Writing History

Crescat Sententia's Amy Lamboley has a round-up of some recent discussion about the current state of historical writing. For my part, I agree with almost everything that's been said, but can't resist adding a few thoughts of my own.

First, I wonder what the relationship is between the evolution of academic writing about history and the growing association between history and the social sciences. Anthropology, political science, and sociology all provide valuable models through which to understand the past, yet they do so with an often specialized vocabulary and manner of expression which is foreign to mainstream English. Rendering something like "symbolic capital" or "political legitimacy" in a way that remains faithful to the concept which you are trying to apply yet makes clear sense to the average reader is a much more difficult task than simply saying that the government was popular.

Secondly, I'm not convinced that the dearth of readable historical writing really exists. Let's admit that there are no Edward Gibbons among us, but also add that the high cultural preferences of the current age don't lend themselves as well to history. There is still tons of well-written history, perhaps better for the fact it is based on the pain-staking research of armies of scholars who focused on figuring out that narrow topic that allows for another solid paragraph or two in a general work. On my desk right now, for example, is John Keay's India: A History, a highly readable work of the type Schama would love which has in its bibliography books such as Muzaffar Alam's The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707-1748. Theodore Hall Partrick's Traditional Egyptian Christianity probably benefitted greatly from D.P. Little's article "Coptic Conversion to Islam under the Bahri Mamluks" in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.

Any interested reader would also get a lot out of the "Cambridge Illustrated" histories and "Oxford" histories of different groups all over the world. On my sidebar you see The Oxford History of Islam, edited by Georgetown University's John Esposito and containing chapters by the University of Chicago's Fred Donner, AU-Beirut's Majid Fakhry, Stanford's Ahmad Dallal, and others, all scholars at the top of their field who contributed to this volume because they found it worthwhile. The current director of UW-Madison's Middle East Studies Program, David Morgan, has a wonderfully written (very witty) book called The Mongols, one of a number of such books published by Blackwell Publishers all written by serious scholars.

The average dissertation or monograph will probably always be somewhat difficult to read, simply because it serves a different function than an authoritative book for general readers: Convincing other scholars that your interpretation of the evidence or suggested approach is correct or useful. For my own dissertation, I need to go over why I accept some transmitters of Muslim historical traditions more than others, or why I take the stands I do in historiographical debates so that 1.) Other scholars will see I know what I'm talking about a give me a job teaching students and 2.) Knowledgeable readers will take my ideas and put them into the more well-written works for the general public. Does that mean I'm a scholar writing for other scholars? Probably, but we're to a point in history where we can do that and still make a contribution.

One additional point about broad vs. narrow topics: Back in the Middle Ages, there were people like Ibn Sina who aspired to know all of human knowledge up to that time. Now, no one would dream of that. There's simply too much knowledge floating around. Ira Lapidus can write A History of Islamic Societies after decades of working in the field soaking up knowledge and experience. Those of us on a 5-year dissertation clock must content ourselves with more modest goals. Peter Partner's God of Battles discusses the idea of holy war in religions of Middle Eastern origin from ancient times to the present, yet the "By the Same Author" page begins with The Papal State under Martin V.

So to reiterate, I do agree that there's a lot of really opaque stuff being written by academic historians, and that a lot of this could be better. However, I don't see evidence of a crisis, but rather of a system that works fairly well and advanding historical knowledge, digesting new ideas and discoveries, and feeding that into the public consciousness in a variety of formats. As long as everyone involved can learn from and respect each other's different priorities and approaches, we should be in good shape.