To Rescue the Past From the Nation: All for One, One for All? Leveraging National Interests with Regional Visions in Southern Africa

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Tilman Dedering for his, as always, perceptive and helpful comments on a draft of this address and for alerting me to important relevant references, and to Christopher Saunders and Nicholas Southey for ascertaining the date of 2005 as the name-change of the Southern African Historical Society.

Notes

1. P. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

2. J. Carruthers, ‘The Changing Shape and Scope of Southern African Historical Studies’, South African Historical Journal, 62, 2 (2010), 385–394.

3. T.R.H. Davenport, ‘The Tiger in the Grass’, South African Historical Journal, 9 (1977), 3–12, see p. 6.

4. Carruthers, ‘The Changing Shape and Scope’.

5. http://www.sahs.org.za/index.php/news7-call-for-papers.html Southern African Historical Society, accessed 26 April 2009.

6. E. Kedourie, Nationalism. 4th ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). This provoked replies from his LSE colleague Ernest Gellner in Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, c. 1964) and Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983) contesting Kedourie’s theories on the potential eliminability of nationalist thought.

7. E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

8. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. (London, New York: Verso, 2006).

9. A.D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism: A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1998); Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). See also P. Spencer and H. Wollman, eds, Nations and Nationalism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

10. R. Robin, ‘Historians and the Nation State’, in A. Iriye and P-Y. Saunier, eds, Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the mid-19th Century to the Present Day (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 486–493, see p. 488.

11. I. Tyrrell, ‘History’, in Iriye and Saunier, Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, 493–496, see p. 495. See also, A. Curthoys and M. Lake, eds, Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2005).

12. Robin, ‘Historians and the Nation State’, 492.

13. J-F. Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009).

14. E. Young, ‘Regions’, in Iriye and Saunier, Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, 882–887, see p. 884.

15. Hans Mommsen, quoted in C. Applegate, ‘A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times’, The American Historical Review, 104, 4 (1999), 1157–1182, see p. 1157.

16. For a summary of the concept and the literature, see Dan Shao, ‘Borders and Borderlands’, in Iriye and Saunier, Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, 99–102.

17. As examples see a number of chapters in R. Elphick and H. Giliomee, eds, The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1979); H. Lamar and L. Thompson, eds, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa Compared (New Haven: Yale University Press, c.1981); N. Mostert, Frontiers (London: Pimlico, 1992).

18. Shao, ‘Borders and Borderlands’, 99–100.

19. D. Thelen, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives from United States History’, Journal of American History, 86, 3 (1999), 965–975, see p. 969.

20. W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce during the Early and Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), vol. 1, p. 8. Quoted in ‘Introduction’, P-Y. Saunier, Transnational History (New York: Palgrave, in press).

21. Iriye and Saunier, eds, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History.

22. A. Iriye, Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present, and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 70; 80.

23. P.J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter, 41 (2000), 17–18.

24. C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2004); W.H. McNeill, A World History, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); W.H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963); P. Manning, World History: Global and Local Interactions (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2005); Migration in World History (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave, 2003).

25. P-Y. Saunier, Transnational History (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3.

26. I. Hofmeyr, Portable Bunyon: A Transnational History of ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

27. A. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalisation of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

28. P-Y. Saunier, ‘Going Transnational? News from Down Under: Transnational History Symposium, Canberra, Australian National University, September 2004’, Historical Social Research, 31, 2 (2006), 118–131.

29. A. Curthoys and M. Lake, ‘Introduction’, in Curthoys and Lake, Connected Worlds, 13–15.