History

The Oxford History of Historical Writing
Volume Two: 400-1400

Edited by Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson
Oxford University Press  646pp + xxii  £95

Thirty years ago it was usual in academic circles to hold that teaching or writing world history was out of the question because it could not be done in accordance with the high scholarly standards that History had aspired to and largely attained since the age of Ranke and Stubbs in the second half of the 19th century. In that argument the clincher was invariably that we did not know what sources there were and couldn’t read them if we did. Now we have grasped that there is no alternative. We must teach world history and learn to situate our own history in a global context, even if it sometimes has to be in the spirit of G.K. Chesterton: that if the thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly. Yet the old objection retains its force.

Nobody can discuss any issue in a global frame without relying on secondary literature, even if it is in part controlled, as of course it should be, by primary expertise in some small portion of it. The greatest difficulty in approaching work on a civilisation that we do not know at first hand is that, however sophisticated its analytical framework, however seductive its unfamiliar subject matter, however conscientiously the author describes the basis of her particular project, truly critical reading is sharply circumscribed by our wider ignorance of the nature and quality of the sources of the historiography to which it belongs.

It is the heroic task of The Oxford History of Historical Writing to address that problem – and particularly heroic in the case of volume two, called on to deal with a period more than twice the length of the next in the series (1400-1800) and 15 times of the last (since 1945). For, though the quantity may be less in something like proportion, the range is not, even allowing for the absence of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas. Twenty lecture-length chapters defined by region, proceeding roughly east to west, from China to Scandinavia, lay the groundwork, outlining the circumstances in which history was produced, the objects it was intended to serve and the changing forms it took.

The great empires and ‘world civilisations’ dominate the admirably comprehensive list but do not frame it: Korean, Coptic, Armenian historical writing, for instance, all have their chapters. Predictable common themes emerge: that history legitimised power, helped to construct polities and identities, tended over time to assume a greater variety of forms and embrace a wider range of subject matter. There is, rightly, no attempt to impose a common format or distil grand generalisations. Instead eight chapters on themes like ‘Universal Histories in Christendom and the Islamic World’, ‘Dynastic Historical Writing’ (in western Europe, Byzantium and China), ‘Religious History’ (in Europe and the Middle East) and so forth supply a series of vantage points, each anchored in its author’s home territory and selecting a couple of others for more or (usually) less thorough comparative discussion.

The volume has the limitations  of its format. Several chapters are brilliant and some are not; they work better as introductions to their own fields than as contributions to any coherent overview of how or why the world in this millennium recorded, understood and used its past. The requirements of the parts do not add up to an ideal balance for the whole. A specialist in the later centuries might feel short changed, because almost all these historiographies helped to shape, and were shaped by, the beginnings of their respective societies or polities; early texts and traditions predominate accordingly. A stranger to Europe would be left without a sense of the scale and quality of the great German historians of the 11th century, or the Anglo-Norman and Angevin ones of the 12th. They were by any standard among the finest and most important of the Middle Ages, but not, as it happens, particularly germane to the themes around which individual chapters, excellent in themselves, have been organised. As a Europeanist I can form little idea how the accounts of other historiographies may have been similarly tailored. But that is where we are. These weaknesses are all our weaknesses and this volume is a bold and helpful step towards addressing them. Nobody should venture into a part of world history new to them without consulting it.

R.I. Moore is Professor Emeritus of History at Newcastle University.