What Is History?

Book Review

Title: What Is History?
Author: Edward Hallett Carr
Publisher: Vintage Books, 1961

By Leo Kee Chye

History can never be seen in the same light again for this book has upset my long entrenched notion that history is but an incontrovertible chronology of facts and causes. If not facts and causes, what is history then? This book review examines.

Who controls the past controls…the future: who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell (1903-1950), British writer.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

The above is a succinct description of a totalitarian society with the means at its disposal to indoctrinate its subjects what they should know and what they should know not. Such society aside, with the dawn of the twenty-first century, in most nations, with almost unfettered access to information and relatively more political freedom, the problem of objective truth about history can be safely relegated to the back of our minds. This optimism was concurred by Lord Acton when he remarked: “Ultimate history we cannot have in this generation; [but] show the point we have reached on the road from one to the other, now that all information is within reach, and every problem has become capable of solution.” (Carr 3).

Less optimistic, however, is Carr as he sets out in this book to examine what really is history.

History, despite being clothed in exquisite book-bindings, shelved in libraries of prestigious universities, and authored by luminaries, is far from being objective and definitive. She too is subjected to the whims and subjective judgments of historians. The astronomical facts with which historians have to grapple before any chance of bequeathing their magnum opus to posterity does not give them the luxury of recording every fact but only what they think to be the relevant ones. Julius Caesar’s crossing of Rubicon and Alexandra the Great’s cutting of the Gordon’s knot are deemed significant events to us now just because the historians deemed them important then. Period. When reading ancient history, we are at the mercy of those few ancient historians. No recourse to alternative sources seems ever plausible.

Carr argues the discretion exercised by historians as to what to record and not to record determines what we know and can possibly know about ancient history. Ancient historians, consciously or subconsciously, courting favour of a reigning regime or plotting the downfall of another, stamped their preferences and prejudices onto their works. This, of course, were no faults of their own since they were very much products of their society and their time. But their works invariably “colour” our perceptions of the ancient world.

To make things worse, ancient or modern historians alike are by no means contented to be mere compilers of historical facts. They, whether to heed to their divine calling or to satisfy their ego, take upon themselves the task of interpreting as well as tracing the causes of historical events. Whether Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War was ignited by an irrelevant quarrel in a far-away country that culminated into a full-blown war of the entire Greek world (Kagan 28) or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of Roman Empire to the triumph of barbarism and religion (Carr 117), the compulsion of reducing to one or few causes prove too tempting to resist.

No where has Carr better illustrated this odd historian’s proclivity than with this example: An examination candidate, who in answering “Why did revolution break out in Russia in 1971?” offered only one cause would be lucky to get a third grade. If he, however, attributed the revolution to a vary number of causes eloquently, he may end up a B grade plus a remark “well-informed, but unimaginative.” An ambitious candidate, who would not settle for anything less than A, will list out the same number of causes but in a hierarchy of magnitude, but with one overriding cause or cause of all causes.

Very seldom, if not none, will one find historians ascribing historical events to chance or the unfathomable whims of gods. If ever produced, such works will be greeted with disdain and their authors be judged sloppy as they refused to exercise their mental faculty in hunting down the causes but explained away via the easier route of chance.

Moreover, history has to be viewed in the context of the present. Though words may not have changed over the centuries, their connotation and denotation amid the backdrop of current political and economic reality may have changed. “Democracy” and “freedom” may mean something to an ancient historian which are not quite the same to a modern historian.

So where does that leave us? Carr does not elaborate. The aim of his book is to stimulate and challenge readers to the status quo.

Though I’m no historian myself nor even a student of history, I believe not all is doom and gloom. Modern science and archaeological discoveries may offer a beacon of hope to history. For example, the discovery of the Terra-cotta warriors of China in the 1970s offers a glimpse into the time during the Qin dynasty, or the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has added dramatically to the understanding of the varieties of Judaism at the time of Jesus and the rise of Christianity.

However, this may just be wistful thinking on my part as George Orwell once said: “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

• Kagan, Donald. 2003. “The Peloponnesian War”. New York: Viking.

Leo Kee Chye

Tuesday, December 9, 2003