The Oxford History of Historical Writing - Volume 4: 1800–1945

THE OX FOR D HISTORY OF

HISTOR IC A L W R ITING

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a fi ve-volume, multi-authored scholarly

survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronological

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 periodization,

and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, refl ecting 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 fi rst 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 4: 1800–1945

Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók

volume editors

Ian Hesketh

assistant editor

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox

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2 6dp

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

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© Oxford University Press 2011

© Editorial Matter Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók 2011

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First published 2011

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The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible by the

generous fi nancial support provided by the Offi ces 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 are the volume editors,

without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their will￾ingness to sign on, and for their fl exibility 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 reader￾ship and approvals process. After her departure, my colleagues and I enjoyed able

help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial level and, editori￾ally, 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 fi nancial

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 Offi ces of the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost

and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kachanoski and

Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offi ces who saw the project’s potential.

The funding they provided enabled the project to hire a series of project assist￾ants, to involve graduate students in the work, and defrayed some of the costs of

publication such as the production of images and maps. It also permitted the

acquisition of computer equipment and of a signifi cant number of books to sup￾plement the fi ne 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 ‘fi nish-line’, to transfer the research

library, and in particular to retain the services of an outstanding research associ￾ate, Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh. I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s meticu￾lous attention to detail, and his ability ruthlessly to cut through excess prose

(including on occasion my own) in order to ensure that the volumes maintained

editorial uniformity internally and also with other volumes, not least because

the volumes are not all being published at once. A series of able graduate stu￾dents 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

General Editor’s Acknowledgements vii

I have to thank the Offi ce of the Dean of Arts and Science for providing project

space at Queen’s, 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.

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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 confer￾ences 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 fi rmly under￾stood 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, fol￾lowing Eduard Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neuren Historiographie ,

were written by master historians surveying their discipline and its origins. The

Oxford series provided some much needed perspective, though it was not fol￾lowed up for many years, and more recent surveys in the last two or three decades

of the twentieth century have continued to speak of historiography 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 fi rst 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 fi ve volumes of OHHW

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

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

We have done the fi rst because the history of non-European historical writing

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

We have chosen the second in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative

narrative (albeit with well over 100 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

x Foreword

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, feature not at all in volume 1, non￾Muslim Africa 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 fi ve 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 important, 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 fi ve to

fi fty 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 fi nd out something about a par￾ticular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’s over 150 chapters can

search elsewhere, in particular to a number of reference books which have

appeared in the past fi fteen or so years, some of which have global range. Our

volumes are of course indexed, but we have deemed a cumulative index an inef￾fi cient 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; 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 consoli￾dated in each volume’s index.

Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are of course

necessary 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 edi￾tors 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

Foreword xi

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

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

in separate national and chronological fi elds, in order to pursue a common inter￾est 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 unneces￾sary repetition of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with cal￾endrical years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and

‘Renaissance’—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 vol￾ume) 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.

As noted in the introduction, OHHW vol. 4, under the editorship of Stuart

Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók, covers the crucial period in the for￾mation of the modern ‘discipline’ of history and all the institutional infrastructure

that has supported it—universities, national historical organizations, modern aca￾demic journals, organized public record publications, and so on. It is a period

bracketed by two era-changing military confrontations, the Napoleonic wars at

the outset and the Second World War at the conclusion. It is the age of modern

global empires (several of them either destroyed or radically reconfi gured by the

two world wars in the fi rst half of the twentieth century) and of the beginning of

modern electronic communications and machine-driven travel. It is the time of

xii Foreword

rampant nationalism (which interacted with history in different ways, according

to the setting) and of a range of other ‘isms’—Romanticism, historicism (and its

not entirely synonymous German counterpart, Historismus ), Marxism, and so on.

And, of perhaps greatest signifi cance, given the global aspirations of this series, it

is the extended conjoncture in our cumulative narrative at which Western forms

and styles of historicity (a rather broad category which admits of wide variations

in the several parts of Europe and its colonial offshoots) spread to embrace most

of the planet. Academic disciplinary structures and ‘historical methods’ were either

imposed by the European metropolis on its subject peripheries and settler off￾shoots, or they were willingly adopted by independent Asian powers—China and

Japan being the outstanding but not the only examples—seeking to use history as

a means to ‘modernize’ themselves and keep pace with the perceived progress of

the West. In some cases (the Americas fi rst, and later India and Africa), history

would serve the cause of eventual independence from European rule; the conclu￾sion of that process is recounted in the already published OHHW vol. 5). As the

editors note, one by-product of this successful dissemination of Western methods

and practices was the near total elision, until recently, of non-Western forms from

most accounts of the history of historical writing. By both accounting for the

establishment of modern historiography and recognizing the alternatives that it

displaced or marginalized, the editors and authors of OHHW vol. 4 have here

helped set the ‘rise of history’ in a rather different, and clearer, light.

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). 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 specifi c, published English translation is listed, in

which case the bracketed title will also be in italics.

Contents

List of Maps xvi

Notes on the Contributors xvii

Advisory Board xxi

Editors’ Introduction 1

Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók

PART I: THE RISE, CONSOLIDATION, AND CRISIS

OF EUROPEAN TRADITIONS

1. The Invention of European National Traditions in

European Romanticism 19

Stefan Berger

2. The Intellectual Foundations of Nineteenth-Century

‘Scientifi c’ History: The German Model 41

Georg G. Iggers

3. Contemporary Alternatives to German Historicism in the

Nineteenth Century 59

Eckhardt Fuchs

4. The Institutionalization and Professionalization of History

in Europe and the United States 78

Gabriele Lingelbach

5. ‘Experiments in Modernization’: Social and Economic

History in Europe and the United States, 1880–1940 97

Lutz Raphael

6. Lay History: Offi cial and Unoffi cial Representations, 1800–1914 115

Peter Burke

7. Censorship and History, 1914–45: Historiography in

the Service of Dictatorships 133

Antoon De Baets

PART II: HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND NATIONAL

TRADITIONS

8. German Historical Writing 161

Benedikt Stuchtey

9. Historical Writing in France, 1800–1914 184

Pim den Boer

xiv Contents

10. Shape and Pattern in British Historical Writing, 1815–1945 204

Michael Bentley

11. The Polycentric Structure of Italian Historical Writing 225

Ilaria Porciani and Mauro Moretti

12. Historical Writing in Spain and Portugal, 1720–1930 243

Xosé-Manoel Núñez

13. Scandinavian Historical Writing 263

Rolf Torstendahl

14. Historical Writing in the Low Countries 283

Jo Tollebeek

15. The Golden Age of Russian Historical Writing: The Nineteenth

Century 303

Gyula Szvák

16. East-Central European Historical Writing 326

Monika Baár

17. Historical Writing in the Balkans 349

Marius Turda

PART III:EUROPE’S OFFSPRING

18. Writing American History, 1789–1945 369

Thomas Bender

19. The Writing of the History of Canada and of South Africa 390

Donald Wright and Christopher Saunders

20. Historical Writing in Australia and New Zealand 410

Stuart Macintyre

21. Historical Writing in Mexico: Three Cycles 428

D. A. Brading

22. Brazilian Historical Writing and the Building of a Nation 447

Ciro Flamarion Cardoso

23. Historians in Spanish South America: Cross-References

between Centre and Periphery 463

Juan Maiguashca

PART IV: NON-EUROPEAN CULTURAL TRADITIONS

24. The Transformation of History in China and Japan 491

Axel Schneider and Stefan Tanaka

25. The Birth of Academic Historical Writing in India 520

Dipesh Chakrabarty