Abstract
This article discusses the benefits and challenges of transnational approaches for modern European history. It reconstructs the origins of a particular Anglo-German entanglement: the meat essence OXO, originally a German invention made in South America by a London-based company. And it links this example to the questions prompted by the rise of transnational history. Surveying the recent literature, the article argues that the parallel histories of nation states and the transnational interest in the space between and beyond them need not be mutually exclusive. The microhistory of OXO thus illustrates the weaknesses as much as the strengths of ‘transnationalism’.
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