READING HISTORY.

History is an account of happenings in the past, but these happenings don’t mean anything without context. For example a history text describes the happening of a king introducing some particular tax and much of the population not being happy about it. But to properly understand this incident I would need to know the details of the new tax and what the rest of the tax system was like and the general principles of taxation of the time and maybe even the structure of the economy as a whole. Also I would need to know what a king was at the time, the nature and powers of that role. Without all this context my understanding of the happening would pretty much just be something like: “one person did something and other people weren’t happy about it”.

Another example. I got a book about the British Empire and it started with an account of how, in the early 17th century, the Spanish already had an Empire and the British wanted one too. And I was thinking: but what is an Empire? The Spanish had one, did they? From the way it is described, it sounds like an Empire is just more territory that some country has. But there must be more to it than that. For example if, tomorrow, France invaded Spain and said: right, Spain is just part of France now. Would that mean France had an Empire? Or does it depend on how they treat the new members of the newly acquired territory? Would Spain just be a part of France? But France would still be a democracy so the Spanish population would then have to be treated like the existing members of France. Unless the French said that there would still be democracy in the France part only. But not in the Spanish part.

Without context the happening often ends up being just the story of a small group of people. For example conflict and ‘power struggles’ amongst royalty. Where the outcome doesn’t affect the life of the country in general. It’s just who the monarch is that changes, otherwise things remain the same. But that’s not historically interesting is it? It’s only interesting in the sense of being dramatic and exciting. But is that ‘historical’? It would only be historically interesting if one king was going to introduce a different economic system or make other changes. - What if I wrote a history of some period and picked some random 1% of the population who weren’t important at all. Just some ordinary people involved in some boring family squabble. That wouldn’t pass for ‘history’. But if that boring squabble is amongst royalty then it is history.

Reading the history of a war. After a while I think to myself: all I am reading here is just a description of the movements of large bodies of people and how they killed each other and in what quantities. This army went there and were met with some other army who killed so many of their soldiers. And then that army retreated and then they got stuck in some mud and ran out of guns. That sort of thing. Very dramatic but where’s the context to what was actually happening. For example: what are they fighting for? How will the world be different depending on which side wins? Maybe they didn’t know either. What if, many months into some massive war, one side stopped and said: “wait a minute, why are we fighting this war, can somebody remind me please?” and nobody can give an answer. In an historical account of ‘power struggles’ you hardly ever find out what power those struggles were a struggle for exactly. The power to do what? I want to know. I remember AJP Taylor’s book called “The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918” but he never says mastery of what. It’s all about the “balance of power” but a balance in the power to do what? It doesn’t say!

The manipulations and political intrigue behind Robert Clive’s victory in the Battle of Plassey is often described in detail in history books. But what he was fighting for and why isn’t explained in detail. And this needs to be explained because it was something strange. OK, it’s explained that he was fighting to become the governor of part of India. But we need more detail about what that means.

Most history that gets written even now is still about powerful people fighting with each other. In recent years there has been more of an emphasis on social history and the lives of ordinary people. But even that tells you hardly anything about what the lives of people were like. Or how their lives changed over that period. We don’t know much about the minutiae of ordinary life because people have never thought it worth recording. So we don’t know things like exactly how people in the past got their rubbish collected and disposed of. Or how they queued up and purchased a train ticket in the 19th century.

In light of all of the above, my ideal history book would be mostly static. A 500 page book on the French Revolution would be 490 pages of description of the structure and internal workings of the economy, society and life in France at the point just before the Revolution. And then ten pages of what happened from 1789. And those ten pages would make sense then.

I don’t want to read history that just tells me what happened in the past. I want to read history that tells me what it was like in the past. By which I mean: what people ate, what houses they lived in, what clothes they wore. And how they got all this stuff and how they behaved towards each other.

I want to know this kind of thing about the past but then I stop and ask myself: do I even know this kind of thing about the present? I am sitting here on this chair but I don’t know where it came from or by what process it got to me.

The ‘what it’s like’ of life is rarely documented in detail. This is why it is hard for us now to find out about the ‘what it’s like’ of the past. How many of the facts of what life is like now will persist into the future? We assume that, in the age of the internet and the massive amounts of information being recorded. That the future will know everything about the past that we live in now. But there might be things that we are failing to make a record of. Because they are so obvious to us. But those are precisely the things that people in the future will be most interested in. For example in the past many people used to have two sleeps during the night. But that’s not something which was explicitly made a note of anywhere, because nobody thought it was important enough. So we are now figuring it out from tangential references in other sources. Ordinary everyday things that people did, and that would strike you the most if you went back in time. Those are the things which are the least likely to be recorded.

[13 April 2016 - revised later]