History remains an essential element in educated citizenry, public culture and national life for broad public masses. The beginning of history writing in true sense can be found in the Greek civilisation. History has been a subject of interest among elite, as part of curriculum of academics and symbol of intellect in ancient and medieval period. Scientific systematisation of history writing took place in the so called modern age (after industrial revolution) under the influence of modernistic values like liberty, equality, fraternity, reason, science etc. Conservative school of Britain enjoyed wider influence in the art of history writing till the advent of E.H.Carr.
E.H.Carr’s “what is history” originated as the George Macaulay Trevelyan lectures (1961). Though they were a salute to the last great Whig historian the George Macaulay (-conservative-), but definite sign of departure from old could be perceived. Nowadays use of terms like economic history, military history, business history, maritime history, diplomatic history etc. Suggest the long journey of history since Carr.
E.H.Carr “what is history” began by making a distinction between history and chronicle. History was an attempt to understand and interpret the past to explain the causes and origins of things in intelligible terms. Chronicle, on the other hand, was the mere cataloguing of events without any attempt to make connections between them. Thus, he differentiated history from chronicle.
In describing history as a constant encounter between then and now, in which the time bound pre-occupations of the scholar needed to be recognized and appreciated, Carr was saying nothing which Trevelyan would have found exceptional. But in urging the primacy of long term economic and social forces, in insisting on the validity of extra-European history, in giving significant attention to sociology and causation, and in denying the importance of the individual or the unique event, Carr was advocating a very different sort of history from Trevelyan’s national narratives and admiring biographies.
Carr thought that the historian should look at the wider forces in history, at economic change, industrialisation, class formation and class conflict, and so on, and in order to understand these forces the historian needed theories developed in the present, whether these were Marxist ideas of one kind or another, Weberian paradigms, sociological concepts and the like. Yet Carr insisted that the central task of the historian, with or without the help of theory, lay in discerning and interpreting patterns regularities in the past.
For Carr, the point of such project was to assist human society in understanding the present and moulding the future. For Carr, history was the scientific study of the past, and its interpretation in terms of large forces and long term developments, aided by social science and thus contributing to the creation of a firm basis of knowledge on which to take political action and political decisions in the present.
Thus when we study the Russian revolution, as Carr did for the last three decades or more of his lifelong, what should interest us- and what certainly interested Carr- is not the drama of the revolutionary conflict, the ideas and actions of the defeated forces of Tsarism, liberalism, democratic socialism, anarchism, and so on, nor even the reasons why these alternatives to soviet communism were so easily defeated; for non of this is of direct relevance to the problems facing society in our own time. The real focus of Carr’s own fourteen-volume history of soviet –Russia, should instead be on how the Bolsheviks developed the ideas which they sought to put into effect once they had come to power, and how above all the idea of the planned economy came to occupy a central position in their thinking and policy.
1960s and 1970s witnessed fulsome adoration of the kind of history as defined and described by Carr in Western Europe, North America and even India. Economic and social history ( aided by the cult of quantification-the advent of computer made it possible for historians to collect and analyse mass quantitative data on the past in a manner and on a scale previously undreamed of ) threatened to marginalize traditional political history, as the preoccupation with causes and with analysis superseded the conventional interest in narrative and chronicle, and as the belief that the history could help us master the present and even change the future seem to give a progressive public purpose that many conservative scholars detested and distrusted.
For the conservative (especially G.R.Elton in his work “The practice of history”) history does not help us understand the present, let alone influence the future. They also denounced social history, the study of the (non-existent?) extra-European past.
By the end of 1970s, there was something of a crisis in the much vaunted ‘new history’ of which “what is history”? Had been in some ways the precursor: quantification did not seem to deliver as much as was hoped; sociology provided less of a help than had originally been believed; and the stress on the causal and the analytical no longer seemed so appealing.
1980s and 1990s witnessed an array of developments which changed the nature of historical enquiry in ways that Elton did not like and Carr did not foresee. Among them were IT revolution, which transformed and democratised scholarship, and the further expansion in higher education; the shift from sociology to anthropology as the most fruitful subject from which historians were now borrowing; the influence of Michel Foucault, postmodernism and the ‘linguistic turn’; the rise of women’s history, gender history and cultural history, and the reconfiguration of imperial history; and a broader shift away from the search for causation to the search for meaning.
The decline of the industrial working class and the emergence of a post industrial society falsified the theoretical assumption of Marxism, just as the growing threat of environmental degradation put a question mark behind the unthinking faith of modernisation theorists in the benefits of untrammelled industrial growth. New kinds of conflicts, based on gender, ethnicity, religious or sexual orientation, came to seem more urgent; and in turn demanded new kinds of historical explanation. The model of causation with which most historians had been operating, in which, however indirectly, the economy operated on society and society operated on politics, was clearly no longer adequate. Finally – and not unconnected to these other developments – the intellectual demarcation lines of the post-war era were abruptly rubbed out by the dramatic collapse of communism in the soviet union and Eastern Europe in 1989-90.These events not only destroyed the grand theories and teleology which Carr had urged historians to adopt, but also any idea that history could be seen to have a single direction and purpose at all. The belief that this idea could be proven by scientific methods which delivered a demonstrably objective view of historical progress was simply refuted by events.
By the early 1990s, therefore, the intellectual world which Carr had championed was in deep crisis. In this situation, some younger historians, particularly those who were concerned with the nature of historical thought itself, began to question not only the possibility of reaching any objective interpretation or understanding of the past, but even the possibility of knowing anything for certain about the past at all. Turning away from social theory to linguistic theory, they began to argue that historians depended on texts for their knowledge of the past. In their view, texts were arbitrary assemblages of words that themselves had come into being only through an arbitrary process of human invention. Each time we read a text, therefore we put the meaning into ourselves. So it was with the historian also. Thus what historians wrote was their own invention and not a true or objective representation of past reality, which was in essence irrecoverable.
For much of 1990s, argument raged over these theories as many historians began to feel a sense of acute crisis in their profession.
But by the early 2000s, resurrection of history writing ensured that the historical profession, after all, had not collapsed. People had not stopped writing history. Students and general readers had not stopped believing that historians were telling them some kind of truth about the past. The sense of crisis in the historical profession was passing, yet historians had not emerged from the battle with postmodernist ultra-scepticism entirely unchanged. In the first place, they had effectively destroyed the economic determinism that underlay so much of the historical writing of the 1970s and 1980s. In its place a new emphasis on cultural history has emerged, on aspects of identity, conciousness and mentality in place of social structure, social organisation and the economic bases of social power. The collapse of grand narratives and large teleological theories in history assisted the reinstatement of individual human beings in the historical record. Historians began writing about people again and above all about humble, ordinary people, history’s obscure, the losers and bystanders in the process of historical change (subaltern history, history from below). Carr wouldn’t have approved.
The present seems to belong to cultural history, partly because it has been the most receptive to the insights of anthropology, partly because it makes very large claims about the terrain of the past which it encompasses; and partly because of the shift in interest from explanation to understanding. Yet for many people , the significant development during recent decades has been the rise of women’s history and gender history; the recovery of the lives and experiences of one half of the world’s population, based on the recognition that gender was not merely a useful, but arguably an essential category of historical analysis and comprehension.
Of course, the turn to cultural history does not mean that other forms of history have disappeared. Political history has revived itself by broadening its scope and embracing many of the recent changes that have taken place in neighbouring disciplines. In the same way, imperial history, which seemed so peripheral, a subject in 1960s has moved centre-stage, transformed and enhanced by the influence of post-modernism and post-colonial studies, and providing an essential bridge between national and global history. Religious history has been the most fundamentally transformed by developments since Carr’s work, as popular religiosity being approached through ritual, culture and gender and distancing itself from history of theology.
The first decades of 21st century are an exceptionally innovative period for history writing. A great deal of history writing produced in an unprecedented range of sub disciplinary specialism and expositional modes, was completely unthinkable or literally unimaginable when Carr set out to describe and define the subject forty years ago. The pursuit of family history on television has extended the scope of history as much outside the academy as it has within. Though its massive potential for entertainment and recreation has not yet been fully exploited.
This article is tribute to E.H.Carr by a young learner of history.
I want to extend sincere thanks also to David cannadine and Richard j. Evans for the support taken from their work.
Purpose: - I have tried to simplify historiographical analysis at my best potential for amateur as well as professional. This article has the immense potential to help the students preparing for civil services competition in India and have history as an optional since syllabus of UPSC contains historiography (approaches of history) as its first topic.
RAGHWENDRA KUMAR THAKUR. (For more articles on history, join me on facebook. Browse to my blog SCHOOL OF HISTORY FOR CIVILSERVICES)
