Rethinking Historiographies of Modern Europe

This presentation examines the frequent emplotment still of modern European history in narratives of "West" and "East," advanced v. backward nations, reform v. revolution, and other key notions of political modernity. Drawing on mentalités of continual secular progress among those nations sufficiently “enlightened” to pursue such paths, decades after the from Eric Wolf, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Maria Todorova, to many others, scholarship of this type continues to perpetrate models of history that pit north against south and east against west within Europe as well as globally. Combatting unreflected tendencies of these types is valuable not only within History and scholarship more broadly, but also in terms of historians’ influence on a broader public, from foreign policy decisions to the treatment of immigrant and minority children in European schools. While Europeanists are generally well aware of these problems, we continue to grasp for terms and structures that avoid reinforcing these world views, with their often pernicious effects. This paper will offer possibilities for alternatives, despite intractable problems of imagining histories of “the West,” especially at the level of textbooks. Further, it will briefly adumbrate how alternate frameworks allow for ideas of how change works that permit us to envision our own role in producing change, at a moment of unprecedented global crisis.