“My first answer to the question, What is History? is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and the present”
This is E.H. Carr’s theses line at the end of the first chapter (The Historian and His Facts) of his seminal study - “What is History”, and I believe it is one of the most comprehensive statements made about the nature of history. This is my second reading of Carr, I read these words four years ago as a student of history and they impressed me deeply and to a large extent shaped my position on the subject. What is history? It is not a question one normally engages with, history to the majority of us who learn it in school is a series of wars and conquests, royalty and revolutions, violence and spectacle. It resides largely in the realm of academia, often deemed an unnecessary system of knowledge in practical everyday life. Carr’s interpretation of it as a tool (amongst other things) of understanding the present imbued the study of history with some added value and the advent of the idea that it could be constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed made the prospect all the more exciting. His key idea, that “history is an unending dialogue between the past and the present”, though propounded five decades ago, I believe, is still as valid as it was in his context.
The terms “process” and “dialogue” establish history as a deliberate construct that helps us understand our present realities through the perspective of time and collective experience. They also emphasize that history is every changing, it can never be completely pinned down to a single set of meanings, and that no historian however convincing or influential has the final word.
Carr says, “When we attempt to answer the question what is history, our answer consciously or unconsciously reflects our own position in time, and forms part of our answer to the broader question what view we take of the society in which we live.” This seems to explain why different kinds of history is written in different eras of thought and why there is the constant need to reconstruct the past. It also means, I believe, that no kind of history that is written is incorrect – it eventually morphs into a past and historiography gives us as much insight into the concerns of a time as history itself.
If one takes the example of G.M.Trevelyan and the tradition of the Whig historians, their point of view was essentially imperialist and the stress lay rather more on chronicle than interpretation because they lived in a society which believed in a certain model of progress where the colonists were redeeming the natives from ignorance and their backward cultures by teaching them more civilized modern and essentially western ways of living. The fetishism of collecting facts of the nineteenth century historian, can be traced back to Darwin’s revolutionary theory of evolution which was one of the greatest achievements of those times. The stability and confidence of early industrial society is reflected in the histories written at that time and in their blind faith in facts as concrete and irrefutable, much in the way they believed their model of progress was.
Carr wrote “What is history?” in 1961, and it becomes evident that a lot of the dichotomies in his writing is a product of the turbulent post war decades that saw a disillusionment with the establishment and the accepted ideas of progress. That he lays so much emphasis on interpretation is no coincidence in an atmosphere which was becoming conditioned to question any given information especially if it came from authority or institution. The fact that his school of history became so popular in the following two decades reflects the spirit of rebellion that pervaded youth culture and university campuses in the 60s and 70s. Similarly his struggle between trying to reconcile the subjective with the objective may seem futile to us now, but it must have been an almost existential question at a time when science was still considered the epitome of how a system of knowledge should function and postmodernism was still in its foetal stages. The fact that economic forces were given so much importance in historical writing of the time was because Marxism was one of the dominant ideologies and communism was on an ascendant.
Similarly, the 80s and early 90s saw a surge of revisionist history which reversed the radical histories of the previous decades and returned to a more conservative point of view at the same time as the fall of the Soviet Union and the return to power of conservative governments such as under Reagan and Thatcher.
The fact that the construction of history is guided by the dominant ideologies of our time is further illustrated in the way history is being written today. The focus on individual narratives, the disintegration of the subject into various specialisms and the skepticism of all forms of meta narratives is certainly reflective of alienation and fragmentation – two primary concerns of post modern society. The growing field of post colonial studies and the advent of bottom up histories, I believe, is a result of the first generation authorial voices that have emerged from beyond the traditional bastions of scholarship in the west. The popularity of cultural history today also has a lot to do with the questions of identity which have gathered primacy in the era of globalization and the internet. The fact that we all tend to agree that all history is subjective and that objectivity is an almost utopian ideal is certainly influenced by post structuralist thinkers such as Foucault or Derrida.
This is a brief illustration of what I understand to be the unending dialogue between the past and present which constitutes history – where the historian is at once agent and catalyst. And though one may never be sure of the facts of the past, surely the histories written in the future will continue to differ in their re-telling of the same stories.
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