In recent years, interest has grown in cultural transfers and transnational history, encouraged by the global integration and skepticism on the nation-state as the chief organizing category of history. The passage from the national framework to a trans-national sphere has prodded scholars to formulate heuristic regional typologies and to make ...
(Show more)In recent years, interest has grown in cultural transfers and transnational history, encouraged by the global integration and skepticism on the nation-state as the chief organizing category of history. The passage from the national framework to a trans-national sphere has prodded scholars to formulate heuristic regional typologies and to make comparisons across historical regions. Despite the wide-spread discussion about the “Nordic” model in social sciences, the typical attempts to write a Nordic history of historiography have been “anthology comparisons,” where historians contribute from their distinctively nationalist perspectives and the comparison is, in practice, left to the reader. This paper aims at overcoming methodological nationalism and the attribution of the nation-state to the self-evident spatial unit of the professional historians through an explicitly cross-national and comparative framework. Given the common heritage (e.g. the centralized, territorial “composite states” in Scandinavia, the Lutheran state church, the strong historical position of peasantry), and the roughly coincidental transformation to modernity, “the North” (Norden) will be examined as a historical region, defined by the historian Stefan Troebst to stand for the construction of a meso-region which is characterized by a cluster of social, economic, cultural, and political structures and which is larger than a state yet smaller than a continent. Based on this viewpoint, using the emergence of social history in the end of the nineteenth century as an example, this paper will discuss to what extent “the North” has also been a historiographical region; for instance, whether the Nordic historians shared same theories, conceptions or similar social experiences, or whether there are remarkable differences in the way by which the past was translated into their own time.
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