What, then, is the history of ‘transnational’ history? The widespread use within historical
writing of the word ‘transnational’ and its cognates did not begin until well after the term
had been launched and relaunched in a series of other contexts. In recent etymological
research, the coining of the term — or at any rate its earliest known use — has been
traced to the German philologist Georg Curtius’s 1862 inaugural lecture at Leipzig
University, which discussed the transnational language families which encompassed
particular national languages; the first appearance of the term in English to have been
identified came in the form of a quotation from Curtius, ‘every language is fundamentally
something transnational’, which appeared in an anonymously-written article in 1868 for
the Princeton Review.