Clio's Battles: Historiography in Practice

Please give me a helpful vote on Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/review/R189EDA40HH26Y/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

This is a book about historiography. Historiography is the study of historical writing. So, this book is a study of the study of historical writing, which is fairly self-referential, and sort of captures the feel of the book.

The author, Jeremy Black, starts with history writing in the ancient world and takes it into our future. His book is ordered chronologically so that each chapter covers some aspect of history. His technique is to jump to individual examples of history writing and the role that such writing fulfilled in that culture, time and nation. His insights are valid and interesting but since he covering the world and all of history, plus the future, the sense is of a superficial barrage of facts. Black ends each chapter with a conclusion, but I found the conclusions frustrating because he did not draw some broader or general overview or lesson from his innumerable examples. Instead, he would usually start with some new particular detail and talk about that instead of the rest of the chapter.

Given the broad topic that this book covers, it is hard to generalize, but if I must, I think that Black's examples show that historiography largely conforms to and supports and promotes the ideology of those in power or who want to be in power. How long has this been going on? Well, it has been going on in a self-conscious way for a long time:

“At the same time, history served as a way to strengthen the dynastic position because the very process of sponsoring history demonstrated appropriate conduct. Political legitimacy required a respect for history. Thus, Khubilai Khan (the grandson of the great Mongol conqueror, Chinggis Khan), who, as Great Khan of the Mongols from 1260 to 1294, completed the Mongol conquest of China, overthrowing the Song, responded favorably to suggestions that a dynastic history in the traditional Chinese style be produced. This response pleased the Confucian intellectuals as showing respect for the Chinese heritage. Confucianism stressed the role of the past and the value of historical models as guides for conduct: the works of Confucius are primarily about past examples of wise and virtuous men. Khubilai approved the founding of a History Office able to assemble records and compose histories, a policy that had been called for by a prominent Confucian scholar. Crucially, the latter wanted to have the historical records of non-Chinese rulers collected and their dynasties commemorated, an approach that made sense of the Mongols and helped incorporate them in Chinese history.”

This seems obvious and simplistic, but Black's numerous examples offer endless variations on this theme. History has been used to provide legitimacy for one side against another and also to delegitimize the other side with equal force. Both Whigs and Tories were able to find examples from history to support opposition or support to governmental policies. As for delegitimizing the other side, there is nothing quite like a historical grievance, particularly in our age when weaponizing grievances through the vehicle of fake history:

“The bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade brought up also the contrast between a historicized sense of grievance, which it was easy to express, and the more complex reality of problems in the modern world. At the same time that Britain was being denounced for the historical slave trade, a denunciation in which there was scant reference to the key role of African cooperation in the trade, African regimes were doing little to criticize the dictatorial and destructive regime of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe who ran the country from 1980. That he was also deliberately propagating what will be a partial, if not false, history made this contrast doubly ironic. Mugabe's claim that the economic travails of Zimbabwe were due to British pressure gave no weight to the mistakes of his own government's policy, but it was a claim that was apparently accepted by many other African states. The shared history of violent opposition to white ruling systems proved more significant, notably for South Africa. The contrasts between the extensive memorialization of the iniquities of the slave trade in Britain and the far more hesitant engagement with the devastation wrought by Mugabe were instructive. The needs in history in the public sphere for good and bad played a role in the preference for criticizing the slave trade, and in the means of doing so. Furthermore, the idea of devoting time to the complexities of issues such as the destructive impact today of First World tariffs on African producers, for example cotton farmers in Burkina Faso and Mali, was clearly not an attractive one.”

Of course, the experts at weaponizing historiography were, and remain, the Communists. This seems more like science fiction than history:

“The significance of these developments can be grasped by assessing the situation in China, where a Communist dictatorship remains to this day. China's inability to cope with its recent history is striking. In particular, there is a determination to hide the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, with the state using force to end pro-democracy uprisings. As such, the episode was a historical crux of the legitimacy of rule by the Chinese Communist Party, one that led Bill Clinton to argue that this party had forever put itself on the wrong side of history. The reports of the unrest were highly misleading, and rewriting was followed by excising the episode. This proved particularly effective for cities outside Beijing, where there were foreign journalists; for example, Chengdu, where the unrest and its brutal suppression long remained hidden. Moreover, no public discussion is permitted – a situation enforced by Internet censors in order to reinforce collective amnesia. Thus, in 2013, Li Weiguo, an activist who applied for permission to hold a candlelight vigil, was detained and interrogated by the police, while, in 2014, a private symposium held in Beijing to commemorate the 25th anniversary led to interrogations and detentions. Most students today cannot identify the iconic photograph of a man standing in front of a column of tanks near the square. Moreover, most young Chinese know nothing about the massacre or understand it solely in terms of the party's propaganda about its role and past.”

Black offers some thoughts about the historiography of the future. America will remain strong, China will get stronger, and Europe will splinter, with the effect that history will be reinterpreted to reflect a Third World perspective. Black shows a real ability to think outside the box with these observations:

“There are also more “blue-skies” challenges worth mentioning. Genetic engineering may well lead to developments in cloning that raise fundamental questions about motivation and agency. The same may come from advances in robotics including the creation of cyborgs merging aspects of humanity and robotics, as well as advances in artificial intelligence, and in computer technology and application. Aside from the degree that such changes transform the “we” who are the stuff and source of historical work, the prospect of historical methods that make sense of initiatives by such bodies, let alone their experiences, is arresting.
Even more so is the prospect that the next millennium may see contact with other life forms in the solar system, not least if more planets are discovered. If it occurs, such contact will pose problems for a range of intellectual specialisms, notably philosophy and theology. History will not be immune, not least as it will be appropriate to devise a historiography that makes sense of human life alongside that of other life-forms. There will need to be an understanding of differing meanings of time and its impact. Geology, a historical science with a distinctive approach to the collection and evaluation of evidence,24 already poses this challenge. Attempts in the early nineteenth century to reconcile geology and theology, attempts linked to the Christian account of the creation and the age of the world, failed. More recently, there has been scant attempt to integrate geology with history in conceptual terms. In contrast, the rise of climate change as a major issue and of environmental history as a sub-discipline, have helped to make it more important to try to reconcile human with non-human terrestrial history. At the same time, there is a danger that such an attempt leads to a geographical determinism linked to socio-biological explanations. Such an attempt, seen for example in the work of Jared Diamond,25 has the appeal of clarity. However, it is mistaken to imagine that theories devised for the natural sciences can be readily transferred to their human counterparts.”

This is a very interesting book, but it is also very dense and thick with an encyclopedia of particular historical examples. It is not a light read and probably not appropriate for the novice or general reader. There is a lot to digest here, and it probably merits several rereads.