This volume, edited by Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldán Vera, is a follow-up to the 2015 International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) in Istanbul, themed “The Concept of the Transnational.” It also inaugurates a new ISCHE series, Global Histories of Education, dedicated to the transnational. The volume's nine chapters provide an introductory framework for the series that explores and engages in critical reflection on transnational approaches proposed in the field of educational history. In this complete and rich book, the editors analyze international education as the result of an encounter between international education and international and global way of thinking, as they emerged from the turn of the nineteenth century. For them, the emergence of international education was in line with the internationalist trends of the time, driven by science and principles of modernizing society (p. 4) and, as a result, reflected the new ways to develop local and global thinking. Through this analysis, the two editors brilliantly show how the dominant idea of the time—“that international cooperation was the normative condition for the production and circulation of knowledge” (p. 5)—initiated the semantics of national and global discourses on the national and the global in education and thus participates in the construction of a new form of academic universalism. The editors then provide an overview of what constitutes transnational approaches in the history of education, on emerging fields of research, and on the theories and methods used in these fields. Following the introduction, the nine chapters consider their research objects from a transnational perspective.

The chapter authors study historical phenomena that contribute to the history of education in various geographical regions, with a focus in exchanges between them and on regions under colonial domination. All adopt a comparable historical perspective, with the exception of Thomas S. Popkewitz's concluding chapter, which emphasizes a sociological, anthropological, and curricular perspective.

A majority of the chapters highlight that the contribution of the transnational, from whatever angle, makes it possible to identify globalization and standardization phenomena in education that underlie the objects studied (p. 35). In addition, phenomena of circulation, changes in scale, and connections between groups of actors benefit from being analyzed at the scale of international connections (for changes in scale, see especially chapter 9 by Damiano Matasci and Joëlle Droux). On the one hand, in the tradition of many educational historians, the volume clearly shows that the use of transnational approaches makes it possible to thwart the hermetic tendencies of a national history. In this respect, the history of education has everything to gain from a perspective that goes beyond national histories to take into account interdependencies between actors, institutions, and concepts throughout history (p. 29). Correspondingly, thinking of analytical frameworks in transnational terms also makes it possible to reflect and position oneself in the face of current use of history and education, in the era of Donald Trump, and the resurgence of global nationalist or xenophobic politics (p. 12). Rebecca Rogers, in her chapter “Conversations About the Transnational,” adds an interesting argument that reinforces the interest in questioning the influence of the national in research (p. 120): thus, the transnational should question the nation as a unit of analysis and as an entity that also controls historians’ sources and the conditions in which knowledge is produced. The national or transnational locations, subsidies, or regulations that manage the archives that historians use are noteworthy to keep in mind when starting a research project.

On the other hand, transnational approaches lead to challenges to a history of education centered on Europe and “modernity.” As Tim Allender states in his chapter on transnationalism and Europe, “It is important to observe that transnational phenomena are not always coterminous with Western conceptions of ‘modernity,’ the postcolonial world and the formation of the nation-state: much less, with Western educational orthodoxy about ‘progress’ and ‘schooling throughout history” (p. 147). In the same vein, the editors, by quoting Noah Sobe, take a stand against the temporalities and divisions of a history with a hegemonic tendency (p. 37).

The diversity of the chapters demonstrates the varied uses of transnational approaches. Some objects of study require a combination of methodologies, underlying what could be called the “great transnational family,” and it is indeed the object that calls for convening one approach or another with others (p. 71). Moreover, some of the chapters highlight positions that balance a reading of the transnational history of education as a stable and unique methodology and highlight the term's many forms. Christine Mayer (p. 52), for instance, says it very well in chapter 2: The many contradictory proposals and definitions of transnational history often depend on the historian's context and position. It can function as an umbrella for all the various practices and thus offers an alternative terminological framework against the dominant, national Eurocentric history. For Rogers, rather than a methodological approach, the transnational represents a posture, a positioning of the researcher, and a means of going beyond the logic of national borders (p. 120). According to her, this reading makes it possible to weaken “the usefulness of a term that often appears more like a nod to what is currently fashionable” (p. 121).

At the end of the reading, some questions emerge, and if they do not take anything away from the interest of the volume, they underline researchers’ historiographical and even epistemological issues. These can be highlighted as follows: In reviewing the current state of research fields, it is sometimes difficult for the reader to distinguish between the methodological approach and the school of thought. For example, gender studies is a recent area of research whose strong methodological and theoretical component could also be identified and located in the methodological field. Social history is also not mentioned, although this approach is largely integrated into transnational research in education. In the same way, the inequality of analysis between the groups identified can sometimes strike the reader when, for example, only a few lines are devoted to describing the field of gender studies, which is fortunately largely offset by a strong presence of articles adopting this perspective (see chapters 3, 4, and 8). The authors are well aware of this; these pages should stimulate reflection rather than freeze debates. This reveals the measurable limits of such an exercise, as it is difficult to convey a good representativeness in an inventory of this type due to its vastness.

In the same way, the last point of this review aims to open a discussion on how the theoretical reflection on the contribution of postcolonial studies (we isolate a generic term here) has been integrated into the entire volume. The editors’ positions in no way seek to reduce the transnational approach to an abstract universalism, without naming the social relationships that this implies, nor do they take the approach for granted. However, it would have been interesting if the introduction had mentioned the different epistemological analyses that situate postcolonial studies not only as a development or a branch of the transnational field, as the authors highlight (p. 23), but also as a founding approach. In other words, like global history, postcolonial studies play a strategic role prior to the emergence of the transnational historical approach, while being the subject of much debate and interpretation. As Mayer highlights in her chapter, the transnational approach emerges under the influence of other disciplines or academic approaches, including postcolonial thinking (p. 49, Shalina Randeria cited by Mayer, p. 57). Several chapters in the book reference postcolonial studies and concepts to situate their research transnationally (Allender, Joyce Goodman, and Popkewitz). Rogers's chapter also highlights the effects of shared influences between Latin American postcolonial approaches, the “postcolonial moment,” and the history of empires (pp. 103-105).

In conclusion, this rich volume is of twofold interest. First, it constitutes an extremely useful reference base for the field of the history of education, both in terms of the theoretical corpus cited and the richness of the proposed objects of study. This makes it possible to clearly identify the relationships, or tensions, between object and method when adopting transnational approaches. Secondly, this volume makes it possible to identify specific features of the history of education in light of this transnational turning point. To this end, the authors invite us to continue deliberating on the study of globalization in education and to pay particular attention to the contexts of dependencies, interdependencies, and circulation in which the field is situated, through time and history, without losing relevance for the reflections on education today.