Approaching the publisher with the proposal for a dictionary of transnational history in 2004, Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier would have been under no illusions about the scale of the task that they were setting themselves and the particular challenges inherent in creating an original reference work of this kind without any close precedents from which to develop a blueprint. What they have achieved since that time is in itself a remarkable feat of transnational academia, marshalling over 350 contributors from 25 countries and gathering ideas for 1,500 topics before whittling the list back down, finishing with more than 400 entries on subjects requiring a grasp of countless languages and expertise in disciplines from history to ecology, anthropology to economics, politics to gender studies, and much else besides.
The resulting Dictionary is authoritative, accessible, and highly readable. Besides the expected list of entries and separate indexes organized by name and subject, navigation is also assisted by a functional series of tree diagrams mapping out the contents of the volume into related themes and sub-themes, particularly helpful for readers with a general interest in browsing rather than a specific topic in mind. Each article is accompanied by a list of cross-references to other related entries, as well as a short but generally very useful bibliography, offering an important jumping-off point for further research.
The editors take a catholic approach to the notion of transnational history, asserting in the introduction their interest lies in the full range of ‘people, ideas, products, processes and patterns that operate over, across, through, beyond, above, under, or in-between polities and societies’, consolidating and subverting national and other units in the process (p. xviii). The picture that emerges from the volume on the back of this inclusive ethos defies categorization according to any of the narrow sets of hopes or fears so often attached to perceptions and predictions of an increasingly interconnected globe, whether neo-liberal prophecies of global prosperity underpinned by free flows of capital across national borders; culturalist celebrations of mobility, hybridity, and forms of identity and agency liberated from arbitrary constraints imposed by states; or warnings of globalized economic exploitation and a sterility engendered by growing standardization and cultural homogenization. Instead, the mosaic formed by the wide-ranging entries – taking in topics from ecumenism to eugenics, love to language diplomacy, Maoism to McDonald’s, the World Bank to world music – highlights dynamics that pull in all these different directions, underscoring the complexity, ambiguity, and contradictions that lurk behind buzzwords such as globalization and transnationalism.
The volume is similarly inclusive in the range of individual and collective actors that its editors and contributors are concerned to take into account, from multinational banks to peripatetic jazz musicians. The world it presents is not one in which nation-states themselves are necessarily withering into redundancy or even retreating to skeleton functions such as security and criminal justice. While the editors are at pains to emphasize that they do not view the Dictionary as a statement of any grand claims about the nature of transnational history, it seems fair to suggest that the vision that emerges has much in common with Ron Robin’s characterization of polycentric historiography in his entry on historians and the nation-state, decentring rather than erasing the role of state institutions, acknowledging their historical significance without necessarily endorsing the nation-state framework (p. 491).
There is also a frequent and welcome emphasis on the intersection between the global and the local, reflecting a refusal to dissolve the latter into the former. This is coupled with an insistence that, as Saunier notes in his own entry on globalization, ‘not everything transnational or even long-distance is global’; that ‘many if not most of the connections and circulations that cross national borders do not embrace the whole planet, they do not by nature add to the interdependence or integration of the world, nor do they connect to integration processes regardless of circumstances of birth’ (p. 457). While the volume includes entries engaging critically with sweeping concepts such as modernity, Westernization, and globalization, the reader is more often directed towards the specificities of particular transnational connections and modestly encouraged to share in ‘a passion for [the] nuts, bolts and pipes’ (p. 462).
The Dictionary might have benefited had much of the material from Saunier’s entry on globalization, which explicitly draws out many of these points, been incorporated into an extended introduction rather than being somewhat lost in the middle of the volume. It is here that the reader comes closest to finding a suggested framework for the study of transnational history, alongside some discussion of the lessons learnt in the process of compiling the volume.
Most other objections to the Dictionary are in fact anticipated by Iriye and Saunier in their introduction. They note that their approach to the project and their search for contributors was inevitably steered by factors such as ‘personal availability, documentation facilities, visibility and command of the English language’ – all impacted in turn by the inequalities and divisions that characterize contemporary academia at the global level – as well as the editors’ own locations and existing networks (p. xix). Such issues surely played a part in ensuring that of the hundreds of contributors, less than a dozen are affiliated with institutions outside the Americas, western Europe, South Africa, and Australasia. This in turn no doubt helps to explain a general tendency to pay somewhat more attention to North America, Latin America, western Europe, Japan, and China than, say, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
As the editors also underscore, there is a degree of variation in approach between the entries: some are theoretical in focus, others more empirical; some give an overview of topics that are frequently explored from a transnational perspective, while others seek to present a new angle on issues that are more often discussed with reference to particular national contexts; some are fully developed essays offering facts, figures, and detailed historical narratives, while others are more tentative and impressionistic forays into new territory. While this variety is generally very welcome, making for a more readable and stimulating volume, it is also the case that certain entries are slightly less satisfying than others. The selection and division of topics in some cases also seems a little idiosyncratic (cappuccino rather than coffee; articles on Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam but not on, say, Hinduism or Judaism; a full entry on Argentinean psychoanalysis in addition to a separate piece on psychoanalysis; and so on).
Such minor caveats do not detract from the fact that the Dictionary is an important new resource, strongly recommended for libraries catering to students and scholars at all levels. The editors humbly assert that, as a novel reference volume in a research field that is itself in its relative infancy, the Dictionary is ‘not intended to be canonical’, that there is ‘no disciplinary brief included in its text, subtext or paratext’. Rather, it represents ‘a step, a prop for further research to develop’ (p. xx). As first steps go, it is an impressive one.
