Transimperial History: The New Global?

Abstract

Just a few years ago, the term “transimperial” needed much introduction and explanation. However, those days seem to be over as more and more scholars explicitly adopt such an approach.
Nowadays, very different topics; such as colonial knowledge, violence, or comparison, different actors, for example, cultural brokers, pilgrims, or enslaved people, and various areas, the Caribbean, the United States, or Scandinavia, to name but a few are put into a new light by adopting transimperial perspectives.

This talk aims at explaining and exploring both the potential and limits of this approach. First, it will distinguish transimperial as a term from others, such as interimperial or transnational. Second, it will argue that the approach might be an intriguing alternative for writing global history with a sharp analytical toolbox that solves some of the methodological problems we face with the latter. Finally, the empirical example of a transimperial (Indo-)Pacific will illustrate the theoretical-methodological arguments.

The session will be held in presence, but it is also possible to access it online. To join, please click the button below and enter the code 294582.

Biographical Note

Nadin Hée (Osaka University, Japan)

Nadin Heé is a historian with a background in Empire Studies and a focus on East Asia, and her critical engagement with postcolonial theory and theories of violence and trans-imperial aspects of colonial history has been published as Imperiales Wissen und koloniale Gewalt. Japans Herrschaft in Taiwan 1895-1945, (Campus Verlag, 2012), which was awarded the JaDe-Prize.

Currently she is interested in global exploration and exploitation of marine resources, doing research that is at the intersection of empire studies and environmental history.
She is trying to reveal how tuna became a global common, and discovered that the Japanese empire did play a major role in the process. To understand its global environmental history, she approaches the ocean as a three-dimensional vertical space, and not, as in many global historical studies, as a void on which people or commodities move. Here she argues that the ocean is not simply a pathway between countries, continents, and islands, but rather that we must consider both the surface and the vertical dimension of the ocean that is also connected to other spaces, such as the land and the sea, and various environmental phenomena such as climate, winds, and more.