Communicating Across Time: How Translation Can Benefit Comparative Historical Analysis

Nicholas Smith, City University of New York - City College
Erica Simmons, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Regardless of the methods used, comparative historical research typically seeks to generate causal arguments that are applicable across a population of cases. But is this the only way to think about how comparative historical research travels? We advocate for an additional logic for thinking about how comparative historical research might produce broadly applicable insights: translation. Much like linguistic translation, the goal of comparing for translation is to develop ideas that are intelligible or recognizable in a different context, even as the context will change the ways in which an idea or political practice is interpreted or enacted. This process then allows scholars to reflect back on the categories, concepts, and assumptions with which they began research and potentially find new causal pathways, develop novel explanatory outcomes, and creatively redescribe or reconceptualize political phenomena. The language of translation opens new possibilities for comparative historical research as it develops a clear logic for comparisons that are both deeply grounded in particular times and places and speak across regions. We demonstrate these arguments by showing how scholars have translated Charles Tilly’s famous argument that war made states in early modern Europe to radically different times and places and how Tilly’s central insights about the relationship between war and state making changed in the process.

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 Presented in Session 140. Historical Forces in Comparative and Methodological Phenomena