Transnational history, which charts networks of exchange, migration, and power across national boundaries, has been championed as an alternative to nation-based historiography. In this compact book, Ian Tyrrell, an Australia-based historian of the US, instead employs it effectively to expand the parameters of one nation’s past. It is no secret that US history as commonly studied has emphasized not simply uniqueness but separation from and even incommensurability with global patterns – a position often given the shorthand label ‘exceptionalism’. Tyrrell’s Transnational nation furthers the growing countertrend of bringing US history into a more considered dialogue with global frameworks of analysis – a movement that took off after the La Pietra conferences of 1997–2000, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians, among others. Dedicated to the ‘La Pietra gang’ as part of its first wave of books intended to reach history classrooms, Tyrrell’s overview brings distinctive strengths to the group, which includes Thomas Bender’s Nation among nations (2006) and my own America in the world (2007).
As US historians enlarge their vistas they tend to emphasize one of three ‘Cs’ that preoccupy world historians: contexts, comparisons, or connections. Whereas Bender’s book sketched the larger global context for five episodes in US history and mine conducted a series of internationally comparative forays over the course of US development, Tyrrell’s text is explicitly connective. Organized thematically inside a loose chronology, its topics encompass the myriad ways that the American nation was ‘produced transnationally’ (p. 3) through flows of people, ideas, goods, and capital, including how events abroad influenced Americans and how Americans exported their ways overseas. Tyrrell has read widely in the literature of trade and migration as well as what Akira Iriye labels ‘transnational affairs’: contacts between societies too independent and varied to be subsumed under the domain of state relations. The vivid individual stories and episodes that Tyrrell chronicles are not merely used as examples of larger patterns; they are the facts from which his always-judicious generalizations – including some comparative insights – emerge. His book is thus the most empirical account so far of a nation that, contrary to its dominant mythology, was often decisively shaped by its transnational ties.
A strong body of work on Atlantic history has now transformed approaches to colonial North America, and after the Spanish–American War of 1898 US commitments overseas become too obvious for textbooks to overlook. But the period between the achievement of US independence in 1783 and the formal commitment to empire has conventionally been cast in continental and even isolationist terms. One of the signal contributions of Tyrrell’s book is that it pries open US engagements with the rest of the world in the 1800s, characterizing that era as a time of economic and cultural openness that would not be equalled until the 1980s. Tyrrell implicitly agrees with Eric Rauchway’s Blessed among nations (2006) that ‘the world made America’ in the nineteenth century through the export trade, migration, foreign investment, and technology transfer. But, in contrast to Rauchway’s one-dimensional account, Tyrrell also emphasizes Americans’ anti-bank and anti-immigrant attitudes, as well as a tariff policy that repudiated free trade in order to build a diversified national economy – an import substitution programme much like those that the US would discourage in developing nations a century later.
The ongoing tension between global integration and national insularity emerges as the dominant motif of Tyrrell’s book. It explains the ebb and flow of US engagement with the wider world as different domestic groups’ agendas won out and American policy-makers externalized their own ambivalence. The struggle between inclusive and exclusionary immigration policies provides one of the richest and most complex examples, since it overlaps with the history of racial ideas, state power, and foreign policy. Vacillation between openness and closedness also governs Tyrrell’s treatment of the years between 1925 and 1970, an innovative periodization that is bookended by the immigration restrictions of 1924 and the national crisis of Vietnam, Watergate, and OPEC. Tyrrell divides this era into contrasting chapters, one that shows how the two world wars and the Cold War extended US global outreach, and another that suggests that hardened racial attitudes and narrowed patriotism limited Americans’ global cultural integration. According to Tyrrell, state and society reversed their roles after the First World War. Before that, transnational social and economic contacts were legion, while the state detached itself politically from the international community; after that, the state joined international agreements and alliances while the American people turned inward to exceptionalism. Only with the ‘new globalization’ of the late twentieth century did both state and society look outward, although Americans brought to their global encounters new versions of the same old tension between their pride in national distinctiveness – sometimes reframed as a messianic mission to the world – and their resentment of global interdependence.
Tyrrell suggests rather than imposes this overarching interpretation on his narrative, whose strongest elements are its close analyses of specific transnational topics. An innovative chapter on ‘How culture travelled’ accompanies American missionaries, businessmen, tourists, artists, and reformers abroad, detailing their activities and the influences with which they returned. Another, on ‘The empire that did not know its name’, follows recent scholarship in linking US continental and overseas expansion, but adds an interesting section on the ‘moral imperialism’ of missionaries and purity reformers. Here and elsewhere Tyrrell draws from his previous research by including examples from Australia and the Pacific and by widening his interpretations of anti-alcohol campaigns, suffrage and reform movements, and environmental impacts into broader narratives that include Europe and the British Empire. Throughout the book, he effectively employs a strategy of moving ‘inside-out’ from US to world history, one that is opposite but complementary to Bender’s ‘outside-in’ approach that situates American developments within larger global trends.
The primary audience for Tyrrell’s book – scholars and students of US history – should be nudged away from insularity by its engaging details. Yet global historians will also be interested in Tyrrell’s incidental discussion of American variations on world patterns: the factors that spurred US economic development, comparative analysis of immigration to the US, the course of US state-building, and the workings of US empire. Embedded within the book’s transnational narrative are thoughtful mini-essays that link American developments to those elsewhere and offer comparative assessments.
Transnational nation will help world historians to understand better the vexed and conflicted history of the US relationship to global engagement. And, while the specific American combination of global pull and national insularity may be unique, its broad outlines are not, as the histories of China, Japan, Russia, or England would show. Without intending to, Transnational nation provides an attractive template for producing a globally-informed history of any modern great power.
