Inevitable Historicity

I don’t think the emergence of cultural history has removed the politics from social history. Instead of replacement, I see complementarity. If social history is concerned with the institutions and forces within a society and how people living within the society negotiate these structures, then cultural history is more concerned with the actual systems and practices of the people to the relative exclusion of the structures. I know I’ve mentioned a few times already that I took a course in imperial Russian history recently, but it bears mention again if only because it provides an example with which to think about the distinction between social and cultural history.

The Decembrist revolution of 1825 pitted former army veterans of the wars against Napoleon against the government – specifically the accession of Nicholas I as tsar following the death of his father, Alexander I. The Decembrists had wanted the tsar’s elder son Constantine to accede, but he had taken himself out of the line of succession. A social history of the revolt would focus on the army as an institution and its treatment of these veterans following their service, the secret societies that emerged in much of Europe over the previous decades and the involvement of these officers in the societies, and the role of the abolition of the service nobility three generations earlier. In comparison, the work of IIuri Lotman on the Decembrists sought to examine the culture of the Decembrists in terms of the “specific pattern of everyday behavior that distinguished the Decembrist not only from reactionaries and like minded ‘stiflers’ … but also from contemporary liberal and educated noblemen.”[1]

If the question is whether the focus in social history on race, class, and gender as “political factors” in social history is lessened in cultural history, then I would say that it is not. Rather, whereas social history would look at race, class, or gender as constructions that emerge as people negotiate the structures of their society (the why), cultural history would examine the practices of race, class, and gender during these processes (the how). In a sense, then, a complete picture of an historical event or period would require aspects of both social and cultural history.

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[1] Iiuri Lotman, “The Decembrist in Daily Life (Everyday Behavior as a Historical-Psychological Category,” in The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, edited by Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1985), 97.

To some extent, the definition and field of environmental history have reflected by the general arc of history in a larger sense over the course of the last forty-plus years, as well as the arc of the particular discipline of history. Important antecedents notwithstanding, Isenberg places the emergence of environmental history in 1976, with the publication of Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeil. In this sense, its emergence coincides with the increased attention paid politically to environmental degradation. The general definition that Isenberg offers – “environmental history understands the environment in a historical context, while at the same time understanding human history in an environmental context”[1] – seems to have not changed very much in these forty years; instead, what seems to have changed more is the discipline-specific emphases placed by historians.

For instance, in his essay, J.R. McNeill distinguishes three main “varieties” of environmental history: material, cultural/intellectual, and political. The material variety, which “concerns itself with changes in biological and physical environments”[2] and their interactions with societies, might consider the impact of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake on religious belief, while the cultural/intellectual variety might focus on the environment degradation wrought by industrialization, and the political version might focus on the events and decisions leading up to Nixon’s signing into law of the Environmental Protect Act of 1970. Each of these varieties represents an extension of an earlier field of historical inquiry; after all, it is not as if the increased secularization of society beginning in the late 18th century is a relatively new topic of inquiry, nor is industrialization or the decision of a President to approve rather than veto a law. Rather, while the focus on the environment or environmental phenomenon might be new, the examples above also represent extensions of pre-existing fields, respectively intellectual history, economic history, and political history.

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[1] Andrew C. Isenberg, “Introduction: A New Environmental History” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, edited by Andrew C. Isenberg (New York: Oxford UP, 2014), 6.

[2] J.R. McNeill, “Observations on the Nature and Culture of Environmental History,” History and Theory, 42, no. 4 (2003): 6.

In a post I wrote in the first week of this course, I wrote about how I felt a key purpose of the study of history was understanding how we came to our current situation so we can correct mistakes and hopefully set forth a better future; in this case, I discussed the specific controversy surrounding pseudoscientific claims about race and IQ. Although I have sensed from some of this week’s readings a certain hostility toward environmental determinism, I have to say that one key work in this subfield – Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel – is directly related to the topic I wrote about a few weeks ago. For that reason, I feel the way in which Diamond in that book so thoroughly accounts for the broad variation in human technological advancement and scientific knowledge is essential to refuting race/IQ claims, particularly as they have become increasingly common lately.

Specifically, using an extreme case, when Europeans first encountered indigenous Australians, the former were on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution and had established maritime empires, complex agriculture, and other markers of “advancement”; the Australians were still literally in the Stone Age. By explaining the comparative lack of domesticable plants and animals in Australia compared to Europe and Asia and why, as well as emphasizing the sheer isolation (for 50,000 years) of the Australians before Europeans arrived, the difference in advancement is no longer paradoxical. Armed with such a powerful argument, a racialist argument is not only no longer compelling (if it was in the first place), but also, the sheer complexity of the environmental determinist position belies the simplicity of the racial one.

In looking over this week’s readings, I’ve identified two tensions that have emerged in the field of environmental history over the course of time. The first is obliquely addressed in the essay by William Cronon, when he writes that, while race, class, and gender are fundamental considerations of some historians, other historians (himself included) “ally our historical work with that of our colleagues in the sciences, whose models, however imperfectly, try to approximate the mechanisms of nature.”[1] Here, Cronon sets himself apart from critical theory and its proponents (and their focus on the three aforementioned key aspects of human society); given the emergence of critical theory and its consolidation within the study of literature in the academy, this critique is underscored when Cronon later refers to the “disease of literary theory.”[2]

The other tension is addressed directly (and briefly) by Linda Nash in her essay. By asking whether agency as considered by historians as a human quality can be extended to nature (and vice versa), Nash engages some of the questions evoked by a more holistic consideration of human existence within its larger ecological context: “It is worth considering how our stories might be different if human beings appeared not as the motor of history but as partners in a conversation with a larger world, both animate and inanimate, about the possibilities of existence.”[3] In some sense, the question that Nash considers is a chicken and egg question, with the emphasis being less which came first and more which asserts greater agency (or power or centrality) than the other. While it might seem self-evidence that nature is more powerful than humanity, there are abundant examples of humans reining in nature’s power, even if, as Nash concedes, these efforts were often less intentional and more “idiosyncratic and ad hoc.”[4]

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[1] William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History, 78, no. 4 (1992): 1348.

[2] Ibid, 1350.

[3] Linda Nash, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency,” Environmental History, 10, no. 1 (2005): 69.

[4] Ibid, 68.

There seem to be three key reservations that Jeanne Boydston enunciates in her essays. The first is what she refers to as the suggestion “that categories of analysis exist a priori in the sources and have merely to be revealed.”[1] The issue here is one of bringing a tool of analysis to a scenario and assuming that the issue is there, rather than assessing the scenario and choosing the tool to apply accordingly — it’s a kind of putting the cart before the horse. This issue is related to one faced by Marxists, which is that they assume that class struggle underlies all of history, rather than first assessing an historical example for the presence of class as an issue.

The second issue is a difficulty among historians and theoreticians in distinguishing gender from sex. In so far as we have a current understanding that sex is biological while gender is sociallly constructed, it was not always the case. Even after (per Boydston) Gayle Rubin suggested this distinction, the definitions remained fluid and subject to debate such that, as Goydston writes, “[b]y the 1980s, it was becoming more difficult for women’s historians to avoid reevaluating the way they used the concept ‘gender’.”[2] Considering gender within the context of critical theory and its considerations of race and class, the problem simply increased in difficulty as intersections among these categories emerged.

Third and finally, Boydston notes about the concept of gender “its predilection for an invidious oppositional binary.”[3] This point is related to the movement by poststructuralism and postmodernism beyond binary oppositions. However, as much as recent and contemporary historians and theoreticians might want to move beyond such binaries, Boydston implies that there is something inherent in the concept itself that resists non-binary categorization. Boydston’s essay is now twelve years old, so perhaps the greater willingness of Western societies to countenance the idea of non-binary gender would undermine the point she made then, but the resistance to the emergence of a concept of gender that is non-binary among conservatives indicates that the evolution of the conceptualization of gender from binary to something multiple is far from over.

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[1] Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender & History, 20, no. 3 (2008): 560.

[2] Ibid, 561.

[3] Ibid, 575.

It seems that me that there are two reasons why gender matters: one general and one more specific. The general idea is that, because half of humanity is female and because the male half of the species has traditionally wielded significant power over the other half, a fairer and truer accounting of the past in history requires an approach that takes gender into account. This point, to me, seems self-evident in the same way that white supremacy has traditionally eclipsed the narratives of non-white peoples and, therefore, a fairer and truer accounting of the past requires a consideration of the experiences of these previously subaltern personalities. The primary difference is that, unlike race, which might not factor into some historical considerations, particularly before 1492, gender is nearly always a consideration.

More specifically (but related), since the advent of critical theory and the application of postmodernist principles to historical inquiry, gender, along with race and class, has become a central consideration of historical inquiry. As such, it cannot be ignored if one is to engage fully with the available scholarship on any topic. That said, each person’s mileage will vary regarding how much s/he chooses to engage gender historiographically. For instance, in her essay, Joan Scott details how feminist historians have taken three approaches to gender: an “entirely feminist” analysis of patriarchy; a Marxist approach; and a psychoanalytic approach.[1] Depending on how one understands historical processes, one or more of these approaches might be appropriate.

For instance, a Marxist, who would bring a decidedly formulaic understanding of history to the study thereof, could expand his/her understanding of class struggle as a driver of history by considering not only the external economic relationships during a period based on relationships with the means of production but also the domestic relationships that emerge for related reasons. Whereas this approach was inherently limited by its emphasis on class and economics, Scott concedes that the Foucauldian approach of emphasizing power relationships and their relationship to sexual politics, allowing a generation of feminist historians to analyze the power differential in gender relationships in new terms. “In so doing,” Scott writes, “they opened the question of causality and offered a variety of solutions to it.”[2]

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[1] Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91, no. 5 (1986): 1057-1058

[2] Ibid, 1060.

• What limitations are there in writing a ‘national’ history?  Are there any good examples of ‘national’ history that you have read?

Last semester, I took a course in Russian imperial history and so studied the history of that country between 1721 (pronunciation of Peter as imperator) and 1917 (February revolution and abdication of the Tsar). What was notable about the course was that we read no work that attempted to cover the entire period. It isn’t even that 200 years (roughly) is too long a period to cover in a monograph; it can be easily done with other countries. Rather, I think it is that there are simply too many “nations” within Russia to address them all coherently in a single volume.

If any book sought to provide a “national history” among the readings in that course, it was Children of Rus’: Right-Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation. However, the book did not attempt to cover “Russian history” so much as the construction of a particular myth of Russian origins in the Kievan Rus that was used in the period under study by Hillis (roughly mid-19th century through the Bolshevik Revolution) to varying extents of success to incorporate Ukraine into the Russian national consciousness. Thus, to some extent, the book tells the story of the promulgation of Official Nationality (nationality, orthodoxy, autocracy) at the highest levels of the empire in an attempt to positively assert the ethnic Russian nature of the empire. At the same time, however, Hillis shows how Ukrainian nationalism — at least as old as Khmelnytsky and the Mazepists — found its expression in the very same myths used by the proponents of Official Nationality.

In Chapter 3 of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson examines the role played by print capitalism – the term he coins to describe the phenomenon that emerged when printing press technology met a market economy – in the emergence of modern European nationalism. By prioritizing so-called administrative vernaculars over earlier languages of officialdom – principally Latin – print capitalism provided, according to Anderson, a crucial underpinning for the imagined national communities that emerged over the centuries following Gutenberg.

Anderson develops this argument methodically over these pages. The process by which Latin, as a rarefied language that few wrote and even fewer spoke, gave way to national languages more or less determined by territory was three-fold. First was secularization, which Anderson chalks up to the efforts of the Humanists in engendering a “new appreciation of the sophisticated stylistic achievements of the ancients.”^[1] Second, unsurprisingly, was the Reformation, which loosened the grasp that the Catholic Church had on literacy generally, and third was the spread of administrative vernaculars themselves, which Anderson calls “an independent factor in the erosion of the sacred imagined community [i.e., Catholic Christianity].”^[2]

From here, Anderson charts the process by which administrative vernaculars displaced older languages, using medieval and early modern England as an example (among others). While the common people continued to speak Old English/Anglo-Saxon following the establishment of Norman rule in 1066, the new ruling class used Latin for administrative purposes. Over the subsequent 250 to 300 years, Latin was replaced by Norman French, while simultaneously, Anglo-Saxon evolved into Middle English (which Anderson confusingly calls “Early English”). By the late 14th century, there were publication of John Wycliffe’s Bible and the introduction of Middle English as a court language. Still, Anderson cautions against concluding that this example characterizes the rise of a national language, rather than a state language; nevertheless, he adds, “the ‘choice’ of language appears as a gradual, unselfconscious, pragmatic, not to say haphazard development.”^[3]

We are still only halfway there, however. It remains for Anderson to detail the “half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.”^[4] While print technology provided a means for the phenomenon under study here, capitalism minimized the number of existing vernaculars, accreting related ones into single print languages. Here again there is a three-fold process: the creation of an intermediary level of discourse between common speech at the bottom and Latin at the top; a “fixity to language”^[5] dictated by the volume of reading material made possible by movable type; and the creation of “languages of power”^[6] – the term Anderson uses for what linguists would call a “prestige dialect.” Anderson ends the discourse with some notable examples, including the Americas.

To his credit, Anderson has provided a fascinating theory of how language emerged as a necessary piece of support for nationalism in Europe (and beyond), and he argues for this process convincingly. In so doing, he places himself in direct dialogue with his contemporary and fellow theoretician of nationalism, Ernest Gellner. Gellner himself was responding to the theories of his mentor Elie Kedourie, who had viewed nationalism through the lens of the developing world and postcolonialism, Whereas Kedourie, as a proponent of empire, had seen nationalism as a corrosive force that undermined the homogenizing tendencies of imperialism, Gellner sought to understand the historical processes that gave rise to nationalism, identifying modernization as essential among them. In so far as Kedourie was concerned with the roles that language and print played in nationalism, he limited his analysis to finding it ridiculous that the mere existence of a distinct language could qualify a population group as a nation, as well as noting with regard to print technology as a vector of nationalism that “the logic of a situation which nobody has designed or desired sometimes imposes a mastery against which it is vain to struggle.”^[7]

Gellner engages language much more thoroughly, offering his famous thought experiment of a minority ethnic group, the Ruritanians, living within the Empire of Megalomania, whose experience with industrialization evokes a crisis by which some percentage of the population allows itself to be absorbed by the now bourgeois Megalomanian society, while the remainder, spurred on by a small but influential intelligentsia, are swept up by a Ruritarian nationalist movement, which “brought forth a new high culture and its guardian state.”^[8] Regarding print, Gellner views it within the larger contexts of modernization and industrialization, affording it less significance than Anderson. In contrast, print technology is absolutely essential to Anderson’s argument about the role language plays in the emergence of nationalism. Whereas Gellner’s focus is explicitly Marxist, noting that the alienation of workers is a key factor in drawing the non-bourgeois within industrializing societies into nationalist movements, Anderson’s treatment is pre-industrial and thus pre-Marxist. While other parts of Imagined Communities engage Marx’s legacy more directly, Anderson is notably dissatisfied with how Marxism has addressed nationalism as a sociopolitical force. In the discussion of print capitalism, however, much of the history is pre-industrial and even the capitalism of which he writes is not industrial capitalism.

If there is a shortcoming to Anderson’s theory of how print capitalism cements the role of language in constructing national identity, it is in the limitation of his examples for the most part to pre-19th century cases that are not ethnic in nature. England and France are obvious choices given the historical roles played by print technology in those cultures, but he hints at something different in writing that the “same earthquake [of print capitalism] produced Europe’s first important non-dynastic, non-city states in the Dutch Republic and the Commonwealth of the Puritans.”^[9] Considered with the observation toward the end of the selection that the “nation-states of Spanish America or those of the ‘Anglo-Saxon family’ are conspicuous examples” of the success of print capitalism,^[10] we are left wondering how well (or poorly) Anderson’s model of print capitalism as fundamental force in the establishment of nationalism fits cases of ethnic nationalism – since the foregoing examples are all better characterized as instances of civic nationalism.

This point notwithstanding, Anderson has provided a powerful theory of the role of print capitalism and the creation of administrative vernaculars and, subsequently, prestige dialects in the imagining of modern European national communities. While the next important voice to join the debate about nationalism was Eric Hobsbawm, who engaged the ideas Gellner and the Czech historian Miroslav Hroch far more than those of Anderson, Hobsbawm had to concede the importance of administrative languages as “an important element of proto-national cohesion”^[11] as a topic best explicated by Anderson. At least as far as the antecedents of nationalism are concerned, Anderson’s theory has gained widespread acceptance.

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^[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 40.
^[2] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 43.
^[3] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 43.
^[4] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 44.
^[5] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 46.
^[6] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 46.
^[7] Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1961), 104.
^[8] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 2009), 62.
^[9] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 42.
^[10] Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47-48.
^[11] Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2012), 59.

• Can ‘national histories’ exist before ‘nations’ do?

Whether national histories can exist before nations do depends to some extent on how one defines the term “national history.” If the term is meant in a generic sense, then don’t think national histories can exist before nations do. Rather, it seems to me that a national history — or perhaps more accurately stated, an ethnic history — is a prerequisite for a nation to acquire nationhood. If the term is meant in the more specific sense that, e.g., Thomas Baker uses it in his essay on Michelet, Macauley, and Bancroft, then the relationship runs in the opposite direction: the nation comes first, followed by the national history, with the latter mainly a way to generate a sort of secular myth for the nation, particularly as avatars of political liberalism. Whereas the American colonists clearly saw themselves as a nation at some point before declaring independence and/or ratifying their constitution, they lacked national history in the specific sense meant by Baker until Bancroft. In turn, this process results in reifying the original nation in a somewhat transformed state, as Baker writes that these historians “helped invent the modern historical conception of nationhood in the years following the Napoleonic War.”[1]

• When and why have historians taken the nation as their unit of study?

I think that the emergence of the nation — or more properly the nation state in many cases — as a unit of study has largely to do with the movement in Europe away from anciens régimes and societies organized on estate systems and toward liberal democracies predicated on expanded suffrage, consent of the governed, individual rights, and the rule of law. This shift resulted in a movement away from “great man” histories toward histories designed to better understand more broadly defined polities. That his movement happened at the same, as Baker notes, that archives were slowly becoming available to researchers resulted in the post-Enlightenment unit of study correlating strongly with the nation state. On this point, Celia Applegate has summarized the situation nicely: “The issue is not so much that nations have been bigger and stronger than […] that the whole process by which the writing of history established itself as a profession in the modern era has been closely interwoven with the making and legitimating of nation-states.”[2]

• What, apart from written history, contributes to the creation of historical consciousness centred on the nation?

Factors such as a common language, a common culture (sometimes including religion), a shared geographic space, and importantly, a shared sense of victimization from outside all contribute to the creation of historical consciousness centered on the nation. Whereas the first three of these factors are comparatively ahistorical, the fourth is historical to some extent, although it can also be more mythic than historical.

• What are the attractions and the possible pitfalls in seeking to write national histories?

The primary attraction of writing national history is a discrete union of analysis. The historian, being bounded by the very bounds that are placed on nations themselves — primarily language and geography — can limit him- or herself on these bases and end up not having to cast too wide a net to force an historical narrative. The pitfall then becomes the inability to address topics that are fundamentally international in their natures or, conversely, subnational.

• What are the consequences of historians’ use of the nation as the basic unit of analysis?

Returning for a moment to Applegate, one major consequence of focusing on the unit is that it precludes the study of smaller geographic units, whether it is the region, state, province, city, town, or village. At the smallest end of this continuum, it precludes subgenres such as microhistory; on the other end, it precludes the study of subnational entities that can be as consequential as nation states in terms of their identities and histories. For instance, studying Belgium as a nation state precludes the study of Flanders and Wallonia as subnational units; studying the United States as a whole precludes study of the U.S. South in the same way.

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[1] Thomas N. Baker, “National History in the Age of Michelet, Macaulay, and Bancroft,” in Lloyd Kramer and Sarah C. Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005), 188.

[2] Celia Applegate, “A Europe of Regions: Reflections on the Historiography of Sub-National Places in Modern Times,” American Historical Review, 104, no. 4 (1999): 1159.

• How is a nation different from other social groups, geographical units and political communities?

This is a difficult question — not only for me personally but clearly for scholars as well. To determine the distinctions between and among different groupings when the overlaps can be substantial is a daunting task. In some ways, defining a nation in part is based on the “Imaginary” nature of nationhood as Benedict Anderson would have us believe. For instance, in the case of social groups, there are usually (although not always) concrete markers that can be assessed to determine one’s standing within such groups; class, e.g., is primarily economic and so measurable. Geographic units and political communities are concretely defined. Nations, however, are much “fuzzier” in terms of what constitutes them. Hastings, for instance, insists that ethnicities only become nations once it “possesses or claims the right to political identity and autonomy as a people” and can be “identified by a literature of its own.”[1] He notes that the Biblical Israelites provide a paradigmatic example, but given that Jews for most of their history in diaspora did not claim any political identity or autonomy. Does that mean that they were therefore not a nation? They certainly had a national literature, but Hastings seems to suggest that this criterion is necessary but not sufficient.

• What are the fundamental disagreements over when and why nations have come into being?

The disagreements are based in part on the terminology, as noted in the previous question. That said, another important factor is chronology. Whereas Hastings insists that nationhood goes back at least as far as the emergence of England as a coherent political entity, others (notably the “holy trinity” of Hobsbawm, Anderson, and Gellner) decided see it as something that coincides with the advent of liberalism and specifically the French Revolution. Within this controversy, I’m inclined to sight with Hobsbawm et al, particularly since I see the rise of nationalism — particularly ethnic nationalism — as a political force in Europe to be a direct reaction to liberalism and its inability to deliver on the principles that it claimed to embody.

• How do you think historians can most usefully study nations?

I think historians can most usefully study nations with detachment. Because there is so much subjectivity loaded into the idea of what constitutes a nation and because there is the necessary aspect (in my opinion) of their being imaginary, in some regards, only an outsider of a particular nation can study that nation dispassionately. In this regard, I sort of agree with the point of Hobsbawm’s about Zionists pursuing Jewish history that Hastings quotes — presumably in disagreement. The obverse of that coin, however, is that, for many smaller nations, there are few non-members of the nations who are sufficiently interested in them to undertake in-depth study. Therefore, if a member of a nation seeks to study his/her nation as an historian, it might best be pursued by conceding at the outset that the whole concept is contingent and subject to debate. An historian who is not able to concede that point is, I think, doomed to draw inherently subjective conclusions.

• What roles have historians played in the formation of modern nations? How have these roles changed since the nineteenth century?

In the past, I think historians have often played a key role in the construction of nationalist mythologies, particularly since (not to put the cart before the horse) I don’t think a nation can exist without history — given that history is a commonly understood criterion for nationhood. The role has changed, by and large, with historians taking a more critical approach to nationalism, not just of individual nations but of the concept of nationhood overall. In the same way that race is now commonly understood within the social sciences to be social construct, whereas it was seen as overwhelmingly “scientific” in the first half of the last century, nations were accepted as concrete realities by historians in the past, whereas now historians are more likely to submit the concept to skeptical analysis and conclude that, while there might be certain physical realities than underpin nationhood, it is more a construction like race.

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[1] Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge, UK, 1997), 3.