Book Review: Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History

Abstract

Transnational history has become something of a phenomenon in the Anglophone world, and Australian historians have followed their international counterparts in their enthusiasm for the potential of its broader, borderless, perspectives to enhance national stories. This volume brings together some of our most respected historians to consider the impact of the transnational on Australian history making, on how historians approach their craft, the questions they ask, the sources they seek and how they utilise them. In an interconnected world where ‘national’ integrity has been challenged by technologies promoting the apparently seamless flow of information, finance and labour, it was always likely that historians would be attracted by transnationalism’s implications for the discipline; the challenges of, as Mae Ngai (2012, quoted by Macintyre, 134) puts it, reimagining histories from ‘the outside in’, a reorientation comparable to social history’s commitment to history from the ‘bottom up’. Historians have refocused their interests on global ‘webs of connection’ (to use Tony Ballantyne’s imagery) in an effort to ‘recover the movement of people, ideas, ideologies, commodities and information across the borders of the nation states’ (Ballantyne 2012, 26). Such a re-conception has been characterised as a historiographical ‘turn’ in much the same way as earlier ‘turns’ towards social, cultural and gender histories. Show more