Finding the Red Thread: Some Challenges in Writing a Global History of Historiography

Although a good deal of historiography is still very western-focused (Ernst Breisach’s 1983 survey has just been issued in a 3^rd edition, and John Burrow has recently published an elegant survey since the Greeks), we’ve become more and more conscious that this is at best a partial picture of the history of our discipline and even less complete as a record of the totality of humanity’s attempts to recover and represent the past. Having been involved in a number of large-scale global historiography projects, most recently the forthcoming Oxford History of Historical Writing, I concluded that there was need for a single-volume, introductory textbook on the history of history, in English, to match up with Markus Völkel’s recent impressive survey in German.

The challenge in writing such a book, a draft of which should be finished by the time I deliver this round table paper, has been to find what Peter Burke has called ‘the red thread’, a theme or set of themes that can turn the book into a unified whole—a history in its own right—rather than an agglomeration of separate histories of history. How can we find some commonality among western historians, Indian creators of itihasa-purana, Muslim ta’rikh, Chinese and Japanese histories? Where does one fit even more unfamiliar (to the Euro-American) forms such as pre-Columbian and Conquest-age pictographic histories? What role does social context play in the development of different historiographies, and what priority should be given it (as opposed to the more usual authorial/textual analysis historiography has favoured)?  Will identifying common themes or continuities force any account into universalism or essentialism? These are some of the challenges awaiting the author of such a work. In my presentation I will discuss both the problems and some of the paths I have taken towards resolving them.