Transnational urban history is an emerging paradigm within urban history. This observation was made by the editors, Janice Reiff and Philip Ethington, in their introduction to the first and only special issue of Urban History devoted to transnational urban history in 2009.Footnote 1 Recent publications testify to the validity of this observation, especially Shane Ewen's much needed introduction to urban history in 2016, which includes a chapter on transnational urban history.Footnote 2
The aim of this article is to take stock of nineteenth-century transnational urban history. The reason for focusing on the nineteenth century is in part pragmatic. The pragmatic reason is to use the nineteenth century, loosely understood as the period between 1815 and 1914, as a means to delimit relevant literature. More important is the personal experience which is the root cause of this article. Approaching urban history as a nineteenth-century historian with an interest in urban political movements, political transfer and translocal nationalism in Europe, it proved difficult to find relevant urban history literature to guide my interpretations and particularly to support my empirical claims. This was the inspiration to have a closer look at transnational urban history writing about the nineteenth century. Furthermore, it left the impression that nineteenth-century transnational urban history is not a well-established field of study, making it an area which still needs attention and debate among urban historians.
Whilst there is nothing peculiar to the idea of nineteenth-century cities acting as nodes in international and transnational transfer and exchange networks, their significance relates to their importance as places in which modernity took place. Nineteenth-century cities stand out as the birthplace of modernity, taking the lead by wielding power and by being relatively progressive.Footnote 3 Thus, the significance of the nineteenth-century city is, on the one hand, its connection to transnational currents and processes and, on the other, its connection to modernity. Modern cultural forms and political ideologies and movements – including nationalism – travelled through cities. Cities were the places in which many transnational processes took local form. Therefore, the study of nineteenth-century transnational urban history merits more attention than it has so far received. Accordingly, the dual purpose of the article is to introduce the transnational approach into an under-studied area and encourage critical debate and reflection.Footnote 4
The method I employ to categorize contributions to transnational urban history involves Diego Ohlstein's systematization of approaches to transnational history. On the basis of a substantial sample of research on transnational history, Ohlstein identifies three categories used to identify and historicize connections, which is the core ambition of all transnational histories. The first methodology involves the ‘enlargement of geographic units of analysis’, the second directs ‘attention to historical linkages between units of analysis’, while the third concerns the ‘adoption of units of analysis or themes that are intrinsically cross-boundary in nature’.Footnote 5 Pierre-Yves Saunier,Footnote 6 in his book on transnational history, surveys the field with a more differentiated method of categorization, which focuses on relations and circulation and what he calls ‘formations’: biographies, events, organizations, territories and ‘topical formations’, the latter being transnational problems debated at a particular moment in history. Saunier's method makes it possible for him to provide a nuanced narrative and to analyse individual contributions from different perspectives, but Ohlstein's generic categorization seems more stringent, simple and therefore appropriate for the purpose of the historiography studied in this article.
After a short introduction to transnational history, I will take a closer look at general urban histories from Ohlstein's perspective. The analysis of surveys of continental urban histories is one way to approach the question of transnationalism within urban historiography, because such surveys mirror broader disciplinary concerns resting on secondary literature as they do. Here, I will shed some light on both the connections established by enlargement of the geographical units of analysis, and the attention paid to historical linkages between units of analysis. I will then introduce specific urban histories that focus on linkages and international organization, which are transnational in nature. Finally, I will look at urban history within enlarged geographical scales that go beyond the nation-state framework, with a particular focus on cities as nodes in translocal networks. I will conclude with a critical discussion of nineteenth-century transnational urban history.
Transnational history and space
Transnational history is neither a theory nor a specific method. It is, most of all, a perspective or an approach to historical studies that regards the nation-state not as an implicit and natural framework of historical investigations on any subject, but as the consciously chosen framework of historical research on some subjects.Footnote 7
A first core element of transnational history, which shows an affinity to global history, is the emphasis on interconnectedness. Sven Beckert has characterized transnational history as a way of seeing, ‘open to various methodological preferences, and to many different questions. It takes as its starting point the interconnectedness of human history as a whole, and while it acknowledges the importance of states, empires, and the like, it pays attention to networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions that transcend these politically defined spaces.’Footnote 8 Transnational history is, then, a perspective and a way of seeing rather than a theory, focused on interconnectedness related to the mobility of persons, goods and ideas across borders, be they political, religious, ethnic or otherwise.Footnote 9 Even though transnational history shares the emphasis on interconnectivities with global history, and ‘[t]he key claim of any transnational approach is its central concern with movements, flows, and circulation, not simply as a theme or motif but as an analytic set of methods which defines the endeavour itself’.Footnote 10
The importance of states, empires and nation-states is their attempt to control, regulate and sometimes restrict the mobility of persons, goods and ideas; that is, their interconnectedness. Of course, interconnectedness is not a historical constant. It has varied throughout history, and has passed through different phases related to technological capabilities, especially technologies of communication.Footnote 11 But historical conditions and restraints aside, transnational history employs a range of concepts to describe various forms of interconnectivity: exchange, transfer, entanglement, imitation, interaction and, not least, flow and circulation. These concepts are applied to illuminate what connects, rather than what divides, and what is mobile, rather than what is stationary. From a transnational perspective, the nation-state is not perceived as an enclosure, but rather as an open, permeable and interacting frame. A transnational perspective on history entails the study of processes of national, local, urban adaptation and appropriation of international or cross-national trends and processes. This can take place on many different levels, including political models and institutions, the cultural and technological sphere and the domain of social movements and organization.Footnote 12
A second central element in the characterization of transnational history concerns scale and space. Scale and space are related to subject matter and research question, and are not given a priori. Unlike history that is spatially defined as national history by states, empires or other geographical factors, there is no clear-cut, predefined space in which transnational history takes place. Accordingly, transnational history can be seen as a consciousness of the meaning of scale and the impact this has on our historical practice.Footnote 13 In continuation of this, ‘the terms “transnational”, or “transnationalism” or “transnationality” are partly misnomers’, as pointed out by Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, ‘in that they imply that the only things we are interested in are dynamics across or beyond nations, states or within the (nation-)state system’. In this way, scholarly language is inadequate to capture ‘transnational’ dynamics, which move on a variety of scales not confined to the national, and Khagram and Levitt's suggestion with respect to transnational research practice is to do away with borders and think openly about connected entities as an acknowledgement of the multiscaled and multispatial character of transnational interconnectivities.Footnote 14 Patterns of exchange and transnational spaces cannot be contained in one fixed category of space such as the nation-state. In addition,
since notions of space as well as the relevant spatial frameworks have changed over time, no single spatial entity can be postulated as the dominant one for all periods in the past. The implication that follows from this is that methodological nationalism is not only flawed but also unhistorical. In a nutshell, the ‘spatial turn’ recognizes the constructed nature of space, acknowledges the simultaneity of various actors and historians in defining spatial orders, and refuses methodological nationalism or any form of centrism.Footnote 15
In a similar vein, Müller and Torp argue for an approach that conceptualizes space as a functional category created through the concrete processes of establishment of economic, social, cultural or confessional networks based on interactions and connections under study. What we encounter are multiple historical geographies of a more or less transient nature. Transnational space is a transient space in the sense that it is ‘meaningful for historical actors only in relation to a specific set of perceptions, interests and strategies, and in a given temporal context’.Footnote 16 With regard to transient spaces created in the process of creating networks, their conclusion is that historically it was more the exception than the rule that such spaces were fully congruent with territorially demarcated political entities. At the same time, at least in a European context, nation-states, according to Müller and Torp, seem to represent a comparatively stable entity of political, social and cultural interaction in the pre-modern and modern eras when compared to confessional or legal spaces in the seventeenth century or the intellectual fields of modern science.Footnote 17
Before I proceed, I need to make a short comment on the use of concepts. Without entering a long conceptual discussion, the concept of transnationalism is problematic in a nineteenth-century context. Contrary to Müller and Torp's contention, the nineteenth century was an age of empires and national movements.Footnote 18 As a consequence of this, Jørgensen has proposed the concept of transurban as an alternative, which removes the problematic conceptual connection between transnational and the nation-state and highlights the entities connected, while emphasizing that transurban flows of ideologies and political templates are always used in local, urban contexts by situated agents appropriating them in their own light and for their own purposes.Footnote 19 The latter point is drawn from Michael Peter Smith's concept of transnational urbanism, which has gained currency in transnational urban history. Smith emphasizes agency and local appropriation; transnational flows are localized and appropriated by socially and spatially situated subjects. Localities are always embedded in the criss-crossing transnational circuits of communication and social practices. Cities are spaces of complex interconnectivity not limited by either local or national borders.Footnote 20
Another alternative is the concept of translocal. It signifies the same insights as the concept of transnationalism. But the underlying assumption is the existence of a multitude of possible boundaries which might be transgressed, and the notion that transnational interconnectivity is one of many forms, being historically the exception rather than the rule. Connections between places, institutions, actors and concepts have been very diverse, but always locally situated.Footnote 21 I will, therefore, use the concepts of transurban, translocal and transnational interchangeably in an effort to undermine the national connotations of the concept of transnational while at the same time acknowledging that the latter has gained very wide acceptance and use.
Urban historiography 1: general urban histories
The majority of urban histories have taken the pattern of urbanization in a national context as their overarching paradigm. On the back of economic change, the urbanizing of the economy, industrialization and migration, the pattern of urbanization is an unavoidable component in the genre of general urban histories. Individual cities are drawn into the narrative as examples of the effects of structural change in different urban settings. The aim is to show the diverse and complex way in which urbanization as structural change is played out in different types of cities and towns, and how the process of urbanization has different but comparatively similar effects across the continent in question.Footnote 22 Lees and Lees, for example, focus on how British, French and German cities responded to the challenges brought about by ongoing urbanization. Especially after the middle of the century, when urbanization intensified, problems arose with respect to hygiene, housing, pollution, poverty and social problems, city planning and the cultural and political participation of the urban masses. The combination and scale of these challenges might vary from city to city, as could local responses to them, but the challenges were the same.Footnote 23
With respect to attention to historical linkages between units of analysis, the picture is more diverse. In their classic survey of European urban history, Hohenberg and Lees introduce the concept of orthogenetic or heterogenetic cities. Orthogenetic cities are local or regional central cities, while heterogenetic cities are internationally oriented network cities. The authors do not pursue the subject in any depth, but mention that heterogenetic cities are characterized by their ability to absorb, appropriate and diffuse foreign cultural patterns, including architectural styles and new technologies; unlike orthogenetic cities, which are inward looking and self-contained in their orientation towards local and regional cultures.Footnote 24 This is mirrored in the narrative outline, where inter-urban ties are mentioned in passing with respect to developing capitalism and commerce and the nodal functions of ‘cities in anchoring the flows of people, goods, and information thereby entailed, and linking the region to its outside markets and sources of inputs – tangible raw materials and equipment, intangible capital and ideas’. The Ruhr region is one example of an industrial region that depends on its integration into transnational networks with respect to raw materials, food supply and supply of workforce. With respect to the transfer of ideas, it is emphasized that the inter-urban network nurtured and propagated the circulation of ideas of humanism, enlightenment, radicalism and revolutionary ideas on a European scale; the network system was ideally suited for the transference of people and ideas.Footnote 25
The point of departure adopted by Lees and Lees with respect to inter-urban connections is to perceive ‘cities as nodes in networks of exchange in Europe and in global economic and imperial systems’.Footnote 26 This is to a large extent mirrored in the narrative in which transurban interconnectivities are much more integrated than is the case with the work of Hohenberg and Lees. The significance of inter-urban networks is highlighted on a number of occasions ranging from revolutionary impulses from the French Revolution in 1789, via urban networks that acted as conduits for international debate, to interest in sewers and sanitation, public health and housing in reformist discourse and Hausmannization in various European cities.Footnote 27
Transurban networks figure most significantly, though, in the analysis of urban colonial networks. Lees and Lees show how networks of communication and transportation tied together imperial and colonial cities. According to them, empires can be conceptualized as series of overlapping networks – political, economic, personal and cultural – which channelled exchanges along a variety of paths and in both directions. In the British empire, London played the central role not least because of its role as a financial centre. Imperial inter-city connections fostered not only material exchanges, but also new ideas and the creation of novel cultural and political forms. The latter is given special attention, and is seen as having a decisive, but unintended, effect on colonial rule in the long run. Civil societies evolved in colonial cities in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and agents had a range of possibilities to act politically and to tap into transnational discourses by drawing, as Ho Chi Minh did in the 1920s, on familiar democratic, egalitarian discourses in Europe and the Americas.Footnote 28
According to Lenger, European cities in the period between 1850 and 1914 were economically connected to both a system of central places comprising a national urban system and an international urban network; but in this period, ‘which represents an early phase of globalization, the weight shifted in favour of the international network’.Footnote 29 The working of this international network is not at centre stage, though; Lenger gives an outline of the variation of national urban systems which differed above all in terms of the dominance of their capitals. This does not mean that transurban interconnectivities are absent. With respect to visual culture, theatre, museums and especially opera, he writes: ‘In the decades before the Great War, Europe's cultural life was thus characterized by layers of trans-national, even global dimensions, differences in centrality of individual states, and struggles over its national aspirations. Nationalization itself had boundaries.’Footnote 30
The empirical chapters of the Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History do not have much to say about transnational urban history or transurban interconnectivities.Footnote 31 According to the editor, Peter Clark, the core issue is the pattern of urbanization worldwide.Footnote 32 This is mirrored in the chapters on modern and contemporary cities. Carola Hein's chapter on port cities being the one exception, the chapters focus on the processes of urbanization. The reader is informed about the Indian and American urban systems, generalized outlines of social problems, poverty and urban governance. But the transnational perspective is on the whole absent except for an outline of the transfer of European planning models to the Middle East.Footnote 33 In the overview given by Lees and Lees of European urban history between 1800 and 2000, they mention that ‘Urban networks went global centuries ago’ and that European urban systems were tied to African, Asian and American urban systems, but the nature and outcome of these ties are not a subject of the narrative.Footnote 34
Urban historiography 2: looking for links and international organization
This section will address contributions to urban history that look for links between units of analysis or analyse units which are transnational in nature such as international organizations. In this context, planning history has developed into the main field of transnational urban history to the extent that there is ‘a regular and fertile exchange between urban and transnational history, so much so that it is impossible and unnecessary to distinguish between the two fields’.Footnote 35 Planning historians work on different scales from transnational connections of city planning in individual cities,Footnote 36 the circulation of scientific knowledge and moral values creating a shared language of urban planning in different citiesFootnote 37 to the global interconnectivities of the planning of urban segregation.Footnote 38
Daniel Rodgers’ classic study emphasizes the role of persons as agentsFootnote 39 of interconnectivities between Europe and the United States with respect to urban social reform between 1870 and World War II. Ideas, policies and legislation travelled with individuals, who selectively adapted them to local conditions at home. This was not a co-ordinated movement. A diverse group of individuals, best categorized according to Rodgers as ‘progressives’, acted as brokers, and a convergence of social political regimes across the Atlantic was brought about through the work of these brokers or intermediaries. The victory of the USA in World War II meant the resurrection of American exceptionalism, making European models less attractive, and in effect resulting in the end of the North Atlantic progressive connection.Footnote 40
The international organization of municipalities, a feature of the early twentieth century and inter-war period following the period of informal exchanges peer-to-peer, has also received thorough scrutiny both from an organizational perspective and from a more person/agency-focused perspective. The evolutionary trend towards organization went hand in hand with specialization along the lines of problem areas such as housing, urban development and local government. Pierre-Yves Saunier has termed this the ‘municipal moment’. With respect to the study of municipal issues and problem-solving, municipal urban governments, according to Saunier, became part of a ‘transnational municipal moment’ which came into existence at the very moment at which the state crystallized in its national form. In the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘there emerged enduring protagonists and durable structures, cultures, legal, and organizational frameworks, which facilitated the transnational activities of municipal urban governments, patterned on long-lasting circulatory regimes and spaces, which still contribute to form the activities of cities on the world scene’.Footnote 41 People, ideas, texts, designs and information circulated and international conferences and associations made the system relatively fixed. The result was convergence with respect to issues and problem-solving across European cities during the nineteenth century. Problems of poor relief, housing and urban planning, for example, were discussed within a common horizon, and transnational exchanges were adapted to local realities. One central element of this was that policy circulation created a form of anti-politics that made urban policy a sphere of technical and managerial concern, reducing policy to questions of science and technology, not a political sphere per se.Footnote 42 This created a transnational frame of reference for city planners when they faced local challenges of the effects of urbanization on sanitation, for instance.Footnote 43 Although global in perspective, this international municipal ‘internationale’ was mainly a west EuropeanFootnote 44 and north Atlantic phenomenon.Footnote 45
Carl Nightingale's recent book on urban segregation stands out as the most wide-ranging planning history with its global scope. The book covers pre-modern as well as modern urban segregation, but what is of interest here is the modern processes of segregation from the late eighteenth century onwards related to race: ‘the difficult and complicated process of rearranging whole cities into separate, unequal, and compulsory residential zones for different races’.Footnote 46 The urban problems of housing, sanitation and disease encountered at the local level were in many ways similar to those confronted by urban planners in general. However, transnational networks were not the result of interested individuals or voluntary import, but were related to the rise of the west to global dominance in the modern era, which spread racial urban segregation on a global scale. Nightingale's fundamental point is that ‘movements to segregate cities spread because they were interconnected’, and they worked within three kinds of institutions critical to the rise of the west: ‘governments, networks of intellectual exchange, and the institutions associated with the modern capitalist real estate industry’.Footnote 47
British, French and United States governments were particularly vital institutions in the spread of city splitting along colour lines. With respect to the exchange of knowledge, the actors and groups involved are similar to those involved in other planning histories: intellectuals, doctors, scientists, lawyers, urban planners and reformers – with the addition of racial theorists, whose theories became more and more central as the century progressed. An ever denser institutional framework of conferences, lecture circuits, professional journals, newspapers, magazines and bestselling books developed, and ideas of race and racial segregation were at the centre of debates and were highly influential on government urban policies. Race was developed into a universal system of categorizing people, and became the central planning tool of residential segregation along racial lines. The first to use race and colour with the specific purpose of dividing cities were British colonial officials in Madras and Calcutta. To them, race and colour were useful categories as a means of administration and with a view to the reduction of the dangers of epidemic diseases. This did not provide a model for racial segregation, but it set in motion the underlying institutions and ideologies needed for its replication: the empire and racist ideology. This ideology was supported by moral, religious, administrative, sanitary and medical arguments, and became the foundation of segregated military stations founded throughout India and the bridgeheads on the Asian continent, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong. The 1890s were the beginning of a period characterized by what Nightingale has called segregation mania. A bubonic plague pandemic spread, as did social Darwinist ideas; from Hong Kong and Bombay segregationist strategies spread to cities in Africa; and segregation was accepted internationally by city planners and what Nightingale calls the international city planning movement.
Urban historiography 3: enlargement of geographical space
The literature on port cities, but especially those of the Indian Ocean, is another thriving field of transnational urban history. This demonstrates an enlarged geographical space beyond the nation-state in which cities are seen as nodes in oceanic or continental European networks of exchanges of ideas and ideologies. As Carola Hein argues, port cities have connected ‘urban systems beyond continents and countries, forming an almost autonomous network semi-detached from national societies’.Footnote 48 Trade networks created linkages that inspired exchange between cities. Migration changed the workforce, while architectural styles and cultural and political forms were shaped by exchanges and interconnections and the local constellations of actors. Imperial history has in general been more interested in the British empire and the Indian Ocean as a space, the frame in which flows of people, ideas and institutions take place, than in the characteristics of individual cities. Metaphors of networks and webs are used to illuminate the relational character of different nodes to one another: ‘places and people can be “nodal” in some of their relations with immediate hinterlands or subordinates (Calcutta in relation to Bengal, for instance), and yet simultaneously “peripherical” in some of their relations with other centres (Calcutta in relation to London)’.Footnote 49
The historiography of the Indian Ocean takes as its point of departure that port cities of the ocean rim were nodal points in a coherent oceanic space of exchanges and interaction. Though the internal and external boundaries of the Indian Ocean were flexible, it was an arena of linked pathways for the flow of ideas, institutions, trade and migration around its shores, resulting in a shared public sphere characterized by cosmopolitanism.Footnote 50 Port cities were the places where people of the region interacted with one another and with people from the west. In the nineteenth century, they gained in importance compared with inland cities, and the role of colonial ports as agents of change in the hinterland increased in the latter part of the century.Footnote 51 This meant that port cities around the ocean had more in common with each other than with their own inland neighbours or hinterland.Footnote 52 It is important to note, though, that this changed fundamentally from the beginning of the 1950s when decolonization, the rise of nation-states, nationalism and state regulation of mobility narrowed the possibilities of transnational community significantly.Footnote 53
Returning to the late nineteenth century before the apogee of the nation-state, transurban interconnectivities and the circulation of printed texts were channels for the dissemination of western thinking as well as being central for Islamic reformists. Western ideas could be disseminated with the aid of new technologies of communication to port cities and centres of commerce; and these same technologies were simultaneously used by local urban religious reformists to disseminate religious printing, enabling cities like Delhi, Lahore and Cairo to become major centres of publishing of the Qur'an and orthodox religious texts.Footnote 54 Mark Frost has shown how imperial cities of the Indian Ocean became nodal points in an imperial network of exchanges and evolved as centres for cultural exchange and intellectual debate. In entrepôts like Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon and Singapore, a non-European, western-educated bilingual professional class emerged, English being their lingua franca. Learned elites began to form themselves into intelligentsias by immersing themselves into discursive activity, and quickly developed habits of intellectual sociability that became organized and systematic. Learned elites became involved in a colonial public sphere, and shared similar concerns for reform and religious revival, social and educational improvement and constitutional change. These urban intelligentsias have been seen as an integral part of the early nationalist movements in the region, expressed through religious and cultural responses to the colonial presence,Footnote 55 to the formulation of a ‘discourse of dispersed nationhood that expressed itself in terms like “greater India”, “Indians overseas”, or “colonial-born Indians”’,Footnote 56 as well as cosmopolitan discourses which transcended colonial boundaries.Footnote 57
From the mid-1880s, Indian cities became the staging ground for the efforts of anti-colonial nationalism. During the second half of the nineteenth century, municipalities emerged as political entities on the basis of various reforms across the empire, making way for native political participation. This opened local and eventually provincial spheres for Indian self-government, which, in turn, became the basis for nationalist movements. Cities were not only a space of social control, as shown by Nightingale, but were also simultaneously emerging as a space of autonomy in which the transition from colonial domination to native elite power took place in the twentieth century. Political movements, social practices and transnational connections were engendered by the development of the city as a municipal entity and inhabited space. In Bombay, middle-class political activity in the urban public sphere expressed patriotism and local identification while affirming middle-class loyalty to the British empire. In the 1920s and 1930s, popular public action and collective protest took a strictly nationalist turn, trying to turn the city into a nationalist space. Cities were not just the incidental location of nationalisms and political struggle: ‘the increasingly autonomous urban domain as constitutive of politics, rather than an incidental location, breaks down understandings of nationalism by reinserting the productivity of specific cities’, Bombay being the case in point.Footnote 58
Without any reference to the historiography of the Indian Ocean, similar points are made by Jørgensen in his study of the European Revolutions of 1848. European cities are seen as nodes in communication networks that created a transurban public sphere. In ways similar to the anti-colonial nationalisms of the late nineteenth century, urban space is seen as productive of a certain form of middle-class sociability and self-organization conducive to the spread of ideas connected to modernity. The vital organizational basis of the activists was the numerous voluntary associations that had mushroomed in European cities, especially in European capitals, from the mid-1820s. In this public sphere, ideas of liberalism, radicalism and competing forms of nationalism circulated, especially after 1840 when censorship broke down across states, along with knowledge about the means of urban protest and repertoire of actions and symbols. Political models circulating in print on a European scale in the decades prior to the revolutionary wave of 1848 provided the ‘knowledge resources’ that were appropriated by urban political activists across Europe. It is argued that circulating political communication accounts for the similarities with respect to political agenda, organizational form and the repertoire of contentious politics which were evident in urban settings across Europe. This meant that urban revolutions across Europe had more in common with each other than with the rural revolutionary activities in their respective hinterlands.Footnote 59
Urban political movements had at their disposal certain organizational resources – voluntary associations and printing presses – which were vital both for their connections to wider public spheres for communicating knowledge and information, and to perform the role as brokers. As brokers or intermediaries, political activists used transurbanly circulating ‘knowledge’ resources – including liberalism, radicalism and nationalism – to organize and mobilize popular support on the basis of their interpretation of local problems, their causes and possible solutions. These mobilizing activists gained mass support in varying degrees at different points in time – or not at all. But under all circumstances their importance was due to their social role as actors accommodating and adapting circulating discourses into locally meaningful action.Footnote 60 In a broader sense, this had to do with the constitution of the middle classes and middle-class modernity, which was not a simple diffusion of a European model, but rather a ‘transnational historical formation through which the meanings, subjectivities and practices of being middle class were mutually – and coevally – constituted across the globe’.Footnote 61
However, it is important to consider that cities as nodes in the translocal or transurban flow of ideological templates such as nationalism seem to be more important in the age of empires than after the advent of the nation-state. The rise of the nation-state as a space of identity formation and decision-making as a key force in modern history happened in waves after 1860 and after World War I in Europe, and with decolonization after World War II.Footnote 62 Even though urban agents were continually aware of what happened elsewhere – from modernist artFootnote 63 to jazz music and opera – more inward-looking national identifications took root with the nationalization of imagined communitiesFootnote 64 and the intensification of national standard language social communication,Footnote 65 and cultural programmes founded on methodological nationalism as an ideology.
Conclusion
Transnational history is mainly discussed in relation to the question of methodological nationalism; that is, the tendency to take the nation-state as the natural ‘taken for granted’ context of historical enquiry. This is seen as a general feature of western scholarship, related to the close connection between the emergence of nation-states and scholarship during the nineteenth century.Footnote 66 Methodological nationalism has come to serve a paradigmatic function as a lens through which the world is seen. Furthermore, urban history has established itself as a scholarly discipline with a range of specialized journals and paradigmatic themes and approaches which produce – in Kuhn's conceptualization – puzzle solving: adding new empirical findings to a well-established research agenda.Footnote 67 This produces specialization within the confines of the central genre of urban history: the single city study, either as a city biography or as an aspect thereof. Even though urban historians more often than most historians work with a comparative perspective, it seems fair to say that the predominant disciplinary perspective has been the history of individual cities or individual cities in a wider thematic context.Footnote 68 In addition, Taylor has argued that central place theory has drawn attention to individual cities as retail and service centres for their regional hinterland, and to national urban systems and national urban hierarchies, while transurban networks have received scant attention.Footnote 69 As argued by Rodgers almost 20 years ago, placing the focus on national differences and the distinctiveness of national cultures draws attention away from transnational connections and movements.Footnote 70 In this perspective, transnational urban history presents itself as an anomaly that challenges the prevailing practice of urban history.Footnote 71
This is a problem to the extent that paradigmatic assumptions direct attention away from fundamental qualities of the object under study. The historiography outlined above suggests that this is to some degree the case. Since a range of subjects are dealt with in a translocal perspective, this shows that looking for transurban interconnectivities is a legitimate part of the practice of urban history. The surveys by Hohenberg and Lees and Lees and Lees contain considerations of a translocal nature, and the latter particularly incorporates transurban interconnectivities in its approach. In addition, the results already achieved by the forerunners of transnational urban history have transgressed the prevailing paradigmatic framework and shed new light on the subjects under study. As emphasized by Saunier 15 years ago, the transnational component is of equal importance with the municipal dimension in the history of urban social reform, ‘because reform movements have existed in symbiosis with similar developments in other countries’.Footnote 72 In the nineteenth century, nationalism and a whole range of other ideologies were diffused through transurban networks. Even though the bet on transurban interconnectivities was taken up long ago, paradigmatic assumptions and puzzle solving does not change overnight,Footnote 73 as the short analysis of continental urban historiography has shown. Urban history writing in an enlarged continental frame is characterized by the core approach; that is, that the pattern of urbanization and its diverse outcome is exemplified by individual cities. While the enlargement of the scale of space thereby combines the process of urbanization of individual cities in a common frame, transurban interconnectivities between actors and urban organizations or the flow of ideas, ideologies and political models are incorporated into these narratives to a more limited degree and somewhat arbitrarily.
Jo Guldi and David Armitage's The History Manifesto Footnote 74 raises another question regarding urban history writing: does disciplinary puzzle solving and ever greater specialization come at a cost? Besides the essential contribution to the understanding of patterns of urbanization, contributions to urban history taking as their point of departure an enlarged geographical scale and viewing cities as nodes in transnational networks have pointed to the role of urban actors and public spheres in the translocal spread of religious revival and especially middle-class modernity. In this way, these are contributions not only to urban history, but also to transnational history in general, contributing to the historicizing of globalization. These contributions extend beyond the paradigmatic confines of the sub-discipline of urban history, but they have on the whole not been written by urban historians and have not been published in urban history publications.
Thus, it might be worth considering if the prevailing paradigm taken by general urban histories continues to hold sway in the context of globalization and the emergence of transnational history approaches. On the one hand, ‘cities are the locations par excellence where global history takes place, and we must study the history of cities in connection with the history of globalization from this perspective’. On the other hand, ‘although we can look back on twenty years of manifold globalization debates and shelves of books about the topic, this has hardly been done so far’.Footnote 75 As noted by Andreas Daum, ‘the specific roles of capital cities have not received much attention within the flourishing historical research on state formation, nation-building, and independence movements or in the disciplines of geography and urban studies’.Footnote 76 Not only does the prevailing paradigm preclude certain macro-historical themes, but urban history also seems to have difficulties manifesting itself outside disciplinary boundaries due to its specialized, single city and, to some extent, national outlook.
Transnational history is, as shown above, all about rethinking space. Transnational urban history is an invitation to stretch spatial imaginations, denaturalize the city and the nation as the natural taken-for-given context of individual cases, and rethink and reframe familiar topics of urban history as well.Footnote 77 To this end, Carl Nightingale has proposed the term ‘diascopic’: ‘To imagine cities diascopically is to keep the geographic scope of our inquiry open, as something we need to establish empirically.’Footnote 78 This is in accordance with the view of transnational history presented in this article. But thinking diascopically poses a challenge to paradigmatic approaches, and under such circumstances scholars, again according to Kuhn,Footnote 79 become philosophers who try to accommodate the challenges by means of disciplinary self-reflection or self-interrogation. The aim of this article is to contribute to this. The claim is neither that all urban history ought to be transnational, nor that the national or the single city framework is no longer relevant, but that looking for translocal connections and considering space should be added as a natural part of paradigmatic considerations.Footnote 80
Transnational urban history always entails a measure of comparative work to find communalities as hints of connections. Building on existing case-studies is the one way to make transnational urban history manageable.Footnote 81 This article has presented ways to approach transurban history focusing on people – the intermediaries – printing presses, voluntary associations or formal international organizations as ways into locating starting points for unravelling networks of transfer and interconnectivities. The enlargement of scale and the search for connections does add new perspectives to urban history and produces new knowledge not only of urban history, but history in general. This article has presented examples which illustrate the fruitfulness of focusing on transurban interconnectivities to understand the diffusion of modernity from opera to modern urban planning and nationalism. Especially with respect to transnational nationalismFootnote 82 in the nineteenth century, the focus on cities as nodes in transfer networks show that processes of global transfer of modernity were no simple diffusion from the west to the rest. But, as the examples also show, many transnational processes of the nineteenth century were, so to speak, urban before they became national. In this sense, the focus on cities as the location of transnational processes of modernity brings urban place more centrally into discussions of national space and national histories.
