Historiography: An introduction

1

Introduction: history and historiography

The purpose of this book is to facilitate the critical reading of works of history. We use the term ‘history’ in at least two ways. It is the word often used to mean the past; and it also means that which is written about the past — historiography or a description of the past. Not all descriptions of the past have to be presented in the form of the printed word, but whatever the medium, the point is that there is a distinction between the past and a description of it. This simple observation, however, is accompanied by a warning that the relationship between those two meanings is a difficult one. We said ‘at least two ways’ and the variety of value-laden other uses of the term ‘history’ should also send out warning signals. For example, people talk about something being a matter of historical record, suggesting an incontrovertible record of fact. Similarly, people accuse others of trying to ‘re-write history’, something historians do all the time, an accusation suggesting that there was a perfect match between the actual historical event and previous descriptions of it. Also we are often told that ‘history will show’ or will judge, vindicating who or what was right and condemning what was wrong, which suggests both accuracy and objective judgement over the long term, when all the information is in and had been assessed, particularly, it is implied, in relation to a self-explanatory course of subsequent history; a popular phrase is ‘the verdict of history’. Trotsky was much given to talking about the judgement of history, and Roy Medvedev’s critique of Stalinism was called Let History Judge. This also suggests that historical events or human actions are assessed in the light of long-term consequences, implying further that the historical narrative is a matter of causal relationships. The judgement may be exercised in terms of whether or not the actors correctly understood the supposed course of history or in terms of a moral judgement upon their motivation or the consequences of their actions; sometimes, and revealingly, no clear-cut distinction is made between the two.

However, another popular term is ‘historic’, designating something that is worthy of record, which suggests not only that some events or actions are more important than others, but that a principle of selection has to be applied. Should the terms ‘historic’ and ‘historical’ be used interchangeably? Perhaps an event considered historic for one generation might not retain its historical significance for later generations. Future generations may discern new significance in hitherto neglected matters, and then have to devise ways of rescuing them from obscurity. Depressingly for historians, the term ‘history’ can also be used to consign events or people to irrelevance, to a dead past, as in ‘you’re history’ or ‘that is now a matter of only historical significance’. This suggests that we should move on from contemplating a dead past that no longer influences us, or at least free ourselves from the past. In contrast to things being of ‘historic’ significance they now become mere history. These casual usages can often be matched to quite sophisticated philosophies of history and, most importantly for our present concerns, actual schools of historical practice. For example, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott thought that historians had legitimately created a form of historical experience that dealt with ‘a dead past’ which was ‘unlike the present’ and was ‘the past for its own sake’ without practical application.¹ In contrast, what is often dubbed the Whig school of history, which preceded what Oakeshott thought of as a more truly historical school, wrote about history as a story of continuous development which explained the present.² This progressive view of history has been described as having ‘an exaggerated sense of continuity’, resulting in a ‘presentist’ perspective, meaning that the purpose of the past was seen to be its contribution to the present rather than its having an autonomous existence of its own.³

So we should not approach the study of historiography by assuming that our task is a simple one of separating wheat from chaff or, in the case of individual historians, sheep from goats, by checking who best matched their description of the past with the past itself. We could hold to that as an ideal objective, but its attainment is fraught with difficulties; and is an impossible, indeed a meaningless task according to a very vociferous and influential group of postmodernists.⁴ In one sense, we have only historiography, not the past itself, because the past, by definition, has gone. Most practising historians will immediately respond to that by saying that we still have, in the present, historical evidence, unmediated records, be they writing on paper or parchment, records of laws, wills or court proceedings, or artefacts dug up by archaeologists, field systems evident still in the landscape, or whatever. This is true, but they do not speak to us directly; they must be interpreted. Alone they are not history in either sense of the term: they are not the past itself either in the sense of a set of empirical facts that speak for themselves or in the romantic sense of the past speaking direct to our historical imagination. History in the historiographical sense is made by us, not by people in the past nor by the record of their actions. Contrary to another popular usage, history does not speak to us directly, even if the source is oral testimony.

We need, therefore, to study the historians who make history. But we cannot study individuals in isolation. There are ways of approaching the past, sometimes self-defining schools of historiography which themselves have a history, and we need to be aware of this. However, we need not be resigned to helpless relativism, merely locating an historian in a particular mind-set or a work of historiography in a particular period or country, and leaving it at that. Nor should we choose an interpretation according to our own prejudices or as a matter of taste — which story we like best. Some historians are more conscientious researchers than others, more accurate, more learned and clearer in their arguments. Many deliberately set out to participate in a continuing debate, perhaps to support an ally or a mentor, or to challenge an opponent. There are established rivalries, even hostilities. Some, one suspects, are being deliberately provocative, perhaps to establish a reputation. Others have career-defining projects. Some are methodologically explicit; others leave the readers to their own devices. It helps to know about these things. Very few disputes are settled by outright victory, though occasionally a fatal flaw is revealed in the methods, the concepts or the research finding of an influential work. Most arguments peter out because the terms of reference change or because the audience, including review editors and publishers, have lost interest. The study of history has an apparently inexhaustible capacity for moving on and developing new areas of interest, not necessarily because of the discovery of new evidence but because historiography is a product of contemporary society, which is in constant flux. A classic case is the development of women’s history; the evidence was often there, but historians had to choose to see it. The past itself cannot demand to be heard; the choice is ours. Methodological failures can occur, and methodological fashions change. For example, under the influence of rampant social science, historians went through a phase in the middle years of the twentieth century of looking for ‘models’ — of revolution, of dictatorships and so on⁵ — and of developing counter-factual propositions using supposedly sophisticated statistical techniques made possible by the use of early computers.⁶ In a sceptical postmodern climate these are no longer fashionable.

We cannot ignore some of the philosophical, as well as the general historiographical issues raised by these points, but historians are down-to-earth people and we tend to like concrete instances rather than general theory, so we will endeavour to work mainly through examples. In Chapter 2 we look at the historical profession, its predilections and traditions; the Whig interpretation of history has been chosen to illustrate the relationship between historiography and a prevalent culture because of its central role in the periodwhen the historical profession began to establish itself in England and because of its continuing popular and political influence. Additionally, the critique that demolished the Whig influence in academic circles is illustrative of the supposedly professional ‘objectivity’ that displaced it and which was subsequently challenged by more relativist approaches. That chapter concludes with an appreciation of the most recent debates between so-called traditionalist and various postmodern positions.

Having established the context in which historical scholarship has to be assessed, we move, in Chapter 3, to a guide to reading historiographical texts, looking at the relationship between ‘facts’ and ‘theories’, and at ‘meta-narrative’ and causation. Examples will include the empiricist—Marxist debate on the French Revolution, class and English social history, and imperialism in the context of globalisation. Students have to read — and then write. So in Chapter 4, we offer a guide to the writing of academic history at undergraduate level, to the skills involved, and contrast this with the non-academic uses of history. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 take three key historiographical topics, important in themselves but illustrative of the issues raised elsewhere in the book. Two are thematic, ‘Gender and history’ and ‘Cultural history’, because they represent a broadening of the original, largely political and then economic, interests of early historiography. One, ‘The Nazis and historiography’, takes a look at the unique fascination that this topic, along with the allied study of the Holocaust, has exercised on both academic and popular historiography. Finally in Chapter 8 we will summarise the main lines of developments in British historiography, the relationships between those developments and academic practice, and conclude with a case for the continuing importance of history. Every chapter includes a guide to further reading.

Notes

1 M. Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 106–11.

2 The monumental classic of the Whig school was W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development (Clarendon Press, 1873) in three volumes. For a brief idea of Stubbs’s approach see ‘Preface’ and ‘A sketch of the constitutional history of the English nation down to the reign of Edward I’, in W. Stubbs, Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First (Clarendon Press, 8th edn, 1895), pp. v–vi, 1–51.

3 P.B.M. Blaas, Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 23–6.

4 The work of Keith Jenkins can reasonably be described as an extreme case of the postmodern approach. For example, see K. Jenkins, Why History? (Routledge, 1999).

5 For the influence of social theory see P. Burke, History and Social Theory (Polity Press, 1992); for models in particular see pp. 28–33. For a contrary position, in relation to the French Revolution, see A. Cobban, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 8–14.

6 The most famous or, for some, notorious example was R.W. Fogel and S.L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Norton, 1995), originally published in 1974. For brief introductions to the subject in general and to Fogel’s role, see M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (Routledge, 1997), pp. 483–7; R.J. Evans, In Defence of History (Granta Books, 1997), pp. 37–44.

2

Academic history

Introduction

In the 1990s and early in the twenty-first century two apparently contradictory things happened to history. The number of students studying history in schools went down (though not the numbers studying it in universities), while in every other respect history was booming. History on the television, popular biographies and, perhaps above all, family history all reached unprecedented levels of interest. A number of theories have been put forward to account for these phenomena. Family history, for example, has been seen as a way of trying to connect with the past, to find roots, in an increasingly rootless and individualist world. It differs from the other forms of interest in the past because it requires historical research, not passive acceptance, on the part of the interested party. Researchers into family history, not ‘professional’ historians, dominate the use of county archives. Much information of use to family historians is available online; censuses from 1841 to 1901, for example, and copies of wills up to 1858. The trend away from history in secondary schools and sixth-form colleges may not indicate anything wrong with the way more formal historical study connects with a wider audience; the explanation may lie outside the world of historiography and be more to do with the pressures on the curriculum, including official pressure to have vocational courses and the popularity of certain new subjects. However, although at the time of writing the downward trend in numbers seems to have stopped and was never evident in the universities, it does raise the question of what exactly ‘academic’ history is and how well it relates to the needs and interests of society.

The rise of academic history

Academic history as we know it — in the sense of being based in academic institutions such as universities, being largely written by academics for students and, one has to admit, for each other — is a fairly recent phenomenon. Before the nineteenth century history was not taught as a separate subject for undergraduates. Classics dominated the curriculum, so the only history that might have been read in pursuit of a degree would have been that of ancient Greece or Rome. A handful of famous historians working outside the universities had produced works for a non-academic audience which are remembered even today. Probably the most famous is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, still occasionally asked for along with ‘the Bible and Shakespeare’, to accompany people with their ‘desert island discs’ as if this classic expression of the ideas of the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ was still the ultimate history of the most important event in western history. It would be tempting to suggest that, once history became ‘academic’, with those overtones of scholarship, professionalism and, thus, objectivity, historiography would retain its value as historical interpretation as well as its literary merit, but there are no last words in historical interpretation. Far from it. Cynics might even say that academic history lost its literary credentials without acquiring scientific ones, but that too would be untrue, for some considerable stylists have written within the academy.

The trend towards academic history is generally thought to have begun in German universities, and its most famous figure was Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886).¹ Ranke did not invent the practice of going to the archives, but he became the best known and most influential of a new breed of academically-based historians, in Ranke’s case at the University of Berlin, who wanted to establish history as a prestigious academic discipline. Only through thorough research, argued Ranke, could historians arrive at a true understanding of the past, and it was crucial to his method that the sources be examined critically – to uncover, for example, the motives of the author of a document, as well as its status and veracity. Ideally, he wanted works of history to be objective – he often used ‘scientific’ terminology in this respect – to be written so as to be true to the past rather than to explain the present, and to be specific to the object under investigation rather than part of some overarching theory about the course of history. This approach is sometimes known as ‘historicism’ or ‘historism’, terms discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. He saw history as an antidote to philosophies of history. But, and this is a major qualification, like many of his contemporaries, including the German philosopher, Hegel, he thought in terms of the state as the key component of modern history, and the Prussian state was clearly his ideal state, and the balance of power of the great European states after the defeat of Napoleon was his ideal international state system: he was of course a child of his times as well as