Transgressive Transnationalism: Griffith Taylor and Global Thinking

Abstract

Griffith Taylor's inflammatory role in Australian public debate over settlement, economic development and immigration policy has been viewed through a national historiographical lens. However a transnational perspective casts his career and ideas in a new light. His intellectual foundations in geology and natural history and his world travels inspired his global thinking. In a period of insular nationalism in the 1910s and 1920s his global perspective was transgressive, though far from progressive. Giving this figure of national import a transnational turn demonstrates the capacity of transnational analysis to invigorate, rather than supplant, national historiographies.