Pierre-Yves Saunier’s Transational history is a brief, useful overview of a growing field. It lays out clearly some basic definitions and issues, and provides well-chosen examples from the literature – though perhaps those examples concentrate excessively on the North Atlantic countries, and on cultural and intellectual history. Saunier is committed to distinguishing transnational history from world and global history and giving it a bounded domain. He describes it as a ‘peninsula’ on the larger landmass of trans-regional history (p. 6), distinguished from the rest of that larger unit by concerning itself with the period in which nations were ‘increasingly’ taken to be the normative form of a society. This is a useful move, though it also raises some problems: how normative do nations have to be for the study of connections across societies to become ‘transnational’? What do we do if the normativity of the nation is much stronger for some participants in an interaction than for others, as would have been true for a great many cases across the nineteenth century and even parts of the twentieth? It would also be useful to have some exploration of how and why this ‘peninsula’ is different from trans-societal history in earlier eras. If, for instance, the claim is that the idea of the nation implies a belief that the geography of ‘decision space’ and ‘identity space’ (to use Charles Maier’s terms) should be the same (p. 7), even as trans-societal ties make that isomorphism illusory, one wonders if this contradiction has been uniformly sharper in the last two centuries than it was among, say, fifteenth-century Italian city-states or self-proclaimed ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ states in pre-colonial India. And if transnational history occurs in a sphere in which the nation is ‘increasingly’ considered normal, does it exclude encounters with indigenous people who cared little for nations – with those interactions presumably then placed instead in ‘world’, ‘imperial’, or, ironically, various national histories? What is gained and lost by insisting on a separate field for the study of connections among people who live in nations rather than, for instance, empires?

The primary focus of transnational history, as Saunier sees it, is establishing the extent and limits of connections: following Frederick Cooper, among others, he emphasizes that we should not treat the actual, limited connections that we find as anticipations of a destined future where everything will be global. Among other things, he notes, resisting teleology in this way is necessary if we are to treat historical actors as having meaningful agency – whether their efforts extended connections, limited them, or both (p. 45). Saunier, who uses many geographic metaphors, points out that flows are the result of slopes, but emphasizes that the slopes he is interested in are made by people; he calls the overall set of slopes affecting any given topic a ‘regime’ and advises historians to trace each of them back to the relevant regime makers (pp. 73–8). The terminology of ‘regimes’ is chosen in preference to the widely used language of ‘networks’ and ‘hierarchies’, which he argues makes too sharp a distinction between egalitarian circuits of exchange and unequal ones of command; he emphasizes (rightly, I think) that all the relationships described involve both reciprocity and inequality (p. 78).

While this may suggest a transnational history defined by distinctive objects of study, Saunier also presents the field as defined by a distinctive angle of vision on topics it shares with other subfields (p. 4). Indeed, a central part of his case for transnational history is that it is necessary for a thorough understanding of topics not usually thought of as transnational, including nation-making itself. Saunier emphasizes the circulation of people and of ideas across many instances of nation-building, but could just as easily have pointed to the importance of trade-based revenues and foreign loans for emerging governments. (In this sense, many modern nations are as much the result of recognition by other nations – especially where there has been dispute over who can legitimately receive customs revenues, mineral royalties, and so on – as they are of achieving legitimacy in the eyes of their own people.) In other cases, transnational connections that were perceived to have ‘failed’ or had limited impact in their own time are interesting as forerunners of later, more powerful regimes of connection. This, for instance, is part of the reason why the once-neglected archives of the League of Nations have attracted considerable attention in recent years.

But, along with his caution against giving such regimes automatic importance as anticipations of ‘globalization’ to come, Saunier also quite rightly cautions against assuming that the mere fact of something being transnational makes it important, even if it fails other tests of historical significance. Careful to ask about possible limits to the growth of transnational history (along with the reasons to expect such growth), he also takes the far-too-uncommon step of asking who its audience should be, noting that if transnational history simply becomes a sort of public history for today’s most mobile people, it will not get far. He instead invokes Thomas Bender’s goal of writing history that can help create more cosmopolitan citizens (p. 140), who value diversity and comparison, and are also aware of how certain local things which they prize are entangled with things elsewhere – but who, as the term ‘citizens’ reminds us, remain embedded in nations. That he considers teaching as well as research here enhances the value of his discussion. I do wish, however, that he had taken that occasion to say more about the challenges of presenting history beyond ‘societies’ – which not only provide units that our audiences recognize and care about, but containers that help us bring into contact subjects as diverse as demography, politics, and spirituality.

The proper objects of such transnational analyses are, as Saunier puts it, ‘formations’: he names five kinds of formations, with different scales and natures (pp. 99–116). Biographies can be transnational history, if the person in question lived between or across multiple nations; so can the stories of organizations (labour unions, temperance movements, and so on) or of events (1968 or the Cold War). The remaining two kinds of formations are the least obvious and the most interesting: ‘territories’ and ‘topical formations’. In both these categories, Saunier emphasizes the ad hoc nature of the objects of study, arguing that this distinguishes transnational history from other kinds of history. In the case of territories, I would have liked him to say more about the status of area studies (which he treats cursorily) and about the difference between transnational spaces that crosscut supposed ‘civilizations’ and those that stay within them. (Many of Saunier’s examples remain within western Europe, and even more within that amorphous but powerful entity called ‘the West’; such ad hoc territories do not do quite the same intellectual work that studies which cross those boundaries through tracing comparisons, connections, or both, can do.) Ad hoc ‘topical formations’ are, for him, the actor-generated problems and issues present in transnational discourse at a particular moment, and so different from many of the objectively present ‘themes’ of world/global history (p. 107). World population, disease patterns, and levels of production and consumption of particular goods, for instance, exist for all moments, even if for many dates we cannot calculate them and the people of that time would not have recognized them as things to be calculated (or altered by concerted effort). By contrast, ‘over-population’ and ‘under-development’ are ideas that come into and go out of fashion, and it is these sorts of topics that Saunier sees as suited to transnational history. Though he does not say so, one reason for such a separation may be that some of the ‘themes’ that he eschews would not be particularly elucidated by emphasizing connections and flows; and, insofar as they call instead for comparison and/or synthesis, they sometimes require a move ‘from archive to library’ (that is, a reliance on secondary sources), which Saunier rejects for transnational history (p. 117). It is less clear, though, why the ad hoc topical formation does not belong to world history (or in some cases national history), just as much as to transnational history – and often the two will be intertwined anyway.

These issues aside, the boundaries and definitions that Saunier provides for transnational history constitute useful first approximations if one wishes to foster a division of labour in which both transnational history and global/world history can be accepted as normal historical subfields, having the legitimacy of traditional ones and respectful of their turf (he closes by saying that he has no wish for transnational history to become ‘hegemonic’ (p. 141)). That sort of normalization is not what all their practitioners want, especially in the case of world history. But it is clearly part of the project which Saunier advocates here – and he does so well.