How to do Transregional History: A Concept, Method and Tool for Early Modern Border Research

Abstract

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.

The black legend on the Spanish presence in the low countries: Verifying shared beliefs on genetic ancestry

“…Based on the historical records it is clear that the Spanish army effectively committed war atrocities including rape in the Low Countries during the 16th century and especially during the Spanish Furies (Pipkin, ; Soen, ). Moreover, it could be expected that some native women would have preferred the company of particular Spanish soldiers (Swart, ), and that in the wake of the Spanish rule over the Southern Netherlands until 1713, mixed marriages occurred between Spaniards and the natives, to which a limited number of families and surnames bare witness until today, for example, Desmadryl and Serrano (Soen et al, ). Nevertheless, the impact of these circumstances on the genetic variation was not so substantial as to have a recognizable signature in the current autochthonous population, not even within a genetic genealogical sample of those communities that became victims of a Spanish Fury in the second half of the 16th century.…”

Los Sitios Reales como elementos clave de las monarquías europeas de la Edad Moderna: una aproximación

“…Los Sitios Reales entrarían claramente en esta categoría, pues fueron centros culturales y económicos dinámicos que trascendían las fronteras de las monarquías multinacionales del momento 27 , y que ayudaron a crear una verdadera cultura europea, así como a establecer contactos con otras culturas en América, África o 26. Metodología explicada por un grupo de investigación de la Universidad de Lovaina (Bélgica) en Soen, V. et alíi (2017). How to do Transregional History: A Concept, Method and Tool for Early Modern Border Research, Journal of Early Modern History, 21, 343-364.…”

Recent geohistorical research on boundary‐making. Challenging conventional narratives on borders and modern state‐building

“…Nevertheless, recent methodological transformations within historical studies, and more particularly the rejection in Global History of the primacy of national perspectives and correlated historiographical approaches structured around the nation (Amelina et al, 2012;Faist, 2012), have been key to laying the foundations for the comparison of different boundary-making processes (Akbari et al, 2017;Mog, 2017). In that sense, historians have come to display highly micro and localised approaches to transregional and global processes (Di Fiore & Meriggi, 2013;Soen et al, 2017).…”