This article argues that the method of transregional history offers a valuable new tool for studying early modern territorial borders. Where existing research strands do not always suffice to accommodate the complexity of such boundaries, this new concept can serve as an alternative. Firstly, transregional history points out that early modern boundaries were not the outcome of actions that were pursued at one spatial level, be it local, regional, national, transnational, or global, but existed at multiple negotiated levels at once. Secondly, the method prompts historians: a) to not predefine “the” singular border of the region under scrutiny, but to follow historical actors as they shifted from one course of action to another in dealing with these multiple borders; and b) to question what transcended the boundaries of a region instead of highlighting how they separated one “unique” area from the next. In doing so, transregional history helps to reformulate questions about territorial boundaries, to make novel heuristic choices in research where and when borders matter, and, hence, to improve our understanding of transboundary historical change.
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Lucien Febvre, “Frontières. Le mot et la notion,” in Pour une histoire à part entière, ed. Lucien Febvre (Paris, 1962), 11-24; Daniel Nordman, Frontières de France. De l’espace au territoire, xvie-xixe siècle (Paris, 1998); Isabelle Paresys, Aux marges du royaume. Violence, justice et société en Picardie sous François Ier (Paris, 1998); David Potter, War and Government in the French Provinces: Picardy, 1470-1560 (Cambridge, 1993); David Potter, “The Frontiers of Artois in European Diplomacy, 1482-1560,” in Arras et la diplomatie européenne—XVIe-XVIe siècles, ed. D. Clauzel et al. (Arras, 1999), 262-275; Steven G. Ellis, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford, 1995); John Gray, “Lawlessness on the Frontier: The Anglo-Scottish Borderlands in the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century,” History and Anthropology 12 (2001): 381-408; Jackson W. Armstrong, “The Justice Ayre in the Border Sheriffdoms, 1493-1498,” The Scottish Historical Review 92 (2013): 1-37; Anna Groundwater, The Scottish Middle March, 1573-1625: Power, Kinship, Allegiance (Martlesham, 2013).
Gwendolyn Wright, “Cultural History: Europeans, Americans, and the Meanings of Space,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64 (2005): 436-440.
Simon Ditchfield, “Preface to the 20th Anniversary Issue: The Pasts and Futures of Early Modernity in Global Perspective,” Journal of Early Modern History 20 (2016): 509-511, and the contributions to that thematic issue.
For example: Michiel van Groesen, “Officers of the West India Company, their networks, and their personal memories of Dutch Brazil,” in The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks (Intersections 14), ed. Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong and Elmer Kolfin (Boston, 2010), 39-58.
Serge Gruzinski, “Les mondes mêlés de la Monarchie catholique et autres ‘connected histories’,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 56 (2001): 85-89.
Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, “Localism. Global History and Transnational history. A Reflection from the Historian of Early Modern Europe,” Historisk Tidskrift 127 (2007): 659-678.
E.g. Ole Peter Grell, “The Creation of a Transnational, Calvinist Network and its Significance for Calvinist Identity and Interaction in Early Modern Europe,” European Review of History 16 (2009): 619-636, and Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner eds., Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: a Transnational History (Notre Dame, 2014).
See Günter Vogler, “Borders and Boundaries in Early Modern Europe: Problems and Possibilities,” in Frontiers and the Writing of History, 1500-1800, The formation of Europe. Historische Formationen Europas, volume 1, ed. Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Esser (Hannover-Laatzen, 2006), 25-30.
Harald Gustafsson, “The Conglomerate State: a Perspective on State Formation in Early Modern Europe,” Scandinavion Journal of History 23 (1998): 189-213; John Morrill, “‘Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown’: Dynastic Crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain, 1504-1746,” The Stenton Lecture 2003 (Reading, 2005).
Fernando Chavarría Múgica, “La frontera ceremonial y la frontera real: el Tratado de los Pirineos y la reavivación del conflicto por el dominio del río Bidasoa (1659-1668),” in Del tractat dels Pirineus a l’Europa del segle XXI: un model en construcció?: actes del congrés; Barcelona-Perpinyà, 17-20 juny de 2009, ed. Òscar Jané (Barcelona, 2010), 86.
See in this respect also Angelika Epple, “The Global, the Transnational and the Subaltern: The Limits of History beyond the National Paradigm,” in Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies, ed. Anna Amelina, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist and Nina Glick Schiller (New York, 2012), 155-175.
Alexander Soetaert, “Printing at the Frontier. The Emergence of a Transregional Book Production in the Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai (ca. 1560-1659),” De Gulden Passer: Journal for Book History 94 (2016): 137-163. For a specific case-study regarding French translations printed in the Cambrai province, see Ib., “Translating and distributing Italian religious literature in the ecclesiastical province of Cambrai (late 16th, early 17th century),” Incontri: Rivista Europea de studi Italiani 30 (2015): 29-40.
Bram De Ridder, “Benchmarking the Past: Politico-Legal Connotations of Tradition, Custom and Common Practice in the Diplomacy of the Eighty Years War,” Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies, published online 25 February 2016 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03096564.2016.1143285).
Jonathan Spangler, “Those in Between: Princely Families on the Margins of the Great Powers—The Franco-German Frontier, 1477-1830,” in Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond, 131-154; Violet Soen, “The Chièvres Legacy, the Croÿ Family and Litigation in Paris. Dynastic Identities between the Low Countries and France (1519-1559),” in Dynastic Identity in Early Modern Europe: Rulers, Aristocrats and the Formation of Identities, ed. Liesbeth Geevers and Mirella Marini (Farnham, 2015), 87-102.
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This article argues that the method of transregional history offers a valuable new tool for studying early modern territorial borders. Where existing research strands do not always suffice to accommodate the complexity of such boundaries, this new concept can serve as an alternative. Firstly, transregional history points out that early modern boundaries were not the outcome of actions that were pursued at one spatial level, be it local, regional, national, transnational, or global, but existed at multiple negotiated levels at once. Secondly, the method prompts historians: a) to not predefine “the” singular border of the region under scrutiny, but to follow historical actors as they shifted from one course of action to another in dealing with these multiple borders; and b) to question what transcended the boundaries of a region instead of highlighting how they separated one “unique” area from the next. In doing so, transregional history helps to reformulate questions about territorial boundaries, to make novel heuristic choices in research where and when borders matter, and, hence, to improve our understanding of transboundary historical change.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1267 | 192 | 17 |
Full Text Views | 400 | 20 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 405 | 46 | 0 |