Historians of the formerly colonized world almost always link the local and the foreign. If what we mean by that term is an approach focusing on movement, flows, and circulation that transcended politically bounded territories, then topics like migration and diasporas, long-distance trade, international political or religious movements, imperialism, maritime studies, and so on fit into the "transnational" tent. Of course, some fields have always been transnational. 1 In 2006, the AHR ran a forum on transnational history the AHA annual meeting theme for 2010, we may recall, was "Globalizing History." These days, journals regularly feature articles on transnational topics, and advertisements for faculty positions often contain the words "global," "world," or "transnational." According to a 2010 AHA report, over half of the history departments listed in the United States (52.3 percent) now include at least one specialist in world history (not the same as transnational history, but a good proxy here), compared to 19.1 percent in 2000. In my (re)turn to transnational history, I'm definitely not alone. Further, it shows how consciousness of the diaspora informed opportunities and strategies in colonial Africa. Vaughan's transnational life history reminds us that American slavery was part of a connected, Atlantic world of bonded labor, one where slavery and freedom were not stark opposites but rather framed a continuum of dependency relations. Before his 1893 death in Lagos, he sent gold coins to a niece in South Carolina whose business had been torched by the Ku Klux Klan his Nigerian descendants maintained contact with their American relatives, to the present. There, he survived slave raids and political upheaval, saw the imposition of British colonialism, and led a revolt against white missionaries. In the 1850s, James Churchwill Vaughan left South Carolina for Liberia, then continued further east to "Yoruba country," now southwestern Nigeria. Although it has required some retooling in new areas, I'm at work on a contextualized biography of a 19th-century African American who made a life and left an impact in West Africa. Twenty years later, however, I'm no longer resisting the appeal of transnationalism.
I turned instead to what seemed to be a more manageable project on colonial Nigerian social history. But as I contemplated the greater commitment of a dissertation, my attraction to a topic that would require multiple national and linguistic competencies and far-flung research began to flag. A summer research trip yielded some rich sources, and I managed to publish an article. My first flirtation with transnational history was as a graduate student, when I began a project involving Brazilians in Nigeria.
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