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ratives called attoriolong (Bugis for “that which concerns people of the past”) which use lengths

of reigns and elapsed times rather than dates to fix chronology.

As these few examples illustrate, a proper survey of Indonesia’s historiography must examine

several distinctive literatures and traditions. The construction of a national sense of the past in the

face of multiple ethnicities has been no less daunting than the establishment of the nation itself.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Dutch-trained Indonesian historians concentrated on

providing a background to support aspirations for Indonesian national independence. With the

backing of Japanese occupiers at war with Western colonial powers, a nationalist-anticolonial historiography

was introduced during the early 1940s. This was largely the work of the nationalist

leader and future president Sukarno, the textbook writer Sanusi Pane (1905–1968), and especially

the lawyer Muhammad Yamin (1903–1962). Yamin, an admirer of the Malay Tun Seri Lanang

and a reader of the French historian Ernest Renan, popularized a romantic vision of history centered

on Java. A number of academics such as Muhammad Ali criticized the nationalist bent in

historiography in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it acquired new teeth with the advent of the

Suharto regime after 1965. A more militaristic official nationalist history emerged under the direction

of the historian, soldier, and minister of education, Nugroho Notosusanto; a virulently

anticommunist and “patriotic” multivolume history of Indonesia prepared in the 1970s, Sejarah

Nasional Indonesia, was an uneasy amalgam of official history with the work of university-based

historians. During Suharto’s “New Order,” the nationalist tradition was strictly enforced on

schools, even in outlying and problematic territories such as East Timor. Since Suharto’s 1998

resignation, nationalist historiography has been openly challenged by a number of alternative visions

of the past, including those representing different localities and submerged ethnic groups

such as the Acehnese.

To the northeast of Borneo lie the Philippine islands. Long under Spanish and then American

rule, the peoples of the Philippines adapted early on to the historical interests of the conquerors,

to the great detriment of pre-existing historical memory. Tagalog awits or metrical poems include

the Historia famosa ni Bernardo Carpio, a romance derived from older stories of medieval Spanish-

Moorish conflict. Having largely eradicated precolonial forms of literature, Spanish missionaries

used the awit as a tool of colonization; the awits became so familiar in both written and oral form

that, Reynaldo C. Ileto notes, the average Filipino by the nineteenth century “knew more about

Emperor Charlemagne, the Seven Peers of France and the destruction of Troy than of pre-Spanish

Philippine rajahs and the destruction of Manila by the conquistadores” (Ileto in Reid and

Marr, p. 381). Ironically, the chivalric and heroic figures in the awits would prove inspirational

to Tagalogs dreaming of emancipation from Spanish rule at the end of the nineteenth century, as

they transformed the legendary Spaniard Bernardo into a nationalist hero.

According to John N. Schumacher, there appears not to have been any formal historiography

in the Philippines prior to the Spanish, despite the existence of writing. The first post-Conquest

example is the Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, written by the Spanish official and unsuccessful warrior

Antonio de Morga (1559–1636) and published in Mexico in 1609—the only early history to

be written by a layman. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the various resident

religious orders produced chronicles largely focused on their own missionary activities. As

with the awits, however, western histories proved eventually an incitement to nationalism, particularly

in the hands of young Filipino secular priests sent back to Europe for higher education

in the 1860s. Published work on Filipino folklore and customs began to appear, along with previously

unpublished chronicles put out in the Biblioteca Historica Filipina series in the 1880s; the

journalist Isabelo de los Reyes would establish a Filipino identity in a number of historicallyoriented

newspaper articles and books. A more sophisticated appeal to history would emerge from

José Rizal (1861–1896), who had visited Germany and become aware of western historical methods.

During an exile in London in 1887–1888, he provided a carefully annotated edition of Morga’s

work, stressing the achievements of pre-Spanish Filipinos and their moral decline under foreign

rule. In this form, Rizal’s views would both contribute to revolutionary sentiment following his

execution, and ultimately to the continuation of historical study through the ensuing decades of

American rule.

This very short survey of a small selection of Southeast Asian historical traditions is far from

exhaustive (we have said nothing of the South Sea Islands, for example, where a great deal of

ethnographic work on historical memory has been done in recent years by anthropologists), but

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New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxxiii

it provides a warning against assuming that history is exclusively the perquisite of Western nations,

or even of highly bureaucratized Asian countries like Imperial China. It is perhaps worth

offering the further cautionary observation that the types of recent political repression of historians,

and attempts by governments to enforce a particular perspective on the past, are conversely

not restricted to Indochinese totalitarian regimes or island military dictatorships (nor to older authorities

like the Catholic Church and the ancient Qin emperors). In the world’s largest democracy,

India, the advent in 1998 of the BJP-led government (defeated in elections as this essay was

going to press) posed a serious threat to historiography and historical pedagogy as the Hindu nationalist

regime undertook measures that included the excision of material in school textbooks

(a measure publicly condemned by historians such as Sumit Sarkar) and the encouragement of attacks

upon distinguished scholars such as Romila Thapar who were deemed to hold disloyal views

of the nation’s past. Other examples can be found in the West, such as the controversy in the

United States in 1995 over an exhibition to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping

of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, the virulent public reaction in Canada to a 1991 television

series perceived as critical of the Canadian forces during World War II, or the ongoing “history

wars” in Australia, turning in 2004 on sharp right-left disagreements over the past treatment of

the aboriginal population by colonists and imperial authorities. Even more odious monthly additions

to the list of historians suffering persecution of one sort or another across the globe make

for uncomfortable reading.

The Middle East. After an eighteenth-century decline in Ottoman historical writing, and the

temporary displacement of Arabic by Turkish as the dominant elite language of much of the Islamic

world, Islamic historiography written in Arabic began to recover in the mid-nineteenth century.

This occurred in the wake both of European expansion into the Middle East and Africa and

of reforms within the Ottoman Empire itself, which gave rise to incipient Arab nationalism. Many

areas had enjoyed some autonomy from Istanbul for a century, with the result that there were already

some examples of Arabic-language histories focused on pan-Arab national identity. This was

true in Tunisia and Lebanon as well as in Morocco, which historically lay outside Ottoman control.

Arab intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century began to write histories as continuous

narratives, rather than annals, devoted to establishing national pasts, which now also

included the pre-Islamic periods. Older pan-Islamic cultural and religious impulses remained as

important as newer Arab nationalism, as Muslims confronted the dilemma of how to coexist with

Western infidel powers, and as modern Islamic thought, influenced by Western science and technology,

itself began to take shape in the hands of activist-reformers like Sayyid Jamal al-Din Afghani

(1838–1897), the author of a history of Afghanistan.

During this period, efforts were made to print historical sources, and a number of learned societies

were founded with historical interests. The Egyptian ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Djabarti

(1753–1825) anticipated this revival of historiography with his compelling account of the French

occupation of Egypt, and a philosophy of history that echoed Ibn Khaldun’s. Al-Djabarti’s countryman

Rifa’ah Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), who had spent five years in Paris, became the channel

through which modern European historiography began to enter the Arab world. He translated

several French works into Arabic and authored a history of ancient Egypt that consciously emulated

modern rather than classical Islamic historical forms; he was also instrumental in reforming

the Egyptian school curriculum, which by the 1870s routinely included history. During the era

of British rule in Egypt, the influential politician Mustafa Kamil further encouraged nationalist

views of his country’s past; this trend cut across and in many ways contradicted the Islamic views

of most historical writing in the previous millennium.

Most of the historians in this period tended to be non-academics: the Syrian Ilyas Matar

(1857–1910) was an Ottoman official, physician, and lawyer, and his compatriot Jurji Yanni

(1856–1941) an Orthodox Christian journalist and intellectual. The Lebanese-Egyptian Jurji Zaydan

(1861–1914) was a journalist and a prolific author of historical novels in addition to a multivolume

history of Islamic civilization (1902–1906). Academic historiography began slowly in the

post-Ottoman era starting in the 1920s, initially in the hands of North American- and Europeantrained

scholars, thus extending the dominance of Western-style academic history over the Islamic

world’s long distinct historiographic traditions. Asad Rustum, a historian of Syria, published an

Arabic-language manual on Western historical method in 1939, largely drawn from Langlois and

Seignobos’s famous textbook, a work that was already fast losing ground in its homeland in the

face of the emerging Annaliste (see below) historical revolution. A Lebanese Maronite, Philip Hitti,

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published a survey of Lebanon in History in 1957; more recently, Kamal Salibi (b. 1929) has revised

the history of Lebanon and made a close study of its earlier, medieval historiography.

In Turkey itself, the collapse of the Ottoman regime and the institution of Kemal Atatürk’s

republic in 1923 occasioned a significant rupture with the recent past and with the longer tradition

of Ottoman official historiography whose last great representative, Ahmed Cevdet Pasa

(1822–1895), a remote disciple of Ibn Khaldun, had produced an enormous annalistic account

of events from 1774 to 1826 (continued by Cevdet Pasa’s successor Ahmed Lutfi up to the 1860s).

Western scholarly methods had, however, begun to appear in Turkey, along with European texts,

in the mid-nineteenth century; at the same time, new historical genres such as memoirs also appeared.

The study of numismatics and sigillography arrived in Turkey about the same time, and

the newer methods began to influence reference books, school texts, and popular histories. The

Faculty of Letters at the University of Istanbul, established in 1900, became a training ground for

historians, and institutions such as the Imperial Museum of Antiquities (1891, now the Archaeological

Museums) provided the infrastructure.

These developments provided a backdrop to the writings of the first generation of republican

historians. Unsympathetic to the decay of the later Ottoman Empire in the previous two hundred

years, the republicans nevertheless embraced the successes of the empire’s glory days from the thirteenth

to the seventeenth centuries. As Cemal Kafadar notes, the founder of modern Turkish historiography,

Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (1890–1966), began to articulate this vision in the 1930s in

a series of lectures at the Sorbonne, soon published as The Origins of the Ottoman Empire in French

and Turkish. Köprülü focused on Osman (the eponymous founder of the Ottoman house) and

the rise of the Turks in thirteenth-century Anatolia; his theories would be elaborated and revised

by the Austrian Paul Wittek (1894–1978). The task of this generation of historians, sorting out

legend from fact, and balancing ethnicity, religion, and other influences, is in some ways redolent

of the romantic nationalist historiographies of the early and middle years of the nineteenth century

and, more remotely, of Renaissance debates about national origins, albeit now approached

with the tools of modern scholarship. The new work, to which non-Turks such as Wittek and the

Greek George Arnakis (a severe critic of Köprülü) contributed, was carried out against a longstanding

Western European historiography of the Ottomans dating back to the Englishmen

Richard Knolles (c. 1550–1610) and Paul Rycaut (1628–1700) and including more recently the

early-nineteenth-century Viennese Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), and the American

Herbert Gibbons (1880–1934). The opening of Ottoman archives in the 1940s redirected

scholarship in newer directions of social and economic history, and since the mid-twentieth century,

Turkey has continued to produce academic historians such as the left-leaning economic historian

Mustafa Akdag˘ (1913–1972) and his critic, the distinguished historian Halil Inalcik

(b. 1916), a student of Köprülü.

As in other regions, since the 1960s social and economic history have emerged in the Middle

East as serious rivals to an older, politically focused narrative history. Islamic-focused women’s history

(which can be traced back to entries on women in an older form, the biographical dictionary

or tabaqat) has also developed, with newer feminist approaches strongest in Egypt; the male-oriented

and restrictive practices of the Muslim fundamentalist regimes have themselves become the

subject of study. As Judith E. Tucker notes, recent feminist historians of Islam, some working

outside the region, have restored women to roles of significant influence in the longer Muslim

past, for instance in Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam and numerous works by the Moroccan

sociologist Fatima Mernissi, such as Women and Islam (1991). Recent collections of essays

such as Guity Nashat and Lois Beck’s Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800 have also explored

the historical place of women in Islamic societies from very early times.

Europe and the Americas. The myriad developments of Western historiography over the past

century could easily merit an article in their own right, but since they are readily accessible in

other works, the principal developments will only be summarized briefly here. Broadly speaking,

the trends outlined for the nineteenth century continued into the first half of the twentieth, though

the Einstein-Planck challenges to Newtonian physics, closely followed by the horrors of World

War I and the end of the old empires, severely shook whatever remained of the late-nineteenthcentury

faith in progress and in science. The pessimism following the war’s unprecedented slaughter

produced some gems of Kulturgeschichte, built on the themes of civilization’s decadence and

decline, such as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga’s (1872–1945) brilliant and Burckhardtian

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New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxxv

aesthetic excavation of The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), which could be read as an allegory

for pre-war cultural decadence. A longer and much less subtle example is the German Oswald

Spengler’s (1880–1936) multivolume speculative analysis of distinctive cultures through history.

Hearkening back to Nietzsche, and at least superficially anticipatory of Nazism, The Decline of the

West was a work of reactionary generalization and extreme intellectual relativism; largely completed

before the beginning of World War I, it appeared to great fanfare just at its end. Among

other things, Spengler’s Decline would help to inspire the very different (if equally speculative and

relativist) British take on comparative civilizations, Arnold Toynbee’s (1889–1975) A Study of History

(12 vols., 1934–1961), which its author began in earnest in 1920, after reading Spengler.

Meanwhile, academic reactions to strict scientific history in the more narrow, positivist sense,

echoing Dilthey’s earlier qualifications, can be seen in the enormously influential Italian philosopher

and historian, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). Like Dilthey, Croce rejected both Rankean

historical method and scientific positivism, arguing instead the autonomy of history from science,

and the inseparability of history and life—records and documents only have significance insofar

as living humans can reflect upon them and, indeed, relive them; conversely, we only make sense

of life by thinking historically. A pronounced antifascist, he also held to a view of “history as the

story of liberty.” Croce’s views appealed to many, including his younger British contemporary,

the archaeologist turned philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943). Collingwood’s posthumously

published The Idea of History advanced the notion that “all history—is the history of

thought” and suggested that the historian must empathize with his or her subjects, enter into the

“interior” of a historical event (the thought of the agent behind the event), and mentally “re-enact”

it in order to retell it. His book remains very widely read, and its concept of historical imagination

has come back into vogue with the advent of postmodernism in the past twenty years. The

Brazilian-born Spanish literary scholar and historian, Américo Castro (1885–1972) echoed both

Collingwood and the American Carl Becker in his assertion that “To write history demands a historian

willing (and able) to enter into the living consciousness of others through the door of his

own life and consciousness” (p. 305). Castro, who fled to the United States following the Spanish

Civil War further reflected historicist sentiments in his views upon the inseparability of a people

and its history, and of the relationship between individual and general histories. In a very

different focus on the human interior, the later works of Sigmund Freud, especially Moses and

Monotheism (1939), applied his own psychoanalytic theories and clinical experience to the “diagnosis”

of history. The process of civilization Freud envisaged as an endless struggle of love and

hate, sex and death, arising from primal patricide, and carried forward by leader-figures such as

Moses in conflict with the mobs whom they dominated—the irony of the similarity in this regard

between a Viennese Jew and aspects of the thought of both Nietzsche and Hitler is difficult

to escape. The European scholarly tradition had without doubt put some distance between itself

and Ranke’s history wie es eigentlich gewesen.

If irrationalism, skepticism, and pessimism were the dominant chords struck in Western Europe

and, to a lesser degree, in North America, the dissonant sound from further east came in the

form of Marxism. Just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Kliuchevskii’s former pupil, Mikhail

Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868–1932), developed a Marxist version of Russian history in his multivolume

study History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism (1910–

1914; English trans. 1931). This was endorsed by Lenin and for a time Pokrovskii was the dominant

force in early Soviet historiography; after his death, however, he was condemned by Stalin

and abandoned by Party historians for his lack of nationalist sentiment. Initial tolerance of intellectual

autonomy in the 1920s gave way to rigid Party control in the 1930s, and the state would

have an overbearing influence on history-writing from the purges of scholars in the 1930s to the

collapse of the Soviet Union seven decades later. This control spread far beyond the borders of

the USSR to include the various Soviet satellite states and Warsaw Pact allies in Romania, Poland,

Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Without state sanctions to support it, academic Marxism never attained a dominant position

in the West, but had a profound influence nonetheless through the 1980s. Marxist, socialist, or

left-leaning historiography began to appear in the Western democracies relatively early in the twentieth

century; the leading Norwegian historian of the first half of the twentieth century, Halvdan

Koht (1873–1965), for instance was an early self-avowed Marxist. The attraction of Marxism increased

in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, which

seemed to bear out Marx’s views of the inevitable collapse of capitalism. The dalliance of many

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lxxvi New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

interwar British and some American intellectuals with communism provided the earliest examples

of historiography that, in the 1960s, would evolve into Labor history, “radical history,” and what

is sometimes called “history from below.” Several classics of late twentieth-century historical writing

such as E. P. Thompson’s (1924–1993) The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and

Georges Lefebvre’s (1874–1959) many books on the French revolution were written from an explicitly

Marxist, albeit more humanistic, perspective that emphasized the daily lives of the history’s

underclasses. A modified version of Marxism articulated by the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci

(1891–1937), with its concept of cultural “hegemony,” has retained an influence in much non-

Marxist historical scholarship and literary history.

A very different creation of the interwar period was what has become known as the Annales

school in France, so called after the journal that began publication in 1929 at the University of

Strasbourg under the guidance of Marc Bloch (1886–1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), two

French scholars much influenced by the earlier work of the sociologist Durkheim and the geographer

Henri Berr, and with close ties to the Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne (1862–1935). The

journal and the “school” (rather a misnomer, albeit useful as a shorthand) have evolved considerably

through successive generations but remain an influential force in France and much admired

elsewhere, particularly in North America. The Annalistes’ repudiation of the political history of

previous decades—Febvre condemned Charles Seignobos for an obsession with events—in favor

of an histoire totale that examined geography, climate, economy, and agricultural and trade patterns,

as well as manners, still seems fresh after seventy-five years. It is, however, a further reminder

of the recurrent swing of the pendulum of European historiographical taste between the social and

the political, the broad and the particular, dating back to the Enlightenment—and beyond, as far

back as Herodotus and Thucydides.

The Annales historians also advocated a new modus vivendi between history and the social sciences,

with Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) calling for the subjugation of histoire événementielle

(short-term human actions, for instance in the political world) to the study of longer periods of

social, material, and economic conjonctures and the much slower geographical and climatalogical

changes that occurred over the longue durée of centuries; the classic expression of this layered periodization

is Braudel’s own study of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age

of Philip II . The statistical tendencies of many members of Braudel’s generation of Annalistes are

most clearly evident in the work of Pierre Chaunu (whose history of Seville and the Atlantic established

a subgenre often called “serial history” because of its attention to establishing continuous

series of historical data on such matters as food prices). Intellectual historians such as Robert

Mandrou and François Furet pioneered a quantitative approach to the history of mentalités, opening

up what has since evolved into histoire du livre, the history of the book. In more recent decades,

however, the Annales historians have veered away from quantification to the study of mentalités

in Bloch and Febvre’s mode, with considerably more emphasis being placed on individual and

collective beliefs, and on life experienced in local settings. The “microhistory” genre of the late

1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including works like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: The

Promised Land of Error (a study of a medieval Cathar village) and Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese

and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, has proved highly saleable in the academic

and even popular book market and has spawned numerous European and North American

imitators.

If any word most characterizes twentieth-century and especially post-1945 historiography, it

would have to be fragmentation (a more optimistic descriptor might be diversity). Historians are

now political, military, family, gender, women’s, economic, social, environmental, intellectual or

cultural, and the expansion of university history departments especially in the 1960s has encouraged

a high degree of subspecialization, together with a proliferation of journals and book series

(which the relatively recent introduction of the Internet shows no sign of slowing down given its

capacity to offer cheap alternatives to conventional print). Although Marxism has by and large

faded from most North American history departments, social history has been maintained, albeit

now often dissolved into various components. Among these, women’s history and its offshoot, the

history of gender (now including masculinity studies) have perhaps been the most successful in

reshaping the recent agenda of the entire discipline. The history of particular ethnicities and religions

or sexual orientations has also become more firmly established in departments and often in

specialty journals. Interdisciplinary approaches to history began seriously in the 1960s with historians

looking to the social sciences, especially sociology and economics, for the theoretical

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New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxxvii

underpinnings that appeared to be lacking from history itself (it is remarkable how often in the

history of historical writing a great cataclysm has been followed by a search for new certitudes, a

pronounced skepticism toward old ones, or both in combination). Among the more interesting if

controversial experiments one must include psychohistory (best represented by Erik H. Erikson).

Equally debatable has been the use of “counterfactuals” (the supposition that events in history occurred

in ways other than they actually did, and the attempt to model mathematically a hypothetical

projected course of events from that alternate starting point), especially in the “Cliometric”

or New Economic History of American academics such as Robert W. Fogel. In the 1980s and

1990s, as the stock of sociology and economics began to fall in the judgment of historians, many

turned instead to the work of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins,

and Victor Turner. (In contrast, social scientists, as Eric H. Monkkonen and others have argued,

maintain a steadfast claim to the appropriation of history across their various disciplines, without

necessarily intending by “history” the discipline that historians actually practice). Meanwhile, the

“history of ideas” has been transformed at one end into cultural history (including most recently

the history of the book), and at the other into the pursuit of the meaning of terms and of texts

in their linguistic and/or social contexts. The latter stream is in turn divisible into a so-called Cambridge

School of the history of political thought, associated with Quentin Skinner in Britain and

J. G. A. Pocock in the United States, the Begriffsgeschichte (history of political and social concepts)

approach associated with the German Reinhart Koselleck, and the “New Historicist” and “cultural

materialist” movements in literary criticism

One trend that began in the mid-1970s but has roots in literary theory and in continental philosophy

(especially the French figures Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the Germans Hans-

Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger and, more remotely, Friedrich Nietzsche) is the so-called

linguistic turn in historiography, often identified with the broader theoretical shift known as postmodernism.

Influenced by cultural theorists such as Roland Barthes, Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and

Paul Ricoeur, and by the prewar German intellectual Walter Benjamin, postmodernism also draws

extensively, if often superficially, from cultural anthropology. The thrust of this has been seriously

to challenge conventional boundaries between history and literature, leading American exponents

of this view being the Americans Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. It has also, as the historical

theorist F. R. Ankersmit suggests, had the effect of “de-disciplining” and “privatizing” history—

restoring the individual author, as opposed to the institutional structures erected in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the center of historical writing. In its most extreme version

(which is articulated less frequently than postmodernism’s most severe critics would have us believe),

it hearkens back to Renaissance pyrrhonism in its radical denial of the fixity of any historical

meaning, the existence of any external reality beyond language (there are only infinite floating

“signifiers,” and no definable or recoverable “signifieds”), and the impossibility of making “true”

statements about the past. The position derived from this—that any version of history is no more

or less valid than another—while seemingly liberal, also opens the door to the legitimation of morally

repugnant positions such as Holocaust denial. This issue has come to the fore in recent years through

a number of celebrated cases, most notoriously the 1990s libel suit brought by Holocaust denier

David Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, who had charged him with gross

fabrication and distortion of evidence to support his theories. A spectacle followed around the globe.

The trial involved the historian Richard Evans and a team of graduate students scrutinizing David

Irving’s research intensively, the consequences of which were the utter demolition of his arguments

and an overwhelming legal victory in the year 2000 for Lipstadt and her publisher.

It is tempting to dismiss much postmodern theorizing, historiographically, as chaotic and intellectually

anarchistic nonsense, perhaps even a sign of fin-de-siècle cultural decadence. There has

recently been an extreme conservative reaction to it, epitomized in the work of the late British

historian Sir Geoffrey Elton, and in the critiques of those who lament the loss of any sense of

master-narrative. But the postmodern trend has been highly influential in academic settings (especially

literature departments); and, while still a minority influence in history departments, it has

found a receptive audience among historians of gender and many social and cultural historians for

whom it has provided a set of codes and categories to replace those once derived from Marxism.

While some of its arguments are virtually self-discrediting, postmodernism has at least provided a

salutary reminder to all historians (if one were really needed) that, Ranke notwithstanding, documents

and texts never “speak for themselves” but are interpreted by historians, and, more important,

that even the most “neutral” document was ultimately the creation of a human being

driven by the assumptions, social pressures, and linguistic conventions of his or her own time.

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lxxviii New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Few historians would now endorse the French ancient historian Fustel de Coulanges’ optimistic

admonition to group of applauding students that it was not he who spoke to them but “history,

who speaks through me.”

A related variant, postcolonial studies, often associated with the literary theorists Edward Said

(1935–2003), Gayatri Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha, has refocused scholarship concerned with

former colonies such as India on the subjected masses rather than on the imperial rulers and their

indigenous elite allies or political successors. The Subaltern School of Indian historiography (the

term derives from Marx and from Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony) founded by Ranajit

Guha is a prominent example, the academic foundation against which it rebels having been established

with the rapid increase of university history departments following independence in 1947,

and the development of social-science–influenced South Asian studies. Guha in particular has argued

that the Renaissance assignment of non-Europeans to the realm of “peoples without history”

was compounded by the subsequent imposition of Enlightenment ideas upon the various colonized

areas of the world, in particular the notion that statehood, as well as writing, was essential

for a people to achieve historical standing. The colonizers, using their control of language, education,

and writing, subjected the Indian past, for example, to Western (and especially Hegelian)

notions of “world-history,” limited by European standards of chronology and narrative. In other

words, they imposed a kind of imperial “dominance without hegemony” over a nation’s true sense

of its own history. “History” in the Western sense (projected backwards onto indigenous itihasa

in an effort to make these seem protohistorical) thus permanently completed the displacement,

commenced by the Persian-influenced histories of the Mughal era, of the ancient tradition and

“old lore,” as well as the sense of everyday experience, embodied in the poetic myths contained

in purana and in epics such as the Ramayana. Vinay Lal, a critic of Subaltern Studies has adopted

an even more radical position, asserting that the accommodation of Indian scholars to the very

value of history, not simply adoption of its Western forms, is an acceptance of servitude. Sumit

Sarkar, an early participant in the Subaltern project, has criticized it for a growing loss of focus

on the very groups it was designed to rescue from oblivion and for its swing in the direction of

cultural studies, while endorsing a microhistorical approach analogous to the practice of Europeans

such as Carlo Ginzburg.

The Latin American experience reflects both European and, more recently, North American

trends, while some of its historical concerns have for decades anticipated the very issues raised in

the 1960s by European Marxists such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, and more recently

in South Asia by Subaltern scholars. Academic historiography was firmly established with the foundation

of public archives at the end of the nineteenth century, and the creation of history departments

at universities. The longest-standing graduate programs date back to the 1950s and

include El Colegio de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad San Marcos

in Lima, and the Universidad de Chile, but a significant proportion of academics with doctorates

have acquired them abroad at European (especially Oxford, Cambridge, and Madrid) and

major American universities, many of which (the University of Texas and the University of California,

Berkeley, for example) have first-rate library collections and strong graduate programs in

Latin American studies.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the liberalism and positivism that had marked the first

decades of postindependence historiography were under duress, in part owing to a growing alienation

from America and Europe. The Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, with its populist and

agrarian origins, suggested that the historical role of Latin American masses and especially indigenous

and mestizo populations had been seriously underestimated; moreover, the political and

economic success of many of the liberal states had been mixed at best. Efforts turned to revisiting

the history of Central and South America from a less Eurocentric perspective. Historians and

ethnohistorians began to pay special attention to the role of the indigenous peoples and to the

ethnic intermixture of populations that had produced a distinctive set of postcolonial societies.

The kinds of anthropological excavation of native perceptions of the past applied in the South Pacific

have also been employed in Latin America in recent decades. Some of the features of African

historiography can also be observed here, in particular the application of Marxist and social science

paradigms such as “dependency” and “modernization” theory. And, as with India, an antiimperialist

scholarship has developed (encouraged by the ideologically controversial five hundredth

anniversary celebrations of Columbus’s 1492 expedition) that insists on the role of European and

especially Iberian colonizers in the “invention” of historical categories such as “America.”

HISTORIOGRAPHY

New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxxix

Conclusion

This article has necessarily been selective, summary, and in places even cursory, in its treatment

of the history of history around the planet. While the differences between various forms of historical

writing—and different traditions—have deliberately been emphasized, some connecting

points also exist. There has been a close relationship between the historical record and the exercise

of power for much of the past four thousand years, power being taken in the ethnic, social,

and economic as well as narrowly political sense. This is perhaps another way of putting the old

saw, mentioned at the very beginning of the essay, that “history is written by the victors,” although

in fact it has just as often been written by the losers (consider Thucydides, the Indian Felipe

Guamán Poma de Ayala, or the poet and historian John Milton, a failed revolutionary) and those

bewildered by the specter of sudden or unwelcome change. There has been an ongoing, dialectic,

and much-changing relationship between literature, legend, myth, and history, and firm and categorical

divisions between these are by no means the hallmark of all historical cultures. One may

also observe the recurrent influence of various forms of present-day self-identification in the construction

of pasts, ranging from the Greek city-states through Renaissance debates about racial origins,

through Spanish discussions of Visigothic foundations, to the competing global nationalisms

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now as then, current problems and perspectives often

drive the most intense and searching investigation of the past: Where French and Spanish invasions

of Italy drove Machiavelli and Guicciardini to the past for explanation, similar calamities inspired

many of the chroniclers of Burma and Thailand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries. Where the Reformation ignited a European debate over the history of the church, modern

German historians have had to wrestle since 1945 with the problem of the country’s aggressive

twentieth-century past and the horror of the Holocaust.

At the start of the twenty-first century, there is a high degree of disintegration and remarkably

little consensus as to what a “proper” historical method is, what phenomena constitute legitimate

subjects of historical inquiry or whether any historical narrative merits “privileging” (a favored

term of literary criticism) as true—or at least more true—over any other. But in facing our own

postmodern confusion, we would be entirely wrong to project a nostalgic, supposititious, and comfortable

uniformity of opinion onto the historical thought of earlier times. Let us in closing recall

the differences between Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew historical writing; Thucydides’ quick

departure from the model established by Herodotus; the contemporary medieval critics of Geoffrey

of Monmouth’s invented British past; the Qing evidentiary debates; the pyrrhonist challenge

to historical knowledge in early modern Europe; and the German quarrels about method in the

late nineteenth century. These are but a few reminders that there have always been many mansions

in the house of history and an almost infinite number of windows, each providing a fresh

perspective on to the past.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL AND COMPARATIVE

Appadurai, Arjun. “The Past as a Scarce Resource.” Man 16, no. 2 (1981): 201–219.

Black, Jeremy. Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past. New Haven and London: Yale University

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of history.

Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1994. Useful survey, confined to western traditions, but full of shrewd judgments and connections.

Brown, Donald E. Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988. Perceptive commentary on a variety of world

traditions, regrettably marred by author’s Eurocentric assumption that there are “sound” historiographies

against which others fall short.

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Butterfield, Herbert. Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship. Cambridge,

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Gilman and Edmund L. King. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977.

Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946. Classic exposition of

philosophy of history also contains a good history of western historical thought.

Elton, G. R. Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study. Cambridge,

U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

lxxx New Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Kelley, Donald R. Faces of History: Historical Enquiry from Herodotus to Herder. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1998. Excellent interpretive chapters on major aspects of European historiography.

Kochan, Lionel. The Jew and His History. London: Macmillan, 1977.

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25–39.

Maciu, Vasile, et al. Outline of Rumanian Historiography until the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.

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Monkkonnen, Eric H., ed. Engaging the Past: The Uses of History across the Social Sciences. Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.

Orr, Linda. “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History.” New Literary History 18 (1986–1987):

1–21.

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Woolf, D. R., ed. A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1998. Covers

most regions and traditions of the world. See especially articles by Romila Thapar, David K.

Wyatt, David Chandler, Anthony Reid, Judith Tucker, Shawn McHale, Ian Copland, Stuart Robson,

Ulrich Kratz, and Somkiat Wanthana on less accessible areas such as Southeast Asia, early India,

and Islamic women’s history, as well as Toivo U. Raun, Andrejs Plakans and P. K. Hämäläinen

on understudied European countries such as Estonia, Latvia, and Finland. All have provided information

used in the present account.

Zagorin, Perez. “History, the Referent, and Narrative: Reflections on Postmodernism Now.” History and

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EARLIEST FORMS OF HISTORICAL WRITING

Brundage, Burr C. “Historiographic Traditions: The Birth of Clio: A Résumé and Interpretation of

Ancient Near Eastern Historiography.” In Teachers of History: Essays in Honor of Laurence Bradford

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1955.

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Mesopotamian and Jewish historical texts; not for the beginner.

AFRICA

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Harneit-Sievers, Axel, ed. A Place in the World: New Local Historiographies from Africa and South-Asia.

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Henige, David. The Chronology of Oral Tradition: The Quest for a Chimera. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.

Hiskett, Mervyn. A History of Hausa Islamic Verse. London: School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London, 1975.

History in Africa: A Journal of Method. Contains many useful articles on aspects of African historiography,

both indigenous and Western.

Jewsiewicki, Bogumil and David S. Newbury, eds. African Historiographies: What History for Which

Africa? Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1986.

Middell, Matthias. “Transfer and Interaction: France and Francophone African Historiography.” In

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Pankhurst, Richard K. P., ed. The Ethiopian Royal Chronicles [Extracts]. Addis Ababa: Oxford University

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New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxxxi

Prins, Adrian. “On Swahili Historiography.” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 28 (1958):

26–40.

Saunders, Christopher. The Making of the South African Past: Major Historians on Race and Class.

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Press, 1988.

Van Jaarsveld, Floris Albertus. The Afrikaner’s Interpretation of South African History. Capetown: Simondium

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studies by Smith, Saunders, and Wright listed above and below.

Vansina, Jan, Raymond Mauny, and L. V. Thomas. The Historian in Tropical Africa: Studies Presented

and Discussed. London: Oxford University Press, 1964.

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EAST ASIA

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1938. Should be read in concert with more recent studies in Unger, 1993, below and Dirlik, 1978,

above.

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Mass, Jeffrey P. Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History. Stanford: Stanford University Press,

1992.

Mehl, Margaret. History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Excellent

study of its subject.

Najita, Tesua. “History and Nature in Eighteenth-Century Tokugawa Thought.” In The Cambridge

History of Japan. Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan, edited by John W. Hall et al., 596–659. Cambridge,

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of the Millennium: Proceedings of the Second Bienniel Conference, Korean Studies Association of Australia,

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Schaberg, David. A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography. Cambridge, Mass.,

and London: Harvard University Press for Harvard University Asia Center, 2001.

Schwartz, Benjamin. “History in Chinese Culture: Some Comparative Reflections.” History and Theory

35 (1996): 23–33.

HISTORIOGRAPHY