A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost.
— Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (1997)
Supernational: Nation, Scale, History
Supernational examines scales of historical writing before the rise of imperial, transnational, and global histories.
Historical writing, we are often told, has long been organized around the nation. Yet the nation only triumphed as an organizing category recently and briefly - a product less of the nationalist 1860s than the decolonizing 1960s, and already being displaced by the 1990s.
Supernational excavates a variety of non-national historical writing since the mid-nineteenth century. Chapters consider figures including Henry Thomas Buckle, J. R. Seeley, Eileen Power, Eric Williams, Winston Churchill, Vera Brittain, A. J. P. Taylor, and Walt Rostow.
Ultimately, rather than denouncing the work of national histories, Supernational locates their strengths and weaknesses in the context of these other scales and forms.
I explored these issues in “The Typicalities of the English? Walt Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, and Modern British History.” This article marks the ending of my story, when the economic historian, presidential advisor, and Cold War anti-communist Walt Rostow influentially asserted the centrality of the nation for post-colonial histories. The Stages of Economic Growth announced a moment when even global history was imagined as an assemblage of national histories. This article won the Walter D. Love Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies.