The History Manifesto by Jo Guldi and David Armitage (review)

This small book addresses several large issues—the character of historical scholarship in recent decades, the relationship between history and other academic disciplines, the opportunity that “big data” offers historians, and the responsibility of historians to engage and seek to persuade the widest possible audience about pressing contemporary issues. The work combines wide-gauge, diagnostic analysis with highly focused, impassioned exhortation.

The authors’ basic argument is that beginning in the 1970s, for various professional and political reasons, most academic historians started researching archive-intensive, small-scale projects within short-term time frames. This microhistorical turn brought both gains and losses. The losses included ceding large-scale historical claims in the public sphere to colleagues in other disciplines (especially economists but also political scientists and evolutionary biologists) less equipped to address the complex, multicausal changes that characterize human life. Consequently, with respect to current issues of global import, including climate change, international governance, and socio-economic inequality, public discourse is now informed by reductionist, mythologizing macro-narratives about such issues as our allegedly inevitable environmental apocalypse or the unavoidability of neoliberal capitalism.

Guldi and Armitage urge historians to recapture public relevance and a political role by re-embracing long-term historical frameworks and integrating them with quantitative analyses of increasingly available, massive digital databases pertaining to diverse natural, political, social, and cultural phenomena. By writing accessible long-term narratives that employ data visually and integrate micro-examples within macro-trajectories, historians can dispel mythologies and break the “short-termism” detrimentally afflicting the public and private sectors and intensifying the global problems that historians can best help to solve. Historians can and should show readers and citizens throughout the world that shared human life has an open future because it has had a contingent, not genetically or economically determined, past.

The History Manifesto deserves to be widely read and discussed (certainly much more extensively than a short review permits). Its impressive range is wedded to a simultaneously critical and exalted assessment of academic history. The authors recognize the importance of quantitative methods and economic history, marginalized for decades within the profession, and they commendably refer to facts, data, and truth without scare quotes. Historians are indeed uniquely situated to explain change over time by integrating divergent kinds of evidence, multiple timescales, and different types of causality, if they are willing to think without self-imposed, microhistorical shackles. With the help of big data, where appropriate, they can help those willing to understand how the past has made the present, undermining dubious mythologies while pursuing history as “a critical human science” (10).

More problematic is the authors’ practical suggestion that history thus revamped might offer to conscientious citizens normative paths to emulate. It is unclear how ethical guidance could emerge from historical analysis as such, regardless of the range of the data or the time-scale in question: Neither past paths nor present possibilities are morally prescriptive. It is difficult to imagine ideologically diverse historians uniting, let alone large majorities agreeing, about fundamental moral issues in polities as divided as the contemporary United States.