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BOOK REVIEW
| Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ANU E-Press, Canberra, 2005. pp. x + 278. $25.00 paper. Free download available from <http://epress.anu.edu.au/cw_citation.html>
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| 'What is all the fuss about?' So writes Patrick Wolfe in the concluding chapter of this volume edited by two of Australia's leading historians, Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake. Wolfe is referring to the fact that for students of race, imperialism or colonialism, the idea of the 'transnational' is nothing new. On the contrary, he points out, at least one party in any colonial encounter comes from somewhere else (pp. 233–34). Connected Worlds brings together a number of papers that were presented at a conference in the ANU's Humanities Research Centre. The agenda for the book is a bold one. In their introductory essay Curthoys and Lake pose the question of whether history's role as 'handmaiden' to the nation state – itself a bold claim – has 'distorted or limited our understanding of the past': 'And if so, can a transnational approach help to develop new and more adequate forms of historical understanding?' (p. 5). Is it worth the fuss? |
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Inevitably a collection such as this can only provide a few glimpses and hints as to the possibilities of transnational history but they are important nonetheless. There are a number of excellent essays in the volume from Patrick Wolfe on Indian Nationalism and Jim Hammerton on £10 Poms to Hsu-Ming Teo on capitalism and romantic love and John Fitzgerald on Sydney's peripatetic Chinese masons. Space allows me to focus in a little more detail on two chapters. The first is John Maynard's examination of the impact Marcus Garvey's Black Nationalist movement on Aboriginal activism in the 1920s. The chapter (which reads like a spoken paper) tells a fascinating story beginning with a family photograph depicting members of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association with Jack Johnson, the African-American boxer who became heavyweight champion of the world in Sydney in December 1908. Maynard goes on to uncover forgotten links between local activists and Garvey's US-based Universal Negro Improvement League in the 1920s and by so doing tantalisingly poses a challenge to the existing view that Aboriginal activism did not originate until the 1930s. The chapter provides a clear signpost for further work (some of which he has subsequently undertaken). |
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Secondly, there is Lake's study of the technology of racial exclusion that underpinned the White Australia policy. Lake points out that the infamous dictation test originated not in Natal in 1897 but in Boston in 1896. Indeed she shows that the 'deployment of a literacy test for racial purposes' began in Mississippi in 1890 (p. 213). Lake's point is that policymakers in South Africa and Australia were looking to the United States for their inspiration rather than within the British Empire. Of course she might have also referred to earlier proposals to use literacy tests to exclude British working men from the suffrage. |
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The emphasis on the US example is motivated in part by the emergence over the last decade of the 'British world' as a frame of reference. Far from a centralised system revolving around Westminster, scholars now usefully look at the British Empire as a global matrix around which ideas and individuals formally and informally flowed. The undoubted importance of the 'Great Republic' suggests that we should instead think in terms of an Anglophone world. Linda Colley has argued that future historians might come to regard the American Revolution not as a profound caesura but as the starting point for a shift in power from London to Washington within an Anglophone world. The sight of Blair and Bush arm in arm in the White House press room festooned with red, white and blue (Stars and Stripes and Union Jacks) suggests she has a point. |
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What then of Wolfe's question? For Australian historians the rise of transnational history is an opportunity to examine our institutions and ideas as part of the wider world which generated them and to tell Australian stories to a larger audience. It is an opportunity not to be lost. The fuss is worth it. |
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Finally, a comment is warranted on this as an E-book. The volume can be downloaded and printed from the ANU site without charge but what you end up with is a dog-eared chunk of A4 copy paper with a bulldog clip on the corner. Fortunately E-Press will sell you a 'perfectly bound copy'. Important books such as this deserve at least a chance for life on the shelf. |
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| The Australian National University |
PAUL PICKERING | |
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