whither conceptual history? from national to entangled histories

Whither Conceptual History? From National to Entangled Histories

MARGRIT PERNAUMax Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions

ABSTRACTTh e last decade has witnessed a remarkable internationalization in concep-tual history. Research covers more countries and languages than ever before, and there have been a number of very good comparative studies. Th is article refl ects on the possibility of taking conceptual history beyond comparison. Like nations, languages can no longer be considered as naturally given enti-ties, but have to be viewed as profoundly shaped by historical exchanges. Th is brings conceptual history into a dialogue with translation studies in a common attempt to unravel how equivalents between languages have been created by the actors.

KEYWORDSentangled history, global history, histoire croise, metalanguage, translation studies, transnational history

From its beginning as an academic discipline in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the writing of history has been closely intertwined with the national project: the investigation of a nations history was an important strategy for ascertaining or even bringing forth its identity as an unchanging quality throughout the ages.1 While Enlightenment historiography imagined the possibility of these national histories coexisting and together bringing forth a view of world history, in the nineteenth century historians increasingly saw their role as serving the nation-state. For both, the obvious frame of refer-ence for most of the historians work was the nation.

Th is paradigm has been challenged in the last fi ft een to twenty years, under the headings of transnational or global history. Both approaches aim at replac-ing the central place that nations held in historiography with a concentration on the transfers and entanglements taking place between themnations, their central thesis holds, are not preexistent to these multiple encounters, but con-

1. For an introduction to the debate, see Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, eds., National-izing the Past: Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac-millan, 2010).

Contributions to the History of Concepts Volume 7, Issue 1, Summer 2012: 111doi:10.3167/choc.2012.070101 ISSN 1807-9326 (Print), ISSN 1874-656X (Online)

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stituted by them.2 Th ese approaches are to be distinguished from two older movements toward overcoming the focus on a single nation, namely interna-tional and comparative history writing. Th e internationalization of historiog-raphy aims at expanding the focus beyond the history of a single nationfor example, universities traditionally supplement the teaching of their own na-tions history by endowing chairs for teaching that of other nations. Th e same holds true for the older versions of books or book series on European or world history, which work on an additive principle. While this approach can be more or less nationalistic, or even aim at overcoming nationalism with a vision of a world in which nations coexist peacefully and on the basis of equal rights and dignity, it still takes as its reference the nation as a clearly demarcated and autonomous unit.3

Comparative history, on the other hand, aims at bringing national histories into dialogue, looking for similarities and dissimilarities in order to discover rules of causality that are valid for a larger region, if not universally. Th ough comparison need not take place between nations onlywe have studies com-paring cities, regions, or even entire civilizationsat least for modern history, most projects tend to use nations as their frame of reference. Comparison has oft en been called the social science alternative to the experiments natural sci-entists are able to conduct.4 To a certain extent this already challenges the his-toricist basis of nationalist historiography. Each nation is no longer a universe unto itself, but is subject to the same laws as all the other nations. Here modern comparative history takes up the traditions of the Enlightenment. However, in order to yield verifi able conclusions, the objects of comparison have to be clearly defi ned. Th is defi nition, moreover, has to remain stable throughout the period under investigationthis is perhaps one of the reasons why nations seem the obvious choice for most comparisons. Historical relations between the nations under study may exist, but as they are not considered constitu-tive, they are not central to the inquiry. Rather, it is the historian who draws links between the objects of comparison according to the questions leading his or her research. Th ough diff erences in national historiographical traditions and diff erent organization of archival material have to be taken into account,

2. For a more extensive elaboration see Margrit Pernau, Transnationale Geschichte (Gt-tingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011).

3. Hellmut Diwald, Ernst Walter Zeeden, Robert Mandrou, Eberhard Weis, Th eodor Schieder, and Karl Dietrich Bracher, Propylen Geschichte Europas (Berlin: Propylen Ver-lag, 1975); Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Th e Story of Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935).

4. A good summary of the debate is to be found in Th omas Welskopp, Stolpersteine auf dem Knigsweg: Methodenkritische Anmerkungen zum internationalen Vergleich in der Gesellschaft sgeschichte, Archiv fr Sozialgeschichte 35 (1995): 33967.

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comparative history is compatible with and able to draw on national histories, notably those whose vision goes toward a world of coexisting nations.5

Pointing to the neglect in this methodology of already existing links be-tween nations, historians of transfer sharply distinguished their approach from comparative history. Instead, they insisted that nations had never existed in isolation, but rather that transfers at all levelspeople, goods, knowledgewere central to the understanding of what happened not only between, but also within nations. Th ese transfers could be triggered by pull as well as by push factors. In any case, diff erences in powerperceived or realwere important elements to consider. In historiographical practice, relations between nations could be broken down into a multitude of discrete transfers, each moving in one direction only and having a beginning and an end. Th e objects transferred were embedded into a new context, a process that involved changes both in the objects, as they acquired a new meaning in the new context, and also in the context, which reacted to the importation. Th ough transfer history has been one of the moving forces behind transnational history, it can still accommo-date the national paradigm. Nations are no longer viewed in splendid isola-tion, but they still constitute the basic reference for the transferspredating them both temporally and ontologically.6

5. Marc Bloch, Pour une histoire compare des socits europennes, in Mlanges Historiques, Marc Bloch, ed. (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1963); idem, A Contribution Towards a Comparative History of European Societies, trans. J. E. Anderson, in Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe; Selected Papers, Marc Bloch, ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 4481; John Breuilly, Introduction: Making Comparisons in History, in Labor and Liberal-ism in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Comparative History, John Breuilly, ed. (Man-chester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Deborah Cohen and Maura OConnor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004); Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Comparative Perspectives on Social Change (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1968); Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, a Book of Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1962); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jrgen Kocka, Comparative and Transnational History: Central Euro-pean Approaches and New Perspectives (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009); Jrgen Kocka, Comparison and Beyond, History and Th eory 42, no. 1 (2003): 3944; Chris Lorenz, Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives, History and Th eory 38 (1999): 2539; Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Th eda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1979); Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Compari-sons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).

6. Th omas Adam, Intercultural Transfers and the Making of the Modern World, 18002000: Sources and Contexts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, Deutsch-franzsischer Kulturtransfer als Forschungsgegenstand: Eine Problemskizze, in Transferts: Les Rlations interculturelles dans lespace franco-allemand


Margrit Pernau

Th is position has increasingly come under attack, on the one side by the Histoire croise developed by Michael Werner and Bndicte Zimmermann, a method that has mainly been taken up by French and German historians,7 and on the other by ideas on entangled history, which have close links to the movement for a new imperial history in the Anglophone world and are marked by postcolonial theories.8 Where these approaches converge is in their insistence that nations do not predate the exchanges between them, but are constituted through these very encounters. Every transfer is a two-way pro-cess, which infl uences not only the receiver but also the sender, though under diff erent conditions, in a diff erent way, and with diff erent results. Th erefore, the investigation of the historical relations constitutes the core of the histo-riographical project. Writing a history of France or Great Britain that does not take into account their close entanglement with the colonies, or for that matter with other European nations, results in not only an incomplete picture (which could later be completed), but one that is fl awed from its inception. Th ere is no way for national histories to add up to an entangled historythe relations and interdependences that were left out of the investigation in the

(XVIIIe et XIXe sicle), Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds. (Paris: Editions Recher-che sur les Civilisations, 1988), 1134; Michel Espagne, Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle, Genses 17 (1994): 11221; Eckhardt Fuchs and Benedikt Stuchtey, Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefi eld, 2002); Jessica Gienow-Hecht and Frank Schumacher, Culture and International History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003); Hartmut Kaelble, ed., Vergleich und Transfer: Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaft en (Frankfurt a.M., New York: Campus, 2003); Rudolf Muhs, Johannes Paulmann, and Willibald Steinmetz, eds., Aneignung und Abwehr: Interkultureller Transfer zwischen Deutschland und Grossbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert (Bodenheim: Philo, 1998).

7. Michael Werner and Bndicte Zimmermann, Vergleich, Transfer, Verfl echtung: Der Ansatz der Histoire Croise und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 607636; Michael Werner and Bndicte Zimmermann, eds., De la Comparaison lHistoire Croise, Le Genre Humain 42 (Paris: Seuil, 2004); Michael Werner and Bndicte Zimmermann, Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croise and the Challenge of Refl exivity, History and Th eory 45 (2006): 3050.

8. Antoinette Burton, Who Needs the Nation? Interrogating British History, Journal of Historical Sociology 10 (1997): 22748; Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Uni-versity of California Press, 1997); Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 18301867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Th ought and the Colonial World (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1986]); Sebastian Conrad and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements 1880s1930s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, La Rpublique impriale: Politique et racisme dEtat (Paris: Fa-yard, 2009); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 16601840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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fi rst place cannot be infused into the fi nal texts. A valid objection to these claims is that important though entanglements may be, it cannotand in fact should notbe ignored that nations have been an important category since the eighteenth century. Despite the importance they had for ordering the con-temporaries worldview, entanglements did not touch everything. On the con-trary, the drawing of boundaries and the conscious refusal of interactions and transfer are as much a part of the picture of historical reality as are transna-tional contacts. Methodologically, however, the evaluation of the importance of entanglement already needs the transnational perspective.

So where do we stand in conceptual history? Th e last decade has wit-nessed a remarkable internationalization of research and research networks. Besides regions with a long history of research in the fi eld, like Germany and Finland, major conceptual history projects are under way in Central and East-ern Europe, the Ibero-American world, China, Korea, and India, while there are many more single scholars in other countries. Many of these new projects work within a national and monolingual framework, but there are also un-dertakings that endeavor to follow a single concept in a plurality of national histories, and thus lead the way toward comparative history. Th ese projects are important for the development of conceptual history.9 Th ey have taken up signifi cant space in past issues of Contributions to the History of Concepts, and we look forward to receiving them in the future as well.

However, as with general historiography, in conceptual history too com-parison need not involve either the transcending of national boundaries or the investigation of transfers and relations between the objects of study. Th e comparison of concepts can therefore draw on existing research that has been conducted within the national paradigm, bringing out unexpected diff erences and similarities and thereby oft en generating new questions.10

9. As an important example of this approach, see the long-term project by Pim den Boer on the concept of civilization in a large variety of national contexts: Pim den Boer, Civiliza-tion: Comparing Concepts and Identities, Contributions to the History of Concepts (CHoC) 1, no. 1 (2001): 5162; Idem, Concepts in Focus, CHoC 3, no. 2 (2007): 205206; Idem, Towards a Comparative History of Concepts: Civilization and Beschaving, CHoC 3, no. 2 (2007): 207233; Sandro Chignola, Civis, civitas, civilitas: Translations in Modern Ital-ian and Conceptual Change, CHoC 3, no. 2 (2007): 23453; Javier Fernndez Sebastin, Th e Concept of Civilization in Spain, 17542005: From Progress to Identity, CHoC 4, no. 1 (2008): 81105; Raymonde Monnier, Th e Concept of Civilization from Enlightenment to Revolution: An Ambiguous Transfer, CHoC 4, no. 1 (2008): 106136; Hagen Schulze-Forberg and Morakot Jewachinda-Meyer, eds., Appropriating the Social and the Economic: Asian Translations, Conceptualizations and Mobilizations of European Key Concepts from the 1860s to the 1940s (forthcoming).

10. Reinhart Koselleck, Ulrike Spree, and Willibald Steinmetz, Drei brgerliche Wel-ten? Zur vergleichenden Semantik der brgerlichen Gesellschaft in Deutschland, England und Frankreich, in Begriff sgeschichten, Reinhart Koselleck, ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,


Margrit Pernau

A transnational history of concepts poses a number of methodological challenges for researchers. One of the projects of nationalism since the end of the eighteenth century has been to establish a correlation between the na-tion and its language. However, nations have never been sealed off from one another, nor have languages. Even aft er the replacement of the medieval and early modern scholarly languages (Latin for Europe, Persian for an even larger region from Central Asia and Iran to northern India) by vernaculars, people and texts continued to move across boundaries, involving processes of transla-tion, both oral and written. If conceptual history therefore is to move into the investigation of transfers, close collaboration with translation studies is of cen-tral importance: if we want to write transnational as opposed to comparative conceptual history, we need to start thinking about language and languages in a new way.

Th is collaboration has been greatly facilitated by the cultural turn in trans-lation studies since the mid-1990s.11 Traditionally translation has been viewed as taking place between two languages, considered to be entities complete in themselves and endowed with stable boundaries. Th e aim of the translator was to identify the meanings of linguistic expressions in one language and to transport them as faithfully as possible into the other language, with transla-tion studies evaluating how successful he or she was in this undertaking. Of course it has long been known that meaning could only rarely be translated in a one-to-one relation. But whether this was to be deplored, as in the traditional

2006), 402461; Reinhart Koselleck and Todd Samuel Presner, Th e Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Nor-bert Gtz, Ungleiche Geschwister: Die Konstruktion von nationalsozialistischer Volksgemein-schaft und schwedischem Volksheim; Die kulturelle Konstruktion von Gemeinschaft en im Modernisierungsprozess (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001); Pasi Ihalainen, Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public De-bates, 17341800 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); idem, Protestant Nations Redefi ned: Changing Percep-tions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 16851772 (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

11. Anuradha Dingwaney and Carol Maier, eds., Between Languages and Cultures: Trans-lation and Cross-Cultural Texts (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); Doris Bachmann-Medick, ed., bersetzung als Reprsentation fremder Kulturen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1997); Beate Hammerschmid and Hermann Krapoth, eds., bersetzung als kultureller Prozess: Rezeption, Projektion und Konstruktion des Fremden (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1998); Susan Bassnett and Andr Lefevere, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1998); Mary Snell-Hornby, Th e Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shift ing Viewpoints? (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006); Michael Cronin, Translation and Identity (London: Routledge, 2006); Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, eds., Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jeremy Munday, ed., Th e Routledge Compan-ion to Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2009); Mona Baker, ed., Critical Readings in Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2010).

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bon mot of traduttore, traditore, or whether the translation-treason was cel-ebrated as adding new meaning to the original,12 the translator was seen to work with given languages, which he did not change.

Th e cultural turn in translation studies now brought the translator into perspective as an active and creative agent. Translators, it was proposed, did not fi nd equivalents between languages, but created them. Translation thereby became a negotiated and contested undertaking, which was embed-ded in social interactions and power relations.13 Th is in turn required an em-phasis on the social histories of the translators, as well as on the institutional history of translation projects.

At the same time, translation ceased to be perceived as an activity marginal to the involved languages. Introducing a concept from another language and embedding it in a new context changed not only the meaning of the word it-self, but also restructured the semantic fi eld into which it had been importedtranslations not only transfer content from one language to the other, but also transform the target language, irrespective of whether this goes hand in hand with a reconfi guration of its speakers experience. However, complete ruptures are still rarer in language than in other fi elds of history. Even if a word contin-ues to be marked as a loanwordthus pointing to the fact that a translation is not possible, as there is no corresponding indigenous termin order to be-come understandable, it has to be, if not translated, then at least explained with words already known to the readers. Th is process links the concepts to their linguistically embodied experiences, and thereby bridges the gap between self and other and colors the meaning of the word in its new context.14

If it is possible to trace the most important translations through which a transfer of concepts has occurred, the conceptual historian is on familiar ground. Th e task then consists of investigating the prehistory of the transla-tion, comparing the meaning of concepts in diff erent textual contexts, and fol-lowing the trajectory of the concept in its new surroundings, the adaptations, contestations, and possibly rejections and counter-translations.15 However,

12. Walter Benjamin, Th e Task of the Translator, trans. Harry Zohn, in Th e Translation Studies Reader, Lawrence Venuti, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 915.

13. Bernard S. Cohn, Th e Command of Language and the Language of Command, in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: Th e British in India, Bernard S. Cohn, ed. (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1997), 1657.

14. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer, bersetzenWohin? Zum Problem der Diskursformierung bei Frau von Stal und im amerikanischen Transzendentalismus, in Hammerschmid and Kaproth, bersetzung, 1131.

15. For this approach see the seminal studies by Jrn Leonhard on liberalism: Jrn Leonhard, Von den Ides Librales zu den Liberalen Ideen: Historisch-semantischer Kulturtransfer zwischen bersetzung, Adaption und Integration, in Kulturtransfer im 19. Jahrhundert, Marc Schalenberg, ed. (Berlin: Centre Marc Bloch, 1988), 1345; idem, Liberalis-musZur historischen Semantik eines europischen Deutungsmusters (Munich; Oldenbourg


Margrit Pernau

fi nding translations may not be as easy as it appears at fi rst sight, and becomes more diffi cult the more we move away from the central position in shaping the meaning of concepts that once was accorded to the canonical texts.

Contrary to what this model presupposes, translators are rarely the sole guardians of language transfers. Much more commonly, we fi nd situations where a substantial percentage of speakers and readers are multilingual, access-ing texts and concepts directly in the other language. Th ey may in turn work as translators in a very wide sense of the term, writing reviews, summaries, and explanations in their mother tongue, which might contain the fi rst transla-tion of a concept, even if it is not marked as such. Th ese translations may be even more hidden, if the reference to the original text is missing altogether and the authors simply start using the translated conceptsin their writings, but also in oral communication. Word-to-word translations of canonical texts, once they occur, may well in that case draw on a history of linguistic encoun-ters, rather than being their starting point.

Th e challenge now facing conceptual history is the move from a history of transfer, which recognizes the profound impact translations may have on lan-guages, to an entangled history. If nations can no longer be considered as given, but have to be viewed as brought about and constantly re-created through these very encounterswhat about languages? Looking at them from the standpoint of day-to-day experience, we consider our knowledge of language as natural, forgetting that it is knowledge that is already marked by centuries of print cul-ture, by dictionaries and language academies, and hence not easily applicable to other linguistic contexts. What would happen to conceptual history if we started out with a notion of language as fl uid, its boundaries the product of construction and subject to debate, its very identity created through encoun-ters, demarcations, and translations?16 Can we fi nd ways to take into account

Verlag: 2001); idem, Von der Wortimitation zur semantischen Integration: bersetzung als Kulturtransfer, in ber-setzen, Ulrike Gleixner, ed. (Essen: Klartext-Verlag, 2008), 4563. For a very convincing elaboration of how to proceed from comparison to histoire croise see Jani Marjanen, Undermining Methodological Nationalism: Histoire croise of Concepts as Transnational History, in Transnational Political Spaces: AgentsStructuresEncounters, Matthias Albert et al., eds. (Frankfurt a.M., New York: Campus, 2009), 23963.

16. Th is is the direction translation studies, notably those focusing on colonial and post-colonial translations, are currently taking: Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China 19001937 (Stanford: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 1995); eadem, ed., Tokens of Exchange: Th e Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Douglas R. Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002); zlem Berk, Translation and Westernization in Turkey from the 1840s to the 1980s (Istanbul: Yayinlari, 2004); Emily Apter, Th e Translation Zone: A New Com-parative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago

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the process of the creation and transformation of linguistic boundaries in the investigation of individual concepts transfer and translation, of which these boundaries are both the origin and the result? How can we give consideration to the power relations that mark not only single translations, but the relations between entire languages? How can we take into account the mutual percep-tions speakers have of their own and other languages? How do these percep-tions contribute to the establishment of hierarchies between languages?17

If language thus can no longer be considered a givenneither at the level of each particular language, nor at the level of the concept of what language is held to meanthe next step would be to integrate the actors concepts into our studies. What is their perception of their own language and of the linguis-tic fi eld in which they are moving? What can grammars and metalinguistic texts tell us about the perceived internal organization of a language and about the ways and modes it is or is not demarcated from other languages?18 What is the tradition of translations that predate and form the backdrop to the transla-tion process under investigation? Why are the texts being translated? What are the limits beyond which a translation is deemed either impossible or even forbidden, as is oft en the case for sacred texts, which can be rendered only in one language? How, when, through which arguments, and by whom are these limits challenged and changed?

Looking at the translation of concepts into diff erent languages, as has been pointed out above, involves searching not for natural equivalences, but for those created by historical translations. However, even the very idea that it is possible to say the same thing in diff erent languages, that languages are inter-changeable as they have an equivalent function, needs historicization, as Lisa Mitchell has pointed out for South India. Monoglossiausing the same lan-guage for the private sphere, the administration of the state, commerce, and re-ligionis but one possible way of organizing communication, one that regards languages as parallel and hence potentially equivalent, and not as complemen-tary.19 It forms the basis for the many nationalist projects of bringing together the identities grounded in territory, culture, and language; to succeed, how-ever, they need not only to ensure the hegemony or even exclusive use of a

Press, 2008); Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: Th e Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Carol Gluck and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, eds., Words in Motion: Towards a Global Lexicon (Durham: Duke Uni-versity Press, 2009); Samah Selim, ed., Nation and Translation in the Middle East, special issue, Th e Translator 15 (2009).

17. Klaus Karttunen, SabhSamjSociety: Some Linguistic Considerations (paper prepared for the Seminar on Conceptual Histories of the World and Global Translations, Bangkok, March 2009).

18. See Mitchell, Language, 68126.19. Ibid., 12829, 15888.


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single language, but the very reconfi guration of the concept of language. If writing transnational history implies the destabilizing of the nation as a given category, and instead looks at the practices through which it was created, trans-national conceptual history has to do the same with languages and the concept of language, and investigate what Lydia Liu called translingual practices.20

For the conceptual historian this implies directing the attention not only to historical translations, as one of the very important processes through which meaning is created and changed, but also to the meaning with which the historical actors endow the translation process itself. Th is challenge is further enhanced by the fact that the translations that have shaped concepts rarely in-volved only one source and one target language, but instead brought together encounters among a multitude of languages. To take only one example: the translations in the nineteenth century between English and the north Indian language of Urdu cannot be properly understood unless one takes into consid-eration both the multiple translations that shaped the English concepts in the European context, and at the same time the entanglements and fl uid boundar-ies between Urdu and Hindi on the one hand and Urdu, Persian, and Arabic on the other. To face this challenge of having to deal with more languages at once than most individual historians can handle, conceptual history in the medium and long term will have to move toward closely integrated collaborative proj-ects. Besides the practical problems it presents, this will also require striving for a new academic culture, one based less on the ideal of scholars working in solitude and freedom21 and more on interaction and coordination.

It will also mean coming to terms with what Koselleck discussed under the heading of metalanguage.22 If concepts closely refl ect experiences, and ex-periences are bound to be diff erent in diff erent historical and regional settings; if on the other hand they involve an interpretation and thus not only a passive viewing but an active shaping of the worldhow can we talk and write about linguistic experiences in a language that is not the one created by and creating these very experiences? What gets lost in translation? Integrating the legacy of historical translations is only a partial solution. It avoids looking at languages as coming into contact for the fi rst time through the intervention of the histo-

20. Liu, Translingual Practice.21. Wilhelm von Humboldt, ber die innere und uere Organisation der hheren wis-

senschaft lichen Anstalten in Berlin [1810], in Werke in fnf Bnden (Darmstadt: Wissen-schaft liche Buchgesellschaft 1960), vol. IV, 25566.

22. Koselleck, Steinmetz, and Spree, Brgerliche Welten, 41213; Margrit Pernau, Transkulturelle Geschichte und das Problem der universalen Begriff e: Muslimische Br-ger im Delhi des 19. Jahrhunderts, in Area Studies und die Welt: Weltregionen und neue Globalgeschichte, Birgit Schbler, ed. (Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2007), 11750; eadem, Gab es eine indische Zivilgesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert? berlegungen zum Verhltnis von Globalgeschichte und historischer Semantik, in Traverse 14 (2007): 5167.

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rian: the relation between Brgertum, middle class, and bourgeoisie, to take up Kosellecks examples, is not one invented by the comparative historian, but has a long history already, as the three concepts have evolved in dialogue with each other. Th is long history of past translations, however, is part of the prob-lem, if we take into account the extent to which translations have been marked by power relations, which we risk incorporating into our own language use by relying on historical translations. Th e ways in which the creation of knowledge is implicated in the establishment and buttressing of power relations has been intensely debated in the wake of Edward Saids Orientalism.23 What has been faced to a lesser degree in these debates is the extent to which knowledge is embodied in languagenot only historical language, but the very analytical language we use to think and write about our subject. Even more than oth-ers, therefore, conceptual historians inevitably remain part and parcel of the history they are investigating. Refl ections on the metalanguage therefore do not take us to an abstract philosophical level, but rather point to the very real and day-to-day dilemma of what it means if, for the sake of communicating with each other, we use English as a universal analytical language. Our ana-lytical categories and concepts are much closer to the historical language than we sometimes like to imagine, and they inevitably transport historical power structures into our own research.

Th is tension between the need for a metalanguage in order to collabo-rate and communicate across linguistic boundaries and its impossibility, if not its dangers, allows no easy solution. Th e self-refl exivity toward ones own lin-guistic standpoint, which is strongly proposed by histoire croise, can mitigate some of these diffi culties by laying open the diffi cult historical legacy of our analytical language, but it cannot entirely eliminate them.

Contributions to the History of Concepts aims at being the forum where all of these projects can come together. We therefore welcome articles on concep-tual history in diff erent countries and panels that follow up the same concept or cluster of concepts in more than one language. In order to further com-munication between research projects done in diff erent languages, which are not necessarily accessible to an international audience, we also strongly wel-come review articles summing up the state of the art in a region, presenting the major actors in the fi eld, their methodological innovations, the topics they engage in, and most importantly the conclusions of their works. We welcome empirical research on how concepts have moved between languages, and fi -nally we encourage theoretical and methodological refl ections on the integra-tion of translation studies into conceptual history and on possible strategies to move from a history of transfer between two languages to an entangled his-tory, taking into account multidirectional trajectories of concepts.

23. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

whither conceptual history? from national to entangled histories

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