A Global History of Modern Historiography

Georg Iggers, Q. Edward Wang, Supriya Mukherjee

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134856473
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Historiographie

The first book on historiography to adopt a global and comparative perspective on the topic, A Global History of Modern Historiography looks not just at developments in the West but also at the other great historiographical traditions in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world over the course of the past two and a half centuries.

This second edition contains fully updated sections on Latin American and African historiography, discussion of the development of global history, environmental history, and feminist and gender history in recent years, and new coverage of Russian historical practices. Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, the authors analyse historical currents in a changing political, social and cultural context, examining both the adaptation and modification of the Western influence on historiography and how societies outside Europe and America found their own ways in the face of modernization and globalization.

Supported by online resources including a selection of excerpts from key historiographical texts, this book offers an up-to-date account of the status of historical writing in the global era and is essential reading for all students of modern historiography.

1 Historiographical traditions in the world

A view of the eighteenth century

Where do we begin?

Transcultural comparisons

We are beginning our discussion of the history of modern historiography on a comparative global scale in the eighteenth century for two main reasons: First, as we already mentioned in the Introduction, this was the eve of the period when Western historiography exerted an important influence on the historical cultures of the rest of the world. Second, the eighteenth century was marked by fundamental changes in historical perspective, primarily but not exclusively in the West. It is then that a modern outlook, as we have described it in the Introduction, emerged that dominated the ways of thinking about history throughout the nineteenth and well into the second half of the twentieth centuries.

The question immediately arises how historiographical traditions can be compared. In the Introduction we have identified several traditions of historical thought and writing; at the same time we are aware that the cultures within which these traditions originated include very different subcultures; thus in the time period we are covering national lines are important. But these traditions of historical thought cannot be defined in exclusively national terms; many important trends are transnational. Notable examples are the broad influence of the Enlightenment in Europe and elsewhere and the spread of “evidential learning” in East Asia. We must be aware that none of these cultures are stagnant, as was often maintained by Eurocentric thinkers from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries but that all have undergone changes in time. Yet for purposes of comparison, we can work with certain characteristics that they share or do not share.

Characteristics of historiographical thought in different cultures

We shall outline three such characteristics.

1. All have a tradition, which, notwithstanding the changes in outlook that these historiographies undergo, give them a degree of continuity. All go back to classical models in distant antiquities, which determined the way history was conceived and written. In the West, the great Greek historians, particularly Herodotus (ca. 484–420 BCE) and Thucydides (ca. 460–400 BCE), provide two very different models that shaped historiography until the modern period.¹ The Islamic world has also been very much aware of the philosophers and the historians of the ancient Hellenic and Hellenistic world. In East Asia, the influence of Confucius, who built and expanded on an earlier tradition of recording and writing history by the shi (scribe/historian) on various levels of government, was felt not only in China but also in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. In India, the origins of a historiographical tradition go back to the Sanskrit Vedas and the Indic traditions of Itihasa and Purana, a body of ancient Indian lore about past times and events.
2. Intertwined with the classical origins of each tradition is a religious component. In the West, it is Christianity with its sources not only in the New Testament but also in the Hebrew Bible. These are also crucial to Islam in addition to the Qur’ān. Both share a conception of historical time as directional with its origin in Genesis, its central event (for Christianity, the crucifixion of Jesus and for Islam, Muhammad’s flight to Medina), and for both, the fulfillment of time with the final judgment. In East Asia, the creation of the shi, an official position, which was hereditary up to about the first century CE, stemmed from the practice of shamanism in ancient China. Though teleological notions are generally absent in East Asian historical thought, they do occasionally occur.² The role of Confucius as a very worldly figure is, of course, very different from Jesus as the son of God or of Muhammad as God’s prophet. Nevertheless, the notion of a heavenly order, tian, which was referred to frequently by Confucius himself and his followers, guides the writings of Chinese historians as they judge the actions of the preceding dynasty. Various forms of Buddhism affect East Asian thought generally with cyclical ideas of history also shared by Hinduism. But cyclical ideas are by no means absent in classical Western thought.
3. Third, the institutional framework in which historical writing takes place differs in each of the cultures we have identified, and in each it reflects changing political and social conditions. Perhaps the greatest divergence in this regard is between East Asian and Western historiography. A determining factor for the former, at least in China but to a lesser extent also in Japan and Korea, is the existence from very early times on, albeit with some interruptions, of an empire or, in Korea, a kingdom, in the service of which historians write history. From very early on, historians in China are integrated in the government bureaucracy; from the seventh century on, there exists a History Bureau, whose task it is to write an evaluative history of the previous dynasty. History is thus written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats.³ On the regional and local level, history is written by collectives similarly organized. Nevertheless, these historical writings do not always serve the interest of the ruler; inspired by their duty to the tian, historians often censure his behavior in their works. Nor are historians always anonymous; we have information about the biographies of many historians. And there are histories written by private individuals. In the West, the situation is almost the reverse. In Classical Antiquity and again in the period since the Renaissance, history is mostly written by individuals not in the service of the state. Particularly in the Middle Ages, it is written within monastic orders, in some cases by historians attached to a court. In the Islamic world, especially in Persia but also in the Greek Orthodox Byzantine Empire, religious orders and court historians play an important role, and again we also have considerable information about individual historians. History was written for a different audience in the West than in China. In Classical Antiquity, historians like Thucydides read their work to an assembled public, and in the period after the Renaissance, printing and a book market made historical writings available to a broad readership. Thus history was written for a broad public more than was the case in China. Book markets were, however, not restricted to the West and were well established in China and Japan.

The West

Characteristics of Western historiography

At this point we shall address the elusive question about the character of the West. This was attempted at a recent international conference in Germany, which included participants from various non-Western countries.⁴ In his opening paper, Cambridge historian Peter Burke, one of the most knowledgeable writers on modern Western historiography, posed ten theses on what specifically constitutes Western historical thought. For him “[t]he most important, or at least the most obvious characteristic of Western historical thought,” which distinguishes it from other cultures, “is its stress on development or progress, in other words its ‘linear’ view of the past.” This is linked to a “historical perspective,” which avoids “anachronisms” and recognizes the individuality of the past. It is further distinctive in its preoccupation with epistemology, that is, with the problem of historical knowledge, its search for causal explanations, and its commitment to objectivity. Moreover “the quantitative approach to history is distinctively Western.”⁵ The problem with this definition is that the characteristics that Burke describes are not Western but modern.⁶ They describe aspects of modern thought that today are shared by many non-Western historians but do not to the same extent apply to historical thought in the West in the medieval or even the Classical period. The linear approach and the idea of progress, the occupation with the problem of historical knowledge – the latter shared by East Asian and Moslem thinkers – and the search for causal explanations emerge in the discussions in the West in the eighteenth century, while the quantitative approach to history belongs to the late twentieth century and is by no means generally accepted.

The emergence of an Enlightenment worldview

What is new in the eighteenth century is a view of the world, which is held by many historians, reflecting the impact of the scientific revolution, a loosening of the earlier reliance on Biblical chronology, and a turn to the critical analysis of sources, which to an extent also took place in East Asia⁷ and which in the West goes back to the Renaissance⁸ and the Reformation.

There occurs in the West in the eighteenth century a gradual and uneven decline in once firmly held religious convictions. This age is often identified as the Enlightenment,⁹ although we have to be aware that the Enlightenment includes very different, often conflicting outlooks, in different national and religious settings, and that the eighteenth century is marked not only by a widely shared belief in science but also by religious revivals, such as Pietism, Methodism, Hasidism, Quietism, and Jansenism, and by the early stirrings of Romanticism. Nevertheless, there is a reorientation in outlook among segments of the upper and the educated middle classes that may be associated with the Enlightenment, which ushers in a modern view of the world.¹⁰

As we just noted, this change in the West was deeply influenced by what has been called the “scientific revolution,” which, as in the case of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), did not question established Christian beliefs but rejected supernatural intervention in the sphere of nature and explained nature in terms of laws that could be validated empirically. While Bishop Bossuet (1627–1704), in his Discourse on Universal History (1681), once more defended a traditional Christian theology, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), in his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695), demanded that all philosophical notions must be subjected to the scrutiny of critical reason. In Great Britain this turn to empiricism was reflected in the philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704), which in turn asserted an important influence on the French philosophes, including Voltaire (1694–1778),¹¹ Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and Jean-le-Rond d’Alembert (1717–1783), who in the mid-century launched the multivolume Encyclopédie.¹² For historical writing, this meant an enhanced commitment to cleansing the narration of the past from legend and a commitment to truth. The great historical narratives of the eighteenth century in Great Britain by David Hume (1711–1776), Catherine Macaulay (1731–1791),¹³ William Robertson (1721–1793),¹⁴ and Edmund Gibbon (1737–1794)¹⁵ undertook such a task, with Hume seeking to dismantle Whig and Tory constructions of the evolution of British political institutions and Robertson and Gibbon directly confronting Christian traditions. In France, the most notable histories by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755),¹⁶ Voltaire, and the Abbé Guillaume Raynal (1716–1796)¹⁷ took on a more analytical character, seeking causal explanations of historical change. Moreover, Robertson, Gibbon, and Voltaire, although still focusing on high politics, took into consideration social and cultural aspects, with Voltaire in his History of Manners (1753) dealing with scientific and technical advancement and with such elements of material life as the invention of eyeglasses and the innovation of street lighting. The Göttingen historian August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809) wrote in 1772 that the historian was “no longer to follow the military road where conquerors and armies marched to the beat of the drum. Instead he should travel the unnoticed route followed by traders, apostles, and travelers. . . . The invention of fire, bread, brandy etc. are just as wo...