So the FORWARD Symposium was a bit of an anti-climax as not many people turned up. Maybe it’ll be like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club: in a few years time everyone will be saying they were there. Was good to see Martyn Bennett again. It doesn’t seem like 7 years since he examined my PhD thesis. If I wanted to compare the speakers to British indie bands (and why wouldn’t I? It’s a perfectly normal thing to do) I’d say that Lucy Worsley was Velocette, Rodreguez King-Dorset was Radiohead, and I was The Indelicates. Make of that what you will. In the evening we went to Lincoln Drill Hall to see Richard Holmes and Gordon Corrigan talking about the First World War. They were both very good.
Below is my paper, along with a Zotero-able bibliography. It’s slightly different from what I actually said as I ad-libbed some extra bits but it’s near enough. (I had some trouble uploading the pictures through Wordpress so some of them might be too big for some people, but I just couldn’t be bothered to set up thumbnails manually.)
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More thoughts relating to my last post on Glenn Burgess on revisionism. I was making what might look like esoteric theoretical points there, and it might not always be immediately obvious how that applies to the existing historiography in practice. Anti-theory polemic often constructs a false dichotomy between all points of view being equally valid on the one hand and only one objective truth being valid on the other. I think things are more complicated than that. Although I reject objectivity I do think that there are many interpretations of history which are invalid for various reasons, including being internally inconsistent, not being very well supported by their own evidence, or even contradicting the laws of physics. But once we’ve dismissed all these interpretations as being impossible, we could potentially be left with many interpretations which are possible. This is where we get the theoretical issues that I wrote about before. It might not be possible, or even necessary, to choose between all these possible interpretations and choose a single correct one.
Applying this to English/British Civil War/Revolution historiography can illustrate the point, but it’s not necessarily obvious because other, more obvious, factors get in the way. For a start, many histories of this period (particularly, but not only, from Whigs and Marxists) have fallen at the first fence because they are internally inconsistent and/or not well supported by their own evidence (these are arguably the same thing, because poor evidence is an inconsistency for any empirical work but possibly irrelevant to non-empirical work). More have fallen at the second fence because other historians have produced evidence which contradicts them. Most, if not all, of the histories written from Gardiner onwards have shared certain basic empirical assumptions, so it’s perhaps surprising that these works have often not lived up to empirical standards of proof. Pointing that out should be alarming, but it might also be misleadingly comforting. Surely if everyone genuinely adhered to proper empirical standards we’d be able to find the one true story, wouldn’t we? I don’t think so. The fact that in practice so many historians have tried to argue for interpretations which are impossible doesn’t do anything to diminish the theoretical possibilities for an abundance of interpretations which can’t be dismissed as wrong but which can’t be chosen between. In practice we’re only just starting to see this.
Following Glenn Burgess’s example, I’ll take two different works and compare them: John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt and John Walter’s Understanding Popular Violence. Both books are meticulously researched to the highest standards (or at least higher than most other books I’ve seen). Their descriptions of what happened would be difficult to challenge on empirical grounds. Both relate to the causes and outbreak of the First Civil War but each has a very narrow focus rather than offering an overarching model which claims to explain everything. It is perhaps this focus that allows the authors to be so meticulous, and therefore avoid falling at the early empirical fences. This is not to say that they are less ambitious than Lawrence Stone or David Underdown (examples of historians who did attempt overarching explanatory models), just that their ambitions might be pointing in a different direction. Neither Adamson nor Walter explicitly claims to be telling the whole story. They have omitted many things and made arbitrary decisions about what to include, as any historian must when writing any history, but they have not attempted to close down other possibilities outside their chosen scope. This is not to say that they think anything goes. Within their chosen scope, both have demolished previous interpretations which now look impossible or at least highly improbable. The most important thing is that these books do not contradict each other much, if at all. It would be quite easy to see them as dealing with different parts of the same thing. Therefore we have two interpretations which differ because their focus and end points differ, but which are not mutually exclusive. However, I suspect that it would be difficult to synthesize both works into a single overarching thesis in the style of Lawrence Stone. They’re just different. Taken together they suggest that the civil war might be too big and complicated to ever be distilled into a single work. I think that this will become increasingly obvious in the future as we see more books like these.
- John Adamson, The Noble Revolt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).
- Glenn Burgess, ‘On revisionism: an analysis of early Stuart historiography in the 1970s and 1980s’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 609-27.
- John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999).
‘On Revisionism’ is an important article from 1990 (you can download it free from Historical Journal) in which Glenn Burgess sets out a fair appraisal of what revisionism is (or was) and defends it from some unfair criticisms, then makes some more sophisticated criticisms. It’s possibly unfair to beat Burgess with a stick that hadn’t been published at the time he was writing and which was (and perhaps still is) considered extremely radical, but I’d like to compare this article with the work of Keith Jenkins, and some of the theorists who inform his work, because there are some surprising similarities. Ultimately Burgess and Jenkins draw different conclusions, but they are tackling some of the same problems and at times use similar arguments. For the purposes of this post I’m not going to question empirical epistemological foundations at all, but if we accept that the past really happened, and that we can know facts about what really happened, there are still many practical and theoretical problems concerning what to do with those facts.
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And now the return of my series of posts about English/British Civil War(s)/Revolution(s) historiography. Today I’m considering Brian Manning’s The Far Left in the English Revolution. Published in 1999, this is one of the most recent examples of old-school Marxism. If you’ve read any of my previous posts on causes and allegiance you’ll know that I’m not really a fan of Marxism, but I’m trying to see the good as well as the bad. I’ll always have a certain amount of respect for him simply because he’s always been prepared to offer a clear, succinct, and empirically testable definition of “revolution”. It’s surprising how unusual that is for a historian of this period.
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This week I have been mostly reading Keith Jenkins and 6 years worth of Scary Go Round. I’m also looking after a coal fire, which means breathing in an unusual amount of hot ash and carbon monoxide. Therefore if I post any really mad ideas in the next few days it’s probably best to ignore them.
The other thing I read was an article by Brian Rejack about Brothers In Arms: Road To Hill 30 (the WW2 computer game that I posted about ages ago). First thought: if only I’d known you could get published in Rethinking History just by writing about how BiA isn’t as realistic as it claims to be. He didn’t even have to cite Derrida (although there is a bit of Barthes). Second thought: if only I’d bothered to look at the extras in BiA. I ignored them on the grounds that I already know quite a lot about WW2 and that I have the research skills to find out even more whenever I want. Do I need to be patronized by pop history factoids? Well, it turns out there’s a lot more to it than that.
One of the central points of the article is that extras can change the way a game (or DVD, where this idea started) is perceived and interpreted. The photos in the BiA extras are a major part of the games claims to realism. They include composites of original photos of WW2 mashed up with screenshots taken in-game, with only the change from black and white to colour showing where one begins and the other. (I’ve also just noticed that one of the composite shots is on the back of the box, but I don’t think I ever looked at the back of the box. So much for close reading…) With this attention to historical detail, surely Gearbox can say “This is How It Really Was”. But it doesn’t really work. When I wrote about the game I was mostly interested in tactical realism, which I think it ultimately fails at, despite being an improvement over MOHAA and CoD. They might have based the levels on maps and photos of the real Normandy, but does the real Normandy have those strange earth banks in the middle of fields with convenient dips in them that you can shoot over when you’re in the right position. If so who put them there and what are they supposed to be for?
Rejack takes a different approach, pointing out that the characters in the game are not emotionally engaging and don’t react to anything like real people. Even the death of Baker’s best friend in a cut scene isn’t particularly moving. Another weakness is that the game “presents a view of history as a straightforward sequence of events, with no sense of competing interpretations or multiple viewpoints”, although the sequel Earned in Blood does attempt something like that (as I mentioned here).
As a comparison, Rejack offers Facade, which involves more sophisticated interaction with NPCs and much less shooting. I’m not sure how excited I can get about a dinner party simulator, but I’ll report back after I’ve tried it.
Causation has always been a problem for me. I remember as an undergraduate struggling to write a 2,000 word essay explaining the French Revolution, and ending up thinking “what’s the point?”. My PhD thesis was mostly about describing rather than explaining, and where the conclusion touched on the reasons for the outcome of the English Civil War it was particularly weak. My first article mostly revolves around the question “continuity or change?” rather than “why?”, and I only ended up making strong claims about the causes of price changes in order to win an argument with the reviewer. But now I’m working on the Difficult Second Article, where I decided I could make the empirical data sexier by linking it to the debate on the causes of the English Civil War. That was probably a bad idea as it’s taking much longer than I expected, but I’ve put too much time and effort into it to abandon it now, and I need another publication on my CV as soon as possible to help with funding applications. So as well as digging into the mountain of historiography on the civil wars/revolution/whatever I’ve been looking into theories of causation.
There now follow some esoteric theoretical thoughts on an article by Steve Rigby (from 1996, so not necessarily the latest thing, but it’s a useful starting point even if the author might have moved on since then) on causal hierarchies, taking in Keith Jenkins along the way. Don’t be surprised if I’ve misunderstood some of it – this blog was always meant to be about thinking in public. (more…)
Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil War, (Barnsley, Pen and Sword, 2006); ISBN: 1844154548.
I’m just going to get straight to the point: this is the best book ever written about English Civil War battles. I’m not being sarcastic or damning it with faint praise. It really is that good. Wanklyn argues that previous methodology of battle reconstruction is inadequate, that familiar sources need to be reassessed, and that we really know far less than we thought we did about what really happened.
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Last week I posted some thoughts in response to the discussions at A Historian’s Craft and Civil War Memory about history and philosophy. In that post I took some of the philosophical problems that affect history and tried to restate them in scientific terms. As Brett pointed out, this really amounted to stating the obvious in fairly uncontroversial terms, but I think that was worth doing in order to bypass the unproductive hostility between both extremes in the postmodernism wars (although the extent to which those extremes even exist is debatable). Whether the major problems we face as historians are philosophical, scientific, or a bit of both, the question remains: how much time should we spend thinking about these problems? In this post I’ll be discussing that question, but I have to warn you in advance that I can’t answer it. So there might not be much point reading any further…
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Rachel at A Historian’s Craft and Kevin at Civil War Memory have both been thinking about how much historians should think about philosophy. Although they take different positions on the issue, they both approach it in a refreshingly un-polemical fashion (contrast with the “that’s you that is” pettiness of this embarrassing exchange between Alun Munslow and Arthur Marwick). It’s almost inevitable that the p-word comes up, but it’s interesting that the word “postmodernism” seems to be used more often by people who are against it than people who are for it, whatever it is. Too often it seems to be a label attached to a conflation of lots of different (and not always compatible) theories, but let’s stick with the stereotypical view of postmodernism for now. Here are two recognisable stereotypes:
The traditional empiricist, who believes that what historians do is to scientifically examine archival evidence to find out what really happened in the past, something which is achievable if you eliminate bias.
The postmodernist who believes that everything is culturally constructed, that an objective scientific study of the past is impossible, and that even science itself is an ideologically suspect paradigm.
Whether these stereotypes are true or not (and you should always be suspicious of stereotyping - isn’t it funny how stereotypes are always someone else?) they crudely illustrate what I’m trying to get at in this post: that both extremes in the postmodernism wars seem to have a stereotypical and inaccurate view of science.
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Recently I linked to The Wapenshaw, a new early-modern military history blog. This is an exciting addition to an area which is under-represented in the history blogosphere (how I hate that word, but I cant think of anything better). There was a noticeable gap here in the first Military History Carnival. Although I found a reasonable number of early-modern posts, most of them focused on America, and only one covered Europe. Another reason why I’m pleased to see this blog is that Rich is paying a lot of attention to me (every blogger is a narcissist!). His first two posts comment on my posts from last year about cavalry charges and drill books. This is a useful coincidence, as I need to write a proposal for a conference paper on this topic by the end of this week, so in this post I’ll trying to get my thoughts into some kind of coherent order. Trying: the post itself is quite incoherent and probably contains some total nonsense, but that’s part of the value of a blog.
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