Historians on History

John Tosh, John Tosh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351586627
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Historiographie

Bringing together in one volume the key writings of many of the major historians from the last few decades, Historians on History provides an overview of the evolving nature of historical enquiry, illuminating the political, social and personal assumptions that have governed and sustained historical theory and practice.

John Tosh's Reader begins with a substantial introductory survey charting the course of historiographical developments since the second half of the nineteenth century. He explores both the academic mainstream and more radical voices within the discipline. The text is composed of readings by historians such as Braudel, Carr, Elton, Guha, Hobsbawm, Scott and Jordanova. This third edition has been brought up to date by taking the 1960s as its starting point. It now includes more recent topics like public history, microhistory and global history, in addition to established fields like Marxist history, gender history and postcolonialism.

Historians on History

is essential reading for all students of historiography and historical theory.

Part I
The documentary ideal

When historians feel the need to demonstrate their claim to exclusive expertise, they usually base it on their command of the primary sources (rather than, say, their powers of explanation or synthesis). V.H. Galbraith was a distinguished medievalist whose reputation rested almost entirely on his critical studies of important documents, like Domesday Book and the chronicles of St Albans Abbey. He maintained that the principal value of studying history lay in a direct encounter with the primary sources; by comparison the interpretations of historians were fundamentally transient.

To some historians the documentary ideal has seemed inadequate. If the past is to come alive and speak to us directly, it must be approached with imagination as well as technical expertise. The historian’s subjectivity is central to the idea of recreation or resurrection, but it is a subjectivity in the service of the past, not the present. For Richard Cobb the explanatory side of history was completely subordinated to the vivid evocation of obscure lives in the past. In books like Death in Paris (1978), Cobb brought the human aspects of revolutionary France uniquely to life. Arlette Farge, a historian of France of the ancien régime, eloquently affirms the centrality of the archive to the historian’s practice, most of all for the uncovering of the lives of ordinary people caught up in legal process. She conveys both the ‘allure’ of the archive and the highly developed critical faculties with which it must be read.

1 V.H. Galbraith

[from An Introduction to the Study of History, C.A. Watts, 1964, pp. 61–74, 79–82]

The study of history is a personal activity – it is an individual reading the sources of history for himself. History is, or ought to be, the least authoritarian of the sciences (if that is the right word). Its essential value lies in the shock and excitement aroused by the impact of the very ways and thought of the past upon the mind, and it is for this reason that actual original documents – themselves a physical survival of that past – exercise such fascination upon those who have caught something of its secret. The late canon Foster, writing of the marvellous riches of the archives of Lincoln Cathedral, has perfectly expressed the nature of this emotion. Acknowledging the debt of inspiration he owed to a brother historian, to whom he had written about them, he says: ‘Soon afterwards he paid me a visit in Lincolnshire, and it will be long before I shall forget his wonder and delight as I opened before his eyes box after box of the original charters. Each moment I expected to hear from his lips the famous “Pro-di-gi-ous” of the enthusiastic and simple-minded Dominie.’ The lectures and the textbooks are a necessary preliminary, a grammar of the subject; but the purpose of all this grammar is to lead the student himself to the sources, from the study of which whatever power our writing and talking has is derived. Where this object is not achieved, we have failed. In my youth it was still common for reviewers to state that A or B had said ‘the last word’ on the difficult question of X, Y or Z. The same fantastic conception still led historians to regard the sources as some dirty coal-mine, from which a precious deposit was recovered, leaving behind a vast, useless slag-heap. I would not be misunderstood: bibliography and historiography are, in their place, of the utmost importance; but the most brilliant reconstructions of the past can never lessen the immediate value of the sources of individual study.

The conception of research as synonymous with the very study of history is not really pedantic: but in fact that much-abused word has long since been identified in our common thinking with a system of higher degrees granted for theses embodying an ‘original contribution to knowledge’. With one or two honourable exceptions, a deep line is drawn in British universities between under-graduate and post-graduate students. The writing of these theses is normally confined to the post-graduate students, who usually attempt one of the higher degrees, either the B.Litt. or the Ph.D. The system is largely borrowed from America (where, however, it is far more highly organised), which in turn took it from Germany. The practice of granting higher degrees has much to be said for it, and it has in any case come to stay. Nevertheless I cannot think it altogether congenial to our native outlook, and perhaps we should do well to take stock of it before it becomes quite as much an incubus upon English learning as it has already become in America. These ‘original’ theses are compiled in a very short time – one, two or at most three years: they are done by young people who have scarcely attained the equipment of a scholar by the time the thesis is completed: the choice of a subject is a perennial and notorious difficulty; and the result, at its best, is apt to be the publication of an immature monograph, much less readable than it would have been if more slowly evolved; while a very serious situation may arise for the student if, by an unlucky choice of subject, he fails to attain the degree. More generally, the student works in an atmosphere of anxiety and haste, at the very time in his career when leisure and time to think are most essential. He passes from the superficial study of wide periods (in which undergraduate work largely consists) to a specialisation that is too narrow, too intense and too hurried.

Higher degrees are bound up with the rapid development of historical teaching into a considerable profession. The demand for teachers has introduced competition which in turn threatens to commercialise historical study. It is rightly felt that the best teachers will be drawn from scholars familiar with the original sources, and the easiest proof of such familiarity is a thesis, and preferably a published thesis. Our young scholars are hard put to it to maintain the necessary quantity of ‘original’ research, while legitimate ambition or economic pressure urges them to hasty publication. The problem is a practical one, and to make even small changes in existing procedure would be a most complicated and difficult task. But having ventured to express my doubts about its adequacy, I will offer three general but still practical suggestions.

1. Something more should be done to efface the hard line generally drawn between under-graduate work and ‘research’. Some insight into the raw material of history and the process by which the slick narrative of the textbooks is evolved should be given to all honours students before they get their degrees. Experience has proved that this can be done, possibly, though not necessarily, by a thesis or exercise, which should not expect, though it might in exceptional cases obtain, publication.

2. The transcribing and editing of texts and documents should be encouraged as subjects for these degrees. At present the subjects are commonly too ambitious, and in the craze for originality the really vital and responsible work of preserving the past by publishing transcripts and calendars is commonly regarded as too humble for the grant of a higher degree. The supplicants for higher degrees would be most usefully employed in doing work for local societies, and such work, just because it is well within their compass, would lay the foundations of a surer and ultimately a wider scholarship than is achieved by the present practice. I am tempted to strengthen my case by a long list of great historians who served their apprenticeship by copying and editing texts, a list that might begin with the names of Stubbs and Maitland. But ‘perhaps’, wrote Maitland, ‘our imaginary student is not he that should come, not the great man for the great book. To be frank with him this is at least probable… . But short of the very greatest work, there is good work to be done of many sorts and kinds… . At least he can copy, at least he can arrange, digest, make serviceable.’

3. Post-graduate scholarships for research should be freely tenable without any obligation or pressure upon the student to enter for higher degrees. Indeed, I see no reason why theses should not be offered for these degrees, if and when they are completed, without any of the present preliminaries – in exactly the same way as those of riper years now supplicate for the D.Litt. degree. Such an arrangement would make it far easier for the examiners to insist on the proper standard, which is one of the crucial difficulties of the existing system. It would also discourage the too-hasty publication of research in book form, in favour of articles or notes in the reviews. The thesis is commonly far too long and too elaborate, the writer’s single talent being hardly discoverable in the napkin of already well-ascertained truth by which it is enveloped. The contribution made by nine out of ten of these theses would go easily into a very few pages, and the verbosity which we all deplore – it must be added – is encouraged by the existing regulations.

I have sometimes wondered whether a great deal of historical research is not vitiated by our insistence upon its originality. Although we pay lip-service in our bibliographies to the just division of all historical writings into primary and secondary authorities, we are too apt to forget in practice that the true purpose of writing books about the past is not to supersede the original authorities, but to make their study more significant for our successors. What matters is that history should be studied, as soon and as far as possible, in the original sources; the originality of the result can safely be left to take care of itself, and is in any case beyond our control. The very conception of research is borrowed from the natural sciences, and it is arguable that in learning the method of science we have too slavishly copied its methods. It is obvious that the historical material available for research is strictly limited in amount, and there is a limit to the methods of inquiry which can be employed. On those aspects of history which are most central and worthy of study, original work in the sense of discovery must surely be the exception rather than the rule. On most lines of inquiry a prolonged study of the original sources is needed merely to reach, or to try to reach, the level of our predecessors. The greater part of such work is not ‘original’, but it is not therefore useless. Viewed across a lifetime, it is rather the main part of one’s research, the condition of those occasional publications, which are in reality its by-products. If this be true, it follows that the subjects treated by aspirants to higher degrees become, and must become increasingly, trivial and abstruse, owing to the current demand for originality. I confess myself to be in imperfect sympathy with the popular conception of an army of young and eager experts, organised and equipped for the conquest of History, methodically dividing up among themselves the country to be occupied, and never resting until the last foot of ground is conquered. One may even doubt whether significant research can be done to order at all. There is something of the accidental about all discovery, which has often only an oblique connexion with the study which led to it. The attempt to organise and direct the human mind on its highest level of activity removes the spontaneity which is its essence, and finds the motive for research in the result to be obtained instead of in the process and the activity themselves. To look back at the vast researches of our predecessors is to realise that their results, important as they were, are in some degree ephemeral, and though much stands fast for future generations, perhaps more is superseded. The activity of research, on the other hand, invaluable to those who pursue it, and to their generation, is perennial, unchanging and significant. Behind the obvious criticisms to which the system of higher degrees is, like any system, open, there is, in my mind at any rate, this deeper uneasiness.

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The thoughts of men are never at a stand, they change from generation to generation; and if institutions or doctrines appear to survive for centuries, it is only with an ever-changing meaning. The past is dead – dead as the men who made it. To sink oneself in even the recent past, then, is a hard discipline, but a necessary one if written history is not to be a vast anachronism.

To approach history as it were from the other end, is to learn humility at the cost of conviction and conceit. To live in any period of the past is to be so overwhelmed with the sense of difference as to confess oneself unable to conceive how the present has become what it is: it is, above all, to regard the study of the original sources not as a preliminary drudgery to the making of ‘history’, but as its most significant function. Such an attitude, it must be allowed, is not likely to produce a Gibbon or even a Macaulay. But if it makes the writing of history far more difficult, it informs the teaching of history with a new life and reality. The learning of history from the very beginning may become a sort of research whose primary object is an imaginative reconstruction of a different world: a personal effort to make the past, as it was, as much alive as the present. This can only be done by the study of the original sources. It is significant that Keats, who caught the nature of history in a famous sonnet, found his highest inspiration not in the Mr Mitford of his day, but in Homer.

In a conception of this kind what really matters in the long run is not so much what we write about history now, or what others have written, as the original sources themselves. They are an inexhaustible and an invaluable inheritance, to every part of which the historians of each succeeding generation will perpetually refer, if knowledge is to avoid that touch of perversion and monstrosity familiar to us from the periods when it was studied at second hand. The power of unlimited inspiration to successive generations lies in the original sources, and the work of reconstructing the past will end only with the destruction of the evidence for it. A great awakening to the value of the sources for history was indeed a mark of the nineteenth century, and a series of Royal Commissions, the latest of which reported early in the present century, effected most salutary reforms in the custody of the ‘public records and of local records of a public nature’. Beyond these lies a vast category of private records, far richer than any other country can boast, which have never been subjected to any form of regulation. These private records are no less valuable for historical study than the public records themselves, and it would be the greatest mistake to imagine that even the history of the State itself and of public administration can be studied without them. Yet their very extent is unknown; they are often inaccessible; they are not always properly preserved from decay or the danger of fire, and, above all, the finest collections are continually being dispersed by sale. The Master of the Rolls, it is true, has already given a lead in the preservation of manorial Court Rolls, and a great deal is being done by the British Records Association, the Council for the Preservation of Business Archives and the numerous local record societies. But however much is done by individuals, some form of State regulation and financial assistance is also necessary. At present our governors, though well meaning, are still museum-bound and millionaire-minded. At their best they are collectors who can be induced to buy, but only to buy exhibition pieces, whose value is a scarcity value. The purchase of old pictures, medieval psalters, original signatures, first editions, and the maintenance of derelict castles and abbeys are a sign of goodwill. But this sub-literate interest in the past, excellent in itself, should be the beginning rather than the end of governmental generosity. The safety and integrity of private collections are a much more pressing need.

Not less important than the immediate physical preservation of the original sources of history is the task of putting them into print. The history of classical Greece and Rome reminds us that only that material survives which exists in many copies. More recently, we may recall the irreparable loss to Irish history by the destruction of the records in the Four Courts, or the wastage that must be going on today in Spain and in China. These are very real dangers and very near. Here again we have a right to expect that the enthusiasm and labour of historians should be helped out by more systematic and better-planned financial assistance from the government. The printing of the national archives is the task of H.M. Public Record Office. At the present rate of expenditure, so far from catching up on the past, which was the original intention in printing them, we are actually losing ground. If this continues, the progress of historical knowledge will gradually slow down. Each generation of scholars must look forward to being in a worse position than that which preceded it. The printed material, easily available for study, will become ever less and less in relation to the task to be performed by historians, and the work of synthesising the vast accumulation of material in monographs will in time become impossible. Meanwhile, as knowledge suffers, the danger of a breach in our historical tradition increases. At a modest estimate we have thirteen hundred years of continuous written records behind us. By far the greater portion of that record is still unprinted, and therefore in jeopardy. In the precarious international situation of today what is required is an effort to secure its only final preservation in print, not relatively equal to that of the Victorian age of splendid isolation, but an effort and expenditure relatively ten times greater. With each generation the tradition lengthens, and with the labours of our historical writers it also deepens. But we can only postulate for our descendants a fuller understanding of national history than we possess if we do everything in our power to preserve its past intact.

2 Richard Cobb

[from ‘Experiences of an Anglo-French Historian’, in his A Second Identity: Essays on France and French History, Oxford University Press, 1969, pp. 17–20, 43–47]

I have never understood history other than in terms of human relationships; and I have attempted to judge individuals in their own terms and from what they say about themselves, in their own language.

Most interesting of all, to me, is the individual unrelated to any group, the man, the girl, or the old woman alone in the city, the person who eats alone, though in company, who lives in a furnished room, who receives no mail, who has no visible occupation, and who spends much time wandering the streets. For, apart from the everlasting problem of violence, the principal one that faces a historian like myself is that of loneliness, especially loneliness in the urban context. Hence my inveterate taste for the chronique judiciaire of Le Monde and, in its day, of Libération (the realm of the marvellous, the generous Madeleine J...