A student’s guide to History’s history
THE HISTORY OF HISTORY IS SO COMPLEX A DISCIPLINE THAT IT HAS BECOME ITS OWN FIELD: HISTORIOGRAPHY.
You will see that in some cases the word is capitalised – this is to show when I am referring to the discipline of History, as opposed to the more general phenomenon of history as a transmission of stories about human beings. These 8 key principles offer a starting point in a very difficult subject – the rest is up to you.
“There are two things: history and the past. And they are not the same, ok?” – Gloria Steinem
1. History may be written down, but history isn’t. The modern subject of History that we study in schools and universities is defined by the fact that it is written down, because the premise of academia is writing ideas down so they can be shared and built upon. It exists for a particular purpose, which is to give us a set of shared understanding and tools for communicating. It is not a universal truth. History with a lowercase h is something that has existed as long as human beings. The majority of it is not written, but exists in other forms: music, dance, textiles, paintings, hair, pottery, stories and poetry to name a few. These are not ‘alternative’ sources of history, but they are often perceived that way by Historians.
2. Most History has been written by rich, white, cis gender, heteronormative, Christian men. But not all. It is an old but true cliché to say that History is written by the victors, which is why society still operates on the assumption that most important things were accomplished by a particular group of people, white European men. But be wary of overlooking the many voices who have told different stories, from Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī who travelled through the Muslim world in the 19th century telling a History that put Europe at the periphery, to Mary Wollstonecraft in 18th century London who chastised Edmund Burke for his misogynistic assessment of Marie Antoinette. Most of the stories of human history have been told and recorded through other means beside writing. Often it is women who were and are the main transmitters of human history because they have so often taken on more sociable roles, as caregivers, leaders, teachers and domestic workers.
3. Years are not what they used to be. The calendar you are probably familiar with, the Gregorian calendar, was first introduced in 1582, modifying the Julian calendar which was introduced in the Roman Empire in 45 BCE. There are many other calendars such as the Islamic calendar which was established in 622 CE, the Chinese calendar developed between 771 and 476 BCE and the Hebrew calendar, the modern version of which came into use the 9th or 10th centuries CE, but which has existed in various forms since the 6th century BCE. Dates and times are not as straight forward as we’d like to think – they are in constant competition. The path of the Gregorian calendar’s global takeover tells a powerful story of the past 500 years.
4. Years are not just numbers. The calendar becomes History because humans make it so. Referring to centuries, for example, became popularized in the 18th century when History came into existence as a profession – before this it was more common to refer to a significant period like a royal dynasty (we still do when we refer to the Tudors). A lot of significance can be attached to years – take 1666 which many saw as a foreboding number because of its biblical association with Satan. It was also a really bad year in England: fire, plague, persecution of religious minorities and a sighting of a comet. As a result, people attached meaning to it. But it is not only in retrospect that humans can make years meaningful. The concept of Millenarianism is the global phenomenon in the lead up to millennia and other significant dates (not just the ones in the Gregorian calendar), where people manifest big changes in society because they expect something dramatic to happen at the turn of a new year.
5. Nations + History go together. The origin of modern nations is a subject of debate – some say their origins date back to the fall of Rome whereas others say nations are constructs of the 17th-19th centuries. Many nations in Africa, Asia and the Americas exist in their current form because of boundaries drawn by European colonizers and the subsequent independence movements fought to make them self-ruled nations. History came into existence in the realm of nation building. History writing in Europe became popularized in the 18th century with writers such as Voltaire and David Hume writing the histories of nations. It helped in establishing the authority of governments who could no longer rely on claims to God-given sovereignty. Edward Gibbon’s book on the decline of the Roman Empire published in 1776 told a narrative about the fall of a great empire to the hands of barbarians, supporting the idea prevalent at that time that imperial European nations had a duty restore ‘civilisation’. In 1983 the historian Eric Hobsbawm used the phrase ‘the invention of tradition’ to show how History is used to invent universal “truths” about society that reinforce the status quo.
6. Full Marx. Karl Marx is known for the theory of social revolution, but he also influenced the discipline of History through his methodological approach. Marx said that the basis of society, or ‘Base’, was its ‘means of production’ (economy) and that everything else was the ‘Superstructure’ (society) which existed to facilitate it. So, in feudal times the means of production was agriculture, and society – monarchs, landlords, the Pope – was there to enforce a social hierarchy so that serfs would obey their overlords and produce food. Marx’s theory was teleological, meaning that he saw it as building towards something, so in his narrative feudalism was overthrown and replaced by capitalism, where labour is the means of production and the overlords are the bourgeoisie, with nations, war, science and culture all existing to keep the capitalist machine turning. Marx said that inevitably the working classes would become conscious of their united position, leading to revolution and the next step in humanity’s development: communism.
If we set the ideas to one side and focus on the method, what Marx did is reimagine History, not as tales of great and terrible deeds by great and terrible men, but as a narrative and a relationship between economics and society. By studying this way, History has developed into a modern science that is used to inform how society is organised and governed.
7. Language is everything. Marx made another important contribution by establishing that cause does not come before effect, instead the two happen simultaneously. In History this idea particularly applies to the use of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein said: “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” What both those philosophers meant is that when you give something a name, you manifest its existence. When you say “I am working class” you don’t mean that literally – literally, you are a lump of atoms. What you are doing by saying by “I am working class” is manifesting a connected community, linked by their status in the Base-Superstructure model. Edward Said wrote a book in 1978 called Orientalism, which argues that European colonialism in the Middle East and Asia was manifested through language. European terms – like oriental, exotic, native, tribe – reduced the societies of colonized lands to being seen as “backwards” (more teleological thinking). By writing ethnographies and drawing maps, European colonizers created their own form of truth about places that they didn’t actually understand, but because their truth was written down they claimed it as “universal”. This idea stems from philosopher Foucault’s statement that “knowledge is power.” European historians like Henri Pirenne wrote that the “east” was “uncivilised” (more language of colonial discourse that we still use day-to-day) – this in turn justified European imperialism. The people who control truth control everything.
8. Landing at postmodernism. When we have established that time is meaningless and History is written by the victors, that it is just an invention to reinforce the economy and that language is used to manifest reality, we are left with postmodernism. If it makes you feel depressed and lonely, don’t worry; that’s how everyone feels when they arrive here. Historians have an impossible task in trying to unravel all of those prejudices and narratives that have informed History. The answer lies in embracing them. In order to best study and benefit from History, we must acknowledge our biases and that our true purpose can never be objective.
