Writing Transnational History

Fiona Paisley, Pamela Scully

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474264006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Over the past two decades, transnational history has become an established term describing approaches to the writing of world or global history that emphasise movement, dynamism and diversity. This book investigates the emergence of the 'transnational' as an approach, its limits, and parameters. It focuses particular attention on the contributions of postcolonial and feminist studies in reformulating transnational historiography as a move beyond the national to one focusing on oceans, the movement of people, and the contributions of the margins. It ends with a consideration of developing approaches such as translocalism. The book considers the new kinds of history that need to be written now that the transnational perspective has become widespread. Providing an accessible and engaging chronology of the field, it will be key reading for students of historiography and world history.

1

Unfree Circuits and the Making of the Transnational

Introduction

In documenting the historiography of the transnational, we include both those historiographies which explicitly position themselves as contributing to that conversation and those which map transnational history by their very subject matter. This chapter focuses on the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean through the theme of transnational history as a history of mass circulation and the local co-joined by webs of empire that, as Tony Ballantyne has argued, operated both horizontally and vertically criss-crossing the globe. The following chapter will focus on the contributions of the New British history and its instantiation in Australasia. In the process of investigating a cross section of studies, we ask whose stories are told and why, as well as what might be lost in focusing on movement rather than location, positionality, power and hierarchy. The scholarship on the violence of enslavement and forced migration and how people sought to imagine and put in place lives free of such violence, as well as the forced mobilization of people across oceans in service of the labour demands of empires and capital, shape the historiography of the Atlantic World and the Indian Ocean.

This literature has helped create new intellectual grids for understanding the transnational: Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic argued that African diasporic cultures centred modernity precisely because of their experience of violence and labour. Slavery was not antithetical to modernity or a bad feature of it: it was the centre of modernity. The Black Atlantic is a ‘non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, ex-centric, unstable and asymmetrical cultural ensemble’.¹ C.L.R. James declared that slaves were the first modern people, suggesting that they were the first proletariat.² And Emma Christopher regards Derek Walcott’s phrase ‘the sea is history’ as a key moment in conceptualizing the site in which ‘much transnational history was lived’.³ The contribution of this literature to transnational history includes focusing on how the forced movement of people across the world shaped economy and society and understanding mobility as constitutive of a transnational world. This conceptualization of transnational history frames the transnational as both a story and analysis of broad swathes of movement across the oceans, not just as an expansion beyond the nation – as US historiography has traditionally approached the subject.

The chapter discusses the early theorizing and histories of slavery in both African historiography and emerging transnational foci on plantation economies and slavery in the Atlantic World; the transnational historiography of food, concentrating on Carney’s Black Rice; and the transnational historiography of the Indian Ocean, with its focus on networks of people and knowledge in Kerry Ward’s Networks of Empire and Clare Anderson’s work on convict labour. Manisha Sinha’s book, The Slave’s Cause, argues for the centrality of black transnational activism to anti-slavery, challenging the Atlantic-centring of much of the work on slave trades, enslavement and forced labour. We follow Margot Canaday’s helpful conceptualization of transnational history

not as a subject but as a method or a way of seeing … that method seems to consist of at least two major propositions. First, historians should cultivate a certain flexibility about following important questions wherever they go. Sometimes questions will not exceed national boundaries … And sometimes important transnational questions will not be about movement at all, as in Mary Renda’s trenchant observation that any fixed location may be itself saturated with transnational relationships.⁴

Early transnational conceptualizations of the slave trade and slavery

The histories of the slave trade, slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans thus have always been transnational, given that these processes involved the forced movement of people from one area, region or continent to another. In comparison, the historiography of slave societies has focused more on the local or national contexts. Histories of slavery have contributed, however, to a much more complex understanding of the concept of slavery itself by exploring the wide range of categories of enslavement and bondage across the world. Key works from the 1970s and 1980s contributed both to a meta-analysis of enslavement and to the specific, though contested, understandings of slavery in transnational frames. A classic point of comparison in the 1970s through 1990s was to compare different forms of slave systems and the kinds of resistance that they facilitated. Brazil, conceptualized as a vicious and large plantation system, facilitated slave revolts; in the United States, a paternalistic system of enslavement rendered collective resistance rare and costly.⁵ Whether discussed explicitly as transnational history or not, this historiography crucially engaged questions of mobility, culture and violence in different regional contexts, thus pushing historians to consider those factors that might be considered intrinsic to conditions of subjection and those that are closely tied to local context.

The transatlantic slave trade was the largest long-distance coerced movement of people in history⁶ and has thus remained the focus of scholarly attention for many years. As Paton and Scully note, there were many Atlantic worlds made through the ‘reiterative tracing of multiple and overlapping routes of communication and trade, and in particular by slavery and the slave trades’.⁷ Paton and Scully also observe that the ‘expansion of slavery in West and West Central Africa involved the “Atlanticization” of people who never themselves crossed the ocean’.⁸ The Atlantic World was the centre for some of the earliest scholarship which transcended the national and continues to be transnational in as much as it considers both sides of the ocean and analyses linkages between different societies. Eric Williams, West Indian historian and the first prime minister of Trinidad, pioneered the foundation of European industrialization as wholly dependent upon the transatlantic slave trade. Williams’s analysis underscored the role of the economic impact of modern industrial capitalism – rather than benevolent British abolitionists – ultimately resulting in the abolition of slavery.⁹ In the United States, the Atlantic seminar in the history department of the Johns Hopkins University was instrumental in creating the field of Atlantic History. Philip Curtin, in a series of books from 1972 through to the 1990s, established a rich vein of scholarship that considered the economic impact of the slave trade and articulated the rise of the ‘plantation complex’, a political economy based on large-scale enslavement.¹⁰

In 1969, Curtin published his landmark book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. The book was transnational to the extent that it covered both the Portuguese, Spanish, French and English trades, and the period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Curtin estimated that some ten million Africans crossed into a state of slavery in the Americas. This lowered significantly, the earlier estimate by Kuczynski in 1936 that some 14,650,000 people arrived in the Americas.¹¹ In the 1980s, the interest in numbers continued, with demographically oriented studies of the trade by David Eltis, Inikori and Rawley, with the latter two arguing that Curtin’s figures were too low.¹² In 1982, Lovejoy agreed with Curtin’s general estimate of imports and also estimated that 11,968,000 people were exported from Africa.¹³ More recent research finds that some twelve and half million Africans were forced onto ships to be transported to the Americas as slaves, with at least ten million arriving in the Americas.¹⁴

Scholarship on slavery has been shaped in a transnational frame by both an appreciation of the compelling similarities of enslavement and the ways that enslaved people experienced the institution in specific contexts. Earlier scholarship on slavery was less transnational than transhistorical. David Brion Davis was a pioneering contributor: in 1966, he published The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, noting that it was only in the late eighteenth century that European and American white intellectuals came to see slavery as indeed a problem. Paul Lovejoy’s magnum opus, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa published first in 1983 and with a third edition in 2012, created a transnational, continentally bound analysis of enslavement in Africa. His analysis contributed to an increasingly nuanced understanding of the varieties of enslavement in Africa and of its growing importance in various societies, so that in the nineteenth century it ‘had become a fundamental feature of the African political economy’.¹⁵ Miers and Kopytoff argued that in much of Africa, there were varying degrees of freedom and that slavery was generally far from the totalizing experience of American slavery. While not explicitly transnational, the analysis hinged on an explicit comparison with an understanding of slavery in the Americas as deeply brutal and alienating.

In their 1979 book, Miers and Kopytoff argued that the concept of ‘rights in persons’, which gave corporate entities lineages rights over particular people partly determined by matrilineal or patrilineal patterns, meant that slavery on the continent entailed a different bundle of concepts of ownership than that which prevailed in European and thus Euro-American societies. Slaves could be acquired through war, trade, pawning or adoption, with the enslaved individual starting out as a marginal outsider to the community but with the possibility of being drawn closely into it: in some cases, by even marrying the slaveholder. For Miers and Kopytoff, the crucial distinction was that in Africa to be free of ties meant to be alone and alienated; to be tied through kinship obligations was to be absorbed into society.¹⁶ Frederick Cooper’s rejoinder was that this exploration of incorporation was all very good and well as long as one examined slavery from the point of view of the slaveholder: for the enslaved, belonging was always contingent, a marginality encoded even into the articles of incorporation. As Cooper stated, ‘[e]ven where slaves were readily assimilated, they suffered a devastating cultural subordination: their loss of their ancestry’.¹⁷

The 1980s also saw an emerging conceptual focus wrestling with the nature of slavery as a structure of domination and the centrality of slavery to Western culture and capitalism. This work exemplifies the benefits of a frame far wider than the nationalist historiography that dominated historical scholarship. In 1985, Orlando Patterson, notably a sociologist rather than an historian, contributed a wide-ranging analysis of ancient, Atlantic and modern slavery. Patterson sought to define the essential features of slavery across time, arguing that the signal feature of enslavement was the experience of ‘social death’, the various mechanisms by which an individual was severed...