| One of the most intriguing aspects of the current diagnosis of a 'transnational turn' is that it forgets that it has already taken place several time. Together with an exploration of this history of the 'transnational' lexical family, this article offers additional assessments for why historians of the modern age not to have yielded to our professional hubris, and refrained from proclaiming a new dawn had came. Historical investigation that stretched across national borders did not begin in the 1990s, and we all know that. Nevertheless, we are also able to learn from the adoption of a transnational perspective on the period from the mid-nineteenh century to current times. Not only in terms of scholarship, but also regarding the methods and frames we use. Picking up from the experience of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, to be published in 2009, the article explores some of the issues and possibilities offered by the transnational perspective. Thus have been identified some problems like the aporia of the nation-centeredness of a good part of the existing transnational literature and the scholarly neglect of the 'narrative of global evil'. Two 'lessons' have also been learned from the experience, that might offer possibilities for future research: one is to question the conventional scalar conception of history with levels starting at the local and ending at the global, the other is the proposal to focus on the structural and dynamic orders organizing transnational flows. The piece concludes with an attempt to turn these possibilities to European history, with the help of some recent scholarship in this field. |
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