Kate Ferris

Introduction: Space and Scale in Transnational History

If the frequency of specific key words in book titles, series or journal editions are an indicator of the shift within a discipline, transnational history has certainly arrived. Next to other key terms that have marked methodological shifts during specific periods in the past such as social history since the 1950s, micro history during the 1970s and 1980s, or more loosely the ubiquitous dominance of cultural history from the 1980s onward, transnational history could mark such a shift. One could certainly argue that forms of transnational history have existed for a long time. Since the early 1990s and even more significantly since the early 2000s, however, the rising frequency of the term transnational – alongside global – history indicates that something within history and neighbouring disciplines has and is still happening. It does not have to be yet another turn, revision or even less a change of paradigm in the sense Thomas Kuhn understands it. But the publication of the rather monumental ‘Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History’ by Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier might indicate the transition from earlier, partly unconnected roots via debate and programmatic pleas to a firm establishment of transnational history – at least in some scholarly communities such as the US, Britain, Germany or France. When, rather simultaneously albeit stemming from different impulses and interests, something such as transnational history emerges in different places and in different intellectual contexts and milieus, arguably most importantly in the US, in Germany and France but also elsewhere, there is good reason to treat it seriously. The detached but almost contemporaneous debates among American scholars on the internationalisation of US history since the early 1990s and the intense discussions among German and French historians about comparative history and the concept of transferts culturels since the late 1980s, or more recently histoire croisée, have certainly fuelled the growing interest in transnational perspectives. Time will have to tell if, and if so what, transnational history or history in a transnational perspective can add to our current understanding of the world and to particular nations and nation states within this world. As some pundits argue transnational history is not new. This is true. But that is not a reason to dismiss it altogether. Transnational history can actually be seen as an umbrella perspective that encompasses a number of well-established tools and perspectives such as historical comparison, (cultural) transfers, connections, circulations, entangled or shared history as well as a modern form of international history. All of these stem from different and earlier contexts and debates but all share the conviction that historical and social processes cannot be apprehended and understood exclusively The International History Review Vol. 33, No. 4, December 2011, 573–584

Slavery and Abolition

Abraham Lincoln has been widely hailed as “immortal,” but historians have only recently charted how sharply the reasons for his attributed status in eternity varied in different places and at different times.2 This was the case worldwide, but it was particularly so in those societies where slavery persisted after 1865. For many people in the Empire of Brazil, the colony of Cuba, and the imperial monarchy of Spain, Lincoln had nobly fulfilled the founding ideals of the US Republic, purging its “great stain” and restoring its claim to be the model of all human emancipation. For others, he was a dangerous idealist whose irresponsibility had caused untold and unnecessary bloodshed—an enduring example of precisely how not to pursue the path to progress. In these three slave-holding societies, unlike in those places where abolition was not an immediate issue, the meaning of Lincoln’s image was shaped by the overshadowing questions of how and when to bring slavery to an end. While virtually everyone agreed that Lincoln and the US Civil War had made abolition elsewhere inevitable at some point, beyond that there was very little consensus about what else the US experience implied for other countries.

Parents, Children and the Fascist State: The Production and Reception of Children’s Magazines in 1930s Italy

The fascist regime, which ruled Italy for over twenty years (1922–43/5), aimed to fundamentally transform Italian society. Mussolini’s regime intended not only to complete the allegedly unfinished Risorgimento project to ‘make Italians’ who would identify with their nation and with each other, but to make fascist Italians. These new fascist men and women would provide both the justification and means for fascist Italy to become a great imperial power; the production of increasing numbers of healthy—and fascist—Italians would provide justification for greater ‘living space’ and furnish the manpower to gain and maintain a new Italian Empire. Key to this intended transformation was the Italian family. The family was understood as the ‘basic cell of the State, the Nation and the people’ in the words of PNF secretary Augusto Turati; ‘the only possible safeguard, the last trench for resistance against the corrosive action of the various amoral and immoral forces which cause social decay’.1

Patents and Profit: The Image of the USA as the World’s Pioneer in Technology, Engineering, Communications and Urban Planning

This chapter explores images of America as the key site of technological modernity, which resulted at least in part from US projects of itself as a world pioneer in mechanical and scientific inventions and their commercial applications, urban planning and communications. Such images again operated in a complex transnational field of images. Spanish scientists and the small but engaged public audience for science looked transnationally, to the USA but also to Britain, France, Germany and further afield to understand how modern technologies might shape Spain’s future. The United States was imagined as a technological pioneer in particular respects: in patenting and drawing maximum profit from inventions; in creating inventions that brought comfort and luxury and in constructing in superlatives—the ‘biggest’, the ‘longest’ and the ‘greatest’ in the world. Spanish images of US technologies were inflected variously with positive admiration and emulation, with envious ressentiment and, increasingly, with fear of the military implications of US technologies and inventions as war between Spain and the USA, over Cuban independence, neared.

Introduction: Imagining ‘America’, Imagining ‘Spain’

This chapter examines the production and circulation of images of the United States in late nineteenth-century Spain, between the ‘Glorious’ liberal revolution of 1868 and the loss of Spain’s New World colonies in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898. It argues that liberal and democratic Spaniards imagined ‘America’ as a complex exemplar of political, social and technological modernity and used these imaginaries to construct self-identities of themselves and of Spain as a modern nation.

Abolition, Emancipation and War: The United States in Spanish Political Culture and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba

This chapter examines a particular facet of the ‘model republic’ provided by the USA: the abolition of slavery. During the sexenio democratico (1868–1874/75) the question of colonial reform, including the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico, became a hot political topic. The growing abolitionist movement in Spain looked to the process of abolition and emancipation undertaken recently in the USA and advocated a similar process of immediate, unindemnified abolition in Spain’s colonies. Connections were made between the Civil War context of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the ongoing independence war in Cuba (1868–78) and the experiences of black Americans, including segregation and the practice of lynching, in the post-bellum USA were deployed as a means to better understand how to manage the aftermath of abolition in Spain’s colonies. However, opponents of colonial reform seized on the Civil War context of US abolition to argue that immediate, unidemnified abolition would be disastrous for Spanish colonial interests in Cuba and Puerto Rico.

A Model Republic? The United States, the Constitutional Question and Political Practice in Spain

This chapter argues that the predominant image of the USA in late nineteenth-century Spain was that of the modern ‘model republic’. Such images resulted from the transnational exchanges of American self-projections, images circulating from France and Latin America and ideas produced in Spain. The image of the USA as a model republic operated in complex fields of images, which included the republican and constitutional models of France and Great Britain. During the sexenio democratico (1868–1874/75), the US ‘model republic’ was particularly potent among Spanish progressive liberals and democrats who identified the USA as a 100-year experiment of a democratic republic in practice; Spanish Carlists and conservatives, however, viewed the US republic as an anti-model and pointed especially to the American Civil War as evidence of the undesirability of this model of modernity in Spain.

Race, Religion, Progress and Decline: Imagining Difference Between the United States and Spain

The final chapter examines how Spaniards constructed and understood essential differences between Spaniards and Americans as the product of racial distinctions between Latins and Anglo-Saxons. Latins and Anglo-Saxons were understood to have fundamentally different and sometimes opposing aptitudes and values—Latins were imagined as artistic, valorous and imaginative; Anglo-Saxons as pragmatic, lovers of individual political liberty, but also uncultured—and these distinctions were read as explanations of differing levels of modern development and progress in Spain and the United States. A key marker of distinction drawn between Latins and Anglo-Saxons was that of religion, between Catholic Latins and Protestant Anglo-Saxons. In any case, the perception of a religious divide fed into categories of difference that were historically and culturally constructed. These were then transmuted into essential biological distinctions of ‘race’, which were assumed to pass through the generations and account for national progress and decline.

‘Liberty’ or ‘License’? Images of Women in the United States and the ‘Woman Question’ in Spain

An important dimension of Spanish images of the United States as the key site of modernity was the liberty that American women were perceived to enjoy. As such, women were imagined as recipients and also barometers of modernity. Spaniards imagined American women as emancipated, educated and free in their personal and social lives, from various perspectives. Liberal Krausist educationalists admired greatly the educational opportunities and practices for American women. Early Spanish feminists like Concepcion Arenal and Emilia Pardo Bazan looked to US women as pioneers of the kinds of educational and political advances that they hoped would come to Spain in the future, but could not imagine in Spain’s present. Spanish travellers to the USA were intensely curious about the informality of interactions and relations between the sexes in contrast to the rigidity of such relationships at home, but disagreed as to whether this was a welcome aspect of the modern way of life or whether modern American women were characterised more by licentiousness than liberty.

‘Elbow to elbow’: Venetian life between the wars

Venice is one of those cities that is, or seems, exceptionally familiar. Thanks to the considerable presence of international tourists who for centuries have been charmed by the unusual topography of a city built on water, thanks to the artists, writers and film-makers who have depicted and re-imagined it, and thanks to the meticulous and dutiful archivists of the Serenissima Republic and Empire, who ensured that one of the most complete set of records of a city-state would endure for empirically minded scholars to pour over many years later, we feel that we already know Venice, even if we have never visited. The history of the city has been studied almost exhaustively: indeed, it has been said that Venice was the first subject of modern history, thanks to the comprehensive nature of its archives which allowed the structures, policies and practices of the Serenissima to be put to the Rankean test.1 Venice’s long history as a powerful, enterprising, entertaining and stable republic and later empire (following the Battle of Chioggia in 1380 it was not successfully invaded until the arrival of Napoleon in 1797) is the period that has most captured historians’ attention. It is also the period that gave rise to the dual myths of Venice, at once the embodiment of stable civic government and an aristocratic hot-bed of moral decadence and frivolity.2