The main objective of this volume is to present recent German-speaking scholarship on comparative and transnational history to a wider audience. Almost all the essays in the collection were originally published in German and most of them are authored by scholars based in German-speaking countries. The work, which is designed as an introduction to a wider research landscape, is structured into two main sections: the first part contains debates on transnational and comparative approaches, while the second one presents a sample of six case studies in the field.
The theoretically oriented section of the book starts with a discussion by Hartmut Kaelble of Franco-German debates on comparative and transfer-oriented scholarship, as well as the tensions mutual benefits, and other relations between these two fields. It is followed by Jürgen Osterhammel’s reflection on transnational ways of writing a history of society. The article warns of treating national and transnational perspectives as zero-sum games and, moreover, offers some reflections on how to take transnational social histories to intercontinental or global levels of analysis. The latter direction is also taken by Sebastian Conrad, who in his contribution argues that the non-European dimensions of European history have been unduly marginalized by German scholars. For example, according to Conrad, paying more attention to the repercussions of colonialism for the history of Europe also entails granting the non-Western world greater levels of narrative agency. In the following piece, Shalini Randeria criticizes Eurocentric approaches to the study of modernization processes, such as the transformations behind facets of civil society and democracy. She argues that the uneven global nexuses framing the spread of modern civil society discourses were far more complex than the concept of diffusionism could possibly grasp. In this context she points that in recent years, scholars and political agents have become more attentive to ‘traditional’ communitarian institutions underlying facets of democracies and civil societies. That historiography cannot bluntly project historical concepts and categories derived from the European context onto non-Western societies is also emphasized in the chapter by Monica Juneja and Margrit Pernau. Both authors share some concerns about international academic power gaps and the necessity for scholars from different parts of the world to cooperate with one another. As part of a programme to overcome Eurocentric disciplinary cultures, they recommend that the scopes of transculturally comparative research should go beyond analysing colonizing vis-à-vis colonized societies, for instance by becoming more open to south–south studies.
Some of the methodological concerns expressed in the volume's theory section are mirrored in the case studies. For example, in his study of the entanglements between Africa and Germany during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Andreas Eckert emphasizes shared transformations and mutual influences more than mono-directional impacts. Dirk Hoerder’s analysis of trans-Atlantic migration patterns invites the reader to think in terms of alternative spatialities. He does this, for example, by viewing the origins of migration no longer just from nation-centred but also from regional perspectives. In addition, he pays attention to lasting migrant networks, hence going beyond a history of either emigration or immigration. Other case studies exemplify different routes taken by comparative historians in the past and the present. For example, Thomas Welskopp’s study of US and German labour during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is based on the idea that long-term synchronic comparisons cannot simply seek to trace back linear differences but rather need to follow far more complex methodological frameworks. Coming from a different methodological direction, Dieter Langewiesche’s investigation of nationalisms is designed as a generalizing comparison, which – among other themes – accentuates the conflict potentials inherent in national polities. Jörg Requate’s study of future visions in the USSR, as well as East and West Germany, during the 1960s is based on a combination of comparative, transfer-related, and globally oriented approaches. Here the author stresses the shared belief in a common systemic crisis within certain intellectual milieus on both sides of the Iron Curtain. A similarly combined vision guides Philip Ther through his discussion of the potentials for a transnational history of Europe. Wary of container perspectives, Ther outlines some transnational historical constellations in which ‘Europe’ was experienced and conceptualized as a distinct entity.
In the introduction, the editors offer some insightful typologies of historical comparison and also discuss the differences between comparative historiography and research on connections or entanglements. In addition, they elaborate on such academic developments as the gravitation of comparative history towards cultural themes, which had previously been more the focal point of transfer studies. They describe a growing sense among researchers that they could not only pursue isolated comparative approaches but need to draw on the historiography of flows, transfers, and shared transformations. In that sense, the two fields have approached each other in recent years.
The introduction also suggests that, during the past few decades, comparative and other transnational approaches have been of particular importance in German-speaking scholarship. The reasons for the relative prominence of these fields range from earlier attempts to problematize the trajectories of modern German history to the more recent demands for European perspectives. Several contributions to this volume exemplify that, whereas much of comparative history had long largely reified Eurocentric assumptions, important academic currents have now started flowing in the opposite direction. In fact, a growing branch of comparative historiography has gone against the notion of European exceptionalism by pointing to a wealth of similarities in other world regions. In that manner it has widened the field’s overlaps with other forms of transnational and global historical scholarship.
All in all, the volume provides an important collection of German approaches to transnational historiography, particularly during the past ten years. What it unfortunately does not offer is a systematic comparison between scholarship published in German and in other languages. While some contributions undertake brief excursions in such a direction, it remains unanswered if and to what degree the methodological turns taken by German historians moved parallel with developments elsewhere, especially in the Anglophone world. This question is left to the reader, who will certainly gain from consulting the rich variety of articles collected in this book.
