Jeremy Black’s previous book, Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures, is a sparkling defense of the legitimacy and utility of counterfactual history—of what ifs—and the best single work on its subject available. He turns here to a not unrelated, and equally weighty and vexing, issue: the uses and misuses of historical knowledge outside, as well as within, academic circles. No one reading this work, and surely no professional historians, will come away from it untroubled by its implications. But, alas, no one will find it as easy going as Black’s earlier work on counterfactuals.
A historian at the University of Exeter, Black is one among an increasing number of scholars who have recently ventured into an emerging field of inquiry: the very nature of historical knowledge. The subject spans everything from the way young children’s minds react to historical information to the problematics of historical knowledge—its logic, epistemological bases, and claims to facticity—to the possibility of historical objectivity, the last subject mired in postmodernist debates about “texts,” “reading,” “the author,” and the like.
Not that the subject of historical knowledge is new, for the questions it raises can be traced back to Herodotus and Thucydides. But this particular season of speculation among historians has sown serious doubts, even among the most dedicated academic specialists, about the conventionally understood foundations and common claims of their endeavors. Jeremy Black does nothing here to allay their doubts. His principal concern is with the location of authority to determine the accuracy and legitimacy of any historical assertion. Professional historians—accustomed to debating, sometimes bitterly, among themselves—accept competing interpretations of the past as givens of their intellectual world. And on the whole, they tolerate their different positions as leading eventually to consensus, if not unanimous agreement. Members of the public, political figures, and especially state regimes have no such toleration for ambiguity and uncertainty. As Black is at pains to show with examples seemingly without limit, few nonhistorians have ever yielded in their efforts to position their communities and themselves within what they claim to be an accurate picture of the present and past so as to legitimate their own ideologies, politics, and rule.
As for empirical accuracy and intellectual weight: Let those be damned!
To make this argument—one that’s irrefutable—Black starts with what historians have traditionally taken to
be historiography: the study of the written history of history. In this large body of work, historians seek to locate knowledge of the past within accumulating interpretations of that past: within earlier and ever-changing versions of times gone by, versions that emerge from the distinctive cultures, ideologies, tribes, and temperaments of the historians who write history. Accordingly, for instance, historians of the American Civil War study what has earlier been written about it, position themselves within that literature, and offer contributions that may move understanding of the war ahead. Historiography has thus been perceived to be the formal study of formal historical thought and writing, whether produced by academic historians like Black or belletristic writers of history like Edward Gibbon and Thomas Babington Macaulay and David McCullough.
Black thinks this conventional approach to historiography too limiting. In a deft move to loosen the definition and contents of historiography from their customarily formalistic confines, Black vastly broadens them to include much more than historians have previously allowed in. This is the “historiography in practice” of his subtitle: the myths, folk tales, ancestral lore, origin stories, clan legends, regime claims, eschatological assumptions, and the like that litter the oral and written record of the past. He also boldly incorporates the kind of history put forth beyond written media—through television, the theater, and art, as well as in social media.
It is difficult to tell whether Black approves of or, as someone who looks reality in the face, rues having to broaden historiography to include the unruly world beyond the control of intellectuals—whether he happily tosses aside centuries of definitional modesty, or feels forced by the way the world works to do so. He’s clearly no fan of history used as the justification of grievances, as “validation for the present,” or as “the ammunition of politics.” But if I read him correctly, he feels it necessary to succumb to facts long overlooked by historians and to conclude on the grounds of the overwhelming evidence he produces that historians don’t control the interpretation of the past, and rarely have done so.
What are we to make of such a conclusion? Academic historians learn soon enough in their careers that their findings and arguments are likely to be challenged, perhaps even dismissed, by other academics. The battle over interpretation is a given of historical inquiry, just as it has been since Thucydides took out after Herodotus at the dawn of written history in the West. From interpretive contests, most historians agree, emerges a gradual, asymptotic approach to consensus, if not to universal agreement. But if others refuse to accept their evidence and findings, or even credit the grounds of their disagreements, why do they bother to try to understand the past? What’s the use of history? Black doesn’t try to work his way out of the difficulty.
But as far as he goes, readers are likely to be convinced by what he does write. And he doesn’t confine his numbing evidence to Western history. He produces strong evidence of the sameness of insouciant, weakly grounded claims and tales about the past everywhere on earth. That’s another of Black’s distinctive moves: Reaching beyond the West, the usual province of Western students of historical thought, to China, Korea, the Islamic world, even to Oceania, for evidence to make his case, he locates the unfettered exploitation of historical claims among every people in every age.
No one will be surprised at history’s unfettered use and misuse, especially by those trying to establish new nation-states or defend older ones. Nothing reveals more about what every serious historian will recognize as the misapplication of historical knowledge than its invocation by those trying to establish or defend national and territorial claims. Kievan Rus, Scotland, the Spratly Islands, Kosovo—need we invoke additional names to clinch Black’s case about history’s invocation as “the solace of continuity and the sore of grievance” ? There can be little confidence that historians can prevail against the obtuseness, ignorance, and willfulness of those who use history to promote their own purposes.
Unfortunately, unlike Black’s earlier book on counterfactuals, this one displays more authority than art. Declarative sentences march through the text like troops on parade. Variants of the verb “to be” and the flat locutions “there is” and “there are” take active life out of most paragraphs. And as if the author wouldn’t devote labor to fluent transitions, each chapter is lazily broken up into short sections, some no more than a page-and-a-half long, each with a tag like “China” and “Britain.” Most sections end with the deflating subhead “Conclusions,” implying that Black himself had given up on making his themes and convictions clear throughout. Author and publisher have ill-served their subject by haste.
Unfortunately as well, Black steers frustratingly clear of the implications of his book. For what does it signify, for historians and others, that the heavy work put into getting the past straight appears (in his telling) to be so inconsequential? Given their weakness in the face of history’s misuse by the ignorant and ideological, coupled with recent assaults on the possibility of “objective” history, should historians close up shop and retreat to occupations with fewer obstacles in their path? These issues have always needed addressing, and never more so than with the publication of this depressing book.
Evidence of historians’ powerlessness to control use of the very knowledge in which they are expert—an absence of control that no one would tolerate among physicians or physicists—may be explained by the differences between humanistic and scientific knowledge, by the former’s availability to everyone in vernacular language and its relationship to political reality. But acknowledging as much doesn’t provide an intellectual and moral grounding for the responsible use of historical knowledge, or for the defense of that knowledge against countervailing forces. It’s a pity that Jeremy Black hasn’t had a go at providing one.
James M. Banner Jr. is the author, most recently, of Being a Historian.
