Joseph S. Lucas and Donald A. Yerxa, Editors
Historically
Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society
March
2004
Volume V, Number 4
Peter
N. Stearns, "WESTERN CIV AND WORLD HISTORY:CONFLICTS AND COMPLEMENTS"
Lauren
Benton, "How to Write the History of the World"
Michael
Cook , "Islam: History's First Shot at a Global Culture?"
Counterfactual
History: A Forum
David
Schaberg, "Truth and Ritual Judgment: On Narrative Sense in China's Earliest
Historiography"
Sanjay
Subrahmanyam, "Europe and the People without Historiography; or, Reflections
on a Self-Inflicted Wound"
Jorn
Rusen, "Morality and Cognition in Historical Thought: A Western Perspective
Historically
Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society
March
2004
Volume V, Number 4
WESTERN
CIV AND WORLD HISTORY:CONFLICTS AND COMPLEMENTS
by
Peter N. Stearns
Anyone conversant
with the history teaching scene in the United States over the past twenty
years knows about the running battle between Western civ and world history
as foci for survey courses served up to college freshmen and not a few
high school students. The conflict has several fronts. Coverage competition
looms large. It is impossible to do justice to the standard topics of a
Western civ course and the ambitious canons of a world history course in
the same year. A common effort at compromise, the high school world history
course (usually 10th grade) that is in fact 67% Western, is legitimately
ridiculed by world historians as providing a civilizationally skewed vision
of what the world was and is all about.
Competition over
values is at least as fierce, and ultimately more intractable. While some
partisans of Western civilization courses are primarily attracted by the
comforts of routine and familiarity, others, including a number of political
and educational leaders, see in the course a defense of superior traditions
in an uncertain world, an opportunity to preach unified values to an increasingly
diverse American student population. Thus the 99-1 United States Senate
vote against the world history portion of the “history standards” issued
in 1992, which insisted that any educational recipients of federal money
should have a “decent respect for the values of Western civilization.”
Thus second lady Lynne Cheney’s assertion that 9/11—a tragedy that seemed
to many a call for greater understanding of the world at large—showed how
essential it was to rally a round Western values and a Western curriculum.
World history partisans, in some instances, have replied in kind with a
gleeful effort at West-bashing and (as critics rightly pointed out in the
history standards debate) a virtuous attempt to shield other civilizations
from adverse comment.
This aspect of the
conflict reflects the resurgence of cultural conservatism in the United
States, but it also picks up on the history of the Western civ course itself.
The course was designed in the early decades of the 20th century by American
educators eager to demonstrate the deeper roots of their own upstart society—in
another period of rapid immigration—but also concern e d about diplomatic
instability following World War I. As one partisan put it, the Western
civ course was designed to help students make a choice between “utopia
and barbarism.” In this vein, innovators conceived of Western civ as, effectively,
the only civilizational tradition, with a straight line from ancient Egypt
and Mesopotamia to the glories of Anglo-American constitutionalism. They
saw their course as a mixture of triumphant coverage and an inculcation
of precious, but now threatened, values. World historians, by no means
uniform West-bashers, simply have to dissent from this tradition. Their
vision must encompass a number of different civilizations (or larger world
forces that downplay civilizations altogether), and their values, implicitly
emphasizing cosmopolitanism and tolerance, point in an alternate direction
as well.
In practice, to be
sure, the battle has not raged as bitterly as periodic rhetoric might imply.
In the Advanced Placement arena, both world history and European history
programs are flourishing (the former is gaining ground, in part because
its recent emergence leaves more room for growth). Colleges and universities
differ in their choices for survey courses, and some programs, as at Stanford,
have combined a traditional Western requirement with imaginative comparative
offerings. The idea of sequences of courses, as a logical solution to the
dilemma of choice, has not penetrated very far, because the American educational
system is so resolutely chaotic where history is concerned and because
partisans are unwilling to yield terrain at any particular point. It would
be possible, for example, to see high schools as offering a civilizational
approach, followed by college-level world history, or vice versa, but that
assumes a level of coordination that simply does not exist in the United
States, as well as a willingness of, say, world historians to abandon high
school in favor of college (or Western civists to cede college), which
so far has proved to be too much to ask. But pure Western civ is on the
decline— most state requirements insist on some world coverage, though
often in Western-oriented amalgams that displease world history purists—and
a continued evolution toward a greater awareness of global history is likely.
Yet one crucial aspect
of the tension between world history and Western civ has not been adequately
explored, if only because Western civ advocates fear any concession while
world historians are often too busy figuring out how to downplay or readjust
the West to give serious thought to more imaginative amalgams. Consider
the following solution. The West should be viewed as one civilization among
several, rather than the whole show. At the same time, the West should
be granted analytical significance that goes beyond either debunking or
rueful acknowledgements of modern power. Now a series of interesting opportunities
arises, which permit efforts to interpret the Western tradition within
a legitimate world history framework.
The key is comparison,
a standard world history tool that now needs to be deployed in the Western
civ arena as well. What, in fact, are the major distinctive features in
Western institutions and values as the civilization has unfolded across
many centuries? The question is oddly unasked; particularly in Western
civ courses themselves but also in many world history surveys. Partly it
goes unasked because we have become accustomed to a factual narrative,
a set of historical stories, that pass for conveying what Western civilization
is all about (the same turgidness can creep into the coverage of other
civilizations in world history, but it is less prominent if only because
the civilizational traditions are less deeply established in our teaching
conventions). And if, in the more specific Western civ tradition, we assume
that “Western” is both distinctive and better by definition, the need for
explicit comparison is simply bypassed. Putting the same point another
way: the Western civ teaching tradition has always been implicitly comparative—the
Western story is older and better—but rarely explicitly so. Analytical
linkage between Western civ and world history depends on bringing latent
assumptions out for focused examination.
Comparison, in turn,
yields a number of ensuing questions. When, first of all, did Western civilization
begin? The Western civ tradition assumes the answer is coincident with
the emergence of civilization itself, but in fact this is hard to sustain
when Western civilization is handled with the same inquiry about origins
that would apply to Indian, Chinese, or Middle Eastern civilizations. Western
civ courses, as they have turned into more standard survey narratives,
have often shortened the timespan involved, beginning with Greece and Rome,
or the Middle Ages, or even later. But they, too, have usually ducked explicit
inquiry into when the West actually begins, because dealing with these
issues assumes a capacity to define a distinctive Westernness. Talking
directly with students about the classical versus medieval options (both
can be defended, depending on what aspects of the Western tradition seem
crucial) is an initial way of putting Western civilization in a framework
compatible with the treatment of other civilizations, and therefore with
world history.
After origins, one
moves to key changes in the Western tradition, to the principal periodization
of Western history evaluated in comparative context. William McNeill once
argued that the West has changed more than other major civilizations. I’m
not sure this is a defendable proposition (here, too, explicit comparison
would be revealing). But certainly in the early modern period the claim
applies, and this raises the issue of what remains Western even amid rapid
change, and also how the definition of a distinctive Westernness evolves
as well. In dealing with change, a focus not only on familiar topics, like
the parliamentary tradition, but also on other key areas where Westernness
may apply, like gender relations, will greatly improve the analysis.
By the early modern
period as well, the question of where Western civ was and is gets
added to issues of effective origins and major change. Like many civilizations,
the West has had a shifting geography, and it has generated borderlands
or zones of unusual contact where issues of inclusion or differentiation
simply cannot be avoided. (Similar issues apply to East Asian civilization—is
it a whole, or must it be divided among China, Japan, Korea, and so on?)
For the West, connections to Eastern and Central Europe (being redefined
in the contemporary world once again) and even to Russia, and also to the
Americas and Australia/New Zealand require explicit analysis that in turn
will enhance the capacity to discuss what the essentials of the Western
tradition “really” are. That the same discussion requires teachers and
students to confront some “exceptionalist” claims, particularly for the
United States, adds to the challenge but also, ultimately, to the potential
for integration.
From the late 19th
century onward, questions two and three (capturing change within the Western
tradition and dealing with shifting geography) are further refined by the
need to deal with the considerable Westernization of other parts of the
world—Japan being a leading case in point. As other societies successfully
incorporate industrialization, consumer culture, and parliamentary democracy,
does a definably distinctive West remain? Here again is a compelling focus
both for the later stages of a Western civ course, taught in a world history
context, and for dealing with one major case of a larger question about
homogenization and differentiation in closing out a world history survey.
Comparison is the
most obvious way to move from assumptions in the Western civ tradition
to the kind of discussion that is compatible with world history, but there
are other bridges as well. Along with comparison, intersocietal contact
is a key technique in world history. Elements of the Western civ tradition
have, of course, long stressed contact— the kind that emanated from the
West from the early modern period onward. A world history approach must
incorporate Western generated contacts, but it adds two points to the analysis.
First, it urges a closer look at the West as a recipient of influences
from other societies—not a brand new topic, but underexplored in the more
triumphal versions of the Western civ tradition. This means, particularly,
lots of attention to the West as an imitative society in the post classical
(medieval) period — where, in fact, comparisons with other imitators, like
Japan or sub-Saharan Africa, are quite revealing. The second addition,
here particularly for more modern times, involves the realization that
contacts are complex, that what the West sent out from the 16th century
onward, from Christianity to consumerism, gets variously interpreted and
syncretically combined, a process very much still going forward .
It goes without saying
that a more analytical approach to Western civilization, derived from a
world history context, embraces both thorns and roses. Some relatively
distinctive features of the Western tradition will seem positive (particularly
since we inevitably evaluate under some influence from this same tradition),
but others, like a willingness to enslave or the modern Western penchant
for racism, are more troubling. Comparison can serve neither triumphalism
nor West-bashing entirely.
The analytical issues
evoked in this sketch a re complex and designed for debate. They do not
resolve agonizing practical issues of competing coverage. But comparative
analysis can cut through some of the often sterile debate between the two
survey options. Certainly, students in a Western civ course that looks
to other societies for measurements of Western distinctiveness, and is
open to the importance and complexity of contacts, will have an easier
time moving into a world history program, should some sequencing be possible.
A Western-oriented world history course, though still potentially misleading,
becomes less objectionable if analytically sharpened. Above all, a willingness
to deal seriously with the Western tradition—but with more explicit analytical
tools—improves the possibility of incorporating Western history into a
world history program. Even coverage decisions are improved through a willingness
to focus on comparative essentials. To be sure, the compromise is slanted
to the world history side, though it builds on assumptions that need to
be tested within the Western civ tradition itself. But the capacity to
find the West in world history (along, of course, with other major traditions;
that’s the whole basis for comparison) should facilitate more constructive
conversation between two still hostile camps.
Peter N. Stearns
is provost and professor of history at George Mason University. He has
taught and published widely in both Western civilization and world history
and currently chairs the Advanced Placement World History Committee. His
most recent book is Western Civilization in World History (2003),
the latest installment in Routledge’s Themes in World History series,
which he edits.
HOW
TO WRITE THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD Lauren Benton
In one of Jorge Luis
Borges’s short stories a royal mapmaker is asked to fashion increasingly
accurate maps of the kingdom until, finally, he covers the kingdom with
a map. This parable is a warning to all historians but especially to world
historians, who may struggle more than others with pressures simply to
“cover” time and territory. Reaching beyond mere coverage is crucial to
the field’s development, and to its status within the profession. How can
we write the history of the world in a way that is not just broad but also
broadly influential?
This question poses
itself at a time when world history has already arrived as a serious research
enterprise. Once the nearly exclusive realm of a few—William McNeill, Philip
Curtin, Alfred Crosby, and some others—the field now draws scholars who
no longer consider an association with world history as a mark of hubris,
a paean to mass marketing, or evidence (God forbid) of a preoccupation
with undergraduate teaching. The field has its own journal, the Journal
of World History, which has seen the quality of its articles rise steadily
and now routinely publishes both original research, much of it done by
junior scholars, and important synthetic pieces. Meanwhile, scholarly interest
in the topic of globalization has helped to forge an interdisciplinary
audience with an interest in the longue, longue durée.
Yet questions remain
about the sorts of methodologies aspiring world historians might embrace
and promote. Aiming for comprehensiveness and relying on older narrative
techniques are not serious options. Without a conceptual framework, the
data threaten to overwhelm argument. Otherwise, we could sensibly choose
to produce a 5,000- book series, each title evoking John E. Wills’s recent
book 1688: A World History; that is, we could write the history
of the world one year at a time.
Whatever else its
virtues, world history has not produced a significant volume of methodologically
thoughtful discussions or theoretically influential studies. There are,
to be sure, discernible methodological patterns and debates in the literature
of world history, and some of these do contain lessons for other subfields.
Following the title of Donald Wright’s well-crafted book from 1997, The
World and a Very Small Place in Africa, one approach involves alternating
attention between global processes and local experiences. This methodology
informs a number of prominent world history initiatives, including efforts
to place formerly insular national histories in global perspective. But
the approach may ultimately prove less important to world historical writing,
and to fields seeking a connection to world history, than two other common
strategies.
One of these approaches
we might label circulationist. Its objects of study are the movements around
the globe of—in no particular order—commodities, capital, ideas, people,
germs, and ways of marking ethnic and religious difference. Like so many
tops spinning, these circuits together comprise what C.A. Bayly has called
“archaic globalization” in the early modern period and what observers of
the contemporary scene call simply “globalization” (forgetting, sometimes,
that it has a history). By shifting our gaze from one sphere of circulation
to another, we simulate a perception of the whole of global interconnectedness.
Following Arjun Appadurai, we can give these circuits names— either his
unwieldy labels of ethnoscape, bioscape, financescape, and so on, or the
more traditional Latinate categories we already associate with established
areas of study, such as migration, diffusion, or expansion.
Another approach
to globalization in its early and late forms is less familiar but just
as important. Rooted in comparisons, it purports to uncover the structural
similarities of polities that may be distant in place and time. Here the
historian finds globalizing influences by surmise, and by arithmetic; so
many similarities in so many places suggest common connections to forces
crossing borders and oceans. When done well, this technique reveals hidden
continuities. It focuses our eyes not on global circulation but on its
imprint, origins, and contexts: for example, status and class distinctions,
strategies of resistance, institutions of rule, and nationalism.
Circulationist projects
appear to be in much greater supply. In part, this is because of a certain
transparency of social theoretical constructs related to the movement of
people, commodities, and ideas. For example, the concept of “networks”
has worked its way into mainstream historical studies and has provided
a vocabulary for historical writing on topics as diverse as European migration,
Third World urbanization, and the transnational diffusion of ideas. In
part, the proliferation of circulationist studies reflects the institutionalization
of regional historical studies and their logical development. For example,
the acceptance of Atlantic history as a bona fide area of research provides
legitimacy —and professional cover—for scholars wishing to map Atlantic
circuits and follow them wherever they might lead, even if this means overstepping
the boundaries of an already expanded Atlantic world.
Yet it is also true
that many circulationist projects remain relatively undeveloped. Thirty
years after Pierre Chaunu mapped, in Braudelian fashion, the movement of
shipping from and to Seville, we still do not know enough about regional
or global circuits of people and goods (let alone microbes). As Alan Karras’s
study of New World Scottish “sojourning,” Karen Barkey’s work on Ottoman
qadis, Alison Games’s research on cosmopolitan English colonists, and other
complex migration stories remind us, patterns and understandings of long-distance
movements are much more varied than historians of a generation ago believed.
Many of these circuits are still in need of documentation, including the
movement of both official and non-official personnel within and across
empires. As for commodities, scholarly interest in consumption has played
an important role in widening and deepening the analysis of global trade.
But here again, one has the clear impression that we are at the edge of
a vast and varied area of study, with much more to explore and explain
besides commodification, symbolic capital, and circuits of silver.
As developed and
promising as circulationist world history may be, structural approaches
to world historical analysis are newer still—and, in combination with studies
of movement, perhaps potentially more revealing. This is somewhat paradoxical
because comparative world history has some of its roots in a familiar,
old-fashioned comparative approach. As David Armitage has pointed out in
surveying trends within Atlantic history, an older comparative history
juxtaposed different civilizational areas and sought explanations for their
diverging trajectories. This kind of comparison is still with us, as we
have been reminded by new attention in the work of Bernard Lewis and others
to the old question of where the Islamic world has “gone wrong.” We also
find it in the continuing debate about the timing of European versus Asian
economic development that has seized the attention of the so-called California
school of economic historians.
There is another
strand of comparative history, though, with roots that are better established
in historical sociology than in sociological history. This approach analyzes
multiple cases involving broadly similar historical processes in order
to advance generalizations about “big history.” In sociology, we think
of Charles Tilly, Jeffrey Paige, and Theda Skocpol as prominent comparativists
in this vein; in history, exemplary works include Michael Adas’s early
book on millenarian movements, Philip Curtin’s study of trade diasporas
in world history, or Patricia Seed’s flawed but interesting comparison
of European ceremonies of possession. Rather than comparing trajectories
and tallying up the factors “needed” for historical change of a certain
kind, such comparative studies examine the structural logic of conflicts
or processes in particular places. Global patterns are seen as emerging
out of the repetition and replication of similar social tensions and practices,
while these are in turn understood as influenced by familiar global circulationist
currents. The methodology has the advantages of privileging the kind of
careful case analysis that historians claim as their strength and of placing
social conflicts and discourse, broadly defined, at the heart of the problem
of defining international order.
I began with this
approach in conducting research for my book Law and Colonial Cultures:
Legal Regimes in World History, 1400- 1900 (Cambridge University Press,
2002). The noticeable dearth of historical studies treating law as a global
phenomenon has no doubt had something to do with the imperfect fit between
traditional legal history and circulationist models. Departing from both,
the book analyzes the ways in which law constituted an element of global
ordering before the emergence of international law and the interstate order.
In early modern empires, including European overseas empires, and in other
sorts of polities, too, legal orders were characterized first and foremost
by jurisdictional complexity. Religious minorities, communities of traders,
and subject populations were expected to exercise limited legal authority
over their own community members. The claims of states did not include
a monopoly over law, and membership in a legal community was only sometimes
defined territorially. This dynamic of multicentric law was both rooted
in particular places and so widespread as to constitute an element of international
ordering. To give just one example, Portuguese agents arriving in West
Africa in the 15th century were aided in setting up trading posts by the
homology that existed between their understanding of their limited jurisdiction
over Christian subjects and Africans’ acceptance of the legal authority
of diasporic traders over their own community affairs.
Jurisdictional complexity
produced both discernible institutional patterns and also, sometimes, transformative
conflicts. Legal pluralism established rules that were there to be broken
or changed, and legal actors at all levels of the colonial order proved
to be adept at maneuvering through and, in the process, altering the legal
order. One of the interesting conclusions of colonial legal histories is
that pressure for the creation of colonial states came sometimes from indigenous
actors rather than from the metropole, which in many cases labored to limit
its own jurisdictional claims and minimize administrative costs. Over the
course of the long 19th century, institutional configurations shifted—
gradually and sometimes only partially—in the direction of state claims
to legal supremacy. In this way, the emergence of a global interstate order
was the product of politics in particular places, rather than the result
of metropolitan or Western designs, or of some incontrovertible systemic
logic.
This example shows
that comparative analysis need not propose a model or experience (of capitalist
development, state formation, or modernity) to be used as a benchmark for
the study of divergent trajectories. It is also important to note that
global circuits— of labor, capital, and ideas—are not irrelevant to patterned
social conflicts but also do not necessarily hold the key to their understanding.
In some ways, this sort of comparative approach builds on the same strengths
that make historians so good at placing local histories in global context.
Attention to the local is indispensable to the ability to generalize about
the global. Yet the technique of juxtaposing broad trends with the history
of any “very small place” cannot by itself confirm broad insights about
global shifts and their origins.
Comparisons of this
type, it turns out, may be surprisingly compatible with a p p roaches influenced
by postmodern perspectives. Both post colonial histories and a recent strain
of scholarship in British imperial history have analyzed iterative structures
within various arenas of discourse on imperialism. Here the echoing effect
of structural similarities occurs not across a range of cases but within
different facets of a global enterprise. As Nicholas Thomas told us nearly
a decade ago, a version of world history can be rendered vertically, as
the study of “projects ” stretching from centers of rule to imperial borderlands.
Both horizontal and
vertical variations of comparative world history present theoretical and
practical challenges. Comparing structures across many cases may suggest
functionalism if one is not careful to emphasize the contingency of outcomes
in all cases. And asserting the essential similarities of various unconnected
arenas of discourse may border on the banal, as when David Cannadine in
Ornamentalism promotes “hierarchy ” as an organizing trope of British imperialism.
While a combination of care and flair may provide an escape from these
shortcomings, there is also no question that we are describing merely a
comparative perspective, not a theoretical answer to the problems of writing
global history. At the same time, we can affirm that world history may
be written with the express purpose of producing theoretical insights and
methodological innovations. Coverage is dead; long live theory.
Regarding practical
challenges, the central problem may become one of sheer effort. Mastering
the complexities of conflicts or discourse in a range of places or cultural
milieux requires a great deal of time, expertise, and travel to collections,
not to mention mastery of multiple languages. Yet these obstacles may appear
less formidable as multi-sited research becomes more accepted by funding
agencies and as the boundaries of regional subdisciplines continue to be
eroded by the circulationists.
Despite these and
other obstacles, there are compelling intellectual reasons for making comparative
history at least as common as circulationist projects in world history.
The approach lends itself to the study of a wide range of social, cultural,
and political conflicts and their local-global interconnections. This translates
into an opportunity to expand world historical inquiry from its more established
base in economic history and its more recent, sometimes disturbingly seductive
move toward biological-environmental narratives. Institutions should also
be objects of study for world historians—not just transnational institutions,
which operated fitfully if at all in most historical periods, but global
institutional regimes that have emerged out of common cultural practices
and patterned political conflicts. And for those who think institutions
are a bore no matter how they are discussed, there are plenty of other
topics that do not always lend themselves to fruitful study through a circulationist
approach. Aesthetic practices and sensibilities, for example, may be widespread
without having come to be so through processes of diffusion.
I anticipate—and
hope—that the better established methods of world history - writing will
stay with us. We need more well crafted studies analyzing specific local-global
interconnections and also more research into the circulation of people,
commodities, ideas, discourse, and, yes, microbes. I also hope that these
efforts will be joined by the multiplication of studies that build on the
best kinds of comparative analysis, moving beyond questions about different
developmental trajectories and probing unlikely elements of global order
and disorder.
Unlike Borges’s mapmaker,
we will not have to cover the world with a map in order to understand it.
Nor will we be limited to other mapping exercises, such as projecting small
scale studies onto a global plane. Instead of cartography, the relevant
scientific analogy might turn out to be contemporary astrophysics. Its
preoccupation with multiple, unseen dimensions in universes we can only
imagine offers the combination of precise analysis and broad conjecture
to which world historians might now aspire. And then there’s the lure,
however remote, of a grand, unified theory—nothing less than a theoretically
compelling history of the world.
Lauren Benton
is professor of history at New York University. Her Law and Colonial
Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge University
Press, 2002) has received the World History Association’s 2003 Book Prize
as well as the Law and Society Association’s 2003 James Willard Hurst Prize
for the best book in legal history.
ISLAM:
HISTORY’S FIRST SHOT AT A GLOBAL CULTURE? Michael Cook
Collecting coins
is a bad habit, but recently I decided to acquire a few Islamic ones. Unfortunately
it’s a little late in the day to be entering this particular market: too
many people in the Persian Gulf (and not on the Persian side of it) have
the same idea. But I’m not competing for the rarities. While it’s true
that I get a mild glow from being the proud owner of an unusual coin, my
real satisfaction is the kick I get from putting coins in front of my students.
The idea is to take abstract historical points and dramatize them in a
concrete way.
Recently, I came
by two silver coins that lend themselves admirably to this purpose. As
can be seen from the illustration (p. 9), the most obvious thing about
them is how similar they are to each other. Both are covered with Arabic
inscriptions, and nothing else— and with one exception, the inscriptions
are identical. The exception is a sentence beginning “In the name of God”
that says where and when the coin was minted—though the formula is the
same for both coins (it appears on the left in the illustration, around
the margin). As to date, the difference is only a few years: one coin (shown
at the top) dates from the Muslim year 107 (725–26 A.D.), the other (shown
at the bottom) from the year 115 (733–34 A.D.). The drama lies in the geography.
The first coin was minted in al Andalus, as the Arabs called Spain—most
likely in Cordoba, since by the year 107 it was already the provincial
capital. The second coin was minted in Balkh, a little to the west of Mazar-i
Sharif in what is today northern Afghanistan. In other words, two almost
identical coins were struck at mints located the best part of 5,000 miles
apart .
By the standards
of current globalization, of course, there is nothing remarkable about
people doing the same thing 5,000 miles from each other. Our present global
situation is the product of the European maritime expansion that began
in the 15th century. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before, unless
we ca re to compare it with the initial settlement of the world’s continents
by our species. But earlier historical developments had from time to time
spread a measure of cultural homogeneity over substantial regions of the
Old World. A millennium before Muhammad, Alexander the Great set out on
a career of conquest that took him from Macedonia to India. Several centuries
after Muhammad, Jenghiz Khan was to initiate the Mongol conquests, which
issued in an empire that extended from Eastern Europe to China.
The process initiated
by Muhammad was nevertheless more remarkable than either of these.
COUNTERFACTUAL
HISTORY:A FORUM
COUNTERFACTUAL
HISTORY has become increasingly popular in recent years. Witness the success
of the What If?™ series, edited by Robert Cowley. Contributors to these
books tend to engage in alternative historical thought experiments such
as what might have been the outcome of a Napoleonic victory at Waterloo,
a Chinese discovery of the New World in the 15th century, or a Theodore
Roosevelt win in the election of 1912. Counterfactual history like this
is popular and entertaining, to be sure, but does it contribute to a better
understanding of the past? One of the most thoughtful critics of counterfactual
history is Cambridge University historian Richard J. Evans. In his 2002
Butterfield Lecture at The Queen’s University in Belfast, he cautioned
historians about the dangers of “what if” history. Historically Speaking
has secured permission to reprint the abridged version of Evans’s Butterfield
Lecture that ran in the December 2002 issue of the BBC History Magazine.
We then assembled a distinguished panel to comment on Evans’s assessment
of counterfactual history. Professor Evans concludes the forum with a substantive
reply.
TELLING IT LIKE
IT WASN’T
Richard J. Evans
What if William the
Conqueror had lost the battle of Hastings? What if Martin Luther had been
burned at the stake in 1521? What if the British had managed to hold on
to the American colonies in 1776? What if Napoleon had won the battle of
Waterloo? What if Lenin had not died prematurely in 1924 but had lived
on for another twenty years? What if Germany had succeeded in conquering
Britain in 1940?
Imagining what might
have happened is always fun. A very diverse range of serious and distinguished
historians has indulged in this pastime, including G.M. Trevelyan, Conrad
Russell, John Vincent, Hugh Trevor- Roper, Geoffrey Parker, Alistair Horne,
Theodore Rabb, Andrew Roberts, Robert Katz, William H. McNeill, and many
others. In recent years, it has become increasingly fashionable to engage
in such speculation, and collections of essays have appeared with titles
such as If I Had Been . . . Ten Historical Fantasies, edited by
Daniel Snowman in 1979; Virtual History, edited by Niall Ferguson
in 1997; and What If?—The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine
What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley in 1998, and so successful
that a second volume appeared under the same editor in 2001 with the title
More What If?
Historians have generally
thought of such mind games as entertainments rather than serious intellectual
endeavors. The subtitle of John Merriman’s collection is Chance and
Humour in History, while Robert Cowley opens his latest volume of speculations
with the complaint that: “One of the troubles with history as it is studied
today is that people take it too seriously.” The earliest such collection,
J.C. Squire’s If It Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History,
treated the whole thing as a kind of whimsical parlor game (as Niall Ferguson
has remarked, somewhat disapprovingly). Later collections, notably John
Merriman’s, do not seem to have escaped very far from such frivolity. Not
All Good Clean Fun Yet it’s not just all good, clean, or in some cases
not so clean fun. “History involving great people or pivotal events,” complains
Cowley, “is out of fashion. Broad trends, those waves that swell, break,
and recede, are everything these days. We are left with the impression
that history is inevitable, that what happened could not have happened
any other way, and that drama and contingency have no place in the general
scheme of human existence.” The “what if” approach, he says, can help restore
drama and contingency to the place which they ought rightfully to occupy.
Cowley’s complaint is, I think, unjustified: historical biography is as
alive and flourishing as ever; microhistory has brought a new dimension
of the personal and the particular into historical writing; and broad trends
and ideas of historical inevitability are more out of fashion than in.
Yet, in my admittedly rather old-fashioned view, there are broad general
reasons for the proliferation of “what if” histories in recent years; the
appearance of so many books advocating the return of chance and contingency
to history is not just a matter of chance and contingency itself.
Is
the Dark Light Enough?
Edward
Ingram
How one envies Richard
J. Evans his certainties, his Manichaean view of the world. For him, what
happened is good: it happened. What did not happen is bad; not bad in itself,
merely a quicks and wise historians will not tread in. And to be so certain
that one knows what happened that one also knows what did not; that one
can tell the one from the other. The difficulty facing the rest of us unfortunates
in appraising the worth of counterfactuals lies not in working out what
did not happen, but what did. . . .
The
New Counterfactualists
Allan
Megill
To make sense of
so-called counterfactual history we need to get clear about the theoretical
issues that counterfactuality raises. We also need to make some distinctions.
I would begin with a distinction between two types of counterfactual history,
“restrained” and “exuberant.” “Restrained” counterfactual history involves
an explicit canvassing of alternative possibilities that existed in a real
past, whereas “exuberant” counterfactual history deals in past historical
outcomes that never in fact came to be. . . .
When
do Counterfactuals Work?
Robert
Cowley
I would like to begin
my remarks with two observations. Richard Evans has written a dismissal
of counterfactual history that is at once learned and elegant, reasoned
and reasonable. In not a few points, if by no means all, I find myself
agreeing with him. But why hide my feelings? I am uneasy being set up as
straw man in his essay, and I don’t like being lumped, even by inference,
with the New Right of history. The Right has never been my chosen refuge.
Counterfactual history is not just the domain of conservatively inclined
thinkers, as many of the contributors to this issue of Historically
Speaking should testify. . . .
Counterfactuals
and the Historical Imagination
William
H. McNeill
Historians can playfully
ask “what if” and historians can be foolish when writing imaginary history,
too. But there is a serious intellectual kernel behind the game, for there
are events, like the failure of the siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.E., that
did make a quite extraordinary difference in what followed. And by drawing
attention to such occasions and wondering out loud how different the world
would be, contingent, surprising, unpredictable aspects of the human past
can become obvious to most readers. This seems worthwhile to me, since
oversimplified schemes for explaining human affairs abound and we are continually
tempted to believe everything was somehow always inevitable. . . . .
Volume
V, Number 4
Alternative
History and Memory
Gavriel
Rosenfeld
What would the field
of alternate history do without its opponents? Since its recent emergence
into the Western cultural and intellectual mainstream in the last generation,
alternate history has garnered increasing attention in no small part due
to the enduring opposition to it among many skeptical historians. By giving
rise to controversy and sparking discussions such as the one printed in
the pages of this bulletin, the critics of alternate history have ended
up further contributing to the field’s prominence. For this reason, it
is safe to say that without its opponents, the field of alternate history
— to paraphrase Jean Paul Sartre’s flawed observations about anti-Semites’
views of Jews— would have to invent them. . . .
Counterfactualism
Defended
Jeremy
Black
One of the great
pleasures of being a “nuts and bolts” historian is that every so often
one’s intellectual betters explain what I’m doing. Molière phrased
it better, but it is late. Reading Richard Evans’s characteristically thoughtful
and interesting piece, I discover that, on at least one occasion, I’ve
been “liberal Whiggish” or “conservative, pessimistic,” if not a “young
fogey.” For, I must confess, I have employed counterfactuals in From
Louis XIV to Napoleon: The Fate of a Great Power (UCL, 1999), published
an essay entitled “A Different West? Counterfactualism and the Rise of
Britain to Great Power Status” (Francia 28/2 [2001]: 129–145), frequently
lecture in the U.S. on the topic “Could the British Have Won the American
War of Independence” (not “should”—more interesting, but outside my competence),
and have discussed, on radio and in print, the “what if” the Jacobites
had marched on from Derby in December 1745. . . .
Richard
Ned Lebow
Richard Evans is
right on target in his criticism of Niall Ferguson’s simplistic and ideologically
transparent use of counterfactuals. Ferguson’s two books do a disservice
to counterfactuals, which remain an essential—if inadequately exploited—tool
of historical and social scientific research.
Robert Cowley’s two
volumes, by contrast, make no pretense about using counterfactuals to do
anything other than to alert readers to just how contingent the past really
was. This is a useful exercise because the “hindsight bias”—one of the
more robust and most heavily documented cognitive biases— leads us to overvalue
the likelihood of events that have already occurred. Historical research
reinforces this bias. R.H. Tawney observed that it gives “an appearance
of inevitableness” to an existing order by dragging into prominence the
forces which have triumphed and thrusting into the background those which
were swallowed up. No matter how well documented or convincingly presented,
historical studies invariably provoke critiques and contending interpretations.
. . . .
Richard
J. Evans
Counterfactual history
is just a tool of historical analysis, as Cowley says, and has to be used
with caution. It has to be applied in very specific, carefully delimited
contexts if it is applied at all, and we have to be aware of its limitations,
which are extremely severe. It’s hard enough finding out what was, let
alone reaching any kind of tenable conclusions on what wasn’t. But if counterfactual
history didn’t exist, then the world of historical debate would surely
be a poorer place. In his concluding contribution, Robert Cowley lets slip
the fact that he has edited three volumes of What If? In my ignorance,
I thought there were only two. I’m off to buy the third one right away.
. . . . .
Truth
and Ritual Judgment: On Narrative Sense in China's Earliest Historiography
David
Schaberg
For historians of
early China, a coincidental agreement between traditional Chinese and modern
Western taxonomies of knowledge supported, through most of the 20th century,
a rather blinkered view of the oldest source texts. Under late imperial
China’s predominant fourfold classification system, these texts had been
pegged as Histories or, in some cases, as Classics, and were thereby separated
from Literature and Philosophy. Scholars could and did admire their literary
characteristics, but the latter were ultimately to be considered superfluous
in comparison with the historical truths the texts conveyed. Meanwhile,
scientific history as practiced by Western and Western- inspired scholars
tended to bracket observations on form and style in source texts, focusing
instead on content and the value of these texts for discerning historical
facts. The situation is a familiar one: it is the state of affairs that
Hayden White addressed in his early books and that he and other scholars
have worked to change. For a number of reasons, the older view—that literary
analysis of source texts may yield appreciations but will not contribute
significantly to a better and more critical understanding of the past—has
been especially tenacious in the early China field. The source texts are
very good, very detailed, and very subtle as narratives of intellectual
and political activity. They present themselves, as if anticipating our
needs, as unbiased re portage. And, by explaining the course of human events
in what must be recognized as Confucian or proto Confucian terms, they
provide a still vital wellspring for the mainstream of elite Chinese culture.
Little wonder, then, that most readers have preferred to imagine these
texts as largely transparent: as snapshots of speech and action undistorted
by the truth- and sense-making habits of storytellers. . . . . . .
Europe
and the People Without Historiography; or Reflections on a Self-inflicted
Wound
Sanjay
Subrahmanyam
In this essay I want
to call into question four widely held assumptions in that ill-defined
field of postcolonial studies. I certainly share some preoccupations and
even assumptions with those with whom I wish to debate. Like them, I am
concerned with the tenacious hold that a linear vision of Western history
from ancient Greece to the United States of Clinton and Bush (with obligatory
pit stops at Rome, the Carolingians, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment,
and the Industrial Revolution) has on school and college curricula. I abhor
the insidious assumption that to know Europe is effectively to know the
world. Also, I am concerned that a recent wave of imperial nostalgia, together
with a market-friendly millenarianism, has given new life to the myth that
the European colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries were really
quite benign structures. We are now told insistently that the British Empire
nobly brought modernity to the heathens, and that we should all be grateful
for it. Yet, I must also part ways with some of the shibboleths of postcolonial
studies, which in fact participate in the very constructs that are ostensibly
being criticized. Here are some of them.
1. The celebration
of myth, and the characterization of history and historical consciousness
as a negative attribute of modernity, one that is moreover probably responsible
for many of the ills that beset contemporary societies the world over.
2. The central place
given to European agency, with the rest of the world being reduced in effect
to victimhood. In the view of the world that is propagated by many postcolonial
studies scholars, Europe continues to act alone, and the role of the rest
of the world is simply to react to European initiatives. Thus, the seemingly
interesting project of “provincializing Europe” often turns out in large
measure to be an examination of how one or the other part of the world
takes on board, reacts to, and refracts ideas and initiatives that have
a uniquely European origin.
3. The eager acceptance
of an exotic characterization of the non-West. Here, the desire to have
the moral upper hand prompts many scholars—in the wake of radical anti-modernists
such as Ashis Nandy—to invent the non-West in the mirror image of Europe.
Thus, it is claimed that non-European societies and cultures intrinsically
incarnate the opposite of all aspects of European modernity. If Europe
is possessive, India must be selfless. If Europe believes in growth, India
must believe in stasis. And so on.
4. The acceptance
that the study of the non- West must essentially be restricted to its encounter
with the West in the period of colonial conquest and rule. This program
emerged very quickly as the implicit conception behind Subaltern Studies,
which, while claiming to examine South Asian history and society, in fact
touched on the period before 1800 in an infinitesimally small proportion
of its essays. It is only in recent times that some questioning of this
practice has emerged . . . . . .
Morality
and Cognition in Historical Thought: A Western Perspective
Jorn
Rusen
There is an important
debate now about the differences between Western and Eastern historical
thought. One are a of difference, it is argued, concerns the role played
by morality. According to this view, Eastern historical thought retains
a lasting commitment to moral values, whereas the West has given up this
commitment in favor of a rational or a scientific mode of historical cognition.
One can easily find the topos of Eastern spirituality and Western
rationality in this qualification of fundamentally different cultural modes
of historical thinking. Retaining a fundamental relationship to values
gives Eastern historical thought an essentially human quality, whereas
the scientific approach to the past dehumanizes history and alienates it
from the orienting forces of culture.
In his recent essay,
“Cognitive Historiography and Normative Historiography,” Masayuki Sato
presents a convincing typology of historical thinking with respect to the
basic differences between Eastern and Western cultural traditions. In the
East (which for him is Japan and China) the moral tradition of historical
thought is still valid, and history serves as a cultural means for guiding
the values of people today. Sato argues that in the East Asian tradition
there has never been a transcendent basis for history. Historical facts
as such have been the only reliable reality for people looking to orient
their lives. In the West, on the other hand, historical thinking was rooted
in a transcendent religious dimension, though it has since become secularized.
In my view, however,
Sato’s understanding of Western historical thought is flawed. Even in the
West, morality has dominated historical thinking. I cannot deny that a
rupture occurred at the very moment when historical studies in the West
emerged as a distinct academic discipline, bringing with it new truth claims
related to empirical evidence. Nevertheless, despite the methodological
emphasis on rationality and related claims of objectivity, morality has
remained an effective element in the West’s approach to history. And, therefore,
making sense of the human past is much the same in the East as it is in
the West. . . .
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