Download PDF | Gelina Harlaftis - The New Ways of History_ Developments in Historiography (International Library of Historical Studies, Volume 64)-Tauris Academic, 2010.
271 Pages
Introduction
The above poem on history and the cover of the book were penned and painted respectively by Nikos Engonopoulos (1907-1985), a professor in the Advanced School of Fine Arts of the Technical University of Athens. Engonopoulos was part of the movement of Surrealism, which appeared in Athens in the 1930s, introducing new, liberating and controversial manners of expression that provoked much opposition and sarcasm at the time. One of the first critics of his art wrote that ‘he produces strange examples of an att which is at once traditional and modern’. Engonopoulos painted ancient Greeks in a Byzantine technique and with the eye of a Modern Greek. As the editors of this book are all Greek, they could think of nothing more appropriate than to introduce it with images of our past and present: the baggage of ‘our glorious’ heritage of the ancient world, breaking through with an element of surprise, humour and unexpected juxtapositions.
The aim of the book is to trigger reflection on old and new ways of history in both teaching and research, by attempting to ‘decompartmantalize’ the vatious fields and periods of history, which ‘too often [have] a diet of tich synchronic detail but too little overview’. Historians have been thinking increasingly of new ways in which to deal with the past. They have sought the best ways to research the past, have tried new modes of historical narrative, have cut history into pieces, have come back to grand long-term interpretations, have doubted their own ability to learn about the past. The various historical fields, the new ways of history and the theoretical trends are not usually combined or examined in one single volume. Specialization in history is such that historians tend to read, publish and communicate only with historians of their own field, area ot period of study. One of the main strengths of this volume of collected essays is that it gives an overview of developments during the last 20 years and the changing agenda of questions in several historical fields, chronological, thematic and regional. And this is done not so much by specialists in historiography as by historians practising in a particular field of history. The discussion is enhanced by the perennial question of how to treat time in history. In this way, the comparative perspective is highlighted and further insight is given into the different historical trends and periods under consideration.
Nevertheless, the structure of the book does not always indicate new ways. Half the book is devoted to the old, familiar, three-fold division of history into ancient, medieval and modern, and half is on thematic and regional/area history, covering history and archaeology, history and the social sciences, economic and business history, maritime history, diaspora history, Ottoman history. The book opens and closes with chapters on historiography, which deal with the main questionnaire of historians. But why only these histories? Why are so many others missing, such as social, gender or cultural history, which were so much ev vogue in the previous decade? These are valid questions, but, even so, the selection of subjects is not just ‘cheerfully eclectic’, to use an expression of Penelope Corfield; there is a reason for this choice.
All the editors of this volume come from the Department of History of the Ionian University, based in Corfu, and most of the contributors had met back in 2005, at a conference held to celebrate the 20 years (1985-2005) of this department. Our intention then was to discuss the history that was taught in the department, in a diachronic perspective that spanned from prehistory to the present. So, the ‘histories’ found in the chapters of the book are all drawn from the curriculum of the Department of History of the Ionian University.
What might be interesting to academics in countries carrying a long historical tradition, such as England, France, Germany or the United States, is how cosmopolitan a small Department of History in a small university, on a small island in a small European country, can be. In the Department of History of the Ionian University, the historical traditions of Europe and North America blend. Different national historiographical traditions meet and mix, whereas in the countries from which they originate these can be hermetically sealed. The historians who ate teaching or have taught in the department, have studied, apart from Greece, in France, Germany, Italy, Britain, the United States of America and Canada, and they have brought back with them experience of the educational systems in which they were trained. New ways can emerge from ‘polyphony’, provided those who engage in discussion can harmonize in a common melody.
Itis appropriate that this volume to celebrate the 20 (and five) years of the Department of History of the Ionian University carries the title New Ways of Flistory. The formation of the department was conceived as ‘new ways’ in history by the Greek historian Spyros Asdrachas (a son of the Ionian island of Lefkas), who taught economic history for many years in the famous [Ve Section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. Asdrachas, along with Vassilis Panayotopoulos, Ilias Iliou and other scholars who came back to Greece, mainly from France, after the fall of the dictatorship in 1974, are among those considered the founders of the ‘new Greek history’ of the 1970s and 1980s; an interdisciplinary history that became the axis not only of the humanities but also of the social sciences.*
As recently as the 1980s, history in Greece was a discipline led by scholars educated in classics and literature; the generic term used in the country is philologists. In fact, no independent Department of History existed until the 1980s; if one wanted to become a historian, one had to get admitted to a Department of Literature (Philology). This is, of course, the result of the weight attached to ancient history and archaeology in Greek universities; similarly, however, in Britain and North America, ancient history is studied in classics departments not in history departments (see Chapter 2). The wave of the ‘new Greek history’ in the 1980s connected history with the social sciences and in this way new subjects, archival material and interpretations became part of the new trend in Greek historiography, which was accompanied by an upsurge of historical publications; the other wave of ‘new history’, of the 1990s, connected with cultural studies and postmodernism, barely touched academic institutions in Greece, with the exception of the University of Thessaly.
The ‘new ways’ were implemented in the new Department of History, established in 1985, the first department of the new Ionian University, which was founded that same year; the Ionian University was part of a new policy of the then socialist government of Greece, which brought massive reforms in the Greek university system and set up new academic institutions in the provinces, in order to decentralize higher education. ‘New’ historical fields, for the Greek university status quo, were introduced in the new department in Corfu, in the late 1980s and 1990s. For example, ‘Medieval History’, that is, Western European Medieval history, was not taught in the main universities of Athens or Thessaloniki; the Middle Ages were regarded only from a Hellenocentric viewpoint and their study meant, in effect, ‘Byzantine’ history. Medieval history was introduced and is still taught in the Department of History of the Ionian University. The same is true of the ‘new’ field, for Greece, of “Ottoman History’; one has to remember that the history of Greeks in southeastern Europe and/or the East Mediterranean was conceived as a history of ‘conquests’, so in most departments of history in Greece the periods of foreign rule — ‘Latin Occupation’, Frankish Occupation’, Venetian Occupation’, ‘Ottoman Occupation’, ‘British Occupation’ — are taught. The teaching of ‘Ottoman History’ as a separate field of study from a non-Greek angle was a ‘new way’ that was adopted by the new departments of history in the new universities, such as the University of Crete and the Ionian University. Meeting the social sciences was another pioneering trend in history and economic history which was introduced in the Ionian University. History of Demography was introduced too, a new subject at the time. Anthropology in the British and American tradition, linked with prehistory, was also introduced for the first time, with Professor August Sordinas; the department still teaches anthropology and ethnology. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, new fields kept appearing in the curriculum, such as Landscape History, Maritime History, North and Latin American History. Even so, despite the ‘new ways’, the Department of History of the Ionian University has not always managed to keep up with new ways and new themes as much as it could have done; it has not fully combated historicism or the complacency and isolation of Greek academic historiography, and it has had to balance in a symbiosis old and new traditions of historiography. It could be that this volume is indicative of the department’s slow but steady progress in the ‘new ways’.
The Ionian University likes to think that it continues the long intellectual tradition of the Ionian Islands, which belonged to Venice for nigh on five hundred years. A significant historiographical production from the Ionian Islands, described as “The Historical School of the Seven Islands’, seems to have been generated since at least the seventeenth and into the nineteenth century.° When the Ionian Islands became part of the British Empire (1815— 1864), as a British protectorate, the British took the lead in continuing this tradition. A British philhellene, Frederic North, Count of Guilford, who had visited Corfu in 1791, when it still belonged to Venice, established in 1824 the Ionian Academy, the first modern Greek University; the University of Athens was not founded until 1837. The Ionian Academy functioned for forty years, until 1864, when the Ionian Islands were united with Greece. Moreover, a number of renowned historians and intellectuals who taught in the Athens University hailed from the Ionian Islands: Spyridon Zambelios (1815-1881) from Lefkas, Spyridon Lambros (1851-1919) from Corfu, Dionyssios Zakynthinos (1905-1993) from Cephalonia, Andreas Andreades (1876-1935) from Corfu.
Diachrony, petiodization and continuity are part of the historian’s agenda. Continuity has never ceased to be a hot topic in modern Greek historiography. Greece’s most famous nineteenth-century historian, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, wrote his unprecedented grand narrative of fifteen volumes in the middle years of the century to prove it. The first chapter of the present book, by Penelope J. Corfield, is on this subject and considers three linked themes. Firstly, she considers the flight from big longterm interpretations of history during the past half-century, citing as reasons inter alia not only the intellectual collapse of traditional ‘grand narratives’ of Progress and/or of inexorable Marxist economic stages, but also the more mundane process of the academic institutionalization of period divisions and sectoral specialisms within history teaching and research. Secondly, she discusses the ways in which a return to diachronic, through-time interpretations can take place, within both history teaching and research. And thirdly, she suggests her own analysis, as presented in her last book, of an integral, threefold patterning within history: of continuity, micro-change and macro-change (alternatively defined as persistence, momentum and turbulence).
The next three chapters present some of the key developments in the study of antiquity, in the fields of ancient history and archaeology. In Chapter 2 Robin Osborne investigates the changing priorities of the academy. He argues that ancient history is changed by a changing agenda of questions, rather than by changes in the body of evidence available. In ancient history, political history was dominant until the 1970s and nonpolitical history was something of a newcomer. Osborne identifies the major changes that have occurred in the way that ancient historians have adapted and incorporated the trends and changes of all history in ancient history.
In Chapter 3, John Bintliff presents some of the key developments in Archaeology over the last generation of research, summarizing new discoveries, new methods and new ways of interpretation. His review is diachronic and, as he states, this extension of archaeological research to include all periods from prehistory to the early modern times is one of the most significant innovations in Greek archaeology. Bintliff first summatizes the results of the most recent research concerning the Palaeolithic, the Mesolithic, the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. He then goes on to show that in the field of Classical Archaeology one of the most powerful changes has been the application of anthropological and analytical approaches to ordinary material culture, as opposed to fine art and public architecture. The development of Landscape Archaeology and the spread of intensive, fieldby-field surface survey, as well as the combination of archival research with regional surface survey and recording standing buildings, have opened new ways for reconstructing changing life in city and countryside in Classical Greece, as well as for the development of the new landscape history of Roman, Crusader, Ottoman and Early Modern Greece, through the study of settlement history, daily life, population, economy, landholding and domestic architecture.
The three chapters that follow ate devoted to the Middle Ages in Western and Eastern Europe. In Chapter 4, Anita Guerreau-Jalabert gives a comparative approach to Medieval Studies in France. She stresses the abandonment of the large themes of social and economic history, which the Aznales School had brought to the fore. In the last 20 years, new themes have been researched, re-defining political history as the history of power, institutions and regulations; emphasis is also given to cultural history and history of representations, which has replaced the history of mentalities. Medievalists have to ‘fight’ the growing interest in modern history and find themselves in a period of reconsideration of the foundations of this field.
In Chapter 5, Cecile Morrisson, on a more optimistic note, reflects on the progress of Byzantine History, which found itself with an ambivalent identity, somewhere between Medievalism, Classics and Orientalism. She finds that, after a long path, in the last 30 years Byzantinists have reinserted Byzantium into general history and have indicated that ‘the theatre of European history did not stop at the borders of the Carolingian Empire and its marches, nor at the outposts of the Latin Orient’. Byzantine Studies, which for too long were restricted to political and diplomatic history, have benefitted from the turn towards an interdisciplinary approach, which brought a new agenda of questions asked, re-interpretation of resources and new syntheses. Collaboration with other disciplines, such as archaeology, geography, numismatics, economics, climatology, art, have provided a new evidentiary base for new approaches. Compilation, translation, publication and digitalization of archives have made access to resources easier.
In Chapter 6, Nikos Karapidakis, occasioned by a lecture by Averil Cameron, published in English and Greek, in the periodical Nea Hestia, as well as the texts published in response, in the same periodical, deliberates perceptively on Byzantine Studies and on studies in medieval history in general.
In Chapter 7, Benjamin Arbel gives an evaluation of Renaissance studies for the period 1985—2005. The Renaissance, a historical phenomenon of Western Europe, has acquired also a chronological definition. Arbel provides a quantified approach to three leading journals: the Italian Rinascimento, the French Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Rennaissance and the American Renaissance Quartely. Some of the results of this bibliographical survey of the articles in these journals reveal the lack of the grand works of synthesis, which has been stressed already in the first chapter, the predominance of works on the Chutch, literature and sources, but also the introduction of interdisciplinary approaches, such as social and economic history, gender, science and magic, philosophy, music, etc.
The encounter of history with the social sciences preoccupies the next three chapters. In Chapter 8, Peter Mathias deals with economic history and its progress in living with its neighbours, in the Anglo-Saxon context. This is the story after the peak that economic history, known as ‘economic and social history’, reached in Britain in the mid-1970s. Since then, economic history has been a declining subject in British universities and internationally, until the beginning of the twenty-first century, when it has gathered again momentum. The main reason for its decline was the impact of what was called ‘new economic history’, better known as cliometrics, which flourished mainly on the other side of the Atlantic. History students, who in economic history had to deal increasingly with sophisticated quantification and elaborate statistical methods, opted for the ‘softer’ socio-cultural history that prospered in the 1990s and brought the shrinkage of ‘hard’ economic history. However, economic history did not disappear. On the contrary, it has come back in what Mathias describes as ‘mega-economic’ history, connected with the rise of interest in global history and globalization, and the return of core-periphery relationships and world-system discourse. Offshoots of economic history have sprouted and grown as independent fields, such as business history, transport history, financial and banking history, urban history, etc. What is more, economic and social dimensions of change have now penetrated all other aspects of history, as we have seen in ancient, Byzantine, maritime, diaspora, Ottoman history, etc. Mathias concludes that ‘even if economic history was in danger of losing its own battle, it has now recovered and, on the wider scene, has been winning a wat’.
In Chapter 9, Walter A. Friedman discusses business history, which, like economic history, lives a life between economists and historians. Business has been ignored by mainstream historians for too long, and up until the 1970s business history was a semi-neglected ‘sub-species of economic history’ (see Chapter 8) that attracted no real interest from theorists or economic historians themselves. Its path has been linked with Harvard Business School, where a chait was founded in the field in 1927; the man who held this chair in the post-war period was Alfred Chandler, a historian by training, who really invented the history of the big corporation internationally and provided a comparative methodology in firm-centred studies in both the United States and Europe. His work was the base from where business history took off after the 1990s. It is true that business history was partially hit in the “decade of post-modernism’, but it was also enriched by new approaches, new ways of examining business, focusing not only on big but also on small firms in all countries and continents of the world, networks, family, ethnicity, class, gender, popular culture, race, and other aspects of society. Some business history has reached out to the social sciences and relates to psychology, economics, sociology and business management. It also relates to ‘mega-economic’ history, with studies in multinational enterprises and international business, and takes part in the discourse on global history and globalization. Thus, by following new ways, business history has succeeded in becoming a field of history in its own right, part of mainstream history.
In Chapter 10, Paschalis Kitromilides gives us a glance at the encounter of history with the social sciences, stressing once more the influence of the Aznales School in twentieth-century intellectual history. He discusses in particular the encounter of history with sociology, anthropology and political theory, and emphasizes the need for social scientists to work with archival material and not secondary sources. He gives an overview of historical writing on Modern Greece along these lines. Economic history, as has been mentioned already, gave impetus to the ‘new history’ of the 1970s and 1980s, and produced a whole new generation of prominent historians. It shook the foundations of traditional political history and its ideologically preordained character, geared to nationalism and following the method of an array of events. Anthropology gave another impetus but, according to Kitromilides, it ended in ‘catastrophic results’, not least when it took ‘the strange and convoluted ways of postmodernism, producing work marked by arbitrariness and subjectivism’. The encounter of political science and history has suffered in the last decades, due to its total autocracy in the decades before, but still continues in a limited way through diplomatic history. Kitromilides concludes that Greek history writing has been transformed and enriched by a continuing dialogue with the social sciences. The danger to history in Greece is its great popular appeal and the superficial way it is used in the mass media as part of political and power games.
Thematic and atea/regional history follows. In Chapter 11, Donald Quataert examines trends in history writing regarding the Late Ottoman Empire, a flourishing field. Partly due to the growing availability of Ottoman and non-Ottoman sources, of state and private archives, and partly due to the fact that Ottoman history is no longer identified only with Turkey but is also understood increasingly as the histories of the Balkan and the Arab provinces, a new breeze has been blowing from the Levant. A new generation of historians has emerged, which writes about Ottoman history from the Ottoman archives, in Ottoman Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian and other languages. Ottoman history is now the largest sub-field of the highly important regional history of the Middle East. It has flourished as an economic and social history, while it has profited also from other histories, such as women’s history and labour history.
In Chapter 12, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe discusses Diaspora Studies — only recently recognized as an academic field — as new ways of history. The study of diasporas stands in stark contrast to national historiographical traditions, as it transcends the nation-state. In a globalized world, global diaspora communities ate increasingly important actors in international conflict and cooperation. McCabe discusses how and where the term can be used; does it include just migration or forcible displacement? How has confusion been created between ethnic groups and diasporas? The three classical historical diasporas, the Armenians, the Greeks and the Jews, epitomize the resilience of older traditional forms of certain peoples that for centuries trespassed boundaries to nation-states. Over 30 new groups have now joined them under the umbrella term ‘diaspora’. This is a multidisciplinary field, drawing from the history of mentalities, histories of daily life, theoretical schools of feminism, postmodernism, global history, economic history, history of material culture, etc. What is so interesting in diaspora studies is that this is not a traditional field, it is a field with no national boundaries and it transcends chronologies. Historians have focused on merchant diasporas, in the networks of ethnic and religious minorities dispersed from their original homeland but united among themselves by strong ties of culture, religion, language and ethnicity. In a way, national historiographies have masked the significance of trade diasporas and their entrepreneurial networks. Over the last 500 years, a succession of regional and long-distance trading networks, initially in Asia and Europe, from the Mediterranean to the northern European seas, the Indian Ocean and the southeast Asian seas, but subsequently stretching across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, lay at the heart of the gradual integration of the world into one global system.
In Chapter 13, Gelina Harlaftis examines the development of Maritime History or the history of *ha/assa (sea in Greek) as an independent field of history. Maritime history has grown since the 1970s, mainly as an economic and social history of the modern period. However, the history of the seas has become very much en vogue in the last decade and the new ways of history have been sought through the ‘rediscovery’ of the sea by historians of the ancient, medieval and early modern periods. So, in the pursuit of ‘new ways’, historians have made maritime history/sea history/history of ¢halassa mainstream history. The new wave called ‘new thalassology’ has ‘sailed’ together with the upsurge of global history in the twenty-first century, including colonial/imperial history. As always when discovering something ‘new’ one neglects the ‘old’, and ‘new thalassology’ scholars, particularly geographers, have neglected maritime history, a history that has flourished as a distinct field of history in the last 20 years ‘aboard the ship’ of an international organization called the International Maritime Economic History Association. The chapter points out the rich produce of maritime historians worldwide, who have been working for years at sea before the neophytes discovered it. Maritime history as a field of history could not but follow the prototype history of ¢balassa, Braudel’s La Mediterranée, and is a synthesis of history with the social sciences, including economics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics and geography, combining the French and British historiographical traditions. The new boost of history of thalassa, which relates so well to global history, a history of contacts and interactions between different civilizations, has increased historians’ interest in the diachronic dimension, ftom ancient to present times.
The last chapter, written by Frangois Hartog, is on historiography and reflects on the concept of ‘the present’ and its relation to the historian. Such reflection is prompted by the practice of the historians, society's demands of them and the difficulties to which they have to respond. The main concepts around which these demands revolve are inheritance, memory, celebration of anniversaries, ‘the present’, identity, crimes against humanity, globalization. The historian has to deal with the media, or various pressure groups, which implement strategies of ‘history’ that explain ‘who we are’ ot give an identity. Moreover, the concept of globalization and its influence on historiography or the so-called global history elicits relevant answers of post-modernism. Is this a transitional stage or the domination of ‘the present’ in historical thought?
The following essays provide plenty of food for thought in answer to that and the other pertinent questions raised throughout this volume. All authors reflect on the different views of history in their own sub-disciplines, on existing traditions, limitations and ways to go ahead. In this way from the juxtaposition of various approaches of different historical fields one gets a clearer picture of the recent trends in history as a whole. After all, history is always renewing itself, in both old and new directions.
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