Nineteenth-Century Transnational History

Our core activity is research into and teaching about historical phenomena which call for an approach extending beyond the perspective of a single nation state or states. Our foci lie in the history of colonialism and capitalism, in exploring the networks created and driven by migration, and in the history of childhoods. We proceed from the assumption that the nineteenth century’s mobility and migration, money and economic systems, knowledge and mentalities, and products and actors were subject, to varying degrees, to local, national, imperial or colonial, and global conditions and influences.

Taking a transnational view enables us to access an approach centring on circulation, communication and the transcending of boundaries without failing to perceive the presence of their supposed opposites, stasis, an inside view, and the manifestation of boundaries. Analogously, our approach draws substantially on the dialectical relationship, crucial as it is to our understanding of the nineteenth century, between the enclosed and contained space of the national and the spatial modi enacted in the transgression of boundaries.