialism: The Search for a New Order in the Far East,
1921–1931 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965).
2 William R. Keylor, The Twentieth-Century World: An International History, first
edition (New York, 1983); Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:
Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 To 2000 (New York, 1987).
3 William L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1890–1902 (New York, 1935).
4 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954).
5 Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansionism,
1860–1898 (Ithaca, 1963); Ernest R. May, American Imperialism: A Speculative
Essay (New York, 1968)
6 Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the
Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism (London, 1961).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

Iriye, A.. Global and Transnational History : The Past, Present, and Future, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2012. ProQuest
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 18 Global and Transnational History

7 Akira Iriye, “Culture and Power: International Relations as Intercultural

Relations,” Diplomatic History, spring 1979, pp. 115–128.
8 Akira Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations
(New York, 1967).
9 Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese-American Expansion, 1897–1911
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1972); Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-
American War, 1941–1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981).
10 Akira Iriye, “The Internationalization of History,” American Historical Review,
February 1989, pp. 1–10.
11 Akira Iriye, The Globalizing of America: American Foreign Relations, 1913–1945
(New York, 1992); Akira Iriye, China and Japan in the Global Setting
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993).
12 Bruce Mazlish and Ralph Buultjens, eds, Conceptualizing Global History
(Boulder, Colorado, 1993), p. 2. See also A. G. Hopkins, ed., Global History:
Interactions between the Universal and the Local (New York, 2006), pp. 3–7.
13 Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,”
American Historical Review, October 1991; Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation:
United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (New York, 2007); Thomas
Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York,
2006); Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900
(Chicago, 1999). For a systematic discussion of the term “transnational” in
the scholarly literature, see Pierre Yves Saunier, “Transnational,” in Akira
Iriye and Pierre Yves Saunier, eds, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational
History (London, 2009).
14 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York, 1996).
15 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New
York, 1994), p. 277.
16 Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the
Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, 2002).
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17 Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, 1997).

DOI: 10.1057/9781137299833

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