The Oxford History of Historical Writing - Volume 3: 1400–1800

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF

HISTORICAL WRITING

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-volume, multi-authored schol￾arly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronologi￾cal history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with

considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of

comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular

period, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodi￾zation, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, reflect￾ing both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in

historical activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford

History of Historical Writing is the first collective scholarly survey of the history of

historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.

Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600

Volume 2: 400–1400

Volume 3: 1400–1800

Volume 4: 1800–1945

Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

Daniel Woolf

GENERAL EDITOR

The Oxford History of

Historical Writing

VOLUME 3: 1400–1800

Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo,

and Daniel Woolf

VOLUME EDITORS

Ian Hesketh

ASSISTANT EDITOR

1

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Editorial matter # Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf 2012

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The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible by the generous

financial support provided by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research)

and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at the University of

Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently by Queen’s University,

Kingston, Ontario.

General Editor’s Acknowledgements

The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of several

years of work and many hands and voices. As general editor, it is my pleasure to

acknowledge a number of these here. First and foremost, to the volume editors,

without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their

willingness to sign on, and for their flexibility in pursuing their own vision for

their piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goals

and unity of editorial practices. The Advisory Board, many of whose members

were subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely of

their time and wisdom. At Oxford University Press, former commissioning

editor Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it through

the readership and approvals process. After her departure, my colleagues and

I enjoyed able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial

level and, editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, and

Stephanie Ireland. I must also thank the OUP production team and Carol

Carnegie in particular.

The series would not have been possible without the considerable financial

support from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan. At the

University of Alberta, where I worked from 2002 to mid-2009, the project was

generously funded by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research) and the

Provost and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kacha￾noski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offices, who saw the project’s

potential. The funding they provided enabled me to hire a series of project

assistants, to involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some of the

costs of publication such as images and maps. It permitted the acquisition of

computer equipment and also of a significant number of books to supplement

the fine library resources at Alberta. Perhaps most importantly, it also made the

crucial Edmonton conference happen. At Queen’s University in Kingston,

Ontario, where I moved into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding was

provided to push the project over the ‘finish-line’, to transfer the research library,

and in particular to retain the services of an outstanding research associate,

Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh. I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s meticulous

attention to detail, and his ability ruthlessly to cut through excess prose (includ￾ing on occasion my own) in order to ensure that volumes maintained editorial

uniformity internally and together with other volumes, not least because the

volumes are not all being published at once. A series of able graduate students

have served as project assistants, including especially Tanya Henderson, Matthew

Neufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen, the last of

whom almost single-handedly organized the complex logistics of the Edmonton

conference. Among the others on whom the project has depended I have to thank

the Office of the Dean of Arts and Science for providing project space at Queen’s

University, and the Department of History and Classics at Alberta. Melanie

Marvin at Alberta and Christine Berga at Queen’s have assisted in the manage￾ment of the research accounts, as has Julie Gordon-Woolf, my spouse (and

herself a former research administrator), whose advice on this front is only a

small part of the support she has provided.

General Editor’s Acknowledgements vii

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Foreword

Daniel Woolf, General Editor

Half a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitled

Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia. Consisting of four volumes devoted to East

Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on conferences

held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in the

late 1950s, that series has aged surprisingly well; many of the individual essays are

still being cited in our own day. The books were also remarkably ahead of their

time since the history of historical writing was at that time firmly understood as

being the history of a European genre. Indeed, the subject of the history of history

was itself barely a subject—typical surveys of the early to mid-twentieth century by

the likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry Elmer Barnes, following Eduard

Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie [History of

Modern Historiography], were written by master historians surveying their disci￾pline and its origins. The Oxford series provided some much needed perspective,

though it was not followed up for many years, and more recent surveys in the last

two or three decades of the twentieth century have continued to speak of histori￾ography as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice. Since the late 1990s

a number of works have been published that challenge the Eurocentrism of the

history of history, as well as its inherent teleology. We can now view the European

historiographic venture against the larger canvas of many parallel and—a fact often

overlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or speaking about the past from

Asia, the Americas, and Africa.

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit. It seeks to

provide the first collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the globe.

It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately seeks

neither to imitate nor to replace it. For one thing, the five volumes collectively

include Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for another, the

division among these volumes is chronological, rather than by region. We

decided on the former because the history of non-European historical writing

should, no more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed in isolation.

We chose the latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative narrative

(albeit with well over a hundred different voices), and in order to facilitate

comparison and contrast between regions within a broad time period.

A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order. First, while the series

as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, each

individual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particular

period in the history of historical writing. These periods shrink in duration as

they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extant

materials and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter

to a fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume 1;

non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume 1 nor volume 2). Second, while the

volumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogue

both within and between its five editorial teams and the general editor, there has

been no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume.

In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teams

have been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘go

their own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—

with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither an

encyclopedia nor a dictionary. A multi-volume work that attempted to deal

with every national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easily

spread from five to fifty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that the

editors seek. We have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while every

effort has been made to balance coverage and provide representation from all

regions of the world, there are undeniable gaps. The reader who wishes to find

out something about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’s

more than 150 chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number of

reference books which have appeared in the past fifteen or so years, some of

which have global range. Our volumes are of course indexed, but we have

deemed a cumulative index an inefficient and redundant use of space. Similarly,

each individual essay offers a highly selective bibliography, intended to point the

way to further reading (and where appropriate listing key sources from the period

or topic under discussion in that chapter). In order to assist readers with limited

knowledge of particular regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certain

chapters have included a timeline of major events, though this has not been

deemed necessary in every case. While there are (with one or two exceptions) no

essays devoted to a single ‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian and

Herodotus to the present are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays with

dates of birth and death, these have been consolidated in each volume’s index.

Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are neces￾sary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity. Towards that end, a

number of steps were built into the process of producing this series from the very

beginning. Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only were

scholars encouraged to communicate with one another within and across

volumes, but draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentary

and review by other authors. A climactic conference, convened at the University

of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, in September 2008, brought most of the

editors and just over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing and

exciting two days during which matters of editorial detail and also content and

substance were discussed. A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference

x Foreword

and series, is that it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work in

separate national and chronological fields, in order to pursue a common interest

in the history of historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways. As the

series’ general editor, it is my hope that these connections will survive the end of

the project and produce further collaborative work in the future. Several key

decisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most important of

which was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnecessary repeti￾tion of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with calendrical

years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renais￾sance’—remain somewhat arbitrary. Thus volume 1, on antiquity, ends about AD

600 prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor, volume 2,

on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and in China

(the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every volume), the

period from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties. Volumes 4 and 5 have a

similar overlap in the years around the Second World War. While 1945 is a

sensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in China,

again, 1949 is the major watershed. Certain topics, such as the Annales School,

are not usefully split at 1945. A further change pertained to the denotation of

years BC and AD; here, we reversed an early decision to use BCE and CE, on the

grounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; BC/AD have at least been

adopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian European

origins.

It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with two

sets of two volumes each (vols. 1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways

as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about

1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era. A further

decision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustra￾tions very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusion

could be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographic

forms of commemorating the past. There are no decorative portraits of famous

historians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history of

historiography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern,

Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee.

This, the third volume in the series (and fourth to be published), spans the gap

between the first two volumes (covering antiquity and what is usually called—

problematically in the case of South Asia and Islam—the ‘Middle Ages’) and

volumes 4 and 5, which deal with modernity. The roughly four centuries covered

in the present volume encompass a period of enormous change, including the

Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and French Revolution in Europe,

the Ming and early Qing dynasties in China, the rise and fall of the Mughal

Empire in India, and the vicissitudes within the other main Islamic powers, the

Persian and Ottoman Turkish empires. It is also the volume in which the

Americas enter fully into the history of history, and both European and

Foreword xi

indigenous forms of historical writing are the subjects of several chapters; Africa,

too, absent from the preceding volumes (with the exception of North African

Islamic writers) receives its first extended treatment here. The editors of this

volume have assembled an international roster of authors with expertise in a

variety of different historical cultures, and they have also included thematic

chapters, many with a strong comparative dimension, addressing some of the

issues that arose over the period, from the application of philological techniques

to historical evidence, to the emergence of ‘antiquarianism’ and the relations

between history, myth, and fiction.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

Non-Roman alphabets and writing systems have been routinely transliterated

using the standard systems for each language (for instance, Chinese using the

Pinyin system). For the transliteration of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac we

have followed the rules set out by the International Journal of Middle Eastern

Studies. Non-English book titles are normally followed (except where meaning is

obvious) by a translated title, within square brackets, and in roman rather than

italic face, unless a specific, published English translation is listed, in which case

the bracketed title will also be in italics.

xii Foreword

Contents

List of Maps xvi

Notes on the Contributors xvii

Advisory Board xxi

Editors’ Introduction 1

Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf

1. Chinese Official Historical Writing under the Ming and Qing 24

Achim Mittag

2. The Historical Writing of Qing Imperial Expansion 43

Pamela Kyle Crossley

3. Private Historiography in Late Imperial China 60

On-cho Ng

4. A Social History of Japanese Historical Writing 80

Masayuki Sato

5. Writing History in Pre-Modern Korea 103

Don Baker

6. Southeast Asian Historical Writing 119

Geoff Wade

7. Indo-Persian Historical Thoughts and Writings: India 1350–1750 148

Asim Roy

8. Persian Historical Writing under the Safavids (1501–1722/36) 173

Christoph Marcinkowski

9. Ottoman Historical Writing 192

Baki Tezcan

10. Islamic Scholarship and Understanding History in

West Africa before 1800 212

Paul E. Lovejoy

11. Philology and History 233

Donald R. Kelley

12. Major Trends in European Antiquarianism, Petrarch to Peiresc 244

Peter N. Miller

13. History, Myth, and Fiction: Doubts and Debates 261

Peter Burke

14. Historical Writing in Russia and Ukraine 282

Michael A. Pesenson and Jennifer B. Spock

15. Austria, the Habsburgs, and Historical Writing in Central Europe 302

Howard Louthan

16. German Historical Writing from the Reformation

to the Enlightenment 324

Markus Vo¨lkel

17. Italian Renaissance Historical Narrative 347

William J. Connell

18. Italian Historical Writing, 1680–1800 364

Edoardo Tortarolo

19. History and Historians in France, from the Great Italian

Wars to the Death of Louis XIV 384

Chantal Grell

20. The Historical Thought of the French Philosophes 406

Guido Abbattista

21. Writing Official History in Spain: History and Politics, c.1474–1600 428

Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske

22. Historical Writing in Scandinavia 449

Karen Skovgaard-Petersen

23. Historical Writing in Britain from the Late Middle

Ages to the Eve of Enlightenment 473

Daniel Woolf

24. Scottish Historical Writing of the Enlightenment 497

David Allan

25. English Enlightenment Histories, 1750–c.1815 518

Karen O’Brien

26. European Historiography on the East 536

Diogo Ramada Curto

27. A New History for a ‘New World’: The First One Hundred

Years of Hispanic New World Historical Writing 556

Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske

xiv Contents