'What role for theory in historiography?' is a question historians constantly ruminate on. When I was at school in the UK, there were generally reckoned to to be four "schools" of historiography through which historians interpreted British history, namely Whig/Liberal, Marxist, Revisionist, Post-Revisionist.
For the uninitiated Whig/Liberal (as I understand it ...) meant the teleological interpretation of the passage of British history which viewed all events in the socio-political sphere after the Norman Conquest (1066) as constituting a progressive march towards multi-party democracy, the rule of law, and individual liberties.
It was initially interpreted as a slow reaction/revolution against the so-called "Norman Yoke", the imposition of which had traduced Anglo-Saxon monarchical traditions and the concept of Common Law. Consequently, the Magna Carta was viewed as the first step in the restitution of private property and the reigning in of extra-judicial Royal powers; the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, the overthrow of the monarchy, and the establishment of the Republic and later Commonwealth affirmed the right of Parliament to raise taxes and levies independently of the monarch; the Bill of Rights of 1689 defined basic rights for Englishmen; and the Reform Act of 1832 revolutionized parliamentary representation, empowered the newly-industrialized areas at the expense of the landowning classes, and swept away the old system of "rotten boroughs." Or something like that ... you catch my drift.
For many, many years, this was *the* widely accepted narrative for the teaching and understand of British history, and was associated with the platforms of the Whig and Liberal parties, until it was skewered by Herbert Butterfield in his tidy polemic, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). By which time, political and intellectual trends had begun to challenge traditional notions of historiography.
Marxist historians, as befitting their background in the socio-economic theories of their hirsute and whiskery fountainhead, viewed many of the events in British history - and here I use "British" as opposed to simply "English" - as products of struggle between the classes following revolutions in modes of production. R. H. Tawney wasn't explicitly a Marxist (he was by all accounts a Christian socialist), but he was inspired by Max Weber - who most definitely was a Marxist - and his works such as The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) and 'The Rise of the Gentry, 1558-1640', Economic History Review, vol. 11, no. 1 (1941) opened up new avenues for like-minded historians to explore major events in British history through the prism of economics. Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone explored similar themes
This segues into Revisionist historiography, which some people take to mean "Contrarian" or "Counterfactual", but is a shade more complex than that. At its best, it adopted the theories and methodologies pioneered by the Marxist historians, took side-swipes at the sacred cows of the Whig/Liberals, but - as the name suggests - looked for new interpretations of accepted narratives.
The classic example was the reinterpretation of the Treaty of Versailles of 1919. As it was largely taught to me, the Treaty was too harsh in its punitive measures against Germany, and played nursemaid to the economic and social conditions that resulted in the rise of Nazism. Such views were widespread early on, not least in John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).
However, more recent revisionist interpetations have argued that the Treaty was in fact highly lenient - see Corelli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (2002). In a similar vein, revisionist historians argued that the policy of Appeasement and Munich Agreement were far from the acts of political cowardice and weakness portrayed by Churchill and others, but rather policies of expediency and acts minor political genius.
Eventually, the Post-Revisionists appeared on the scene, positing themselves somewhere in between all three of the above mentioned groups, generally eschewing political or methodological biases, and preferring instead measured conclusions based on judicious interpretation of the source material ... and shouldn't that be the preferred methodology of all historians?
Finally, I reach the point of this post. I am a product of my education, and as a would-be historian my formative teenage years were spent in fields (17th Century Britain and Europe) very different to the ones I now frolic in (15th Century Central Asia). Moreover, my current region and period of focus has been largely untouched by the major theoretical and methodological developments in Asian history of the past 30 years of so, to wit Post-Colonialism, 'Orientalism', Subaltern Studies, 'the Cambridge School', and Micro-history, to name the most prominent. On top of that, Central Asian studies in America and Europe has benefited immensely from the opening up of libraries, archives and sites of historical interest in the Post-Soviet space which were previously inaccessible.
In the past few years, historians of Central Asia - and not least those who focus on the periods of Tsarist (1865-1917) and early Soviet (1917-41) rule - have begun to discuss the study of the region in terms commonly used in, say, the study of British-ruled India or French colonial Algeria. Debates about the applicability of Post-colonial theory to the study of Central Asian history, or the usefulness of Saidian (i.e. inspired by Edward Said, Orientalism) memes e.g. Tsarist geographical expeditions as tools of imperial rule, have appeared in the journals.
Such debates are impassioned and inspiring but, like the trends outlined above, they can lead to ossification, stagnation and a certain kind of groupthink in the halls of acadme. Historians grounded in the study of Russia, Russians, and the Russian language (for example ...), need to learn to engage with Central Asia for Central Asia's sake. Theories explaing the rise and consolidation of, say, the Manghits in Bukhara should be grounded in close analysis and interpretation of the sources for that period and place.
Similarly, an understanding of early Russian attempts to impose Imperial systems of taxation and law in the Steppe or Ferghana valley need to based on a solid understanding of pre-Imperial norms (if such things even existed). Foucault - much beloved Foucault - remarked words to the effect that the solution to the problem of global and hegemonic discourses was to found in the "Local".
3 comments:
First of all, you are the only hirsute and whiskery fountainhead for me.
Recently, however, I received a sharp corrective from another fuzzy little Marxist, a very good student of American economic history, during a discussion of an otherwise fairly uninteresting book on the Tokugawa-Meiji transition. I characterized one strand of the existing historiography as "teleological" because it saw the transition as part of a series of changes leading to the historical inevitability of the modern democratic Japanese state. He asserted, instead, that such a conception was not "teleological," but rather "Whig." No one seems to have known what he was talking about, but, given your discussion, it seems like an apt label: Just as in England/Britain, the Japanese progressively cast off the yoke of some oppressive social system.
Now: You have described the Whig conception of history as teleological. It seems ideological, perhaps, since it legitimizes the present state of things. But is it the case that a teleological conception of history must locate the endpoint of history in the unseen future? Or is there another subtle distinction that I'm missing?
Can an historiographical theory be both teleological AND ideological? I sure Marxists (and their critics) would argue that it can, and this is certainly the case in this example.
The point of the Whig interpretation was to posit the Whigs (and their Liberal successors) as the upholders of constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy and liberal freedoms, and therefore as the natural conclusion to these developments in British history ...
... but of course, no political party has yet willingly disbanded once these goals have been achieved!
... which isn't a very good answer because my mind was on other things when I signed off!
Truth be told, I find myself more confused than ever, trying to pick out distinctions between the teleological and Whig interpretations of history.
First up, you are probably right that the Whig interpretation isn't strictly teleological. I suspect this is because in many ways the Whig interpretation was a forward-moving ideology based on some - frankly - backward looking ideas; and I literally mean *backward*, in as much as it was a philosophy that attempted to reverse the long- drawn-out effects of the Norman Yoke.
To answer your first question - possibly unsatisfactorily - it is not so much a case of identifying an ideal endpoint, but rather a case of 're-booting' history by arguing that the 'mytharc' of British history was NOT (or, more correctly, should not have been) a product of complex political, economic and social factors, drawn out over a couple of thousands years, within which the Norman Conquest was merely one of innumerable interactions between the British Isles, its inhabitants and the Continent and its inhabitants, but rather a slow reaction/revolution against foreign invaders, their alien customs and oppressive rule.
However, there are teleological elements to the Whig interpretation in that Whig historians argued that these developments were partly rooted in some apparently well-defined and naturally-occurring sense of British identity that inspired an otherwise disparate and disunited band of actors across several hundred years, whom Winston Churchill in the title of one of his books simply referred to as The Island Race.
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