The houses of history: A critical reader in history and theory, second edition

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Introduction

Why do we want to study history? Is it to try to excavate every last fact about the past, like the antiquarian Mr Casaubon caricatured in George Eliot’s Middlemarch? Or is it to try and better understand the human condition, both past and present, so that we may work together towards a better future? In the opening pages to his memoir, the historian Geoff Eley reminds us that:

how exactly the past gets remembered (and forgotten), how it gets worked into arresting images and coherent stories, how it gets ordered into reliable explanations, how it gets pulled and pummelled into reasons for acting, how it gets celebrated and disavowed, suppressed and imagined – all have tremendous consequences for how the future might be shaped. All of the ways in which the past gets fashioned into histories, consciously and unconsciously, remain crucial for how the present can be grasped.¹

George Orwell’s famous phrase took this understanding further, arguing that: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.² Can historical narratives be this powerful? Are they, to use a concept drawn from Michel Foucault, a discourse of power? Some historians think they are. For example, it has been argued that the conceptualization of European history into medieval and modern both ‘disguises the truth about the past’ and justifies a particular political order in the present.³ We will take up this debate again a little later in the chapter, but these brief examples demonstrate that history is not just about the past, but the present and future too.

Both past and present are always intertwined in historical practice. Historians seek to understand people whose lives and sensibilities were very different to their own. We also try to make sense of the present by investigating the processes of change over time that contributed to shaping the world in which we live. Both these activities are conducted with historical hindsight, which consists of at least two interrelated dimensions. Each new generation of historians brings different questions to the study of the past, drawing upon their own collective experiences and socio-economic contexts. In addition, new scholars critically engage with and respond to the perspectives of the earlier generation. The questions that emerge from this process generate new interpretations or analyses that make connections, or identify patterns of change, of which our historical actors were not always aware.

In the process of formulating new questions and interpretations, and identifying patterns of change in the past, historians draw upon concepts and theories from a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, particularly literary criticism, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, geography, and philosophy. Each of those academic subjects is based upon an explicit body of concepts and theories that form a constantly evolving foundation for the discipline, taught at undergraduate level. In contrast, it could be argued that historians, working in a wide range of fields, geographical contexts, and time periods, draw upon a multidisciplinary set of approaches. The skills of source criticism (whether the sources are written documents, photographs, material objects, or oral history) are the unifying constant of university history training. While critical source analysis is essential, it does not necessarily facilitate the kind of broader disciplinary reflexivity that should also be at the heart of an education in history.⁴ The purpose of this book is to introduce students to the diversity of theoretical and conceptual approaches that have so enriched the study of the past.

But is it possible to construct an account of history and theory that reflects the diversity of approaches in many different global contexts? Peter Burke has proposed that historians now share a ‘global’ culture, which consists of a set of similar principles and questions. These, he argues, were shaped through long interaction and converged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This convergence, he goes on to say, weakened, if not dissolved, Western hegemony over the academic discipline of history.⁵ Burke lists these practices in the form of ‘ten theses’ that include, for example: a linear view of the past; a concern with epistemology; the idea of objectivity; the preponderance of causal explanations; and literary forms. All of these ‘theses’ entail a theoretical dimension and are integral to the content of subsequent chapters in this book. Needless to say, Burke’s proposition has met with lively debate, and two responses in particular are important to bear in mind.

First of all, Aziz Al-Azmeh draws our attention to the diverse influences in late antiquity upon Burke’s ‘coherent historical tradition’: these emerged from the Mediterranean to Persia, cut across languages, and included Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions. The early influences, therefore, were neither Western nor Eastern in an exclusivist sense.⁶ Turning to the contemporary world, however, historians were more inclined to see Burke’s model of historical principles as less a convergence and more of an imposition. Hayden White, for example, asks whether Burke’s ‘ten theses’ represent the ‘Westernization’ of other cultures in the context of the spread of global capitalism.⁷ In this context Dipesh Chakrabarty also draws our attention to the institutionalization of the historical profession and the development of the modern university. In India, for example, ‘traditions of history [were] considered amateur, and the university scholars waged a fight to become the highest custodians of the nation’s past’.⁸ This debate over the global homogeneity of professional historical practice alerts us to both the diverse roots of Burke’s paradigm of historical thinking, and the importance of contextualizing the spread and adaptation of historical approaches within global economic and political processes and the growth of national educational systems.

The Houses of History will explore the theoretical perspectives and debates that are generally acknowledged to have been the most influential within the university-led practice of history over the past century and a half. The chapters are organized very broadly into a chronological framework: that is, based upon the period in which each theory generated the most substantial body of historical writing. But the structure of this book should not be taken to cover all possible theoretical or conceptual approaches to the past, or reflect uniform national trajectories. For example, Chinese historiography has converged and diverged from the path of Western historiography and theory at different times over the course of the twentieth century.⁹

What do we mean by theory? The historian Arif Dirlik has proposed the following definition:

I think that most of us working in these fields [of social, political and cultural theory] understand theory to mean the formulation of abstract relationships that seek to make sense of diverse historical phenomena…. The grand theories or metanarratives associated with the names of K. Marx and M. Weber or, more recently, of world-system analysis, are of this type. For historians, however, theory may simply mean the use of abstract concepts such as class and gender in organizing and/or explaining historical data. Theory mediates the relationship between the particular and the general; it suggests patterns to the relationship …¹⁰

Theories, therefore, may range from the identification of patterns in the historical evidence that explain historical change over long periods of time to smaller abstract concepts to define particular phenomena. Concepts are also the building blocks of grand theory, as in the concept of ‘class’ for the Marxist theory of historical materialism. The development of theoretical models or concepts, as Dirlik later points out, does not foreclose on historical truth: other theories may posit alternative understandings based on emphasizing different aspects of, or evidence from, the past. He concludes that ‘theorization – the activity of producing theories – therefore is an interpretive act in its choice of concepts, and their relationships, to represent reality’.¹¹ This book is based on the understanding that every piece of historical writing has a theoretical basis on which evidence is selected, filtered and understood.

One criticism often made of the historical profession is that the theorization upon which historical accounts are constructed is rarely made explicit, in contrast to the cognate disciplines referred to earlier. There is a perception that ‘substantial numbers of practising historians remain relentlessly uninterested in fundamental questions concerning the status of the knowledge they produce.’¹² Critics attribute this disciplinary omission to the institutional forces that influence what is produced, from peer expectations to the needs of commercial publishers.¹³ In the absence of explicit theorization in a historical text, it can be difficult to identify the theory or concepts upon which it rests. When reading the following chapters, therefore, we suggest that you bear in mind the following four interlinked themes: context, temporal framework, causation or drivers of change, and subjectivities. These themes will help you elicit and understand the theories underlying a work of history.

The approach of historians to these themes will also reflect their fundamental epistemological stance. By epistemology we mean the theory of knowledge, or justification for what constitutes historical knowledge. During the late twentieth century, orthodox empirical historians were riven by disagreement over the ideas and implications of poststructuralism. Empiricism and poststructuralism are, in pure form, conflicting epistemologies. The first is based upon the belief that it is possible to reconstruct the past from surviving evidence, that historians are able to gain access to aspects of a real past. In contrast, poststructuralists argue that our understanding of the past, and our sources, are framed through structures of language and discourse, and that there is no access to an unmediated past. These two perspectives are encapsulated in the terminology of reconstruction (empiricist) and representation (poststructuralist). We suggest that you might wish to read the chapters on empiricism and poststructuralism first, for the remaining chapters on different theories and concepts contain references to the work of historians from both epistemological perspectives.

Returning to the four themes, the first concerns the context in which theoretical perspectives, including key concepts, acquire purchase among historians. Of course, in practice, theoretical perspectives overlap, continue to have ongoing adherents, are modified and revised over time, and can re-emerge with new force at a later date. It is also important to note that some influential theoretical works, including those of Maurice Halbwachs (the chapter on public history) and Ferdinand de Saussure (the chapter on poststructuralism) were published decades before historians internationally engaged extensively with their ideas. This can be due to delay in translation, leading to a more restricted earlier impact within the original linguistic context. But the use of specific theories in historical analysis may also be the consequence of changing socio-economic and political contexts. One question we would like you to consider is why the theories covered in this book acquire traction among historians at particular moments in time.

This is not an easy question to answer, as Ludmilla Jordanova acknowledged: ‘Scholars turn to an idea or approach when it seems apt for that time’, but ‘it is extremely difficult to explain how trends get started, take hold, and die away’.¹⁴ The philosopher of history, Frank Ankersmit, has suggested that ‘there is an indissoluble link between history and the miseries and the horrors of the past’.¹⁵ Ankersmit extends the concept of trauma, defined broadly as a rupture between the individual’s internal and external worlds that prevents reconciliation between past and present, to collective Western historical consciousness.¹⁶ There is no doubt that the experience or knowledge of the repression, violence, and war of the twentieth century had a profound impact on the thinking of more than one generation of historians in many different parts of the world. Progressive historians in the United States and Whig historians in England largely retained faith in the positive evolution of mankind in the first half of the twentieth century. But after the First World War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Second World War and the Holocaust, and struggles for colonial independence, historians coming to maturity in the post-war period increasingly became less enamoured of theories of progress, less inclined to believe in a trajectory of human betterment.¹⁷ Could human beings continue to be thought of as intrinsically good with the capacity for reason? Increasing scepticism undoubtedly influenced the receptivity of some historians from the mid-twentieth century onwards towards theoretical perspectives that approached the past through the lens of conflict, rather than progress, emphasized the role of unconscious mental drives rather than rationality, or displaced conscious human agency in favour of determinist linguistic structures and discourses.

It could be argued that this is something of a contextual paradox, particularly in the West. The generation of historians born after the Second World War experienced a period of unprecedented economic growth which led to a rise in living standards that eventually also lifted some peoples in other parts of the world out of poverty. Furthermore Fascism had been defeated and Europeans forced to surrender their colonies, albeit at a terrible cost in human life. The Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movements in Europe and the Americas succeeded in some of their aims, opening up new possibilities for those previously excluded. These achievements, accompanied by relatively full employment and the provision of social security, enabled many people, particularly in the West, to live more secure and fulfilling lives, as the title of the prize-winning British documentary series The People’s Century suggests.¹⁸ Why, when historians were participating in or benefiting from effective collective action in both domestic and international contexts, were they inclined towards theoretical perspectives that rejected the idea of rationality and progress? Furthermore, what impact does this have upon the way we think about the present and the future? To what extent have these pessimistic post-war perspectives influenced contemporary thinking about the scope of human agency, and our capacity to change or influence the present and the future?¹⁹

A little earlier in this chapter Chakrabarty drew our attention to the role of the educational and institutional environment in shaping the development of historical approaches in India. After the First World War, in a different example, the French Annales historians Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre both taught at the University of Strasbourg where the faculty structure, unusually for the time, facilitated collaborative teaching and research.²⁰ Bloch and Febvre were deeply influenced by the social scientists with whom they worked, and rejected the focus upon elites and political history of orthodox French historiography in favour of the study of social collectivities and mentalités: ‘not the man, never the man, human societies, organized groups’ wrote Febvre in 1922.²¹ To understand collective human behaviour and beliefs, these Annales historians exhorted historians to be ‘geographers. Be jurists too, and sociologists, and psychologists’.²² The interdisciplinary context within which Bloch and Febvre worked during this period of their lives led to an exchange of ideas that had a significant impact upon their approach to historical analysis, and the ‘new’ history they pioneered had a major influence on historians in other parts of the world.

In the 1950s and 1960s two developments in the rapidly expanding university sector in the West also had an impact upon the spread of interdisciplinary theories within history programmes. First of all, the growth of area studies programmes, in Chinese, Islamic, and African Studies for example, were interdisciplinary from the start. In the United States this development was driven largely by ‘a prolonged crisis in American diplomacy which gave added urgency to the development of expertise on African and Asian areas.’²³ Designed, therefore, to educate not only academics, but also diplomats and government experts, area studies programmes reflected the interdisciplinary orientation of the ‘new’ Annales history. The expansion of tertiary education in the West during the 1960s also led to wider participation by the working class, women, and ethnic minorities. Interested in their own histories, these emerging historians contributed to the growth of social history and analyses of class, gender, culture, and ethnicity during subsequent decades.

Turning to the second theme, that of time and temporal frameworks, these are at the heart of historical enquiry. Change over time has been one of the consistent themes of historical research, but neither time nor change are understood or measured in uniform ways. At the most basic level, calendars reflect different criteria for measuring time. For example the Christian Gregorian calendar (introduced in 1582) is different from the traditional lunisolar calendars of many other religions and cultures in China, Japan, and Vietnam. The people of the Punjab may use three calendars for different purposes, reflecting processes of rural social change over the past century.²⁴

Do time and change move in one direction and at the same speed? Western historiography is dominated by a linear notion of time, homogeneously moving forward. Recently Noël Bonneuil has argued that Western models of historical time are fatally influenced by this notion of trajectory, and that alternative conceptualizations that ‘no longer lead toward just one particular future or that reflect a single past’ are needed.²⁵ The historian Charles Beard thought that historians had a choice among three possibilities: ‘History is chaos and every attempt to interpret it otherwise is an illusion. History moves around in a kind of cycle. History moves in a line, straight or spiral, and in some direction.’ The choice was ultimately an ‘act of faith’.²⁶ Change may also be perceived to move at different speeds, as in the model proposed by Fernand Braudel in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published in 1949. Braudel’s tripartite structure, discussed further in chapter 5, consists of slow environmental cycles, medium-term social and cultural processes, and short-term events.²⁷ Braudel emphasised the greater significance of long-term historical structures and processes (the longue durée) over short-term events, and his conceptualization of time and change has fundamental implications for historical analysis and the role of human agency.

It has been argued that the most significant contribution historians could make to social theory relates to the conceptualization of historical time, or social temporalities. The American historian and political scientist William Sewell outlined the theory of social temporality he believed to be implicit in the analyses of historians, although rarely acknowledged explicitly in historical work.²⁸ The principles of social temporality, he argued, include fatefulness (that time is irreversible); that historical outcomes are contingent upon a temporal sequence, which explains the significance attached to chronology in historiography; the importance of events which change the course of history; and complexity, that a diversity of temporalities, from the long-run to the sudden, may exist simultaneously at any one time. Consequently time is heterogeneous, a mix of continuity and change. This, he concluded, means that historians ‘assume that historical temporality is lumpy, uneven, unpredictable, and discontinuous’.²⁹ This understanding of historical time (and of course other historians might well take issue with Sewell’s characterization) is not entirely compatible with the explanatory structuralist analyses of social scientists, such as the theories of Freud, Marx, or Saussure. As Sewell noted, when historians ‘borrow social-theoretical concepts we often find that the concepts don’t quite fit’: as you read the chapters, think about how historians adapt, revise or combine different theories or concepts in their analyses of continuity and change in the past.³⁰

One of the major ways in which historians conventionally divide time is by periodization, homogeneous conceptualising categories such as Medieval, Early Modern, or Modern, or those named after ruling elites or individuals such as Meiji Era in Japan or Victorian Britain. These divisions of time are inherited from earlier generations and they always contain ‘fundamental assumptions’ about major turning points in the past, or attribute a unifying set of values or aesthetics to the period.³¹ The practice of periodization, and the ‘mapping of homogenized historical time’ is not without critics.³² Kathleen Davis asks why, in a context where teleological and stage-oriented histories are being challenged, ‘do the monoliths medieval/religious/feudal and modern/secular/capitalist (or developed) survive, and what purposes do they serve’? She argues, for example, that divisions such as the medieval/modern distort ‘the histories of fields such as medicine and philosophy and occlude minority histories such as those of women and the racially or religiously oppressed’.³³ Does periodization entail a ‘politics of time’, as Davis has suggested, that sanitizes the past?³⁴

The temporal frameworks adopted by historians are also linked to theories of causality, the third theme to keep in mind. What are the causes of events, or the drivers of change, in the past? The answer will depend, in part, upon the temporal and spatial scope of the project. For example, world or global history is much more likely to be approached through an extended period of time, centuries or more, whereas microhistory will focus upon a much shorter period of time, a particular event, community, or the lifetime of one individual. The first is more likely to draw upon explanatory models of long-term economic or other processes, and the latter upon short-term events and immediate cultural or political factors.

In Sewell’s model of historical practice, discussed a little earlier, chronology and the ‘event’ appear to play a significant role in historical explanation. But this is clearly only part of the story: because events happen in sequence does not necessarily imply cause and effect. Drawing upon the notion of different levels of time, the drivers of change in the past may derive from multiple causes that are both slow-moving long-term processes and short-term event-based factors. As we shall see in the chapter on narrative, combining analysis of long-term trends or structural causes with a chronological story is not always easy.³⁵

Historians draw upon a wide range of long-term and short-term factors to explain change in the past.³⁶ A revolution provides a good example of the kind of event arising out of a myriad of causes, from economic relationships and material conditions to the ideas and organizations that gave form to the struggle.³⁷ There is no doubt that historians would agree that causality is complex, and the problem then arises of assigning different degrees of significance to a wide range of causes. If historical analysis simply becomes ‘a welter of irreducible historical contingencies’, as one historian has put it, there can be little coherent explanation.³⁸ In order to prioritize causes historians may claim that the weight of evidence is the basis for their judgement.³⁹ But another historian will be along shortly to challenge that argument, and it is important to recognize that all historical explanations draw, to a greater or lesser degree, upon either assumptions or more conscious theorization about the relative importance of particular driving forces in history. Some explanatory models are intended to be comprehensive and universal. The historical materialism of Marx falls into this category, as do the psychoanalytic model of Freud and the evolutionary theory of Darwin. But historians may adopt particular concepts without necessarily endorsing the entire theory. For example, the concepts of ‘class’, or the ‘unconscious’, are widely used by historians who do not define themselves as either Marxists or Freudians.

Political and economic factors, in particular, have played a significant role in many historical accounts. First of all, emerging nation states were central to the codification of empirical epistemology in the nineteenth century (chapter 2), and many historians today continue to write within the framework of national and political history. However, the rise of transnational fields of historical enquiry and global history, and the rejection of homogenizing narratives by poststructuralist scholars, have challenged the notional autonomy and unity of the nation state. Are we now in a postnational era? One problem facing historians writing transnational or global history lies in finding ways to avoid teleological (self-fulfilling) or Western-centric models of modernity.⁴⁰ The term ‘modernity’ will arise in a number of chapters, and is another example of the ‘politics of time’ referred to earlier. There is no one interdisciplinary definition of ‘modernity’ and the term is highly contested. It has been used to identify a wide range of historical turning points, including the Reformation, Enlightenment and scientific thinking, industrialization, economic development, and increasing emotional control, among others.⁴¹ It is, however, a linear Western model of progress and has been widely challenged, particularly in postmodern and postcolonial thinking (see chapters 11 and 12).

The final theme is that of subjectivities, the mental worlds of those who lived in the past. The ‘new history’ of Bloch and Febvre included a focus upon what they described as mentalités, or the mental tools used by people in the past to make sense of the worlds in which they lived. These mental tools included structures of belief based upon unconscious assumptions and expressed through linguistic metaphors and symbols. The term subjectivities is now more widely used than mentalités, following criticism that the latter inclined towards cultural stasis and consensus and did not encompass change over time.⁴² Subjectivities include cognition and emotion, as well as memory, imagination, myths, ideologies, and desires. This is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of the historian’s task: to understand the mental worlds of those we study. To do so we draw upon discursive, narrative, affective (emotional), and psychoanalytic concepts and theories, among others. The theories and concepts that inform many contemporary analyses and interpretations of historical subjectivities are fully explored in later chapters of this book.

The four themes of contextualization, temporal frameworks, causation and drivers of change, and subjectivities will enable you to interrogate the assumptions and perspectives, theories and concepts upon which historians draw to analyse and interpret the past. We have sought to include examples from a wide range of historical contexts, but length and language requirements for an introductory text in English inevitably placed constraints on this process. Each chapter begins with an outline of the specific theory, its strengths and difficulties, and how it has been utilized in the research and writing of historians. The second half of the chapter consists of an article, chapter or extract by a historian, prefaced by a set of questions to guide your reading. For further sources remember to look at the chapter endnotes as well as the concluding list of additional reading. We encourage you to look up unfamiliar terms (even if these are defined within the text) to deepen your understanding of the vocabulary of theory, and historians’ names to expand your knowledge of both the context and the focus of their research.

The next chapter outlines the principles of empiricism, the founding epistemology of the professional discipline, and explores the ways in which historians have challenged and modified this theory of knowledge over the past century and a half.

Notes

1  Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor, 2005), p. ix.

2  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London, 1949).

3  See: Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia, 2008); and Constantin Fasolt, ‘Scholarship and Periodization’, History and Theory, 50, 3 (2011), p. 415.

4  See Simon Gunn and Stuart Rawnsley, ‘Practising Reflexivity: The Place of Theory in University History’, Rethinking History, 10, 3 (2006), pp. 369–90.

5  Peter Burke, ‘Western Historical Thinking in a Global Perspective – 10 Theses’, in Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Western Historical Thinking (New York, 2002).

6  Aziz Al-Azmeh, ‘The Coherence of the West’, in Rüsen (ed.), Western Historical Thinking, pp. 60–1.

7  Hayden White, ‘The Westernization of World History’, in Rüsen (ed.), Western Historical Thinking, p. 118.

8  Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Global and Multicultural Discipline of History?’, History and Theory, 45, 1 (2006), pp. 101–9.

9  Merle Goldman, ‘Restarting Chinese History: Review Essay’, The American Historical Review, 105, 1 (2000), pp. 153–64.

10  Arif Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories: The Past as Legacy and Project (Lanham, 2000), p. 113.

11  Dirlik, Postmodernity’s Histories, p. 113.

12  Allan Smith, ‘Historians and Theory: A Comment’, Rethinking History, 9, 4 (2005), p.485.

13  Smith, ‘Historians and Theory’, p. 486.

14  Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (2nd edn, London, 2006), p. 77.

15  Frank R. Ankersmit, ‘Trauma and Suffering: A Forgotten Source of Western Historical Consciousness’, in Rüsen (ed.), Western Historical Thinking, p. 76.

16  For definitions of ‘trauma’, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996).

17  Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern (3rd edn, Chicago, 2007), pp. 77, 335–43.

18  BBC/PBS television documentary series of 26 one-hour programmes on the twentieth century, first transmitted in 1995.

19  See the discussion by Inga Clenndinnen, writing in the Australian context: ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’, Quarterly Essay, 23 (2006), p. 66.

20  Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, 1989), p. 90.

21  Cited in André Burguière, ‘The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales’, in Stuart Clark (ed.), The Annales School: Critical Assessments, vol. II (London, 1999), p.409.

22  Cited in Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–1989 (Stanford, CA, 1990), p. 2.

23  Michael Adas, ‘Social History and the Revolution in African and Asian Historiography’, Journal of Social History, 19, 2 (1985), pp. 335–6.

24  Muhammad Aurang Zeb Mughal, ‘Calendars Tell History: Social Rhythm and Social Change in Rural Pakistan’, History and Anthropology, 25, 5 (2014), pp. 592–613.

25  Noël Bonneuil, ‘The Mathematics of Time in History’, History and Theory, Theme Issue 49, 4 (December 2010) p. 28.

26  C.A. Beard, ‘Written History as Act of Faith’, American Historical Review, 39, 2 (1934), pp. 228–9; cited in Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (3rd edn, Chicago, 2007), p. 331.

27  See also Reinhart Koselleck, who was influenced by Braudel: The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford, 2002) and Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass., 1985).

28  William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005).

29  Sewell, Logics of History, pp. 8–9.

30  Sewell, Logics of History, p. 5.

31  See Jordanova, History in Practice, ch. 5.

32  Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 20.

33  Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 4.

34  See the discussion in Helge Jordheim, ‘Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities’, History and Theory, 51, 2 (2012), p. 154.

35  See David Hackett Fischer’s concept of the ‘braided narrative’, in Albion’s Seed (Oxford, 1989), p. xi.

36  See the range of factors outlined in Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods (Ithaca, 2001), pp. 127–40.

37  See R. Bin Wong, ‘Causation’, in Ulinka Rublack (ed.), A Concise Companion to History (Oxford, 2012), pp. 27–56.

38  James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London, 2000), p. 10.

39  See further discussion in Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), ch. 5, ‘Causation in History’, pp. 129–60.

40  See Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York, 2014); Eileen Ka-May Cheng, Historiography: An Introductory Guide (London, 2012), ch. 6.

41  See Lynn Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest, 2008); Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107, 3 (2002), pp. 821–45.

42  Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (New York, 1997), pp. 170–1.

2

The empiricists

Empiricism is both a theory of knowledge, an epistemology, and a method of historical enquiry.¹ There are few historians who dissent from the use of empiricism as a research method, and most routinely employ the analytical tools and protocols developed over the past one hundred and fifty years to contextualize and interpret source materials. Historians sometimes prefer to describe their work as a ‘craft’, with all the connotations of hands-on knowledge and skill, and this emphasizes methodology rather than theory. Yet all historical writing is constructed upon a theory of knowledge, and since the formal foundation of history as a university-led discipline of study in the mid-nineteenth century the principles of empiricism have received considerable critical attention and critique. Given the importance of empirical research to historical enquiry it is essential that we understand the origins, founding principles, and critiques of empiricism as an epistemology, and to consider where historians have stood in these debates.

The empirical approach to historical research has its origins in the ‘scientific revolution’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.² Challenging the control exercised by the Church and its clerics over the generation and dissemination of learning, natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon argued that knowledge should be derived from observation and investigation of the material world. These principles of scientific enquiry were carried forward by the philosophers of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and applied to the study of human society. It was in this broad intellectual context that history, sociology, and anthropology, academic disciplines with which we are now familiar, emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. Embedded within the new, university-led professionalism of historical study, therefore, was an emphasis upon evidence rather than abstract reasoning, and systematic archival research into material documents became the foundation of historical methodology.

At the University of Berlin, between 1824 and 1871, Leopold von Ranke played a major role establishing and disseminating professional standards for historical training. Rejecting many of the sources previously used by historians – particularly personal memoirs, or accounts written after the event – Ranke argued that historians should only use ‘primary’ or original sources, those generated at the time of the event under consideration. These documents should then be subjected to the closest scrutiny, and only then ‘by gathering, criticizing and verifying all the available sources, could [historians] put themselves in a position to reconstruct the past accurately’.³ In a well-known phrase, Ranke also argued that historians should refrain from judging the past, and simply describe what actually happened, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’.⁴ Richard Evans, a British historian of Germany, has suggested that this phrase has been incorrectly understood, and that Ranke sought to ‘understand the inner being of the past.’⁵ He intended that each historical period should be understood on its own terms and not judged by the historian’s own criteria. This emphasis upon the specific historical context is also described as historicism, and entails the rejection of broader general theories or principles, for example, economic determinism.

Nonetheless, Ranke perceived human history as the working out of God’s will, and in consequence Georg Iggers concluded that for Ranke ‘[t]he impartial approach to the past … revealed the existing order as God had willed it…. One cannot understand the new science of history as it was understood by Ranke without taking into account the political and religious context in which it emerged’.⁶ That context was the nineteenth-century ferment arising from nationalism and the growth of European states. A prolific historian, Ranke wrote over sixty volumes of chronological narrative focusing upon the political and diplomatic history of Europe.

Ranke’s influence was widespread: his pupils were appointed in the new universities being established throughout Europe and North America.⁷ The following exhortation by the eminent French historian Henri Houssaye, opening the first session at the First International Congress of Historians in 1900, illustrates the preoccupation with factual evidence that had become the core of historical practice:

We want nothing more to do with the approximations of hypotheses, useless systems, theories as brilliant as they are deceptive, superfluous moralities. Facts, facts, facts – which carry within themselves their lesson and their philosophy. The truth, all the truth, nothing but the truth.⁸

The four core tenets of scientific, empirical history, as it stood at the turn of the century, might therefore be codified as follows:

1.  The rigorous examination and knowledge of historical evidence, verified by references.

2.  Impartial research, devoid of a priori beliefs and prejudices.

3.  An inductive method of reasoning, moving from particular observations to broader analyses. (In contrast, the deductive approach entails reasoning from the general to the specific, i.e. approaching or testing the evidence through the lens of a wider set of concepts, specific theory or hypotheses.)

4.  Coherence, usually expressed in the form of narrative.

Implicit within these research principles is a specific epistemology, or theory of knowledge. First of all, the past exists independently of the individual’s mind, and is both observable and verifiable. Secondly, through adherence to the research principles above, the historian is able to represent the past objectively and accurately. In other words, the truth of a historical account rests upon both its coherence and correspondence to the facts.⁹ These principles represent the search for objective truth, ‘the noble dream’ of the historical profession, to use a phrase recurrent in American historiography.¹⁰

The epistemology codified in these principles is also the foundation of ‘positivism’, a term originating with the French philosopher August Comte in the 1830s.¹¹ Comte argued that the objective analysis of evidence could be extended to the formulation of broad laws governing historical development. At the heart of this approach lies the perennial question of agency: to what extent can individuals exercise agency or free will, or are our lives ultimately determined by larger, including socio-economic, forces? Comte was firmly in the latter camp, but rather than being a pessimist he believed that identification and understanding of the laws governing human society and history would enable human life to be improved, if not perfected. Positivism, combining empirically verifiable facts into general laws, profoundly influenced many of the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century, including Karl Marx and Charles Darwin.¹²

The core tenets of empirical history remained deeply influential among the historical profession throughout the twentieth century, although, as both this and subsequent chapters will demonstrate, not without significant critiques. Reflections on the practice of history written decades apart by two Regius Professors of History at Cambridge University both focus upon these foundational empiricist principles. The first, J.B. Bury, declared in his inaugural address in 1902 that ‘history is a science, no less and no more’. For Bury, the writing of history was a science because of its ‘minute method of analysing … sources’ and ‘scrupulously exact conformity to facts’. Believing that ‘science cannot be safely controlled or guided by subjective interest’, he stated that it was the role of universities to train students in objective analysis, setting aside the influence of their own time and place. ‘There was indeed’, Bury commented, ‘no historian since the beginning of things who did not profess that his sole aim was to present to his readers untainted and unpainted truth’.¹³

Sixty-five years later G.R. Elton took up the same cudgels in defence of the empirical method in history and his book, The Practice of History. Elton, like Bury, believed that the correct historical method was the key to revealing the truth about the past. Both men compared the creation of historical knowledge to building with bricks and mortar. Each published piece of research represented a brick, and the work of the historian was therefore analogous to that of a skilled craftsman. The analogy is revealing, for neither Bury nor Elton expected, or desired, the labourer to have knowledge of the larger edifice.¹⁴ The material foundations of this edifice, the labours of countless scholars, had to be sound, and both men placed a great deal of importance upon the correct historical method for the evaluation and use of historical evidence.

With irrefutable, factual information located at the heart of historical enquiry, the method of establishing the veracity and adequacy of the evidence became paramount, and this leads us to the first principle of empirical history. The careful evaluation and authentication of primary source material is one of Ranke’s most significant legacies. These include the technical analyses of sources, such as paleography or statistics, as well as source criticism that includes questions such as authorial authority or competence of the observer.¹⁵ In a widely read textbook on historical methodology Arthur Marwick listed seven criteria which should be applied to historical documents. The first four steps involve the basic verification of authenticity.¹⁶ One of the most famous forged documents in history, the Donation of Constantine, purported to show that the Emperor Constantine gave his crown and empire to Pope Sylvester I after the latter cured him of leprosy. The document was exposed as a forgery seven hundred years later by the Renaissance writer Lorenzo Valla.¹⁷ But forgeries are not confined to the medieval world; the comparatively recent revelation that the ‘Hitler Diaries’ were fraudulent suggests that authentication of sources remains an essential part of the historian’s work.¹⁸

Marwick’s three final criteria relate more to interpretation than verification. The aspiring historian is advised to ask, for example, ‘what person, or group of persons, created the source [and] how exactly was the document understood by contemporaries?’¹⁹ Elton argued that the historian should not impose his or her own questions upon the evidence; rather, the questions should arise spontaneously out of the material itself.²⁰ This is a clear statement of the second and third dimensions of empirical epistemology: impartial research, devoid of a priori beliefs and prejudices, and an inductive method of reasoning. But to what extent can historians, embedded in their own time and place, either fully understand the ways in which historical actors perceived their world, or lay aside their own conceptual, social, or cultural perspectives? This is the most contested dimension of empiricism as an epistemology and has been the subject of sustained critique from the mid-nineteenth century to the recent poststructuralist challenge (see chapter 11).

Among the earliest critics was one of Ranke’s pupils, the great Swiss cultural historian of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt, who rejected the focus upon the political narratives favoured by his mentor. What interested Burckhardt were the beliefs and values of past societies, ‘the inner core of bygone humanity … what manner of people these were, what they wished for, thought, perceived and were capable of’.²¹ But he did more than turn the historian’s gaze from the political to the cultural realm: he also fundamentally challenged the empiricists’ belief in impartial, objective historical truth. Historians bring their own perceptions to their study of the past, he argued, and other scholars might understand the Renaissance very differently: ‘a cultural period and its mentality may present a different picture to every beholder, and … easily have led others to essentially different conclusions.’²² Burckhardt represents an alternative interpretive hermeneutic tradition in cultural history that looks for understanding or meaning in contrast to the search for origins, causes, or explanation that dominated nineteenth-century empiricist historiography. This search for meaning is also demonstrated in the work of ethnohistorians, for example, who read the written records of the colonizers ‘against the grain’ to reveal the perspectives of the colonized, and as a consequence construct very different accounts of colonial history.

An exclusive emphasis upon the core principles of empirical epistemology may also lead historians to reject understandings of the past based upon different types of historical sources, such as oral tradition or material culture. For example, in the 1960s the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper claimed that there could be no history of precolonial Africa, only the history of Europeans in Africa.²³ Trevor-Roper’s assertion also raises the question about the extent to which the orthodox principles of an empirical epistemology are compatible with the study of societies based upon very different cosmologies. The fundamental principle of historicism, derived from the Romantic scholar Johan Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), is that all societies should be understood within the framework of their own values and beliefs. In chapter 12 indigenous and postcolonial historians make precisely this point and propose very different ways of thinking about the past.

Despite Burckhardt’s emphasis upon the historian’s subjectivity in mediating representations of the past, the goals of impartial research and inductive reasoning remained at the heart of university-led historical practice. But not all were convinced: was it really possible to be entirely impartial? The British historian and philosopher R.G. Collingwood, writing in the mid-1930s, specifically addressed this question:

We have been trained to think that all intellectual inquiry should be impartial, animated by no practical end and no desire except to discover the truth, whatever the truth may be. That, at least, is the notion which I find myself inheriting from the tradition of scholarship and science to which I belong. But I am often uneasy about it, and wonder whether this complete separation of theory from practice is possible.²⁴

Collingwood began by identifying two kinds of partiality: ‘one depending on what we want’, and ‘the other on what we think right’. In practice Collingwood argued that neither of these was entirely avoidable. Focusing here upon the first kind of partiality, Collingwood argued that prejudice, ‘a desire to find that a certain answer to the question one is asking is the right one’, leads the researcher to ‘prejudge questions or settle them in advance’. While the answer may seem clear that this kind of partiality is wrong, Collingwood does not let historians off the hook so easily. ‘Can historians be unprejudiced?’, he asks.²⁵

In an entertaining passage he makes the case that ‘clearly they can’t be’, particularly when investigating a subject that touches upon, or reflects, their interests. He concludes that the logical principle therefore ought to be that ‘in order to avoid prejudice, the rule must be laid down that no one who is personally interested in a subject may write the history of that subject.’ He called this principle ‘the doctrine of the historian as eunuch’ and roundly rejected it. ‘All historical thought’, he argued ‘is a re-enactment in the historian’s mind of certain experiences which happened to people in the past. How is the historian to enter into the mind of a statesman like Richelieu or a soldier like Marlborough, if he has no experience whatever of politics or war?’²⁶ In other words, Collingwood suggested that it was the depth of life experience that equipped historians to understand the past.

This argument was also made by the nineteenth-century German sociologist and historian Wilhelm Dilthey, when he pointed out that ‘the power and breadth of our own lives and the energy with which we reflect on them are the foundation of historical vision’.²⁷ Collingwood also argued that historians should be much more self-reflective and ‘examine our own minds and find out what our prejudices are.’²⁸ While critical self-reflection has not generally become part of postgraduate training in history, the requirement for disciplinary reflexivity, investigating normative assumptions such as the theoretical underpinnings and social rationale of the discipline has now, for example, become part of national benchmarking of history programmes in the United Kingdom.²⁹

What about the third principle, that of inductive reasoning? If questions should emerge from the sources themselves, rather than the historian’s mind, how could historians bridge the temporal and cultural gap between themselves and the conceptual and perceptual worlds of past historical actors? Should the historian’s role be confined to that of ‘scissors and paste’, copying the ‘testimony of authorities’?³⁰ Collingwood also rejected this position. Historians could not ignore the omissions, concealments, distortions or even lies in documentary evidence; and they had to make choices and selections, otherwise their work would be ‘a mere chaos of disconnected details’.³¹ He argued that historians should approach their sources in a critical frame of mind and exercise their ‘autonomy’ in three ways:

1.  treating ‘historical agents not as authorities but as witnesses that can be questioned critically’;

2.  selecting ‘information according to their interests or in order to address questions’;

3.  and finally, engaging in interpolation, ‘filling in gaps in evidence with ideas reached inferentially’.³²

To focus here on the third point, Collingwood suggested that inferences were made by the exercise of ‘historical imagination’.³³ By this Collingwood meant that historians drew upon an a priori historical imagination that needed to be internally and externally coherent and consistent (and therefore differ from fiction); have a specific spatial and temporal location; and finally, the historian’s account must be consistent with the evidential traces of the past.³⁴ The exercise of historical imagination does not, however, mean that historians will reach the same conclusions. Judgements concerning causation or motivation, for example, are often the product of the historian’s inferences and are impossible to prove.³⁵ Let us take the example of the decline in fertility in Britain, the United States and Australasia between 1870 and 1920. Based upon quantitative analysis of the census data, historians accept that there was a significant decline in the average number of live births per married woman during this period. In this case the overall trend appears to be clear. But the reasons for the fertility decline are less so; there are at least half a dozen explanations that range from the economic (fertility behaviour determined by inter-generational wealth flows) to the social (the increased authority of women within the home).³⁶ While the fertility decline was undoubtedly the consequence of a complex set of factors, historians continue to search for the principal causes.³⁷ In a world facing rapid population increases, understanding human motivation for fertility control in the past acquires particular contemporary salience.

But agreement among historians is remarkably difficult to achieve, and historical events are open to a multiplicity of interpretations. The same evidence can generate two quite different stories about the past, and problems arise when these are incompatible. For a striking example of this in practice, see the comparison by environmental historian William Cronon of two histories of the long drought that struck the Great Plains of North America in the 1930s.³⁸ The first study describes the drought as a natural disaster over which the people of the Dust Bowl triumphed; the second focuses upon the failure of human beings to understand the cyclical climate of this semi-arid environment, leading to ecological collapse. Cronon ultimately concludes that ‘to try to escape the value judgements that accompany storytelling is to miss the point of history itself, for the stories we tell, like the questions we ask, are all finally about value’.³⁹

Are we then to accept that all interpretations are relative? Relativism is the belief that absolute truth is unattainable, and that all statements about history are connected or relative to the position of those who make them. Even while empirical methods continued to dominate training in the United States and Britain throughout the twentieth century, many leading historians during this time adopted a more relativist stance, including Charles A. Beard and E.H. Carr.⁴⁰ One difficulty with subjectivism is that it leaves the door open to the unacceptable face of moral relativism. Is one interpretation of the past as good as any other? For example, where does this leave us in terms of evaluating the impact of imperial conquest by force or the dispossession of indigenous peoples during colonization? And should we not, for example, challenge those historians who attempt to refute the historical reality of the Holocaust? An interpretation based upon such a travesty of the documentary and oral record indicates the moral deficiency of an unqualified subjectivist position.⁴¹ All this debate over the epistemological foundations of historical research left empirical historians in an unsatisfactory state of limbo, evident in the conclusion by Dominick LaCapra in the mid-1980s that ‘extreme documentary objectivism and relativistic subjectivism do not constitute genuine alternatives’.⁴²

Is there any way out of this epistemological dilemma? These debates over the scientific status of historical epistemology have received much less attention over recent decades, a consequence of the influence of new cultural theories and concepts discussed in later chapters of this book.⁴³ However, Allan Megill has recently suggested that if historians wish to assert that their accounts of the past are true, the boundaries between fact and speculation, or inference, must be clarified.⁴⁴ His solution is a set of criteria drawn from the philosophy of science called ‘inference to the best explanation’, or ‘abduction’. This approach incorporates both deductive and inductive reasoning, and focuses primarily upon justifying the historical analysis or explanation. Based upon the work of Paul Thagard, Megill outlines three criteria for deciding which explanation is the best in any given case:

1.  ‘consilience (the more data explained by an explanation, the better);

2.  simplicity (the fewer auxiliary hypotheses necessary to make an explanation work, the better)’;

3.  ‘analogicality (the more similar or comparable the explanation is to other explanations known to be true, the better).’⁴⁵

The third, Megill argues, is less applicable to historical research and should only be used with great care. To these three criteria Megill adds a fourth. Reversing the usual explanatory order of cause and effect, he suggests that ‘in judging historical accounts we ought to remember that explanations in which the reasoning is from effects to causes are preferable to those in which the reasoning is from causes to effects’. This, he maintains, keeps ‘the historian rooted in the real evidence’.⁴⁶ The core imperative of empiricism is reflected in this statement, while the four criteria for evaluating historians’ explanations offer one way to justify inferences made on the basis of the evidence. Megill concludes that it is not necessary for the historian to explicitly spell out the process of abductive reasoning behind his or her historical analysis, but this would continue to leave the reader in the dark concerning the processes behind the selection of sources and argument implicit in the historical narrative.

Let us turn now to an example of empiricist history, taken from one of Geoffrey Elton’s most influential works, England Under the Tudors, first published in 1955. Born in Germany in 1921, Elton studied at the University of Prague before completing the doctoral thesis at Cambridge on Tudor government that ‘made his reputation’.⁴⁷ His corpus of work focuses primarily upon administrative history, and he also become one of the leading defenders of empiricism as a theory of knowledge. The extract that follows contains many of the distinguishing features of empiricist history. To begin with, examine the title and table of contents. What do these suggest about Elton’s approach to this period of English history, both in terms of focus and organisation? What historical factors appear to be missing from his account? The title suggests the study is about England, but in this case, is dynastic history equated with national history? It is interesting that Elton wrote his path-breaking study of the Tudor government in the 1950s, a time of unprecedented state expansion in Western Europe, the debate over which may have influenced the focus of his work.

Elton was adamant that his own interpretation of the Tudor government ‘came to my mind not (as some of my critics would have it) because mine was a naturally authoritarian mind looking for virtue in rulers, but because the evidence called them forth.’⁴⁸ This is an appeal to the orthodox inductive method. Throughout the chapter Elton identifies strongly with the interests of Henry VII, and nothing is more apparent than the dismissive treatment meted out to luckless pretenders. What other examples can you find in the reading that might indicate an implicit theory of the importance of strong leadership? One of the criticisms of Elton’s work revolves around the use of narrative. Does the narrative form, telling a story, lure ‘the reader into accepting the author’s preferred interpretation simply as a happening’?⁴⁹ This has been described as the ‘Elton dilemma’, the problem of narrative as an explanatory historical device. Every narrative contains implicit analysis because the historian must decide how to arrange the evidence. But the device of telling a story allows the historian to evade critical scrutiny of the theorising underpinning its structure.⁵⁰ Does Elton, as the omniscient narrator, allow the flow of the story to obscure the degree to which he is making judgements on the basis of undeclared criteria?

Notes

1  E.P. Thompson made a clear distinction between empiricism as an ‘ideological formation’ and the empirical techniques of historical investigation in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York, 1978), p. 6.

2  Dorinda Outram makes the point that the terms science and scientist were not invented until the early nineteenth century, and the more common contemporary term would have been ‘natural philosophy’, see The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 48–9.

3  See Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), p. 18.

4  Cited in Ernst Breisach, Historiography, Ancient, Medieval and Modern (2nd edn, Chicago, 1994), p. 233.

5  Evans, In Defence of History, pp. 17–18. See further discussion concerning transatlantic philosophical and epistemological misunderstandings in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988),