Historians and Their Data: The Complex Shift from Nation-State Approaches to the Study of People's Transcultural Lives

DIRK HOERDER

FOR BOTH HISTORIANS of the nation-state and historians of migration it would have been easy to escape from established nation-centered, bordered master narratives. During the somewhat misnamed age of nationstates, when large parts of Europe consisted or empires, some fifty to fiftyfive million men, women, and children migrated from one society to another, thus moving between—often contradictory—master narratives, linguistic practices, and systems of meaning. If migrating in stages, they, in fact, moved between several such systems and narratives and, at each step of their trajectory, made choices: cultures might be switched, mingled, fused, re-fused, or refused. Most left specific regions of an empire to arrive in specific regional labor markets or agrarian settlements in the United States or Canada. Upon arrival, statewide political institutions remained distant, but everyday lives had to be negotiated in multiple social contexts. Historians who described such choice between societies did not recognize the opportunity to free themselves from the constraining state-centered frame of reference. Some called such migrants "uprooted," others constructed a "nation- to-ethnic-enclave" move, and those who lacked knowledge of the migrants' language of origin restricted themselves to the "arrival-at-Ellis-Island-with-cultural-baggage" approach. Historians in the state of origin did not even notice emigrants or deleted them from collective memory.