The Oxford History of Historical Writing - Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF

HISTORICAL WRITING

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-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, reflecting 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 5: HISTORICAL WRITING SINCE 1945

Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf

VOLUME EDITORS

Ian Hesketh

ASSISTANT EDITOR

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford

3ox2 6dp

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

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

# Oxford University Press 2011

Editorial matter # Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf 2011

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate

reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction

outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,

Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover

and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Data available

Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India

Printed in Great Britain

on acid-free paper by

MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

ISBN 978–0–19–922599–6

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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 are 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

Bestley 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

Kachanoski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offices, who saw the

project’s potential. The funding they provided enabled the project 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 for two years 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 (including on occasion my own) in order to ensure that volumes main￾tained 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 management 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

This page intentionally left blank

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

Neuren Historiographie, 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

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 Eurocen￾trism 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 regional. 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, feature not 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 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

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

x Foreword

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

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 unnec￾essary repetition of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with

calendrical 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

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.

In volume 5, the second-published of the series but its concluding volume

chronologically, my co-editor, Axel Schneider, and I have had to deal with a tiny

fraction of the time covered in other volumes, but also a period of unprecedented

change—which has not yet abated. We decided at the planning stage that the

volume should have two sorts of chapters, one thematic and the other national￾regional. This, in essence, meant that many countries and parts of the world

would go unrepresented, but the series as a whole, as noted above, has never

intended comprehensive coverage. Moreover, while historiography is still in

Foreword xi

many ways organized by national fields, in the past sixty years the most interest￾ing changes have crossed and re-crossed spatial lines—at an accelerated pace in

the electronic/virtual era of the past ten to fifteen years—such that many

important developments would have fallen between geopolitical cracks in a

book arranged exclusively along national lines. Thus our volume begins with a

series of thematic chapters reflecting on history’s relations with its neighbours as

well as with a selection of the differing approaches, methodologies, and sub￾disciplines which have emerged in the past sixty-five years. These developments,

however, have played out in practice within the institutions and cultures of

particular countries and regions, and have been affected by variable political

and social circumstances. The second half of the book therefore traces the

working-out in practice of some of the themes opened up in the first half within

national, and in some cases transnational, contexts.

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 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

Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf

1. History and Theory 13

Chris Lorenz

2. History and Memory 36

Alon Confino

3. Censorship and History since 1945 52

Antoon De Baets

4. Postcolonial Criticism and History: Subaltern Studies 74

Gyan Prakash

5. World History 93

Ju¨rgen Osterhammel

6. Global Economic History: A Survey 113

Peer Vries

7. Women’s and Gender History 136

Julie Des Jardins

8. The Historiography of Environmental History 159

J. R. McNeill

9. The Historiography of Science and Technology 177

Seymour Mauskopf and Alex Roland

10. History and Social Science in the West 199

Kevin Passmore

11. From the Search for Normality to the Search for Normality:

German Historical Writing 220

Stefan Berger

12. Historical Writing in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary 243

Maciej Go´rny

13. French Historical Writing 266

Matthias Middell

14. British Historical Writing 291

Michael Bentley

15. Scandinavian Historical Writing 311

Rolf Torstendahl

16. Italian Historical Writing 333

Stuart Woolf

17. Historical Writing in the Balkans 353

Ulf Brunnbauer

18. Athens and Apocalypse: Writing History in Soviet Russia 375

Denis Kozlov

19. African Historical Writing 399

Toyin Falola

20. Argentine Historical Writing in an Era of Political and Economic

Instability 422

Joel Horowitz

21. Brazilian Historical Writing 440

Marshall C. Eakin

22. Mexican Historical Writing 454

Guillermo Zermen˜o Padilla

23. Historical Writing in the United States 473

Ian Tyrrell

24. Arab Historical Writing 496

Youssef M. Choueiri

25. Indian Historical Writing since 1947 515

Supriya Mukherjee

26. Thai Historical Writing 539

Patrick Jory

27. Vietnamese Historical Writing 559

Patricia Pelley

28. Indonesian Historical Writing after Independence 575

Ann Kumar

29. Settler Histories and Indigenous Pasts: New Zealand and Australia 594

Bain Attwood

30. Chinese Historical Writing since 1949 615

Susanne Weigelin-Schwiedrzik

31. Japanese Historical Writing 637

Sebastian Conrad

xiv Contents