Boundaries and Conversations: Reflections on a New "New" Diplomatic History

This brief response to the interdisciplinary manifesto “Provincializing ‘New’ Diplomatic History” traces family resemblances between discussions in diplomatic history and in the history of international law, and the shared implication of these discussions in larger questions of how we understand projects of international, global or transnational history. The response probes the Manifesto’s framing of a new “new” diplomatic history, arguing for an approach which is less about drawing lines in new places, further out from a Eurocentric institutional touchstone, and more able to put the multifaceted nature of terms like “diplomacy” in issue as a permanent structural question. In closing, the response explores some of the methodological suggestions made in the Manifesto, including what is at stake in imagining scholarly cooperation itself as diplomacy.