When future historians look at their profession as it was in the twentieth century, they will see scholars working within boundaries of national consciousness. To explain that condition, they will show how the profession arose during the rise of the nation state and how historians produced intellectual foundations for nations, which by 1950 covered the globe.
History thus came to see the world in and through national development. National autonomy attained normative supremacy; its violation came to be portrayed m pejorative terms, such as imperialism, dependency, and neo-colonialism. The nation state emerged as an inviolate moral entity in world political culture as historians reified nations in historical studies. The profession developed world standards of excellence and languages of communication, as historians made the nation state their intellectual base of operation. Substantively, nation states and national populations still constitute preeminent objects of historical study as late as the 1980s. The emergence, characteristics, and interactions of nations preoccupy surveys and syn theses. National chronologies define periods. Nations also define the pool of scholars who produce most research on each nation and thus the subjective conditions of their inquiries. Each nation provides its own key historical problems, traditions, and trajectories, which are the meat of scholarly diets. Local studies and monographic research must be fitted into national historiography to make sense.
Assumptions drawn from national cultures about time, space, society, events, and trends make history relevant and significant. Self evident, uncontroversial, and effective, they lower the cost and increase returns of scholarly effort. They are foundation stones under edifices of historiographic privilege. The result is consensus among scholars and readers about the basic rules for constructing historiography in national terms.
Consensus pertains not only to the study of a nation by its native historians but also pertains to the study of any nation by all historians. German, Indian, Chinese, and American history, present specific sets of historiographic imperatives, built into the genealogies of nation states; these imperatives establish terms for the study of nations and international relations, because in a world of nations, every nation’s genealogy must be related to all others, and each national culture has its own historiographic agenda.
Historians refine, defend, and reify styles of historical consciousness consistent with each national agenda, creating closed systems. Each national history defines history itself. The most meaningful events and people in each national history are those that are most critical in its progress toward dominant national goals of independence and well being. Internal and external crises in the genealogy of each nation state thus preoccupy its historiography: internal crises, above all, that strain national development and unity; external crises, above all, that threaten national identity and independence. Internal and external crises often intersect, for example, during imperial expansion and war; these intersections mark critical moments in national cultures and historiographies alike.
Modern world historiography arises from the need of national cultures to confront and define their external context in their own terms. Its founding fathers attained authority because their ideas suited expansive, domineering, national self-awareness. Edmund Burke made this clear when in the aftermath of American independence he warned the British not to make themselves “too little for the sphere of their duty.” “If . . . we do not stretch and expand our minds to the compass of their object,” he warned, “be well assured, that everything about us will dwindle by degrees, until at length our concerns are shrunk to the dimensions of our minds.” (The Historian and British Colonial History, by Vincent Harlow, p. 24.) During the next century, competing European powers encompassed and subordinated the histories of all non-European peoples.
Empire inflects world history despite the end of formal imperialism, and the expansion of American minds to encompass their object progressed rapidly after World War II. But in a world of nations, the Americanization of world history ran headlong into competing national historiographies. Ensuing battles were bitter. Southeast Asian history became tangled in the Vietnam War. The histories of the Middle East and Latin America were embroiled in competing national agendas. Less dramatic turmoil animated the history of other world regions. For in the Third World—in newly or precariously independent national cultures—the struggle to control the writings of history centers on authority over the construction of national genealogies.
Furthermore, in these cultures—the vast majority—history is clearly and admittedly political, because the dense meanings of nationhood are in the making: internal crises of unity and development assault historians’ sense of the past; external crises threaten the freedom of national consciousness. Historians build their images of the past faced with pressing internal struggles for control of the national future and external struggles with old and new imperial powers, whose world historiographic authority continues to radiate from metropolitan universities, research institutions, and funding agencies. The historiographic opposition between imperialism and nationhood is part of Third World national culture. In Europe and America, historiography can sustain a much more self determined, autonomous idea of the national past, for western power means historiographic authority and autonomy on the world stage.
History thus produces different lessons and meanings according to its national setting. Though broad consensus might characterize each national corps of professional historians, to follow one’s national genealogy out from “our” world to “theirs,” means moving into a world of conflicting historiographic authority. Yet in a world of nations, nations must make sense of themselves by confronting other national genealogies, which intersect and define contexts for one another. Each national culture requires some sense of its place in world history. But no national culture could generate a world history acceptable worldwide. Efforts to do so universalize one national sense of the past and meet fierce opposition in other national settings, though they might gain authority and popularity in their own. Each national culture is thus encouraged to produce a world history for itself: none has the inbuilt impetus to search out and digest competing national visions of the past; none could digest the historical sensibilities of all others; and a world history composed of all national histories would be nonsensical.
In 1985, three routes into the future face the profession in the United States—where the national culture enjoys fantastic wealth, projects its influence worldwide, seeks wider influence, eschews imperialist domination, and espouses democratic ideals. One route follows from the collective decision to define history inside the huge domestic market for historical products. The profession could concentrate on the minutiae of the US national genealogy, making sense of the world through an image of America charting its unique destiny in a world of nations doing the same. America would need foreign area specialists, but their value would derive from their relevance in the insular national imagination. They would be expendable in times of cutbacks, when their work would appear a luxury compared to staple products of American historians. Taking this road would replicate past decisions by US auto and steel industries. It would be perilous, promising intellectual impoverishment and continual crisis in the profession. ·
Another choice is to anticipate further expansion of US power by projecting national self-awareness onto world history. This entails a professional commitment to foreign area studies based on national histories conceived in terms consistent with expanding American influence. Decisions to move along this road would produce a charged political environment in the profession, because imperialist and democratic components of US national culture would clash openly in historical discourse. Foreign area specialists would become representatives of foreign national cultures, working to enrich America’s store of information on the world in which America pursues wealth and power.
This strategy at least confronts the global environment. It enables historians to take advantage of widening world markets for US scholarship, in which US government and business have a stake. It could expand the field of opportunity for scholars but meets a dead end, because it constructs the world in terms of the US national identity and global agenda. It imagines other cultures only by comparison and contrast with America. By reducing the world to the dimensions of minds that chart America’s national destiny, it is doomed by imperial antecedents and chauvinist implications. Its future, moreover, depends upon the unlikely continuous expansion of US power.
There is a third choice, which would permit Americans to explore more meaningfully their own national heritage by exploring more fully the world. Following a commitment, neither to national markets, nor to world power, but to free human development, this choice of futures would require an effort to break free of the cultural constraints imposed by national consciousness. Into the mid-twentieth century, the ideal of free human development inspired the formation of nation states, in a world of empires; but in the late twentieth century, this same ideal leads beyond the nation state. To enhance free human development, historians need to enrich the store of ideas—including conceptions of the world—from which people can freely create their own sense of the past. Scholars need to expand and integrate the range of historical objects for observation and understanding. To develop historical knowledge on these lines means to diversify the definitions of historical objects and to make them meaningful in manifold, conflicting visions of the past.
Moving along this path would mean defining historical objects independently of national cultures, and to study them within national settings, in order to formulate comparative generalizations that encompass global diversity. Such comparative history would embrace the world without subordinating historiography to national cultures, and would provide material for understandings of the human past situated in but not defined by national consciousness. Gender, working classes, families, entrepreneurs, peasants, ethnic groups, and communities are among the many nonnational social phenomena whose comparative study can provide keys to world history conceived not in national but in human terms. Farming, trade, industry, cities, empires, nations, capitalism, and socialism are among the historical processes that touch the lives of all human beings in distinctive yet comparable settings.
Comparative history, conceived at a global scale, not only highlights historical objects other than those defined by nations, and opens the way to the critical appraisal of national culture itself, it leads historians to comprehend the diversity of cultures shaping human experience. Each culture, in its own terms, adds meaning to the whole historical enterprise. To specialize in the study of history along comparative, global lines propels the historian into a multicultural network of interdependent scholars, who, based in their own national cultures, work as intellectual citizens of the scholarly world. To choose this direction for professional development requires years of hard work, above all in foreign languages and cultures. It requires history departments to redefine the logic of their composition in global rather than national terms. But historians of our profession in the next century will no doubt conclude that the future brightened with each lonely, difficult decision by historians to follow this rocky, uncharted road toward history that transcends the nation state.
David E. Ludden is an assistant professor of modern South Asian history at the University of Pennsylvania.
