I’m stuck in the same rut as fantasy authors who feel compelled to write trilogies of 1,000 page books, apparently, but I want to take one more stab at explaining why a presentist critique of presentism in historical study annoyed many practicing historians.
I understand that many of the people looking in with bemusement and puzzlement at James Sweet’s overly abject apology and the spectacle of the American Historical Association locking its Twitter account to everybody but existing followers think this all seems like another spectacle of cancellation and ideological excess. I also understand that many of the people on social media jumping into the fray are just far-right provocateurs who have no interest whatsoever in the issues involved. But I think there’s at least some folks who are innocently holding to a conception of historical study that has never really been valid—that historians should (and have) studied the past ‘objectively’ by simply collecting evidence and sifting out bias—who read James Sweet’s essay and wonder what all the fuss is about. I want to talk to those people, who I think come by that perception via the way history is sometimes taught in high school, or via the kind of wearying odor of hand-me-down positivism that sometimes exudes from other social sciences.
I’m going to borrow an example of why this is the wrong way to think about history—both history itself and about the professional study of it in the academy—from a book I’m reading for pleasure at the moment, David Mattingly’s An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 2006, part of the Penguin History of Britain series of books. It’s a clearly written, authoritative overview of the history of Britain under Roman rule that has no overt “politics” that it professes. And yet Mattingly makes very clear from the outset how much a kind of presentism has shaped the way that contemporary British publics—and practicing historians—have understood the history of Roman Britain in the past, and how much our present mindset has enabled other interpretations of the available evidence as well as the collection of new evidence over time.
Mattingly describes how much of the British public has understood the Roman era until quite recently: a “civilizing” moment that marked the boundary between the prehistorical savagery of the people living in Great Britain and their entry into historical time under Roman authority, as many Britons in the south and midlands of the island moved towards Roman settlements and “Romanized”, adopting the habits and outlook of their erstwhile conquerors while losing their former rude brutality for the most part. The narrative of Roman pacification and civilization often served in the last several centuries as an ethnonationalist marker justifying an southern English disdain for Northern England, Scotland and Ireland as places that had either been untouched by Roman power or had so fiercely refused it that the Romans ended up building frontier walls to keep the unapologetic savages out of the Pax Romana.
In my own historical work, focusing on late 19th and 20th Century sub-Saharan Africa, primarily those societies that came under the rule of the British Empire for the first half of the 20th Century, I’m more than familiar with the worldview that Mattingly describes. British imperial administrators in Africa frequently told African subjects that the British had come to be the Romans to Africans, and just as Britons had been brought into proper urbanization, agriculture, and culture—as well as Christianity—so too would the peoples of Africa.
This was in some cases cynical rationalization, but more than a few district administrators were merely repeating the lessons they had learned as public schoolboys, offered earnestly by teachers and university professors alike, who were merely repeating the knowing consensus of classicists and historians in turn.
As Mattingly points out, there is instead—and has been for quite some time—quite a lot of evidence to suggest that a great many of the people living in Brittania at the time of the initial waves of Roman conquest and afterwards did not Romanize, did not welcome the Roman presence, and were not a bunch of woad-daubed brutes who knew nothing of agriculture or settled living. But both scholars and the general public in the early to mid-20th Century in England were simply not inclined to see the evidence that way. That would have required a sympathetic view of people struggling against—or at least trying avoid—imperial rulers, and it would have required an honest accounting of the quite considerable and fairly continuous violence of Roman occupation. It would have required recognizing the human complexity of pre-Roman societies on the island rather than accepting the generic descriptions of savagery and primitivism that the few surviving Roman chroniclers we have today applied to virtually all non-Roman societies in Western Europe.
British scholars and British publics couldn’t see their way to interpreting the evidence that way because they were ruling an empire whose ideological lens required them to see their subjects as primitives with no history, required them to overlook or ignore the violence they routinely applied to maintain their rule, and required them to think of imperialism as a benevolent process that would in short order be appreciated by the people they ruled despite any evidence to the contrary. They couldn’t even fully apply the implications of their self-congratulatory identification with the imaginary Romans in Britain in the sense that the British Empire in Africa was frankly terrified of the equivalent of “Romanization” as the conventional historical wisdom described it, e.g., African subjects who became literate in English, converted to Christianity, adopted elements of the material culture of Western Europe, and who expected to be granted rights and privileges as “civilized men” accordingly.
There’s nothing factually implausible about a British intellectual in the 1920s identifying more with Boudica than Agricola, and even than identifying thus to the point of reversing the common analogy and seeing the contemporary British Empire from the perspective of the colonized. Indeed, there were some—not many—who did. But for most establishment figures, that would have required a leap that was both political and intellectual that would have been shocking and offensive to most of their peers. It took the world changing to the point that the perspective of the colonized became knowable and available to the British mainstream in order to make a new historiographical approach broadly palatable and to fuel new readings of old sources as well as new investigations that turned up new evidence. You can’t easily think through to “well, perhaps we should try looking for the remains of Roman-era settlements that weren’t under direct Roman authority” or “perhaps we should question just who the people who ‘Romanized’ actually were and how many of them there were in the settlements that we do know” until you’re prepared to be skeptical about the idea that the Romans “civilized” southern Britain or prepared to think more rigorously about the sociology of settlements controlled by the Romans. The analogy to the British Empire provided a new way to think about Roman Britain only once the British Empire itself was something that could be questioned, criticized and ultimately ended and rejected.
This is what is so frustrating about the culture wars of the moment—and what I think Sweet’s address exasperatingly amplified. We know more and I think we know better about the past because of the politics of the past sixty years. It’s not merely that the old paradigm of Roman conquest was ideological, it is that it was empirically wrong and in hindsight, depressingly incurious and unimaginative. But in order to think better about the evidence, we had to challenge a series of orthodoxies that maintained empire, justified racial hierarchy, and made plausible interpretations effectively unthinkable.
Do we have our own blindspots? Undoubtedly. Precisely because they are, we will not easily arrive at understanding them simply by knowing that we have them. They will not be simply the ideological mirror image of our current political commitments. This is not a pendulum or a cycle. Western Europeans who were involved with Atlantic Africa in between 1500 and 1800, mostly but not exclusively in the context of the slave trade, knew more about those African societies than late 19th Century European conquerors did, because they needed to. They were not in the grip of an ideology that demanded that they be completely unable to see the political, cultural or religious complexity of those societies. Frederick Lugard managed to forget in a mere handful of years everything that Mungo Park learned in one trip.
What we know, what we want to know, and what we force ourselves not to know change over time just like everything else does. The study of the past always bows to—and is lifted up by—the present. Historical knowledge answers to the needs of its makers, whether that is rediscovering how people fought against conquerors or soothing the consciences of invaders. But I also do believe that we get better over time, as long as we maintain some of the discipline and continuity of our knowledge-making practices. I believe that what Mattingly is describing in his book is progress in what we know of Roman Britain and that this progress was only possible because of the success of anti-colonial struggles elsewhere in the course of the 20th Century. It was not merely a product of technique or of new evidence found by happenstance. I believe that what Sweet calls a troubling presentism is in fact the precondition of our next steps forward in understanding more and understanding better the past that has produced our present.
This is a remarkable piece. Oh, I so wish the leader of a professional society of historians could have produced and circulated this. It is well informed by just the kind of work and thought on the past outside Europe that should have been a lay-up for Jim Sweet.