A History of History

Question: Are historians of ancient history more honest and unbiased than the historians of modern history?
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Narrative and analytical history (as opposed to simple chronicles) has been written for different reasons at different times. Although it is dangerous to generalise, you might like to consider the following.

The father of Western European history was the Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484 BCe – c. 425 BCe). Herodotus regarded history as a source of moral teaching and included a number of moralising diversions in his 'Histories' of the Persian Wars. Although his immediate successor as an historian, Thucydides (c 460 BCe - c 395BCe), introduced a much more scientific approach to the writing of history in his 'Peloponnesian Wars', a good number of (mainly Roman) classical historians perpetuated the tradition of drawing moral lessons from history and their writing was skewed to this purpose. Most often the intention was to draw unfavourable comparisons between the Rome of their day and the glory of an earlier time; but there were also Roman and Greek writers whose recording of contemporary or near contemporary events were designed to promote political or personal agendas (or both!). So that the distortion of history has existed from the earliest times.

By the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, Europe consisted mainly of barbarian enclaves (during the so-called Dark Ages) that left the fringes of Empire seperated from Rome. Christianity, sometimes in heretical form and already established in some barbarian tribes, endured. And in the far west the surviving monasteries of Wales, Ireland and Brittany served as a conduit that preserved and transmitted traditions of scholarship and memories of a civilised past via Scotland and northern England to a mainland Europe that was being Christianised and restored from the south. History became the business of the Church, and the Church the business of history.

But scholarship was perverted into a sterile scholasticism that lacked curiosity, intellectual rigour and dynamism. In the 7th Century, as the great population movements subsided, an increasingly powerful papacy reached out across the barbarian divide to the remote Christian communities in the west. A united Church imposed its orthodoxy on pagan or heterodox enclaves and provided the institutional framework for a re-invented Empire, soon to be dubbed Holy Roman. Henceforward the Church was to assume a monopoly of learning, based for the most part on scholasticism and with the aim of creating a literate and educated clergy capable of promoting and justifying dogma.

There were occasional departures into pseudo-history in the Middle Ages, for example in Norman England, where native legends and foundation myths were commandeered by a new and alien elite in order to claim some kind of legitimacy. And the Rennaissance generated a new fascination with the classical past and a new understanding of scientific process.

But it was not until the Enlightenment of the 18th / 19th Centuries that historians began to attempt an objective approach, although not untinged with philosophical speculation. Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' was the first major milestone of modern historiography. The 19th Century saw the emergence of a truly scientific approach to history, especially in Germany; but here and elsewhere history was sometimes used to further nationalistic and chauvinist agendas.

1848, the ‘Year of Revolutions’, had brought pressure to bear in many quarters. The century had seen the growth of separatism, triggered by maladministration and corruption, in the quest for self-determination and democracy and in some cases with the added ingredient of socialist political theory. New nation states were created, and emerging nationalist movements proliferated through the propaganda of aspiring political classes and by the usual methods: the distortion and re-invention of history, the stimulation of patriotic fervour without regard to historical political geography, the creation of folkish ‘heritage’, the fomentation of ancient grudges, the incitement of hatred towards neighbours.

The use of history as a propaganda tool persists on the outer fringes of Western writing and even more so in regions of the globe where political conflicts or the clash of ideologies are current. And, more generally:

All important historical writing is revisionist and subjective (however much the historians think otherwise), and all writers, whatever their period, will choose their own points of focus. The wider the reading, the more the reader will be exposed to differing perspectives and opinions, and the better will he/she be able to form their own view of whatever passes for historical reality.


A recent (2007) and absorbing account of the development of historiography is ‘A History of Histories’ by John Burrow. Purchase from Amazon here, or go to History Unlimited for a detailed review and entry to the web site.