Transcultural Biographies: A Cultural Perspective

Abstract

The nation state is an invention of the nineteenth century. Before this, mobility could include the crossing of state borders without being “transnational” in the contemporary sense. As culture and the state were not claimed as congruent, cross border mobility was not necessarily transcultural either. When people moved from one place to another, and entered another state, they may have had to apply for permission to enter and reside there, or paid fees or customs. They may even have encountered cultural difficulties. On the other hand, they may not have encountered any of these obstacles as the country, or perhaps more accurately the empire in which they lived, was a multicultural society. Many of Europe's great cities, like Vienna, Trieste, Prague, Krakow, Chernovtsy, Vilnius, Riga, and St Petersburg, to mention just a few, were multicultural (or indeed multinational) communities.