FUTURE BY HISTORY: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Philosophy of history has a threefold dimension: material, formal, and functional, which have largely been conceptualized as mutually exclusive. It is high time to mediate them into a coherent relationship, and Rohbeck's book is a decisive step toward such a new philosophy of history. The book is divided into three parts: the first deals with the relationship between history and the future, the second analyzes the relationship between history and ethics, and the third synthesizes these two aspects into a pragmatics of history. With regard to the first part, historical thinking is based on a perception of temporal otherness related to the past. Rohbeck prolongs the time perspective by bridging this time gap into the future. As to the second, Rohbeck replaces teleology by ethics. Teleology includes ethics but limits its scope to a one‐sided development. Ethics allows many more options. Finally, who is the agent for historical ethics? Rohbeck proposes the “generation” as the basic actor in historical change and the addressee of ethical commitment. At the end of his work, Rohbeck draws consequences for the idea of philosophy of history from his idea of historical ethics. He shows that history has a new perspective if it is viewed through the lens of ethical elements in the fundamental relationship between past, present, and future. Of course, many questions follow this fascinating new version of the old philosophy of history. I raise only three of them: (1) What synthesizes the three dimensions of time into one and the same history? (2) Did we not learn from historicism that values in ethics have an inbuilt temporality? This argument does not run against the idea of an ethics of history, but should sharpen its genuine historical character. (3) Who is the agent of this change: who brings it about and at the same is subjected to it? An anonymous sum of generations in space and time is not a convincing answer. We need an integrative idea that covers the vast field of experience of the human world in space and time and that covers the strong commitment to universal values. In this respect it would be worthwhile to pick up the idea of humankind as it was conceptualized as the red thread of history in traditional, modern philosophy of history.     

THE FORGOTTEN WOMEN: A HISTORY OF MIGRANT LABOUR AND GENDER RELATIONS IN VANUATU

Writing on the labour trade focuses on the question of whether Melanesian labourers recruited to work in Australia and Fiji were kidnapped slaves, or willing volunteers. This debate about victims versus actors tends however to be constructed from the viewpoint of the male recruit. The small minority of Melanesian women who were recruited are typically seen as motivated to go because of love or sexual relations with men, and are sometimes portrayed as ‘prostitutes‘. Through an examination of some primary sources, secondary interpretative histories and the oral history of one region of Vanuatu, this paper queries this image of women in the labour trade. It suggests moreover, that the labour trade must be seen as having dramatic effects on relations between women and men in Vanuatu's villages.     

HOW TO CHANGE HISTORY

The recent death of Eric Hobsbawm provides a fitting occasion to take stock of the entire trajectory of his work. Taking his final book, How to Change the World, as its starting point, this essay considers Hobsbawm's effort to change the way history was written. It divides his career into three main phases: 1) during the 1940s and 50s when he served his apprenticeship and emerged as a leading labor historian of modern Britain. Working in conjunction with colleagues in the Communist Party Historian's group, Hobsbawm helped to raise Marxist history to academic respectability; 2) during the 1960s and 70s, Hobsbawm reached the apogee of his career, publishing the first two volumes of his synoptic history of modern capitalism, as well a multitude of more specialized and critical works. No longer just one among a group of Marxist scholars, he—along with E. P. Thompson—became one of the most famous and influential historians in the world. 3) For Hobsbawm, as for other Marxists, the 1980s and 1990s were a time of crisis, when Marxism was destabilized and communism collapsed. Ironically, this essay argues, it was during this challenging period that Hobsbawm's most influential work appeared—most notably, his studies of modern nationalism and his analysis of the “invention of tradition”. Whereas the early Hobsbawm had worked to bring Marxist history into the academy, the later Hobsbawm (perhaps inadvertently) showed how the academy could absorb analytical elements initially formulated in a Marxist framework by translating them into non‐Marxist terms. Whatever one thinks of Hobsbawm's intellectual legacy, one must acknowledge his status as a polymathic giant who wrote global history that was at once theoretically grounded, publicly accessible, and historiographically consequential.     

ANIMAL HISTORY

This review reflects on animal history as a subfield of the discipline of history and presents its main arguments and future tasks. Its main goal is to identify the new research prospects and potentials proposed by the book edited by Susan Nance, The Historical Animal. These include such topics as the problem of “the animal's point of view,” animal agency (animals understood as “historical” agents and actors), the problem of identifying traces of animal actions in “anthropocentric” archives and searching for new historical sources (including animals’ testimonies). It also explores methodological difficulties, especially with the idea of the historicization of animals and the possible merger of the humanities and social sciences with the natural and life sciences. The review considers how studying animals forces scholars to rethink to its foundations history as a discipline. It claims that the most progressive proposals are coming from scholars (many of whom are historians) who advocate radical interdisciplinarity. The authors are not only interested in merging history with specific sciences (such as animal psychology, ecology, ethology, evolutionary biology, and zoology), but also question basic assumptions of the discipline: the epistemic authority claimed by historians for building knowledge of the past as well as the human epistemic authority for creating such knowledge. In this context several questions emerge: can we achieve “interspecies competence” (Erica Fudge's term) for creating a multispecies knowledge of the past? Can research on animals’ perception of change help us to develop nonhistorical approaches to the past? Can we imagine accounts of the past based on multispecies co‐authorship?     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

AL MINA AND HISTORY

Summary. Woolley's finds at Al Mina and subsequent discoveries of Greek material along the Syro-Phoenician coast, are reassessed in the light of recent claims for Phoenician priority in the dissemination of orientalia in the Mediterranean world. The markedly different character of Al Mina and the goods likely to have been distributed from the area is demonstrated by comparison of the record of Al Mina and that of other eastern sites, and the pattern of distribution of orientalia. Reluctance to acknowledge the role of the site in Greece's orientalising revolution is examined.     

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY,INCONCEIVABILITY, AND METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM1

The debate between individualism and holism in the philosophy of history pertains to the nature of the entities relied on in historical explanations. The question is whether explanations of historical items (for example, events, actions, artifacts) require the assumption that the collective historical entities (for example, civilizations, cultures, and so on) used in these explanations are (sometimes) conceived of as irreducible to the actions, thoughts, and beliefs of individual human beings. In this paper I analyze two methodological problems that holist explanations face in the writing of intellectual history. The first problem derives from the fact that holist explanations in intellectual history have to rely on the claim that certain beliefs were inconceivable to some individuals because they were members of specific collectives, whereas it is unclear how historical research can justify such claims when made from the holist position. The second problem pertains to the difficulties the holist position faces when it has to account for the novel properties of artifacts studied by intellectual history.     

HISTORY AS PHILOSOPHY

Historians have taken a beating in recent times from an array of critics troubled by our persistent unwillingness to properly theorize our work. This essay contends that their criticisms have generally failed to make headway among mainstream historians owing to a little noticed cognitive byproduct of our work that I call history as philosophy. In so doing I offer a novel defense of professional history as it has been understood and practiced in the Anglophone world over the last half‐century or so while suggesting, in conclusion, that historians could not do other than they do without serious psychic and societal loss.     

HISTORY OF CHILD WELFARE: A Present Political Concern

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, an increasing number of inquiries into the history of children’s out-of-home care have shown that child welfare sometimes failed to protect children. In this Special Issue, we explore how the Nordic countries have responded to allegations and scandals of historical child abuse within child welfare, and also how history matters in these political processes. We ask how Nordic societies have acknowledged past historical child abuse and how they aim to deal with its legacy. Attempts to redress, and provide compensation for, past failures are discussed in the context of transitional justice.     

HISTORY/PHILOSOPHY/SCIENCE: SOME LESSONS FOR PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Rheinberger's brief history brings into sharp profile the importance of history of science for a philosophical understanding of historical practice. Rheinberger presents thought about the nature of science by leading scientists and their interpreters over the course of the twentieth century as emphasizing increasingly the local and developmental character of their learning practices, thus making the conception of knowledge dependent upon historical experience, “historicizing epistemology.” Linking his account of thought about science to his own work on “experimental systems,” I draw extensive parallels with other work in the local history of science (the ideas of Latour, Pickering, Rouse, and others) and consider the epistemological implications both for the relation between history and philosophy of science and between history and theory more broadly. In doing so, I suggest that the long‐standing gap between the natural sciences and history as a “human science” has been significantly bridged by the insistence upon the local, mediated, indeed “historicized epistemology” of actual science.     

DRAMATIC ELEMENTS IN POLYBIUS' GENERAL HISTORY: AN ANALYSIS BASED ON THE MODEL OF THE CONNECTIVITY OF THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN WORLD

The Histories composed by Polybius is the only extant historical work from the ancient world which directly criticizes the historical tradition "tragic history." Modern researchers generally agree that the reflections and criticism of Polybius on tragic history is one predominant feature of his "objective history." Nevertheless, in the structure of general history in The Histories, Polybius himself also uses certain dramatic elements, such as stage props, selection of historical materials, fictional asides and the tragic theme of tyche, to rationalize Romans' dramatic conquest of the whole Mediterranean within fifty-three years. Polybius' failure to exclude dramatic elements from The Histories reflects the limitation of the historiographic thoughts of Greek historians as well as the complex relationship between literature and history in the Hellenistic cultural context.At present, Global, Entangled and Transcultural History are commonly used key words in modern history, and also ancient history has partly taken over their ideas and concepts. With the present bibliographical survey of recent literature on the topic with regard to antiquity, the chances and challenges of conducting research under this perspective are examined.     

THE WORDS OF HISTORY

In From History to Theory, Kerwin Lee Klein writes a history of the central terms of the discipline of theory of history, such as “historiography,” “philosophy of history,” “theory of history,” and “memory.” Klein tells us when and how these terms were used, how the usage of some (“historiography” and “philosophy of history”) declined during the twentieth century, and how other terms (“theory” and “memory”) became increasingly popular. More important, Klein also shows that the use of these words is not innocent. Using words such as “theory” or “historiography” implies certain specific ideas about what the writing of history should be like, and how theoretical reflection on the nature of history and its writing relates to the practical issues of the discipline. In the second half of his book, Klein focuses more on the concept of memory and the memory boom since the later part of the 1980s. He observes that “memory” came to be seen as a kind of “counterhistory,” a postcolonial, fragmented, and personal alternative to the traditional mainstream discourse of history. Klein does not necessarily disagree with this view, but he does warn us about unwanted side effects. More specifically, he argues that the discourse of memory is surprisingly compatible with that of extremist right‐wing groups, and should be treated with suspicion. Although Klein certainly has a point, he presents it in a rather dogmatic fashion. However, a more nuanced version of Klein's criticism of memory can be developed by building on Klein's suggestion that there is an intimate connection between memory and identity.     

WRITING THE HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT AID

International aid has been a significant element both in economic development and international politics since 1945, but has been insufficiently integrated in the discipline of history. The present article discusses the main problems of method, sources and discourse in the field of aid history, based on the recently published three‐volume history of Norwegian development aid. The shifting conjunctures of aid are seen in relation to main paradigm changes in development theory. It is emphasized that history is not a macro‐evaluation, but that it provides a basis for reflection, in this as in other fields.     

AMERICAN HISTORY IN A GLOBAL AGE1

Historians around the world have sought to move beyond national history. In doing so, they often conflate ethical and methodological arguments against national history. This essay, first, draws a clear line between the ethical and the methodological arguments concerning national history. It then offers a rationale for the continued writing of national history in general, and American history in particular, in today's global age. The essay makes two main points. First, it argues that nationalism, and thus the national histories that sustain national identities, are vital to liberal democratic societies because they ensure the social bonds necessary to enable democratic citizens to sacrifice their immediate interests for the common good. The essay then argues that new methodological and historical work on the history of nations and nationalism has proven that nations are as real as any other historical group. Rejecting national history on critics' terms would require rejecting the history of all groups. Instead, new methods of studying nations and nationalism have reinforced rather than undermined the legitimacy of national history within the discipline.     

RECONCEIVING THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY: FROM REPRESENTATION TO TRANSLATION

Arguing that history is not the application of a rigorous method to sources bequeathed to us from the past but rather a practice of coding that constructs “the past” in particular ways, this article seeks to delineate the key elements of this coding. Modern history treats past objects and texts as the objectified remains of humans who endowed their world with meaning and purpose while constrained by the social circumstances characterizing their times. This time of theirs is dead, and it can only be represented, not resurrected; the past is only ever the human past, and it does not include ghosts, gods, spirits, or nature. If, as argued here, “the past” does not exist independently of the means by which it is known and represented, then the many different modes of historicity that human beings developed and deployed before the modern form of history became dominant cannot be measured against “the” past in an effort to compare their accuracy or adequacy in representing it. The concluding section of this article asks what we are doing when we write the history of those who did not share the presumptions of the modern discipline but who had their own mode(s) of historicity. What, it asks, is the character and status of the knowledge produced when we write histories of premodern and non-Western pasts?     

ROMAN HISTORY,THEN AND NOW

The argument here is that despite the many similarities of writing the history of ancient Rome, whether the Republic or the Empire, there are stark and significant differences between Edward Gibbon and Mary Beard. In part this is a matter of style and literary genius. It is also evidence of a vast cultural difference, reflected in changing attitudes about writing history and its importance. Beard is impatient with Gibbon's oratorical formality and conceits. Her own writing is easy and unmannered. These literary habits are determined by audience as well as personality. Gibbon addresses the English ruling class and enlightened opinion. His concerns are politics, religion, and law—the interests of his readers who governed and shaped opinion. Beard is more interested in the private and personal, subjects that until recently had only a marginal place in historical writing. She relies heavily on sources that were unknown to Gibbon, and might not have interested him anyhow. Her style mirrors these concerns. She does not assume her readers have had a Classical education nor that they know the general outlines of Roman history. She has little or no tolerance for Gibbon's obsession with religion, and, at least in SPQR, slight interest in either paganism or the rise of Christianity. Her thousand‐year slice of history—Gibbon also tackled a millennium—stops well short of Gibbon's broad philosophical vision of Rome as the cradle of Europe. These contrasts in style, taste, sources, and personality are not offered in judgment, but as commentary on the continuing vitality of Roman history.     

ON LAWFULNESS IN HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

The use of general and universal laws in historiography has been the subject of debate ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s there has been a growing consensus that general laws such as those in the natural sciences are not applicable in the scientific writing of history. We will argue against this consensus view, not by claiming that the underlying conception of what historiography is—or should be—is wrong, but by contending that it is based on a misconception of what general laws such as those of the natural sciences are. We will show that a revised notion of law, one inspired by the work of Sandra D. Mitchell, in tandem with Jim Woodward's notion of “invariance,” is indeed applicable to historiography, much in the same way as it is to most other scientific disciplines. Having developed a more adequate account of general laws, we then show, by means of three examples, that what are called “pragmatic laws” and “invariance” do in fact play a role in history in several interesting ways. These examples—from cultural history, economic history, and the history of religion—have been selected on the basis of their diversity in order to illustrate the widespread use of pragmatic laws in history.     

TRANSCENDING DICHOTOMIES IN HISTORY AND RELIGION

At first glance, to speak of “history and religion” presents no problem. We merely identify two items to discuss in the same study. We quickly discover, however, that since at least the twentieth century the pair “history and religion” has tended to operate as a dichotomy. Within the dominant traditions of discourse originating in Europe, over many centuries, the verbal pair “history and religion” became a dichotomy encoded as the dichotomy “secular and religious,” signifying the opposition “not religious and religious.” This dichotomy does not usually appear alone, but commonly comes associated with other dichotomies whose terms align with either history or religion. The short list of associated dichotomies includes: temporal and spiritual, natural and supernatural, reason and faith, public and private, social and personal, scientific and theological, objective and subjective, rational and emotional, and modern and medieval. The opposing parts come gendered as masculine and feminine. Usage of the dichotomies creates tensions with practitioners of virtually all religions in all regions of the world. Rigorous and consistent users of the dichotomies misunderstand the character of religions as ways of life, fail to account for the persistence and revival of religion in the twenty‐first century, and overlook the intrinsic manner in which history manifests religion and religion manifests history. The defective outcomes prompt a number of constructive suggestions for transcending dichotomies in history and religion. These reflections on dichotomies refer to several varieties of Christianity, the emergence of the secular option, and the imagined triumph of Hindu dharma.     

亨利·皮朗的史学思想与地中海史研究

亨利·皮朗是20世纪初西方史坛的著名学者。他提出的“皮朗命题”被誉为20世纪最具影响力的史学命题之一。皮朗创造性地将地中海视为一个整体,从不同文明之间大范围互动的角度解读欧洲的起源与发展,开拓了新的研究视野与范式。随着全球化的深入发展,作为新区域史主要研究对象之一的地中海成为学术研究的热',而费尔南·布罗代尔的《地中海与菲利普二世时代的地中海世界》是地中海史研究里程碑式的著作。通过对皮朗史学思想与布罗代尔等地中海史研究学者的著作进行对比分析可以看出,皮朗强调经济与社会史研究,倡导超越民族主义史学的局限性与注重在大范围空间对历史进行长期性与结构性分析,对布罗代尔的地中海史研究产生了直接影响。而对“皮朗命题”中有关伊斯兰教与基督教二元对立的中世纪早期地中海分裂性论断的反思,则推动了新地中海史研究的发展。