The brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, active in the last years of the eighteenth century and first part of the nineteenth, are excellent examples of the cosmopolitan scholar and Universalgelehrter (polymath). Wilhelm, a Prussian diplomat and government administrator, is chiefly remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of the world’s languages, as well as to the theory and practice of education. He is seen as the architect of the Humboldtian education ideal which spread from Germany all across the world and as far as the United States and Japan.Footnote ¹ Above all, this ideal recommends the integration of formal instruction in arts and sciences with active research to achieve both a broad general education and the acquisition of cultural knowledge. Wilhelm’s younger brother, Alexander, a geographer, naturalist, and explorer, travelled widely across Central and South America developing the ideas for his multi-volume treatise, Kosmos, in which he attempted to identify connections between the various scientific disciplines and human culture.Footnote ² When he returned to Europe in 1804 he was one of the most celebrated scientists of his day, exercising a profound influence on the next generation of scientists, including Charles Darwin.Footnote ³

Both Humboldt brothers were part of an international network of scholars with global reach. They served as foreign members in multiple learned societies, including the American Academy of Science and Art, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Science. Likewise, they corresponded extensively with an international network of eminent scientists, thinkers, and writers, ranging from Thomas Jefferson to Johann Wilhelm von Goethe. Alexander von Humboldt’s wide-ranging correspondence even includes letters from the Guaraní, an indigenous group in today’s Brazil.Footnote ⁴ When Alexander died in 1859, his friends declared him to have been ‘the pride and the delight of his contemporaries in both hemispheres’, one of ‘those few powerful minds, who … appear only once in the course of centuries, and represent, combined in them, the Science of their times, in its many branches’.Footnote ⁵ Rarely have two brothers shaped their day and age so thoroughly through their scholarly curiosity and universal knowledge about the world.Footnote ⁶

Much later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Humboldt brothers came to represent a particular tension which occupied German historians writing at the time, such as Friedrich Meinecke. In 1908, Meinecke published his famous book Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat. In it he described the genesis of the German nation-state (with analogies to other European states) as a process driven by the tension between the ‘universal and the national idea’.Footnote ⁷ The German nation, so Meinecke argued, had emerged over the course of the nineteenth century as the organizational idea of the nation had gradually overturned the older cosmopolitan idea, dominant in the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁸ Early Humboldt biographers, such as Meinecke’s student Siegfried Kaehler, attempted to explain how the two cosmopolitan brothers fitted into Meinecke’s paradigm. While Kaehler saw Wilhelm as having developed a deep consciousness of and pride in his German identity, he argued that Alexander by contrast, had remained a cultural cosmopolitan who felt equally at home in Germany, in France, and in many other countries.Footnote ⁹ Puzzled by this difference, Kaehler, writing in 1916, mused over who had been the ‘better’ brother.Footnote ¹⁰

The question of how the ‘national’ relates to the ‘global’ – or ‘universal’, in Meinecke’s terms – not only existed for the historical actors themselves, but persists today as an analytical challenge for historians writing about them. In this special cluster, ‘Educational networks, educational identities: connecting national and global perspectives’, our three authors revisit the question that so interested Kaehler: how do ‘cosmopolitan’ scholars construct their identity when situated in an environment where both ‘universal’ and ‘national’ ideas are exerting pressure and influence over them? A first important point made by the articles in this cluster is that the tension between processes of ‘universal’ integration and ‘national’ separation are in no way confined to the classic ‘age of nationalism’ in the nineteenth century but constitute important features of both earlier and later periods – in particular, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the one hand, and the twentieth century, on the other.Footnote ¹¹ As well as expanding the analytical timeframe for such investigations, the articles engage with and develop further recent discussions among historians about how we can write history beyond the nation-state.

As summed up by Merry Wiesner-Hanks, global history has been largely concerned with exploring ‘connections within the global human community … the crossing of boundaries and the linking of systems in the human past’. It is, she writes, citing David Northrup, the story of the ‘great convergence’.Footnote ¹² The new cultural history, by contrast, has ‘spent much more time on divergence, making categories of difference ever more complex’ and highlighting the importance of an increasingly varied array of cultural markers including ‘race’, gender, class, age group, religion, and nationality.Footnote ¹³ As Wiesner-Hanks points out, both global history and the new cultural history are attempts to write history ‘beyond the nation state’, and both seek to do so by shifting analytical perspective: one ‘zooms out’ to view events from the macro level, while the other moves inward to focus on the micro.

Until relatively recently, historians working at both these levels pronounced the old history, written from a national perspective, to be more or less defunct.Footnote ¹⁴ In the last few years, however, there has been an important drive to recover and reposition the ‘national’ perspective both within and between the level of the individual or small group, on the one hand, and the transnational or global, on the other.Footnote ¹⁵ It is increasingly acknowledged that the tendency of historians to adopt a global perspective does not destroy the historical influence and cultural resonance of the ‘nation’ and the ‘national’ any more than a focus on individual or small-group identity construction does. Instead, we should rather be exploring how these different levels relate to each other, or, more precisely, how they help to constitute each other.

The three articles brought together in this special cluster employ the actor network as a methodological tool to link national and global perspectives. While actor-network theory and its application in historical research is not new in itself, we see its particular value for global history in helping to dissolve the long-standing binary opposition between the ‘universal’ and the ‘national’.Footnote ¹⁶ Our authors all confirm Thomas Weber’s assertion, which he made when writing on early twentieth-century educational networks, that national and transnational identities have never been mutually exclusive concepts and that a marriage of ‘transnational and national identities’ has been ‘more common than we have hitherto thought’.Footnote ¹⁷

The challenge of integrating different analytical perspectives and spatial scales is especially acute in the history of education and educational exchange; and this makes historical actors in educational networks particularly interesting as case studies for investigating the relationship between the national and the global. Historically, the world of education, particularly higher education and universities, has been constituted and experienced simultaneously as both national and international. This is clearly seen with the early modern Republic of Letters, as well as in later forms of transnational scholarly exchange, where the interchange of ideas, objects, and personnel took place between individual scholars and institutions operating across national, regional, and imperial borders.Footnote ¹⁸ Students were keen to study abroad, attracted by the most famous scholars, bursaries, and the reputations of particular universities; scholars themselves travelled to carry out research, collaborate with colleagues, and exchange ideas. Recent approaches developed within digital history have helped us visualize the far reach of these transnational scholarly networks.Footnote ¹⁹ Ideas also travelled through the creation of complex international networks of correspondence, and exchanges of books, maps, and other objects.Footnote ²⁰ At the same time, as we saw earlier in the case of the Humboldt brothers, these exchanges were shaped by the national contexts and systems of education in which these individuals and institutions were based and from which they set out on their border-crossing journeys.Footnote ²¹

Educational exchange has, therefore, been continually inscribed with both national and international meanings, which have by no means always been compatible with each other. Frequently, indeed, they have come into open conflict. In her article for this cluster, Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf shows clearly the very different meanings that were associated with particular objects linked to Elihu Yale, the benefactor of Yale University, in different national contexts. Items that were imbued with deep educational significance for students and faculty at Yale University in the United States, were valued completely differently in India – for their military and religious significance – given Yale’s nearly three decades as an East India Company official in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There is no trace of the great educational benefactor here. Likewise, the organization of educational and scholarly activity internationally has often jarred with the construction of ‘national’ territoriality and governance; indeed, the two have co-existed uneasily for many centuries. As Steffen Rimner shows in his article, the original ‘self-strengthening’ motivations of the Chinese government, which lay behind the establishment of the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) in the United States in the mid nineteenth century, were significantly undercut by the cultural identification that many of the students sent by China to be educated in America developed with their host country and with the West more broadly. The final article, by Tomás Irish, examines the comparable tensions that existed between the internationalist ethos and transnational collaborative tradition of the scholars employed in an advisory capacity by the different nations represented at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the specific priorities and agendas of their respective national governments in the post-war landscape.

The original conference that gave rise to this special cluster concerned itself specifically with the challenge of developing analytical tools, which allow historians successfully to combine a range of different perspectives or levels of analysis – in particular, the national and the global. This might be compared with the ability of an individual to imagine him- or herself simultaneously as a member of multiple, overlapping groups of differing size and significance. At the conference, held at the Freie Universität Berlin in August 2013, we sought to evaluate the actor network as a potentially valuable tool of analysis for this project of integration. We began by considering the science and technology studies concept of the actor network as developed by Bruno Latour, John Law, and Michael Callon, which has a number of theoretical and methodological advantages.Footnote ²² First, and most significantly for our purposes, as a constructivist concept, building on French poststructuralist thought, actor-network theory seeks to overcome essentialist explanations of social behaviour. Through a focus on the complexity and multi-locational nature of cultural interactions, integrating many different spatial scales, actor-network theory, as developed by Latour and others, has often been used to disrupt and to challenge traditional analytical binaries, including national versus global. As Latour himself has written:

Another hallmark of actor-network theory, as developed by Latour in particular, is the integration of human and non-human (object) actors within social and cultural networks.Footnote ²⁴ It is important to note that the ‘agency’ attributed to object-actors is not intentional in nature, but rather passive: they are best understood as items which can be inscribed by human actors with a variety of cultural meanings depending upon the particular sets of connections and contexts of which they are a part. In this cluster, Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf engages closely with this aspect of actor-network theory, arguing that it allows the complexity and multifaceted nature of the different meanings attributed to and associated with the various items and artworks in the extensive collections of Elihu Yale to be more deeply and accurately understood. She fully embraces the concept of passive agency, treating the items (or object-actors) she examines – from portraits of Yale to ornamental sundials and oriental screens – as critical in generating new narratives of meaning for a variety of actors across both space and time. The figure of Yale himself is left at a certain point in time, while the objects associated with him continue to generate new connections and significances down the centuries to the present day.

Steffen Rimner and Tomás Irish also acknowledge the important role of objects in the networks they study – above all, books, maps, and other scholarly apparatus. However, they chiefly approach their respective subjects from the perspective of social network analysis, which focuses on connections between human actors – individuals, groups, organizations, and societies – rather than objects. Thus, Steffen concentrates his analysis on the personal and institutional ties which bound members of the CEM, Chinese students sent by the Chinese government to be educated at American universities, as they developed their careers and personal relationships in later life. In particular, he focuses on the deployment of the CEM and the successful harnessing of their cultural capital by the Chinese government in the 1874 investigations of coolie conditions in the forced-labour regimes of Cuba and Peru. However, he also explores the development of an intimate and convivial atmosphere of cosmopolitan sociability between members of the CEM and their American hosts beyond anything anticipated or intended by their Chinese government sponsors.

Moving forward in time to the period immediately following the First World War and the attempts to broker a lasting peace at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Tomás Irish traces the complex transnational networks connecting scholars from many different disciplines called upon by their respective national governments to provide expert advice on various aspects of the peace deal. He teases out the tensions and contradictions between their international identities as scholars, bound by their various disciplinary cultures, conventions, and long-standing collaborations, and their increasingly prominent role as servants of the very different political and economic agendas of their respective countries.

In 2003, Patrick Manning insisted that world (or global) history needs to clarify what distinguishes it from other fields, thematically, conceptually, and methodologically.Footnote ²⁵ The multifaceted approach to the actor network adopted by the different articles in this cluster is, we argue, one answer to Manning’s challenge. While we do not intend to represent the approach as a catch-all methodology, it does allow scholars to engage with processes of scaling in historical analysis, and to grapple more effectively with investigating the ways in which pressures and influences were directed at the individual historical actor from ‘universal’, national, and local levels at the same time. The actor-network approach helps to dissolve a long-standing binary that has been assumed to exist between the national and the global. In contrast to Friedrich Kaehler’s assessment of the Humboldt brothers as inherently different, one ‘national’ the other ‘cosmopolitan’, the authors in this cluster use the actor-network approach to analyse the myriad forms which the process of identity formation across borders could assume. In place of a simple binary, we must think instead, with Thomas Weber, in terms of complex ‘marriages’ of ‘national’ and ‘universal’, involving repeated contextual switching between the two levels rather than a hybrid mixing of the two. The authors focus on the aims of networks as well as their content and structures, on the individual actors as well as the actor groups and institutions of which they were a part. Small and large, all of these networks represent important units and building blocks without which larger, global networks are not fully comprehensible.

Through the publication of this thematic cluster we seek to insert the actor network as a key methodological link between the micro and macro levels of analysis in global history. Focusing on the actor network, on the individual as well as upon actor groups, helps us to marry a global history approach with that of the ‘new cultural history’. It allows us to explore the interlinkages between the micro and macro levels more fully. At the macro level, the concept of the network traces connections and linkages which frequently cross national and cultural boundaries. Meanwhile, at the micro level, the actors’ perspective brings to light the different negotiation processes involved in constituting the meaning of these networks for the individuals traversing their highways. Finally, our focus on educational networks highlights the continuity and longevity of certain forms of network throughout the early modern and modern eras, marking educational networks as one of the oldest forms of global connectedness.