Clio’s Battles: Historiography as Practice by Jeremy Black (review)

How should history be presented to the public in an increasingly demotic age of movies, television, and YouTube? Are images now replacing words? To what extent have the bitter academic disputes of recent decades shaped or warped popular views of the past? Have journalists, pundits, and politicians been more successful? These and other issues constitute Black’s stunningly erudite attempt to bridge the gap between traditional historiography and public history, most notably by explicating how history has been used to unite and to divide as well as to justify and discredit views of the present.

Black begins with the observation that governments have been increasingly shaping the past, especially in the 120 new states founded since 1945. But established nations have done the same thing. Witness Japan’s elites overlooking Japanese atrocities committed in China during World War II or, more ominously, China’s leaders refusing to acknowledge the murderous regime of Mao Zedong or the 1989 massacres in Tiananmen Square. George Orwell famously quipped that those who control the present also control the past, though even he might be shocked by the extent to which historical scholarship has fallen prey to state power or, in the West, to simplistic popular renderings interested more in narrative than truth. Moreover, within the academy, professional approaches have been challenged by institutional funding, bureaucratization, and political correctness.

Black devotes the first third of his study to a historiographical survey from antiquity to the present. Although the account covers well-trodden ground, it reminds readers how ancient historians such as Thucydides focused primarily on human agency rather than omens to explain the past. During the Middle Ages, historical writing combined with religion both to explain God’s purposes and to predict the end of the world. At the same time, Anglo-Saxon monasteries meticulously evoked history to protect themselves against the Normans, a tradition pursued later by English monarchs to resist the authority of the Holy Roman Empire. With regard to China, Black pays due attention to Sima Quin, the father of Chinese historiography, though he neglects to discuss Sima’s meticulous use of sources and emphasis on the “known world.” Black takes pains to stress that historiography during the Tang and Song dynasties was not as static as Western commentators have claimed. Nevertheless, he stresses that China’s emphasis on cultural superiority and on controlling the past is a “longstanding one, although not without direct linkage between imperial and Communist days” (37).

After dismissing Islamic historiography as “assertion,” Black turns his attention to the early modern period. His account hardly breaks new ground, but he makes the worthy points that the Humanists relied on documents, that English historical identity was both presented and bolstered by the plays of William Shakespeare, and that the religious wars of the seventeenth century were “in large part fought out by means of historical works” (45). Much more incisive is Black’s treatment of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s rejection of history, at least in its radical form, by the philosophes—an interpretation with much merit, given the horrors of the French Revolution. Nonetheless, as Black notes, Voltaire was a major exception to the trend. Across the Channel, historical writing flourished, primarily because the freedom to write and publish combined with a market economy to meet popular demand. Although authors—such as Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788)—wrote from the top down, most scholars had extensive interests, most notably in widely read newspapers engaged in political debate. Furthermore, their writing may not always have been philosophical, but it was vigorous and clear.

During the nineteenth century, traditional and academic history converged with the emergence of scholarship that followed the practices of Leopold von Ranke and the founding of research universities. In some of the most stimulating pages of his study, Black deftly shows how professional scholarship enriched historical writing, notwithstanding the sanguine faith in progress propounded by Thomas Babington Macaulay...