Historians are increasingly realising that ‘history must be understood, not simply as a sum of national histories or a chronicle of inter-state affairs, but also as a story of transnational connections and circulations, by people, goods, capital, ideas and tastes’ (Pierre-Yves Saunier and Akira Iriye (eds), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, 2009).
The history of voluntary action is a particularly rich field for transnational and comparative history, from eighteenth-century hurricane relief funds and transatlantic anti-slavery campaigns to the work of development NGOS and international volunteering programmes after the Second World War. The case for a transnational approach to the history of voluntary action was made in a blog essay for this website by Dr George Campbell Gosling and Dr Melanie Oppenheimer.
The Voluntary Action History Society is therefore seeking to build on previous activities and set up an international network of researchers working in this area.
The first events of this new network will be the Making Connections workshops hosted by Professor Virginia Crossman at Oxford Brookes University in the spring and summer of 2011. The first of these will bring together researchers from across the UK, and the second also from across Europe, who are working on the history of European welfare and humanitarianism.
