Transnational Historiography: Exploring the Strata Between National and World History

A simple dichotomy between world history and national history presents a distorted picture of historical scholarship. Beneath the nation-state, vibrant sub-national histories of regions, cities, and communities have long flourished. Between the nation and the globe, several key strata of spatial structuring have emerged as vital fields of study, offering crucial bridges for historical analysis beyond the Wallersteinian world-system.

The First Stratum: International History and its Evolution. The first such stratum is international history, which extends far beyond traditional diplomatic accounts. Pioneered by Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren and Leopold von Ranke, this tradition examined Europe as an interacting state-system. Post-1945, "realist" diplomatic history produced seminal works like A.J.P. Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe. Decades later, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers revitalized the genre by incorporating long-term economic and military dynamics, framing the narrative within a cyclical model of imperial ascendancy and decline.

Simultaneously, the French school of international history, founded by Pierre Renouvin, greatly enriched analysis by integrating geopolitical, demographic, financial, and cultural factors. Later scholars like Akira Iriye pioneered the study of power and culture in international relations. By the 1990s, historians such as Paul W. Schroeder revealed the normative, peace-preserving undercurrents within the European state system. International history adeptly incorporated insights from the new cultural history, with the culture of the Cold War becoming a particularly fruitful area. This culminated in works like Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War, which re-conceptualized the conflict as a global struggle across multiple arenas, effectively bridging international and global history.

The Second Stratum: The Resurgence of Imperial History. The second major stratum is imperial history, encompassing the study of colonialism, colonies, and postcolonial nations. This field has achieved high theoretical sophistication, producing comprehensive works like the multi-volume Oxford History of the British Empire. A comparative methodology has been employed to great effect, as seen in John H. Elliott’s Empires of the Atlantic World, which juxtaposes the Spanish and British empires.

Scholarship has expanded beyond maritime empires to include continental ones, with the ethnically diverse Tsarist empire becoming a focal point for innovative research. As demonstrated by historians like C.A. Bayly, imperial history serves as a natural and effective conceptual link between national and global perspectives, tracing how imperial formations shaped interconnected worlds.

The Third Stratum: Integrated Histories of Large Regions. The third stratum involves the integrated history of large regions and continents. These studies, dealing with politically fragmented, culturally hybrid spaces, share more methodological kinship with world history than with national narratives. Fernand Braudel’s monumental work on the Mediterranean set an early model for such regional panoramas.

Ambitious projects have followed, such as K.N. Chaudhuri’s Asia before Europe, which attempted to integrate the Indian Ocean world into a vast civilizational framework. Similarly, a Eurasian perspective has gained traction, overcoming orientalist divides by highlighting pre-modern unifications like the Mongol Empire and facilitating cross-cultural comparisons, as in Jack Goldstone’s work on early modern revolutions.

The concept of Atlantic history has evolved from a Cold War-era narrative of liberty to a more complex field. It now balances the "white Atlantic" narrative with the history of the "Black Atlantic," foregrounding slavery, cultural creativity, and coercion. Viable frameworks for Atlantic history include: the age of revolution as a shared crucible of modernity; the formation of colonial identities; and the study of mass migration systems, both forced and voluntary.

Conclusion: The Fertile Ground of Transnational Strata. In practice, rigorous world history rarely attempts to encompass the entire planet uniformly. The most fruitful hypotheses and dynamic scholarly communities have often coalesced around these intermediate strata—the study of international systems, empires, and large regions. Fields like the history of slavery and the slave trade exemplify this, expanding from the Atlantic "plantation complex" to global comparisons of coerced labor systems and their legacies. These transnational approaches provide the essential scaffolding and empirical depth that make a truly integrative global history possible, moving beyond abstraction to grounded, interconnected analysis.