Professional Historians in Public: Old and New Roles Revisited 9783111186047, 9783111185910

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Professional Historians in Public

The Politics of Historical Thinking

Edited by Brigitta Bernet, Lutz Raphael, and Benjamin Zachariah Advisory Board: Caroline Arni, University of Basel Amar Baadj, American University in Cairo Berber Bevernage, University of Ghent Federico Finchelstein, New School for Social Research, New York Kavita Philip, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Jakob Tanner, University of Zürich

Volume 5

Professional Historians in Public Old and New Roles Revisited Edited by Berber Bevernage and Lutz Raphael

This research was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG).

ISBN 978-3-11-118591-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-118604-7 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-118605-4 ISSN 2625-0055 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023933751 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Nicolas Poussin, Klio und Fama, ca. 1650. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

The Politics of Historical Thinking Historical thinking has a politics that shapes its ends. While at least two generations of scholars have been guided into their working lives with this axiom as central to their profession, it is somewhat of a paradox that historiography is so often nowadays seen as a matter of intellectual choices operating outside the imperatives of quotidian politics, even if the higher realms of ideological inclinations or historiographical traditions can be seen to have played a role. The politics of historical thinking, if acknowledged at all, is seen to belong to the realms of nonprofessional ways of the instrumentalisation of the past. This series seeks to centre the politics inherent in historical thinking, professional and non-professional, promoted by states, political organisations, ‘nationalities’ or interest groups, and to explore the links between political (re-)education, historiography and mobilisation or (sectarian?) identity formation. We hope to bring into focus the politics inherent in historical thinking, professional, public or amateur, across the world today. Editorial Board: Brigitta Bernet, University of Trier Lutz Raphael, University of Trier Benjamin Zachariah, University of Trier Advisory Board: Caroline Arni, University of Basel Amar Baadj, American University in Cairo Berber Bevernage, University of Ghent Federico Finchelstein, New School for Social Research, New York Kavita Philip, University of British Columbia, Vancouver Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna Dhruv Raina, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Jakob Tanner, University of Zürich

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-202

Contents The Politics of Historical Thinking

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Introduction Berber Bevernage and Lutz Raphael 1 New Roles for Professional Historians and New Public Uses of the Past 3

Part One: Histoires Engagées: A Critical Look Back Stefan Berger 2 Eric Hobsbawm as a Public Champion of Cosmopolitan Universalism 37 Larissa Schulte Nordholt 3 Two Sides of Activist Scholarship Within UNESCO’s General History of Africa (1964–1998) 65 Kanad Sinha 4 Colonial Historiography, Hindutva, and the Difficulty of Reading the Ancient Indian Historical Traditions 89

Part Two: Law and Historical Expertise Vladimir Petrović 5 Challenges of Historical Expert Witnessing in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Elsewhere 117 Bain Attwood 6 The Waitangi Tribunal and the Public Life of History

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Part Three: Old and New Public Demands on Professional Historians Fernando Nicolazzi 7 Between Discipline and Profession: Historical Studies and Their Public Relevance in Brazil 163 Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt 8 Policy-Oriented History for the EU: The Rise of a New Type of Professional Practice for Historians? 185 June Bam and Rafael Verbuyst 9 Indigenous History, Activism, and the Decolonizing University: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Struggle over the Khoisan Past in Post-apartheid South Africa 213

Part Four: Public History in New Media Alexandra Kolesnik, Boris Stepanov, and Irina Savelieva 10 Russian Public Historians in the New Media (The Case of Telegram) 245 Flávia Florentino Varella and Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo 11 Practices of Popular Science and Digital Curation in Theory of History on the Portuguese Edition of Wikipedia 271

Part Five: Perspectives: Moral, Epistemic, and Political Antoon De Baets 12 Historians and Human Rights Advocacy

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Jakob Tanner 13 The Politics of Memory and the Task of Historians

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Benjamin Zachariah 14 Languages of Legitimation and the Registers of Legitimate History 351

Contents

Biographical Notes

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Selected Bibliography on ‘Public Uses of the Past and the Role of Professional Historians in the Public Sphere’ 379 Index

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1 New Roles for Professional Historians and New Public Uses of the Past For most of the second half of the twentieth century, historians’ biggest fear concerning the public relevance of their profession was that of a society increasingly lacking interest in the past or in the historical dimensions of life. Whether or not this fear was exaggerated, it was not baseless. During the high days of modernization from the 1960s to the 1990s, in many parts of the world, historians were confronted with, and even felt marginalized by an ever-growing futurism or presentism in their societies. Other social sciences tended to dominate public visions of the future and the definition of present problems and challenges. This kind of presentism was also fuelled by a kind of collective amnesia after the violent conflicts of the recent past. Think, for instance, of the pact of silence in Spain’s transition to democracy, or the silence about the recent past relating to the Nazi period in Germany, but also in other European countries under Nazi occupation, or allied to the German Empire during the Second World War.1 Amnesia, or at least a loss of historical consciousness was the main tendency in societies striving to liberate themselves from their traditions and their past.2 Professional historians were generally sceptical about this presentism, and they tried to defend their established positions in education and culture, with different outcomes worldwide. In Europe, for example, they were generally successful, as university teaching in history was needed to train the growing number of school teachers in secondary education.3 Historians used different strategies to defend the continuing public relevance of their discipline. Some tried to cast off the suspicion of conservatism and defend the relevance of their discipline by showing that historical expertise remained relevant even in societies that were oriented toward the present or future. Historical expertise could facilitate the emancipation from the dead weight of the past, either by drawing lessons from it, or by contesting the authority of tradition and revealing its socially constructed or ‘invented’  Richard Ned Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner and Claudio Fogu, eds., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Jörg Echternkamp, ed., Experience and memory: the Second World War in Europe (Oxford: Berghahn, 2010); Jan-Werner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press 2002).  François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).  Ilaria Porciani and Lutz Raphael, Atlas of European Historiography. The Making of a Profession 1800–2005 (Houndmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 50–69. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-001

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nature.4 Others embraced the alleged practical irrelevance of their discipline by turning to anti-utilitarianism or to aesthetic enjoyment (jouissance) as their trademark or source of pride. Showing interest in the past as past and out of pure curiosity for its otherness could be seen as the sign of an intellectually mature, cultured society, in pursuance of the artistic motto of l’art pour l’art.5 Whether due to the success of this double strategy or not, it seems that the discipline managed quite well to cope with and adapt to this context of decreased societal and political interest in certain parts of the world during the high days of modernization. Many of the epistemic turns that academic history as a discipline underwent in the western world took place during these decades, and they can be interpreted as responses to changing public demands in times of the shrinking public relevance of history as past politics. The academic discovery of ‘world[s] we have lost’, and the ‘otherness’ of a past6 seemingly no longer of direct relevance for the legitimation of today’s world, its social and political order, for example, opened the academic world to new cultural demands linked to the rise of the heritage industry.7 It may thus be that several of the historiographical innovations and turns were facilitated by the conditions of relative freedom and relative absence of political pressure that were created by the decreased or at least changed public historical interest.8 In the past couple of decades, since roughly the 1990s, the social context in which professional historians find themselves has radically changed in large parts of the world. It would be misleading to claim that the modernization-style dislike of history has died out everywhere. Generally, however, public interest in the past is clearly blooming. ‘Dealing with the past’ is high on the agenda of governments and policymakers all over the world, and at all kinds of levels.9 International organisations  Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds.‚ The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).  See for example Louise Fradenburg, “‘So That We May Speak of Them’: Enjoying the Middle Ages,” New Literary History 28, No. 2 (1997): 205–230; and: Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, De vreugden van Houssaye: Apologie van de historische interesse (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1992).  France and French historiography were pioneering these trends under the heading of “histoire nouvelle”: Lutz Raphael, Die Erben von Bloch und Febvre: Annales-Historiographie und nouvelle histoire in Frankreich 1945–1980 (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1994).  Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches. (London: Routledge, 2013).  However we should not forget that academic history continued to profit from the ongoing public demand for the legitimation of existing nation-states – democratically or dictatorially ruled. This holds true for countries like Russia as well as France or Germany. Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History after 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Stefan Berger, The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  Christoph Cornelißen and Paolo Pezzino, eds., Historikerkommissionen und historische Konfliktbewältigung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).

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(such as the UN) urge countries to deal with their colonial pasts and set up reparation and memorial programmes,10 or to enter into dialogue over their divergent historical narratives. In January 2014, for example, the role of historical narratives in conflict and peace building was chosen as a central theme for a debate in the UN Security Council under the presidency of Jordan. Jordan even asked the Security Council to “consider mandating a small United Nations historical advisory team” which could assist states to recover archives or set up historical commissions once the guns fall silent.11 National governments set up historical commissions, create memory laws, or offer formal apologies to deal with the dark pages of their past, whether related to colonialism, slavery, genocide, or political repression.12 City councils worry about politically embarrassing street-names or monuments and set up their own local initiatives to inquire into historical injustices (sometimes going back as far as to medieval or early modern trials against alleged witches) and to publicly state their changed moral values and political allegiances.13 Policy-makers of course do no turn to the past entirely on their own initiative. They are being urged on by activists and

 Report on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racial Intolerance by UN special rapporteur E. Tendayi Achiume: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/ UNDOC/GEN/N19/259/38/PDF/N1925938.pdf?OpenElement [Last seen: 26 May 2022].  See Letter dated 14 January 2014 from the Permanent Representative of Jordan addressed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN Security Council S/2014/30).  For an overview of the ever-increasing number of state-sponsored historical commissions established around the world the last couple of decades, see: Cira Pallí-Asperó, Clarifying the Past: Understanding Historical Commissions in Conflicted and Divided Societies (New York: Routledge, 2022).  In 2015 the city council of Brentonico in Northern Italy hired a historian to collect evidence in order to re-open a trial of, and vindicate, a woman who was executed in 1716 on charges of witchcraft. Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Woman convicted of witchcraft to get retrial 300 year on,” The Guardian (16 October 2015). In January 2021, the Belgian city of Lier formally rehabilitated three women who were prosecuted for witchcraft 431 years earlier, offered official apologies, and created a commemorative plaque. In May 2022, the city council of Ghent discussed how to rehabilitate several alleged witches executed in the 17th century. One of the ideas suggested was to use a concept of Stolpersteine, memorial cobblestones, as have been used to commemorate victims of the Holocaust in Germany. The examples of initiatives listed above are often described as part of a globally hegemonic project of ‘liberal memory’ which are based on sometimes very optimist and naive sets of assumptions about the power of historical truth telling or ‘moral remembrance’ that will quasi-automatically foster reconciliation, instill civic values, or lead to democratization. See: Charles Forsdick, James Mark and Eva Spišiaková, “Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation: How We Remember in the Twenty-First Century,” Modern Languages Open, 1 (2020): 1–34. And: Lea David, “Moral Remembrance and New Inequalities,” Global Perspectives 1 (2020): 1–15. Yet, some commentators have also pointed out the existence of an increasingly vocal reaction against this project, which has been called the rise of “illiberal memory”. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “The Rise of Illiberal Memory,” Memory Studies (2021): 1–18.

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‘memory entrepreneurs’,14 who mobilize all kinds of strategies of public pressure, including the use of legal actions in national as well as international courts and tribunals.15 The (renewed) interest in the past is of course not limited to the spheres of politics, collective action, and jurisdiction. It can also be noticed in many other societal spheres. Reflecting on memory, archives, and the presence of the past is a major topic in contemporary art.16 Historical topics are omnipresent in films and TV series, in literary fiction, or, economically more importantly, in games.17 ‘Points of historical interest’ are also a crucial element in the many variants of vintage or heritage culture that often serve as the stage and inspiration for the fashion industry, forming an important motor for the rise of international tourism. While heritage tourism was, in the nineteenth and for large part of the twentieth century, still a phenomenon directed at a small and highly educated elite, it has become a mass phenomenon and a key asset of a global tourism industry, often essential for the national economy of a country (examples becoming negatively visible with dramatic economic consequences when the pandemic situations in 2020 and 2021 virtually wiped out the tourist traffic, striking examples of this effect being felt in Egypt or Sri Lanka).18 To sum up, history (or rather all kinds of relations with the past) is in high demand, and historians no longer need to fear a society devoid of interest in the

 Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).  For a discussion of this type of memory activism from below, see: Yifat Gutman and Jenny Wüstenberg, “Challenging the Meaning of the Past from below: A Typology for Comparative Research on Memory Activists,” Memory Studies, 15 (2022): 1070–86. For the use of judicial means by memory activists specifically, see: Berber Bevernage, “Cleaning up the Mess of Empire? Evidence, Time and Memory in ‘Historic Justice’ Cases Concerning the Former British Empire (2000Present).” Storia Della Storiografia 76 (2019): 63–82.  Craig Staff, Retroactivity and Contemporary Art (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018); Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004): 3–22; Christine Ross, The Past Is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).  Jerome De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008). And: Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott, eds., Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).  On the high hopes that have often been placed on heritage for the economic development of underdeveloped regions, and for a critical analysis of how risky this kind of strategy is, see Gregory Ashworth, “The Commodification of the Past as an Instrument for Local Development: Don’t Count on It,” in Heritage Impact: Proceedings of the first international symposium on the socioeconomic impact of cultural heritage, ed. J. McLoughlin et. al. (Budapest: Archeolingua 2005), 81–88.

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past. Yet, despite the opportunities for publicly engaged history that it offers, and contrary to what historians may have hoped for, this widespread societal interest in the past does not seem to have translated into an increased interest in, or prestige of, the academic discipline of history, or of the expertise of professional historians outside of the academic sphere. Paradoxically, an increased societal interest in the past seems to coincide with a situation in which conventional academic historical expertise has come under severe pressure. More than ever, it seems that historians have lost their hegemony in what Paul Ricoeur called “the space of retrospection”.19 A key thesis of this book is that this situation is merely a paradox, not a contradiction, because the pressure on professional historians seems to be directly related to the increased and more variegated demands for history. Professional historians are struggling with this public demand, often feeling badly prepared for the jobs offered and the tasks to be fulfilled. Old routines seem not to fit today’s demands. Highly specialized, historians must recognize that their explanations and their knowledge are often seen as useless, their speech boring, their utterances non-communicable or irrelevant. An extreme illustration of this trend is the immense popularity of the television series ‘Drunk History’, which ran in the US between 2013 and 2019, and in the meanwhile has had adaptations in several countries including the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Hungary, Poland and Australia. The concept of the series is that a celebrity person is asked to narrate a ‘real’ historical event while being (very) drunk; actors then re-enact this story. Interestingly the makers of the series stress that their show is historically accurate in terms of dates, names and main “story elements”, and the series is being advertised as “educational comedy”. The show has been hailed in several media outlets as “informative” or as containing “secret educational value”,20 and judging from many comments and discussions on internet fora, its alleged historical accuracy has also been an important part of the series’ attraction for its viewers. Given that the series typically focusses on conventional and often already well-known histories in terms of their contents, its popularity clearly shows that viewers often do not long for innovative or different historiographical content, but a more entertaining and less dry style of narrating it. A more radical trend in public discourses ignores the specific skills of historians as useful for a better understanding of the past, and insists on the right of everybody to his/her memory and to a usable past. Populist voices use the existence of professional doubts about the validity or existence of ‘facts’ to spread the idea that expertise and counter-expertise cannot be distinguished, and are of

 Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 351.  John Jurgensen, “The Secret Educational Value of ‘Drunk History’”, The Wall Street Journal (27 November 2017).

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equal value; they therefore deny the idea of ‘truth’ in any conventional epistemic sense.21 Problems of communication, defiance of scholarly authority, overspecialisation, professional scepticism, all this and more, converge to create a situation where professional historians have to adapt to new challenges and to develop new rules and practices for their public interventions. This book analyses how historians have dealt with these challenges by focussing on a series of cases where professional historians have intervened in public debates.

1.1 New demands and new challenges for professional historians Following our hypothesis that a growing demand for history coincides with an ongoing disciplinary crisis, often combined with a lack of professional solutions to meet that demand, we will have a closer look at both sides to better understand the new challenges professional historians have to cope with today. On the demand side, processes of democratization and the so-called “participatory turn”22 in the production of knowledge have paved the way to a new relationship between academic expertise and the general public. What has been called the “third wave of democratization”23 from the 1990s underlined the political relevance of history as public argument in many countries, opening the door for public debates about the past which had until then been forbidden or censored by authoritarian regimes. In 2010, political scientists identified 90 democracies worldwide – instead of 40 three

 Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Darrin Durant, and Martin Weinel, eds., Experts and the Will of the People: Society, Populism and Science (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020). Tuukka Ylä-Anttila aptly remarks however, that ‘post-truth’ politics and the valorization of common sense over expertise is only one dimension of the relation between knowledge and populism. (Right wing) populists often also use a positivist and scientistic discourse to claim that they have their own counter knowledge that gets to the real truth which is being hidden by mainstream experts. Tuukka Ylä-Anttila, “Populist Knowledge: ‘Post-Truth’ Repertoires of Contesting Epistemic Authorities,” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 5 (2018): 356–388. Also see: Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones, eds., History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis (New York: Routledge, 2020).  Per Hetland and Kim Christian Schrøder, “The Participatory Turn: Users, Publics, and Audiences,” in A History of Participation in Museums and Archives Traversing Citizen Science and Citizen Humanities, ed. Per Hetland et. al. (London: Routledge, 2020): 168–185.  Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

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decades earlier. In many of these new democracies the recent past of authoritarian regimes and of state crimes committed by them were crucial topics that had to be addressed in order to establish the legitimacy of the new order. The re-politicization of the past was one consequence of this wave of democratization, leading to very different political uses of history. They range from a renaissance of an academic historiography serving the cause of the nation and its state (as in many east European countries) to new forms of a history from below defending the emancipation of repressed groups, and the rewriting of the past for a new post-colonial world order. The authority of professional historians as experts tends to lose its epistemic status as an unquestioned assumption, and is generally questioned in the name of others’ claims to tell the truth about history: eye-witnesses and their view of the past, the social or collective memories of whole groups, or the research results of lay citizens claiming their right to participate autonomously in (historical) research.24 The cultural and political background to these challenges to academic authority has been the shift in the public understanding of democracy in many countries worldwide, away from a narrow concept of democracy as an institutional order of checks and balances in the sphere of government to an understanding of democracy as an equal and open access to all forms of participation in politics, culture and society. In the academic world of science and scholarship, this has led to demands to democratize the institutional settings of knowledge production. The deeply hierarchical and elitist order of academia and the defence of autonomy in the name of ‘pure’ scholarship have come under assault both by politicians dreaming of a more direct programming of sciences and scholarship and a better control of their (often high) public investments, and by social groups demanding a higher share of representation for their cause and for themselves.25 Like the Bastille in 1789, the negative image of the Ivory Tower has become the omnipresent symbol of an ancien régime of knowledge production to be abolished. This demand for participation and open access to the past is supported by a self-critical mood among intellectuals and academics who have identified the many traces of self-interest and self-legitimation of professional historians behind the idealistic discourse of defending the truth about history based on the complexities of the sources.

 For an influential argument on the impact of an increasing intellectual egalitarianism and anti-elitism on the conventional notion of expertise, see: Thomas M. Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).  Mary Henkel, “Can Academic Autonomy survive in the Knowledge Society? A Perspective from Britain,” Higher Education Research & Development 26 (2007): 87–99.

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More or less globally, we can observe the rise of demands for a “usable past”26 serving the interests of social groups, private owners or shareholders of (private) academic institutions, or the nation-state as a whole. In recent times professional history and its academic settings have been interrogated in terms of their suitability for public claims made in the name of groups fighting for their public recognition and searching for support for the creation of social/collective memories unifying them, and helping to create what is often called a “group identity”.27 As a result of these claims, professional historiography is confronted with a problem it has been familiar with since its beginning: its use as a powerful identity marker that can serve the case of all kinds of ethnic or national cultural essentialisms.28 Beyond these openly political demands in the name of social, religious or ethnic groups or political parties, we can observe a more subtle, less politicized form of this general trend: we could think of the many different ways public history and the museum sector are requested to have lay citizens (addressed as their “stakeholders”) participate in the creation of their research agenda and their programmes. A host of new ideas, such as “citizen science”29 and “crowd sourcing”30 have come up as part of this wave of democratizing the world of science and scholarship. For professional historians, it is still new to think of themselves addressing their public usefulness in terms of a ‘service’ for ‘clients’ – this kind of direct utilitarian definition of historical scholarship has been the monopoly of fascist or communist dictatorships: Dienst am Volk or “partisanship” were more central elements of national socialist or Soviet historiography, resulting in direct political

 According to Jeffrey Olick this notion of a usable past was first coined by the American literary critic Van Wyck Brooks who already during World War I claimed that American culture needed to create a pragmatic and coherent image of its past that would serve its present-day needs precisely because due to its heterogeneous population it lacked clear unifying traditions. Jeffrey Olick, “From Usable Pasts to the Return of the Repressed,” The Hedgehog Review 9 (2007).  A term whose naïve and essentialist use must be avoided in social sciences and history: see Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’,” Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1–47.  Stefan Berger, History and Identity: How Historical Theory shapes Historical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 1–34, 284–309.  For a discussion of the rise of the notion of ‘Citizen Science’, see: Bruno J. Strasser et al., “’Citizen Science’? Rethinking Science and Public Participation”, Science & Technology Studies 32 (2019): 52–76.  The term crowdsourcing – a combination of crowd and outsourcing – was first coined by journalist Jeff Howe in 2006 to describe how new technologies such as the internet enabled businesses to outsource tasks that were once performed by their own employers to a large of often vaguely defined networks of people via open calls. Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2008). The practices of crowdsourcing has been especially influential in the museum and cultural heritage sector. Mia Ridge, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014).

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control over historical research. In apparently strong contrast to its authoritarian predecessors, the new economic model of a kind of professional service industry delivering useful knowledge to different groups is deliberately and enthusiastically pluralistic, yet it remains rather silent on the need for the preservation of autonomy and self-regulation in science and scholarship. A diffuse image of professional historians as “service professionals” in pluralistic democracies is increasingly popular, and it fits public expectations in many democracies. A more elaborated version of this new utilitarian demand is what the anthropologist Ronald Niezen calls “therapeutic history”.31 By this term he means the (often rather creative) use of history to raise self- or group esteem, and to address alleged identity crises or wounds created by the past. When applied to victims of past violence, this version of public demand seems morally superior to the power-based partisanship for the state, or lobbying activities for vested interests, but it nevertheless creates a dilemma for the professional historian, as it may undermine the epistemic values of his/her discipline and profession.32 All these claims to the need for a usable past in pluralist democracies take for granted that the institutional settings of academic scholarship (mostly organized in universities or other research institutes) somehow manage to avoid a situation in which the autonomy of knowledge production and the critical stance of historical research is undermined. But a closer look at recent trends in academia show that this may not be that easy to ensure. Particular attention must be paid towards the rise of recent populist movements and their use of the past. In many countries, they use the rhetoric of exclusion from the so-called establishment, both in government and in academia, to claim their right to a proper, alternative history that remains hidden or warped by mainstream historical wisdom.33 Egalitarian polemic against an (alleged) elitism of the discipline is often combined with the rediscovery of older narratives on the nation’s past glory. Populist movements defend the equal right of all groups to choose

 Ronald Niezen, The Rediscovered Self: Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).  Lutz Raphael and Benjamin Zachariah, “Why should anyone Trust a Historian? Intellectual Honesty and the Purposes of History,” Bloomsbury History: Theory, Method and Historiography online-publication (2021), DOI:10.5040/9781350970885.076; Herman Paul, “What is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires,” History and Theory 53 (2014): 348–371.  For a discussion see: Berber Bevernage, Eline Mestdagh, Walderez Ramalho and MarieGabrielle Verbergt, eds., Claiming the People’s Past: Populist Politics of History in the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Also see: Christoph Kohl, Barbara Christophe, Heike Liebau and Achim Saupe, eds., The Politics of Authenticity and Populist Discourses. Media and Education in Brazil, India and Ukraine (Cham: Springer Nature, 2021); Omar Al-Ghazzi, “We Will Be Great Again: Historical Victimhood in Populist Discourse,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 24 (2021): 45–59.

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their own ‘improved’ history, and view the political arena as the level where the truth of the past as an essential element of collective identity can be decided. One can observe the consequences of such populist visions when their representatives come into power. Think here, for example, of the often plainly mythical references to history and heritage that were used in the Brexit campaign.34 Also think of former US President Donald Trump’s creation of a 1776 Commission that had to help install a new patriotic curriculum in American schools and counter the alleged leftist attacks on the nation’s exceptional history in the form of the removals of confederate monuments, or the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Trump considered the latter project as propaganda that tries “to make students ashamed of their own history”.35 The animosity toward professional historians is also very outspoken in the discourse of India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. Modi has backed up his Hindu nationalist revision of Indian history by celebrating “folk stories” by “common people” as an alternative to academic histories, and by creating several grand new memorial sites which he claims are needed to correct the “mistakes” and “injustices” made by the writers of history, to the disservice of those who actually “shaped history”. During a foundation stone laying ceremony at one of these new memorials, Modi stated that “History of India is not just what was written by those who enslaved this country and those with a slave mentality. India’s history is that to which the common people of India have kept in the folk stories of India, that which has been carried forward by generations.”36 Beside political demands in a broad or direct sense, we see the rise of many forms of market-based activities around the past. History matters, as we said, and history sells, we must add. In many western countries, private (or public-private) ‘history making’ companies have been founded where you can order a business history or sometimes a family history.37 Especially noteworthy is the boom in private companies that promise to reveal the history of your ancestry if you mail

 Nicholas Ross Smith and Maximilian Mayer, “Brexit and the Trap of History,” Global Affairs 5 (2019): 445–451. And: Kenneth Brophy, “The Brexit Hypothesis and Prehistory,” Antiquity 92 (2018): 1650–1658.  Michael Crowly, “Trump Calls for ‘Patriotic Education’ to Defend American History from the Left,” New York Times (17 September 2020). Also see: Oz Frankel, “Historical Consciousness in the Age of Donald Trump: Populism, Evangelicalism, and the Typological Imagination,” in Claiming the People’s Past, ed. Bevernage et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).  “History of India is not just what was written by those who enslaved us, says PM Modi,” The Times of India, 16 February 2021.  Brian W. Martin, “The Business of History: Customers, Professionals, and Money,” in The Oxford Handbook of Public History, eds. James B. Gardner and Paula Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 122–138.

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them a DNA sample (and a check, of course).38 Frequently in cooperation with neighbouring disciplines, we see the rise of professional consultancy bureaus for the heritage sector, for museums, and of course the private companies who specialise in archaeological surveys at construction sites that are now often mandatory for big real estate developers. Consultancy bureaus and legal firms working on lawsuits about so-called toxic tort cases – e.g. cases about historical pollution, or diseases related to lead-paint contaminations, asbestos or tobacco, also often need professional historians to serve their clients.39 We also mention ‘historical interest’ as a motivation taken seriously by the tourist industry, both at the level of travel agencies and that of their local partners.40 The economic balance sheet of these activities varies, but they have created a worldwide market niche where professional historians often intermingle with other academically-trained specialists from the humanities, but also with local enthusiasts for the past of their city or region, and various other autodidacts. Moreover, much money is made and more capital needed in the markets for computer- and television-based infotainment. The gaming and film industries often use historical costumes, settings, and past events to tell their stories and make their products fashionable. Once again, their artistic ambition to recreate the atmosphere of a ‘past we have lost’ or to create a realistic vision of the past they have chosen as the staging for their story requires strong and professional historical expertise.41 The technical procedures, the size of the audience, the globalization of the demand, and the variety of themes of the past taken up all over the world, have

 The largest of this type of for-profit companies is ‘Ancestry.com’, see https://www.ancestry. com/ [last seen: 31 May 2022]. For a discussion of this phenomenon see: Jerome De Groot, Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (London: Routledge, 2022).  Ramses Delafontaine, Historians as Expert Judicial Witnesses in Tobacco Litigation: A Controversial Legal Practice (Berlin: Springer, 2015). David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, “The Trials and Tribulations of Two Historians: Adjudicating Responsibility for Pollution and Personal Harm,” Medical History 53, No. 2 (April 2009): 271–292.  Fiona Starr, “The Business of Heritage and the Private Sector,” in Heritage and Globalisation, eds. Sophia Labadi and Colin Long (New York: Routledge, 2010). Helaine Silverman, “Branding Peru: Cultural Heritage and Popular Culture in the Marketing Strategy of PromPerú,” in Encounters with Popular Pasts, eds. Mike Robinson and Helaine Silverman. (Cham: Springer, 2016).  Chris Kempshall, “War Collaborators: Documentary and Historical Sources in First World War Computer Games,” First World War Studies 10 (2019): 225–244. And: Alexander von Lünen, Katherine J. Lewis, Benjamin Litherland, and Pat Cullum, Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian (New York: Routledge, 2019). Historians have in their turn started to takes video games more seriously as either forms of popular history or as teaching tools. It is noteworthy in this context that the American Historical Review has since recently started publishing reviews of ‘historically based video games’ in its review section. “Video Game Reviews: Introduction,” The American Historical Review 126 (2021): 214.

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changed in scope and scale. Historians are part of this globalized culture industry, more often as consultants than as members of production teams, and they often have to be satisfied with assisting tasks. In all these forms of histotainment, the story tends to be more important than the creation of historical insight or provision of historical nuance. Yet the blurring of the demarcation line between fact and fiction, story and history, is perhaps the culturally intriguing and politically irritating sideeffect of the many uses of the past in the culture industries of today. They concern professional historians as consultants or employees but also as school or university teachers who are confronted with the powerful, but often distorted, images of the past imprinted in the minds of their students. The filmmaker D.W. Griffith, in 1915, prophesised a time “[w]hen children in public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures [. . .] Certainly they will never be obliged to read history again.”42 Beyond the demands of society, political authorities are creating new demands for professional historians. Worldwide, the state and its institutions are still the single most important sponsors of academic history, but in addition to the classic forms of archives, universities and research institutions organized, financed and controlled by the State, the past decades have seen the rise of new forms of state-sponsoring.43 In addition to their funding of a large part, and in some countries the entire infrastructure of higher learning and teaching, public authorities have increasingly launched research programmes targeted to very specific topics often legitimated by political interests. In Germany and France, ministries finance and contract inquiries into their ‘dark’ past during the Nazi period. In the Netherlands, the government has recently asked several research institutes of its Royal Academy of Sciences to inquire into the extreme violence committed by its colonial forces during the Indonesian war of independence.44 The European Union has launched a series of programmes targeted to strengthen the cultural and historical legitimation of the existing European Union.45 The UNESCO had as early as in in 1964 commissioned a large number of historians to write its ‘General History of Africa’ series,46 and in 1994 it launched a ‘slave route’ project,

 D.W. Griffith, ‘Five dollar ‘movies’ prophesied’, cited in David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign country -Revisited (Cambridge: University Press, 2015), 408.  Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History after 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).  The final report of this inquiry has been published in the book: Gert Oostindie, Ben Schoenmaker and Frank Van Vree eds., Over de Grens: Nederlands Extreem Geweld in de Indonesische Onafhankelijkheidsoorlog 1945–1949 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022).  See chapter 8 in this book.  See chapter 3 in this book.

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taking up a central topic of postcolonialism and making it an official project of the world community.47 Where sponsoring creates incentives, other state activities directly intervene in the field of history production. The legal regulation of how to present and to name events of the past is an example in kind. The list of so-called memory laws concerning the correct ways of referring to genocides or massacres in the past has grown longer during the last twenty years, demonstrating a growing sensitivity both of democracies and authoritarian regimes to control the way their citizens talk about the past and communicate among each other.48 The motivation behind such regulations varies enormously. In some cases, such laws are deemed necessary to curb hate speech or denialism with regard to past state crimes, civil wars or collective violence, or even to heal the wounds created by such pasts – thus fitting into what has been called “therapeutic governance”.49 In other cases, memory laws clearly attempt to curtail by law the expression of minorities’ views, and to prop up authoritarian readings of the past. Even liberal democrats now see the necessity to regulate what has previously been regarded as a sphere of autonomous professional communication and a realm of free public opinion. Often, the background for this democratic interventionism are populist manipulations of historical facts and their effort to invent a usable past that has never existed. In the hands of authoritarian regimes or dictatorships, state censorship is used to impose a glorified view of the nation-states’ past and to silence critical voices. One must carefully look at every case of legal intervention and contextualize its political agenda. Still, one must recognise that the past has become an important asset both at the international and the national level of the political. The public recognition of past crimes, and the taking responsibility for its consequences, have become an element of state diplomacy and of ‘soft power’ in international relations. This path was opened after 1949 by the new Federal Republic of Germany confronted with the atrocities of Nazi warfare, the state murder of Jews all over Nazi-occupied Europe, and the exclusion of Germany from the international community of states. In the last three decades, we can observe a massive widening of this kind of state diplomacy in relation to past crimes, expanding the field beyond the Holocaust to

 See the official website of this UNESCO project: https://en.unesco.org/themes/fostering-rightsinclusion/slave-route Last seen: 26 May 2022].  For a good overview, see: Uladzislau Belavusau and Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias, eds., Law and Memory: Towards Legal Governance of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).  Claire Moon, “Healing Past Violence: Traumatic Assumptions and Therapeutic Interventions in War and Reconciliation,” Journal of Human Rights 8 (2009): 71–91.

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other genocides, to slavery, and to pogroms.50 Whereas the ethical debate on collective responsibility for state crimes of the past dominates internal debates in the former colonial powers, the financial as well as symbolic aspects of reparations and the political aspect of higher international esteem as a victim country dominate on the other side. When the United Nations urges former colonial states to address their colonial pasts and engage in historical self-reflection and set up appropriate mechanisms to ‘decolonize’, both aspects come together. European countries such as the United Kingdom and Belgium have been reprimanded by UN special rapporteurs and commissions on racism and colonialism for not appropriately addressing their colonial history.51 Partly in response to this, a ‘truth and reconciliation’-style parliamentary commission was established in Belgium in the summer of 2020. The commission tasked a panel of experts (including five academic historians) to write a report on the historical and contemporary impact of Belgian colonialism and to formulate recommendations that could lead to reconciliation and redress. An extensive expert report was published in October 2021, but the parliamentary commission ended with a humiling failure when no political consensus could be found around the question of whether Belgium had to officially apologise for its colonial history. Several of the experts published an open letter to communicate their disappointment and anger. The sense of malaise was worsened by the fact that the official announcement of the commission’s failure came on the same day, 19 December 2022, that the Dutch prime minister officially apologised for his country’s history of slavery and slave-trade. Again, professional expertise is on demand here, but the political setting, both international and national, is a new and challenging framework for historians. Another noteworthy and relatively new use of history by policy-makers focuses on the question of integration of migrants or newcomers and the moral panic around the idea that mass migration will create a loss of traditional values and norms. History classes are often a key part of the migrant integration programmes that have been set up by many European governments in the past decades. In the Netherlands and the Flemish region of Belgium, the issue of migrant integration

 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000); Elzar Barkan and Alexander Karn, eds., Taking Wrongs Seriously Apologies and Reconciliation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). And: Christopher Daase, Stefan Engert, Michel-André Horelt, Judith Renner, and Renate Strassner, eds., Apology and Reconciliation in International Relations: The Importance of Being Sorry (New York: Routledge, 2015).  For the report by six special rapporteurs (dated 31 may 2021) reprimanding the UK government, see: https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile? gId=26395 [Last seen: 26 may 2022]; for the report of August 2019 by the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent about its mission to Belgium, see: https://documents-dds-ny. un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G19/243/13/PDF/G1924313.pdf?OpenElement [Last seen: 26 May 2022].

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and the related fear of a loss of traditions and national identity was one of the main motivations for the creation of an official state-sanctioned history canon.52

1.2 Uncertainties on the supply side We started with the hypothesis that the growing demand for public history and its new media and for a usable past meets a discipline that has to cope with a series of internal tensions and developments that afflict its capacity to respond to these challenges. One must not overburden the model of challenge and response, but it may be useful to outline the uncertainties and the margins for manoeuvre the discipline and its scholars have when confronted with the situations described so far. The spread of new demands, particularly those emanating from political conflicts, encountered a discipline that had been rather successful in opening itself, its research agenda and communication to the new cultural interest in the past since the 1980s. The many turns the discipline has lived through in the last 50 years ended up in a rather slim adaptation to a postmodern mood that spread among the humanities during these decades. Only a small minority of academic historians subscribed to a strong programme of postmodern criticism of academic truth claims. Strictly constructivist theories of scholarship could mobilize more support among those professionals specialized in problems of theory and methods than among the large majority of historians specialized in empirical, archival research. Yet, a certain scepticism about the notion of a singular historical truth or about absolute objectivity and a value free ‘empiricism’ has spread relatively widely among historians, especially among younger scholars and particularly those engaged in the ongoing turns, cultural, linguistic, pictorial, spatial or other. In many countries, this creates a situation in which the new external demands described above cause confusion about how to respond adequately to them. The Ivory Tower started to become empty, it had no defenders; and internal critique often doubles that coming from outside when questions of expert authority or academic power are discussed. The academic middle ground (politically of left liberal opinion) in the humanities has

 For the (original) official Dutch history canon and report by the Dutch canon commission see: F. van Oostrum, A Key to Dutch History: Report by the Committee for the Development of the Dutch Canon (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007). For a critical discussion of the idea of a canon, see Maria Grever, Ed Jonker, Kees Ribbens, and Siep Stuurman, eds., Controverses rond de canon (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2006). A specially created commission is currently working on the official history canon of Flanders but it has not yet published its results.

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felt largely overwhelmed by the new political and moral accusations against them by political activists, social and ethnic groups and populist aggressors. Right wing and conservative historians (and other intellectuals) have generally found it easier to deal with these demands and charges, often simply by dismissing them as constituting an ideologically driven “tyranny of guilt” that is being wielded against or even masochistically embraced by “the west”.53 Still there is the challenge of democratization when it comes to questions of memory and the relevance of individual experience of the past as it is expressed by contemporary witnesses. Particularly the historiography of the Holocaust and of genocide has profited from these testimonies and the inclusion of them into their narratives. One outcome of this new attention to subjectivity and experience is a generalised claim for the so-called epistemology of testimony54 and that of “positionality” or “situated knowledge” – mostly pioneered under the influence of feminism.55 This is highly relevant when professional historians are confronted with claims of victims or their representatives to give priority to an emic view and to waive all claims to objectivity and reconstruction of facts of the past by appealing to the “evidence of experience”.56 One result of this situation is that the discipline has started doubting and tuning down some of its once foundational epistemic principles – namely those revolving around the ideal of absolute objectivity and the conventional correspondence theory of truth exactly when the political and societal demand for objective expertise and for historical truth has gained strong momentum. It took more than a decade and the recent populist movements to shift the epistemic debate in the other direction. Confronted with rather simplistic versions of cultural relativism and narrativism in public debate and a political (mis-)use of the self-critical scepticism of professional truth-claims, several philosophers and practitioners of history have increasingly reflected on the methodological foundations of historical scholarship and have started to critically defend particular notions of historical truth, objectivity

 See, for example: Pascal Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pénitence: Essai sur le masochisme occidental (Paris: Grasset, 2006). In the UK a group of conservative historians has joined together in order to, in their own words, “reclaim” history (especially the pride of national history) and protect it against all kinds of “wokeist” attacks. See: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/ [Last seen: 31 May 2022].  For a good discussion of the epistemology of testimony in relation to historiography, see: Verónica Tozzi, “The Epistemic and Moral Role of Testimony,” History and Theory 51 (2012), 1–17.  Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–599.  For a classic critique see Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773–797.

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and realism.57 If we look at these theoretical debates, it seems that the post-modern moment is beginning to fade away. In the theory of history, a “post-narrativist” turn now gains followers58 and we may follow Nancy Partner in saying that postpostmodern historiography has actually overcome the postmodern crisis not so much be refuting the epistemic challenges it posed, but by simply defusing and incorporating narrative theory and textualism into its practices. She argues that the concept of “narratives” and “storytelling” is all around (it is probably the most central legacy of the post-modern turn) but that it is no longer perceived as threatening and that it is indeed disarmed of its critical edge.59 Despite the fact that the postmodernist momentum is over, and that a growing number of historians and philosophers of history are trying to come up with sophisticated renewed concepts of objectivity or truth, it seems unlikely that the discipline will soon or ever be able to return to its pre-postmodern or pre-linguistic-turn naïve realism, or to positivist notions of truth and objectivity. In that sense, there is no easy solution to the supply crisis we mentioned above. Professional historians have a hard time responding to the “Rankean rage”60 that is characterising much of the public debate, and they hardly seem able to supply the kind of absolutely objective historical truths that many from a broader public demand. It is remarkable indeed that professional historians seldom use the discourse of truth-telling and objective fact finding that is so widespread among policy makers and civil society activists today; this seems to be one of the reasons why historians are sometimes reluctant to join initiatives by the latter actors. Behind these epistemic controversies and uncertainties, we may discover structural changes inside academia and within the discipline. We must keep in mind that the number of professional historians with university diploma has never been so great as today, both in relative and absolute terms. The diversity of the profession has grown, whether we look at the international level or at the level of the national fields most historians are part of and working in. Diversity of gender, class, race/ethnicity or religion also opened the way to a growing pluralism in methods and perspectives. At the same time, academic specialisation seems the  See for example, Tor Egil Førland, Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography (New York: Routledge, 2017). Christopher Behan McCullagh, “The Truth of Basic Historical Descriptions,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 9, No. 1 (2015): 97–117; Adrian Currie, and Daniel Swaim, “Past Facts and the Nature of History,” Journal of the Philosophy of History (2021): 1–28.  Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  Nancy Partner‚ “Postmodernism: ‘The Crisis of Narratives’ and the Historical Discipline,” In The Routledge Companion of Historical Theory ed. Chiel van den Akker (London: Routledge, 2021), 332–346.  Robert Darnton, “Poland Rewrites History,” The New York Review of Books 28, No.12 (1981): 6–10.

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only way to cope with the multiplication of knowledge and information available and necessary for any serious historical research. One result of these three basic trends – diversity, pluralism, and specialization – is that the epistemological foundations of the discipline are more fractured than before, and that the old fact-opinion border-line has to be redefined by professional historians worldwide.

1.3 New roles, but old challenges? One should not forget that the internal consensus about the limits of narrative freedom and the basic standards of evidence has been the result of a rather long and slow move towards professionalization during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The making of professional rules and protocols has its counterpart in the creation and reproduction of the scholarly personae of the professional historian.61 Like members of any academic discipline, historians must learn and cultivate a set of personal habits that correspond to “ideal-typical models of what it takes to be a scholar”; and are characterized by “different constellations of virtues and skills”.62 These personae change over time and are negotiated in often subtle and unconscious ways by newcomers and gatekeepers inside the professional community. They underwent and still need a constant refashioning. Impartiality, assiduity and perseverance became epistemic virtues among a scientific community of still exclusively male academic historians at the end of the nineteenth century. This role model was silently adapted to the strong and often non-reflected beliefs of historians in values like nationhood, religion or state authority, and led to a more nuanced and reflective definition of historians’ scholarly personae in the twentieth century, giving space to (professionally controlled) engagement and partisanship as productive counterparts of impartiality and detachment.63 Recently, the opening of universities to economic incentives and market models has changed the scientific persona of historians in often subtle ways, inviting them to self-promotion or “to ‘valorize’ their knowledge, to engage in ‘outreach’ so as to increase their ‘public visibility profile’, to strive for ‘excellence’ in teaching, or to enter the competition for ever-larger research grants”.64 New roles, as we discuss in this book, need the adaptation of

 Raphael and Zachariah, “Why should anyone Trust a Historian?”, 2–3.  Paul, “What is a Scholarly Persona?”, 348.  Norbert Elias, Involvement and Detachment. (Dublin: University College 1987).  Herman Paul, “What is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires,” History and Theory 53 (2014): 348–371, 352.

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established habits, and they provoke reflection and re-definition of ideal-typical models inside the profession. Although we stress the novelty of the situation, we are not blind to the fact that many problems are part and parcel of the making of the modern profession and the discipline of history. One reason for this kind of longue durée is the fact that the past has become both more controversial and more interesting as traditional and authoritative narratives about it have lost ground in most countries worldwide, due to long-term economic, social and cultural transformations. The link between modernization and history as a discipline in modern academia may explain why many uses of history we discuss in this book have precedents since the eighteenth century. The sensitivity to change must not make us blind to the longue durée of social and political roles professional historians have played in the public sphere. A good example of this longue durée is the relationship between memory and history. They have long been contested areas among different social or religious groups, and in the cultural sphere. Another area where we see continuity is the political sphere. The past is an object of polity, a tool for the legitimation of public authority and the nation-state, its power and its violence.65 In all these uses of the past, in many countries, both consumers of the past and professional historians share a common understanding of what history is, as they all frequented schools where history has been an integral part of the curriculum and where school teachers have been trained by academic historians. This may seem trivial, and most observers are skeptical about the bits of historical knowledge that survive the school years, but it is schooling that creates a common interest among the population. The increase of schooling and higher education all over the world has fueled a growing demand for facts, buildings, pictures, or narratives of the past.66 The nineteenth century may be regarded as a first high season of public uses of professional knowledge about the past, and these demands were often highly controversial – think of the contested ‘truths’ that national and nationalist historiographies in competition with each other have created,67 or the denial of any history to the peoples that European powers colonized.68 As academic history was

 Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, eds., Nationalizing the Past. Historians as Nation Builders in modern Europe (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2010); Stefan Berger, The Past as History. National Identity and Historical consciousness in Modern Europe (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015).  Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country.  Tibor Frank and Frank Hadler, eds., Disputed Territories and Shared Past. Overlapping National Histories in Modern Europe (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).  Eric R.Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1982).

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mainly used to reconstruct the past in terms of state-building and the high politics of the rise and fall of dynasties and empires, its ties to politics were strong, and historians served as educators of princes, as advisers to governments, or engaged themselves as politicians. International affairs and warfare brought historians in contact with law courts and legal procedures. Chapter 5 starts with a very early example of this, from the late eighteenth century, when Edmund Burke tried to underline his parliamentary accusation of the war crimes against Governor General Warren Hastings in India by historical expertise; but the high point of the use of history and historians for legal expertise was the twentieth century, first after the First World War and the accusation of German war crimes,69 then a landmark with the international military tribunals on German war crimes in Nuremberg and on Japanese war crimes in Tokyo.70 During the first decades of the post-war period, the judicial and political aftermath of the Second World War gave a strong boost to the field of (especially contemporary) history in several European countries.71 The wave of decolonisation in the same period, similarly, gave an impulse to the discipline in many newly independent countries where professional historians were asked to provide their new states with a new patriotic past that often involved evoking the idea of a pre-colonial glory or cultural authenticity and prosperity.72 History thereby was reclaimed from the colonizers, whose experts had denied many of their former colonies and their peoples any substantial ‘historical past’. Therefore, historiography became a central element of nation-building in these states.73 Continuity must equally be taken into account when we discuss the challenges that academic historiography has to master when it tries to communicate with a broader public. The professionalization of history widened the gap between the formal standards of internal and external communication, and time and again the discipline has discussed the problems it has had in reaching out to

 Marina Cattaruzza and Sascha Zala, “Negotiated history? Bilateral historical commissions in Twentieth Century Europe,” in Contemporary History on Trial. Europe since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian ed. Harriet Jones et.al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 123–142.  See chapter 5 by Vladimir Petrović in this book.  Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Lutz Raphael, “Militancy and Pluralism: Party and Church Institutes of Contemporary History in Western Europe since 1945,” in Setting the Standards. Institutions, Networks and Communities of National Historiography, ed. Ilaria Porciani and Jo Tollebeek (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 240–265.  R. Reid, “States of Anxiety. History and Nation in Modern Africa,” Past and Present 229, (2015): 239–269.  See chapters 3 by Larissa Schulte Nordholt on postcolonial African history and 4 by Kanad Sinha on Indian ancient history as part of the nation’s past in this book.

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a larger public. Journalists and gentleman historians were the main competitors in the field, and their books did not always conform to the standards of the profession, but had far better sales on the market.74

1.4 New/old notions of expert authority: case studies and structure of the book This book is an invitation to reflect on the dialectics of new or renewed demands, and new or renewed practices of professional scholarship in the field of public history worldwide. Most of the chapters deal with problems and trends of the last three decades, but we have deliberately opened up the chronology to better understand the aspects of continuity and effects of the longue durée. All chapters can be read as case studies that help to better understand some of the ongoing challenges. They deal with different regions of the globe: Asia and the Pacific (2), Latin America (2), Africa (2), Europe (3), or across regions, presenting a global perspective (4). Part One, ‘Histoires Engagées: A Critical Look Back’, groups together three chapters that deal with historians who defined their own professional activities against mainstream academic positions, combining public political partisanship or engagement with a historiographical revision of established euro-centric, colonial and nationalist views held by many of their colleagues. In Chapter 2, Stefan Berger reads the biography of the well-known British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm as a lifelong attempt to redefine the ideal-type of a professional historian engaged in the cause of the political and social emancipation of the working and subaltern classes throughout the twentieth century, starting from an orthodox communist partisanship model, and ending up in reinventing the tradition of a politically independent cosmopolitan intellectual with a social-democratic agenda. In Chapter 3, Larissa Schulte Nordholt analyses the twisted history of the making and the reception of UNESCO’s General History of Africa. Started in 1964, at the zenith of decolonization, as a contribution to the intellectual liberation of the whole continent, the publication of the final volume in 1998 was accompanied by political and professional criticism coming from a generation of African historians now teaching in Western universities and being an integral part of a new model of post-colonial scholarship in sharp opposition to the older programmes of nation and state-building that

 Barbara Korte and Sylvia Paletschek, eds., Popular History, Now and Then: International Perspectives. (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012); Martin Nissen, Populäre Geschichtsschreibung: Historiker, Verleger und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit (1848–1900) (Köln: Böhlau, 2009).

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informed the original UNESCO project. Schulte Nordholt invites us to reflect on the academic and political dynamics that subtly contribute to the shaping of intellectual programmes of public history. The ‘scholarly personae’ of activist African historians changed dramatically with the impactful move from newly-founded universities in Africa to the newly-created centres for African studies in the global North. In Chapter 4, Kanad Sinha reconstructs the long battle Indian historians fought against orientalist visions of ancient India, and the intimate link between professional scholarship and the struggle against openly ideological and political uses of narratives that serve the myths of a Golden Age of an ancient Hindu society and culture. Sinha reconstructs a longue durée of historical scholarship engaged first against colonial, later against nationalist and (neo)fascist myths about the early periods of South Asian history. Part Two ‘Law and Historical Expertise’ takes up the specific challenges that historians are confronted with when entering the courtroom, and more generally expose their expertise to legal frameworks. During the past decades, we have seen the creation of a series of new institutions, from the international courts on war crimes, to national tribunals and commissions of truth and reconciliation. All these institutions follow legal and political protocols that shape the way professional historians practicing as experts in them have to communicate their knowledge. They transform historical facts or narratives into legal verdicts with economic consequences for the distribution of property and income, or political consequences that add public authority and sometimes binding normative or legal power to truth claims. In Chapter 5, Vladimir Petrović delineates continuities and change when historians and their historiographical arguments become part of legal procedures in International Criminal Tribunals dealing with war crimes and genocide. His analysis of the use of historical expertise in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia underlines the particular challenges that can arise in so-called adversarial legal systems where each party procures its own experts. This often leads to ‘wars of experts’ whereby the court is confronted with strongly diverging or even mutually incompatible interpretations of the past. Petrović comes to the sobering conclusion that the expectations about the role of historical expertise in international criminal justice are often too high, and that, while introduced with the intention to clarify, history is often transformed into a battleground and can become a “quarrelsome distractor”.75 Petrović does not conclude that historians have no legitimate place in the courtroom; rather, he pleads for a careful re-examination of their role

 Petrović in this book, 137.

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on the “precarious institutional crossroads between history and law”, and he offers some suggestions toward responsible “historical forensics”.76 In Chapter 6, Bain Attwood focuses on the uses of history and historical expertise in the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand, a special commission of inquiry that was set up in 1975 to deal with Māori claims and grievances about historical breaches of the eponymous colonial treaty of 1840. Attwood offers an insightful discussion of different types of history that have emerged in the context of the tribunal, as well as the reservations or open criticisms expressed by academic historians. He uses these discussions as a basis to reflect on the perennial tensions between what, taking his cue from Dipesh Chakrabarty, he calls the “public” and “cloistered” life of the discipline of history. Attwood ends on a positive note by signaling an important lesson that academic historians can learn from being confronted with different “historical registers” or representations of the past as found in the Waitangi Tribunal. Part Three ‘Old and New Public Demands on Professional Historians’ focuses on the impact, challenges and opportunities of more direct politically driven demands placed on history. The chapters in this section discuss the influence of top-down political interventions by state-related actors as well as more bottom-up political initiatives by activist groups, but each of the chapters stresses the interactive and dynamic nature of the relation between the sphere of politics and the changing profession of history. In chapter 7, Fernando Nicolazzi discusses the repeated and eventually (in August 2020) successful attempts by the Brazilian Congress to legally define the profession of history, and thus regulate who can and who cannot be considered a professional historian. Nicolazzi provides a detailed description of the long-winded political campaign to regulate by law the profession of history – a process going back to 1968 – and the changes in the subsequently-proposed legal definitions. Beyond the descriptive level, Nicolazzi’s chapter points out that a thorough discussion of the public relevance of history requires a profound theoretical reflection on the ambiguous and dynamic relations between the distinct, but often conflated, professional and disciplinary dimensions of the field of history. Diverse publics search for historical contents that go beyond what the traditional discipline of history has to offer, and the only way history professionals can regain public legitimacy, according to Nicolazzi, is by creatively reinventing their discipline and adapting it to a changing social context, while simultaneously taking care that profession and discipline do not become antonyms. In chapter 8, Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt analyses the influence on the structure of the historical profession of the increasingly-substantial sponsorship by the European Union (EU) of ‘targeted’ historical research. The EU research programmes studied by

 Petrović in this book, 138, 118.

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her confront us with a particularly interesting case that clearly shows that the demarcation line between autonomously-defined research topics and politically-driven ones is systematically blurred by these programmes, and that economic and policymaking incentives create their own space of historical production and may offer alternative careers for academic historians beyond the small world of the university. The targeting of science and the humanities by means of public sponsorship and pre-defined programme lines is a very strong trend in many European countries. Historians are part of this trend, and the discussions on its intellectual costs and risks are just beginning. The chapter is based on an extensive dataset indexing 98 policy-oriented research projects with a historical dimension that were funded by the EU between 1994 and 2020. After analysing the epistemic characteristics of the funded projects, the expectations formulated by policy makers, and the practicalities faced by historians working in such a policy context, Verbergt argues that a new and distinct type of professional practice or of doing history – namely “policy-oriented history” – is emerging. Rather than focusing on state-sponsored initiatives, June Bam and Rafael Verbuyst in chapter 9 discuss the challenges and opportunities created by the call by indigenous activists in South Africa to ‘decolonize’ the university. Partly based on autobiographical reflections, this chapter analyses the case of the San and Khoi Centre that was recently established at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and the way this centre attempts to engage in a difficult and precarious knowledge partnership with representatives and activists from historically marginalized communities. Bam and Verbuyst raise the key question of how the Centre can “respond to activist demands on the past while simultaneously rethinking academic historiographical rigour in a decolonizing university”,77 and they thereby critically reflect on their own positionality, their hopes, and potential pitfalls. Part Four ‘Public History in New Media’ turns to changes in the media landscape and their consequences. The traditional media in which professional historians used to communicate their knowledge and share their expertise with a broader public do not meet new demands: TV channels, games, tweets or blogs follow a different logic of production and demand other professional skills than those learned in and trained at universities. At the level of individual practice, all these changes challenge the routines of academically-trained historians and at the same time create chances for new experts who bring in media expertise, communicative skills, political experience or legal knowledge, but no (or not necessarily) professional training for dealing with the complexities of many historical ‘sources’, as the professional historians like to call the documents or traces of the past that they use. In

 June Bam and Rafael Verbuyst in this book, 215.

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chapter 10, Alexandra Kolesnik, Boris Stepanov and Irina Savelieva present a pilot study they did on a series of history projects by Russian historians featured on the popular and rapidly expanding Russian web-based media platform Telegram. On the basis of their analysis of a selection of Telegram history channels and interviews with their creators, the authors reflect on the still recent emergence of the field of public history in Russia, and the impact this has on historians’ professional identity. They discern the emergence of a new generation of historians who show a clear “willingness to combine different communication channels and to develop new media formats”.78 In their view, media change is related to a new understanding of the historical profession. In chapter 11, Flávia Florentino Varella and Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo analyse the particular form of community-based knowledge production and validation practices of what is arguably the world’s largest encyclopedic project, Wikipedia. The chapter focusses on the collaborative public history project ‘Theory of History on Wikipedia’ which ran at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil, between 2018 and 2020, and was featured in the Portuguese edition of Wikipedia. Since this project was launched and supervised by the authors, the chapter offers a unique perspective that combines a careful analysis of practices of digital curation by the community of Wikipedians, as well as a self-reflexive analysis of the tensions and negotiations that can arise when different disciplinary modalities – scholarly historiography and encyclopedic digital writing – are combined in order to engage in a practice of ‘shared authority’. The chapters of Part V ‘Perspectives: Moral, Epistemic, and Political’ try to develop arguments for normative standards that may help to better respond to the new demands and to define role models for professional historians that may be integrated in renewed ‘scholarly personae’ of the discipline. Antoon de Baets, in chapter 12, pleads in favour of the moral and political yardstick of human rights as a universalist approach that helps to defend the autonomy and freedom of the discipline when confronted with political power, but also when dealing with ethically difficult questions of partisanship and engagement. In chapter 13, Jakob Tanner addresses the public uses of history and the ambivalent relationship between history and society – “oscillating between enlightenment of the democratic public, fixation of state power, and obfuscation of the mind” – as an old problem that always takes on news forms, and thus demands a constantly renewed critical reflection. Tanner relates this problem to the particular epistemic nature of history, which combines elements of scientific practice with elements of storytelling. The main challenge when rethinking the “task of the historian” in the context of changing public demands is to deal

 Alexandra Kolesnik, Boris Stepanov and Irina Savelieva in this book, 268.

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responsibly with this ‘epistemic double bind’ by on the one hand keeping historical research firmly based in historical facts, and thus respecting the ‘veto right’ of facts, while on the other hand safeguarding the interpretative openness that is necessary to keep historiography a healthy and dynamic intellectual practice. Although the ongoing blatant historical revisionisms, caused, among other things by resurgent nationalisms, can make this task very difficult and dangerous, Tanner remains optimistic. “Professional historiography”, Tanner argues, “can make a credible claim to truth despite – or precisely because of – its manifold conflicts of interpretation and reinterpretation.”79 He pleads for a close transnational collaboration among professional historians, who must continue to insist on the importance of their professional skill and their right to academic freedom and independent research. In the last chapter of the volume, Benjamin Zachariah warns that history is suffering a disciplinary crisis because the question of what history is or needs to be is increasingly decided upon outside of the profession, and because professional historians, locking themselves up in their ever-narrowing specialisms, are giving up on the tradition of disciplinary self-regulation via stringent and effective procedures of peer review, and are increasingly self-censoring and opting for ‘morally safe’ positions when they discover socially inconvenient truths. Focusing mainly on German discussions about the Holocaust and its relation to colonial violence, Zachariah identifies three “registers of legitimate history” in the public realm. He describes these as languages of legitimation which structure the way in which certain historical topics can be legitimately talked about and by whom. He calls them the “truth and reconciliation” register, the “historical consciousness” register and the “sensibilities of representation” register, and argues that they all come with their own taboos and problems. Zachariah especially warns against what he calls the “identitarian trap” whereby social groups competing for public recognition (or resources), often based on notions of (inherited) victimhood, treat histories as their possession and in their turn become possessed by ‘their’ history, with a self-reinforcing social fragmentation as result. Taking a self-avowedly prescriptive stance, Zachariah argues that: “If certain histories are possessed by particular people, these particular people must be dispossessed, and ‘their’ histories given freely to others, with others’ histories also given to them. Remembering histories that do not belong to you is a matter of decoupling history from identity, without which decoupling you cannot achieve mutual understanding.”80

 Jakob Tanner in this book, 348.  Benjamin Zachariah in this book, 370.

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1.5 In lieu of a conclusion: some central questions underpinning the book We hope that the reader finds it easy to follow the main threads that bind together these case studies. This book started in a workshop in Delhi in the early days of March 2020 with a fruitful and vivid dialogue between the participants coming from USA, Latin America, Europe and Asia and we would like to end this chapter taking up some questions that started there and that seemed essential to us during the making of this book. 1. How is the conventional knowledge production and expert authority of academics being challenged in the process of the creation of new public demands upon history? As mentioned above, very different public demands confront professional historians with situations where they have to serve heteronomous aims and follow rules of conduct that differ from those inside their academic field. We focused on the effect of democratization and pluralism as general trends during the last two or three decades, and we said that they tend to dethrone the authority of experts. What seemed to be ‘natural’, in the sense of being taken for granted, is more and more considered to be a privilege that needs legitimation. But there is more at stake. Democratic rule gives more credit than ever to Carl Becker’s programmatic slogan “Everyman His Own Historian”, first presented as presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1931.81 The public legitimacy of popular demands for a usable past has increased in recent decades. Memory, belonging, and the evidence of experience have become important assets when professional expertise is challenged in public debates. Yet, all chapters in this book show us that democratization does not lead to a radical negation of professional knowledge production. It often leads to a redefinition of public roles and the way historical knowledge is used in public debate. It is on the contrary authoritarianism that has most directly challenged historians’ expert authority as an autonomous voice. (Neo-)fascist and populist movements and governments do insist on their direct political control over the past, and they openly challenge the right of historians to communicate the results of their critical research when it challenges the official or partisan version of the past. What we observe in this case is less a new challenge than the renaissance of an old threat: the political manipulation of the past such as has been a particularly strident quality of Stalinism or National Socialism.

 Carl Becker, “Everyman His Own Historian”, American Historical Review 37 (1932): 221–236.

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The political fabrication of a usable past has come to the forefront with Trumpism and more recently with Putin’s reinvention of a Russian-Soviet past serving his imperial wars.82 Beyond its direct manipulation by authoritarian rulers and populist politicians, social media has profoundly changed the way historical knowledge is communicated. The rules of conduct and the common practice of communication (length, use of emojis, interaction with followers) established in the formats popularized by social media undermine the established norms of professional speech, and they hit historians hard as they risk the destruction of the necessary link between the enunciation of facts and their interpretation or explication. History as a discipline is based on communication that organically links both sides, and there is no ‘truth claim’ that can properly be called ‘historical’ without one of the two elements, single facts and the explication of their contexts. Therefore, the “twitterisation of academic history”(Zachariah) is a vital challenge to the discipline and the profession, and it is still necessary for historians to intervene to define professional rules of conduct in these social media. Two case studies in this book show us other ways: academic historians take up the challenge to contribute to open access knowledge via Wikipedia and to negotiate quality standards and selection criteria of this new format (chapter 11 on Portuguese Wikipedia and theory of history); and they use the social media as a platform for a more experimental and more informal communication of their professional activities. (Chapter 10 on Russian historians using the online platform-Telegram). 2. By whom is the professional historians’ expert authority challenged: other professionals such as judges, journalists’ artists, or laymen, or (populist) politicians? In terms of the political dimension, we identify politicians and other actors in the political field, such as journalists and activists, as the main group who give voice to and have personal interest in criticizing conventional history production and the conventional rules of the discipline. But we should not underestimate the fact that such claims to a past beyond the control of professional historians counterchecking truth claims are more often than not supported or articulated by persons creating their own authority in the public sphere, insisting on their own counter-expertise based on alternative sources or special access to ‘deeper’ insights in a hidden past that has allegedly been destroyed or silenced by professional knowledge and academic historiography. They represent a new version of

 Klaus Gestwa, “Putin, der Cliotherapeut. Überdosis an Geschichte und politisierte Erinnerungskonflikte in Osteuropa,” Neue Politische Literatur 67 (2022): 15–54.

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those gentleman historians and retired statesmen or active politicians reinventing themselves as historians of their own time and deeds. In many countries, their historiography was very popular and found more readers than the conventional production of their academic competitors. One must emphasize the fact that this kind of counter-expertise is strongly linked to culture wars that are mainly led by those living inside the many arenas of today’s cultural production – from theatre, the arts, and literature – whose actors are most exposed to precariousness, but who have much stronger links to the humanities in academia than their precursors had in the past. The way professional historiography is linked to these fields of cultural production differs enormously from one country to another, but we may note that actors of these fields of cultural production are exposed to strong economic competition in directly or indirectly politically framed and controlled markets (from TV to theatre and art). It is here that the most elaborate and radical challenges to the authority of academic knowledge and expertise have been articulated and are spread internationally. In contrast to these public challenges to conventional historical knowledge in the field of cultural and intellectual production, public demands on history from law and economics do emphatically look for conventional knowledge production for their own purposes – and perhaps the growing demand in these two fields creates more complicated challenges for the ethics of professional historians and the way they conduct their research and communicate their findings. 3. How have professional historians (up to now) reacted to the challenging public demands placed on and uses made of the past? Have they chosen to publicly engage? How have they done so? Again, there is not one single answer to these questions. Empirically we do not know how many historians are practicing as ‘public historians’, in the sense that they have jobs in the public sector or work for private companies of all sorts. Most probably the great majority of academically-trained historians are working as school teachers and professors/lecturers at universities worldwide. A rather small number is doing research for public or private institutions. The academic institutional framework that has been constructed with the making of the modern profession is still the backbone of historiography and its routines. Engaged historians are still a minority, and even if we include occasional public interventions, many academic historians are still well entrenched in the so-called ivory tower. In liberal democracies, this distance from public interventionism by a large majority of historians is counterbalanced by a kind of institutionalised and officialised zone of public history, where a number of academic historians are seen as and act like the ‘representatives’ of the profession: they step into the light of the public sphere and

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engage in discussions and debates more or less as the voices of professional historiography. As populist or authoritarian interventions in public debates about the past have been rising in number, more professional historians have engaged in defending the cause of professionalism in dealing with the past, insisting on the verification of facts, on the reconstruction of complex contexts, and on the difference between interpretation and falsification in historical narratives or explanations. This has triggered new reflections on the epistemic foundations of the discipline and the ethics of public history. Chapters 12 to 14 in this book take up these reflections: From different starting points, Jakob Tanner, Antoon de Baets and Benjamin Zachariah insist on the necessity to defend the specificity of professional historical investigations in times of intensified political use of memory and history, and they concur in the defence of a kind of professional universalism defined by different epistemic or humanistic values that allow the professional historian to define his/ her own criteria of historical judgment relatively independent of heteronomous political or moral uses of the past. 4. How should/could academics engage or react in the future? The stress on the need to defend a space of professional autonomy seems to be one of the leitmotifs that we find in all chapters of this book. The authors show very different ways of how to define and to defend this space, but they all plead in favour of a renewal of academic professionalism combined with public engagement. There are sceptical voices in this book who see the profession weakened by overspecialisation and by the rise of identity politics; but others insist on the options open to engaged historians to present their critical findings on the past in public debates, and to resist trends towards unilateral definitions of usable pasts in the name of state power, group interests, or collective memory. Many chapters in this book are case studies of engaged historians who use their professional knowledge in defence of groups or people excluded until recently from public representations of history. The re-appropriation of a past denied by colonial or national historiography is still a field of work that needs public commitment of professional historians (often in cooperation with other experts such as anthropologists or linguists), but this is work where the legal and political integration and rehabilitation of these histories and peoples create new problems of legal regulations combined with claims to material and symbolic compensation. In all these disputes, professional historians are obliged to reflect on their civic roles and the different political languages of legitimation they are willing to serve with their own expertise on the past. We see a series of very different political and moral options all compatible with the professional ethics of historians: the project to develop a post-colonial historical knowledge that serves

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the needs of a nation defined by the equal rights but different pasts of different cultural and ethnic groups (see chapters on New Zealand and South Africa), the project of defending the universalism of human rights, or the project to construct a usable past for a nation-state on the basis of a historical reconstruction and public acknowledgement of internal difference and the collective recognition of violence and injustice in the past.

Part One: Histoires Engagées: A Critical Look Back

Stefan Berger

2 Eric Hobsbawm as a Public Champion of Cosmopolitan Universalism At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century Eric Hobsbawm remains one of the best-known historians world-wide, recognized as a self-professed public intellectual who combined research in global labour, economic and social history with the writing of extremely popular history books that reached an audience that went well beyond university students and lecturers. In addition, he was a prolific publicist who published in newspapers and journals where he reached a mass audience. This chapter will discuss aspects of Hobsbawm’s work, in particular on questions of social democracy, nationalism and national identity in relation to his universalist ethos. He was already born under a transnational cosmopolitan star: in Alexandria, Egypt to a mother of Austro-Hungarian Jewish background and a father who was a London East-End merchant of Polish-Jewish descent. Growing up in the politically tense atmosphere of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s he made a political decision against Jewish nationalism and for Communism – a decision he stuck to throughout his long life that he wrote extensively about in his autobiography Interesting Times.1 Experiencing first-hand the hyper-nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s, Hobsbawm championed proletarian internationalism. His early career as a professional historian was steeped in an internationalist orientation that rejected much of British history writing as parochial and found inspiration in the world of the French Annales instead.2 He became an important member of the Communist Party Historians’ Group3 and championed an internationally oriented economic and social history that put the labour movement and working people centre stage. At the same time, he was politically active on behalf of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) – a commitment that clashed frequently with Hobsbawm’s dislike of all orthodoxies and was eventually getting weaker and weaker over the years. Yet he always refused to cut his ties to the party entirely.

 Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times. A Twentieth-Century Life (London: Allen Lane, 2002).  As Peter Burke has pointed out, Hobsbawm’s interest in the Annales was exceptionally early. He was certainly a pioneer in forging links to the Annales. See Peter Burke, “Annales in Britain,” in Annales in Perspective: Designs and Accomplishments, ed. Drago Roksandić, Filip Šimetin Šegvić and Nikolina Šimetin Šegvić (Zagreb: FF-Press, 2019), 85–86.  Bill Schwartz, “‘The People’ in History: the Communist Party Historians’ Group, 1945–1956,” in Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics, ed. R. Johnson, G. McLennan, B. Schwartz and D. Sutton (London: Routledge, 1982), 44–95. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-002

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He was a prolific analyst of contemporary politics commenting in particular, from the late 1970s onwards, on the crisis of the left and, at the same time, from the early 1980s onwards, on the return of nationalism and national identity debates. This chapter will explore his life-long rejection of nationalism and his championing of universalism and social democracy (not in the party-political sense but in the sense of a democratically organized social and economic sphere that augments political democracy4) through his many publications, both scholarly and political. I will argue that his interest in empire throughout his writings was one way of relativizing the importance of national frameworks. Thinking with nationalism but beyond and above nation-state frameworks, Hobsbawm’s work amounts to a steadfast defence of universalism and universalist values that he saw rooted in his Marxism. These values were meant not only to think but to change the world in the direction of extending the practices of social democracy; in this sense he was a life-long disciple of Marx. The chapter starts off by exploring the tight links between Hobsbawm’s political orientation and his decision to study history at Cambridge. The study of the past was, for him, a means to analyse the present and underpin the struggle for a better future. Yet it was precisely this connection between a political programme and the self-understanding of a professional historian that was frowned upon by most mainstream historians at the time of Hobsbawm’s socialization into the historical profession. The dominant view from the 1930s to the 1980s was that the historians’ craft rested on their professional self-understanding as detached and objective analysts of the past.5 The second part of this chapter seeks to shed light on the making of the professional historian and how Hobsbawm sought to combine his intensely political interests in the past with his advancement as a professional historian who had to build his academic credibility and authority in the midst of the ensuing Cold War, which was to play a crucial role in the formation of Hobsbawm as a public intellectual. The third and fourth parts of the chapter will then cover in some detail how Hobsbawm, through his writings, engaged a wider public by putting forward two central agendas: first, the promotion of forms of social democracy, and, secondly, the promotion of a social democratic universalism as an antidote to nationalism. In the fifth section of the chapter, I will return to his professional self-understanding as a historian and how it

 Ulrich Heinemann and Manfred Wannoeffel, “Soziale Demokratie: Begriff, Elemente, Entwicklung und Bedeutung für die Erinnerungskultur,” in Erinnerungskulturen der sozialen Demokratie in Deutschland, ed. Stefan Berger, Wolfgang Jäger und Ulf Teichmann (Bielefeld: transcript, 2022, forthcoming).  Rolf Torstendahl, The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism (London: Routledge, 2015).

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influenced his actions as a public intellectual seeking to foster social democratic universalism. The final, concluding part of the chapter will pose the question to what extent Hobsbawm’s understanding of both a public and a professional historian is still relevant to professional historians acting as public historians today.

2.1 The partisan historian: the decision for history as the outcome of Hobsbawm’s political orientation Hobsbawm was attracted to Communism when he moved to Berlin in 1931 – at the tender age of 14. Having lost his father two years earlier, his mother sent him to lodge with his uncle in the German capital. His cousin in Berlin, Otto Friedmann, was a communist and he soon made friends with one of the older pupils at his new school, Stephan Hermlin, who was to become famous as a poet, essayist, translator and writer of short stories in the German Democratic Republic where he was close friends with Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker. He went by the name of Rudolf Leder at the time and became Hobsbawm’s first political teacher providing him with Soviet novels and introducing him to the intellectual world of communism. In the midst of the economic slump in the German red capital, it was not difficult for a politically interested boy to convince himself that the class struggle formed the foundation for a better future world – all the more so as he had been struggling to find a place and an identification for him to this moment. In Vienna, where he had moved with his parents in 1919, fleeing the Egyptian revolution of that year, he initially was part of the Viennese bourgeoisie. When the family fell economically on hard times, they had to move to a less fashionable part of the city and their status of belonging to the bourgeoisie became doubtful. Not only socially but also culturally it was difficult for young Eric to decide where he should belong. His father was English, his mother Austrian. He was bilingual. Born in Egypt, where his father served in the British colonial administration, he found it difficult to relate wholeheartedly to Viennese cultural mores. In his autobiography he recalls how it was easy for him to leave Vienna, as Austria had never been his home.6 A son of Jewish parents, he lived in a city scarred by antiSemitism. Although his mother did her best to instil in him an interest in things Jewish, he declared himself an atheist – uninterested in religion when he was 13. He himself had a strong sense of the cosmopolitan origins of his family: “the  Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 8–25.

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Hobsbawm household lived . . . in a transnational world, where people like us . . . moved from country to country in search of a living.”7 Communism provided him with an identification and when he joined the Socialist Sunday School Students’ League in Berlin in 1932, he found a political and social home that he had not possessed until then. Later he described Berlin as “the city, in which I spent the two most decisive years of my life”.8 Taking part in Communist demonstrations, electioneering and other political work during 1932 and 1933 left a deep impression on him that he was to take with him when his uncle moved his extended family from Berlin to London in April 1934, not for political but for economic reasons. Attending St. Marylebone Grammar School, Hobsbawm developed his intense interest in Marxism, and he was encouraged in this by the liberal, broadly Labourite atmosphere both at school and in his family surroundings. A firm admirer of Lenin and Stalin, he became an acolyte of Soviet communism. Seeing himself as a Communist intellectual he nevertheless joined the Labour Party in order to spread Marxism among what he saw as the only credible political alternative to the Conservatives. After all, Britain never had a mass Communist Party like Germany had before 1933.9 As a self-declared Marxist the history part of historical materialism appealed to him and it was one of his favourite subjects at school, where his teacher soon realized his potential and encouraged him to apply for a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. Eventually, it was King’s College in Cambridge that awarded him a fellowship which enabled him to start his university studies in 1936. The “liberal, slightly bohemian” atmosphere there suited his cosmopolitanism and his Marxism.10 Most of his teachers at Cambridge he found tedious, with the exception of Mounia Postan, an economic and social historian, pupil of R. H. Tawney, to whom he was attracted because of his cosmopolitan origins and his championing of social and economic history.11 In his autobiography, Hobsbawm recalls Postan’s lectures at Cambridge as “a holiday from British interwar insularity, of which the Cambridge history faculty provided a particularly self-satisfied example.”12 Postan was of Jewish descent from Bessarabia, which at the time of his birth in 1899, was  Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 51.  Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 44.  James Eaden and David Renton, The Communist Party of Great Britain Since 1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flynn, Communists and British Society, 1920–1991 (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2007).  Richard Evans, Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History (New York: Little Brown, 2019), 119. This chapter is deeply indebted to Evans’ wonderful biography of Hobsbawm.  Edward Miller, “Michael Moissey Postan, 1899–1981,” Proceedings of the British Academy 69 (1983): 543–557.  Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 283.

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part of the Russian empire, but mostly Romanian-speaking. He had fled Soviet Russia in 1920. An academic, he was also active as a journalist – something else that appealed to the young Hobsbawm. He was also almost alone among Cambridge historians in championing the teaching of social theories, including Marxist ones, and the value of those theories for understanding the past. Together with his wife, Eileen Power, they were the leading economic historians of their age and put their stamp on the Cambridge Economic History of Europe that they edited.13 Their international networks included the founding generation of the Annales in France, to whom Hobsbawm was introduced through Postan.14 Whilst Hobsbawm remained extremely unimpressed with most of his academic teachers at Cambridge, he threw himself into the life of the Socialist Club, with around four hundred members one of the biggest student organisations at the university and one that was dominated by Communists intent on building antifascist alliances. The issue of Spain and the International Brigades loomed large over discussions here and its membership was highly international and cosmopolitan, including several members who came from the British colonies. Hobsbawm was soon put in charge of publishing the club’s weekly Bulletin, which he transformed into a more intellectual forum of debate. At Cambridge, Hobsbawm led a life between political commitment and a university training in history. His intellectual interests in history, however, were entirely determined by his political interests and commitments, which is why he looked in history for methods and theories that might help him find a way of doing history that was in line with his political outlook. At this early stage in his career, partisanship for the Communist Party was key to his understanding of the past and the professional historian, in his own understanding, was only useful if he could serve the party and work for the ultimate victory of Communism. The academic world was attractive but ultimately a side show in a world dominated by what appeared to him, like many others, an epic struggle between fascism and communism. In this struggle anti-fascist alliances made him look for progressive allies that shared both his political visions and his notions of doing history as a partisan intellectual. During his second year at Cambridge, he won a scholarship that allowed him to study agricultural conditions in French colonial North Africa. His study trip to Morocco and Algeria resulted in a paper that was to cement his interest in the agricultural poor and their culture and politics and made him want to write a PhD on French imperialism. The Second World War, however, intervened. He served in the Army Educational Corps during

 Maxine Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power, 1889–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).  Evans, A Life, 130.

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the war and came to the attention of MI5 who kept tabs on him well into the postSecond World War period, suspecting him more than once of being a Soviet spy but never finding any evidence for it.15

2.2 Gaining academic authority When he was released from the army in 1946, he resumed his intentions to embark on a career as a historian. As he was now a married man, he decided against his previous plans to research colonial North Africa and found a topic much closer to home and in line with his political interests: the Fabians. Supervised by Postan, he undertook a critical analysis of the Fabian Society concluding that it was not socialist, as its politics were ultimately not aimed at the abolition of capitalism. This was still entirely in line with his vision of the partisan historian who had to serve the Communist Party and aid in its struggle to abolish capitalism. He passed his examination in 1950 and naturally sought to publish the thesis as an important step to a career as a professional historian. However, he fell foul of the political implications of his work. Cambridge University Press, where he submitted the manuscript, asked R. H. Tawney to review it. Tawney had been professor of economic history at the London School of Economics (LSE) between 1931 and 1949 and was just retired from this post. He also had been on the executive of the Fabian Society between 1921 and 1933 and a member since 1906. A professional historian he had also built a reputation as a public intellectual and an engaged historian with close ties to the Workers’ Educational Association and a range of other progressive left-of-centre institutions.16 It was therefore not surprising that he rejected Hobsbawm’s critical take on the Fabians and accused him of intellectual snobbery and arrogance. A second report, commissioned by the syndics of Cambridge University Press, was by another leading economic historian, T. S. Ashton, professor at the LSE, whose resolute anti-Marxist positions led to a wholesale condemnation of Hobsbawm’s manuscript. The close interrelationship between Hobsbawm’s politics and his history-writing had caught up with him. Within the Academy (at least in Britain) it was possible to be an engaged historian (see Tawney) but impossible to be a partisan historian. Hobsbawm was never to publish on Fabianism.17

 Evans, A Life, 183–240.  Lawrence Goldman, The Life of R.H. Tawney: Socialism and History (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).  Evans, A Life, 242–249.

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Hobsbawm, however, had his supporters at Cambridge, especially inside his own college at King’s, whose fellows elected him to a four-year Junior Research Fellowship – a traditional stepping stone to an academic career in Britain. Sticking with British history, he turned his attention from Fabianism to trade unionism and published a series of articles in a journal for economic history, the Economic History Review.18 Established at the London School of Economics, alongside the Economic History Society, in 1927 by Eileen Power, Postan was one of its editors as was Tawney. Throughout the 1930s the journal had developed a reputation for possessing a radical edge and a distinct interest in linking the past to contemporary social and political concerns – both things that appealed to Hobsbawm.19 He also established a life-long relationship with the Communist Party publishing house of Lawrence & Wishart, where he first published his famous article on The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-Century Britain in 1954.20 Being aware of the need to gain a reputation among the relatively small group of social and economic historians in Britain, he published specialized, archive-based research in reputable journals, whilst at the same time also sparking academic controversy which would make him a household name standing out among his peers. The labour aristocracy controversy was the first example of his penchant for historical controversies that was to accompany him for the rest of his life and would not only gain him academic friends. It was all the more important, therefore, that he gained academic recognition through articles such as the one on tramping artisans or on the relationship between economic developments and social movements that were all published in Economic History Review.21 Recognising the importance of gatekeepers in the historical profession, he sent his article on tramping artisans to the two people who had barred his PhD thesis from being published in an attempt to win their approval and ensure a smooth reviewing

 Eric Hobsbawm, “General Labour Unions in Britain, 1889–1914,” Economic History Review 1 (1949): 123–142.  Theodore Cardwell Barker, “The Beginnings of the Economic History Society,” Economic History Review 30 (1977): 1–19. As Power and Postan had close contacts with the Annales in France, it is likely that they adapted the Annalistes’ desire to link the study of the past with the concerns of the present. For the Annales see Lutz Raphael, “The Present as Challenge for the Historian: the Contemporary World in the Annales E.S.C., 1929–1949,” Storia della Storiografia 21 (1992): 25–44.  Eric Hobsbawm, “The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Democracy and the Labour Movement. Essays in Honour of Dona Torr, ed. John Saville (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954), 201–239.  Eric Hobsbawm, “The Tramping Artisan,” Economic History Review 3 (1951): 299–320; Eric Hobsbawm, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800,” Economic History Review 5 (1953): 1–25.

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process for the journal. It worked and having gained the support of Tawney and Ashton; his career took a promising turn.22 Hobsbawm also used his academic links at King’s in Cambridge to secure a position, already in 1947, i.e., during his PhD studies, as Lecturer in Economic and Social History at Birkbeck College in London which he owed to a warm recommendation by his undergraduate supervisor, Christopher Morris. Birkbeck suited Hobsbawm, as its students were ordinary working men who worked during the day and studied in the evening. Its students and staff were broadly on the left of the political spectrum.23 Indeed, from early on, he began to foster his international academic networks through a shared commitment to Marxism and Communism. In 1951 he got Delio Cantimori, a Communist Italian historian, to invite him to Rome where he mixed with other Communist historians, such as Ambrogio Donini. Italian Communist historians shared with Hobsbawm an understanding of a partisan scholarship that had to take side in the bipolar world of the Cold War. Their existence as public historians in political opposition to the restoration of capitalism in the West appealed to him. Their positioning between scholarship and commitment and their desire to promote economic and social history as science and as politics influenced his own self-understanding deeply.24 Through Cantimori he also was to forge links to the Marxist economist of Italian origin at Cambridge University, Piero Sraffa.25 Next to Paris and France, Italy was to become Hobsbawm’s second intellectual home. His cosmopolitanism was to prevent any focus on things British, even if he shrewdly chose British topics to foster his early academic career in a surrounding prioritizing national history.26 In the 1930s and into the 1940s, Hobsbawm could still imagine a life as a party official and a paid Communist activist, but by the late 1940s and early 1950s he had opted for a career as a historian. This decision had much to do with his ambiguities regarding the path of Communism. He had justified the purges in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. He had endorsed the Soviet war against Finland and the Hitler-Stalin pact. He had officially broken with Titoism, like all Stalinists. He was to support the Soviet interventions in East Berlin, Budapest and Prague in

 Evans, A Life, 250.  Evans, A Life, 269–271.  On Italian Communist historiography see Paolo Favilli, Marxism and Historiography. Contesting Theory and Remaking History in Twentieth-Century Italy (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022).  Evans, A Life, 285–286.  On the importance of national history to national identity debates in Europe see Stefan Berger, The Past as History. National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

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1953, 1956 and 1968. Throughout his life, he would remain a loyal Communist, but his private papers reveal a growing ambiguity towards Soviet Communism and the supporters of Soviet communism in Britain.27 Life as a historian would give him a professional independence that would allow him to pursue his intellectual interests and stay with his Marxist outlook without having to be directly involved in Communist politics. From following the ideal of being a partisan Communist historian Hobsbawm was to move more and more towards becoming a critical Marxist intellectual with a considerable degree of autonomy from the Communist Party. In that he was quite similar to another giant of Marxist social history writing in Britain, E. P. Thompson. Thompson broke earlier and more decisively with Communism, but in their desire to find an independent Marxist approach to the writing of history that would free itself from the shackles of party orthodoxies and in their self-understanding as public intellectuals, they led parallel lives, even if Thompson remained far more English in his outlook and historical interests than Hobsbawm.28 In their attempts to apply Marx’s historical and dialectical materialism to the past they both insisted on the importance of a human agency that was never entirely predetermined by structural factors and hence always unpredictable.29 And in his work for European Nuclear Disarmament (END), Thompson moved towards a variant of a cosmopolitan universalism that also characterized Hobsbawm.30 More orthodox Communists were soon to think of Hobsbawm as a revisionist, but it remained his life-long desire to forge links between Communism and more mainstream left-of-centre progressives. This is also why he was keen to publish not only in Communist outlets but in other ‘bourgeois’ presses, journals and media. The setting up of the journal Past & Present in 1950, in which

 I follow Evans, A Life in this assessment who, throughout his biography of Hobsbawm stresses this tension between the loyalty to Communism and an ever growing inner distancing from the narrow, inward-looking world of the CPGB.  Cal Winslow, ed., E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics (New York: Monthly Review, 2014); Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor, eds., E. P. Thompson and English Radicalism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Scott Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: E. P. Thompson, the New Left and Post-War British Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Bryan D. Palmer, E. P. Thompson, Objections and Oppositions (London: Verso, 1994); Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds., E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).  Andrea Bonfanti, “Eric Hobsbawm’s Dialectical Materialism in the Postwar Period, 1946–1956,” Twentieth-Century Communism 19 (2020): 61–87.  Stefan Berger and Christian Wicke, “‘. . . Two Monstrous Antagonistic Structures: E. P. Thompson’s Marxist Historical Philosophy and Peace Activism During the Cold War,” in Marxist Historical Cultures and Social Movements During the Cold War. Case Studies from Germany, ed. Stefan Berger and Christoph Cornelissen (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), 163–186.

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Hobsbawm was closely involved, also served the purpose of forging links between Marxist and other progressive social historians in order to make social history a stronger force among the world of historical writing generally. From the outset, Hobsbawm positioned the journal close to the French Annales and was also responsible for soliciting a range of contributions by French Annales historians for the journal during its early years.31 Of course, forging alliances to non-Marxist and non-Communist historians also had a practical aspect: publishing here gave him the academic and popular credit that would help him with his career as a professional historian. If he was no longer active in official Communist politics from the 1950s onwards, his cosmopolitan universalism revealed itself also in his ongoing commitment to support Communist movements outside of Britain. Thus, he was a member of the British – China Friendship Association and he also supported Communism in the German Democratic Republic becoming active in the British Council for German Democracy in the late 1940s and editing the Council’s newsletter, Searchlight on Germany. He was also a member of the London Committee of the British – Czech Friendship League.32 In all of these activities he continued to position himself in the bipolar world of the Cold War on the side of the Communist half of that world. Hobsbawm’s turn from partisan Communist politics to a more independent Marxist historiography revealed itself most decisively in his active membership in the Communist Party Historians’ Group, first established in 1938. Here he built life-long contacts and academic alliances with other Marxist historians and public intellectuals in Britain, such as John Saville, E. P. Thompson and Raphael Samuel. The group was united by a belief that history had an important function to fulfil in fostering a progressive politics and the group’s debates on history always had a strong political edge seeking to influence the labour movement in particular and focusing their research on working-class history. Hobsbawm’s cosmopolitan internationalism once again was to the fore in his attempts to bring together British, French and Italian Marxist historians, organizing a joint conference in December 1952. Indeed, due to Hobsbawm’s initiative, British and other Marxist historians forged close links within a range of internationalist conferences and associations.33

 Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Eric Hobsbawm, “Past and Present: Origins and Early Years,” Past & Present 100 (1983): 3–14.  Evans, A Life, 305–307; specifically on his activities regarding the GDR see also Stefan Berger and Norman LaPorte, Friendly Enemies: Britain and the GDR, 1945–1990 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 52, 78, 151 – 153, 305 and 313.  Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians. An Introductory Analysis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).

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Hobsbawm’s journal articles in the Economic History Review cemented his reputation as a professional historian. A string of other articles in Past & Present built on this credit and gave him a reputation as an innovative and intellectually stimulating historian. It was in the very first issue of Past & Present that he first published on the Luddites saving them from the condescension of historians such as Jack Plumb who had previously seen in them nothing as irrational and pointless clogs in the wheels of progress.34 It was here that he widened his historical gaze on things British in a string of articles on the crises of European feudalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He argued that these crises, that he traced not only in Britain but also in other continental European countries, were the origins of rebellions and revolts moving history from feudalism to capitalism – in line with his own Marxist understandings of history. His command of several European languages was noticeable in the footnotes to these articles.35 His links to French Marxist historians in the Annales meant that his theses were immediately picked up across the Channel giving Hobsbawm a powerful international sounding board and raising his international reputation at home.36 His international cosmopolitanism strengthened his claim of being both – a Marxist professional historian and a Marxist public intellectual. Hobsbawm was a frequent visitor to Paris in the 1950s mixing here with Communist intellectuals like himself but also with an eclectic circle of left-wing dissident intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre and his circle as well as Henri Lefebvre.37 Indeed, the great French intellectuals at the time, like Sartre but also Camus, were models of critical and autonomous thinkers, firmly on the left, but not clearly and slavishly associated with the French Communist Party.38 Paris at the time became Hobsbawm’s intellectual home where he drew nourishment both in terms of his political orientations and his historical writing which he still thought of as two sides of the same coin.39

 Eric Hobsbawm, “The Machine Breakers,” Past & Present 1 (1952): 57–70.  Eric Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century,” Past & Present 5 (1954): 33–53; Eric Hobsbawm, “The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century. Part 2,” Past & Present 6 (1954): 44–65.  Frédéric Mauro, “Sur la ‘crise’ du XVIIe siècle,” Annales ESC 14 (1959): 181–185.  Evans, A Life, 323–329.  David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Post-War France (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002).  The close connection between Hobsbawm’s politics and his history is also the main theme in Gregory Elliott, Hobsbawm: History and Politics (London: Pluto Press, 2010).

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2.3 Hobsbawm’s commitment to the extension of social democracy Hobsbawm had committed himself at an early age to communism which he saw as best placed in overcoming capitalism and imperialism that he regarded as the dominant political ideologies and socio-economic systems respectively of his time. They had to make way for a more socially just society in which political democracy was to be augmented by social democracy. His early articles on the labour movement and trade unionism reflected his interest in political organisations representing workers and advancing ideas of social democracy.40 His work on feudalism was inspired by historical materialism and its idea of world-historical progress.41 Following the rejection of his PhD thesis he still had not published a monograph and in 1953 he submitted a proposal for a book on the subject of The Rise of the Wage Worker to Hutchinson’s University Library, whose history section was edited by G.D.H. Cole, himself a model of a public intellectual as socialist and academic.42 Cole was enthusiastic and encouraged Hobsbawm, but the readers of the manuscript once again rejected it on the grounds of political bias.43 This was the second time that his close alignment of his political thinking and his historical interest got in the way of passing the peer-review process in British academic publishing. Both instances revealed to what extent historical writing was a political exercise and involved political decisions about which interpretations could be published and which could not. If Hobsbawm portrayed the Industrial Revolution as nemesis for many ordinary people who suffered terrible hardship and exploitation, his peers held up the same Industrial Revolution as the epitome of modernity which also had a national(ist) dimension in that it was made in Britain. The impact of the Industrial Revolution on ordinary people had been the subject of hot controversy among economic and social historians that was reflected in the ‘standard of living’ controversy in which Hobsbawm played an important part.44 Hobsbawm came down on the side of those who argued against the view that real wages had increased during industrialization retaining a highly critical

 He collected the most important ones in Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men. Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964).  Eric Hobsbawm, “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” Marxism Today (August 1962): 253–256.  Luther Carpenter, G.D.H. Cole: an Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966).  Evans, A Life, 330–332.  Ronald Max Hartwell, ‘The Standard of Living Controversy: a Summary’, in The Industrial Revolution, ed. Ronald Max Hartwell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970), 313–345.

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edge towards capitalist development. For a number of years, he had been fascinated by those labouring poor who, in one way or the other, seemed to challenge the logic of capitalism. He had first come across millenarian peasants struggling against capitalism through his contacts with Italian communist historians. When Max Gluckmann, a South African Marxist anthropologist at the University of Manchester, invited Hobsbawm to deliver a series of lectures at Manchester, he made primitive rebellion the lead theme. Gluckmann recommended publication with Manchester University Press and after another set of peer reviews, Hobsbawm, following two failed attempts, could publish his first monograph, entitled Primitive Rebels, in 1959 – at the age of 42.45 It was a highly innovative work of history but also, like his previous two attempts, a political statement. Despite all his obvious sympathy with bandits and outlaws, he characterized them as ‘primitive’ thereby affirming the teleological modernist logic of Marxism. Yet there was also the message that deviant and marginal people of all sorts deserve attention and sympathy, not just class-conscious industrial workers towing the Communist Party line. Social democracy and social progress had to take note of many different political forces and could not follow a one size fits all model. It was an important political message for the left – one that they had not heeded until their commitment to social engineering rebounded on them in the 1970s and 1980s. Hobsbawm’s engagement with issues of social democracy continued with many of his subsequent books that were almost invariably written not just for the specialist but for an interested general reader. In the Age of Revolution (1962), Hobsbawm brought a Marxist interpretation to bear on nineteenth-century history highlighting struggles for emancipation and social progress.46 His concept of the ‘dual revolution’, industrial and political, had a huge bearing on subsequent debates surrounding the nineteenth century. Following on the back of the huge publishing success of the Age of Revolution, Hobsbawm collected some of his seminal essays in labour history and published them under the title of Labouring Men (1964), with the same publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. It was during the 1960s that labour history made its cometic rise in Britain and elsewhere. Labouring Men was a reference point for many of the younger labour historians coming of age in the 1960s.47 Hobsbawm provided them with a kind of labour history that

 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959); on the context of publication see Evans, A Life, 381.  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicoloson, 1962).  How much Hobsbawm was an inspiration is very visible in Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, eds., Culture, Ideology and Politics. Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London: Routledge, 1982).

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was attentive to institutions but went beyond them in contextualizing workers and working-class lives and merging formal politics with questions of culture and social structures. Labour history at the time was intensely political, seeking to contribute not just to an understanding of the past but, through the past, to influence the present and help build a better future – for working people. This was in line with Hobsbawm’s attempts to merge history and politics in the Cold War struggles against capitalism, and he became a reference figure also in this regard. At the end of the heady decade of the 1960s, Hobsbawm joined forces with George Rudé, the historian of crowd politics in the French revolution, to publish Captain Swing (1969), portraying the violence of the Swing riots as a form of crowd politics in protest of capitalist modernization.48 It fitted well with E. P. Thompson’s notion of the “moral economy” guiding working-class protests in eighteenth-century England.49 The question of violence against capitalism began to pre-occupy also sections of the radical left in the late 1960s. Whilst the book was no justification of violent struggle it historicised past violent struggles against capitalism. Hobsbawm followed up the success of Captain Swing with a geographically wide-ranging book on social banditry entitled Bandits (1969).50 His interests had clearly moved from the industrial working class to the rural bandit, living on the margins of society and resisting both state and capitalism but not in a classconscious but rather a pre-political way, if we restrict political to political organizations, such as parties and trade unions, as was common before the 1960s. One of the effects of Hobsbawm’s book was precisely to widen an understanding of the political that was to become so characteristic of the new political history.51 His concern and identification were still with the poor and downtrodden – past and present. The book was serialized by the Observer newspaper and amounted to a huge success – able to inspire a younger generation of social historians who, following Hobsbawm’s own call, wanted to push social history away from the organizational history of political parties and trade unions and towards a broader history of society.52 He encouraged a Marxist approach to the study of the history of society, not just in Britain but in many parts of the world during extensive visits, e.g. to India and Latin America, where he soon was revered by a younger

 Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969).  Edward Palmer Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present 50 (1971): 76–136.  Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969).  On the new political history, see Jon Lawrence and Alexandre Campsie, “Political History,” in Writing History: Theory and Practice, ed. Stefan Berger, Heiko Feldner and Kevin Passmore (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 323–342.  Eric Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100 (1971): 20–45.

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generation of Marxist social historians. Sarvepalli Gopal, the biographer of Nehru and son of the second president of India, had invited Hobsbawm to Delhi in 1968/ 69 where he met many younger historians who were avid readers of Past and Present and admired his work on rural banditry that rang a chord with historians of India. One of them was Romila Thapar who recalled later how Hobsbawm’s lectures and seminars were strengthening an already existing interest in Marxist economic and social history at the time.53 In 1968 Hobsbawm had also attended the Cultural Congress in Havana where he met left-wing intellectuals from across the globe who were all opposed to the Vietnam war and US imperialist policies which, according to Hobsbawm, united the left just as the Spanish Civil War had united it in the 1930s.54 Hobsbawm’s intense interest in the ‘Third World’ resulted from his recognition that in the bipolar world of the Cold War, the anti-capitalist struggle had intensified here and was much more acute and alive than it was in the metropolitan centres in the global north. Quite apart from setting the historiographical agenda to promote the values of social democracy, Hobsbawm continued to use his writings as political manifestoes in favour of extending social democracy that were in direct communication with his work as a public intellectual who had a strong presence in the mass media. Thus, in 1972 he ran a couple of broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 in which he championed industrial democracy and the role of shop stewards in strengthening the kind of social democracy that he wanted to see in Britain and globally.55 His public support for the Vietnamese side in the Vietnamese-American war and his ongoing refusal to criticize ‘really existing socialism’ in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe showed where his political loyalties lay. Yet he was very far from an orthodox Communist by the 1970s. In 1973 he assembled some of his popular writings for the mass media in a collection entitled Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays.56 More than anything the essays revealed the ambiguities and unresolved tensions in Hobsbawm’s own politics: sympathetic to 1968 he still thought many of its aspects were infantile; committed to Communism, he was abhorred by the intellectual poverty of its orthodoxy; engaged on behalf of the downtrodden and the poor, he was prone to narrate their struggles with considerable doses of nostalgia; convinced of the need to overcome capitalism, he lauded attempts to make capitalism more socially responsible. But what comes out most clearly in the

 Cited in Evans, Hobsbawm, 449.  Eric Hobsbawm, “The Cultural Congress of Havana,” Times Literary Supplement (25 January 1968).  Evans, A Life, 451–452.  Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973).

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essays is his commitment to the values of social democracy that remained one of the key red threads through his thinking from beginning to end. Hobsbawm was never content with writing academic and popular history books and articles. He felt a desire to write as a publicist for the mass media. Through his strong links with Italian Communism, he came to write frequent articles for the Italian Communist Party newspapers, especially L’Unità and Rinascita.57 They amounted to a running commentary on the developments on the British left during the 1960s and 1970s. He felt close to the PCI not the least because of his deep appreciation and admiration for the Marxist Antonio Gramsci, in whom he recognized a fellow intellectual and an enemy of orthodoxies. Hobsbawm also regularly contributed articles to the theoretical journal of the British Communist Party, Marxism Today, largely on historical topics, the history of capitalism, the history of the labour movement and on Marxism. During the 1980s, under the editorship of Martin Jacques, Marxism Today became a hotbed for intellectual debate that reached way beyond the Communist Party. Both its authors and its readers reflected a popular alliance of intellectuals opposed to Thatcherism and market radicalism that threatened the achievements of social democracy in Britain also in Hobsbawm’s views. In the 1980s he used the columns of Marxism Today to comment on British contemporary politics. One of the landmark articles he published here was The Forward March of Labour Halted, his Marx Memorial lecture of 1978, in which he astutely analysed the over-reliance of the labour movement on support from industrial workers.58 Instead, Hobsbawm argued, it needed to recognize the importance of winning other social groups and forge tactical alliances if the labour movement wanted to be the dominant force in British politics. The article caused another huge controversy. Hostile to Thatcher, Hobsbawm was concerned about the radicalization of the Labour Party. Labour, in his view, needed to seek alliances and build bridges to the centre-ground of British politics to become powerful again – a highly pragmatic take by someone still officially committed to Communism. At the end of the 1980s, in 1989, he published his assembled political essays in a volume entitled Politics for a Rational Left.59 Flicking through the essays one is left with a strong impression of a pragmatic Social Democratic intent, above all, to halt the advances of neoliberalism and return the country to a benign social democracy, towards which it had made great strides in the post-Second World War world. There was little hint here of a revolutionary Marxist.

 Evans, A Life, 496.  Eric Hobsbawm, “The Forward March of Labour Halted,” Marxism Today (September 1978): 279–286.  Eric Hobsbawm, Politics for a Rational Left (London: Verso, 1989).

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Yet Hobsbawm remained, also in his historical work, a strong critic of an unfettered capitalism. Written as a sequel to the Age of Revolution, Hobsbawm published The Age of Capital in 1975, in which his belief in the unsustainability of capitalism as an economic and moral system was very much to the fore.60 In Worlds of Labour (1984)61 Hobsbawm provided a sequel to Labouring Men, again looking at the lives of ordinary working people including the organisations they built. His cosmopolitanism, evident in the broad geographical coverage, the comparative and transnational vistas, and his wide intellectual interests, was highly visible in the book. Completing his trilogy on the nineteenth century with the publication of The Age of Empire (1987),62 Hobsbawm still argued that it was the class struggle that moved history on and that class was the central interpretative axis around which to hang the narrative of nineteenth-century history. Following the fall of communism, he developed his thesis, prominently explicated in the Age of Extremes (1994),63 that capitalism in the west had only developed a human face (essentially the welfare state and a larger share of the spoils for workers) because of the threat of Communism represented by the Soviet Union and its allies. If we follow this logic, Communism helped to bring about the golden age of social democracy in the non-communist West. At the same time as he credited Communism with this achievement, Hobsbawm remained almost entirely silent about the criminal energies of Communism. His ongoing refusal to become a renegade was close to ideological blindness. Already in his trilogy on the nineteenth century, Hobsbawm had worn his Marxism lightly. In the Age of Extremes, it almost disappeared entirely. The language of class, let alone class war, did no longer feature prominently in his analysis. In line with his political writings from the 1980s, his historiographical analysis had also become social democratized. Still believing that socialism should be the answer to a more humane and equal society, Hobsbawm stuck to his left-wing universalism but was well aware that political developments did not go his way.

 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975).  Eric Hobsbawm, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984).  Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987).  Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1989 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994).

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2.4 Hobsbawm’s rejection of nationalism It was not just that the world, under the influence of neoliberalism, was becoming more socially unjust. Old evils, above all, nationalism, also made a reappearance after 1990. As a boy, Hobsbawm had been emotionally close to his mother. She was an enthusiast for European unification and an admirer of Count Coudenhove-Kalergi.64 Hence, already in his upbringing he was confronted with strong transnational sentiments. By the mid-1930s, as an 18-year old, Hobsbawm fell in love with Paris – largely because, outside of the Soviet Union, it was the place with a mass communist party and a promising labour movement.65 The Popular Front government inspired him, and later, France was to retain an unrivalled intellectual attractiveness, not least due to the ‘monde braudelien’, which was appealing to his transnational, universalist sentiments, but also due to the kind of public intellectuals he was encountering here – broadly on the left but autonomous from direct control by the Communist Party.66 Both politically and historiographically Hobsbawm had rejected nationalism but he stayed attentive to it as a social force. As a 20-year-old, bathing in the Mediterranean Sea on a trip to France, he first pondered what it meant to feel part of a nation, a feeling that he so clearly lacked at the time: To have a fatherland means knowing all about the people among whom you work; to know their little peculiarities, what fairy-tales they are told when they are small, what they do when they take girls home from the dance at night, what bad jokes the old men make . . . An emotion which can mobilise the politically undeveloped and give comfort even to the stateless, by proxy, cannot be overlooked.67

Already in the Age of Revolution (1962), he had given a lot of attention to nationalisms and national questions but refused to discuss the many subjects of the book along national lines, thus trying to evade what later would be called ‘methodological nationalism’.68 Spatial categories played little role in structuring the volume. In the Age of Capital (1978), despite its title, much attention is again lavished on the tensions between nationalization and democratization between 1848 and

 Evans, A Life, 22.  Evans, A Life, 94–106.  Jack H. Hexter, “Fernand Braudel and the Monde Braudelien,” Journal of Modern History 44 (1972): 480–539.  Cited from Hobsbawm’s notes from his visit to Southern France in 1937 in Evans, A Life, 155–156.  Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick-Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: NationState Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks: a Journal of Transnational Affairs 2:4 (2002): 301–334.

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1875. Yet it is also noticeable how, throughout this volume, Hobsbawm emphasizes the importance of empires rather than nation states paying attention both to European and non-European empires (Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman) This emphasis on empires rather than nation states being the key organizing drivers of historical processes in the nineteenth century was already strong in Industry and Empire (1968).69 Although the latter publication was Britain-centred, Hobsbawm methodologically refused to give in to a nation-centred perspective, despite all the attention he lavished on the British industrial revolution and its economic, social and political consequences. It was characteristic that he immediately sought to contextualise the British development in world economic terms with a chapter on “Britain and the World Economy”. In Age of Extremes, Hobsbawm confirmed his global orientations and his preference for empires over nation states as organizing principle of world history. The book starts off with the last gasp of the British empire at the starting decades of the twentieth century only to move to the violent attempts to create a German world empire. The Cold War is depicted as struggle between an American and a Soviet empire, in which the latter’s main function is to temper the ugly side of capitalism in parts of the American empire, especially in Western Europe. The Soviet Union is hardly the shining promised land as which it had still appeared to the young Hobsbawm, but he also did not entirely cut his attachments to a social system that, at the very least, had overcome capitalism. One of the central chapters in the book, at the end of its first part, is entitled “End of Empire”. There is a strong notion in the subsequent second part on the post-1945 world, of a translatio imperii, from European/British to American global predominance. Globalisation, social change and the end of Eurocentrism are the three red lines that structure the book. By contrast, nations and nationalism hardly figure. Like his trilogy on the nineteenth century, Age of Extremes is dominated by Hobsbawm’s lifelong attempt to write the history of capitalism that he saw as being rooted, above all, in spatial categories of empire. As he states towards the end of the book: “We live in a world captured, uprooted and transformed by the titanic economic and techno-scientific process of the development of capitalism, which has dominated the past two or three centuries.”70 He was to return to the issue of the comparison between the British and American empires of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively. In the last substantive chapter of his autobiography, Hobsbawm reflects on ‘the age of

 Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: an Economic History of Britain since 1750 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968).  Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 584.

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the American empire’. After expressing a general dislike of the US and a gratitude that his children did not have to grow up there, he identifies what he sees as the real problem with US dominance: “The US empire does not know what it wants to do or can do with its power, or its limits.”71 Is there a hint here that the nineteenth-century British empire was superior to its successor in that it had a better idea about how to use its power? Can it be that Hobsbawm, despite his professed cosmopolitanism, was still a child of the British empire? In his book On Empire (2009), he drew direct comparisons between the British and the American empires that were generally unfavourable to the Americans.72 Here he also underlined his belief that empires, far more than nations, were the key political driving forces of history, in close alliance with the economic driving forces of capitalist development. Regardless of his attentiveness to questions of empire, Hobsbawm was in the vanguard of those who rediscovered nationalism as a subject of academic study in the early 1980s. 1983 has rightly been called the annus mirabilis of nationalism studies, for it was in this year that three publications appeared that were fundamental to the rediscovery of nationalism as an important subject for study.73 Next to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism, it was an edited collection, edited by Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm, entitled The Invention of Tradition that had a deep impact of a younger generation of scholars of nationalism.74 The essays in the volume, which went back to a Past and Present Society conference, were united by the desire to show that claims of nations that their customs and traditions could be traced back to an ancient past were mostly fabricated. These traditions were often of far more recent origins and rooted in the promotion of nationalism. Once again, contemporary political events had been vital in drawing Hobsbawm further into the study of the history of nationalism. He had watched with fascination the rise of Margaret Thatcher to power and her use of a nationalist, imperialist rhetoric to win the hearts and minds of many in Britain, including many among the working classes. Hobsbawm interpreted the Falklands War as  Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 410.  Eric Hobsbawm, On Empire: America, War and Global Supremacy (New York: New Press, 2009).  Stefan Berger and Eric Storm, “Introduction: Writing the History of Nationalism – in what way, for whom and by which means?” in Writing the History of Nationalism, ed. Stefan Berger and Eric Storm (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 1–18.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

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having nothing to do with the far-away island off the Argentinian coast, but everything to do with the crisis of capitalism in Britain itself. It was, in his eyes, an attempt to overcome the long history of post-war decline, Britain’s acquired reputation as the ‘sick man’ of Europe and the dramatic economic slump of the late 1970s.75 The return of nationalism in the wake of the fall of communism was used by Hobsbawm to construct another apologia for really-existing socialism, as it had, according to him, at the very least kept nationalism in check.76 As he wrote in the New Statesman in 1992, he rejected nationalism because “the political project of the left is universalist”.77 Following the fall of communism around 1990 Hobsbawm did not tire to lambast nationalism. Highly critical of the historiographical nationalism that rose to prominence in many of the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe, he condemned “preachers of a national myth” helping states to decree the right kind of nationalist history. This, he argued, was not the business of democratic and constitutional states. And he called on historians to counter such trends: “. . . the progress of historical studies is frequently a danger to nationalism. I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a danger.”78 In On History, he reminded his readers that history had been the prime raw material in the hands of nationalists. Without the construction of nationalist histories, nationalism would not have become the powerful ideology that it was: “The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element in these ideologies.”79 Yet he was optimistic that historians could contribute to unravel these dangerous ideologies: The very fact that historians are at least beginning to make some progress in the study and analysis of nations and nationalism suggests that, as so often, the phenomenon is past its peak. The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling around nations and nationalism.80

Little did he know that he was writing these sentences at another dusk rather than a dawn. The universalist cosmopolitan Hobsbawm found it difficult to conceive of the victory of such a retrograde ideology as nationalism. He condemned nationalism,

 Eric Hobsbawm, “Falklands Fallout,” Marxism Today (January 1983): 13–19.  Evans, A Life, 546 f.  Eric Hobsbawm, “Whose Fault-Line is it Anyway,” The New Statesman (24.4.1992): 23–26.  Eric Hobsbawm, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Little Brown, 2013), 282.  Hobsbawm, On History, 9.  Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 192. The first edition was published in 1990.

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and he knew of its powers, but he still underestimated it. The historian, for Hobsbawm, in the light of the revival of nationalism, had a special responsibility: “We have a responsibility to historical facts in general and for criticizing the politicalideological abuse of history in particular.”81 The urgency of this was underlined by the fact that “the sentences typed on apparently innocuous keyboards [by nationalist historians] may be sentences of death.”82 Hobsbawm, the public historian and engaged intellectual, cannot be properly understood without shedding light on his firm belief in the authority of the professional historian and his ability ultimately to change the world for the better.

2.5 Believing in the authority of the historian Being a professional historian and being recognized as a professional historian was important to Hobsbawm. Promoted to a readership in history at Birkbeck in 1959, he looked elsewhere for professorial positions during the 1960s but was not successful. A highly public historian with a political edge made many enemies. Time and time again he was rejected for positions at other universities, often because he was seen as being politically too radical. Finally promoted to a professorship at Birkbeck in 1970 he was eventually to stay at the same institution for all his academic life. His colleague at Birkbeck, Frank Trentman, talked warmly about Hobsbawm’s approachability for students and staff: “Eric did not care whether you were a junior colleague or a student, as long as you took history seriously. History was a mission, not a job.”83 But what did it mean to Hobsbawm: taking “history seriously”? I think it meant, above all, intervening in the contemporary world and its struggles through an analysis of the past. He did not tire in forwarding ideas and arguments that were capable of criticizing what he regarded as the twin evils in this world, capitalism and nationalism and working towards more social democracy and more universalist cosmopolitanism. The public historian had to follow these ethical imperatives in an empirical way that used the authority and methodology of the professional historian to establish facts. His life-long love of Marx and his commitment to Marxism was rooted in his recognition of a fellow soul – Marx had also been taking history seriously. Hobsbawm derided those Marxists, who did not take history seriously, e.g., Louis Althusser, whose anti-humanism and whose dismissive attitude towards

 Hobsbawm, On History, 7.  Hobsbawm, On History, 54.  Cited in Evans, A Life, 559.

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empiricism Hobsbawm could not share.84 Hobsbawm firmly believed in the power of empirical facts which gives all his books a very empirical feel. He was committed to the ideas of scientificity that stood at the beginning of professional historical research in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.85 In the introduction to Nations and Nationalism (1990), he indicted “nationalist historians” for failing to leave “their convictions behind when entering the library or the study.”86 Hobsbawm believed firmly in the power of the empirical historian to demask myths and tell truth to power. His home became a magnet for Marxist intellectuals from all over the world, including Eastern Europe and Latin America and his multilingualism made him capable of building stable bridges into the Hispano-, Franco- and Germanophone worlds as well as to his beloved Italy. Seeing himself as an intellectual, he mixed with fellow historians but also politicians and other intellectuals. The conversations he had regularly with Labour Party leader Michael Foot on the no. 24 bus from north London to central London were legendary. When his daughter married the Labour Party politician and future Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the latter was a regular guest at the Hobsbawms’ home.87 For all his commitment to revolutionary anti-capitalism, social democracy and universalist humanist ethics he remained attracted to traditional honours and was ready to accept membership in the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall in 1983. He was pleased to receive an Honorary Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge in 1973 and equally proud to be elected to a Fellowship of the British Academy in 1976. He refused to be knighted but accepted a Companion of Honour. As Michelle Perrot, a leading French social historian, remarked about Hobsbawm, he was a “Marxist, who opposed established society, had at the same time a profound respect for the traditions of this British society that had welcomed him into its arms.”88 And Richard Vinen, a historian of Britain and France, remarked that the British establishment repaid this grudging respect of Hobsbawm by adopting and championing him as one of their own: “Even Hobsbawm’s much-vaunted cosmopolitanism fits into an English identity. The English Establishment has always had a soft spot for people . . . who can explain foreign ideas in elegant English prose.”89

 Eric Hobsbawm, “Marxism without Marx,” Times Literary Supplement (3.12.1971).  Heiko Feldner, “The New Scientificity in Historical Writing around 1800,” in Writing History, ed. Berger, Feldner and Passmore (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 7–24.  Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, 12.  Evans, A Life, 412–413.  Cited in Evans, A Life, 480.  Cited in Evans, A Life, 620.

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I have noted above Hobsbawm’s desire to overcome methodological nationalism. In Industry and Empire (1968), he starts off his first chapter on “Britain in 1750” with the observation that national history and the development of nations in the eighteenth century might best be grasped by looking at the many commentaries that were written on British developments by foreign visitors. It was a brilliant, cosmopolitan, way of looking beyond national history in order to understand national developments. He returned to this theme in Uncommon People (2011) where he argued with respect to Sicilian history that the foreign historian (like himself) was more able to see clearly, because he was not weighed down by historiographical nationalism.90 Of course, he needed a thorough grounding in Sicilian history, but if he acquired that, he was potentially in a better position to assess it than the national historian. Talking about his strong emotional ties with Italy, Hobsbawm, in his autobiography, argued: “being a historian helps to understand a country”.91 This could be read as an admission that understanding national frames can be an important historical exercise, yet it was one that Hobsbawm, throughout much of his life, attempted to escape. At the end of his introduction to Industry and Empire, he again felt the need to justify his focus on Britain by arguing that it was more than a simple case study. It had been the motherland of the Industrial Revolution. Hence its national history had been pivotal to global developments. Looking at national history, he argued, was only of interest because of its ramifications for global developments: “No change in human life since the invention of agriculture, metallurgy and towns in the New Stone Age has been so profound as the coming of industrialization.”92 That change needed “a single leading pioneer country. That country was Britain, and as such it stands alone in history.”93 Hobsbawm’s universalism could only conceive of national developments when they had a global, universal significance. This tendency drew him ‘naturally’ to comparison, and, indeed, in the Age of Capital he made as strong plea in favour of comparative history. The interest in transnationalism and comparison threads itself through his work from the beginning to the end. His first monograph, Primitive Rebels, is about southern Europe, especially Italy and Spain in its investigation of a transnational phenomenon, social banditry. Ten years later, in Bandits, he was to extend the comparative scope to global dimensions, taking into account Latin America in particular. Labouring Men and Worlds of Labour, his two seminal collections of

 Eric Hobsbawm, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), chapter 13.  Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, 358.  Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 21–22.  Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 21–22.

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articles on labour history, are thoroughly transnational and comparative. In Uncommon People, Hobsbawm traces radical traditions on a global scale and is refusing to be hemmed in by the geography of national frames. In fact, his commitment to transnational history re-enforced his thinking in the geographical frames of empire. In Fractured Times, he reminds his readers of the extraordinary strength of empires even in the twentieth century. They had been, in his eyes, the major constitutive force in the development of modernity. And his political essays, Revolutionaries and Tales of Marx and Marxism,94 very much are comments on a world political stage. The global dimensions of his histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have already been mentioned above. Although his own work has sometimes been criticized for being Eurocentric,95 his global intentions were rarely in doubt. As he put it in On History: “historians must give up the old habit of looking for specific factors, only to be found in Europe, which made our culture qualitatively different from and therefore superior to others.”96 He was keen to replace notions of European exceptionalism with global comparison, although such comparison would, of course, in turn raise the question again whether there were things that were peculiarly European.

2.6 Conclusion: Hobsbawm’s self-understanding of a public historian intellectual: relevant for today or outdated? Hobsbawm, it could be argued, was driven by normative convictions that were formed very early on in his life: a commitment to the values of social democracy originating in his Marxism, and his thinking in imperial rather than national frames. His biographical and scholarly influences were both militating against a strong national orientation and predestined him to become a champion of a more socially just world in which nationalism would no longer be an ideology that brought ordinary folk into violent conflict with each other. Whilst avoiding a national tunnel vision in historical writing, he engaged deeply with the ideas of nation and nationalism – always in the desire to leave them behind. Revolution,

 Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (New York: Little Brown, 2011).  Famously in Edward Said’s overall positive review of Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes. See Edward Said, “Contra Mundum,” London Review of Books (9.3.1995): 22–23.  Hobsbawm, On History, 64.

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social progress and capitalism were far more important organizing principles for his own understanding of the past than nations and nationalism which is also why he tended, despite all the attention he gave them, to underestimate these phenomena. Hobsbawm was indeed, an early pathfinder of transnational history – demonstrating its huge potential but also exemplifying its tendency to ignore the power of national frames. Rather than regarding national and transnational history as parallel universes that have little in common, they need to be thought together and put alongside local and regional geographical frames in sliding geographical scales whose interactions explain much about historical developments. The recognition that regimes of territorialization have been under permanent reconstruction that in turn have always been contested makes it necessary to historicise the various spatial constructions and put them in dialogue with one another.97 Finally, Hobsbawm was a very modern historian in his historiographical scientificity. He believed in empiricism and truthfulness and throughout much of his work he wore his Marxism lightly, never letting theory interfere with what he called the facts. He was therefore always sceptical of the insights of poststructuralism, narrativism and postmodernism which, he argued, eroded the foundations of the kind of scientificity that he did not want to let go off. In the contemporary debates on the theory of history post-narrativist theorists, such as Jouni-Matti Kuukanen and Marek Tamm attempt precisely to put historical practice and historical writing back on methodological foundations that take into account the insights of narrativism and poststructuralism but still allow a meaningful scientific discourse to take place among historians and between historians and wider society.98 Such post-narrativism combined with Stuart Hall’s useful concept of “identification” might indeed serve as basis for an engaged history on behalf of particular groups in society that does not lead to essentialisms and avoids the pitfalls of a highly problematic identity politics.99 Hence, in several respects, Hobsbawm’s self-understanding as a public historian seems highly relevant today albeit in need of being updated. He belonged to a generation of left-wing public historians who freed themselves from direct subservience

 Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann, “Global History and the Spatial Turn: from the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization,” Journal of Global History 5:1 (2010): 149–170.  Jouni-Matti Kuukanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of History (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); Marek Tamm, “Truth, Objectivity and Historical Evidence in Historical Writing,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 8:2 (2014): 265–290.  I have argued this at greater length in Stefan Berger, History and Identity: How Historical Theory Shapes Historical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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and dependency on the Communist Party. As partisanship gave way to critical autonomous thinking, the party historian was superseded by the more free-floating public intellectual that is still an ideal today. French and Italian examples had been key to Hobsbawm’s changing self-understanding as a public historian. His cosmopolitan universalism also remains an ideal that continues to be worth pursuing in a world in which right-wing populist nationalism is on the rise. Yet we also need to realize to what extent such cosmopolitan universalism remains rooted in western-centric forms of thinking and refashion a critical cosmopolitanism that is aware of its limitations and its need for intercultural dialogue.100 Hobsbawm’s desire to see capitalism re-embedded into a socially responsible frame is equally topical in a world in which the divisions between a global north and a global south continue to be stark and in which the social differences between poor and rich are increasing throughout the global north.101 His desire to use the authority of history to influence public opinion on a wide range of political contemporary issues is one that needs to be rekindled among professional historians today, as their voice is often lacking or weak in contemporary political debates. His insistence of professional methodological standards and the ability of the historian to make meaningful statements about the past is worth reestablishing against the false notion that everyone can construct their own past in an ‘everything goes’ mode, or the equally false notion that only those to whom a particular history ‘belongs’ can make statements about that history. His obituaries are testimony to the fact that his ideas on being a public intellectual, his cosmopolitan universalism and his professionalism remain a reference for a whole range of contemporary historians. Jürgen Kocka, for example, concluded his obituary with the words: “His work will be read for a long time to come.” This was the case, he argued, because he was an outstanding professional social historian and an independent left-wing activist.102 One of Hobsbawm’s biographers, Gregory Elliott, emphasized how his life-long dedication to “the good old cause”, meaning a left-wing vision of solidarity, social justice, and universalism  Gerard Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Walter Mignolo, The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (Durham/North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2021); Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Michael Murphy, A Post-Western Account of Critical Cosmopolitan Social Theory. Being and Acting in a Democratic World (Lanham/Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).  In the contemporary world Joseph Stieglitz has argued for such a re-embedding of capitalism. See, for example, his People, Power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).  Jürgen Kocka, “Eric J. Hobsbawm (1917–2012),” International Review of Social History 58 (2013): 1–8, 8.

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were an ongoing model for future generations of historians.103 Having been part and parcel of a global circle of left-of-centre intellectuals for virtually all of his life, he had produced, in the words of Tony Judt, a “Hobsbawm generation” whose self-understanding as historians “was irrevocably shaped by Eric Hobsbawm’s writing”.104

 Elliott, Hobsbawm, 149.  Tony Judt, “Downhill all the Way,” New York Review of Books (25 May 1995).

Larissa Schulte Nordholt

3 Two Sides of Activist Scholarship Within UNESCO’s General History of Africa (1964–1998) 3.1 Introduction How do historians deal with the tensions between political and academic demands on their work? Should academic historians involve themselves in the public uses of the past?1 If so, to what end? Since the writing of history developed into an academic discipline in nineteenth century European universities, various public demands have been made on historians. In the nineteenth century, the most pressing demand was to provide nation-states with a historical narrative. Concerns surrounding identity formation and the expansion of historical knowledge beyond the history of European nation-states and politics, moreover, have been key developments of the history of the historical discipline in the twentieth century and, arguably, the twenty-first. The history of the historical discipline, it follows, is one of entangled academic, political, moral and social imperatives. It is partly for this reason that its professionalization has involved different and changing conceptualisations of what it means to be impartial, detached or, more recently, ‘objective’ as a historian.2 Although all history-writing in some way has to deal with the question of political engagement and public demands, this becomes all the more poignant during times of heightened political stakes. It was specifically during the period of political decolonization and the end of empire that the borders of what counted as historical knowledge shifted as a result of global political change. The formation of postcolonial nation-states around the globe in the twentieth century created an increased demand for new nationalist narratives in an effort to move away from European colonial conceptualisations of the histories of those geographic areas. Questions of historical authority and the public use of history became increasingly pressing because the historical discipline was itself embroiled in the history of

 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Public Life of History: An Argument out of India,” Public Culture 20 (2008), 143–68, 145.  See for instance: Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities,” in The Making of the Humanities Volume III, ed. Rens Bod, Thijs Weststeijn and Jaap Maat (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 27–42 and Herman Paul, “Distance and SelfDistanciation: Intellectual Virtue and Historical Method Around 1900,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 104–16. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-003

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empire.3 In this chapter, I focus on the public life of history as part of the Africanisation of African historical studies in the latter half of the twentieth century. I argue that whether public demands on historians’ work were seen as congruent or incongruent with scholarly rigour was partly dependent on positionality within the politics of global knowledge production about Africa. The history of African historical studies is an especially pertinent topic because African historical studies have always formed a battleground for different ideological goals, be they colonial, anti-colonial or something else again. This was partly the result of shifting power structures in the global politics of knowledge production about Africa. The academic study of the African continent originated in nineteenth century Britain and early twentieth century France and was closely connected to the British and French colonial enterprises.4 This included a period in the 1940s and 50s when left wing intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sartre developed an interest in Africa. In the 1960s finally, during the period of political decolonisation, the historical study of Africa briefly became centred on African anti-colonial intellectuals on the continent.5 These African historians argued that African history had to serve a public function as a tool for nation-building and development on the African continent. This situation did not last, however. As a result of Cold War tensions, funding for African studies in the United States grew considerably during the 1960s and after, causing the discipline to consolidate on American soil. This somewhat embroiled African studies in the United States with the country’s foreign expansion across the globe as well as with anti-communist tendencies.6 At the same time funding for African history within African countries dwindled as a result of political and financial crises.7 The public demands that were made on African history were

 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Politics and Possibility of Historical Knowledge: Continuing the Conversation,” Postcolonial Studies 14 (2011): 243–50, 245–46.  Georges Balandier, “The French Tradition of African Research,” Human Organization 19:3 (1960), 108–111, Anthony Kirk-Greene, “The Emergence of an Africanist Community in the UK,” in The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa in the Twentieth Century, eds. Douglas Rimmer and Anthony Kirk-Greene (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000), 11–40, 11–12 and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Le Choix de l’Afrique. Les combats d’une pionnière de l’histoire africaine (Paris: La Découverte, 2022).  Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “L’historiographie africaine en Afrique”, Revue Tiers Monde 216 (2013), 111–127, 114–16.  Pearl T. Robinson, “Area Studies in Search of Africa,” in The Politics of Knowledge. Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley: University of California, 2004), 119–183, 119–20.  Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia, “African Historiography and the Crisis of Institutions” in The Study of Africa. Volume 1. Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Encounters, ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2006), 135–67, 152.

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therefore partly dependent on one’s position within the shifting geographic and ideological environments of the discipline. My case study here concerns the UNESCO-sponsored General History of Africa (GHA), an 8-volume history of the African continent that was drafted and published between 1964 and 1998, with the aim to show that African societies had histories worth studying. Bethwell Ogot, one of its key figures, described the project as imperative for the political future of the continent. For him history-writing as academic endeavour and political initiative were intimately connected.8 UNESCO sponsored the GHA because it supported newly independent African states’ wish to write a history of the continent from an African perspective in an effort to contribute to the remaking of a global order after the Second World War.9 As such, the GHA was influenced by both internationalism as well as anti-colonial state-building. It also aimed to be taken seriously by the academic community. From its very start, the historians working on the project, Africans as well as some Europeans and Americans, stipulated that the majority of the authors had to be from all corners of the African continent, and that the project had to be written from an African perspective, which they understood to be pan-African. The GHA’s aims were vast in that it contained the history of Africa, expressly including North Africa, in eight volumes, from the earliest beginnings of humanity to the end of empire in the twentieth century. It was led, from 1971 onwards, by an International Scientific Committee for the Drafting of a General History of Africa, consisting of 39 members, the majority of whom were also African or of African descent.10 The first volume was published in 1980 in French and in 1981 in English, the last volume appeared in 1993 in English and finally in French in 1998.11 When the GHA was reviewed by the Africanist community in the United States and the United Kingdom, the GHA’s political aspirations caused these reviewers to raise their eyebrows. The GHA historians and those historians who reviewed the work from the global north differed in opinion on the political and ideological motivations informing the creation of the project. Could an academic  Bethwell Ogot, My Footprints on the Sands of Time (Kisumu: Ayange Press Limited, 2003), 384.  In her article on the GHA, Chloé Maurel describes, based partly on research in state archives, how several African states, UNESCO and the Organisation of African Unity came together in political support of the GHA, Chloé Maurel, “L’histoire Générale de l’Afrique de l’Unesco. Un projet de coopération intellectuelle transnationale d’esprit afro-centré (1964–1999)”, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 54 (2014), 715–737, 715–16.  UNESCO archives Paris (hereafter UAP), SHC/CONF.70/8 rev. Paris 5 April 1971, First Plenary Meeting of the International Scientific Committee for the drafting of a General History of Africa, Rules of Procedure, Article 1, UNESCO, Paris, 30 March – 8 April 1971, 1.  Larissa Schulte Nordholt, “Africanising African History. Decolonisation of Knowledge in UNESCO’s General History of Africa (1964–1998)” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2021).

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history project be both politically motivated as well as sound in a scholarly sense? In this chapter, I will show how the political and public nature of the GHA was used both as a positive and negative description within the retrospective perception of the GHA. Whereas the mostly Euro-American reviewers of the 8-volume series tended to see its civic engagement as a disqualification, the African contributors to the project saw it as a sign that the GHA historians had done the African past more justice than previous historians they saw as Eurocentric and colonialist. They argued that African historical studies had to be connected to African societies in order to be worthwhile. The historians who reviewed the work in their scholarly journals, conversely, criticized the work for precisely the qualities that its insiders had lauded. As a result, moreover, of the shifting centre within African studies, reflection on the project from ‘inside’, by those who had contributed to it and who were sympathetic to it, took on a nostalgic tone as the realization dawned that the GHA had represented a unique chance at decolonizing African history. This chapter first discusses how reviewers judged the GHA after it had been published before discussing how insiders reflected on the project after its end. The GHA was an activist project of intellectual emancipation and therefore contained an inevitable tension between political imperatives and research standards. This was the result of the aim of the work to challenge the existing status quo, both within the academic world of history writing and outside of it, as part of the politics of decolonization.

3.2 The reception of the GHA by Africanists in the United States and the United Kingdom I will here focus specifically on the American and British critics of the GHA through an analysis of published reviews of the project in academic journals, as it was around these Anglophone researchers that the centre of African studies had become focused. Although there are some reviews in French, the vast majority was, tellingly, in English. Most of the African academic historians of the time, moreover, had contributed to the GHA volumes and could therefore not review them. This is striking: African historiography and African studies more broadly have had to reckon with a historic orientation towards European ideals of knowledge production and European epistemic colonisation from their inception. What was studied under the guise of African studies has largely been determined by factors from

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outside the continent.12 It is for that reason that it is of particular interest to analyse how Euro-American researchers judged a project of African self-determination. The founding of the African Studies Association in 1957 in the United States marked the formal beginning of Africanist scholarship in the US, although not the beginning of academic research into the African past.13 A pan-African inspired academic study of the continent had already taken place at historically black institutions in the US, such as Howard, since at least the late nineteenth century.14 This vindicationist and transcontinental tradition, closely related to the same brand of African history that was part and parcel of the GHA, aimed to ascertain the authenticity of the African past to prove that white supremacist ideas on the absence of Afro-history were wrong.15 After World War II, however, new, primarily white, Africanists sought a separation between the study of continental Africa and the (African-American) diaspora and related issues of race and identity – a separation which the GHA did not necessarily seek. Yet, within the GHA, African-American scholars never claimed their place, and it was the white scholar Philip Curtin who served as one of the most important American GHA historians. The reason African Americans never claimed their place within the GHA may accordingly be that the intellectual pursuit of the African past in the United States was not left untouched by the country’s history of racism and segregation, creating a gap between Euro-American, Afro-American and African inquiry into the continent in North America.16 In total, I analyse 35 reviews written about various volumes of the GHA, 30 of which were written by Britons or Americans. In the 1980s and 1990s, it seems, they mostly decided what was and was not good scholarship within African history, at least within academic journals. The critique the GHA received can be roughly divided into two main categories. The first type of critique was focused on the way the GHA lagged behind current historiographical debates both in terms of themes as well as methods. Secondly and perhaps more scathingly, there were those reviewers who disapproved of the entire project due to the fact that it had a political agenda. This was sometimes caused by the presence of a chapter by Cheikh Anta Diop in volume two on the African and black origins of Ancient  Paulin J. Houtondji, “Knowledge of Africa, Knowledge by Africans: Two Perspectives on African Studies,” RCCS Annual Review 1 (2009): 121–31, 127.  William G. Martin, “The Rise of African Studies (USA) and the Transnational Study of Africa.” African Studies Review 54 (2011): 59–83, 60, 75.  Martin, “The Rise of African Studies (USA),” 70.  Michael O. West and William G. Martin, “Introduction,” in Out of One, Many Africas. Reconstructing the Study and Meaning of Africa, eds. William G. Martin and Michael O. West (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1999), 1–38, 19.  Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Perpetual Solitudes and Crises of African Studies in the United States,” Africa Today 44 (1997): 193–210, 193.

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Egypt, which harvested especially harsh criticism. Of course, there is overlap between these two categories, and neither are mutually exclusive. When the GHA was praised, conversely, it was often for its authenticity and its adherence to panAfrican diversity. Praise was also directed towards specific well-known authors who had devoted their time and energy to the GHA, such as Jan Vansina or Terence Ranger.17 It is perhaps not coincidental that both valued scholars and trailblazers were Europeans. Owing to the fact that the first two volumes appeared in the same year in English, in 1981, quite a few reviews focus on both volumes at once. One such review was written by Bogumil Jewsiewicki in French, next to an English review by Peter Shinnie. Jewsiewicki was a Lithuanian historian who had been at Louvanium and later the National University of Zaire in Kinshasa from 1968 until 1977. The remainder of his career as an academic took place in Québec. He was a specialist on Congolese history. His review claimed that the UNESCO project had failed in its mission to return history to the people. Specifically, Jewsiewicki thought the absence of a neo-Marxist perspective of history was “une lacune deplorable”.18 He accused the project of being a servant of state power rather than a useful critique of the way African history had been done. The project was mostly engaged in debunking old Eurocentric myths, and proved outdated by the time the project came out.19 As Jewsiewicki suggested, the GHA’s raison d’être, that Africa had a history apart from Europeans, had, at least within Africanist circles, become a commonplace by the time the first volumes were published. The debate about the purpose of African history had progressed, and as a result, Jewsiewicki identified the GHA as not radical enough in its rejection of either European oppression or African autocracies.  See: Donald R. Wright, “Reviewed Work(s): Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Centuries. Volume IV of General History of Africa by D.T. Niane,” Canadian Journal of African / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 20 (1986): 133–5, 133; Randall L. Pouwels, “Reviewed Work(s): General History of Africa. Volume 5, Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century by B. A. Ogot,” The American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1371–2, 1371; John Hargreaves, “Reviewed Work(s): UNESCO General History Vol I: Methodology and African Prehistory by J. Ki-Zerbo,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 54 (1984): 111–2, 111; David W. Phillipson, “Review: The Unesco History: Volume One. Reviewed Work(s): ‘UNESCO General History of Africa. Vol I: Methodology and African Prehistory by J. Ki-Zerbo’,” The Journal of African History 23 (1982): 115–6, 115; Ivor Wilks, “Reviewed Work(s): UNESCO General History of Africa. Volume I: Methodology and African Prehistory by J. Ki-Zerbo; UNESCO General History of Africa. Volume II: Ancient Civilizations of Africa by G. Mokthar,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 15 (1982): 283–5, 284 and Tom McCaskie, “Reviewed Work(s): General History of Africa, VII: African under Colonial Domination, 1880–1935 by A. Adu Boahen,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 57 (1987): 401–403, 403.  Shinnie and Jewsiewicki, “The UNESCO History Project,” 550.  Shinnie and Jewsiewicki, “The UNESCO History Project,” 543.

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This made it seem like the nationalist-oriented GHA was created in the service of increasingly autocratic states. Jewsiewicki’s critique perhaps was owed to the fact that the development of a materialist perspective on history had played an important role in the study of Africa both within Africa itself, at Dar-es-Salaam surrounding figures such as Walter Rodney and Isaria Kimambo, for instance, and outside.20 It was Rodney who developed the concept of underdevelopment within a Marxist analysis of colonialism, notably in his 1972 classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.21 Rodney had briefly been associated with the GHA, but he was assassinated before he had the chance to contribute a chapter. Other reviewers had similar opinions; they did not disagree with what the GHA had set out to do, but, did not consider the project a success on its own terms either, in part because new debates and questions had arisen. David Phillipson concluded that, laudable as UNESCO’s original aims may have been, the times had changed so radically that the result was of “very doubtful quality”.22 John Hargreaves and Christopher Ehret drew similar conclusions.23 Tom McCaskie pinpointed these thoughts articulated by other reviewers by contextualising to what extent the GHA had adhered to a political and scholarly ideology that had since become outdated, and which he did not necessarily agree with either: In a very real sense this book is an epitaph rather than a future directed effort; [. . .] in its breathless (almost ingratiating) plea for an ‘African past’ it encapsulates the mirror image of decolonisation and independence – a curious mixture of defensive apologia and self (academic) congratulation about Africa’s place on the world stage.24

McCaskie then, like Jewsiewicki, thought the GHA represented the kind of scholarship that had ‘mirrored’ Euro-American academia and Euro-American modernity in an effort to decolonise without really being critical of the underlying logic of such scholarship. What both Jewsiewicki and McCaskie diagnosed, then, was the absence, largely, of postcolonial critique within the GHA.

 Within a French context it was primarily Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch who as an Africanist, following the Annales school, engaged with Marxist historical analysis, Mamadou Diouf, “Africa in the World,” Africa Today 63 (2016), 58–65, 58.  Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Pambazuka Press, Cape Town: 2012 [1972])  Phillipson, “Volume One,” 115.  Hargreaves, “Vol I,” 111–12 and Christopher Ehret, “Reviewed Work(s): UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. I: Methodology and African Prehistory by J. Ki-Zerbo,” African Studies Review 24:4 (1981): 133–34, 133.  T.C. McCaskie, “Reviewed Work(s): General History of Africa: Volume IV. Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century by D.T. Niane,” African Studies Review 28:4 (1985): 109–11, 109.

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Radical as it may have been in 1964, these reviewers concluded that in 1981 the GHA had mostly been overtaken by new and even more radical insights. In a way, this was proof of the GHA’s achievements. It is ironic that the GHA found itself criticised by authors from the global north for not being decolonised enough. It would likely not have been possible to voice critique of the sort mentioned above without first arguing that African history was a viable academic endeavour, which was exactly what the GHA and its African trailblazers had set out to do. It is a testimony to the progress of African historiography that such statements as ‘Africa has a history’ had become uncontroversial by the time the first volumes appeared. Many reviewers, moreover, objected to what they identified as overt political ideology and the presence of a political agenda within the GHA. Often, Diop’s chapter seemed to serve as a catalyst for that sentiment. In his chapter, Diop made use of race science and racialist ideas on the origins of people to make the pan-African argument that ancient Egyptian civilization had been African and black. Peter Shinnie indicated that he did not subscribe to what he perceived as the political ideology that underwrote the GHA. Reviewing volume II, including the Diop chapter, he wrote that the GHA authors had managed to produce “a massive work of little worth” due to the political nature of the work.25 One of the most important reasons for Shinnie’s disapproval was the chapter by Diop: “It seems that UNESCO and Mokhtar were embarrassed by the unscholarly and preposterous nature of Diop’s views but were unable to reject his contribution.”26 In the American context, the chapter was most likely reminiscent of African-American Afrocentrism and the black American need to meaningfully connect Afro-American history with Egyptian civilization. This could have been interpreted as a threat by white Africanists who sought to produce ‘objective’ knowledge on Africa which, as mentioned above, they felt needed to be separated from what they saw as domestic issues of cultural heritage.27 Shinnie, however, was also critical of the inclusion of racialist language in volume II: “surely by now historians of Africa can do better than to describe Kushite kings as having ‘features . . . more akin to those of Hamitic pastoralists with an undoubted strain of black blood (pp. 282–83). This is writing virtually on the level of Anta Diop.”28 The use of racialism within the GHA was an unforgivable error to Shinnie. He concluded that the work was altogether too ideological and politically charged in order to function as serious scholarship.

   

Shinnie and Jewsiewicki, “The UNESCO History Project,” 539. Shinnie and Jewsiewicki, “The UNESCO History Project,” 540. West and Martin, “Introduction,” 10. Shinnie and Jewsiewicki, “Review: The UNESCO History Project,” 540.

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Shinnie was one amongst many of the reviewers who thought the Diop chapter was problematic.29 J. Jeffrey Hoover, an American who, at the time of writing the review in 1981, worked at the University of Lubumbashi in Zaire, wrote that he “was sadly struck by the stale aroma of racism” when referring to Diop’s chapter. He quickly dismissed all discussions about skin colour and nose length as “the dirty laundry of Egyptology”.30 The inclusion of Diop was seen as proof that the GHA had been unable to rid itself of political pressure to include such chapters. The Diop chapter had made it into the volume partly as a result of the GHA’s wish to contribute to political emancipation: the inclusion of racialism had made the chapter unsound from a scholarly perspective in the eyes of many GHA historians too, yet, it also made the very basic observation that Egyptian civilization had been African and belonged to African history. It thereby underwrote a core belief of the GHA that the history of North Africa was African. The demarcation between political and epistemic concerns was not as clear-cut as the reviewers sometimes supposed. The inclusion of Diop’s chapter, moreover, was seen by some insiders as part of the GHA’s emphasis on the political as well as epistemic affirmation that the inclusion of different ideas and perspectives was important.31 Diop’s chapter, however, was not the only reason reviewers reacted negatively to what they perceived as political intrusion into a work of scholarship. Ivor Wilks, a British specialist on the Asante kingdom in Ghana, wryly noted: Those of us who are perturbed by the whiff of an Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four in all of this [. . .] will not find their fears assuaged by UNESCO Director-General Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow’s statement of purpose, that the General History of Africa will be ‘widely disseminated in a large number of languages’.32

What to make of his sarcasm? In his review, Wilks seems particularly disturbed by the idea that UNESCO exerted control on the work.33 Roland Oliver, moreover, joined this type of critique by suggesting that editorial decisions had “not always been actuated by purely scientific considerations”.34 Much harsher critique was

 See: Michael Brett, “Review: The Unesco History: Volume Two,” The Journal of African History 23:1 (1982): 117–20 and Wilks, “Volume I,” 283–285.  Hoover, “Vol II,” 136.  Larissa Schulte Nordholt, “Multiple Hamitic Theories and Black Egyptians: Negotiating Tensions between Standards of Scholarship and Political Imperatives in UNESCO’s General History of Africa (1964–1998),” History of Humanities 6 (2021), 449–469.  Wilks, “Volume I,” 283.  Wilks, “Volume I,” 285.  Roland Oliver, “Reviewed Work(s): General History of Africa Vol. V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century by B. A. Ogot,” The English Historical Review 108 (1993): 681–83, 681–682.

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levelled against the GHA by Robert Ross, a white South African, in his review of volumes I and II. He considered the GHA’s attempt to create a history that would encompass the whole of the African continent a failed one, and questioned whether it was even sensible to treat Africa as one historical entity, thereby implying he did not agree with the project’s pan-African ideology or did not think it had a place in serious historiography. “At first sight [. . .] the only criterion to be used would be that of race, a highly dangerous and outmoded concept, although not one that has been avoided in these volumes”, Ross wrote, referring to the Diop chapter, which he called a “valueless undertaking”.35 Although Ross’ review may have been one of the harshest in terms of phrasing, essentially, he, Wilks and others agreed about the quality of the work. Many of the reviewers did not agree with or trust the pan-African UNESCOinspired outlook of the GHA, and they did not think political ideology belonged in scholarly writing about Africa in the first place. For them, African history had to be independent of the very political ideologies that had made it possible in the first place. The kind of history of Africa they adhered to was a depoliticized one that had shed both its colonial and anti-colonial origins. Conversely, the reviews that were positive in a general way mostly praise the GHA along lines that are very reminiscent of the project’s original goals: its panAfrican orientation, the focus on Africa from within and the inclusion of a diversity of perspectives on the same historiographical issues. The review by Basil Davidson is illustrative of this point. It was one of the earliest and most positive reviews for volumes I and II. Davidson praised the project for its pan-African aspirations. In Davidson’s estimation, it was the GHA’s focus on a diversity of African views that made it laudable as a project that transcended national interests. He, moreover, seemed to praise the annex that was added to Diop’s chapter: “On one or two knotty controversies [. . .] the editors are not content to leave the recording of alternative versions to a single hand, but go out of their way to provide discursive ’annexes’ [. . .] There is a lively and attractive promotion of the awareness that historiography is also ‘history in the making’.”36 This, of course, seems like an improbably positive comment on the controversy surrounding Diop’s contribution, given that the debate over the ancient Egyptians created an uproar within the GHA community and well beyond.37 Davidson’s positive appraisal of the

 Robert Ross, “The Mountain has Gone into Labour,” Itinerario VI (1982): 149–52, 150.  Basil Davidson, “Review: General History of Africa by UNESCO,” Third World Quarterly 3:3 (July 1981): 559–60, 560.  See: Martin Bernal, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization. Vol. 1 The fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) and Mary R. Lefkowitz, Black Athena revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1996).

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GHA stands out, not in the least because Davidson himself was a towering figure within the field of African history. It may be that Davidson, not an academic by trade originally, was less inclined to police the boundaries of scholarship than others. He was not against political positioning either, as his radical anti-colonial stance and efforts to aid in the struggle against Portuguese colonialism show. As Caroline Neale has argued moreover, Davidson had aligned himself very closely with the same Africanist ideals of scholarship as the GHA.38 What is surprising, however, is that he, unlike Jewsiewicki, did not assess to what extent the GHA had actually managed to satisfy those goals. Perhaps he felt a sympathy towards the project, its original political anti-colonial aspirations and specifically its pan-Africanism and therefore may have attempted to, in the face of critique, draw attention to what could be deemed positive about the Diop contribution. Yet, others also wrote positive reviews. Anthony Kirk-Greene aligned himself with the GHA goals, praising the project for creating a view of “Africa-from-within”.39 Richard Lobban, an American specialist on the history of the Sudan, stated that the GHA “correctly stresses an Afro-centric perspective”.40 Where some of the reviewers thought the pan-African aspirations of the project had led to politically correct but academically unsound historical work, a minority aligned themselves with the GHA and seemed to argue that these political aspirations could not be seen separately from the historical work itself. Contrary to many of the more critical reviewers, they did not think the project was too political for they were sympathetic to its political outlook. These authors placed the GHA within the larger context of resistance against European prejudice. The political and epistemic ideals the GHA espoused were hard to separate or identify as independent concerns, and only became identifiable as somewhat separate endeavours after African history had already been accepted as worthy of academic historical research. The American and British Africanist community as it had emerged from the 1960s onwards had also wanted to see African history accepted as a valued and reputable epistemic activity, just like the African founders of the field. What that meant, and whether it included pan-African perspectives, differed markedly in different geographical, political and epistemic contexts. The

 Caroline Neale, Writing “Independent” History. African Historiography 1960–1980 (London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 44–46.  A.H.M. Kirk-Greene, “Reviewed Work(s): General History of Africa, Vol I: Methodology and African Prehistory by J. Ki-Zerbo; General History of Africa, Vol. II, Ancient Civilizations of Africa by G. Mokhtar,” The English Historical Review 99 (1984): 461–62.  Richard Lobban, “Reviewed Work(s): General History of Africa, IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century by D.T. Niane,” The International Journal of African historical Studies, 18 (1985): 551–52, 551.

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engaged scholarship of the African founders of the discipline on the continent was not always necessarily a part of the mostly white American Africanist academy. Nevertheless, what was deemed too political or perhaps not political enough could change over time, as becomes clear in Jewsiewicki’s review. Whether reviewers appreciated the GHA or not, deemed it successful or not, largely hinged on whether they judged the GHA as primarily an academic project or as something that was academic, but which also served different public purposes.

3.3 The nostalgic remembrance of UNESCO’s General History of Africa This second section is concerned with the retrospective perception of the project from inside, meaning by those who had either contributed to the project or who could be deemed its intellectual allies or progeny. The reflections on the project discussed here function as pars pro toto for larger questions regarding the public use of history. What did these insiders see as the project’s most lasting contribution, not necessarily to scholarship, but to the emancipation of African history and Africans in society? I ask this question specifically in opposition to the relative outsiders whose views were discussed above. What did these insiders think was the way forward for African history and what role, if any, could the GHA play in the future? The section argues that the insiders to the GHA framed the political and civic responsibility they accorded to the project as activism. That activist frame, however, was conceptualized within quite a traditional idea of what historical knowledge was: a collection of truths meant to convey the true African past. This was nevertheless framed as activist because it was in reaction to colonial and racist ideas that African historians of Africa had to establish themselves and advocate for their ideal of Africa-centred history. This ideal included a sensitivity to the societal relevance of African history. The remembrance of the GHA from inside, secondly, was nostalgic because the GHA was reminiscent of a time when it seemed possible to make use of history for the purpose of emancipation. I am mindful that nostalgia as a concept is somewhat overused in the analysis of modernity, often in an effort to diagnose people’s reactions to rapid change or perceived cultural decline.41 Here, I use

 See: Tobias Becker, “The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique,” History and Theory 57 (2018): 234–250 and David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4–13.

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nostalgia as a tool to characterise an emotional element accorded the history of the GHA. I thereby wish to convey that the GHA was meaningful to its contributors as more than just an academic project and that they did not think emotions and academia or politics and academia could or should be neatly separated. It is also not to say that the reviewers discussed above were not also emotional in their rejection of certain parts of the GHA. It is to say that the retrospective reflection on the GHA from inside its own ranks was permeated with a sense that the GHA, a project which ran for half a lifetime, had left an affect that allowed for it to be significant beyond academia. This nostalgia in the remembrance of the GHA from within its own ranks can be characterised as existing between a spectrum of restorative and reflective nostalgia, a typology made by Svetlana Boym in her The Future of Nostalgia. The former corresponds more clearly to a longing for home, nostos, or a wish to reconstruct the past, and the latter to the wishful longing itself, algia. The latter specifically does not necessarily conflict with the present or the future or with the complexities of modernity as it accepts that the past is past, although both forms of nostalgia long for a past that has never in fact existed as such.42 Boym’s reflective nostalgia rhymes with the fact that when the GHA was launched in 1964, African history was in the making and its purpose could still be meaningfully shaped. The African historians working on the GHA rightly saw it as an extraordinary chance to create autonomous and meaningful African history. The ideal of a decolonised African history, however, turned out to be difficult to realise given the intellectual, academic, political and financial context of African historical studies in the second half of the twentieth century. By the time the GHA volumes had actually been published, the landscape of African studies had changed considerably and the sub-discipline had been partly shaped by people from outside the continent, as has been discussed above. African history had lost its prime position as a shaper of national destinies, as money flowed away from institutions on the continent in the 1970s and ‘80s and nationalist history increasingly seemed unable to cope with the economic and political problems of the postcolonial eras.43 Already in the 1970s, African universities, and especially humanities faculties, had started to contend with funding problems and increasing mismanagement as the economies of some countries started to nosedive, whilst politicisation elsewhere led to increasing restrictions on research. In the Democratic Republic of

 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), XVIII. See also: Patricia M.E. Lorcin, “The Nostalgias for Empire,” History and Theory 57 (2018): 269–285.  Brizuela-Garcia, “African Historiography,” 149–58.

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the Congo, for instance, ‘Zairianisation’ or nationalisation of universities caused universities to become subordinated to political ideology and biased management, resulting in a complete detachment from societal needs or academic ideals, be they colonial or Congolese.44 Even if ‘Zairianisation’ suggested the opposite and seemingly aligned with the interests of African historians in its goals to revalue indigenous culture over colonial influences in a politics of authenticity invented by its President, Mobutu, its practical effects on research were stifling because academic freedom suffered at the hands of an autocratic government.45 Across the continent, moreover, the humanities were generally considered of much less importance for economic development than technical and financial degrees, resulting in the overall decline of many universities, causing history as a discipline, and by extent the GHA, to suffer.46 Budgetary crises across Africa as a whole, moreover, constrained government ability to spend on higher education, forcing governments to turn to foreign investment and aid, of which structural adjustment and shock therapy were a part. As Mahmood Mamdani has put it, the World Bank came into many African countries with both a “carrot and a stick”, they injected financial aid but not without demanding educational reform.47 Increasingly seen as elitist, African history as a scholarly endeavour did not seem to be able to deliver on the promises of independence and thereby lost societal relevance.48 Governments, furthermore, in line with these IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes, generally also tended to cut public funding for higher education in order to focus on other forms of education.49 As Thandika Mkandawire and Adebayo Olukoshi have

 René Devisch, “The University of Kinshaha: From Lovanium to Unikin,” in Higher Education in Postcolonial Africa. Paradigms of Development, Decline and Dilemmas, ed. Michael O. Afoláyan (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007), 17–38, 19–26.  This paradox has been explored in great detail by Mudimbe: V. Y. Mudimbe, Autour de “la nation”: leçons de civisme: introduction (Kinshasa: Editions du Mont Noir, 1972), 52–9. See also Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa, 176.  See various chapters in: Michael O. Afoláyan, ed., Higher Education in Postcolonial Africa. Paradigms of Development, Decline and Dilemmas (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2007) and J.F. Ade Ajayi, Lameck K.H. Goma & G. Ampah Johnson, The African Experience with Higher Education (Accra: The Association of African Universities, 1996), 144–66.  Mahmood Mamdani, “Introduction: The Quest for Academic Freedom,” in Academic Freedom in Africa, ed. Mamadou Diouf and Mahmood Mamdani (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997), 1–16, 3.  Brizuela-Garcia, “African Historiography and the Crisis of Institutions,” 150.  Lynn Hewlett et al., “Key Features of Student Protest Across Historical Periods in SubSaharan Africa,” in Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa, ed. Susan Booysen (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 330–334, 332.

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noted, this tended to work in favour of authoritarian regimes who benefitted from a restricted academic class.50 Since the 1980s, African universities have also had to contend with a brain drain as a result of the developments described above – which included some of the GHA editors, such as Ali Mazrui who left Makerere University in Uganda for the University of Michigan in the United States as a result of Idi Amin’s regime.51 Another example of decline, and resulting brain drain, is the fate of history as a discipline in Nigeria. In an article for History in Africa, published in 2006, Olutayo Adesina placed the General History of Africa itself in a larger narrative of decolonisation, the emergence of new elites, and the eventual fading into the background of history as an academic discipline in the Nigerian academy. Adesina placed the blame for this decline on the instability created by a succession of military regimes and the Structural Adjustment Plan adopted in 1986. The latter especially introduced what Adesina called a “widespread cynicism about the utilitarian value of history”. Students, who had become infected with the same logic of utilitarianism, increasingly opted for diplomas that seemed more practical and lucrative, such as management, accountancy, business and law. The early dreams of Africanists of mental liberation and emancipation, Adesina concluded, only seemed viable in times of economic optimism.52 The ideals of the 1960s, therefore, seemed to be drifting further and further away, not just in terms of viability, but in terms of public relevance as well. As a consequence of these struggles, the commemoration of the project, which started taking shape even before the last volume was published, in the 1990s, was surrounded both by a need for justification as well as mourning the loss of a time when real change had seemed possible. The nostalgia inherent in the remembrance of the GHA included a yearning for the time when African history could still be meaningfully shaped by Africans themselves rather than in Euro-American institutions. One way the GHA was remembered was in obituaries written for its key contributors.53 Obituaries for GHA historians emphasized the contribution that these  Thandika Mkandawire and Adebayo Olukoshi, “Issues and Perspectives in the Politics of Structural Adjustment in Africa,” in Between Liberation and Oppression. The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Africa, eds. Thandika Mkandawire and Adebayo Olukoshi (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1995), 1–20, 4.  Toyin Falola, Nationalism and African Intellectuals (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001), 214 and Claude Ake, “Academic Freedom and Material Base,” in Academic Freedom in Africa, eds. Mamadou Diouf and Mahmood Mamdani (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997), 17–25, 18–20.  Olutayo C. Adesina, “Teaching History in Twentieth Century Nigeria: The Challenges of Change,” History in Africa 33 (2006): 17–37, 23, 27–33.  See the following obituaries for Jacob Ade Ajayi, for instance: Toyin Falola, “Professor Jacob Festus Ade-Ajayi (1929–2014): A Eulogy with a Dirge,” Website African Studies Association, August 14,

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historians had made to the public good of their respective countries and to African historical representation as a whole. In some obituaries, activism functioned as the framework of reference to convey this idea. Adu Boahen, the editor of volume seven and the president of the GHA committee in the 1980s, was celebrated explicitly as a “scholar-activist” who represented “Africa’s voice to its post-colonial past”.54 He was also a politician proper who served time in prison as a result of his political activities. The public good for him was more important than his private good. This too was the case for Joseph Ki-Zerbo, another West African historian, from Burkina Faso, and the editor of the first GHA volume. For him as an anti-colonial political activist as well as an academic historian, the inclusion of African history devoid of colonial stereotypes served a political purpose as much as it served an epistemological purpose. Upon his death, he was remembered as such: “Joseph Ki-Zerbo, lui, n’a jamais accepté la césure fictive entre intellectuels et politiques.”55 The public demand made on history according to Ki-Zerbo was to help develop his country and the African continent. The obituaries written for him framed this by making a claim upon history that was rather traditional in its conception of historical knowledge, yet, they named it activism: Et justement, c’est là où se trouve le mérite de la science historique, qui seule permettre de garrotter les falsifications, les interprétations arrangeants les faux refuges, tout en sachant qu’ils sont lestes et inévitables, d’où cette exigence d’inscrire dans la pensée historiographique, la place qu’il faut à un mécanisme de veille et de vigilance. Mais n’y a-t-il pas là un aveu de militantisme, quand bien même il est scientifique?56

This claim to activism, even though the underlying idea of historical knowledge was not all that different from those made in nineteenth century Europe, was the

2014, [Last seen: 31 March 2020], http://www.africanstudies.org/news/391-professor-j-f-ade-ajayi1929–2014 and Olufunke Adeboye, “J.F. Ade Ajayi, 1929–2014,” Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, 85 (2015): 741–44, 742.  Unnamed person, “Editorial: Professor Emeritus Albert Adu Boahen (1932–2006),” The Journal of African History 47 (2006): 359–61, 359 and Ivor Agyeman-Duah, “The Historian who Made History himself,” New African, (July 2006): 58–60.  ‘Joseph Ki-Zerbo never accepted the fictional divide between intellectuals and politicians’ [all translations are my own], Mangoné Niang, “Le veilleur de jour,” Présence Africaine 173 (2006): 21–22, 22.  “And this is precisely where we find the merit of the historical science, as it is the only way to curb falsifications, conveniently reassuring interpretations, knowing that they are nimble and inevitable, hence the need to make room in historiographic thinking for a mechanism of observance and vigilance. But is this not an admission of activism, even if it is scientific.” Adame Ba Konaré, “L’histoire africaine aujourd’hui’,” Présence Africaine 173 (2006): 27–36, 35.

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result of the historical moment inhabited by African history.57 The expansion of historical knowledge to include the narratives of the previously colonized was preceded by the inclusion of the nation-states that emerged from the ashes of empire as part of a Cold War world order. This was in turn accompanied by a struggle over the ‘how’: how to represent the past of the formerly colonized (what methods to use?) and the ‘why’, for whom and with what goal in mind? The latter question is the question of the public life of history, as Chakrabarty has put it.58 The role given to activism here is a representation of the struggle over the ‘why’. The question of which public was deemed most important was key: that in the global north, as represented by the reviews discussed in the last section and, before that, the colonial historiography against which all of the historians discussed above were reacting; or the public as it was imagined to exist in Africa, or the global south, as represented through the idea of activism as a public good. To further illustrate this point, I want to look at how one of the most famous historians engaged with the GHA was remembered: Walter Rodney, already mentioned above as part of the Marxist innovation in African history from the 1970s onwards. Rodney was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at the age of 38 before the first GHA volume was published. Rodney’s death was experienced as a tragedy in Africanist circles. Mazrui, who was the editor of GHA volume eight and himself an engaged academic, wrote an obituary on behalf of the GHA. Mazrui praised Rodney for his versatility as a scholar and his flexibility in working both as a historian and as a social and political reformer: “He was a scholar who recognized no distinction between academic concerns and service to society, between science and social commitment.”59 Mazrui’s testimonial to Rodney’s virtues accentuated his identity as an engaged scholar who was concerned with the public use of history. At the time, Rodney was perhaps the best-known example of a historian who had mobilised his academic work for the betterment of society. Rodney argued, following C.L.R James and Frantz Fanon, that oppressed peoples across the globe needed to be educated about their shared past and that historical research had unearthed the systems of oppression that bound them together.60 The fact that

 As commented upon here: Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Présence Africaine: History and Historians of Africa,” in The surreptitious speech: Présence Africaine and the politics of otherness, 1947–1987, ed. V.Y. Mudimbe (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992), 59–94, 75.  Chakrabarty, “The Public Life of History,” 162–65.  UAP, CLT CID 103, Ali Mazrui, ‘The Man Who Did Not Seek an Exit Visa. A Tribute to Walter Rodney.’ This tribute was drafted by Ali A. Mazrui on behalf of the Bureau of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO General History of Africa (July 1980).  Marika Sherwood, “Walter Rodney,” in Pan-African History. Political figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787, ed. Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood (Routledge: London, 2003), 163–68.

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Mazrui choose to highlight the entanglement between Rodney’s work as a scholar and his work as a political activist suggests that he, and by extension part of the GHA, saw this entanglement as conducive to historical research, or at least as not necessarily problematic. Given Rodney’s Marxist methods and stands, his idea of historical knowledge challenged the authority of academic history writing more seriously than the mostly nationalist perspective of the historians mentioned above. Nevertheless, Rodney’s activism and theirs was, in the end, a demand for the inclusion of new historical perspectives within the academic discipline of history. The obituaries attempted what Boym has called a “transhistorical reconstruction” of times that are perceived as better.61 They painted a brighter picture than had perhaps existed at the time, smoothing over the tensions between political and scholarly imperatives. This is not surprising, as obituaries serve a function as a reflective practice towards their field of scholarship as well as the individual, and as such they lend themselves to both nostalgia and boundary work, tending to project an image back in time that may not have existed in exactly that way.62 Because the field on the continent of Africa itself was, and arguably still is, weathering a storm of underfunding and political instability, the retrospective boundary work that concerned the first generation of academic African historians, is almost by definition nostalgic in its longing for the past and its challenge towards the future. This kind of nostalgia may suggest a longing for a return to that time of the post-independence period, when, to some, it seemed like the twentieth century would be Africa’s century: when, to put it differently, the breaking of empires promised the making of a new world and a new way of doing history that would take into account African concerns ‘on the ground’. In other words, it presented a public demand towards history. The importance of connecting African history to contemporary African problems is also to be found in an editorial introduction to a Présence Africaine special issue honouring Ki-Zerbo, which strikingly focuses almost exclusively on his contribution to the General History of Africa. The introduction quotes the very first sentence on the eight-volume series: ‘Africa has a history.’ It reads almost as an ode to the General History: Cette grande entreprise de réflexion sur l’histoire de l’Afrique fut exemplaire à plus d’un titre. Elle révélait ce qui avait été si souvent et si complaisamment tu, et fut menée selon les formes et les méthodes que requiert la recherche historique. [. . .] il est loisible de rappeler

 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, XVIII.  Anna Echterhӧlter, Schattengefechte: Genealogische Praktiken in Nachrufen auf Naturwissenschaftler (1710–1860) (Gӧttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), 10, 20–21.

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les enjeux de cette vaste entreprise d’une histoire de l’Afrique afin de mieux envisager les différentes tâches qui restent à accomplir.63

The editorial acknowledged the importance of the GHA for African history, but also impressed upon its reader the sense that continued work was necessary. The anti-colonial literary magazine Présence Africaine described how the GHA, under Ki-Zerbo’s direction, had as its task to further knowledge on the African continent: “L’enjeu de cette entreprise était aussi d’ordre épistémologique.”64 That epistemological mission, however, could not be separated from the people it was subsequently made to serve. Knowledge could not be separated from the struggle that had become part and parcel of the African past as Présence Africaine saw it. African history, then, was a public enterprise as opposed to a detached endeavour, as most of the reviews discussed above seem to have seen it as. The editorial introduction placed the legacy of the GHA partly outside academia. The GHA set out not only to convince academia of the existence of African history, but also society as a whole, and this task had not yet been completed. It is telling, for instance, that the editorial denounced Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 Dakar Discourse, in which the 23rd president of France had imperiously stated that the “African” had not yet entered history.65 The Présence Africaine introduction deemed this a Hegelian and decidedly racist conception of history that, once again, proved the importance of Ki-Zerbo’s work as well as the need for the General History of Africa.66 However, the authors of the editorial made clear that the battles of today were not the same as KiZerbo’s. Histories of Africa had been written, and the academic discipline had grown and even prospered, but, paradoxically, this had not necessarily created a greater understanding of African history. In global media, Africa was still portrayed as a war- and conflict-ridden continent, a place of poverty and disease, views which had merely replaced old stereotypes by new ones. “Le succès de l’histoire générale de l’Afrique a rendu paradoxalement plus tendues les relations des historiens africains

 “This great undertaking of reflection on the history of Africa was exemplary in more ways than one. It revealed what had been so often and so complacently concealed, and was conducted according to the models and methods required by historical research. [. . .] it is possible to recall the stakes of this vast undertaking of a history of Africa in order to better envisage the various tasks that remain to be accomplished” Unnamed Person, “Écrire L’Histoire de L’Afrique Après KiZerbo,” Présence Africaine 173:1 (2006): 5–8, 5.  “The challenge of this undertaking was also epistemological,” Unnamed Person, “Après KiZerbo”, 5.  The 2006 issue was actually published the year after.  Unnamed Person, “Après Ki-Zerbo,” 7.

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avec les progrès qui sont accomplis dans leur discipline”.67 The success of African history as a discipline, which Présence Africaine here linked decidedly to the GHA, had, as a result of geo-political power structures, caused the discipline to move away from the continent itself, putting the endeavour of African history in the hands of Euro-Americans. Présence Africaine concluded that the GHA itself needed to be disseminated more widely on the African continent, and that was arguably where the UNESCO project had failed. The editorial introduction then, seemed to express a longing for a chance to revisit the GHA and the possibilities encased within it. This nostalgia expressed a longing to reclaim the African particular away from the perceived Euro-American universal. Another nostalgic document that mourns the loss of the centrality of African actors, institutions and perspectives within the discipline is the De Vita Sua written by the Belgian pioneer of oral historiography, Jan Vansina.68 Vansina had spent his life building the discipline of African history, and had played an important role in the drafting of the GHA. Yet, he wrote the text because he was worried about the direction African history was taking: The main body of historiography about Africa is foreign to Africa: it stems from foreigners, is published elsewhere, often out of reach to locals, often about topics that are of concern elsewhere, and most often in the so-called ‘west’. In Africa many of those accounts are seen as barely relevant. [. . .] Unlike most of my colleagues who probably see what I have thus far described as a minor hindrance at best, I have become gradually convinced over time that this issue constitutes a major problem for non-African historians of Africa, if only because of the role histories play in sustaining or even creating collective identities.69

Vansina almost seemed to be speaking directly to the establishment of African historiography in the United States – of which he himself was a part. “Many academic scholars tend to write more in analytical ways, than to compose a continuous narrative and instead write primarily for their peers ‘to advance knowledge’.” But, Vansina wondered, is that what the primary purpose of African history should be? “I have [. . .] witnessed directly the pent-up demand of so many Congolese, and other Africans who have sought a history that is meaningful to them” and therefore not just the advancement of knowledge in Europe or North America. Vansina constructed history as a meaningful endeavour as part of history as an academic

 “The success of the general history of Africa had paradoxically made the relationship of African historians with the progress made in their discipline more strained”, Unnamed Person, “Après Ki-Zerbo,” 8.  Vansina died on 8 February 2017 and had published the final word on his life on 4 April 2016, Jan Vansina, “De Vita Sua,” Society 53 (2016, published online 4-4-2016): 240–45.  Vansina, “De Vita Sua,” 240–41.

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endeavour – meaningful in that it should carry a social responsibility. That responsibility was often absent in a foreign context, according to Vansina.70 There was a divergence of interests between those writing the history of Africa and those living it. As a result, Vansina thought that the promise of creating a “vibrant African historiography [. . .][had] vanished by the mid 1990’s.”71 The historiography Vansina observed around him in 2016 was no longer that of the old “colonial vintage”, but it was nevertheless divorced from African interests.72 That is not to say that Vansina thought there had been no meaningful contributions to African historiography from Africa itself. Indeed, for him the General History of Africa was exactly that. Vansina perceived of the GHA as one of his most important contributions to scholarship.73 Vansina’s belief in the importance of meaningful history that spoke to the people who one wrote history about, stemmed from his immersion in the General History of Africa. His conviction that history was an emotional affair that spoke to much more than the augmentation of academic knowledge, but that had to be socially meaningful for the everyday reality of the people who functioned as the subjects of history, grew during his time spent with historians such as Boahen, Ki-Zerbo and others. In a series of interviews conducted by Florence Bernault at his home in Madison in April of 2016, around the time the De Vita Sua was published, Vansina explained that he had come to realise that identity was one of the main drivers of history. “All history has to do with identity and all identity has some form of history in it”, Vansina said during the interview.74 For that reason too, Vansina saw himself more opposed to what he called the foreign interpretation of African history. Moreover, he even stated that “the banked fires of the old colonial or imperial histories have been rekindled in the former metropoles and are slowly eroding the effects of UNESCO’s achievements, not only internationally but in Africa, as well. Reacting today against this, as I still do, feels ever more as just a rearguard action.”75 In the context of this chapter, the above reads almost like a direct response to the reviews discussed in the previous section. Vansina shows himself averse to the universalising tendencies he identified in the historical establishment, and expressed the same kind of nostalgia for the particular as mentioned above.

 Vansina, “De Vita Sua,” 241.  Vansina, “De Vita Sua,” 241.  Vansina, “De Vita Sua,” 241.  Vansina, “De Vita Sua,”, 243.  Jan Vansina, “Maturation of African history”, interview by Florence Bernault, April 8, 2016, video, 03:36–03:42, https://janvansina.africa.wisc.edu/interviews/ [Last seen: 08 January 2021].  Vansina, “De Vita Sua,” 244.

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Vansina felt responsible for the way African history had moved away from the continent. In the end, however, he did not plead for a purely indigenous history of Africa, but a history of Africa wherein foreign historians, like himself, are tuned into the needs of the continent they are concerned with. His De Vita Sua contains a clear directive for future generations: to write history that is meaningful outside of academia and for the people whom it concerns; and to do this in the face of critique and struggle if necessary. Vansina’s reflection on his own position and his retrospective recognition of the importance of African historians in his own trajectory is deeply reflexive and motivated by morality. In these texts, Vansina is longing for the period when it seemed that real change could be made, but when he had not sufficiently heeded its call. The nostalgia that is present in the reflection on the GHA, furthermore, does not necessarily only bring to mind a longing for an era when decolonisation of history seemed possible, but specifically reflects the ongoing necessity of decolonisation itself. Not simply because one cannot return to the past, but also because the kind of decolonisation that postcolonial critique identified as necessary could probably not have come into being without there first being the decolonising efforts that focused on political and historiographical self-representation – the problem space of the anti-colonial project, as David Scott has put it.76 Not because, as Scott is careful to explain, “the anticolonial nationalists were simple minded essentialists, but because it [the post-colonial excavation of the origins of colonial knowledge itself] had not yet become visible as the question of the moment”, that question being “the decolonisation of self-representation itself, the decolonisation of the conceptual apparatus through which their political objectives were thought out.”77 As Scott makes clear elsewhere, the emplotment of the anti-colonial moment which sought a romantic narrative of vindication no longer seemed realistic. Criticism on the status quo, moulded into a romantic narrative of a postcolonial utopia, had lost its power and had been made redundant as a result of a neoliberal world order.78

3.4 Conclusions What does the above tell us about the public and political use of the GHA? The public demands made on African history had shifted somewhat during the course

 David Scott, Refashioning Futures: criticism after postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 10–15.  Scott, Refashioning Futures, 12, 14.  Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 9.

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of the GHA project, although the reconstruction of a national past and the concurrent need for decolonisation of that past has remained important for the elites of African countries. In Nigeria, for instance, the recent history of history as a secondary school subject attests to the enduring importance of nationalism and patriotism for the country. The subject was removed from the curriculum in 2009, but reinstated for the 2021–2022 school year, primarily because of its importance for nation building.79 Nevertheless, questions regarding the writing of histories from below and Africa’s place within a neocolonial world have also remained important. This is reflected in current calls for decolonisation. The Fallist movement, which grew out of the 2015 ‘Rhodes must fall’ and ‘fees must fall’ student protests in South Africa, has combined an interest in decolonising the curriculum to make it more relevant for a wider student population with a demand for economic justice, both in terms of fees as well as regarding the payment of cleaning staff.80 The documentary film, Everything Must Fall (2018) shows just how integrated demands for social justice and a decolonisation of knowledge have become in South African academia. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, moreover, explains that the movement became symbolic of the wish to radically change the whole idea of the university from a “western” one to an “African” one, including the use of indigenous languages and in defiance of the neoliberal changes that had been made in the years previously.81 It seems that public demands on history in Africa may not have radically changed since the 1960s, at least rhetorically, as the separation between public and academic demands on history remains vague in light of an ongoing reckoning with Africa’s colonial past. It becomes all the more striking that the Euro-American reviewers wished to separate the overt politics of decolonisation connected to the GHA from the detached scholarship that had become associated with African history in the global north. The GHA was to be admired for its historic accomplishment. As such, it was seen as more of a remnant of a different activist past, than a work of state-ofthe-art scholarship. The reviewers seemed to have lost sight of that activist past and the important anti-colonial origins of African historiography, not to mention

 Ayodeji Olukoju, “What studying history at school can do for Nigerians”, The Conversation 05-08-2021, https://theconversation.com/what-studying-history-at-school-can-do-for-nigerians165339, [Last seen: 15 March 2022].  See: Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa, 221–42; Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nişancioğlu and Dalia Gebrial, Decolonising the University (London: Pluto Press, 2018); Lynn Hewlett et al., “Key Features of Student Protest Across Historical Periods in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in Fees Must Fall: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa, ed. Susan Booysen (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2016), 330–34.  Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Epistemic Freedom in Africa, 238.

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the ongoing and recurring calls for decolonisation during their own times. The explanation for this may be that since its transformation from an imperial and Eurocentric project into a more African endeavour in the 1950s and 1960s, African history had become more and more incorporated, accepted into and eventually centred on the Euro-American academy that had at first denied its existence. That left the need for overt scholarly activism less and less pertinent for those who inhabited the discipline in the north. This perceived divide between African history as a political and public tool and African history as a mostly academic endeavour hits at the heart of the conception and growth of African studies and the recurring tensions mentioned above. African historians of Africa attempted to challenge this divide. Those who looked back at the project with sympathy after it was finished regarded it with a sense of nostalgia, because they rightly regarded the project as a unique chance at decolonising and thereby shaping what public use African history could be for the African continent. In the obituaries written for some of the GHA’s key figures activism was used as a frame to highlight what the insiders thought was an important aspect of African history and the GHA, namely its public use. The obituary writers claimed expert authority for those they commemorated by highlighting how they had criticized the colonial historians, albeit within a somewhat conventional framework of historical knowledge production.82 The reflections on the GHA as a whole also pointed the way forward for African historical studies by reiterating the importance of an African history connected to the African continent. The insiders, then, moved beyond the binary opposition of public versus academic and conceptualized African history as both. They valued the GHA most for its authenticity and its related moral as well as epistemic advocacy for African ownership of knowledge about Africa. How historians of Africa dealt with public demands on the past was highly dependent on their own contexts and background. For the GHA historians, and perhaps all historians, it was necessary to hold notions of scholarly standards in perpetual tension with notions of public political engagement precisely because the writing on the past is both a scholarly and a civic experience. This democratization of history has presented a challenge not only to the authority of the professional historian, but equally to the question who gets to be a professional historian and, by extension, who gets to judge what good historical scholarship is.

 This is not to say activism featured in the obituaries written for all GHA historians.

Kanad Sinha

4 Colonial Historiography, Hindutva, and the Difficulty of Reading the Ancient Indian Historical Traditions The University Grants Commission in India has recently come out with a draft undergraduate syllabus for the discipline of History. The contents of the syllabus have been identified as attempts of ‘saffronisation’ by many academics, indicating that the politics of Hindu fundamentalism (known as Hindutva) – which allegedly dominates the vision of Bharatiya Janata Party, now in power – has now attempted to impose its own version of India’s past in the official university curriculum. Hindutva, indeed, had its own ideas about Indian history, partly based on Hindu mythology and partly based on glorification of Hinduism and demonizing of Islam as an invading force. The Hindutva ideologues have repeatedly denounced mainstream historical research in post-independence India, largely dominated by Leftists and Liberals, as biased and Eurocentric, and propagated an alternative narrative, which as they gained in confidence, they sought to call a ‘nationalist’ narrative. However, the rise of the BJP to parliamentary power with a huge number of seats, and the gradual control of the Hindutva supporters of all Central Government institutions, including the ones associated with higher studies, has now provided an opportunity for the Hindutva view of History, so far marginal in mainstream academia, to become ‘official’. A glance at the major changes introduced in the draft syllabus may help us understand the ideas associated with this version of History. It includes topics such as ‘Eternity of Synonyms (of?) Bharat’ (Bharat is the name of India in most Indian languages) and a discussion of (Hindu) religious literature such as the Vedas, Vedangas, Upanishads, Smritis and Puranas. On the other hand, much of the earlier content related to early Indian ‘secular’ literature, such as Kautilya’s Arthashastra and the creative works of Kalidasa, have been left out. It also renames the Harappan Civilization as ‘Indus-Sarasvati Civilization’, another longstanding claim of the Hindutva thinkers trying to identify India’s bronze age urban culture with the ‘Aryans’, a claim that is unsustainable given the current scholarly consensus.1

 Basant Kumar Mohanty, “UGC drafts undergraduate history syllabus: Mythology drives ‘Idea of Bharat’”, The Telegraph, April 26, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-004

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The new presentation of early Indian history has three major premises: representing Bharat (i.e., India) as eternal, looking at the Indian past through religious literature rather than secular literature, and claiming an ‘Aryan ancestry’ for India’s cultural heritage. Of course, there are also strong claims regarding India’s medieval history, as Hindutva wants to downplay the role of Mughals and characterize Muslims as invaders. The draft syllabus has predictably reduced the content on Mughal history. Therefore, we can think of a fourth pointer in the Hindutva presentation of India’s past: looking at history through religious lenses and contrasting a glorious ‘Hindu’ ancient India with a dark age of ‘Muslim’ medieval India. While these claims directly contradict the findings of serious historical research in post-independence India, what is the politics involved in them? Is the Hindutva view of History really a ‘nationalistic’ way of an Asiatic civilization to claim its own past? Is the mainstream Left/Liberal historiography really suffering from a colonial hangover? Therefore, is Hindutva History, leaving aside its questionable factual basis, a challenge to the knowledge system built by colonial rule? Does a historian of early India, then, succumb to a colonial legacy by rejecting Hindutva historiography? These are challenges faced by any historian working on early Indian textual traditions. Some of the postcolonial theorists of contemporary India, in fact, tried to link the rise of Hindutva with the colonial overhaul of Indian knowledge system. In his essay ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, Ashis Nandy claimed that the rise of the historical mode as the dominant mode of constructing the past was a result of Enlightenment rationality espoused by the Eurocentric colonial modernity. The uncritical acceptance of History as the only avenue to reconstruct the past, once exported to the ‘nonmodern’ world, created a disjuncture in the knowledge systems of the societies which lived with open-ended concepts of the past or depended on myths, legends, and epics to define their cultural selves. Thus, in search of empirical certitude provided by the discipline of History, the moral certitude provided by the non-historical constructions of the past in ‘ahistorical’ societies was lost. Therefore, both the secular historians and the Hindutva forces had to fight over the monopoly of official construction of ‘historical truth’, delegitimizing each other’s claims and presenting their own cases.2 In the absence of a scope for pluralism in viewing the past, as the historical past had become absolute in the post-Enlightenment modern nation-state, the epics, myths, and legends could no longer remain alternative, nonhistorical construction of the past. Thus, those who wanted their narratives recognized also had to claim the domain of academic History, dominated by secular historians, and establish their own narratives as the ‘historical truth’.

 Ashis Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” History and Theory 34, No. 2 (1995): 44–66.

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Thus, S.P. Gupta, whose ambition once was to do his doctoral work in history under Romila Thapar (one of the most prominent secular historians of early India),3 gradually became the ideologue of Hindutva history, which denounced the narratives presented by Thapar and her colleagues. Does Hindutva, then, perhaps in a distorted way, claim recognition for the alternative knowledge systems of precolonial India which was an ‘ahistorical society’? Is Hindutva, at the intellectual level, a critique of colonial and Eurocentric knowledge systems? Is there any merit in the claim that the Indian secular historians practised a discipline as dictated by Eurocentric narratives including colonial ideologies (Orientalism and Utilitarianism) and Marxism? Was Indian civilization essentially an ahistorical civilization on which History was imposed by the ‘outsiders’? In this essay, I shall search for the answers of these questions, by looking at how the colonial historians introduced the discipline of History in India and how is that related to the secular and Hindutva views of history, focusing mainly on the four major claims of Hindutva historiography, as outlined above. That will also involve the contention if myth and history are similarly important in the construction of the past. Should the mythical past be accommodated in the construction of the historical past? Even if not, is it a viable alternative to the historical past in societies traditionally considered ‘ahistorical’? I shall reconstruct the role of professional historians in this long struggle over the ancient past of India, the way they were influenced by their political and cultural interests and the contributions they made to reformulate the arguments in the debate by their own professional activities. Instead of debating in terms of the ideological confrontation between Western/Indian, colonial/anticolonial, Myth/History this chapter reconstructs how the Hindutva positions in the actual debate on ancient history of India are themselves framed by the legacies of colonial historiography and deny the long and twisted history of political and intellectual debates and the important role of professional scholarship in them.

4.1 Colonial historiography and the notion of an ahistorical early India The discipline of History, as practised in modern academia, is no doubt a product of post-Enlightenment Europe. However, there are numerous writings of the premodern world which have been globally recognised as historical writings. Of

 Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” 62.

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course, these writings were not informed by the ideas of archive and referencing, objectivity and empiricism, as preached by the Positivist philosophers of nineteenth century Europe. However, they shared certain methodological similarities with the way modern historians reconstruct the past. The grounds of similarities might have been less with Herodotus, simultaneously called the ‘father of history’ and ‘father of lies’, than with Thucydides, often celebrated as the ‘father of scientific history’, but it was recognised that both of them and many other GrecoRoman authors following them had an intention of truthfully recording the events of the past, had looked for information in various sources, and had presented their narrative in a plausible chronological framework. The chronicles of medieval European church historians, though not as credible, had a similar intention and methodology. When colonial education system reached other civilizations beyond Europe, similar historical literature was found in many premodern societies. It was understood that Sima Qian and other Chinese historians recorded their past, often as official chroniclers. The Muslim world had produced many competent medieval historians. Manetho compiled the list of kings of ancient Egypt, and so on.4 In India, the academic practice of the modern discipline of History coincided with the coming of British colonialism. The earliest historians of modern India were often colonial administrators inspired by an Orientalist vision and looking for creating a knowledge base to know this oriental civilization. One of the earliest and most notable discoveries of Orientalist scholarship in India was by William Jones (1746–1794), the founder of the Asiatic Society (1784), who pointed out the linguistic similarities among Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and eventually conceptualized the  For detailed discussion on the various precolonial historical traditions, see G.A. Press, “History and the Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity,” in History and Theory 16 (1977): 280–296; Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Place of Herodotus in the History of Historiography,” in History 43 (1958): 1–13; Arnaldo Momigliano, “Greek Historiography,” in History and Theory 17 (1978): 1–23; Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Arnaldo Momigliano, “History and Biography,” in The Legacy of Greece, ed. M.I. Finley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 155–184; Arnaldo Momigliano, “Christianity and the Decline of the Roman Empire,” in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 1–16; Francis Macdonald Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971) reprint (first publication 1907); Willem den Boer, “Greco-Roman Historiography in its Relation to Biblical and Modern Thinking,” in History and Theory 7 (1968): 60–75; Frank Furedi, Mythical Past, Elusive Future (London: Pluto Press, 1992); Richard William Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (1970): 173–196, 21 (1971): 159–179, 22 (1972): 159–180, 23 (1973): 243–263; ChunChieh Huang, “The Defining Characteristics of Chinese Historical Thinking,” in History and

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idea that many of the major Indian languages and old Persian belong to the same language family which gave rise to several major west European languages including Greek and Latin. At a time when colonial anthropology was also rising, and there was great excitement in classifying people into hierarchical ‘races’, the speakers of the ‘Indo-European languages’ were soon imagined as belonging to the same ‘Aryan’ race which founded both the Vedic civilization of ancient India and the classical Greek and Roman civilizations in Europe. Thus, the Aryans were the harbingers of classical culture in Europe. The collapse of the classical European civilization, thanks to barbarian invasions, had brought in the ‘dark’ Middle Ages, whereas modernity came to Europe with the revival of the classical civilization during the Renaissance. Indian civilization was imagined to have a similar trajectory. The Aryans, who composed the oldest known body of Indo-European literature (the Vedas), founded the glorious civilization of ancient India, which collapsed with the Islamic invasions which brought in the dark medieval era.5 Was this theory perhaps an indication that the Hindus of India share a common origin with their colonial masters, and that British rule could restore the Aryan glory by replacing the Mughals (the descendants of non-Aryan invaders)? Was it, then, the foundation of the colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’? However, as the narrative goes, the Aryan civilization of India was not identical with that of the West. The classical Europeans were materialistic and practical. They had developed the notions of citizenship and democracy, and recorded their achievements meticulously in various branches of secular literature including History. The ancient Indians, on the other hand, were otherworldly and religious. They focused more on the spiritual goal of liberation from rebirth. Thus, they produced a huge number of religious texts but little or no history. Their society was governed by religious codes of conduct prescribed by the Dharmashastras. The liberation-oriented spiritual texts, such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Vishnu Purana,

Theory 46 (2007): 180–188; Qingjia Edward Wang, “Is There a Chinese Mode of Historical Thinking?,” in History and Theory 46 (2007): 201–209; Julie Scott Meisami, Persian Historiography to the End of the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019) reprint (first publication 1999); Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Gerald P. Verbrugghe and John M. Wickersham (eds.), Berossos and Manetho: Native Traditions in Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006) (first publication 1996); Robin George Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) reprint (first publication 1946); Romila Thapar, The Past Before Us (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2013), 3–18.  For more detailed treatment of these theories, see L. Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (New York: Basic Books, 1974); F. Max Muller, Biographies of the Words and the Home of the Aryas (London. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1888); T.R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (Delhi: Yoda Press, 1997).

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and the most authoritative Dharmashastra, the Manu Smriti, were among the earliest Sanskrit texts translated into English. While this portraiture might have had sometimes more than just an implicit assumption that Indians were disinterested in worldly affairs and were subservient to a static socio-political structure where society followed age-old norms and one despotic king replaced another, pointing to the incapability of the Indians to rule themselves, the German Romantics, such as F. Max Muller, considered India’s spirituality a lesson to be learned by the materialistic industrializing West.6 However, the idea of a static, otherworldly, ahistorical ancient Indian civilization was a crucial component of the Orientalist representation of India. Vincent Arthur Smith, the author of what was for a long time the standard textbook on ancient India, devoted one-third of his book to Alexander’s invasion of India and its political and cultural impact, implying that the little political and cultural dynamism ancient India showed was the result of cultural contact with the Hellenistic West.7 He ignored the fact that the operations of Alexander’s army were limited to the Northwest of the Indian subcontinent, that the duration of the campaign was not more than four years, that Alexander had to back out before facing the strongest contemporary power of North India (the Nandas), and that Indian sources have no recollection of the invasion. To Smith, great ancient Indian rulers were either grand spiritualists themselves (Ashoka) or memorable empire-builders (Samudra Gupta). The Orientalist idea of Indian society as ahistorical and static was shared by the Utilitarians who also defended the colonial subjection of India on the ground of the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number of people’. Indians were incapable of ruling themselves in a modern, civilized, secular way. Thus, it was the ‘white man’s burden’ to govern India. The idea was best enshrined in James Mill’s book History of British India which followed the tripartite pattern of periodization of European history (Classical, Medieval, and Modern), but named the three periods ‘Hindu Age’, ‘Muslim Age’ and ‘British Age’.8 Thus, the most defining characteristic of precolonial Indian history was the dominant religion, or, the religion of the ruler. Were all ancient Indian rulers Hindu (or belonging to sects broadly falling under the retrospectively coined umbrella term ‘Hinduism’)? Definitely not. Nor were all the medieval rulers Muslims. Moreover, the instances of the ruler imposing his religious belief on the subjects were rare exceptions, rather than the norm, in both ancient and medieval India. However, Mill’s periodization

 F. Max Muller, India: What Can It Teach Us? (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883).  Vincent Arthur Smith, The Early History of India (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904).  James Mill, The History of British India (Vols. I-III) (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1817).

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definitely did not think so. Rather, it clearly contrasted precolonial Hindu/Muslim India with the secular (not ‘Christian’) British rule, and played off Hindus and Muslims as competing communities of which the latter gained political power by supplanting the former. Thus, Indians were shown as people clearly divided by religious identity, and the only way to keep them together was the secular government introduced by their colonial masters. This view translated very well into an imperial policy of divide and rule, and had a long-standing political impact on the history of India, eventually leading to the ‘two nation theory’ that led to the Partition of India. However, the idea of two competing peoples whose lives were dominated by fixed, unchangeable religious texts downplayed the possibility of the existence of non-religious systems of knowledge, least of all History. It was difficult to characterize Indian Muslims as people without history, since the Islamic world had a rich corpus of historical literature, and several historical texts were produced in medieval India. However, the early Indians were conceived as parts of an ahistorical society by both the Orientalists and the Utilitarians. They got their cue from one of the earliest Muslim commentators on early Indian knowledge systems. The polymath Al-Biruni came to India in the eleventh century and left a valuable account of the country, in which he observed that the Hindus had no sense of history.9 Following him, colonial historians characterised ancient Indian society as one without historical consciousness. The Orientalist A.A. Macdonell emphatically proclaimed, “Early India wrote no history because it never made any.”10 The Cambridge historian E.J. Rapson’s opinion sounds a little bit tempered, but shares similar sentiment: In all the large and varied literatures of the Brahmans, Jains and Buddhists, there is not to be found a single work which can be compared to the Histories in which Herodotus recounts the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians or to the Annals in which Livy traces the growth and progress of Roman power . . . But this is not because the people of India had no history . . . . We know from other sources that the ages were filled with stirring events; but these events found no systematic record.11

James Mill commented with his usual disdain that “no historical composition existed in the literature of the Hindus.”12

 Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” 58. For the original text, see Al-Biruni, India, trans. and ed. by Edward C Sachau (India: Rupa, 2002) reprint (first publication 1910).  A.A. Macdonell, History of Sanskrit Literature (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), 11 (reprint, first published in 1900)  E.J Rapson (ed.), The Cambridge History of India (Vol. I) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 57.  Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” 58.

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The portraiture of early India as an ahistorical, religious, static civilization was thus a consensus in the colonial educational system. Therefore, Gibbon opined that the art and genius of history writing was unknown to the Asiatics, and the mythological legends of India could not be confused with historical compositions.13 An exception among the colonial scholars was F.E. Pargiter who questioned the merit of studying a civilization only through scriptures: Hitherto opinions about ancient India have been based on a study of the Veda and Vedic literature without much regard for historical tradition outside that . . . To make the former the chief and more authoritative basis of historical reconstruction is much the same as to write European history mainly from theological works – an undertaking that would not receive a moment’s acceptance.14

He pointed out that an oral bardic historical tradition called itihasa-purana existed parallel to the Vedic tradition, and assumed that the ancient Indian Puranas and epics belonged to that tradition. Pargiter’s thesis depended on the conviction that Vedic tradition represented the Brahmanical religious tradition, which lacked historical consciousness, while the Puranic tradition (at least the genealogies and ballads about kings) contained more historically-oriented kshatriya traditions preserved by the suta bards. However, despite acknowledging that the kshatriya tradition was eventually Brahmanised, he did not consider that the then available Puranic texts, produced not earlier than mid-first millennium CE, are as much Brahmanical production as the Vedic literature is, and neglected the necessity to corroborate the information with the parallel Buddhist and Jaina traditions which he dismissed as religious. He also did not realise that the present Puranas are not offshoots of one original Purana that contained the bardic narratives of the past. Rather, these are religious sectarian texts with little connection with the bardic oral tradition of the same name. As a result, Pargiter ended up constructing a historical narrative based on one kind of religious tradition, ignoring all others which were actually older and better preserved ones, and his genealogies and narratives could be exposed by comparing them with the information gathered from other sources. Despite raising a pertinent question, Pargiter failed in providing a viable alternative methodology, by uncritically accepting almost all the details provided by the Puranic sources. Hence, Pargiter’s stance being exceptional and unsuccessful, the idea of an ahistorical early India whose central focus was Hindu religion and spirituality, and whose construction of the past – in the absence of historical writing – was

 Nandy, “History’s Forgotten Doubles,” 58.  F.E. Pargiter, Ancient Indian Historical Tradition (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997), 13–14 (reprint, first published 1922).

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based on the alternative tradition of epics and legends was created by colonial historiography, containing essentially ‘foreign’ ideology, whose influence Hindutva historiography claims to combat.

4.2 Nationalist, Marxist, and secular historiography: decolonising early Indian past Indian nationalism, at least the kind of nationalism that inspired the newly educated class, had derived its ideas from European discourses. The nationalist historians of India were educated in the modern, colonial educational system. Many of them had imbibed certain ideas of colonial historiography, including the ahistorical nature of early Indian culture and the idea of a glorious Hindu past. However, they were also the first group to have challenged some of the notions of colonial historiography, particularly the claim of an otherworldly and religionoriented early India. In 1905, R. Shamashastry, the librarian of the Oriental Research Institute, Mysore, had discovered the manuscript of a Sanskrit text unknown till then, and transcribed, edited, and published it in 1909. Six years later, he came up with the first English translation of the text, Kautilya’s Arthashastra. It was a treatise on statecraft and political economy. Initially, the historians identified Kautilya with Chanakya, the mentor and minister of Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the biggest empire of precolonial India and a contemporary of Alexander the Great. The text was proof that ancient Indians were not indifferent about political and economic affairs, and was regarded almost as a first-hand proof of how the Maurya empire was administered. The identification of Kautilya and Chankaya was based on a play, Vishakhadatta’s Mudrarakshasa, which was composed at least eight centuries after Chandragupta Maurya’s time. Hence, whether the Arthashastra is actually a Mauryan document produced by a practising politician has been questioned. Nowadays, the text is usually considered as a normative prescriptive text, a shastra, included in the Brahmanical knowledge system, and developed over many centuries. Thus, the Arthashastra is not exactly ‘secular’ literature. But its existence definitely showed that material concerns were not ignored in early India and there was a scholarly tradition developed around those concerns. The political history of ancient India had received considerable attention in nationalist historiography. H.C. Raychaudhuri, who taught European political history, came out with a masterpiece that documented ancient Indian political history from the time of the Later Vedic Kuru king Parikshit to the fall of the Gupta

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empire in the sixth century CE.15 K.A. Nilakanta Sastri produced a similar history for South India, even though he could not get over Mill’s identification of ancient India with Hindu rulership, and – therefore – included the medieval kingdom of Vijayanagara within his history of ancient South India.16 K.P. Jayaswal had laboriously shown that there were non-monarchical political systems in ancient India, and, thus, republicanism was not exclusive to ancient Athens or Rome. However, though these polities, known as gana-sanghas, were historically breeding grounds and supporters of heterodox religious movements such as Buddhism and Jainism, Jayaswal titled his work Hindu Polity,17 which shows how deep was the impact of a James Mill-influenced communal periodization on the nationalist historians of early India. Early nationalist historians challenged colonial historiography, but within the methodological scope delineated by European historians. Hence, Raychaudhuri showed that India had political history just as Europe did. Jayaswal claimed that India had democratic and republican ideas like ancient Greeks and Romans. R.C. Majumdar, rather than criticizing the absurd anachronism in Smith’s labelling of Samudra Gupta as the ‘Napoleon of India’, argued how Samudra Gupta was a greater and more successful conqueror than Napoleon and how the Maurya army was superior to those of the successors of Alexander.18 Therefore, most of the nationalist historians also accepted the notion of the lack of historical consciousness in early India, as their historical methodology followed the rules set by colonial historiography. Raychaudhuri lamented that no Thucydides or Tacitus left accounts of ancient India.19 Majumdar accepted: “It is a well-known fact that with the single exception of the Rajatarangini [a twelfth century chronicle of Kashmir] . . . there is no historical text in Sanskrit dealing with the whole or even parts of India. But ideas of history and historical literature were not altogether lacking.”20 Some other nationalist historians followed the methods of Pargiter in trying to reconstruct a dynastic history of early India on the basis of the Puranic myths.  H.C. Raychaudhuri, Political History of Ancient India, new edition with a commentary by B.N. Mukherjee (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006) (first published in 1923).  K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, A History of South India: From Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagara (Delhi Oxford University Press Paperback Edition, 1997) (first published in 1955).  K.P. Jayaswal, Hindu Polity (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Pratishthan, 2005) (reprint, first published in 1924).  R.C. Majumdar, Ancient India (Delhi: Motilal Banrasidass, 1987), 105–106, 231–233 (reprint, first published 1952).  Raychaudhuri, Ancient India, 1.  R.C. Majumdar, “Ideas of History in Sanskrit Literature,” in Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, ed. C.H. Philips (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 13.

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Their attempts failed as they repeated Pargiter’s mistakes of not understanding the difference between the old bardic tradition named purana and the much later religious texts of the same name. S.N. Pradhan had to repeatedly rectify the errors in the Puranic tables on the basis of the information gathered from Vedic, Buddhist, and Jaina sources, leaving much room for doubt about the details of the information for which no such corroborative or corrective source is available.21 A.D. Pusalkar, arguing against dismissing Puranic tradition altogether and preparing a chronological arrangement for traditional history up to the Bharata War (the central event of the ancient Indian epic Mahbharata), divided in eight phases, and ranging from 3100–1400 BCE, himself acknowledges that while the Puranic accounts show a picture of massive conquests across the subcontinent and up to South India and Sri Lanka by kings like Mandhatri, Sagara, and Rama, contemporary records up to the end of the Vedic period show that the Aryans had not advanced much beyond the central plains of North India till then. Therefore, the authenticity of the Puranic tradition was suspect even in the eyes of some of their ardent supporters.22 Under such circumstances, works such as P.L. Bhargava’s, attempting to synchronize Puranic chronology with the information known from Vedic sources and accounting for the mismatch as textual corruption in the hands of the priestly class who canonized the present texts, becomes a tacit acknowledgement of the unreliable nature of the presently available Puranic texts and the priority of the Vedic sources over them.23 Most of the nationalist historians, thus, could not go beyond the colonial portraiture of ancient India as a society without historical consciousness, and prioritised one set of religious traditions or another for learning about ancient India, just like their colonial predecessors. The only notable exception to this tendency among the nationalist historians was U.N. Ghoshal. He had painstakingly pointed out that there were historical narratives present in early Indian literature, even though not in a very organized form. Therefore, the Vedic literature contained genealogical tables of teachers and students, as well as praises of the chiefs and their achievements in dana-stuti hymns of the Rig Veda and the gatha and narashamsi hymns of Later Vedic literature. The narratives known as the itihasas and puranas were selfconsciously more historical in orientation. Thus, there are occasional references to historical incidents, such as the Battle of Ten Kings, in the Rig Veda Saṃhita (the oldest of the Vedic texts) itself, and allusions to statements of ritualistic authorities,

 S.N. Pradhan, Chronology of Ancient India (Calcutta: Cosmo Publications, 1927).  A.D. Pusalker, Studies in the Epics and Purāṇas (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1958); A.D. Pusalker, “Aryan Settlements in India,” in The History and Culture of the Indian People: The Vedic Age, ed. R.C. Majumdar (Mumbai: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996), 245–267 (reprint).  P.L. Bhargava, India in the Vedic Age (Lucknow: D.K. Printworld, 1956).

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historical examples of efficacy of rituals, historical explanations of the emergence of certain rituals, and memories of theological disputes and intellectual debates in Vedic literature. Despite many defects, a mass of genuine tradition was collected and memorised. Similarly, early Buddhist literature in Pali does not contain any full-length historical biography of the Buddha, but treats him as a man and preserves scattered historical memories and traditions about the most important incidents of his life. The Puranic genealogies contain too many defects to be relied on, but nevertheless were attempts to preserve a traditional memory. All these traditions contributed to the eventual making of early Indian historiography as manifested in Bana’s biography of king Harsha or, in a more systematic manner, Kalhana’s chronicle, the Rajatarangini, about the history of Kashmir.24 V.S. Pathak followed a similar line of argument while studying the composition of historical biographies in early medieval India. He points out that ancient Indians had a tradition of recording and memorising the achievements of kings right from the time of the Vedic dana-stutis, gathas, and narashamsis, up to the epics and Puranas. The Bhargava and Angirasa brahmanas specialised in such activities. On the other hand, there was the bardic tendency to construct and preserve genealogies and dynastic lists, real or fictional, which were incorporated in the Puranas, and inspired similar constructions within the Buddhist and Jaina traditions as well. With the large-scale appointment of Bhargava-Angirasa brahmanas in royal services and growing royal patronage to them in the early medieval period, these traditions crystallized in the production of historical literature, such as royal biographies. These biographies, Bana’s Harshacharita (seventh century), Bilhana’s Vikramankadevacharita (eleventh century), Someshvara III’s Vikramankakhyabhyudaya (twelfth century), and Jayanaka’s Prithviraja-vijaya (twelfth century), were considered literary production, and contained fictional genealogies, poetic imagination, and exaggerations typical of court literature. Thus, they may not meet the methodological standard of the modern discipline of History. But they were historical literature without a doubt, indicating that there was historical consciousness in the society and practised methods of memorising, recording, and presenting the past.25 The nationalist historians could not totally shrug off their colonial learning, but challenged some of the colonial notions; nor did they regard all aspects of colonial learning as necessarily wrong or to be shrugged off. The secular historians of post-independence India – Marxists, Liberals, and non-aligned, have taken further and bolder steps in decolonising Indian historiography. In this process, Indian

 U.N. Ghoshal, Studies in Indian History and Culture (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1957), 1–242.  V.S. Pathak, Ancient Historians of India: A Study in Historical Biographies (London: Asia Publishing Hose, 1966).

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Marxist historians often deviated from the classical Marxist understanding of Indian civilization. Karl Marx, whose idea of history was shaped by the knowledge system prevalent in nineteenth century Western Europe, had thought of early Indian society in a manner similar to India’s colonial representation. It is well known that while Marx spoke of historical evolution from slave society to feudal society to capitalist society, the model was based on the history of western Europe. Asiatic and African societies were considered static and ahistorical. Despotic rule and changeless socio-economic conditions characterize Marx’s idea of the Asiatic Mode of Production.26 Indian society, to the Indian Marxist historians, was not a static, changeless peasant body ruled by a series of despotic rulers enjoying the stagnancy of the Asiatic Mode of Production. Rather, D.D. Kosambi spoke of a ‘combined method of Indology’ in his bid to utilize the sources untapped by colonial and early nationalist historians – including myths and folklore – to develop a better understanding of the evolution of Indian culture and civilization.27 One of the leading Marxist historians of early India, R.S. Sharma, was one of the strongest advocates of looking at early India as a dynamic civilization. He showed many points of massive transition in early Indian history, arguing that the implementation of iron technology had brought in urbanization and state formation in mid-first millennium BCE,28 or that the system of tax-free land grants in Gupta and post-Gupta India had resulted in an Indian equivalent of feudalism.29 Both the claims have been challenged, and gave rise to rich historiographical debates, but those debates clearly shattered the myths around changeless early Indian society. The latter, the ‘feudalism debate’, in fact, was a massive blow to Mill’s communal periodization which considered the entire time block before the foundation of the Delhi Sultanate, i.e., up to the twelfth century, as a ‘Hindu Age’ identified with an ancient period. Both the parties supporting and opposing Sharma’s thesis of Indian feudalism had accepted that there was a structural change in Indian history from the sixth/seventh century, and thereby validated the label ‘early medieval’. Historians like Raychaudhuri had also transgressed Mill’s periodization earlier. But the Feudalism Debate indicated that the yardstick of periodization in Indian history should be political, social, and economic changes, rather than the religious affiliation of the rulers. It was just a matter of time before the notion of ancient India as an ahistorical society would be challenged.

 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx on India, ed. Iqbal Husain (Delhi: Tulika, 2011).  D.D. Kosambi, Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings, ed. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).  For an overview of the debate, see B.P. Sahu (ed.), Iron and Social Change in Early India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).  R.S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism (New Delhi: McMillan, 2009) (reprint, first published in 1965).

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The strongest proponent of this challenge over several decades has been Romila Thapar. Thapar has recently shown in her book The Past before Us, that the polemic about ‘western’ ways of viewing history has very little basis: the entire corpus of a supposedly occidental historical tradition can hardly be accommodated within any single definition of history. The understanding, definition, and methodology of history practised by Herodotus and other Classical historians were starkly different from the discipline practised by the Medieval European church historians or the post-Renaissance and post-Enlightenment Positivistic history popularised in the nineteenth century. Similarly, there were diverse methods of perceiving the past within the Mesopotamian, Chinese or Islamic cultures. Al-biruni’s comment about the Indians not having any history may therefore be a result of his unawareness of the historical traditions of the Indian society and his search for a parallel to a model of history familiar to him. His main informants being the ritual specialists did not help him either. Therefore, Thapar thinks that historical consciousness does not need to conform to any particular model. It begins with a society showing consciousness of both past and future and starting to record the past.30 To argue over whether a particular society had a sense of history or not on the basis of our recognition of the presence or absence of a particular kind of historical tradition – one which has been predetermined as being properly historical in perpetuity – seems somewhat beside the point. It is more purposeful to try and ascertain what each culture regards as its historical tradition and why it does so; and to analyse its constituents and functions as well as assess how it contends with competing or parallel traditions.31

Following this approach, we can agree with Thapar that many early Indian texts reflect a consciousness of history and subsequently there came into existence recognizable forms of historical writing. Both varieties of texts were used in early times to reconstruct the past, and were drawn upon as cultural, political, religious, or other such resources at various times, in various situations, and for a variety of reasons.32 Ancient India, thus, had a good range of historical traditions emanating from a sense of the past and including the three essential aspects of a historical tradition, namely consciousness of the past events as relevant or significant by a particular society (the reasons for such choice being implicit); the placing of these events in an approximately chronological framework, which would tend to reflect elements of the idea of causality; and the recording of these events in a form which meets the requirements of that society.33 A historical tradition is therefore an

   

Thapar, Past Before Us, 4–16. Thapar, Past Before Us, 4. Thapar, Past Before Us, 3. Thapar, Past Before Us, 4.

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authentic record, if not of actual events, certainly of the believed assumptions about the past. It is created from the intellectual and social assumptions of a society. Consciously selected events are enveloped in a deliberately created tradition which may only be partially factual.34 Since the different interpretations of the past are shaped by social and intellectual background of the compilers of the traditions, the choice of the materials and their interpretations differ. Early India seems to have at least three distinct historical traditions from a very early period: the Vedic-Brahmanic, the bardic tradition called itihasa-purana (Brahmanised later), and the Shramanic (within which the Buddhist and the Jaina traditions can be differentiated). However, these historical traditions, though historically conscious, did not end up in the composition of texts which can be called “History” in the modern sense of the term. Rather, their perception of the past remained embedded in other kinds of texts, mostly religious. Thus, Thapar had called them “embedded history”. However, since these traditions ensured the perpetuation of the practice of memorizing, organizing, and narrating accounts of the past – real or mythical – gradually the practise of history was becoming externalized. Court poets composed royal inscriptions which began with a genealogical (usually partly mythical and partly historical) account of the patron’s ancestors and gave an exaggerated account of the patron’s achievements. The dramatist Vishakhadatta made events of remote as well as recent past the themes of his historical plays – sometimes to reinterpret the past to suit the needs of his times, sometimes to justify the controversial succession of Chandra Gupta II (c. 376–414 CE) who was possibly his patron. Gradually, externalized history-writing took distinct literary forms, such as the charita (historical biography) and vamshavali (chronicles recording the list of dynasties ruling over a particular region). Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, often described as the earliest instance of history-writing in India, was nothing new, but a culmination of the long history of early Indian historical traditions. It might have followed a methodology similar to the modern discipline of History in the discussion of the three centuries preceding Kalhana, but its earlier sections are based on embedded histories found in the Puranas, local Upapuranas, and Buddhist tradition. Rajatarangini was a vamshavali of Kashmir, like the vamshavalis of other regions such as Chamba, a part of early Indian historical traditions, possibly the best but not the only one of its kind. Thapar’s thesis was thus one of the biggest steps in decolonizing the practice of early Indian history. It finally presented a strong methodological position to challenge the colonial notion of early India as an ahistorical society. Without repeating

 Thapar, Past Before Us, 5.

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Pargiter’s mistake of considering every detail of a set of myths as factual or considering the alternative knowledge systems of early India totally divorced from the Western idea of History, Thapar showed that early India, like most other ancient civilizations, had its own method of remembering and representing the past, which – just like the similar traditions elsewhere – had its similarities and differences with the modern discipline of History. Some of these traditions can be found only as embedded in religious literature – whose features can be identified without claiming the entire body of religious texts as History. Some others are available in a more externalized form. The two most popular texts of ancient India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, have also been contextualized by Thapar in her discussion of embedded history, rather than being dismissed in an allegedly Eurocentric, Post-Enlightenment understanding of the discipline. Thus, in a way, Thapar could have been an icon for those who wanted to free the historiography of ancient India from the ‘Western’ biases – the colonial stereotypes and the early Marxist idea of India. However, surprisingly, Thapar happens to be the historian hated most by the followers of the Hindutva ideology, subject to personal attacks and cultural mobilization by Hindutva supporters across the world.35

4.3 The archaeology of Hindutva, Hindutva and archaeology The discussion above indicates that Hindutva has little to do with whatever progress Indian historiography has made in decolonizing historical knowledge. Rather, if we go back to the four major premises of Hindutva historiography, we shall understand that the roots of Hindutva can be found in the colonial knowledge system, not in the attempts of decolonization. The communal policy of ‘divide and rule’ reflected in Mill’s communal periodization and the ‘two nation theory’ is copied in the historical model that glorifies an ancient ‘Hindu’ period and vilifies medieval ‘Muslim’ rule. Moreover, the claim of an ‘eternal’, ‘unchanging’ Indian culture echoes the Eurocentric claim of a static, changeless, age-old Indian civilization which was necessarily ahistorical. History is a study of changes. A claim of ‘eternity’ downplays the possibility of historical change. That is why the Hindutva claim of the historicity of the Ramayana and Mahabharata are qualitatively different from Thapar’s study of these

 Sandip Roy, “Whipping Girl of the Right: Attack Romila Thapar’s Ideas, not her Integrity,” Firstpost 7 (November 2014); Indrajit Hazra, “The Cause against Romila Thapar: A (New) Sycophant in the Room,” Economic Times 2 (September 2019).

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texts as “historical traditions”. The latter studies these texts as documents of historical change. The former viewed them as unchangeable scriptures which should also be considered as repositories of (historical?) truth. Thus, Hindutva does not uphold the possibilities of early Indian texts as historical texts – they consider them as religious scriptures and, therefore, transcendentally true. It is, again, a reiteration of the colonial position that early Indian society was otherworldly and religious, and its history can be found only in religious beliefs and convictions. The best example of this tendency can be found in the case of the early Indian epic Ramayana. On December 6, 1992, a Hindu fundamentalist crowd had demolished a medieval mosque built in the sixteenth century by Mir Baqi, a commander of Babur’s army, at Ayodhya. This event was the culmination of political developments over the preceding few years around the Hindutva claim that the mosque was founded by demolishing an old temple that marked the birthplace of Rama, the hero of the Ramayana and the most popular deity of North India. No contemporary source, not even Babur’s autobiography, mentions such temple demolition. Secular historians and archaeologists strongly argued against the supposed existence of any such temple on that plot. However, right wing archaeologists pointed out the presence of pre-Islamic structures beneath the mosque’s level on that plot. The recent judgment by a five-member bench of the Supreme Court of India, that ordered the rebuilding of the temple on that plot, has taken into account the second view, though it accepted that the judgment was not based on archaeological considerations and that there was no clear evidence of temple demolition. Yet, despite acknowledging the demolition of the mosque as an act of vandalism, the bench awarded a verdict in favour of the ‘rebuilding’ of the temple whose existence itself is doubtful. Methodological issues regarding the archaeological data were not discussed. It was not mentioned that the presence of pre-Islamic structures in pre-Islamic periods is an obvious possibility at any archaeological site or that a pre-Islamic structure was not necessarily a Hindu temple (it could also be a palace or a Budhhist or Jaina shrine or any other monument or building). Moreover, the very presence of a structure in archaeological records does not mean that it was forcibly demolished. The arguments which were prioritized in the verdict were the Hindu belief that the place marks the birthplace of Rama, which, understandably, no one challenged before the court.36 This entire political and legal debate, thus, was a claim of the historicity of Rama and the Ramayana, not on the basis of the acknowledged methods of historical enquiry but on the basis of religious belief.

 Full text of the Ayodhya Judgment available at the link www.thehindu.com/news/national/arti cle29929717.ece/Binary/JUD_2.pdf; Saif Ahmad Khan, “The Ayodhya Verdict Dissected,” The India Forum 7 (February 2020).

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It is not that the Hindutva historians did not try to find out archaeological corroboration of the Ramayana, by following standard methodological procedures. The archaeologist B.B. Lal had started a popular project named “Mahabharata archaeology” in the 1950s. He had successfully brought out that some of the major sites described in the Mahabharata (including Hastinapura, Indraprastha, Kurukshetra, Mathura, and Vairata) shared a similar material culture in early first millennium BCE, the period when the Later Vedic texts were composed, which was named the Painted Grey Ware (PGW) Culture.37 That was no direct archaeological corroboration of the Mahbharata narrative, since the rural material culture of the PGW sites differ starkly with the description of grand palaces and urban centres in the Mahabharata. Yet, it could at least indicate that the Mahabharata tradition grew around real historical sites of the Later Vedic Kuru-Panchala janapadas. Indeed, the Mahabharata probably originated as a bardic record of the suta bards about the deeds of the Later Vedic Kurus, though the text assumed its present written form much later and after many revisions, additions, and interpolations. However, when Lal undertook a similar project of ‘Ramayana archaeology’ in the 1970s, it did not bring much success. That was natural. Unlike the Mahabharata, the Ramayana itself does not claim to be an itihasa, but describes itself as a kavya (creative literature). The geographical knowledge of the poet of the Ramayana seems very limited beyond the North Indian plains. Hence, it is doubtful whether some important sites of the Ramayana narrative, such as Kishkindha and Lanka, were real places or just poetic imagination. Even the places which were real, such as Ayodhya and Mithila, did not yield any archaeological proof for arguing that they were important centres before the very end of the Later Vedic period.38 In fact, the Ramayana was not taken seriously even by Pargiter and his followers who wanted to construct early Indian history on the basis of the Puranas and the Mahabharata. Yet, Lal’s excavation of Ayodhya brought out the idea of the existence of a preIslamic structure beneath the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, which resulted in the political developments discussed above. The story of Rama is present in many forms and versions among many religious, linguistic, and ethnic communities across South and Southeast Asia. The Sanskrit epic Ramayana, attributed to the poet Valmiki, was the oldest full rendering of the story. The composition of the text is popularly dated between fourth century BCE and fourth century CE. However, it has been argued that some of the geographical data of the text point towards a pre-Buddhistic milieu. Hence, the

 B. B. Lal, “Excavation at Hastinapura and other Explorations in the Upper Ganga and Sutlej Basins,” Ancient India 10–11 (1954–55): 5–151.  B. B. Lal, “The Two Indian Epics vis-à-vis Archaeology,” Antiquity 55 (1981): 27–34.

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earlier date can be pushed back to seventh century BCE39 when a single poet (known as Valmiki) must have composed the bulk of the text. The four introductory sargas (chapters) of the Book I of the Ramayana introduces the text as a kavya (creative literature) dealing with love and the pangs of separation, inspired by the pathos of the poet who witnessed the untimely death of one of a pair of copulating birds. The poet chose as his hero an ‘ideal man’ (not a god), whose life story was not his invention but was popularly known. After Valmiki’s composition, it was popularized through bardic performances with musical accompaniments.40 However, this heroic romance about love and separation changed its character when it was revised and canonized by the brahmanas who added a seventh book (Uttarakanda) and interpolated many legends in the first book (Balakanda) to reshape the character of Rama from a romantic hero to an ideal Brahmanical king who was also an incarnation of Vishnu.41 Rama as the ideal god-king was a popular figure in subsequent literature validating the rules of particular kings, including Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsha (fifth century CE) and Sandhyakaranandin’s Ramacharita (eleventh century CE). However, Valmiki’s was not the only available version of the story of Rama’s adventures. As Valmiki himself acknowledges, he had developed on an already prevalent popular story. In the 1980s, A.K. Ramanujan had pointed out the presence of over 300 versions of the story in South and Southeast Asia, and argued for considering each version as similarly important.42 Paula Richman, also a great advocate of this ‘many Ramayanas’ model, on the other hand, accepted that some versions have to be considered more important, given their immense popularity – the Sanskrit work of Valmiki, the early medieval Tamil retelling by Kampan, the sixteenth century Awadhi epic by Tulsidas, and the late twentieth century Hindi teleserial produced by Ramanand Sagar.43 Romila Thapar has shown how the content of the story of Rama the ideal man changed in different historical contexts. Thus, in the Buddhist story of Dasaratha Jataka, where a pre-state clan society is depicted, sibling incest is valorised (as it  John Brockington, Epic Threads (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 225; Robert P. Goldman, “History and Historicity,” in Valmiki, The Rāmāyaṇa, vol. 1: ‘Bālakāṇḍa’, trans. Robert P. Goldman (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 22.  Valmiki (Vol. 1), I.1–4.  See Kanad Sinha, “A Tale of Three Couples and their Poet: Ramakatha, Love and Valmiki in South Asian Tradition,” Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 18, Nos. 1–2 (2011): 43–79.  A. K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in Many Rāmāyaṇas, ed. Paula Richman (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), 22–49.  Paula Richman, “Questioning and Multiplicity within the Ramayana Tradition,” in Questioning Ramayanas, ed. Paula Richman (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 9.

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was considered the purest, unmixed origin by certain clans) and the story of political rivalry of powerful monarchs (Rama and Ravana) is absent. Rama is an ideal self-contained Bodhisattva, who marries his sister Sita. The situation changes in the Valmiki Ramayana, produced in the agrarian state society of North India. The hero coming from such a society defeats the demonized and fantastic clan-chiefs of forest-dwelling Vanaras and Rakshasas, situated possibly in the Deccan region. The confrontation was between the agrarian state society and the forest-dwelling clan societies, and the victory of the former was normativized. Rama becomes the hero of that victory, and – after the Brahmanical revision – the ideal king to rule over such a state. However, when the state society reaches the Deccan during the Maurya period, and many post-Maurya Deccanese states become patrons of heterodox religions, especially Jainism, the monstrous and animalistic representation of the Rakshasas and Vanaras became a problem for the Jaina authors. Vimala Suri’s Paumacharia criticises Valmiki’s text as a fantastic production of an ignorant, poor poet whose account falsified the true story of Rama, and he therefore presents the ‘true’ version which acknowledges the presence of multiple glorious royal families across the subcontinent. One of them was the Vidyadharavamsha whose descendants included both the Vanaras and Rakshasas. Ravana was born in the Meghavahana lineage, a branch of the Vidyadharas, which was interestingly the lineage of Kharavela, the first major independent king of eastern Deccan and a great patron of Jainism. The clash of Rama and Ravana was thus the clash of two powerful kings both of whom adhered to Jaina values. Rama, the ideal man, was the better Jaina and completely non-violent. Therefore, in this story, it is not Rama, but his younger brother Lakshmana, who kills Ravana.44 The ‘many Ramayanas’ approach looks at the Ramayana historically, considers it as a document of historical change, but negates the possibility of considering its content as factual. After all, even if Rama was a historical figure, which of the multiple accounts should be considered his realistic history? Was he an ideal romantic hero, or a self-contained Bodhisattwa, or a Brahmanical king, or a nonviolent Jaina? Was Ayodhya really his birthplace, or Benares as claimed by the Buddhist version? If the religious belief around Rama in North India is the issue of predominant consideration, is he even the Rama of Valmiki’s epic? Originally, Valmiki depicted Rama not as a god but as an ideal man. Even in the interpolated sections, he is just one of the many incarnations of Vishnu. The Rama who is the Supreme Deity to many North Indians who were mobilized to demolish the Babri Masjid, cannot be found in any ancient text, but in the medieval devotional epic

 Romila Thapar, “The Rāmāyaṇa: Theme and Variation,” in Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History, ed. Romila Thapar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 647–679.

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of Tulsidas. Hindutva historiography does not believe in the recognised methods of historical analysis. They try to use archaeology to their aid. But, when that fails, they try to validate religious belief as the supreme argument. That belief showcases Rama not just a historical/mythical/literary figure, not even as one of many gods, but a singular god as the rallying point of a ‘syndicated religion’ (a religion allowing little variations and consolidated around a single God, an authoritative singular scripture, one historical founder, and congregational worship). Therefore, they detest the ‘many Ramayanas’ model, and has used force to keep Ramanujan’s pathbreaking essay outside university syllabus.45 Since Hindutva represents its past following the colonial stereotypes, as a changeless, static, monolithic, ahistorical, and religious civilization, its religious identity had to be reshaped as the colonial thinkers conceived religion – a syndicated body of monolithic believers with one God, one scripture, and one prophet. These are not features historically shared by Hinduism with the three Semitic world religions. Hindutva thus not only rewrites history, but invents a new religious identity which Thapar calls “syndicated Hinduism”.46

4.4 Hindutva and the ‘Aryan’ identity The historical vision of Hindutva is not only derived from colonial ideas, but retains the colonial obsession with ‘racial’ identity. As we have seen above, the idea of the ‘Aryan’ race was the result of a confusion between linguistic and ‘racial’ identities. Thanks to the Nazis, the repercussion of the idea of Aryan supremacy in European politics is well-known. In India, the idea that the Aryan ‘race’ who composed the Vedas were the founders of an eternal ‘Hindu’ civilization received two early setbacks. In 1816, F.W. Ellis pointed out that the major South Indian languages do not belong to the Indo-European family, but to a different one known as “Dravidian language family”. Hence, Indo-European speakers were not the only people of pre-Islamic India. In the 1920s, the archaeological remains of a bronze age urban civilization were discovered in the sites of Harappa (Western Panjab) and Mohenjodaro (Sind). As the sites were located on the banks of Ravi (a tributary of the Indus) and the Indus, the civilization was initially called the Indus Valley Civilization. Evidence suggested that this civilization was pre-Vedic. The people lived in fortified urban centres, practised agriculture and long-distance trade, had a script of their

 Vijetha S.N., “Historians protest as Delhi University purges Ramayana essay from syllabus,” The Hindu 15 (October 2011).  Romila Thapar, Sydicated Hinduism (Delhi: Critical Quest, 2010).

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own, worshipped images of female fertility goddesses, and did not domesticate the horse. On the other hand, the Rig Veda depicts a people who were nomadic pastoralists, did not know the art of writing, offered fire sacrifice to predominantly male deities, and used horses and horse-drawn chariots. The poets of the Rig Veda also knew about their antagonists, referred to as Dasas and Dasyus. Initially, this opposition was interpreted in racial terms, assuming that fair, tall, blonde, sharp-nosed Aryans fought the short, blunt-nosed, dark skinned ‘non-Aryans’. However, such racial profiling was the result of highly selective reading of the Vedic texts. A closer reading would show that the difference was mainly cultural and linguistic, and mobility was not unknown. Vedic priests sacrificed for Dasa chiefs who adopted and patronized the Vedic culture. Many Vedic priests were sons of Dasis. Yet, the colonial racial imagination had a lasting effect on India. The Hindutva brigade remained hell-bent on proving that the founders of the Harappan civilization were Aryans. Therefore, the Vedic and the Harappan civilization were essentially the same. Another side of the argument also tried to show that the Harappan people were Dravidians/non-Aryans, and argued that the civilization declined in the middle of the second millennium BCE, because of Aryan invasion. Dalit politics in India often adopted the same racial model to argue that the Indian Dalits are the descendants of indigenous non-Aryans, whereas the upper castes are the descendants of foreign invaders. However, no evidence to suggest any massive invasion or racial clash bringing the decline of the Harappan civilization has been found. The confrontations described in the Rig Veda seem to be localized skirmishes between two groups of people with overlapping areas of operation. The coming of the Indo-European speakers in the Indian subcontinent was possibly a process of slow migration rather than a massive invasion. The Harappan people, who built massive urban centres and participated in long-distance trade, seem to be cosmopolitan, rather than of any one ethno-linguistic stock. Environmental factors could have contributed more to the decline of the Harappan urban centres than the movement of the Indo-European speakers from what is now the region of Iran.47 The Hindutva imagination of equating the Vedic and Harappan civilization received a new lease of life after Indian independence. The partition of India meant that Harappa and Mohenjodaro, the two oldest sites of India’s first urban civilization, were now located in Pakistan. There were many archaeological excavations to find similar centres on the Indian side of the border. Gradually, it was found out that the Harappan Civilization was the largest bronze age urban civilization hitherto known. Several sites were unearthed in modern Haryana, Rajasthan, and

 For an overview of the debate around the decline of the Harappan civilization, see Nayanjot Lahiri (ed.), The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000).

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Gujarat. These were not located on the Indus valley. Rather, many of them were along the course of now dried up Hakra-Ghaggar river. This provided an opportunity for Hindutva archaeologists to try to identify this river with the Sarasvati, celebrated and deified in Vedic literature. Thus, they argued that the Harappan and Vedic civilization were essentially the same, and should be called the “IndusSarasvati Civilization” or simply “Sarasvati Civilization”.48 This would push back the date of the Vedas, especially the Rig Veda, to the third millennium BCE at least, and would argue for the migration of the Indo-European speakers to Iran and Europe from India which would therefore be able to claim to be the original home of the great Aryan race. Inconveniently or conveniently, the Harappan script has not been deciphered. Therefore, it is impossible to say with certainty which language/s they used. However, pushing back the date of the Rig Veda to the third millennium BCE is still difficult. Vedic Sanskrit contains some retroflex sounds borrowed from Dravidian or Austric languages, which are absent in most other Indo-European languages. This weakens the plausibility of the ‘out of India’ hypothesis. Moreover, an inscription datable to the fourteenth century BCE has been found at the Hittite site of Boghazkoi (Turkey), which mentions the names of some Vedic deities, but in a linguistic form earlier than Vedic Sanskrit. Thus, the language of the Vedas most probably took its shape after the fourteenth century BCE, and Boghazkoi might have been a place on the journey of a branch of Indo-Europeans towards India. The Rig Veda uses the name Sarasvati for not one but many rivers: one a dying river, one a mythical river goddess, and the third a thriving river. The third occurs mainly in Book II, composed by the Gritsamadas who – according to Michael Witzel – were located in the farthest northwest of the Vedic world, and was possibly a river in Afghanistan (known as Haraxvaity in the Avesta). Some superficial similarities – not uncommon among civilizations with porous, overlapping borders and cultural interaction – are often pointed out as proofs of identity between the Vedic and Harappan civilizations, whereas many fair and foul means have been adopted to gloss over the differences. The high point of the latter was the claim by N.S. Rajaram and Natwar Jha to have deciphered the Harappan script, a claim received with scepticism at first, and ridiculed later when it was found out that Rajaram’s claim to have located a horse seal was a fraud, created from a computer distortion of a broken unicorn bull seal.49 The idea that the Harappan civilization was a pre-Vedic and non-Vedic cosmopolitan civilization succeeded by the Vedic civilization founded by the speakers of the Indo-

 S.P. Gupta, “The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization: Beginnings and Development,” in The Aryan Debate, ed. Thomas R. Trautmann (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 157–204.  Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer, “Horseplay in Harappa,” Frontline 30 (September 2000).

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Aryan language, who migrated from Iran where Indo-Iranian, an offshoot of IndoEuropean, was spoken, remains the standard view of serious academic scholarship. Though the idea of ‘race’ has become obsolete in academic research, genetics has entered the field of archaeology in recent decades. In the last decade of the twentieth century, much of historical genetic inference relied on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which passes down the generations only from mother to daughter. The utilization of mtDNA, and later the Y chromosome (which travels down from father to son) allowed broad generalizations to be made about the movement of human groups. Since 2000, the coming of whole genome analysis helped researchers to construct much more robust patterns of relationships of modern populations. Following this model, it has been found out that most South Asians derive a part of their ancestry from a group similar to West Eurasians, the ‘Ancestral North Indian’ (ANI), and a group distantly related to East Europeans and more closely linked with the indigenous population of the Andaman Islands, the ‘Ancestral South Indian’ (ASI). However, there were mostly pure ASI populations even 4000 years ago. Thus, the ASI can be identified with the indigenous population of the subcontinent, whose genetic features are a compound of ancient Iranian farmers and the ancient indigenous South Asians. This was the genetic profile of the Harappan people whose remains have been studied, as well as of the prehistoric human remains found from the Swat Valley in Pakistan and the recently analysed Harappan-era sample from Rakhigarhi, all dating prior to 2000 BCE. Many South Asians, especially those from South India, carry genetic profiles similar to the ASI. These people also contributed to 70% of the ancestry of the ANI, the balance of which was bolstered by the arrival of pastoralists from the steppe after 2000 BCE. It seems that the new genetic features were brought to the subcontinent by migrants from Eurasian steppes since it possesses a particular Y-chromosomal lineage, R1a1a, which has a widespread Eurasian distribution across Eastern Europe, Central Asia and South Asia. The distribution of the ANI features among the South Asians can be profiled by caste and geography, because of the strict caste-based endogamy practised throughout the subcontinent over the last 2000 years. Thus, the people of the north-western parts of the subcontinent are genetically closest to the people of the Middle East and Europe. Similarly, traditional upper castes, especially brahmanas, are closer to the populations of the Middle East and Europe. Scheduled castes and tribal populations have the least affinity to the Middle Easterns and Europeans. Brahmins from Uttar Pradesh and Jats from Punjab exhibit closer affinity to West Eurasians than Brahmins from Tamil Nadu. But Chamars from Uttar Pradesh exhibit less affinity to West Eurasians than Brahmins from Tamil Nadu. Bengali Brahmins seem genetically closer to Brahmins from Uttar Pradesh than they are to non-Brahmin Bengalis. Thus, R1a1a, common among Europeans, Central Asians and upper castes in South Asia,

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seems to have occurred in the subcontinent after about 2000 BCE, and is better preserved among the upper caste Hindus practising caste-based endogamy. Since the Y-chromosomal lineage R1a1a-Z93 is common among the Central Asians and South Asians, and has been found among the people of the Andronovo and Sintashta cultures who expanded from the west about 4000 years ago into Central Asia, the route of the migration is also charted out. On the other hand, the presence of the y-chromosomal lineages R1a1-Z93 in the graves of the Srubna culture (situated between the Dnieper and the southern reaches of the Volga Mountains between 1800 and 1200 BCE), but absence of any South Asian heritage in them proves beyond doubt that R1a1-Z93 did not originate in South Asia and hailed from the Eurasian steppe. This strongly points towards the arrival of a group of pastoralist Indo-European speakers to South Asia in the period after 2000 BCE from the Eurasian steppes via Central Asia and Iran. However, what is interesting in the discussion above is that R1a1-Z93 being a Y-chromosomal lineage is passed along the male line. The ANI genetic profile, predominantly present among the North Indian upper castes, is inherited from the father’s side. While the paternal Y-chromosomal lineages of the people of the northwest of India and upper castes had more affinities with the West Eurasians, most South Asian mtDNA lineages are deeply rooted in the subcontinent.50 Therefore, the absence of the R1a1 in a 4500-year-old male skeleton found from the site of Rakhigarhi (Haryana) solidifies the idea that the Harappan civilization preceded the coming of the Eurasian steppe nomads. Yet, attempts have been made to turn this evidence upside down by claiming it as a proof of the absence of Aryan influx (suggesting that the ‘Aryans’ were indigenous to Indian subcontinent, completely ignoring the hard fact that the skeleton predates the dates assigned to the migration of the Indo-Aryan speakers in the Indian subcontinent) and by connecting this skeleton with the genetic features of North Indian Brahmins. Kai Friese demonstrates that this misrepresentation of scientific data is part and parcel of the BJP-led project of writing Hindutva history to “use evidence such as archaeological finds and DNA to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago, and make the case that ancient Hindu scriptures are fact, not myth.”51 On the other hand, though the DNA record is indeed in favour of the standard view that Harappan civilization predated the coming of the Vedic Aryans in the second millennium BCE, leading secular historians like Thapar and Nayanjot Lahiri

 Razib Khan, “Genetic Origins of Indo-Aryans,” in Which of Us are Aryans?, ed. Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese and Razib Khan (New Delhi: Aleph, 2019), 135–154.  Kai Friese, “The Complications of Genetics,” in Which of Us are Aryans?, ed. Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese and Razib Khan (New Delhi: Aleph, 2019), 119–134.

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remained sceptical in using such findings.52 After all, the genetic data of just one skeleton in a highly populated cosmopolitan civilization can hardly be considered conclusive. Moreover, the obsession with genetic profiling of the Harappan people is nothing but a continuation with the colonial obsession with ‘racial identities’, which undermines the more important study of historical processes. It is the challenge of the secular historians of early India to decolonize the field, particularly by prioritising questions different from the ones set by inherited colonial interests and obsessions. Hindutva, on the other hand, is a political movement set outside the scholarly agenda. Yet, it has a claim to particular historical narratives. Therefore, a set of subservient historians tried, not very successfully, to establish a Hindutva agenda that tried to be scholarly. What they have essentially achieved is a journey back to the field set by the colonial masters, where racial and communal identities were the primary concerns and scriptures the primary sources for studying an eternal, changeless, ahistorical Indian culture. In a world where the very idea of ‘truth’ has become contentious, such regressive scholarship can aspire to become mainstream when they are backed by a supportive political regime that captures academic institutions of legitimation. The appointment of a well-known Hindutva ideologue, Y.S. Rao, who had no peer-reviewed publication to his credit but was the head of the Andhra Pradesh branch of the Akhil Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Yojana (an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha, the biggest Hindu nationalist body in India), as the Chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research, the principal funding and regulatory body of historical scholarship in India, was made in the very first year of the present BJP Government’s first term starting in 2014. UGC’s new draft syllabus is a further example of the direction Hindutva history-writing takes. The secular historian of early India, therefore, has to challenge the Hindutva notion of history, not because they prioritize ‘foreign’ methodology over ‘indigenous’ ones, but to fight the legacy of colonialism on the field itself.

 Friese, “The Complications of Genetics,” 131.

Part Two: Law and Historical Expertise

Vladimir Petrović

5 Challenges of Historical Expert Witnessing in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and Elsewhere It is difficult to say what was on Friedrich Nietzsche’s mind in 1873 when he wrote about “dragging the past before a court of justice” in his famous essay On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. However, there are good reasons to believe that he did not think that the future would bring robust litigation in both civil and criminal courts, within national and international jurisdictions alike, where history will play such a central role. Yet, this is exactly what happened. Riding this wave, many historians were pulled into legal arena in different capacities. From their traditional role of spectators and chroniclers of the trial, they became participants in the trial as experts, and sometimes even put on trial. Such new framing of their old role deserves attention, especially as these disciplines share a long and intimate connection. Even the original meaning of the ancient Greek word for historian (ίστωρ – the one who knows) could be translated for the contemporary world as ‘expert’. Over time, historical expert witnessing emerged as a well-established, if not sufficiently recognized practice. Yet it has a rich, and at times downright dramatic history.1 As a rule, such cases as involve expert witnesses with a training in history deal with grave historical injustices, and are aimed at opening a proverbial can of worms. Although some historical expert witnesses are enthusiastic about their experience, many come out of the witness box disillusioned, if not traumatized. In this contribution I thematize some of the challenges related to historical expert

 See Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (London: Verso, 1999). Norbert Frei, Dirk van Laak and Michael Stolleis, eds., Geschichte vor Gericht: Historiker, Richter und Suche nach Gerechtigkeit (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000); Alain Wijffels, ed., History in Court: Historical Expertise and Methods in a Forensic Context (Leiden: Ius Deco Publications, 2001); Olivier Dumoulin, Le rôle social de l’historien: De la chaire au prétoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003); Richard J. Evans, “History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness,” History and Theory 41 (2002), 326–345. The topic received limited attention in contemporary discussions of changing the public role of a historian. Harriet Jones, Kjell Östberg, and Nico Randeraad, eds., Contemporary History on Trial: Europe Since 1989 and the Role of the Expert Historian (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Its evolution is scrutinized in Vladimir Petrović, The Emergence of Historical Forensic Expertise: Clio Takes the Stand (New York: Routledge, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-005

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witnessing, in particular the delicate relationship between the local context and global perspectives. I highlight their interplay in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in order to suggest possibilities for alleviating a structural tension which persists in proceeding of huge public importance.

5.1 Prologue: historical forensics and a subtle art of opening cans What could historical forensics, which consists of different forms of historical contributions prepared by historians for judicial use, have in common with opening cans? They are both complicated undertakes, which yield result only if several key components are firmly in place – the can, the opener, and the willingness to use it. For instance, even with the best can-opener, no result is achievable if there is no can. That had happened to Lorenzo Valla, a Renaissance humanist who persuasively demonstrated that one of the key medieval documents (the Donation of Constantine) was a crude forgery. This document, which claimed that the emperor Constantine left the entire western part of his imperial domains to the care of Pope Sylvester and his successors, was used for centuries by Rome in its fight for supremacy with secular powers and other bishoprics alike. Through testing this document’s internal cohesion and analysing its language and content, Valla shred its authenticity to pieces. This was great scholarship, no doubt, which set a high standard for the historical criticism of sources for centuries to come. However, in the absence of adequate legal procedures, Valla could only daydream about taking “the forger himself by the neck, and drag him into court”.2 It was his book, instead, which found its way to the list of forbidden books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum) compiled by the Inquisition. Equally frustrating is the opposite situation, where the can (judicial procedure) is there, and there is a willingness to open it, but one lacks a sharp opener (an able expert). Consider the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the first Governor-General of Bengal, and a chief representative of the East Indian Company in India. The proceedings were held in front of the Parliament of Great Britain between 1788 and 1795. None other than Edmund Burke was prosecuting him, aware

 De falso credita et ementita Constantini donation declamation, (1440) in Lorenzo Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922). The donation of Constantine, in: Andrea Mork, ed., Fake for Real: A History of Forgery and Falsification. House of European History (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2020), 37–40.

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that the outcome of the trial would serve as an example for future British colonial administration. Eager to open the can of worms of Hasting’s rule, he was using all the evidence he could get. In this undertaking, historical evidence also had a small role to play.3 Unfortunately, Burke’s historical evidence was occasionally lacking both in relevance and reliability. For instance, not knowing a lot about the customs of this wide subcontinent, but eager to prove that Hastings was transgressing them for personal gain, Burke focused on Hasting’s mistreatment of Bahu Begum, a widow of Nawab of Awadh. Hastings conspired to get her out of power and to take control over her considerable wealth by supporting a mutiny which came to be known as “the Spoilation of the Begum”, in which her own son played an important role. Showcasing this example, Burke attempted to present Hastings as a greedy brute, oblivious to sacred obligations of family relations. Those, Burke claimed, are especially strong in Moslem countries. To prove that claim, he demanded a passage to be read into a transcript, deriving from a book, the History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, written by a Moldovan Duke, Demetrius Cantemir (1663–1723). Burke’s attempt to include this fragment in the court record on April 24, 1788, rocked the chamber. Hasting’s attorney “objected to such evidence. He said that the reveries of Prince Demetrius Cantemir might be evidence of what was the custom of Constantinople; but unless it could be proved that the customs of Musselmen all over the world were the same as at Constantinople, the authority of that Prince, in his history of the Turks, could not be evidence of a custom in India.” However, Burke stood by his expert: “Prince Cantemir had been a man of great learning, and from his education in Turkey, well acquainted with the customs of Musselmen: he had been hospodar (sic!) or King, or Prince of Moldavia, a kingdom nearly as large as Ireland, before he joined the Czar Peter I and afterwards he distinguished himself in letters as well as in arms. the history of such a man could not without much decency called reveries.”4 Upon such intervention, a passage from the book was read – a note entitled Sultana Valide. It contained the following line: “The Sultans have always treated their mothers with great respect, in compliance with the

 Around that time, in Folkes v. Chadd (1782), the judge, Lord Mansfield, provided the foundational judgement forc ases involving expert evidence: “For in matters of science the reasoning of men of science can only be answered by men of science.”  The Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq: Late Governor General of Bengal, before the Curt of Peers Sitting in Westminster Hall (London: J. Ridgway, 1788), vol. II, 343–344. For more on Cantemir, see Johann Strauss, “The Rise of non-Muslim Historiography in the Eighteenth Century,” Oriente Moderno 79 (1999): 217–32.

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divine precepts and those of the Koran (. . .) Sultan is forbid by the laws to lie with any of the women kept there, without his mama’s consent.”5 The explicit character of this passage became a target to political cartoonists, an emerging genre in the United Kingdom at the time. Two days after the court session, on April 26, 1788, one such illustration was printed under the title A Reverie

Figure 1: A Reverie of Prince Demetrus Cantemir, Ospidar of Moldavia Publ’d 26 April 1788 by Thos. Cornell, Bruton Street © The Trustees of the British Museum, released as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

 The Trial of Warren Hastings, vol. II, 346.

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of Prince Demetrus Cantemir, Ospidar of Moldavia, but it actually showed Burke himself napping and dreaming the harem scene. Burke made light of this ridicule: “It is our nature and we cannot help it; it is the most difficult thing in the world to bring ourselves to a proper degree of sympathy when we are describing those circumstances which are not ingrafted in our nature by custom.”6 However, this could not downplay the soundness of his opponents’ observation. Reflections of a Moldovan Duke on the Ottoman Sultans from the beginning of the eighteenth century bore dubious relevance to the situation in the principality of Awadh at that same century’s end. Actually, such generalization spoke more about the pervasiveness of prejudicial simplification about the rest of the world in many English minds of the time, including Burke’s. Such misreading of a local context was not atypical for the period. With historical scholarship in its infancy, reliable information and balanced interpretations were very rare. The rigor of historical method developed through the nineteenth century, in the seminars of Leopold von Ranke, Lord Acton and Gabriel Monod.7 However, even the most rigorous application of historical method would not necessarily yield a desired legal result, as demonstrated exactly by Monod, the founder of Revue historique, and a number of his colleagues, who rushed to the call of Emile Zola to help exonerate Captain Dreyfus, testifying as experts in several trials surrounding this dark fin-de-siecle affaire.8 Although some of the finest historians of France used state-of-the art methods to analyse the documents in the courtroom, it was not their scholarship, but a political decision in the form of a presidential pardon, which set Dreyfus free, despite the stubborn resistance of the military and civilian judiciary alike.9 It became clear that, besides the can and an opener, a willingness to open the can is a third necessary requirement for a successful outcome. However, the potential for a cause célèbre to engage both national and international public opinion was firmly established. An era of public trials, which functioned both in the courtroom and outside, had begun. In this “court of public opinion”, the voice of historians was

 F.P. Lock, Edmund Burke, 1784–1797 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 184.  The professionalization of historiography has been scrutinized in comparative perspective by Georg G. Iggers and Q. Edward Wanq, A Global History of Modern Historiography (London: Pearson, 2008), 128–133; Rolf Torstendahl, The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism (New York: Routledge 2015).  Vladimir Petrović, “Swinging the Pendulum: Fin-de-Siècle Historians in the Courts,” in Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice, ed. Nanci Adler (Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 21–36.  More on the role historians played in it in Olivier Dumoulin, Le rôle social de l’historien: De la chaire au prétoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

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to be heard as well, giving a new meaning to the concept of the world’s history as the last judgment (Weltgeschichte als Weltgericht of Schiller and Hegel).10 Nowhere was this fusion more visible than during the immediate post-war reconstruction of global order and its reckoning with the legacy of atrocities in the Second World War: through creation of “the two great Trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo the past was being judged”.11 Although historians played no visible role in this process, key architects of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg were well aware of the historical significance of the proceedings. In his letter to President Truman, American Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson made no secret of his overall goal – “the establishment of a well-documented history of what we are convinced was a grand, concerted pattern to incite and commit the aggressions and barbarities which have shocked the world.”12 His successor in the Nuremberg Military Tribunal, General Talford Taylor, furthered that pattern, aiming “to promote the interest of historical truth and to aid in the reestablishment of democracy in Germany”.13 To that end, Nuremberg became “the world’s greatest research institute.”14 The past was indeed dragged before a court of justice.

5.2 From Nuremberg to The Hague After Nuremberg, the Cold War froze attempts at institutionalization of an international judiciary, but the abrupt ending of that global confrontation seemed to remove this obstacle. Fifty years after the Trial of Major War Criminals in front of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, a wide coalition was successfully advocating for the adoption of the Rome Statute (1998), leading to the creation of the International Criminal Court (2002), headquartered in The Hague. A powerful narrative emerged, its arc stretching from Nuremberg to The Hague, raising expectations  Joan Wallach Scott, On the Judgment of History (New York, Columbia University Press, 2020), xiv-xvi.  Judith Shklar, Legalism: Law, Morals, and Political Trials (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 200.  Letter from Robert Jackson to Harry S. Truman (6 June, 1945): 11, War Crimes File (WCF), Rosenman Papers, Harry S. Truman Presidential Museum & Library http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whis tlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/documents/index.php?pagenumber=2&documentid=14–7& documentdate=1945–06–06&studycollectionid=nuremberg&groupid=, [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Telford Taylor, Final Report to the Secretary of the Army on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials Under Control Council Law No. 19 (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1949), 101, 102,  Robert Kempner, “The Nuremberg Trials as Sources of Recent German Political and Historical Materials,” American Political Science Review 44, No. 2 (June 1950): 448. This is usually wrongly paraphrased as “the greatest historical seminar ever held in the history of the world.”

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with tempting promises about a more just world.15 Occasional setbacks, such as atrocious conflicts in Yugoslavia, Rwanda and other places, were seemingly dealt with by the United Nation’s Security Council through the creation of ad hoc tribunals which were to serve both as a stop-gap measure to remedy these conflicts, and as a testing ground for a global permanent court.16 Hence a number of new highvisibility spaces for reckoning with past atrocities were created. The scope and size of historical forensic contributions in front of contemporary judicial institutions is astounding. That is especially the case with the international tribunals. Consider the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, first of its kind after Nuremberg. Founded in 1993 by a Security Council resolution, it functioned for over a quarter of a century. During that time, 161 persons were indicted for war crimes, with 4488 witnesses who stepped forward to testify, some repeatedly, leading to 6717 testimonies altogether. During its 10800 trial days, the ICTY has generated 2.5 million pages of publicly accessible transcripts.17 Its judicial database, which contains only a small segment of the ICTY archives, is open for research, and contains over 100,000 exhibits which were entered as evidence during the proceedings which unearthed an astounding number of war crimes during this conflict, which claimed over 130,000 lives.18 No wonder that one of the achievements on its website states that “as the work of the ICTY progresses, important elements of a historical record of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s have emerged. The ICTY has established crucial facts about crimes, once subject to dispute, beyond a reasonable doubt.”19 In contrast to Nuremberg, historians were deeply involved in this process. They feature prominently among 263 expert witnesses who appeared in front of the ICTY. Many experts reappeared, leading to 443 expert testimonies and altogether 472 instances of expert witnessing at the ICTY. Hence, expert testimony stands for 7% of witnesses, or one in every thirteen. Even more remarkably, the expertise of 104 of 472 (22%) were dedicated to historical subjects.20 Although not necessarily delivered by historians, those testimonies had a visible historical dimension. Among the experts were also sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, military experts or  Philippe Sands, From Nuremberg to The Hague: The Future of International Criminal Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).  Bernard D. Beltzer, “War Crimes”: The Nuremberg Trial and the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” Valparaiso University Law Review 30 (2011): 895–912.  https://www.icty.org/en/content/infographic-icty-facts-figures [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  ICTY Court Records, http://icr.icty.org/ [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Establishing the facts, https://www.icty.org/en/about/tribunal/achievements [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Communication with the ICTY outreach office, 22 June 2020 Subject: An Inquiry from Boston University.

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people with several degrees under their belt. Altogether 56 such experts testified about historical matters in the ICTY, and many reappeared, leading to over one hundred testimonies and reports delivered in 37 cases, out of 62 proceedings conducted by the ICTY against 111 persons. It is fair to say that a typical trial in front of the ICTY was likelier than not to have a historian in a witness box. In some proceedings, there would be one or two historical experts, in others more, and in one case, against Slobodan Milosevic, a dozen.21 On the face of it, what more could one ask? The list features a number of internationally recognized scholars, some of global reputation, some deeply embedded in the local context. Their contributions are dominantly historical in nature, but they borrow handsomely from related disciplines – legal and genocide studies, demography and discourse analysis, heritage, military and area studies, as well as propaganda research. Furthermore, from the titles one can detect that they are using different perspectives, treating different aspects of the problem, scrutinizing different units of an analysis, unearthing previously unknow facts, and interpreting them daringly. Finally, over two centuries after the Hastings trial, a problem seems to be solved. Here is our can, here is the opener, here is a will to open it – worms beware! Yet, in a recent assessment of the ICTY’s legacy, Marko Milanović writes: “The facts in the cases before the ICTY were certainly established to the satisfaction of the Tribunal’s judges, but even they would not say that they are the only audience that matters.” He assessed “the reception of factual determinations by international criminal tribunals by target audiences in post-conflict societies. The picture painted by the surveys is depressing: denialism and revisionism are not just alive and well in

 Their names and expert report titles are giving an impression about the size and scope of history in the ICTY courtrooms: (Audrie Budding, Serbian nationalism in the 20th century: historical background and context; Robert Donia, The Assembly of Republika Srpska, 1991–1995: Highlights and Excerpts; Reynaud M.J. Theunens, The SFRY Armed Forces and the Conflict in Croatia – JNA Activity in BiH and JNA (VJ) Support to Bosnian-Serb Forces; Renaud de la Brosse, Political Propaganda and the Plan to Create ‘A State For All Serbs:’ Consequences of using media for ultranationalist ends; Ton Zwaan, On the Aeitology and Genesis of Genocides and other Mass Crimes Targeting Specific Groups; Smilja Avramov. Kosovo and Metohija in the 20th century: The political, ideological, demographical and cultural coordinates of ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Southern parts of Serbia; Čedomir Popov, Greater Serbia: Reality and myth; Kosta Mihajlovic, Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts; Slavenko Terzić, Kosovo and Metohija in the 20th Century; Andras Riedlmayer, The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Kosovo (1) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (2); Ivan Kristan, Constitutional and legal issues in the case against Slobodan Milosevic; Ewa Tabeau et al, Ethnic Composition in and Internally Displaced Persons and Refugees from 47 Municipalities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1991 to 1997–1998. Most of the reports are deposited in Miloševic Trial Public Archive, http://hague.bard.edu/icty_info.html, [Last seen. 4 August 2018].

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the former Yugoslavia – they are thriving.”22 Quantitative data, repeatedly, confirm this bleak picture.23 The ICTY courtroom narratives might be assessed positively in the international arena, yet they do not travel to the affected region, jeopardizing another stated goal of the Tribunal – strengthening the rule of law there. So, what went wrong? Much of the disappointment rests in inflated expectations. It was probably beyond any tribunal’s reach to alter collective perceptions, which were rooted in the wartime propaganda and enhanced by the national narratives of the states founded on the ruins of the former Yugoslavia.24 However, tempting as it is to lay the entire burden on the audience, one needs to analyse the transmission of Tribunal’s activity as well. The ICTY was notoriously slow in establishing its outreach. The proceedings were held far away from Yugoslavia, with English and French as dominant languages. Professor Robert Hyden remembers that in the early days of the Tribunal, he was the only person in the courtroom who knew the language of the accused.25 That had changed in time, due to the efforts of the translation unit and due to the founding of an Outreach office around 2000.26 Yet, despite this office’s robust activity, reception did not significantly change, which obliges one to look beyond the Tribunal’s hostile audience or rusty transmission belts, in order to scrutinize the process of production and dissemination of historical knowledge by the ICTY, and specifically the role historians play in it.

 Marko Milanović, “The Impact of the ICTY on the Former Yugoslavia: An Anticipatory Postmortem,” The American Journal of International Law 110 (2016): 233–59, 239. A much more positive recent self- assessment of key personalities from the ICTY is available in Carsten Stahn, Carmel Agius, Serge Brammertz, John Hocking and Colleen Rohan, eds., Legacies of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: A Multidisciplinary Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).  OESC and BCHR, Public perception in Serbia of the ICTY and the national courts dealing with war crimes, http://www.osce.org/publications/srb/2009/12/41942_1399_en.pdf [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  On local and global obstructions to justice rendering see Jelena Subotić, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (London: Cornell University Press, 2009). More optimistic is an assessment by Diane F. Orentlicher, Shrinking the Space for Denial: The impact of the ICTY in Serbia (Beograd, Open Society Institute, 2008).  Interview with Professor Robert Hayden, 17 July 2020.  Ellen Elias-Bursac, Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal Working in a Tug-of-War (London: Palgrave, 2015). The Outreach office was founded in 2000. https:// www.icty.org/x/file/Outreach/15-years-of-outreach/outreach-15_en_light.pdf The astounding scope of its activity in https://www.icty.org/en/features/icty-legacy-dialogues [Last seen: 21 February 2021].

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5.3 Entering the minefield: expert witnessing in the ICTY Given the vast variety of legal contexts in which historians appear, a good place to start is a procedural aspect of this problem. Commissioning expertise is a thorny issue in every legal regime. In the continental system, criminal justice is historically grounded in the inquisitorial procedure.27 The experts are summoned by the judge, and although they can be suggested or challenged by the parties, they typically come from a pre-existing list run by the state authorities. Adversarial procedure, typically for the Anglo-Saxon legal environment, rests on a different approach, elevating the judge to the role of procedural arbiter, who takes an active but detached role in a criminal case, ensuring that the parties are treated even-handedly.28 Therefore, common law judges rarely commission expertise, leaving this to the parties, but they strictly scrutinize the admissibility of expert witnesses and their reports, serving as gatekeepers.29 Both systems have their merits and problems. In its extreme, continental courtroom expertise can turn into an “inside job”, whereas the adversarial procedure of common law can turn experts into “hired guns”.30 Transparency and clear procedure, reliable precedents and codes of conduct serve to improve this inherently imperfect practice, which remains particularly contested in the domain of ‘softer’ sciences. Operating in a framework which was borrowing both from continental and common law, mixing adversarial and inquisitorial procedurals elements, the ICTY has inherited weaknesses of both systems in regard to expert witnessing. As an international tribunal, the ICTY could not rely on investigating mechanisms equivalent to the ones at the disposal of the state. In such circumstances, “to adopt strict rules on admissibility of evidence in these circumstances would complicate the task of the Tribunal tremendously when its lack of coercive powers  Friedrich Toepel, Grundstrukturen des Sachverständigenbeweises im Strasfprozessrecht (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002); Lirieka Meintjes-Van der Walt, Expert Evidence in the Criminal Justice Process: A Comparative Approach (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers, 2001).  Sheila Jasanoff, Science at the Bar: Law, Science and Technology in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Tal Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).  Specifically in the case of historians Jonathan D. Martin, “Historians at the Gate: Accommodating Expert Testimony in Federal Courts,” in New York University Law Review 78 (2003): 1518–1543.  Morgan J. Kousser, “Are Expert Witnesses Whores? Reflections on Objectivity in Scholarship and Expert Witnessing,” in The Public Historian 6 (1984): 5–19; David J. Rothman, “Serving Clio and the Client: The Historian as Expert Witness,” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77 (2003): 25–44.

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already makes gathering of evidence very difficult.”31 To overcome that obstacle, the rules of procedure leaned more towards adversarial then inquisitorial practice, at least as far as the law of evidence, including the issue of expert witnessing, was concerned. Although the judges could summon experts as well, their reports were in practice almost always commissioned by the parties. The judges got to decide on their admissibility, both in terms of the relevance of the findings and the credentials of the expert, but they were initially reluctant to exercise this power. Therefore, the ICTY became increasingly dependent on the production of expertise by “. . . professionals who provide their expert opinion on topics such as military doctrine, political structures, former Yugoslav law, demographics, financial transactions, and forensic evidence. They help the judges to determine the circumstances in which crimes were committed . . .”32 For historical expert reports, the procedure is as for any other: the party calls upon an expert who then submits the report to the Trial chamber and discloses it to the other side as well. The other party then has the opportunity to challenge the report on the basis of its content or the credibility of its author. The panel, consisting of three judges, decides on the admissibility. In case the report is deemed admissible, and the other party still questions it, the expert is summoned to the courtroom to testify about the content of the report, and is cross-examined by the opposing party.33 This was usually the case in the ICTY practice, and took place almost without exception when historical expert testimonies were at stake. Such a pattern was established early on. The first witness who testified in front of the ICTY, and indeed the very first witness to testify in front of any international tribunal since Nuremberg and Tokyo, was an expert, Professor James Gow of King’s College London, political scientist specializing in Yugoslav civilianmilitary relations, who testified in 1996 in a case against Duško Tadić, a lowranked Serbian perpetrator from the Bosnian War. This first case was of immense importance as it was determining applicable law and setting up the procedural precedents. On that occasion, it turned out that the judges were apparently interested in both the recent and distant past of that region. The presiding judge,

 Almiro Rodrigues, Cecile Tournaye, “Hearsay Evidence,” in Essays on ICTY Procedure and Evidence in Honor of Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, ed. Richard May (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2001), 291–296.  https://www.icty.org/en/about/registry/witnesses [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  ICTY, Rules of Procedure and Evidence, rule 94 bis, https://www.icty.org/x/file/Legal%20Li brary/Rules_procedure_evidence/IT032Rev50_en.pdf [Last seen: 21 February 2021]. More on the ICTY’s rules of procedure and law of evidence: Gideon Boas, “Creating Laws of Evidence for International Criminal Law: The ICTY and the Principle of Flexibility,” Criminal Law Forum 12 (2001): 41–90.

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Gabrielle Kirk McDonnald, asked Gow if he can begin “from the 14th Century? Is that possible for you to do? Maybe you do not even understand my question because I am not much of an historian, although I actually majored in history.” Gow replied: I am not necessarily a historian either (. . .) I think the purpose of the evidence that I am attempting to give is to set the events of 1991 and afterwards in their military-political context. In order to do that I have been reviewing some of the factors which went to create the Yugoslav states which dissolved in 1991, and that has meant making reference to not only the 14th Century but the 4th Century, but I hope in both as cursory a way but also as useful a way as is possible.

McDonnald would not let go this opportunity to learn about the distant past of the Balkans: “I want you to just talk, if you can, talk to us and tell us, take it from the 14th Century.” Eventually, Gow obliged “OK. If you do not mind, I will go back to the 4th Century and go through the whole thing chronologically.34 However, this was not the only historical lesson the bench was getting, as the defence also deployed the expertise of an anthropologist and legal scholar, Professor Robert Hayden of the University of Pittsburgh.35 Faced with significantly different interpretations of historical events, the judges were confronted with a revelation familiar to most professional historians – historical context is like a nose. Everybody has one, and not one is like another. Historical evidence hence turned from a sideshow into a battleground. Facing this challenge, the judges attempted to reconstruct a context of their case by building on the points of agreement: “Expert witnesses called both by the Prosecution and by the Defence testified in regard to the historical and geographic background and such evidence was seldom in conflict; in those rare cases where there has been some conflict the Trial Chamber has sought to resolve it by adopting appropriately neutral language”.36 Hence in their 1997 judgment, their description of historical context opened with the following passage: For centuries the population of Bosnia and Herzegovina, more so than any other republic of the former Yugoslavia, has been multi-ethnic. For more than 400 years Bosnia and Herzegovina were part of the Ottoman Empire. Its western and northern borders formed the boundary with the Austro-Hungarian Empire or its predecessors; a military frontier along that

 https://www.icty.org/x/cases/tadic/trans/en/960507IT.htm 123–24 [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/tadic/trans/en/960910ed.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021]. https:// www.icty.org/x/cases/tadic/trans/en/960911IT.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021]. He published his reflections in Robert M. Hayden, “Biased Justice: Humanrightsism and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” Cleveland State Law Review 47 (1999): 549–573.  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/tadic/tjug/en/tad-tsj70507JT2-e.pdf [Last seen: 21 February 2021].

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boundary was established as early as the sixteenth century to protect the Hapsburg lands from the Ottoman Turks. The presence of this old military frontier . . .37

The contextual part of judgment stretched for over 40 pages before the name of the accused was even mentioned. Worse still, the effort to rely on consensus clearly eroded as they got to contemporaneous matters. This early indicator that the reconstruction of historical background is not an effortless task, and contains an explosive antagonistic potential, went fairly unnoticed. That was somewhat surprising, as the forensic fragility of historical evidence had been debated in the United States for some time.38 In Europe, it came to full attention in the course of belated Holocaust trials in France. One of the leading experts in that field, Henry Rousso, famously refused to testify in the case against Maurice Papon in October 1997 with the following argument: “In my soul and conscience, I believe that historians cannot be ‘witnesses’ and that the role of ‘expert witness’ rather poorly suits the rules and objective of a court trial. It is one thing to try to understand history in the context of a research project or course lesson, with the intellectual freedom that such activities presuppose: it is quite another to try to do so under oath when an individual’s fate hangs in the balance.”39 A lively debate was furthered with Carlo Ginsburg’s book The Judge and the Historian (1999) which emphasized the incompatibilities between a criminal procedure and historical investigation.40 The concern was also raised about the tension between different standards of proof and evidence, as well as legal and historical understanding of the concepts of fact, cause, agency, or even truth. The finality of the legal proceeding seemed opposed to the open-ended nature of historical research, whereas the potential of perpetrators to use history as their refuge was also recognized.41 On the other hand, the Irving versus Lipstadt trial in the United Kingdom (2000) saw an unprecedented involvement of historical expert witnessing from the UK, US,  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/tadic/tjug/en/tad-tsj70507JT2-e.pdf, 20 [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Hal K. Rothman, “Historian v. Historian: Interpreting the Past in the Courtroom,” in Public Historian 15 (1993): 39; Neil M. Richards, “Clio and the Court: A Reassessment of the Supreme Court’s Uses of History,” in Journal of Law and Politics 13 (1997): 809; Daniel A. Farber, “Adjudication of Things Past: Reflections on History as Evidence,” and Reuel E. Schiler, “The Strawhorsemen of the Apocalypse: Relativism and the Historian as Expert Witness,” Hastings Law Journal 49 (1998): 1009–1026, 1169–1181. Cf. Ramses Delafontaine, Historians as Expert Judicial Witnesses in Tobacco Litigation A Controversial Legal Practice (Cham: Springer International Publisher, 2015).  Henry Rousso, The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 85.  Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice (London: Verso, 1999).  Gerry Simpson, “Didactic and Dissident Histories in War Crimes Trials,” in Albany Law Review 60 (1997): 801.

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Germany and the Netherlands, and left many convinced that the transnationalization of historical expert witnessing is a useful antidote to the parochialism of both national judicial systems and historiography. However, even Richard Evans, who deployed his testimony in that case, expressed reservations about historical expertise in criminal cases.42 These sporadic and disconnected exchanges were unlikely to reverberate in the ICTY courtrooms, which were increasingly relying on historical professionals. Back in 1997, when Robert Donia of the University of Michigan was first called to deliver his expertise for the ICTY, the prosecutor explained to him the mandate: “None of the judges came from South-eastern Europe and lacked background knowledge of the history and culture of the area.”43 Its internationally composed panels were in need of a broader context in which crimes took place, and were impaired in their gatekeeping function in this domain. Outsourcing historical background to historians became a firmly established precedent, leading the ICTY right into a minefield, described by Donia, who testified no less than 15 times in front of that court: “Whenever the prosecution has called a historian as an expert witness, the defence has responded in kind.”44

5.4 Antagonistic pattern: stretched between local contexts and global perspectives As its full name reveals, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991 is an international judicial body, however temporally, spatially and substantively limited in its jurisdiction. This international court tried individuals for breaches of international law that were committed in a very specific historical context. Dealing solely with mass crimes committed in the course of the collapse of the former Yugoslavia posed a challenge of applying global standards of international humanitarian

 Richard J. Evans, “History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness,” in History and Theory 41 (2002): 340.  Robert Donia, The Witness Who Saw Nothing: The ICTY through the Eyes of an Expert Witness on History, manuscript provided by the author, 2.  Robert J.Donia, Encountering the Past: History at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, The Journal of the International Institute, Volume 11, Issue 2–3, /Winter 2004), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/ j/jii/4750978.0011.201/–encountering-the-past-history-at-the-yugoslav-war-crimes?rgn=main;view= fulltext [Last seen: 21 February 2021].

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law on a very limited case. That tension between the global and the local found its way into the existing structural setting of adversarial testimony, aggravated by the relaxation of the gatekeeping judicial function. The parties quite regularly challenged each other’s experts and their reports, wrapping their cases into alternative, competing and even mutually exclusive historical interpretations of past events. Such wars of experts are not uncommon, and national legal systems have built systems to curb them.45 The ICTY neither had the time to develop such case law, nor was the matter given a timely thought. Retrieving the historical background of the Yugoslav wars for judicial purposes remained elusive in the subsequent cases, as antagonistic couplings of experts became the new norm. Rare were the situations in which historical presentation was uncontested by another expert. such as the testimony of Professor Marie-Janine Calic from LMU Munich (in the Čelebići case),46 Even in such cases, a testimony was likely to be subjected to a cross-examination, an experience which Professor Nick Miller from Boise State University (Prlić case), found “extremely unpleasant (. . .) It was also new to me to be in such a generally adversarial situation. I found it extremely tense.”47 The higher the stakes, the higher the likelihood that clashes would appear. With time, the indictments became more ambitious, resulting in more complex cases that were climbing up the chain of command to reach wartime commanders and politicians. They were naturally tempted to wrap their defence in a national flag, presenting themselves as champions of their nations and victims of international conspiracy. Historical evidence was deployed accordingly in a cluster of cases that investigated crimes which occurred in the course of the Croatian armed involvement in Bosnia and Hercegovina. It triggered a series of expert testimonies delivered by sociologists and historians (Robert Donia, researcher in Balkan history at University of Michigan, and John Allcock, professor of sociology at the University of Bradford for the prosecution; professor of sociology at Texas A&M University

 Daubert standard which regulates the admissibility of expert testimony under the US federal law upon inspecting whether the theory or technique employed by the expert is generally accepted in the scientific community; whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication; whether it can be and has been tested; whether it has a known error rate; and whether the research was conducted independent of the particular litigation or dependent on an intention to provide the proposed testimony.” This standard never functioned ideally for “soft” sciencesLawrence. Rosen,. “Expert Testimony in the Social Sciences: A Historical Overview of Contemporary Issues.” Law and History Review 38 (2020): 123–42  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/mucic/trans/en/970318ED.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Communciation with Nicholas Miller, 5 April 2012.

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Stjepan Meštrović, and Mladen Ančić, history professor form University of Zagreb for the defence).48 Over time, such an antagonistic pattern was reappearing in many ICTY trials, influencing heavily the geographic distribution of 56 experts who testified in front of it. Out of 56 experts, over a third came from the region of the former Yugoslavia (7 from Serbia and 6 from Bosnia, 5 from Croatia, 2 from Slovenia), but the AngloSaxon environment was also heavily present (16 from the United States, 6 from the United Kingdom) followed by continental European experts (3 from the Netherlands, 2 from Germany, 2 from France, 2 from Russia, 1 each from Denmark, Belgium and Bulgaria, Poland, Italy).49 The distinction between global and local is somewhat blurred by the fact that many international scholars have deep roots in the Balkans.50 However, the internationals were typically engaged by the prosecution, whereas ex-Yugoslavs predominantly testified for the defence. These positions were entrenched. In different contexts, I spoke with about 15 expert witnesses out of 56, and literally none would ever consider testifying for another side. Therefore, instead of learning about the background of the conflict, the judges were forced into deciding between growingly incompatible interpretations, which were hitting a very delicate spot between the international and national, to which belongs one of the defining tensions of contemporary historiography.51 Not many understood the potential uses of this growing cleavage better than Slobodan Milošević, Serbian wartime president and the first head of state to stand trial before an international court for the crimes that transpired during his time in office. Arrested in Belgrade and transferred to the ICTY in June 2001, he was facing charges for war crimes committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Representing  Ksenija Turković, “Historians in Search for Truth about Conflicts in the Territory of Former Yugoslavia as Expert Witnesses in Front of the ICTY,” in Časopis zasuvremenu povijest 36 (2004): 41–67.  These numbers look very different in the ICTR, where there were 4400 witness appearances, but were only 63 expert witnesses altogether, with approximately 104 expert witness appearances in total. 27 witnesses testified for the prosecution, 36 for the defence. 58 were male, 5 were female. They came from Belgium: 6; Canada: 4; France: 12; Germany: 2; Kenya: 3; Ivory Coast: 1; Jordan: 1; Malawi: 1; Mauritania: 1; Namibia: 1; Netherlands: 1; New Zealand: 1; Norway: 2; Rwanda: 5; South Africa: 2; Switzerland: 3; Tanzania: 1; United Kingdom: 1; United States of America: 13; Zimbabwe: 1. Correspondence with the ICTY.  Geographic distribution can also be misleading, due to the mobility which characterizes global academia. How to bracket a scholar who did her degrees in Germany but teaches in the United Kingdom, or a Dutch anthropologist teaching in Germany? There are even more complex cases, such as a scholar from Bosnia of Serbian origin teaching law in the United Kingdom, or a historian born and schooled in the United States but teaching in Denmark.  Lutz Raphael, Geschichtswissenschaft im Zeitalter der Extreme: Theorien, Methoden, Tendenzen von 1900 bis zur Gegenwart (München C.H.Beck, 2010), 20–22.

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himself, basically uninterested in the juridical outcome of his process but invested in his desire to promote his version of recent history, Milošević skilfully utilized the antagonistic nature of adversarial proceedings. Wherever possible, he built on the distinction between the global and the local, in a trial which, according to Sabrina Ramet, became a space to “write (or rewrite) the history of the War of Yugoslav Succession (. . .) It is also a drama, over which Milošević and prosecutors (. . .) are competing for the right to compose the script.”52 Interestingly, by that time the prosecution was not unaware of the dangers of opening a historical Pandora’s Box, but had proceeded in that direction anyhow: “Matters of history always leave scope for argument, for doubt between historians. But history, even distant history sometimes available to this Court through the witnesses, will have a relevance from time to time in showing what the accused thought, what those identified in indictments as his co-perpetrators thought, what his compliant supporters thought, and what was available in history to fire up the emotions, particularly nationalist emotions.”, read prosecutor Geoffrey Nice’s opening statement, echoing the opinion of the ICTY Chief Prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte: “I recognize that this trial will make history, and we would do well to approach our task in the light of history.”53 Seizing the opportunity to portray the proceedings as a trial of Serbian history and not of his leadership, Milošević retorted in his own opening statement: “There are true historical facts that speak of all of this, and it is nonsensical to accuse the wrong side (. . .) Scholars will be coming here, academicians, if they dare come.”54 A historian who stepped first into this whirlwind was Audrey Budding from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, who in 1998 defended her dissertation Serb Intellectuals and the National Question. She was invited by the Office of the Prosecutor to write an expert report, entitled Serbian Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: Historical Background and Context, which she delivered in 2003. She was subsequently cross-examined by a self-representing Milošević: “This report that you produced here was prepared by you as commissioned by the side opposite. Is that true? And I suppose that your doctoral thesis was the result of your free and independent scholarly choice; correct?”55 This triggered a lively

 Sabrina P. Ramet, “Martyr in His Own Mind: The Trial and Tribulations of Slobodan Miloševic,” in Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 5 (2004): 112–138.  ICTY, Milosevic trial, 10 April 2002.  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/020212IT.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021].https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/020214IT.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Budding https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/030723ED.htm, 24838 [Last seen: 21 February 2021].

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methodological exchange, in which Milošević positioned himself as a radical historicist, evoking some authorities to that end: Milošević: Do you know this work of Leopold Ranke? Budding: I’ve read it years and years ago. Yes, of course I know it but I wouldn’t at the moment be able to recall much about it. Judge May: Is it now regarded as a work which is relied on in modern scholarship? Budding: Well, I think that historical scholarship has moved far beyond where it was in the nineteenth century, so I think the primary interest of this work now would be as an example of very outstanding nineteenth century scholarship. (. . .) Milošević: Yes, but if we stencil one situation from one century onto another century, do you as an historian believe that this amounts to one of the gravest methodological mistakes in – for an historian? Judge May: What do you mean? Milošević: Well, precisely what I said (. . .) The copying of a historical situation from the end of the twentieth century onto the first half of the nineteenth century, does it amount to the phenomenon of copying, a stencilling of a situation? So, I’m asking Ms. Budding is it considered to be one of the gravest methodological mistakes in the science of history? Judge May: It seems to be absolute nonsense what you’re saying. Milošević: That is a projection of a historical situation onto another period which amounts to the gravest methodological mistake in the science of history. If you don’t understand this, I have to move on to my next question. Judge May: No, because it’s rubbish. I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you don’t make the question clear, the witness can’t possibly answer it.56

Over a year later, Milošević got a chance to return to this theme and develop it through deployment of his own expert witnesses. A substantial part of the testimony of Dr Slavenko Terzić, director of Historical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, was devoted to a refutation of Budding’s findings: “Unfortunately, I cannot agree with that at all, and I have a complete opposing view to Ms. Budding (. . .) who had previously written a very good doctoral thesis (. . .) This impression that Ms. Budding has gained is not based on archival research (. . .) Ms. Budding’s methodology is very strange.”57 Furthering this conception, Professor Čedomir Popov of University of Novi Sad devoted his report to the deconstruction of

 ICTY Transcripts, 24.7.2003 https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/030724IT. htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Terzic https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/041209IT.htm 34381, 34429

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the concept of Greater Serbia, which was in his view imputed from the outside. “Serbia, in your perception, has been really a victim nation and a victim state for hundreds of years, basically, hasn’t it? Is that right?”, asked prosecutor Nice, eliciting a calm answer: “That’s right”.58 Popov also found Budding’s report “pseudoscientific”: “I don’t know whether Ms. Budding is a member of the academy, perhaps she is, but her writings are a confusion (. . .) She is mixing up (. . .) historical criteria from the 19th century and 21st century criteria. And it is a basic rule of historical methodology as formulated by Dilthey, the philosopher of history, whereby every historical appearance must be looked at from the context of its own times and not from our time”.59 Another stab was inflicted by Kosta Čavoški, Professor at the Faculty of Law whose expert report entitled Budding versus Budding, The Two Faces of the Same Author in the Case of Slobodan Milosevic.60 This provocative expert report was admitted into evidence on March 1 2006, but was never delivered.61 Ten days later, Milosevic died in his cell, collapsing under the weight of this mammoth trial, which was significantly prolonged, not least due to the lengthy ventures into the recent and distant past.62 He was successful in persuading Serbian public opinion in his central thesis that it is not him, but Serbian history which is on trial.

 https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/041215IT.htm, 34567 [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/041215IT.htm, 34568–9 [Last seen: 21 February 2021]. https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/tord/en/041203-2.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/tord/en/060206.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021]. Čavoški was contrasting Budding’s dissertation and report almost line by line, pointing out at inconsistencies, omitting to note that they might come from the difference between those two genres. Čavoški nontheless published his report in an unusualy bilingual form Kosta Cavoski, Budding versus Budding: Two Faces of the Same Author in the Case of Slobodan Milosevic (Belgrade: Nikola Pasic, 2006).  https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/tdec/en/060301.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Vladimir Petrovic, “Slobodan Milošević in the Hague: Failed Success of a Historical Trial.”, in Remembrance, History and Justice, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu, Bogdan Iacob, (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015), 296–310. Gideon Boas, The Milosevic Trial: The Milosevic Trial: Lessons for the Conduct of Complex International Criminal Proceedings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Timothy William Waters. The Milošević Trial: An Autopsy. Ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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5.5 A belated transformation Given that the Milošević trial was widely perceived as the peak of the ICTY’s activity, it is most unfortunate that its anticlimactic end overshadowed an interesting development in historical expert witnessing in front of that court. In the early years of the tribunal, the prevailing historical testimonies were highly contextual. They rested on a macroanalysis delivered by an outside expert. Their purpose was to provide a broad historical context for a particular case. An unstated goal of such an approach was also to educate the judges, who came from all around the world, in the specificities of the Yugoslav region that they were typically not acquainted with. Initially, this didn’t work out very well. However, the last decade of The Hague tribunal (2006–2016) brought in many useful novelties. The trials were shorter and more strictly managed. The judges also showed more readiness to control and direct the scope of expert testimonies. The time of great narratives had passed, and although there were numerous judicial problems and challenges, historical forensic contributions by and large switched from painting a monumental background to meso and microlevels.63 At the same time, the reports were increasingly resting on the documents unearthed over the time by the ICTY. The Office of the Prosecutor secured a continuity of such activity through the creation of specialized units, the Military Analysis Team and particularly the Leadership Research Team, which produced detailed studies focused on the wartime personalities (Patrick Treanor, The Bosnian Serb Leadership, 1990–1992) or institutions (Christian Axboe Nielsen, The Bosnian Serb Ministry of Internal Affairs: Genesis, Performance and Command and Control 1990–1992) that stood the test of time, both as pieces of criminal evidence and of historical scholarship.64 Many circumstances contributed to this paradigm shift, not least the passage of time. The difficulties of producing instant histories about the conflict, which was practically still unfolding in late 1990s, were alleviated with the growing availability of primary documents. Many experts who reappeared in the ICTY noticed the shift. Robert Donia recalled his first appearances (1997): “I approached my testimony in the Blaškić case as I would an introductory lecture to an audience of educated and curious, but relatively uninformed, listeners.” Later on, he

 Richard Ashby Wilson, Writing History in International Criminal Trials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 119–128.  A detailed survey conducted among the people engaged in the ICTY prosecutions confirms this impression: Ahmad Wais Wardak, Andrew Corin and Richard Ashby Wilson, “Surveying History at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” The Journal of Eurasian Law 4(1) (10 May 2011): 1–39, 7.

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observes, “historical testimony evolved from relatively unstructured, generic presentations of monumental history to narrowly-defined, thoroughly documented, and exacting micro-histories.”65 However, although historical forensic testimony in time found more stable anchoring in the Tribunal’s procedures and judgements, it was not as successful in entering public discourse in the former Yugoslavia, already contaminated with bitter feuds over the past. All in all, given the vast scope and uneven character of historical forensic contributions before the ICTY, its complete assessment is still in the waiting, especially against the backdrop of tens of thousands of documents which are at this moment available to the researchers, and hundreds of thousands more which are still waiting to be disclosed.66 Still, until such time, it is safe to conclude that the initial tension, flagged over two centuries ago by the Hastings trial, is far from overcome. Historiography belongs to the realm of highly interpretative scholarship, where consensus is more the exception than the rule. This is especially the case with the history of the Balkans, and definitely with the historiography of the recent Yugoslav wars, which arguably opened out ever more conflictual topics during two decades of painstaking research. Introduced with an intention to clarify, history transformed itself into an important and quarrelsome distractor from the judicial merits of the cases, providing a venue for battles for interpretations of the Yugoslav war in the ICTY courtrooms, which continued decades after the cessation of actual hostilities.67

5.6 Concluding remarks: toward responsible historical forensic contributions The landscape of the contemporary international criminal judiciary is a complex one. The era of ad hoc tribunals is continuing with the creation of hybrid courts in  Donia, The Witness Who Saw Nothing, 4.  An assessment of the ICTY documentary legacy by Iva Vukusic, “The Archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” in History 98 332, No. 4 (2013): 623–635  Todor Kuljić, Olga Manojlović Pintar, Olivera Milosavljević, O., The Balkans Rachomon: historiography and literature on dissolution of SFRY (Belgrad: Helsinki Commitee for Human Rights in Serbia: 2002). Sabrina Ramet, Thinking about Yugoslavia. Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Charles Ingrao, Thomas Emmert, Confronting the Yugoslav Controversies: A Scholars’ Initiative (Washington: US Institute for Peace, 2012); Dubravka Stojanović, Husnija Kamberović, Eds. Ratovi 1990-ih u regionalnim historiografijama: kontroverze, interpretacije, nasljeđe, (Sarajevo: Udruženje za modern istoriju, 2021).

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Bosnia, Kosovo and Timor-Leste. More recently, Kosovo Specialist Chambers started its work and there are talks about establishing an international court for Syria.68 Despite the challenges it faces, the permanent International Criminal Court is also there to stay. Furthermore, significant elements of international humanitarian law are integrated in national judiciaries, and as the doctrine of universal jurisdiction takes hold, proceedings for war crimes and human rights abuses are happening all around the world. However, as the hopes which characterized the last decade of the 1990s are giving way to sombre realities of a growingly unstable world in the twenty-first century, it becomes clear that the tensions between universalism and particularism are here to stay as well. Scenes from the ICTY courtrooms are very likely to appear elsewhere. This court, troubled as it was, was better positioned for such a task compared to the ICTR or ICC.69 If the ICTY could not get its history right, with a quarter of a century and well over two billion euros at disposal, it might as well be that generating a universally acceptable historical narrative is simply too tall an order for any international judicial institution.70 Not even Nuremberg could do it. The courts can, and indeed should open all sorts of cans of worms, but closing them remains a wider societal task, which entails different professions and multiple agencies. Such dialogue about the past sometimes entails generations, has its setbacks too, yet it has no alternative, in my view. As historians continue to perform on this precarious institutional crossroads between history and law, it is prudent to re-examine their role in that light. Let us then turn to another metaphor. Any mountaineer aiming at the conquest of the hights of the Himalaya is aware of the enormous importance of local knowledge. The most coveted among such helpers are Sherpa, native to the land and  https://www.un.org/press/en/2021/ga12319.doc.htm [Last seen: 21 February 2021].  Nigel Eltringham, “Illuminating the broader context: anthropological and historical knowledge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013): 338–355. About the ICTR in general see Thierry Cruvellier, Court of Remorse: Inside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). A recent assessment on the effect of these tribunals: Sterio, Milena, and Michael Scharf, eds., The Legacy of Ad Hoc Tribunals in International Criminal Law: Assessing the ICTY’s and the ICTR’s Most Significant Legal Accomplishments Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. International tirbunals are increasingly under such scrutiny: Nancy A. Combs, Fact-Finding without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiary Foundations of International Criminal Convictions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Aldo Zammit Borda, Histories Written by International Criminal Courts and Tribunals Developing a Responsible History Framework (Berlin: Springer 2020); Barrie Sander, Doing Justice to History: Confronting the past in International Criminal Courts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).  Rupert Skilbeck, “Funding Justice: The Price of War Crimes Trials,” in Human Rights Brief 15, No. 3 (2008): 6–10. The budget of the ICTY is available at https://www.icty.org/en/about/tribunal/ the-cost-of-justice [Last seen: 21 February 2021.

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accustomed to mountain climbing. Their role in such explorations was so huge that the term Sherpa became an idiom for a mentor and a guide, teaching essentials to an ambitious outsider, even functioning as a cultural translator. Historians and social scientists who appear as experts frequently are serving a similar purpose. They are mediating between a global perspective informed by the international humanitarian law and the knowledge of local context in which mass crimes have occurred. Their success rate varies, and is dependent on many variables – the overall legal setting, the nature of the case, the topic of the testimony, personal traits of the expert, social responses. All instances simply need to be scrutinized case by case. In such a scrutiny, the issue of yardstick is of a paramount importance. The first one is strictly legal. In this arena, it is possible to detect whether a testimony was successful simply by tracing how is it reflected in the judgment, if at all. Another yardstick pertains to extrajudicial effects of expert’s appearance, i.e., its influence in the public arena. However, both yardsticks are of limited relevance for assessing the scholarly contribution of an expert. In this case, the report is to be reviewed like any other scholarly product, against the background of existing literature and availability of the sources, in order to assess whether it furthers our knowledge or not. All in all, one and the same appearance of the expert can be legally indispensable, publicly counterproductive and historiographically relevant. However, it can also come across as historiographically redundant, publicly influential and legally marginal. At this point in time, a historian venturing into a legal arena has a very limited means of influencing those outcomes. Some experts were presented with a more limited mandate than they would prefer. Some were given a limited quantity of evidence to work with, others were allowed access to more substantial bodies of evidence. Some historians adjusted with ease to this collaboration, frequenting courtrooms all around the world. Many testified once, never to do it again. Seen from another side of the bench, some historians were very helpful witnesses, others much less so. One thing is certain, the courtroom is no classroom, and even the most meticulous preparation can simply go wrong, as the history of historical expert witnessing is teaching us repeatedly. So, what is to be done? A tempting solution would be to abandon an entire venture as futile. Many historians are actually doing just that. After such exposure to the blunders of historical forensics, they can hardly be blamed. Although in an ideal world one would pick the right person for the right topic, in reality, for the many experts who appeared before the court, frequently there is a long list of those who declined to do so. The consequences of these attritions are depicted in Charles Mayer’s warning: “If good judges and historians shun these

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tasks, they will be taken on by prejudiced or triumphalist ones.”71 Such is indeed often the case, especially in this complex interplay between local contexts and global perspectives. This is most unfortunate, especially given the general retreat of the humanities and their limited impact on the contemporary world. Yet, it would be equally ludicrous to subpoena historians and force them to testify against their will, even though there were such cases as well. Seemingly, historical forensics remains permanently stretched between such Scylla and Charybdis. Yet help is on the way in navigating those tricky waters. Over time, important theoretical insights and practical experience, amassed, create conditions to build responsibly on the work of our predecessors72 They should be brought into dialogue, with some practical interventions and tangible goals in mind. One should not underestimate the ability of historical scholarship to autoregulate. For instance, over a decade ago, Professor Antoon de Baets of Groningen University proposed a code of ethics for historians, given their “specific duties because they obtain special knowledge about the past.”73 This is all too obvious in the legal arena. Hence there is no reason not to set up a working group to examine experiences of historical forensic ventures in international legal arenas, and draft a set of recommendations to enhance their performance. There is evidence that forensic historians can sometimes act as a powerful superconductor between past realities and present concerns. In less fortunate cases, the expert plays a far less helpful role, exacerbating the tension into an unbridgeable gulf. Increasing awareness about the challenges of this practice creates preconditions for improving its future manifestations. Such reflective bridging between the two fields has the potential to reduce the political pressure, ease the disciplinary tensions, and contribute both to advancing the legal process and furthering the academic exchange.

 Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, eds., History, Memory and the Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 1.  Nanci Adler, Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice (Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 21–36. Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York: Rotuledge, 2012). Maxine D.Goodman, “Slipping through the Gate: Trusting Daubert and Trial Procedures to Reveal the Pseudo-Historian’ Expert Witness and to Enable the Reliable Historian Expert Witness – Troubling Lessons from Holocaust-Related Trials,” Baylor Law Review 60 (2008): 824–879.  Antoon De Baets, Responsible History (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), 191.

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6 The Waitangi Tribunal and the Public Life of History In her widely read book History in Practice, Ludmilla Jordanova points outs that “the idea of a usable past is hardly new” but is “probably more prominent now than ever”. She also notes that history is not only being used more these days but that as a result of what we might call the democratisation of history it is being put to more diverse ends. This has very real implications for the nature of historical knowledge as well as the ways that claims about historical truth are dealt with by democratic nation states. In this chapter I am going to consider the example of one settler colonial society – New Zealand – in which the past has been put to greater and more diverse uses in the last several decades.1 Since the mid-1970s, New Zealand’s indigenous people, known as Māori, have been making legal claims about the losses of sovereignty, land, language and culture they have suffered as a result of the British colonisation of their country, which began in the early to mid-nineteenth century. These claims have been considered by an important legal tribunal and major settlements have been reached in a context in which the outcomes have been widely regarded as having major significance for the state, the nation and its peoples.2 The same process has been occurring in the comparable settler societies of Canada and Australia.3 In all these cases, history has been central. This is so for at least two reasons. First, the losses that indigenous people have suffered, and which are fundamental to the claims that have been made and considered, occurred because of events that took place in the past. Second, both the claims and the consideration of them are rooted in an assumption or an assertion that the claimants are these nations’ aboriginal or first peoples and nations.

 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 168, 175.  There was nothing new about Māori making these claims or the fact that they were addressed to and considered by courts or legal commissions, but there can be no doubt that they have been more vigorous in making these claims and that have had greater impact.  A somewhat similar process occurred earlier in the United States. Between 1948 and 1978, a body known as the Indian Land Claims Commission investigated claims about land loss. Historical research played only a minor role in its work, yet this had implications for historical practice as it played a major role in prompting the foundation of the new historical sub-discipline called ethnohistory (See Michael E. Harkin, “Ethnohistory’s Ethnohistory: Creating a Discipline from the Ground Up,” Social Science History 34 (2010): 113–28; and Christian McMillen, Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-006

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Yet the fact that history has been fundamental to the claims indigenous people have made does not necessarily mean that the discipline of history or its practitioners play a major role in either the making of those claims or the consideration of them by the settler state. The role that history and historians have played has varied considerably between the jurisdictions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In the case of New Zealand, they have been crucial. This is so for a particular historical reason. The way in which Pākehā (that is, settlers) acquired, and Māori lost, land mostly involved some legal instrument or another that was derived from the colonising power, not the least of which was a historic treaty, which in turn has had two consequences: first, the claims have been made and considered in reference to the colonial law at the time of the events in question, rather than just some abstract notion of justice or rights; and, second, the use of legal instruments to alienate land created a vast written archive, which has largely survived, and the expertise of trained historians is deemed necessary in order to recover and make sense of it. By contrast, in the Australian case there was no recognised historic treaty and no legal process through which indigenous land was alienated. Consequently, anthropology and anthropologists rather than history and historians have been the key players in the making and consideration of indigenous people’s claims.4 A broader factor helps to explain further why history and historians have been central to the claims process that I am considering here. Recent decades have seen the rise of a particular kind of politics, which we might call the politics of recognition, in which the past has been fundamental to the work of legal inquiries that have been established to provide reparation of some kind or another to the victims of oppression. Perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon, at least in the West, concerns the Nazi era in Europe or more particularly the Jewish Holocaust. As a result, there has been a juridification of the past, in which both history and the work of historians has been pressed into the service of the law and legal forms of understanding and judgement.5 The process I have sketched here has been part and parcel of a more general change in the relationship between what the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has characterised as the two lives of the discipline of history: the cloistered and the public. By cloistered, Chakrabarty means history as it is practised in academic contexts; by public, he means history as it is practised in realms beyond the university. As he has pointed out, there has always been a field of tension between the two lives of the discipline of history – indeed, this is one of my principal arguments in  For a discussion of the Canadian example, see Arthur J. Ray, Telling it to the Judge: Taking Native History to Court (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).  See Richard J. Evans, “History, Memory and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 326–345, for a discussion of this point.

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this chapter – but it has almost certainly become greater in recent decades. This is so because the academic discipline of history and its practitioners have come under pressure to accommodate ways of representing the past that they previously tended to rule out or regarded as invalid. The relationship between the cloistered and the public lives of history has been especially awkward and tense in colonial or formerly colonial societies. Indigenous as well as other marginal groups (such as the Dalits in India) have sought to make good the fact that they tend to be ‘historypoor’, that is, poor in terms of the sources of knowledge about the past that the discipline of history has traditionally valued. They have done this by using whatever resources (such as memory, myth and legend) best enable them to make claims about the past – claims that academic historians might have considerable political sympathy for, but which they might find difficult to accept or sanction because they amount to ways of representing the past that do not meet the evidentiary requirements of their discipline.6 The growth in the public life of history, especially in contexts such as the one I am discussing here, has drawn our attention to the probability that history practised in strict accordance with its disciplinary rules will not always useful in the broader public realm, however relevant it might be. This finding, it perhaps goes without saying, runs contrary to the assumption of many academic historians that by representing the past in accordance with the discipline they will invariably serve the interests of the oppressed and thus always be on the side of the angels.

6.1 The Waitangi tribunal In this chapter I focus much of my discussion on a special legal commission of inquiry known as the Waitangi Tribunal, which was established by an act of the New Zealand parliament in 1975. Before we consider the terms that were set down for its work, some information about the Treaty of Waitangi, after which this tribunal is named is required. This treaty was an agreement that was made by agents of the British Crown and Māori rangatira (chiefs) in the course of 1840, after which large-scale British colonisation of the islands of New Zealand began. In the years that followed, the Treaty was, like so many such treaties, more often breached than honoured by the colonial state. Yet it was also remembered, especially but by no means only by Māori, as a sacred compact and became the

 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Politics and Possibility of Historical Knowledge: Continuing the Conversation,” Postcolonial Studies 14 (2011): 246, and The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 7, 10.

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subject of a very powerful myth about the foundation of the nation that was articulated in popular historical texts such as a book by a journalist and author Thomas L. Buick. The Treaty of Waitangi Act empowered the Waitangi Tribunal to hear claims by Māori concerning any breaches of the Treaty that occurred after this legislation was enacted and to make recommendations to the government for redress if the claimants demonstrated that the Crown (in effect the New Zealand state) had in fact breached what were called the principles of the Treaty. The Tribunal was given the exclusive authority to determine the meaning and effect of those principles, and in undertaking this interpretive task it was directed to take note of the points where the English language text of the Treaty differed from the Māori language text.7 In the years immediately following the establishment of the Tribunal, it only heard a small number of claims, but in the early 1980s it issued several important reports after Edward (Eddie) Taihakurei Durie, the chief judge of the Māori Land Court, was appointed its chairperson. Yet the Tribunal only really came into its own in 1985 when the New Zealand parliament bestowed upon it the authority to hear Māori claims about historical breaches of the Treaty and thus grievances that dated back to the signing of the Treaty in 1840. In the wake of this change, there was a veritable flood of claims by Māori iwi (tribes) – some 1200 claims by 2005. Moreover, history and historians became increasingly important to the Tribunal’s work, as I will discuss later. The Tribunal itself soon began to use its new powers to articulate a radical reinterpretation of the Treaty. In order to understand how this occurred, we need to note, first of all, the terms of the Treaty. According to its English language text, the Māori chiefs ceded to the British Crown sovereignty as well as the right to be the sole purchaser of their land – known as the right of pre-emption – and in return the Crown guaranteed to Māori the possession of their lands, promised its protection, and granted them the rights and privileges of British subjects. For about a hundred years, this English language text was regarded as the official version of the Treaty at the same time as New Zealand law held that the Treaty was a legal nullity.8 Some were aware that the Treaty had been formulated in two languages and that there were differences between the two texts, but they nonetheless regarded the English

 The Treaty of Waitangi Act 1975, especially the preamble, http://www6.austlii.edu.au/nz/legis/ hist_act/towa19751975n114226/, [last seen: 9 November 2020].  For a discussion of what has often been regarded as the crucial legal case, see David V. Williams, A Simple Nullity? The Wi Parata Case in New Zealand Law and History (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2011).

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text as the primary one and assumed that the British Crown’s intentions in making the treaty determined its meaning and implications.9 The Tribunal, by contrast, adopted a very different position, holding that the Māori text of the Treaty, not the English text, was primary. Before I consider the role that history and historians played in the Tribunal’s work after it was authorised to hear claims regarding historic breaches of the Treaty, I wish to explain why and how the Tribunal came to take that stance on the texts of the Treaty. This discussion will reveal that many of the aspects of public history that historians tend to associate with the closing two decades of the twentieth century were evident in the middle decades of that century, or at least they were in New Zealand (where the relationship between the public and cloistered lives of history was undoubtedly different to that found in countries such as the United States). The first part of my explanation concerns the research conducted by a historian, Ruth Ross; the second and third parts the political and legal changes that meant her work was taken up in a particular but unexpected way.

6.2 The tribunal’s prehistory In February 1972 Ruth Ross presented a paper at a two-day seminar that had been organised by Victoria University of Wellington’s public outreach program in order to discuss the origins and significance of the Treaty of Waitangi, and later that year she published a version of this paper in an academic journal, the New Zealand Journal of History. In both, Ross made two specific points in the course of advancing a much larger argument. First, she contended that the Māori language text was the Treaty, pointing out that this was the text that the vast majority of the English agents and the rangatira had signed. Second, she suggested that there were major differences between the two texts. How was this so? First, Ross cast doubt as to whether the concept of sovereignty had been explained satisfactorily to the Māori chiefs, as the missionaries responsible for translating the English language text into Māori had improperly used the term kawanatanga, meaning chieftainship. Ross argued that if they had used another Māori word instead, namely mana, no rangatira would have had any doubt about what they were being asked to cede and so would not have agreed to sign the Treaty. Second, she argued that the Māori text stated that in return for ceding kawanatanga the Crown had confirmed and guaranteed

 See, for example, James Rutherford, Hone Heke’s Rebellion 1844–1846: An Episode in the Establishment of British Rule in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University College, 1947).

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to Māori te tino rangatira, meaning political authority and power, in regard to their lands, their places of abodes and all their property. Thus, she contended, the chiefs must have assumed that the British Crown was guaranteeing them something more than just the possession of their lands. Third, Ross argued that the translators had not properly translated the term ‘the exclusive right of pre-emption’ properly. She implied that if the rangatira had understood that they were being asked to cede to the British Crown the sole and exclusive right to purchase their land, they might not have signed the Treaty. Finally, Ross contended that the promise of bestowing on Māori the rights and privileges of British subjects was a nullity given the pre-emption clause in the Treaty’s second article.10 Given that Ross declared that the Māori text was the Treaty we might assume that she held that any consideration of its meaning and its implications for the present day should proceed on the basis of that text. However, this would be a mistake. It is clear that she was intent on emphasising the differences between the Māori text and what he called the English draft (or drafts) of the Treaty in order to bring into question whether the Treaty should be regarded as a valid agreement or contract. Thus, she concluded her New Zealand Journal of History article in this fashion: Ever since the 1840s the New Zealander has been told that the Treaty of Waitangi was the Māori Magna Carta . . . [and that it is a sacred compact]. Yet how many how many of today’s New Zealanders, Māori or Pakeha, ever look at the Treaty of Waitangi? To each one of us – the politician in Parliament, the kaumatua on the marae, Nga Tamatoa in the city, the teacher in the classroom, the preacher in the pulpit – the Treaty of Waitangi says whatever we want it to say. It is a symbol, of Pakeha self-righteousness, of Māori disillusionment. On the one hand, lip service is paid to its ‘spirit’ and ‘intentions’; on the other, agitation mounts for its ‘observance’ and ‘ratification’. The signatories of 1840 were uncertain and divided in their understanding of its meaning: who can now say that its intentions were? . . . [A] treaty – if this was indeed a treaty – can surely be ratified only in the terms in which it was signed. However good intentions may have been, a close study of events shows that the Treaty of Waitangi was hastily and inexpertly drawn up, ambiguous and contradictory in content, chaotic in its execution. To persist in postulating that this was a ‘sacred compact’ is sheer hypocrisy.11

How had Ross reached this interpretation? The answer to this question lies mostly in her location as a historian. While she was a professionally trained historian,

 Ruth Ross, “The Treaty on the Ground,” in The Treaty of Waitangi: Its Origins and Significance, foreword by Guy Powles (Wellington: University Extension Publications, 1972), 20, 23, and “Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Texts and Translations,” New Zealand Journal of History 6 (1972): 142–143, 145, 148.  Ross, “Te Tiriti,” 153–154.

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she never held an academic post. Instead, all the work she undertook as a historian, beginning in the early 1940s, can be regarded as public history and so was influenced by what Chakrabarty has called the public life of history and hence the pressures that are exerted by stories about the past that are coined, claimed, and contested in the public domain, rather than by cloistered life of history alone. This played a crucial role in Ross’ work in several respects. First is the simple fact that she undertook extensive research about the Treaty of Waitangi. Prior to the late 1970s, hardly any academic historians in New Zealand – that is, historians who held positions in a New Zealand university – were much interested in the Treaty, let alone in undertaking a major study of it, in contrast to public historians such as the aforementioned Buick. More specifically, nearly all the research that Ross undertook in regard to the Treaty was the result of the commissions she received from public bodies that were by their very nature influenced by the public life of history. Second, the nature of those commissions exerted a major influence on how Ross undertook the research. In the case of first commission she received (in 1953), she was required to prepare an introduction for a reissue by the New Zealand government printer of a facsimile of documents relating to the Treaty of Waitangi (that had been first published in 1877). This task, at least in Ross’ eyes, required her to adopt a particular approach to the Treaty, namely one that focused primarily on the texts of the Treaty rather than the context in which it was made, and to accept that it was foundational to the nation. As a result, she began to believe, more than any previous scholar had done, that there were major differences between the English and Māori texts of the Treaty and that this had implications for any account of the foundations of the nation.12 Furthermore, in pursuing line of inquiry, Ross, because the nature of her earlier work as a public historian had prompted her to undertake historical research that involved Māori, sought the help of several Māori, which few of any academic historians were in the practice of doing at that time, and they both encouraged and enabled her to examine the Māori text in a thorough-going fashion.13 In the case of the second commission Ross received to work on the Treaty (in 1955), the commissioning agent, the School Publications Branch of the New Zealand Department of Education, allowed and encouraged her to present in a bulletin (or

 Given what I have related about Ross’ argument about the Treaty, readers will not be surprised to learn that she soon realised that this would be extremely problematic for the commissioning agent and so she eventually abandoned the commission (Ruth Ross to J.C. Beaglehole, 1 April 1954, Ruth Ross Papers, Auckland War Memorial Museum Library, MS 1442, Box 24, Folder 5, and Ross to Michael Standish, 18 April 1957, Ross Papers, Box 91, Folder 1).  Ross to Beaglehole, 26 May 1953, 4 August 1953 and 19 April 1955, Ross Papers, Box 24, Folder 5.

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small book) for school children an account of one of the Treaty’s signings from a Māori perspective. This was so because the Department had particular requirements: that its authors present an accurate picture of the past as seen from the perspective of the historical players, that they produce accounts in the form of narrative rather than analysis, and that they use fictional devices in telling those stories if need be. These factors meant that Ross was much less bound by the conventions of academic history than a historian working in the academy, and this was especially important because there are no first-hand contemporary historical sources by Māori about the Treaty. Her use of various literary devices, but primarily that of a play, enabled her to present readers with number of different, indeed conflicting interpretations of and opinions about the Treaty and thus lay bare what she saw as a gulf of understanding between the Pākehā and Māori parties to it. Ross was very conscious of the degree to which this piece of work broke the rules of the discipline in which she had been trained. Soon after its publication, she remarked in a letter that it was “a curious sort of thing – fact and fancy, reconstruction and deduction, past and present all inextricably mixed. I don’t know if you would call it history.”14 Ross’ work on the Treaty was also profoundly influenced by another aspect of her location as a historian. At the time she undertook much of the work that the two Treaty commissions required her to do, Ross (and her husband and two young children) had moved from New Zealand’s largest city (Auckland) to a small Māori community in New Zealand’s far north, Motukiore, which was on the Hokianga River, near the site of one of the earliest Treaty meetings (in February 1840). Both this place, and its remoteness in more senses of the word than one, were crucial to what Ross wrote about the Treaty and how she wrote it. The fact that she lived in a Māori community led her to focus more on their perspectives of the Treaty than she would otherwise have done. In one of the letters she wrote shortly after she had published her school bulletin she observed: “Though I didn’t realise it at the time I drew as much on my experience as I did on the historical records. I could never have written this bulletin without knowing the area and the people. Not only is the scene Motukiore but the people of the hapu [sub-tribe] are Motukiore people, living and dead.” Ross’ remark also suggests the kind of shift in authority from the written historical record and the historian on the one hand to informants on the other that typifies the practice of oral history, which was much more common among public historians than academic historians at this time. Similarly, Ross’ remark in the letter I quoted in the previous paragraph reveals another distinctive  Ross to Alan Mulgan, 23 June 1957, Ruth Ross Papers, Box 91, Folder 1; Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Wellington: School Publications Branch, Department of Education, 1958); Ross to Standish, 21 November 1958, Ross Papers, Box 91, Folder 2; Rachael Bell, “Ruth Ross: New Zealand Scholar/ Treaty Scholar” (MA thesis, Massey University, 2005), 68–69.

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aspect of much public history, namely the way in which it tends to challenge or subvert the separation between past and present that is commonly regarded as fundamental to the practise of history in the cloister.15 Finally, here, we should note that Ross’ 1972 paper is itself an example of the public life of history in the sense that it was produced as the result of an invitation she received to a seminar that was organised not by an academic department at Victoria University of Wellington but by its public extension program, just as her article that followed was, despite the fact that it was published in an academic journal of history, the result of its editor issuing her with an invitation to submit it after he heard of the paper she had delivered at the seminar.16 Almost as soon as Ross’ paper and article were presented and published in 1972, her research began to have considerable political impact, not least because important Māori players heard the former or read the latter.17 Quite unexpectedly, though, what was taken up was not her principal argument that the Treaty had too many inconsistencies and contradictions for there to be a common understanding about its meanings and implications and so it should not be regarded as a document that provided the foundations of the nation, but rather her contention that there were major differences between the Māori text and the English text, her argument that the Māori text was the real treaty and the English version  Ross to Standish, 21 November 1958; Ross, “The Autochthonous New Zealand Soil,” in The Feel of Truth: Essays in New Zealand and Pacific History, ed. Peter Munz (Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed and Victoria University of Wellington, 1969), 55.  Keith Sinclair to Ross, 1 March 1972, Ross Papers, Box 84, Folder 4.  According to Ross, the Member of Parliament for Southern Māori, Whetū Tirāketene-Sullivan, who opened the seminar at Victoria University of Wellington and chaired the session in which Ross gave her paper, could not get a reference she had made to an important speech in 1865 “fast enough” (Ross to A.G. Bagnall, 21 June 1972, Ross Papers, Box 84, Folder 4. At the beginning of her paper, Ross had said something like this: “James Edward Fitzgerald remarked in a debate on the Treaty of Waitangi in the House of Representatives in 1865: ‘if this document was signed in the Maori tongue, whatever the English translation might be had nothing to do with the question’. He went on to point out: ‘Governor Hobson might have wished the Maoris to sign one thing, and they might have signed something totally different. Were they bound by what they signed or, by what Captain Hobson meant them to sign?’ To which one would now add the question: Was the Crown bound by what Hobson signed, or by what he assumed its meaning to be? Any attempt to interpret the provisions of the Treaty of Waitangi, or to understand what the signatories, both Hobson and the New Zealanders, thought it meant must review the circumstances in which the agreement was drawn up, taking to account all the relevant texts” (11 August 1865, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates 1864 to 1866, p. 292; Ross to A.G. Bagnall, 21 June 1972, Ross Papers, Box 84, Folder 4; Ross, “Te Tiriti o Waitangi”: 129). Later, Ross sent offprints of her article to both TirāketeneSullivan and the Member of Parliament for Northern Māori, Matiu Rata (Ross to Whetu TiraketeneSullivan, 27 January 1973, Ross Papers, Box 84, Folder 4, and Ross to Matiu Rata, 25 January 1973, Ross Papers, Box 84, Folder 4).

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was merely a poor translation, and her suggestion that the chiefs had not ceded their sovereignty to the British Crown and that the Treaty had guaranteed to Māori more than their rights of property in land.18 This suggestion of Ross’ soon became central to what some academic historians have called “the modern treaty” (as distinct from “the historical treaty”, that is, how it was understood in the past or more especially at the time it was signed). As Michael Belgrave has pointed out, this treaty was, above all else, a treaty of rights, which is to say that it was interpreted as a text that provided for particular rights for Māori and particular responsibilities of the Crown to uphold those rights in order to address its breaches of the Treaty. More especially, though, it was interpreted as charter for indigenous rights – that is, the rights that only indigenous peoples can claim – which in recent times some Māori, such as the radical group Nga Tamatoa, had increasingly claimed.19 Most importantly, the Minister of Māori Affairs, Matiu Rata, in the government of the day called for the Treaty to be honoured by the New Zealand state as a compact that guaranteed particular rights for Māori. More particularly, in drafting the bill to establish what became the Waitangi Tribunal, which, as we have already noted, directed this body to take into consideration the ways the English text differed from the Māori text, he drew upon Ross’ contention that the two texts of the Treaty differed markedly in their meaning.20 By the time Ed Durie assumed the chairmanship of the Tribunal, a new generation of New Zealand legal scholars such as Paul McHugh and David Williams, inspired by recent legal rulings in North America, had begun to challenge the long-held legal doctrine that treaties like the Treaty of Waitangi were not cognisable in international law and were only applicable in domestic law if certain provisions had been adopted in local statutes. These scholars were particularly influenced by recent judgements in regard to the contra proferentem rule in interpreting treaties, that is, the rule that in interpreting a contract in which terms are ambiguous the preferred meaning should be the one that works against the interest of the party that drafted the contract. Consequently, these scholars argued

 Rachael Bell, “‘Texts and Translations’: Ruth Ross and the Treaty of Waitangi,” New Zealand Journal of History 43 (2009): 39.  Michael Belgrave, Historical Frictions: Maori Claims and Reinvented Histories (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005), 43–45.  Report of the Government Caucus Committee of Maori Affairs on the Treaty of Waitangi, 5 February 1974, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga, CAB 244/1/1 Part 4; Secretary, Attorney-General’s Department, J.M. McEwen, to the Minister of Maori Affairs, Matiu Rata, 19 June 1974, Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kawanatanga, 75/111 Part 1.

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that the Māori text was the appropriate one to use in the task of understanding the meaning of the Treaty of Waitangi and its implications.21 As a result of the historical, political and legal arguments I have been discussing, the Waitangi Tribunal began to approach its task in keeping with a particular assumption that was embedded in ‘the modern treaty’, namely that the instrument by which the Crown had assumed sovereignty in New Zealand was the legal contract known as the Treaty of Waitangi, and that the sovereignty of the New Zealand nation state was conditional on it observing the terms of that contract as it was being interpreted or reinterpreted now, which is to say that the nation’s sovereignty and thus its legitimacy were held to be dependent on the state addressing and redressing the breaches in the fulfilment of the terms of the Treaty that had occurred since 1840. As a result, one historian has pointed out, the Treaty began to “approach the stature of a fundamental law, contract of government, and ancient constitution.”22

6.3 The tribunal and public history After the Tribunal was granted the power to hear claims about breaches of the Treaty dating back to 1840, useable stories about the past became more important to its work in two fundamental ways. First, the Tribunal itself increasingly created histories in the reports that it submitted to the government about each claim. Second, the process of making and hearing claims increasingly called for scholarly history rather than Māori oral tradition and oral history, and so required academically trained historians to undertake archival research, prepare the claims, write historical reports, and appear as expert witnesses in order to substantiate or challenge the claims presented to the Tribunal (whether on behalf of Māori claimants, the Crown Law Office, the Office of Treaty Settlements, or the Tribunal itself). Both are examples of public history but they differ in some respects. Consequently, one historian at least has found it useful to give them different names:

 P.G. McHugh, Maori Land Laws of New Zealand (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan Native Law Centre, 1983), and David V. Williams, “The Use of Law in the Process of Colonization” (PhD thesis, University of Dar es Salaam, 1983); Waitangi Tribunal, Report on the MotonuiWaitara Claim (WAI 6) (Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 1983), especially 45–52; Waitangi Tribunal, Report on the Manukau Claim (WAI 8) (Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 1985), 64–70; Waitangi Tribunal, Report on the Orakei Claim (WAI 9) (Wellington: Booker & Friend Ltd, 1987), 180–182.  J.G.A. Pocock, “The Treaty Between Histories,” in Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past – A New Zealand Commentary, ed. Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 76.

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‘Tribunal history’ for the former, ‘Treaty history’ for the latter.23 Needless to say, Treaty history corresponds much more to history as it is undertaken in the academy (and it has led in the last thirty years to a comprehensive scholarly review of relations between and Māori and Pākehā); Tribunal history resembles many of the ways history is used and abused in the political realm.24 As historical work by and for the Tribunal’s task was undertaken in the period after it was granted jurisdiction to hear historical claims, disquiet among historians steadily grew. In part, the source of this concern was the same as that which commonly arises when academically trained historians undertake research in accordance with the agenda or priorities of another party rather than being chosen and directed by the historian themselves. At the very least, the work that historians were commissioned to do required them to provide Treatycentred histories, that is, historical accounts that took the Treaty as absolutely central to the past under consideration. At most, it required them, especially in the case of those working for claimants, to produce accounts that advanced the claimants’ claims.25 There was also growing concerns of the kind that are commonly held whenever historians work in the context of the law. The historian was placed in the position of an inferior that had to appeal to a superior authority, and whereas the historian is primarily concerned with understanding and explaining the past on its own terms insofar as this is ever possible, the lawyer seeks to retrieve the past in order to find authoritative normative precedents and rules so they can make judgments for the present.26 More particularly, there was disquiet among some critics because it appeared that historians had to provide accounts of the past that served the Tribunal’s judicial task of investigating claims by Māori that they had suffered loss as a result of the Crown breaching the principles of the Treaty. This was a task, Andrew Sharp

 See Giselle Byrnes, The Waitangi Tribunal and New Zealand History (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially 53.  In this period, many more historians have been engaged to do this work than have held academic positions with the responsibility to teach and research New Zealand history.  Bronwyn Dalley, “Finding the Common Ground: New Zealand’s Public History,” in Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History, ed. Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), 25; Giselle Byrnes, “Jackals of the Crown? Historians and the Treaty Claims Process,” in Going Public: The Changing Face of New Zealand History, ed. Bronwyn Dalley and Jock Phillips (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), 113, 115.  Andrew Sharp, “Recent Juridical and Constitutional Histories of Maori,” in Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past – A New Zealand Commentary, ed. Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 31; P.G. McHugh, Aboriginal Title: The Modern Jurisprudence of Tribal Land Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 274–276.

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and Paul McHugh pointed out, that required the juridification of the past, that is, that the past be represented in such a way as to make it available for legal or quasi legal judgment. In this way of doing history, legal tribunals and the historians who work for them jointly seek to discover rules and principles in the past that can be applied to the case presently at issue. This meant, Sharp explained, that past actions and events had to be described in such a way that they could be brought under a known set of rules and principles by which their juridical status could be determined. In the case of the Tribunal’s work, he remarked [past] events, actions and conjunctures are interpreted as cases which fall under the principles of the Treaty (or, when relevant, the rules of law). They are described in unidimensional terms so that of them it may be asked whether rights were violated, duties (for instance of protection and consultation) discharged or not, responsibilities attended to or treated with negligence, or whether the relationship of trust between Māori and Crown was sustained. They are examined to determine whether property was fairly or fraudulently alienated, or whether those who sold the land had the authority to do so. Most generally they are examined to find out whether the sovereign (the Crown), in certain acts and omissions had encroached on tino rangatiratanga in breach of the contract and covenant of the Treaty (Article II) which guaranteed it.27

At the very least, other critics pointed out, in this way of doing history the Treaty had to be interpreted in the light in the light of present-day principles rather than the principles that informed the Treaty at the time it was made in 1840, and yet those present-day principles were represented by the Tribunal as though they are ageless or timeless in order to provide authority and warrant for its recommendations to government. Not surprisingly, these observations led several critics to argue that Tribunal history, if not Treaty history, was inherently presentist in nature. Indeed, one critic even questioned whether it should be regarded as history at all.28 Another academic historian, W.H. Oliver, expressed disquiet about the Tribunal history on the grounds that it delineated a past that did not actually occur. He claimed it depicted British colonisation of New Zealand as though it was dependent on Māori consent and that this should and could have led to partnership, power-sharing and economic well-being for Māori as well as Pākehā. This “retrospective utopia”, as Oliver dubbed it, amounted to a counterfactual history: “A  Andrew Sharp, “History and Sovereignty: A Case of Juridical History in New Zealand/Aotearoa,” in Cultural Politics and the University in Aotearoa/New Zealand, ed. Michael Peters (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1997), 160, 164; Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh, “Introduction,” in Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past – A New Zealand Commentary, ed. Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 4.  Michael Belgrave, “The Tribunal and the Past: Taking a Roundabout Path to a New History,” in Waitangi Revisited: Perspectives on the Treaty of Waitangi, ed. Michael Belgrave et al. (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2005), 37–38.

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future is discovered in the past, not in the past that actually occurred but in the past that was promised or held to be promised by the British Crown in signing the Treaty.”29 Other historians have contended that the Tribunal’s work not only demanded juridical and counter-factual history but called forth another form of history that also diverges from the way it tends to be practised in the academy, namely Māori tribal histories, which are often produced in the form of oral histories and oral traditions. The presentation of these histories, Miranda Johnson has argued, meant that the Tribunal became a site of struggle between different histories. This is not merely because these representations of the past differ from those provided by academic historians who rely on the written records of the past, but also because they re-present the past in a way that diverges from that of academic history. This is so in three overlapping respects: first, they challenge the discipline’s privileging of those historical sources created at the time of the past being considered; second, they subvert the fundamental premise of the discipline’s practice that Michel de Certeau famously called “a clean break between the past and the present”; and, third, the fact that they present history orally as well as visually means that they tend to make greater emotional claims on their audiences than written history does. As such, Johnson has argued, these Māori histories should not be regarded as simply different examples of history or even different uses of history but rather as different ways of “being in history otherwise”, given that they work to forge a deeper connection between the past and the present than the academic or cloistered practice of history tends to do.30 The way that both juridical and tribal histories work prompted critics of Tribunal history to observe that neither of them are much concerned to trace the ways in which the past is unlike the present and that consequently the past and present in each tend to “merge effortlessly into each other.” In other words, it was argued that these accounts of the past lack that sense of anachronism that has been so fundamental to academic history’s treatment of the past.31 This led Oliver to remark: “all this is not so much a matter of doing history as of defying it – of reasserting, to

 W.H. Oliver, “The Future Behind Us: The Waitangi Tribunal’s Retrospective Utopia,” in Histories, Power and Loss: Uses of the Past – A New Zealand Commentary, ed. Andrew Sharp and Paul McHugh (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001), 10–11, 26.  Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 4; Miranda Johnson, “Making History Public: Indigenous Claims to Settler States,” Public Culture 16 (2008): 100, 108, 116–117, my emphasis.  See Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), chapter 1.

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the point of reinventing, the evidence of continuity and denying the significance, if not the actuality, of change.”32 The critics of Tribunal and Treaty history I have been discussing would all acknowledge that these ways of doing history have had very real advantages: they have enabled the Tribunal to provide straightforward and emphatic findings and those findings enabled it to make recommendations to government that have led to numerous major settlements in favour of the Māori claimants, and this has provided Māori with the means to begin to redress the losses they have suffered and the settler nation with a means to recuperate its sense of itself as morally worthy and thus legitimate. Nonetheless, those critics have been troubled by the possibility that this progress has been achieved at a cost. Oliver remarked: Outside the claims process . . . this way of doing history runs the risk of failing to convince any but its practitioners and beneficiaries . . . If it can be plausibly suggested that [historians] have got the history wrong, and if they decline to consider the possibility that they have, they may end up looking as if they believe that any serviceable past will do. Their credibility is likely to suffer, not just as to opinions about the past but also as aspirations for the future.33

Many historians in much the same context I have just been describing have raised a somewhat different concern: how can one adjudicate between competing claims in the public life of democracies if there is no common agreement about the very idea of historical facts and evidence? These historians fear that the absence of such a consensus can lead to an outbreak of excessive relativism or irrationalism and thereby undermine the body politic and impair the capacity of the nation to function. Yet other historians have asked whether, in the interests of justice, it is appropriate to insist that peoples who are ‘history poor’ must provide

 Oliver, “The Future Behind Us,” 25.  Oliver, “The Future Behind Us,” 27, and Looking for the Phoenix: A Memoir (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2002), 169. A noted American historian, Richard White, reflecting on research in the field of Native American history, has expressed much the same concern: “For history to do effective work in the world over the long term, it has to be true to the complexity of the past. Without some commitment to the past on its own terms and a desire to portray its fullness, excursions into the past become an intellectual shopping trip to find what is useful to the present. If historical knowledge is made simply tactical, then the past becomes valued only as a tool in present struggles. The past loses its integrity. The past as past, as a different country with different concerns and rules, a place where we might actually learn something different from what we already know, vanishes. Such tactical uses of the past discredit those who use them within the academy” in: “Using the Past: History and Native American Studies,” in Studying Native Americans: Problems and Prospects, ed. Russell Thornton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 236, his emphases.

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accounts of the past that meet the requirements of the dominant groups who are history-rich.34 In a rather different vein, the famed New Zealand-born historian J.G.A. Pocock has noted that, while Oliver was right to point out that we cannot revise the history of the Treaty of Waitangi exclusively as the record of how what was done ought not to have been done and how what was not done should have been done, there is value in proceeding in this way because we discover the many grievances that did arise, and were perceived as arising, from the failure of major players to act in keeping with the obligations they knew they had.35 Moreover, at the same time that Pocock acknowledged Oliver’s point that it is probably inexpedient politically – and almost certainly morally – to disregard the discipline of history by suggesting that those who made the Treaty “meant what it is historically impossible that they could have meant”, he argued that “the history of what a past statement meant is not altogether incompatible with the political decision that it should be interpreted in a certain way in the present.” Indeed, Pocock suggested that we can accept the differences between what an academic historian says about past statements and actions on the one hand and what a legal tribunal says about them on the other so long as we recognise these interventions for what they are. More especially, Pocock argued that what is required in this situation is ‘a treaty between histories’, that is a process of ongoing discussion and negotiation between two parties who descend from those who made the Treaty and who admit that the nation has more than one history. As such, academic historians need to acknowledge and accept that the discipline of history is a limited public good.36

6.4 Treaty history and national history In the wake of the historiographical, political and legal changes that took place in the 1970s in the way that the Treaty of Waitangi was interpreted, Treaty history was produced not only by those academically trained historians who were commissioned to

 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 98–99, 101, 107.  Another academic historian, Jim McAloon, has made the same point, stating, for example: “Against the argument that the Tribunal retrospectively applies present standards to the past, I suggest that the Tribunal tends to rely on views and arguments that were unsuccessfully advanced in the past. This is, of course, a politically charged approach but it is not therefore ahistorical” in: “By Which Standards? History and the Waitangi Tribunal,” New Zealand Journal of History 40 (2006): 197.  Pocock, “The Treaty Between Histories,” 77–78, 80, 93–95.

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undertake research by the Tribunal and the parties to its work, but also by historians engaged in research under the aegis of New Zealand universities. As I have already implied, the relationship between the public and cloistered lives of history can differ considerably between nations. In the case of New Zealand, the fact that its universities are publicly funded and the nation has had at the very least an egalitarian ethos has meant that academic historians who teach and research their country’s history have long felt more of an obligation to contribute to public debate and discussion about their nation’s past than is the case for academic historians in many other countries. The influence of Treaty history is most evident in what has come to be regarded as the classic account of the Treaty, Claudia Orange’s 1987 book The Treaty of Waitangi, which was the result of a doctoral thesis undertaken at the University of Auckland. In this study Orange put the Treaty not only at the heart of the history of relations between Māori and Pākehā but of the nation itself. In large part, Orange’s focus was on the Māori text of the Treaty, the impact on Māori of the Pākehā’s abrogation of it, Māori remembrance of what was deemed to be the Treaty’s guarantees, and Māori calls for the Treaty’s terms to be respected. This can be attributed to Pākehā apprehension that there was a chasm between Māori and Pākehā histories of the country because of the nation’s failure to honour the treaty, a conviction that traditional historical and legal accounts no longer provided the state with legitimacy since its maltreatment of the Māori rights guaranteed by the Treaty was no longer considered to be morally acceptable, and a premise that this state of affairs could and should be put right by the settler state itself. To resolve these matters, Orange suggested that a new foundation for New Zealand could be found in the history she told, which placed the beginnings of the nation state in a contract, namely the Treaty of Waitangi, called it to account for its breaches of the Treaty, and urged it to redeem itself by honouring this agreement. By these means, the basis for a reconciled nation could be forged, the colonial state renewing its legitimacy and thus its authority by respecting claims for Māori rights on the one hand and repelling Māori claims for sovereignty on the other.37 Treaty history also had a considerable impact on the genre of national history in New Zealand. A number of national histories that were produced in the 1990s and the 2000s proceeded on the assumption that there were not only two treaties, the Māori and Pākehā, but that two pasts had actually stemmed from them. This became a way of articulating an argument that Māori and Pākehā have had very

 Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi (Wellington: Port Nicholson Press/Allen & Unwin, 1987). Since its publication, this book has been reprinted as well as updated several times and sold tens of thousands of copies.

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different historical experiences since colonisation began, that these histories needed to be reconciled, and that a historical narrative about the Treaty of the kind Orange provided might perform this task.38 As the influence of Treaty history spread from the public life of history to the cloistered life of history, there was a good deal of concern among some academic historians. These critics pointed out that the Tribunal’s task required historical accounts that focused on the Crown and especially its villainy and so overlooked the role played by other historical actors, not least Māori themselves. Similarly, they observed that histories produced in the context of the Tribunal’s work were preoccupied with differences and conflict between Māori and Pākehā and so overlooked similarities and accommodation to say nothing of the differences and conflict between Māori. Critics also complained that very little of the research that historians did as part of the Tribunal’s work were made available publicly. Likewise, they claimed that Treaty history distracted historians from undertaking more interesting research, and there can be no doubt that many aspects of the relations between Māori and Pākehā have been neglected in recent decades.39 At the same time, it should be noted that the work that several academically trained historians undertook in the context of the Waitangi Tribunal led to a few major scholarly books. In the finest of these, Michael Belgrave convincingly argued that commissions of inquiries such as the Tribunal have in fact been an enduring site of encounter between Māori and Pākehā and that the Tribunal’s work can be understood as part of a long history of Māori presenting historical accounts to such tribunals in support of their claims and those claims being considered by them.40 Just as importantly perhaps, the encounter between the public and cloistered lives of history that has taken place in the context of the Tribunal’s work has undoubtedly served to sharpen historians’ grasp of how the meaning that actions and events had at the time they occurred can differ considerably from the meaning those actions and events have subsequently had at particular moments in time, and has provided the opportunity to consider the relationship between

 Judith Binney et al., The People and the Land: Te Tangata me te Whenua: An Illustrated History of New Zealand, 1820–1920 (Wellington: Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1990); James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Allen Lane, 1996) and Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Auckland: Allen Lane, 2001); Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2003). See, more recently, Atholl Anderson et al., Tangata Whenua: A History (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2015).  See, for example, Kerry Howe, “Two Worlds?” New Zealand Journal of History 37 (2003): 50–61.  Belgrave, Historical Frictions.

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these two historical registers.41 Moreover, contemplation of the meaning that actions and events have come to have in the public life of history with the passing of time helps to reveal that the meanings that actions and events acquire later are often much more powerful than the meanings they had at the time, thereby drawing into question whether it is appropriate for academic historians to privilege the latter over the former period in time, which is undoubtedly an important lesson to learn.

 See, for example, Alan Ward, “History and Historians Before the Waitangi Tribunal: Some Reflections on the Ngai Tahu Claim,” New Zealand Journal of History 24 (1990): 150–167.

Part Three: Old and New Public Demands on Professional Historians

Fernando Nicolazzi

7 Between Discipline and Profession: Historical Studies and Their Public Relevance in Brazil 7.1 Historians and the public relevance of historical studies When historical knowledge began to be seen in terms of the modern idea of science, in the nineteenth century, and was institutionalized within universities, the discipline of history and the historian’s profession became expressions that referred mutually to each other, making the disciplined historian the professional of history-writing. Discipline and profession, therefore, have become practically synonymous as defining elements of historiographical practice since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Given the public relevance of historical studies and the role played by historians in the twenty-first century, we might wish to ask whether this is this still the case. In his book on “the nature of historical knowledge”, published in 2012, James M. Banner Jr. suggests that “neglecting the distinction between discipline and profession is more than an innocent terminological error that, once corrected, allows us to speak and write of history as before”. Beyond a simple terminological confusion, this error “fatefully affects the development of the discipline’s structure and hierarchies, the training and employment of historians, the honours and compensation extended to individuals, and the aspirations and sense of self-worth of those who contribute in their many ways to history’s welfare”.1 In other words, the confusion between what defines the discipline of history and what constitutes the historian’s professional performance can compromise or even impede a proper discussion regarding the public relevance of history.

 James M. Banner Jr., Being a Historian. An Introduction to the Professional World of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xii. Note: In many parts of this chapter, I have relied on the English translation by Paulo Bunselmeyer Ferreira. I would like to thank Lutz Raphael and Berber Bevernage for their patient and careful review of the text, as well as for the comments that helped to further build the argument. This research was funded by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-007

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Banner Jr. emphasizes the importance of assessing the historian’s public performance based on the logic of a professional occupation that is not limited to the idea of a disciplinary activity. In this sense, thinking of history as a profession beyond the discipline is equivalent to considering it a professional occupation in its labour dimensions, which involves ethical assumptions, standards of conduct, regulatory processes, rights defined in law, ways of entering the labour market, forms of remuneration, etc. The aim of this chapter is to propose a discussion on the public relevance of history, placing it between discipline and profession, thus reinforcing the feasibility and need to separate theoretically its disciplinary dimension from its professional status. Such discussion is supported by research that takes the Brazilian social context as the object of study, where the disciplinary reality of history is relatively recent, with the creation of the first university courses dating from the 1930s, and the regulation of the profession of history by the Brazilian Congress was approved in August 2020. First, I will establish some theoretical criteria that allow distinguishing the disciplinary dimension from the professional status of history. Then, I will discuss the emergence of the disciplinary field and the process that culminated in the approval of the law that regulates the historian’s profession in Brazil, indicating some of its implications for the social performance of historians. Finally, I will argue that, considering the context of the twenty-first century, reflection on the public relevance of historical studies in Brazilian society requires an expansion in the way of understanding the discipline of history in order to meet the public demands placed on its professionals. It means that what the different publics of history expect from one who produces historical contents is not limited to what the discipline of history has to offer. Therefore, the historical discipline must reinvent itself according to professional demands to face the crisis of legitimacy that is perceived in Brazilian political and social context.

7.2 Historiographical practice between discipline and profession Michel de Certeau establishes some criteria for distinguishing between discipline and profession. For de Certeau, the historiographic operation causes a disjunction between discipline and profession, as the first, considered as the organizing structure of historiographical discourse, ends up hiding the second, that is, hiding the

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professional dimension of history and the characteristics that make history a kind of work or a form of production: the ‘real’ as represented by historiography does not correspond to the ‘real’ that determines its production. It hides behind the picture of a past the present that produces and organizes it. Expressed bluntly, the problem is as follows: a mise en scène of a (past) actuality, that is, the historiographical discourse itself, occults the social and technical apparatus of the professional institution that produces it.2

There is a clear distinction between what the discourse of history manifests, the real represented, and what it hides, the work of representation carried out. It is the non-dit of the historiographical operation he analysed about a decade earlier in L’écriture de l’histoire. At that time, de Certeau understood history as a “practice (a discipline), its result (the discourse), or the relation of the two in the form of a ‘production’”.3 That is, the non-dit takes place precisely in the space between practice and discourse: when achieved, the latter ends up hiding the former. The dissimulation work, in turn, is the distinctive feature of the historiographic operation he faced “as the relation between a place (the recruitment, the milieu, the profession, etc.), analytical procedures (a discipline), and the construction of a text (a literature)”.4 It is important to indicate in this passage de Certeau’s terminological choices. Although he uses the French term place, it is not possible to disentangle from it the notion of a lieu social, which refers to a means of “elaboration that circumscribes proper determinations: a liberal profession, a position as an observer or a teacher, a group of learned people, etc.”5 Likewise, if in the first passage the term used is métier, it immediately refers to a profession libérale. In any case, what is worth highlighting here is the structure of the historiographical operation formulated by de Certeau. As a combination of a lieu social, a pratique and an écriture, the way it is structured produces a discourse that is made possible by the provisions of the disciplinary procedure, which ends up silencing the sounds of its production, that is, the determinations specific to the place. In other words, the writing of history manifests the traces of a discipline hiding its professional aspects: “none of the noises of production, of techniques, of social constraint, of professional or political position could bother the harmony of this relation: a silence was the postulate of this  Michel de Certeau, Heterologies. Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 203.  Michel de Certeau, L’Écriture de l’Histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 28–29. I used the translation into English of Tom Conley as a basis, modifying it when I deemed convenient. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 21.  De Certeau, L’Écriture de l’Histoire, 64 (The Writing of History, 57, emphasis of the author).  De Certeau, L’Écriture de l’Histoire, 65 (The Writing of History, 58).

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epistemology”.6 For de Certeau, therefore, although articulated in the same intellectual operation, discipline and profession are not necessarily interchangeable elements of this operation: the dissimulation of the second is a condition for the epistemological legitimacy of the first. De Certeau’s formulations were made from a critical dialogue with the work of Michel Foucault. Even without directly mentioning the speech Foucault delivered in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, it is possible to see its reverberations in de Certeau’s words. It echoes the idea of discipline as one of the forms of “rarefaction of discourse”, as a “sort of anonymous system at the disposal of anyone who wants to or is able to use it”, ultimately, as a “principle of control over the production of discourse”.7 We can also mention here James M. Banner Jr.’s suggestions that “history is a single discipline practiced in many professions”, and that, consequently, “historians share the same discipline but not the same profession”.8 Generally speaking, if a discipline is predominantly organized on the basis of epistemological criteria that consolidate and are transformed by the discipline itself, disguising the social conditions that make it possible (public interest, forms of financing, political legitimacy, etc.), a profession, characterized by formal training in a field of knowledge, is organized according to a logic that relates to spaces of occupation and to the labour market.9 For historians, their identity is linked to the disciplinary record, defined by a specific training process, rather than to their professional occupation, which establishes a job position shared by other individuals. In other words, it is the link to a disciplinary community, not to a professional collective, that determines what a historian is. As Banner Jr. states, “a profession, as distinct from a discipline, is a field defined by an endeavour, not by a body of thought; it concerns the direction and manner of use of a body of knowledge, not that body of knowledge itself”.10 For the discussion on the public relevance of history, therefore, discipline and profession cannot be considered as simply interchangeable terms: one can practice the profession without having the disciplinary credentials (e. g. university degrees) to do so; someone else can comply with all the technical protocols that the discipline imposes on its practitioners, without necessarily turning its practice into a profession.

 De Certeau, L’Écriture de l’Histoire, 67 (The Writing of History, 59).  Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du Discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 32, 37 (the translation is mine).  Banner Jr., Being a Historian, 1.  Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “Professional Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition,” in Public History. Essays from the Field, ed. James B. Gardner and Peter S. Lapaglia (Malabar: Krieger Publishing Company, 1999), 7.  Banner Jr., Being a Historian, 4.

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There is no doubt that since the late 1970s the disciplinary field of history has increasingly turned its attention to the historian’s professional performance. The US situation may serve here as an example. The emergence of Public History at the end of the 70s was a sign of this concern to expand the field of professional occupation for historians, corresponding with crises in the job market. This fact even made possible the development of an “applied history” without, however, having transformed the disciplinary principles of the production of historical knowledge.11 The French historiographical context, somewhat more reticent about the developments of an applied history,12 also did not fail to note the dilemmas and impasses that the job market imposed on historians, even though this reality was mainly thought of from within the academy (i.e., from the disciplinary field). Gérard Noiriel wrote his book Sur la “crise” de l’histoire, in 1996, emphasizing from the beginning the “age of uncertainties” marked by the “fluctuations in the university labour market and its consequences for the historian’s profession”.13 Olivier Dumoulin turned his gaze to the rôle social de l’historien, emphasizing the historian’s role as an expert, above all in judicial matters, in the contemporary public scene.14 All these considerations allow us to reinforce the argument that discipline and profession should not necessarily be thought of as interchangeable terms. At the same time, the relation between them needs to be situated in a dimension that articulates the academic system, a privileged place for the discipline and its development, and the public space, an environment where social demands on history are made, and, therefore, where the contours of the profession are defined. More than that, it is about giving the discipline and the profession an understanding that provides them with dynamism and adapts them to the changing social conditions of the twentieth-first century. In my perspective, thus, the discipline of history should be considered in terms of its epistemological as well as its historical elements. This means, first, that the theoretical reflection on the relationship between discipline and profession must be pursued in terms of the historicity of that relationship, and, second,

 Thomas Cauvin, “The Rise of Public History: An International Perspective,” Historia Crítica 68 (2018): 3–26.  Henry Rousso, “L’Histoire Appliquée ou les Historiens Thaumaturges,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 1 (1984): 105–121.  Gérard Noiriel, Sur la “crise” de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 23.  Olivier Dumoulin, Le rôle social de l’historien. De la chaire au prétoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).

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that discipline and profession thought of as separate categories can illuminate each other when we think about the public relevance of history.15

7.3 The disciplinary field of history and the historian’s profession in Brazil In August 2020, after a long political campaign in which the National Historical Association (ANPUH) played an important role, the profession of history was subject to legal regulation in Brazil. Its approval by Congress, after the initiative of senator Paulo Paim, a former factory worker of the Worker’s Party (PT), was the outcome of a long process that began in 1968, when the first bill was written by the historian and journalist Heródoto Barbeiro, at that time President of the Brazilian Federation of Historical Studies Centre (FBCEH). Since then, twelve more bills tried to pass into law, following a tortuous path which highlighted important elements in thinking about the public relevance of historical studies in the Brazilian context in the twenty-first century. Analysing the various bills presented by parliamentarians against the backdrop of the creation and consolidation of the disciplinary field helps to situate such elements based on the reflections raised before. In this section, I will highlight some important moments of the institutionalization of history as a discipline in Brazil. Unlike in other countries, the institutionalization of history as an academic discipline is something quite recent in Brazil. If in the nineteenth century, right after political independence from Portugal (1822), which gave rise to the Brazilian Empire, the writing of history was undoubtedly one of the main discursive instruments for defining the elements of identity of the new nation and the political contours of the new State, it was carried out above all by an “académie de savants” and not exactly by universities that trained specialized cadres. The Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (IHGB), founded in 1838 based on the French model of the Institut Historique de Paris, served as a privileged place for the constitution of a scientific history in the country. However, it was not exactly an institution for

 See Mooney-Melvin, “Professional Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition”, ibid., and Jean-Louis Fabiani, “À quoi sert la Notion de Discipline?,” in Qu-est-ce qu’une Discipline?, ed. Jean Boutier, Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (Paris: Éditions de EHESS, 2006), 11–34.

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the training of historians, being predominantly composed of scholars, diplomats, politicians, and public officials from the newly constituted imperial elite.16 The Proclamation of the Republic in 1889 began a slow process of moving away from the imperial and monarchical reference-points, including the IHGB itself. Regarding historical knowledge, it took four decades for modern universities to be created and, therefore, for new institutional spaces for historical knowledge to be established. In this period, Brazilian historiography was marked by the tradition of historical and sociological essayism, formed by a generation of scholars who were graduates of Law, Medicine, or Engineering faculties, writers without specific training, or dilettante researchers. An important exception is the trajectory of Gilberto Freyre, whose academic training in social sciences took place at Columbia University, in New York, in the early 1920s.17 It was only from the 1930s onwards that a university historiography began to be produced and, with it, the specialized training of historians found support, aimed particularly at the field of teaching and for working in the school system. The creation of the University of São Paulo (USP), in 1934, and the University of Federal District (UDF), in 1935, in Rio de Janeiro, were important milestones for the implementation of history undergraduate courses. History then set off to become an academic discipline practiced by professionals. Being a professional historian would mean, from that moment and throughout the twentieth century, having a specialized training and acting in the so-called “disciplinary field” of history.18 Discipline and profession were practically seen as synonyms. The field started to be structured based on the Brazilian university system, which was consolidated as the locus of research and training of researchers. The creation of public funding agencies, such as the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), both in 1951, established the structural conditions for the development of scientific research in the country, which found its

 Manoel Luiz Salgado Guimarães, Historiografia e Nação no Brasil 1838–1857 (Rio de Janeiro: Eduerj, 2011); Lucia Maria Paschoal Guimarães, Debaixo da Imediata Proteção Imperial: o Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 1838–1889 (São Paulo: Annablume, 2012).  Lucia Maria Paschoal Guimarães, Da Escola Palatina ao Silogeu: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 1889–1938 (Rio de Janeiro: Museu da República, 2007); Angela de Castro Gomes, A República, a História e o IHGB (Belo Horizonte: Argumentum, 2009); Fernando Nicolazzi, “Disoriented Time and Social Knowledge: the Historical Essay in Brazil, c. 1870–1940,” The American Sociologist 51, No. 3 (2020): 279–290.  Diogo da Silva Roiz, O Curso de Geografia e História da FFLC/USP e a Constituição de um Campo Disciplinar em São Paulo 1934–1968 (São Paulo: Alameda Editorial, 2021); Marieta de Moraes Ferreira, A História como Ofício. A Constituição de um Campo Disciplinar (Rio de Janeiro: Editora da FGV, 2013).

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main front line in Postgraduate Programs housed in different universities. Although there were other institutions dedicated to social analysis, such as the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB) and the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP), there is no doubt that in the field of social sciences and humanities, public universities constituted the main references for the research and formation of specialized professional staff. In the specific case of history, it is also worth recalling the foundation, in 1961, of the National Association of University Professors of History, currently the National Historical Association (ANPUH), the main entity that brings together Brazilian historians. Initially conceived as a place of encounter and dialogue between university professors, its creation took place in a context of disputes regarding the institutionalization of history “as a discipline in the university space and as an area of professional activity for its qualified staff”.19 This took place a few years before the dictatorial government carried out a university reform that has profoundly transformed the functioning of universities in Brazil, extinguishing the system of chairs in force until then and inaugurating the current institutional format in which departments play the role of fundamental university units. The model was the US university system. This fact is important for the historiographic field, as it allowed the creation of a more delimited and autonomous institutional bond for it. If history courses, in the past, were allocated to Schools or Faculties that included many other courses in the humanities, with the reform they became directly linked to specific history departments, resulting in greater autonomy for history both in the epistemological dimension of the discipline and in the recruitment criteria of the profession. The first postgraduate courses in history began to be implemented in Brazil in the following decade, promoting a greater specialization of the disciplinary requirements of history and adding a distinguishing element in the professional statute of historians. There is now an implicit hierarchy between a teaching graduate, entitled to teach in basic education, and a postgraduate degree holder, whose predominant focus is research and higher education. This differentiating element is important, since through the second half of the twentieth century a divide emerged in the field of Brazilian historiography between the teaching of history and historiographical research. The titles of Masters and PhD, thus, worked as something more than a higher

 Paulo Thiago Santos Gonçalves da Silva, “A Associação Nacional dos Professores Universitários de História: Espaço de Identificação Profissional e Legitimação do Saber Histórico 1961–1977” (PhD Thesis, Universidade de Brasília, 2014), 157.

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professional qualification, producing a social distinction between career practice in non-university education and practice in universities with a focus on research.20 With the consolidation of university research in the 1980s, it is also possible to notice a consolidation of history as a discipline, revealed through the notion of “historiography”, understood here as a kind of discourse on the writing of history, which has been developed and transformed since the end of the nineteenth century and started to function as an important element of legitimation of historical knowledge in Brazil.21 Thus, until the end of the twentieth century, the main features of the disciplinary field of history in Brazil remained largely organized by the university institution and the national postgraduate system, linked to the two main agencies for research development in the country and creating the basic conditions for the defining of the professional historian. Obviously, this was not a linear and problem-free process, and it was even possible to speak in terms of a “historians’ identity crisis” in the mid-1990s.22 In any case, discipline and profession maintained an undeniable conceptual symbiosis at this time: talking about professional historiography implied acknowledging its disciplinary and academic status. To some extent, these characteristics are still noticeable today, but some transformations that took place in the twenty-first century seem to indicate a moment of questioning this symbiosis between discipline and profession. An important inflection point in this process can be seen in the celebration of the “500 years of Brazil”, since the late 1990s. These celebrations took up much public space, feeding a renewed taste for the national past and, above all, adding new layers to the social interest in history. In addition, from 2010 onwards, the increasing use of digital platforms and social networks to disseminate historical content, simultaneously with the institutionalization of public history in the country, brought out a variety of other actors who claimed their role not only as history consumers, but also as its producers.23 As historian and editor Luciano Figueiredo stated in 2013, “we

 An analysis of the 1970s, taking as a case study the historiography produced at the University of São Paulo, can be found in Diego José Fernandes Freire, “O Passado da História: os Historiadores e as Historiadoras da Universidade de São Paulo e a História da Historiografia Brasileira na Década de 1970” (PhD Thesis, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 2020).  Matheus Henrique de Faria Pereira, Pedro Afonso Cristóvão dos Santos, and Thiago Nicodemo, “Brazilian Historical Writing in Global Perspective: on the Emergence of the Concept of ‘Historiography’,” History and Theory 54, No. 4 (2015): 84–104.  Francisco Falcon, “A Identidade do Historiador,” Estudos Históricos 17 (1996): 7–30.  Some references about such situations can be found in the following works: Ana Maria Mauad, Juniele Rabêlo de Almeida, and Ricardo Santhiago (eds.), História Pública no Brasil. Sentidos e Itinerários (São Paulo: Letra & Voz, 2016); Juniele Rabêlo de Almeida and Sônia Meneses (eds.), História Pública em Debate. Patrimônio, Educação e Mediação do Passado (São Paulo: Letra

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have never seen such enthusiasm for the past here, evidenced in the abundance of exhibitions, soap operas, documentaries, websites, television and radio programs dealing with historical events, in addition, of course, to books, newspapers and magazines”.24 History definitely became an object of consumption.25 Despite this renewed public relevance assumed by history in Brazil, the global context was also one of loss of legitimacy of the discipline and, by extension, of new representations of the professional historian in public space. Political campaigns against universities, at a time when neoliberal rationality won out over forms of institutional administration and academic evaluation, brought about important changes in the place that historical knowledge assumed in contemporary societies.26 As one of the most important interpreters of this situation in Brazil pointed out, everything culminated in an “emptying of the bases and borders that shaped the disciplinary identity, focusing both on a theoretical deficit of self-legitimation and on a current dispersion with regard to the understanding of its pedagogical purposes”.27 Thus, putting this disciplinary crisis in perspective with its related professional dimension, Rodrigo Turin makes an even more acute comment: “in this scenario, intensified by the variety of media available to different social agents, the historian increasingly sees his authority being intensely disputed in the public arena, blurring that strong distinction between professionals and amateurs, established in the nineteenth century”. Turin ends his argument with a crucial question for this context: “what is left of this distinction? On what basis can the historian’s profession and its role in society be supported today in the face of these new social and political experiences?”28 It was in view of this broader framework of the formation of a disciplinary field of history in Brazil that the discussion about the profession of historian gained momentum to the point of entering the sphere of parliamentary debates.

& Voz, 2018); Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho and Ana Paula Tavares Teixeira (eds.), História Pública e Divulgação de História (São Paulo: Letra & Voz, 2019); Benito Bisso Schmidt and Jurandir Malerba (eds.), Fazendo História Pública (Vitória: Milfontes, 2021).  Luciano Figueiredo, “Apresentação,” in História do Brasil para Ocupados (Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2013): 9.  Jerome de Groot, Consuming History. Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009).  Arthur Lima de Avila, Fernando Nicolazzi, Rodrigo Turin, “Apresentação,” in A História (in) Disciplinada: Teoria, Ensino e Difusão do Conhecimento Histórico, ed. Arthur Lima de Avila, Fernando Nicolazzi, Rodrigo Turin (Vitória: Milfontes, 2019), 7–18.  Rodrigo Turin, “Entre o Passado Disciplinar e os Passados Práticos. Figurações do Historiador na Crise das Humanidades,” Tempo 24, No. 2 (2018): 188.  Turin, “Entre o Passado Disciplinar e os Passados Práticos,” 192.

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In the next section, I will briefly review this discussion by focusing on some of the main features that can be highlighted from the thirteen bills that were drafted in Congress aimed at regulating the profession of historians.

7.4 The search for regulation of the profession of history in Brazil Before the law was finally enacted, in 2020, several attempts had been made over at least fifty years since the first bill was filed in 1968. The reason behind this first initiative, following a demand from the Brazilian Federation of Historical Studies Centres (FBCEH), was that a legal regulation could guarantee labour rights for professional historians outside the education system. At that moment, the main area of activity for historians was teaching in schools, already recognized by the law. Taking place contemporaneously with the university reform and the moments of greater escalation of the civil-military dictatorship against the Brazilian population, this legislative proposal foresaw a regulation of the profession of “historiographer”,29 giving it a practical character that was in line with the training provided by universities when history and geography were part of the same course.30 The activities assigned for the professional historian were defined by the bill as reconnaissance, research, surveys and studies of a historical or archaeological nature, which are indispensable for: I. delimiting the characterization of historical regions and subregions, with a view to research in general and, in particular: a) to the research of commercial historical sources, in regional, interregional or international level; b) to the policy of settlement, migration and colonization; c) to propositions, on a local, regional or national scale, of problems pertaining to History.31

This first attempt failed, according to the report by the Committee on Legislation and Norms, due to the lack of “necessity or convenience” for the field of teaching and education. It is also worth noting that the proposal sought to recognize those

 Historiógrafo (historiographer) is an old word in Portuguese to refer to those who register what happened or write history. It is not used anymore to name one who practice historiography and even in late 1960s it was already an unusual word for that.  Between the creation of universities in the 1930s and the mid-1950s, the training of historians was undertaken in History and Geography courses. They were separated into distinct courses only with the enactment of a federal law in 1955.  Regulates the Profession of Historiographer Act, Chamber of Deputies 2.033 (1968).

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with a teaching degree in history, holders of a BA in history, as well as those who occupied teaching positions at the Faculties of Philosophy or Economic Sciences at that time, as individuals capable of exercising the profession. In other words, disciplinary education and university performance, on the one side, and profession, on the other side, were totally linked. Fifteen years later, and still during the dictatorial period, a second bill was sent to the Chamber of Deputies. The bill was proposed by congressman José Carlos Fonseca, a journalist and lawyer of a right-wing party (PDS), in pursuance of the demands from historians from his own region, the state of Espírito Santo. In this case, the term used was no longer the old and already unusual word “historiographer”, but “historian”. Other changes than the name indicate a transformation in the perception of the profession. First, the reference to a teaching degree was removed, making the professional practice something solely for bachelor’s degree-holders in history, a clear sign of a separation between teaching and research.32 In addition to them, people who have performed the function of historian for at least five years from the date of approval of the law could also apply for professional accreditation. As for the activities attributed to historians, a general formulation was established at that time, which, almost four decades later, would be approved in the 2020 law with just a few modifications: planning, organizing, implementing and directing historical research services; assistance for planning, organizing, implementing and directing documentation and historical information services; advising on criteria for evaluating and selecting documents for preservation purposes; elaboration of opinions, reports, plans, projects, appraisals and works on historical matters; advice and consultancy to workers in the field of History and participation in interdisciplinary activities of studies, projects and historical research.33

These were the activities a historian was supposed to do as a professional. However, one of the activities that would no longer appear in the approved law deserves to be highlighted here: “teaching the History of Historical Research Methods”. It is possible to note, therefore, that if the 1968 legislative proposal made the profession conditional on academic training, the 1983 one made it possible for people who did not have any university degree to be considered as belonging in the profession as long as they had practiced history before. At the same time, it established a very clear distinction between the teaching of history, not contemplated in the

 In Brazil, higher education teaching degrees (licenciatura) aim at training qualified teachers for working in education institutions as well as in other professional areas. BA degrees (bacharelado) allow graduates to work in different areas to their own qualifications, including teaching, but only in higher education.  Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Chamber of Deputies 2.647 (1983).

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bill, and the professional performance of holders of a bachelor’s degree, who could also teach methods related to historiographical investigation in university courses. That is, the social distinction between the basic education teacher and the professional historian linked to higher education institutions was reaffirmed with this bill. In addition, the justification for this legal norm suggested that many of the functions that would be the exclusive competence of historians were being performed by “lay people or professionals from other areas”, a fact that would not only affect historians’ careers, but compromise “the quality of the work carried out”. It would be possible to attribute part of the reasons for this very specific representation of the historian to the consolidation in the 1980s of university research and academic training at postgraduate level, excluding from the professional sphere those who were amateurs or dilettantes. In the 1990s, five other proposals were filed with the Chamber of Deputies, two of them by the same author. In general, they all established that the free exercise of the profession would be restricted or guaranteed to bachelor’s and teaching graduates in history, in addition to those without higher education who had already exercised the function of historian for at least five years.34 It is important to highlight that since 1999 the postgraduate degree started to be mentioned, establishing that Masters and PhDs in history could also legally exercise the profession. This is an important indication of the impact that postgraduate studies have had in terms of training qualified professionals for the labour market in history. Regarding the activities the professional historian was expected to perform, the bills established, varying in few details, those already indicated in the 1983 proposal. As for the justifications presented by the parliamentarians, the 1991, 1994 and 1995 bills indicated the social demands that had been made on the part of teachers’ organizations, student bodies and even from an association of archivists, restating the aforementioned distinction between professional historiography and the work done by lay people. In turn, the two 1999 texts sought to present a more grounded definition of what a historian is and does. The bill n. 2.047, proposed by Congressman Wilson Santos, a graduate in law and a former schoolteacher in the state of Mato Grosso, highlighted that “the professional of History is a professional who is dedicated to understanding historical facts, to discover their importance, consequences and causes”. And it added that the daily work of historians “consists of selecting, classifying and relating data collected in excavations and archaeological research, libraries, archives, private

 Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Chamber of Deputies 1.883 (1991); 4.753 (1994); 351 (1995); 2.047 (1999); 2.260 (1999).

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diaries and other documents, checking their authenticity, analysing their importance and scientific meaning”.35 In the same year, Congresswoman Laura Carneiro, a lawyer, proposed bill n. 2.260, justifying the need to regulate by law the profession of history, stating that “the Historian’s role is to remember what people forget. The past he studies is not a dead past, but one that, in some sense, is alive in the present and which helps man to understand the society of the past and increase his mastery over the society of the present”. Her justification also considered the historian as “a selector of sources, which after their analysis, acquire meanings, as History requires selection and ordering of facts about the past in the light of some principle or norm of objectivity accepted by the Historian, which necessarily includes elements of interpretation”.36 There is no space here for a detailed discussion of these two definitions of what, according to both legislator’s view, should be history and the exercise of the historian’s profession. What must be highlighted, though, is the fact that they formulate explanations for the relevance of legally regulating the profession based on criteria that are predominantly epistemological, dealing with the very definition of what history is and addressing the technical dimension of research. Only at the end, and very briefly, does Carneiro reinforce the importance of recognizing the profession in order to expand its field of work, until then quite restricted to teaching activities. In other words, what would justify professional status for historians was its proper disciplinary function. This kind of justification will still be predominant in the three other bills filed between 2000 and 2006.37 Bill n. 3.492 (2000), proposed by Congressman Ricardo Berzoini, a former employee of a public bank, focused on the old demand made by ANPUH, mentioning the general features that define history as an academic practice, such as “theoretical assumptions, work methodology, handling documentary sources, among other requirements”, and its importance for the exercise of the profession. In addition, it restated the distinction stipulated since 1983 that separated the work of the professional from that performed by a layperson or amateur, highlighting potential dangers to society: “when these activities are performed by people who do not have specific training as a Historian, countless distortions and misunderstandings occur, with real and visible damage to institutions, to the educational system and to society as a whole”.38

 Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Chamber of Deputies 2.047 (1999).  Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Chamber of Deputies 2.260 (1999).  Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Chamber of Deputies 3.492 (2000); 3.759 (2004); 7.321 (2006).  Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Chamber of Deputies 3.492 (2000).

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As for the requirements for the exercise of the profession, the requisite for university training in history remains, both in the bachelor’s and in the teaching degrees, or at a postgraduate level as well as work experience as a historian for at least five years from the date of enactment of the law. About the activities, the general definitions previously established since the 1980s were maintained: planning, organizing, implementing and directing historical research services; planning the exercise of teaching activities, in basic and higher education, in its teaching and research dimensions; planning, organizing, implementing and directing documentation and historical information services; developing criteria for evaluating and selecting documents for preservation purposes; elaborating opinions, reports, plans, projects, appraisals and papers on historical matters; advising institutions responsible for the preservation of historical, artistic and cultural heritage.39

Therefore, the various bills that tried to regulate the profession of historian in Brazil between 1968 and 2006 largely followed the developments that took place in the disciplinary field of history, particularly after the creation of postgraduate courses. Besides, the ways in which the historian was depicted in legal texts indicates a public perception that separates the work of the professional from that performed by amateurs, making ambiguous the criterion of a university degree in history as a sign of distinction between them. After all, anyone who had been carrying out such activities for at least five years would be recognized as a historian, despite not having a degree in history. Among all the proposals elaborated from 1983 onwards, only bill n. 2.260 (1999) did not refer to the exercise of the profession by individuals with no higher education. This fact is relevant because it indicates that the projects in general showed that the possibility of being recognized as a professional historian at that time was not something exclusive to university education, the place par excellence for the discipline of history. Nevertheless, it was still its status as a discipline that established the parameters to define the professional character of its practitioners.

7.5 The historian’s profession beyond the discipline If all the legislative proposals ended up not becoming laws, and were shelved for different reasons that will not be addressed here, particular attention can be directed to bill n. 368 (2009), that is, to the original text that supported the public discussions and legislative debates that led to the passage of the law in 2020. There are peculiarities in it that make it relevant to noting a change in the way of  Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Chamber of Deputies 3.492 (2000).

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understanding the relationship between the discipline of history and the profession of historian in contemporary Brazil. In particular, there is a disjuncture between discipline and profession, especially regarding the activities foreseen for the exercise of the profession and the justification presented for the project. As to the requirements, it should be noted that the requirement for a university degree or postgraduate degree in the field was maintained, but the possibility of being recognized as a historian if one was already exercising this function for at least five years was not included in the first version of this bill. In other words, according to the text, a professional historian would be simply that individual with a specific academic title in history. Profession and discipline, therefore, would be almost equivalent categories in the original version of the proposal. However, when we look at other parts of the legal text, there is a broader understanding of the historian’s professional status, causing a mismatch in relation to the disciplinary reality of history. First, the activities were more detailed, with the following excerpt being added to the previous formulation: “organizing information for publications, exhibitions and events in companies, museums, publishers, video and CD-ROM producers, or Television broadcasters, on History themes”. There is not just an indicator of actions, but also a detailing of the social spaces in which a historian might work, such as private companies, museums, publishers, producers, as well as a more specific delimitation of the forms in which the work of a historian appears, namely, written content, museum exhibitions, audio-visual materials, and even digital products. That is, the perception of what a historian does professionally goes far beyond the abstract idea of “understanding historical facts”, of expanding “the knowledge and understanding of the various aspects of human activity”, or even of “understanding the society of the past and increasing its mastery over the society of the present”. In this case, the professional field, the divulging of historical knowledge, as well as the different forms of expression used, are clearly indicated, suggesting that the idea of the public relevance of historians requires a consideration of the demands of the public and of their modes of consumption.40 This characteristic is even more visible in the justifications presented for the project, which are worth quoting here at length: The historian’s field of practice has no longer been restricted to the classroom, a traditional stronghold of this profession. Its presence is increasingly requested not only by cultural support entities, to develop activities and to cooperate, together with professionals from other

 This passage was later removed from the bill based on a parliamentary amendment that questioned its level of detail and argued about the need for legislation to maintain a higher level of generality.

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areas, in the restoration and preservation of our historical heritage, but also by industrial and commercial services, and artistic production businesses. In the industrial sphere, the historian has been working in the field of consulting on products that were launched in the past, to analyse their trajectory and assess the feasibility of their relaunch in the consumer market, or even to study the causes of their success or failure. Due to his qualifications, the historian is essential for businesses in the tourism sector, which hire his services to develop tourist itineraries for visiting places of historical and cultural appeal. Public and private entities use the historian to collect and organize information for publication, video and CDROM production, programs for television stations, exhibitions, and events on history themes. No less valuable is his collaboration in the arts, where the historian conducts period research for theatre, film, and television producers, either helping with the elaboration of scripts or giving advice on scenarios and other elements of artistic production. In a world where the quality and excellence of goods and services are becoming more and more sophisticated, historians must have their profession regulated, as their work no longer accommodates first-time amateurs or adventurers.41

From the definition of a disciplinary idea of history that should guide the role of the historian, such as those presented in the 1990s, we move to a concern with their “field of practice” and with their “presence” in the public space, taking into account sectors such as consumer goods and service industry, without losing sight of historians’ tasks of organizing materials and information in public and private entities, as well as consultancy activities on issues related to the past. It can be noted, therefore, that the representation of the historian in this project gains in scope. Viewed at the same time as a teacher/professor and as a researcher, the historian also appears there as an expert in historical contexts. His role could serve to guide tourists to historic sites and to avoid anachronisms in cultural productions, or even as an advisor for retro fashion, informing the industrial sector about what kind of “historical products” could have commercial appeal in the present. The professional historian, in this sense, is pictured as someone whose dispositions and virtues go far beyond those we normally find in academic training courses in history, at least in Brazil, and, therefore, go far beyond what the discipline of history defines.42 There was an evident paradox in this project: while it restricted the profession to individuals who had the disciplinary credentials to exercise it (a history degree), it also defined the professional as someone whose skills were not part of

 Regulates the Profession of Historian Act, Senate 368 (2009).  Herman Paul, “Performing History: How Historical Scholarship is Shaped by Epistemic Virtues,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 1–19. João Ohara, “The Disciplined Historian: ‘Epistemic Virtue’, ‘Scholarly Persona’, and Practices of Subjectivation. A Proposal for the Study of Brazilian Professional Historiography,” Práticas da História 1 No. 2 (2016): 39–56.

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the basic training found in the discipline. In general, university history courses are not intended for activities in sectors such as the provision of cultural services, advice for the consumer goods industry, the production of audio-visual content, or similar activities. For this reason, it is possible to argue that the project was elaborated from a clear disjunction between discipline and profession. It should be noted that, although the debate existed in a rather fragmentary way, it was only from the 2010s onwards that the field of public history in Brazil gained consistency and began to organize an agenda for discussion on the public performance and roles of historians, as well as on the demands and expectations of audiences in relation to history. More than that, it entered institutional settings for the formation of historians and today appears as an unavoidable component in both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in history in the country. In any case, its effects are still quite limited in terms of substantially altering the academic training of historians. The justification of the profession supported by bill n. 368, therefore, was out of step with the training made possible by the discipline of history. Thus, in its original idea, the bill was not only very restrictive, but also misplaced in its principles. The text’s repercussion was marked by numerous debates inside and outside the historiographical field, and its slow processing lasted more than a decade and resulted in significant changes to the initial proposals when it was approved.43 The law enacted in August 2020 defines as mandatory requirements for the exercise of the profession the training in a higher education course in history, a Master’s or Doctorate degree in history, or in a Postgraduate Program that has a line of research in the area of history.44 In addition, it guarantees recognition to people who have been in the profession for at least five years with any other university degree. The two most significant changes in relation to the original project are that, on the one hand, it does not differentiate between a teaching degree and a bachelor’s degree, and, on the other hand, it establishes the general condition of having obtained a university degree as a necessary criterion for being a professional historian. Regarding the activities attributed to the professional historian, the law says the following, maintaining the general lines of what many projects had established since the 1980s:

 Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho, “Regulamentação da Profissão de Historiador no Brasil: Muitas Oportunidades e um Risco Considerável,” Café História (24 February 2020), [Last seen: 12 October 2021] https://www.cafehistoria.com.br/regulamentacao-da-profissao-de-historiador-riscosoportunidades/.  Profession of Historian Act 14.038 of 2020.

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Teaching the subject of History in elementary and high schools, as long as the requirement regarding the obligatory nature of a degree is fulfilled; organization of information for publications, exhibitions and events on subjects of history; planning, organizing, implementing and directing historical research services; advising, organizing, implementing and directing documentation and historical information services; advice aimed at evaluating and selecting documents for preservation purposes; elaboration of opinions, reports, plans, projects, appraisals and works on historical themes.45

Opening up to other areas, however, is the object of another parliamentary proposal that seeks to restrict the profession only to those with a specific background in history. This is the case of bill 4.722 (2020), whose justification focuses less on a particular idea of history or its profession than on legal details, suggesting that the approved law is inconsistent with the purpose of regulating a profession. It means that other political issues indicate the complexity of this point for the current context. If, on the one hand, the legal opening for the recognition of professionals trained in other areas is an achievement in the sense of expanding the field of historiographical practice to forms that are not necessarily limited to the disciplinary formation of history, on the other hand, this makes it possible for certain practices that transcend not only the theoretical-methodological assumptions of historiography, but also their ethical limits, to gain social legitimacy through the law. Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho was one of the authors who, although an advocate of the law, pointed out the dangers that this legal breach could bring to public debate.46 Allowing non-history graduates to be legally recognized as professionals, as long as they have proven to have worked for at least five years, will enable individuals, groups and companies focused on the political instrumentalization of the past to legitimize their practices, gaining an institutional seal in retrospect for their activities. In a context in which, especially in Brazil, scientific denialism occupies a large place in the public sphere, even becoming a State policy of Jair Bolsonaro’s government, the risk that forgers of history can be legally recognized as professionals is considerable.47

 Profession of Historian Act 14.038 of 2020.  Leal Pastor de Carvalho, “Regulamentação da Profissão de Historiador no Brasil: Muitas Oportunidades e um Risco Considerável”.  Marisa von Bülow, Rebecca Neaera Abers, “Denialism and Populism: Two Sides of a Coin in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil”, Government & Opposition, (10 May 2022), [Last seen: 30 December 2022] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/government-and-opposition/article/denialism-and-popu lism-two-sides-of-a-coin-in-jair-bolsonaros-brazil/94FF980F8CF1D28AEAC72F96DD3516E6].

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In Carvalho’s words, there is a risk in the law as it “facilitates the obtaining of professional registration by people committed only to political agendas, just by showing that in the last five years they have worked as historians. No specific training in history is required in this case. Registration would be a way of gaining authority and legitimacy”.48 Without any other regulatory norm that establishes minimum theoretical, methodological and ethical criteria to define who can be recognized as a professional historian, the field is open to reprehensible practices and practitioners without commitment to historical knowledge. This poses yet another difficult question: should there be such regulatory norms? Who should define them? Could this not lead to a disciplinary closure of the profession at the same time as there is an expansion of public history practices? At any rate, apart from the dissemination of fake news and political lies that characterizes the uses of the past by far-right movements,49 historical content that denies important aspects of Brazilian history, such as the dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, is being produced on a large scale by private companies, serving as ideological support for Bolsonaro’s government.50 In this regard, the Brazilian historiographic community will need to find intellectual and political means, not limited to legal norms, to face the many forms of historical denialism.

7.6 Some conclusions The debate on the public relevance of history in Brazil gained renewed momentum in the previous decade alongside questions raised about the professional performance of the historian, in the context of an economic crisis that had strong repercussions on the job market for historians. More recently, with the rise of social movements with clearly fascist traits and with historical denialism getting stronger, the theme assumed decisive importance in Brazilian political discussions. The question of what social place would be reserved for professional historians in society,

 Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho, “Regulamentação da Profissão de Historiador no Brasil: Muitas Oportunidades e um Risco Considerável”.  Vinícius Bivar, “‘Long Live the Polarization’. The Brazilian Radical Right and the Uses of the Past under Jair Bolsonaro,” in Far-right revisionism and the end of history. Alt/Histories, ed. Louie Dean Valencia-García (New York; London: Routledge, 2020), 235–248; Caroline Silveira Bauer, “La Dictadura Cívico-Militar Brasileña en los Discursos de Jair Bolsonaro: Usos del Pasado y Negacionismo,” Relaciones Internacionales 28 (2019). Doi: https://doi.org/10.24215/23142766e070.  See for instance the article by Bruno Meyerfeld in Le Monde. Bruno Meyerfeld, “Le ‘Netflix de Droite’ Brésilien fait le Plein d’Abonné,” Le Monde (31 December 2021).

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i.e., the practitioners of history recognized by law, is one of the questions that inhabit countless conversations within and outside the disciplinary field of history. This chapter has sought to reflect on the relationship between the discipline of history and the historian’s profession based on the many parliamentary proposals that sought to regulate the practice by law. Such proposals were born from various social demands, most of them formulated by practitioners of the discipline. Among the reasons for this, social legitimacy and the guarantee of a place in the labour market were the main motivators that gave rise to a process that lasted about half a century. At the same time, it was clear that, although permanently in contact with each other, discipline and profession did not occupy the same places, nor did they play equivalent roles. If historiographical common sense ends up considering them as synonyms, and as interchangeable terms, the Brazilian example shows how problematic this can be. The profession-regulating process took place simultaneously with the consolidation of academic historiography, particularly with the institutionalization of postgraduate studies in the 1970s and its consolidation in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, if universities have become the privileged place for historians to train and practice professionally, the turn of the twenty-first century brought about an opening up of spaces for professional activities, motivated by a renewed taste for the national past and by public interest in history. As a result, new social actors, story producers, entered the scene.51 This resulted in shifts in the way historians themselves conceived their identities. In the 1990s, Francisco Falcon dealt with the theme from an eminently epistemological perspective, commenting on the history crisis as a crisis of the historian’s craft and even a crisis of his own identity. Identity, in this case, was understood as “the historian’s self-awareness, beginning with the intention to produce a history text” and also as “recognition of the work produced by the historian as a historical one”. The discourse of disciplinary history was, therefore, the main principle of identity for historians. Falcon also highlights that his reflection did not emphasize the distinction between “self-taught historians and professionally trained historians”, thus indicating that the most important part of this discussion was less the professional field of activity of historians than the material they produced within the discipline, that is, the historiographical text.52 Two decades later, Rodrigo Turin’s reflection on the historian’s identity evinces displacements motivated by a new context. Discussing the process of imposition of  Sônia Maria de Meneses Silva, “Os Historiadores e os ‘Fazedores de História’: Lugares e Fazeres na Produção da Memória e do Conhecimento Histórico Contemporâneo a partir da Influência Midiática,” Opsis 7 No. 9 (2007).  Falcon, “A Identidade do Historiador,” 13 (emphasis of the author).

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a neoliberal order in the academic sphere and the exhaustion of the traditional forms of the discipline linked to the nation-state and the modern assumption of training (Bildung), Turin took into account the social status of the professional historian, inquiring whether it should be “the faithful guarantor of a historical truth” and, at the same time, “offer the so-called ‘history’ or, more precisely, ‘memory’ services, adapting to the demands of an increasingly fast-paced and flexible market”.53 The historian’s identity is no longer founded on the same ground as before: the profession, which is no longer assumed to be synonymous with the discipline, gains relevance in the discussion. All this indicates that we are going through a moment in Brazilian historiography in which discipline and profession can no longer be seen simply as interchangeable categories. The legal recognition of the professional historian comes precisely in a context of questioning the disciplinary evidence and of the crisis of its institutional space, i.e., the universities. The challenge is to think about what kind of relations can or should be established between them. After all, if discipline and profession are not exactly synonymous, it is necessary to ensure that, in a society that ends up commodifying everything, they do not end up becoming antonyms.

 Turin, “Entre o passado disciplinar e os passados práticos,” 192.

Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt

8 Policy-Oriented History for the EU: The Rise of a New Type of Professional Practice for Historians? 8.1 Introduction: EU research policy The institutionalization of history as a professional discipline has since the nineteenth century been closely tied to the nation state, and academic historians have for a long time been acting as advisors to politicians and policymakers.1 From the early twentieth-century Applied History Series in Iowa to Nazi historians supporting the Third Reich, the phenomenon of historians acting as policy advisors or consultants has taken a variety of forms.2 Whereas older connections between historians and the state often relied on informal personal relations, over the last two decades, historical research funded with specific policy purposes has become increasingly formalized in funding schemes.3 Especially at the European level, policymakers have since 1994 called on historians and other social scientists to study topics ranging from migration, technologies of governance, memory dynamics, populism, to the history of European integration itself. Along with other social scientists and humanities scholars, historians have benefited from more than 212 million euros in EU project and network funding for research with a historical dimension. In comparative terms, the EU probably is the largest sponsor

 On the institutionalization of history in relation to the state, see Marek Tamm, “Writing Histories, Making Nations: A Review Essay,” Storicamente 12 (2016): 1–29. On history and policymaking, see e.g. Ian Tyrrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2005); Otis L. Jr. Graham, “The Uses and Misuses of History: Roles in Policymaking,” The Public Historian 5, No. 2 (1983): 5–19.  See e.g. these volumes on individual historians important in these regards: Rebecca Conard, Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013); Mathias Berg, Karl Alexander von Müller. Historiker für den Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).  Applied or policy-oriented history is also emerging inside the academy, see e.g. Jacqueline Niesser and Juliane Tomann, “Public and Applied History in Germany. Just Another Brick in the Wall of the Academic Ivory Tower?,” The Public Historian 2 (2018): 11–27. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-008

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of historical “targeted research” in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Europe.4 It is very likely that the funding and impact of such state-ordained historical research will only grow stronger in the following decades. The policy-demand for historical research has increased in the two most recent European Union Research Framework Programmes (FP7 and Horizon 2020; 2007–2013 and 2014–2020 respectively), and since 2007 “a deeper understanding of the Union’s past” has been described as an important societal need.5 To “contribute to an understanding of Europe’s intellectual basis” and stimulate “reflective societies”, research on “its history and the many European and non-European influences” is deemed especially necessary.6 Other actors are also jumping on the history-for-policy-train. Organizations lobbying for the social sciences and humanities have since 2000 consistently asked for increases in policy-oriented research funding, and repeatedly mention history as an important contributing discipline.7 Inside academia EU grants for targeted research have harnessed scholars’ attention, at least in part because basic funding for historical research has declined in many European countries.8 In sum, professional historians have increasingly been acting as parttime policy informants, also often called “experts”, “policy consultants” or “applied historians”, and will probably continue to do so.9

 Nikos Kastrinos, “Policies for Co-Ordination in the European Research Area: A View from the Social Sciences and Humanities,” Science and Public Policy 37, No. 4 (2010): 302.  Regulation 1291/2013 Of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11.12.2013 establishing Horizon 2020 – the Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2014–2020) and repealing Decision No 1982/2006/EC, [last seen: 24 November 2021], https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-con tent/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32013R1291.  Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, “Bridge over troubled waters? The link between European historical heritage and the future of European integration” (Brussels: European Commission, 2014): 6.  On lobbying, see Rafael Yann Schögler, “European Union Research Funding: Priority Setting in the Social Sciences and Humanities” (PhD diss., University of Graz, 2013).  On funding and the prioritization of “socially or economically useful [historical] research”, see Lutz Raphael, “State Authority and Historical Research: Institutional Settings and Trends Since 1945,” in The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History after 1945, ed. Berber Bevernage and Nico Wouters (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 229.  On “historical consultancy”, see Jorma Kalela, “History Making: The Historian as Consultant,” Public History Review 20 (2013): 24–41. On “applied history”, see Violet Soen and Bram De Ridder, “Applied History in The Netherlands and Flanders: Synergising Practices in Education, Research, and Society,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 136, No. 4 (2021): 27–57.

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Given the significant growth of funding “history for (EU) policy”, it is high time for this phenomenon to receive careful attention.10 Though many historians have claimed relevance for policymaking on blogs and in opinion pieces, sometimes self-presenting as “public historians” rather than policy consultants, more empirically-driven overviews of the practice and history of advising (EU) policymakers are currently lacking.11 It thus remains unclear what exactly policymakers ask historians to do, and which assumptions about the value of historical research and expertise underlie calls for policy-oriented historical research. While these developments have caught the eye of university professionals and administrators, eager to secure external funding for their institutions, historians of historiography have been rather slow to start answering these questions – especially in relation to the EU.12 A notable exception is the pioneering work of political scientist Morgane Le Boulay, who studied 34 research networks with a historical component funded within the EU’s Framework Programmes between 2001–2018.13 Her survey reveals the relation between changing preoccupations in European politics and calls for policy-oriented historical research.14 By highlighting how narratives about the crimes of communism and totalitarianism have been especially prominent

 The EU also funds historical projects within their well-known “bottom-up” or “fundamental” initiatives such as the European Research Council or Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, but those do not have a policy-oriented core and instead aim to foster fundamental research and to further researchers’ individual (international) careers. I therefore do not discuss them in this chapter.  See e.g. the websites “Dossier Toegepaste Geschiedenis,” Historici.nl, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://www.historici.nl/category/dossier-toegepaste-geschiedenis/; “History & Policy,” History & Policy, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://www.historyandpolicy.org/.  Though historiographers and theorists have focused on transnational institutions such as the EU, the Council of Europe, or the European Court of Human Rights, they usually highlight memory laws and public history projects rather than the funding of academic historical research. See Luigi Cajani, “Bringing the Ottoman Empire into the European Narrative: Historians’ Debate in the Council of Europe,” in Narrating Islam, ed. Gerdien Jonker and Shiraz Thobani (London and New York: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2010), 95–119; Jan-Werner Müller, “On ‘European Memory’ Some Conceptual and Normative Remarks,” in A European Memory?, ed. Pakier Malgorzata and Bo Stråth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 25–37; Ann Rigney, “Ongoing: Changing Memory and the European Project,” in Transnational Memory, ed. Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2014), 339–359; Sara Jones, “Cross-Border Collaboration and the Construction of Memory Narratives in Europe,” in The Twentieth Century in European Memory, ed. Tea Sindbæk Andersen and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 27–55.  Morgane Le Boulay, “EU Research Policy as a Transnational Memory Policy Instrument? The Framework Programmes and the Production of Competing Visions of Europe,” Memory Studies (2021): [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020988751.  In this, her work confirms the general statement of Johan Heilbron, Thibaud Boncourt and Rob Timans who claimed that “the SSH have proved to be vulnerable to shifting ideological winds and political attacks” in the EU context: Johan Heilbron, Thibaud Boncourt, and Rob

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within EU-funded research, and by showing how several of these projects emphasize the phenomenon of ‘European identity’ – thereby contributing to the EU-promoted assumption that such a thing indeed exists – Le Boulay convincingly presents this part of EU research policy as a transnational instrument of memory policy. History for EU policy is, here, clearly serving previously established European policies. Though Le Boulay’s work is an invaluable first step towards understanding EU policy-oriented historical research, her analysis is heavily focused on the topics that the European Commission focuses on. With this chapter I aim to go beyond a topical analysis, and instead ask whether such policy-oriented historical projects also reveal an epistemically specific “type” of historical practice? To answer that question, I draw on a substantially larger dataset of 98 policy-oriented historical research projects funded by the European Union (EU) between 1994 and 2020.15 Not all projects explicitly deal with memory or with European identity, but they all mention history as a contributing discipline or claim to take a historical perspective on a topic or problem. What all 98 projects also share is that they are funded within the EU’s programme for solving “societal challenges” – either by informing policy decisions or by executing them. To assess whether these projects could be theorized as revealing a specific “type” of history, I take inspiration from historians and sociologists of science such as Sheila Jasanoff, Gil Eyal, and Helga Nowotny.16 All these scholars have

Timans, “Understanding the Social Sciences and Humanities in Europe,” Serendipities. Journal for the Sociology and History of the Social Sciences 2, No. 1 (2017): 3.  For my comments on historical projects, I draw on a database with all EU-funded policyoriented projects that have a historical dimension that I compiled in January 2021 (projects funded after that date are not included in the database). To compile the database, I used overviews of projects published by the European Commission and Excel files with all EU-funded grants between 2007 and 2020 that can be downloaded from the websites of the European Union. Publications: DG-XII, “Synopses of TSER projects funded as a result of the three calls for proposals (1995/1996–1997/1998)” (Brussels: European Commission, 1999); Directorate K-Knowledge-based economy and society, Unit K-4 Research in the social sciences and humanities, “Improving the Socio-Economic Knowledge Base: Synopses of key action projects funded as a result of the three call for proposals (1999–2002)” (Brussels: European Commission, 2004); Directorate L-Science, economy and society, “Social Sciences and Humanities in FP6. All calls 2002–2006” (Brussels: European Commission, 2007). Excels: European Commission, “CORDIS – EU research projects under FP7 (2007–2013)”, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://data.europa.eu/data/datasets/cordisfp7projects? locale=en; European Commission, “Horizon 2020 projects: downloadable list”, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-sections-projects .  Sheila Jasanoff, “Serviceable Truths: Science for Action in Law and Policy,” Texas Law Review 93 (2015): 1723–49; Helga Nowotny, “Real Science Is Excellent Science – How to Interpret PostAcademic Science, Mode 2 and the ERC,” Journal of Science Communication 5, No. 4 (2006): 1–3; Gil Eyal, “Trans-Science as a Vocation,” Journal of Classical Sociology 19 (2019): 254–73.

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studied scientists working outside universities, and all of them have in their own ways contrasted such scientific work to the fundamental scientific research done in universities. Taken together, their work shows that emerging practices of scientific work must be (typologically) understood not only in relation their goals and ideals, but also with attention to the specific locations, procedures, and practices that play into any scientific activity. Consequently, the second part of this chapter discusses the expectations of policymakers as they are set out in calls, legal texts, and policy documents, as well as the “practicalities” of working for the European Commission. In this part, I highlight the procedural and practical constraints that historians must reckon with when they receive EU funding. By looking at project reporting, I also go over the practice of doing history for EU policy and the types of expertise and skills necessary for such work. The key concluding question I address in the third part of this chapter is how the history being done in this policy context differs from more conventional academic history. One could of course ask whether a static idea of “conventional academic history” is a concept of the right order in contrast with the EU-centred empirical backbone of this chapter, as there exist many different academic histories and it is rather unclear what defines the “academic” in academic history.17 Is it its location (universities, research centres), its goals (for knowledge’s sake), or the specific means of evaluation (peer review) that typify academic history – or all those things taken together? I have chosen not to pick one defining aspect, and to broadly define the contrast-category of conventional academic history by looking at goals, procedures, as well as location, and outputs.18 I am aware that many of the characteristics of policy-oriented history that I draw out below have also become prominent within the academy. The neoliberal research policies and auditing requirements that inform policy-oriented research policy have, in fact, also been institutionalized in many universities.19 It may also be that practices and

 See a similar remark on engaged history: Jörn Rüsen, “Engagement: Metahistorical Consideration on a Disputed Attitude in Historical Studies,” in The Engaged Historian, ed. Stefan Berger (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 33–43.  Based on sociologically and anthropologically inspired historiographical approaches that emphasize the procedures and contexts with which historians work, amongst others Rolf Torstendahl, The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism, (New York: Routledge, 2015); Georg Gerson Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1997); Jo Tollebeek, Fredericq & Zonen. Een Antropologie van de Moderne Geschiedwetenschap (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008).  A good piece on the neoliberalization of higher education remains Chris Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management,” Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 599–629. The research done for this chapter is part of a larger project on the history of European funding for historical research since the 1970s, which also looks at the

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discourses which currently impact academic historical research have, for a while, been much more explicitly visible in a policy context. To understand the interconnections between fundamental and targeted or “applied” history in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this typological exercise could thus be exactly the right starting point historiographers need. Before commenting on the content and characteristics of the policy-oriented projects that historians pursue, let me briefly explain how EU research policy is organized and where these projects I discuss here fit in. It is important to know that, ever since the 1980s, EU research funding has been formatted in large-scale funding schemes that are called “Framework Programmes” (FP’s). These FP’s have been organized in four, five, and seven-year cycles and encompass several sub-programmes, each with their own goals and themes. Policy-oriented historical research has always been located under the thematic priorities budget and organized through a specific sub-programme for the social sciences and humanities. All these social sciences and humanities sub-programmes start from a “challenge-based approach”, with the idea that bringing together researchers, resources, and knowledge from different fields will help the EU tackle the “societal challenges” that are discussed at top-level political meetings.20 The absolute budget for the social sciences and humanities subprogrammes has grown from 147 million ECU to 2,280 million EUR between 1994 and 2027.21 In relative terms to the absolute budget for all targeted research in the EU, this constitutes a growth of 1.34% to 4.26% of the budget. Within the last twenty-five years, there have been five similar sub-programmes in which a total of 98 policy-supporting projects with a historical dimension have been funded (CORDIS database). As Table 1 shows, most of these projects were funded within the last two sub-programmes, on Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities (2007–2013), and Europe in a changing world (2014–2020). The goals and priorities for these programmes are always defined by the European Commission (which can be seen as the EU’s government) together with the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. Each time a new framework programme is launched, EU politicians and officials redetermine how it is structured, decide on the number

history of the European Science Foundation and the emergence and institutionalization of the European Research Council.  For Horizon 2020, seven (global) challenges were identified, covering health and demographic change as well as food security and climate action. See: European Commission, “Societal challenges”, [Last seen: 21 March 2022], https://wayback.archive-it.org/12090/20220124130819/https://ec. europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/societal-challenges.  ECU stands for “European Currency Unit”, which was a unit of account used by the European Economic Community between 1979–1999 and which was composed of a basket of member country currencies. This calculation includes the proposed budget for Horizon Europe (2021–2027).

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and priorities of sub-programmes, and renegotiate the budget. These discussions are always initiated by the European Commission with a proposal which is compiled after gathering advice from stakeholders and expert groups. This proposal is then amended and commented on by the Council of Ministers – a gathering of the Ministers for Research from all 27 member states – and by the European Parliament in several rounds. During this legislative process, which is known as the ordinary legislative procedure or co-decision procedure, interest representatives and stakeholder groups – also simply called lobbyists – try to influence the general structure and goals, as well as the specific topics of the FP’s.22 Table 1: Social Sciences and Humanities sub-programmes and number of projects with historical dimension (1994–2020). SSH SUB-PROGRAMME

TOTAL AMOUNT OF FUNDED SSH PROJECTS

NUMBER OF HISTORICAL PROJECTS FUNDED✶

% OF HISTORICAL PROJECTS FOR TOTAL FUNDED SSH PROJECTS

TARGETED SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESEARCH PROGRAMME (FP)





.%

IMPROVING THE HUMAN RESEARCH POTENTIAL AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE BASE (FP)





.%

CITIZENS AND GOVERNANCE IN A KNOWLEDGE BASED SOCIETY (FP)





.%

SOCIO-ECONOMIC SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES (FP)





.%

EUROPE IN A CHANGING WORLD – INCLUSIVE, INNOVATIVE AND REFLECTIVE SOCIETIES (H)





.%

TOTAL





.%

✶

For the inclusion criteria and sources used to compile this dataset and the tables, see footnote 15

 More information on the decision procedures can be found on the websites of the European Commission, see: European Commission, “How Decisions Are Made,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/decision-making-process_en. In the EU’s transparency register, one can find a selection of lobbying organizations that are involved in the EU’s decisionmaking process: European Commission, “Transparency Register,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/transparencyregister/public/homePage.do?redir=false&locale=nl.

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For historians, the most relevant lobby organization on the European funding level is the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities (EASSH).23 More general research organizations such as LERU (League of European Research Universities) and the Young Academy of Europe have also lobbied on behalf of the “social sciences and humanities”.24 The impact of such lobbyists on historians’ projects within the FPs would deserve a separate chapter.25 For the purpose of this chapter, it is however important to note that all these interest groups lump together the “social sciences and humanities”, and constantly emphasize the societal and the forward-looking value of SSH research. This concept of “SSH” that is prominent in these sub-programmes is an EU creation that has always been left undefined. A discursive analysis by Rafael Schögler and Thomas König has shown that before this category of SSH came into being, the categories of “socio-economic science” and then “social science” also circulated up until 2007. They warn against expecting “too much from a hermeneutic interpretation of the use of ‘social science’, ‘socio-economic science’, and ‘SSH’”, since they interpret the acronym SSH “as a bureaucratic attempt to aggregate a broad field of different, and quite heterogeneous, scientific activities”, to contrast with the category of STEM research.26 After the legislative and consultative process is finished, the decisions that launch the framework programmes are published in the Official Journal of the European Union.27 The decisions that are relevant for this chapter are those launching the five earlier-mentioned sub-programmes for the “social sciences and humanities” of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Framework Programmes as well as of Horizon 2020 (running respectively from 1994–1998, 1999–2001, 2002–2006, 2007–2013, and 2014–2020). From the moment those decisions are published, calls for projects and “work programmes”, i.e., documents with application guidelines and topic descriptions, can be communicated by the Directorate General for Research, which is part of the European Commission. It is at this moment that the supply-side of policy-oriented historical research sets into action: historians react

 “European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities,” [last seen: 24 November 2021], https:// eassh.eu/.  See e.g. the publication tabs on their websites: “League of European Research Universities,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://www.leru.org/; “Young Academy of Europe,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://yacadeuro.org/.  One should also consider professional European SSH associations and their lobbying activities. An overview of those associations and their history can be found in Thibaud Boncourt, “The Struggles for European Science. A Comparative Perspective on the History of European Social Science Associations,” Serendipities 2, No. 1 (2017): 10–32.  Schögler and König, “Thematic Research Funding in the European Union,” 112–113.  These legal texts can be consulted via the online database EUR-LEX: “EUR-LEX. Access to European Law,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://eur-lex.europa.eu/homepage.html.

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to calls, create consortia and networks, prepare arguments and timelines, etc. At this point, the grant consultancy industry also sets into motion: agencies such as Euro freelancers, PNO Consultants and Civitta offer services to improve and support applications.28

8.2 Policy-oriented history: analysis of projects The projects I discuss were all sponsored as policy-oriented research and have all successfully gone through the EU’s application and monitoring process. From the perspective of their content, however, they form an eclectic mix.29 Some contents or areas are more popular than others – 28 out of 98 projects (28.57%) focus on questions about “(European) identity” or “identities” and at least twelve (12.24%) projects focus on issues around (religious) tolerance and intercultural dialogue. Yet in general professional historians have over the past quarter of a century been asked by European officials to focus on a multitude of “societal challenges”. As revealed in project titles such as “Lines of Exclusion as Arenas of Co-Operation: Reconfiguring the External Boundaries of Europe”, and “Peace processes in community conflicts: from understanding the roots of conflicts to conflict resolution”, historians have drawn on their specialisms in political, cultural, social, as well as economic history. This chapter thus only briefly focuses on thematic priorities, to then analyse what leeway historians do and do not have within this specific EU “machinery of knowledge production”.30 Though the Commission involves some stakeholders when setting up subprogrammes and writing calls, the reality for most researchers is that the topics that are eligible for funding are already laid down, and that they react to calls rather than co-create them. Getting to know the demands placed on historians by

 Many of these consultants also offer project management services once projects manage to secure funding. See “PNO Consultants: Horizon 2020,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https:// www.pnoconsultants.com/uk/grants/horizon-2020/; “Euro-freelancers: EU funding,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://www.euro-freelancers.eu/eu-funding/; “Civitta funding services,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://civitta.com/services/funding.  Due to privacy regulations, it is impossible to get access to denied project applications (ca. 80% of all applications). Though studying unfunded applications would allow a fuller understanding of the selection criteria and desires of policymakers, it is in any case is interesting to see what has been funded over the past 25 years because this positive approach reveals where money has been spent.  Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures. How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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policymakers is therefore crucial to understanding the phenomenon of EU policyoriented history. Over time, the way topics have been defined by the Commission has, moreover, become increasingly professionalized. In contrast to 1994, topics of research are since 2007 more finely categorized, and the most recent work programmes for H2020 (2014–2020) are up to 130 pages long. Compared to a good thirty pages for the work programmes from FP6, and sixty pages for FP7, it is striking how since 2014 the Commission’s brochures very explicitly state the specific challenge that scholars need to address, the scope of the problem at hand, as well as the impact they expect the research to have.31 In relation to the constraints funding mechanisms put on academics, taking a closer look at the phrasing of calls can thus be very worthwhile, especially since the wording chosen can influence who feels like he or she has the right expertise to respond.32 While this was already the case before 2014, this seems to have become even more so in recent years. In a call from 2016 entitled “Religious diversity in Europe – past, present and future”, for example, the Commission asks researchers to contextualize “religious co-existence from a historical perspective” and to do so “using a broad historical and geographical perspective” in a “comparative and multidisciplinary” manner.33 More specifically, scholars need to focus on the “relations, cooperation, tensions within and among these diverse communities or social groups”; with “the gender dimension of these issues” also being considered. Since “religious beliefs and affiliation to religious groups and communities were historically the cornerstones of the functioning of societal relations in Europe,” the Commission believes that such research will “contribute to the promotion of a European public and cultural space and to enhancing mutual dialogue and understanding”. The project should result in “innovative dissemination tools in order to be used for education purposes of any type” and in “proposals for appropriate changes in national educational systems”. The proposed budget is 2.5 million EUR, but researchers can also apply for lesser amounts of money.34

 See e.g. European Commission, “Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2018–2020,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/wp/2018–2020/main/ h2020-wp1820-societies_en.pdf; European Commission, “Citizens and Governance in a knowledgebased society Work Programme 2004–2006” (Brussels: European Commission, 2003).  Schögler, “European Union Research Funding,” 65.  European Commission, “Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2016–2017,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/wp/2016_2017/main/h2020wp1617-intro_en.pdf, 91.  Ibid., 91–92.

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Within these policy-based calls, historians thus have little to no room for interpretation when it comes to choosing the topics and questions they want to work on, and in this specific case, some of the “deliverables” of the projects have also already been decided on (educational dissemination tools). Historians’ work, moreover, must be present-, society- and problem-oriented, rather than solely focused on the past or on the academy.35 Of course, the historians working within these projects can to a certain extent decide on specific cases and methodologies to be used, but the topics and priorities set out by the EU dictate what issues and general questions historians will be working on. As the inclusion of the “gender dimension” above shows, the Commission sometimes also decides which aspects of a phenomenon need to be especially considered. More fundamentally, this example shows how many of the EU’s ideas about societal challenges start from normative policy assumptions about the challenge(s) in question – e.g., in the project call above, that religious intolerance can be connected to extremism, and that attitudes of “peaceful co-existence and rationality” are appropriate answers to that challenge. In another call from 2017, the Commission explicitly assumes that the challenge of “mutual understanding” can be addressed by “working through troubled pasts”.36 This idea is presented as the “original telos of European integration” which needs to be brought back onto the European agenda in “times of crisis”, when “value-oriented identities” are necessary – even though the necessity and efficacy of memory policy to change or reinforce values has long been under attack within memory studies itself.37 Of course, the scholars who react to EU calls can always question such assumptions, and at times policymakers even straightforwardly ask academics to do so, e.g. in a project about the European “public space”, in which reflections on “how meaningful it is to speak of a common “European” culture or history or public space” are invited.38 Reflexivity, in fact, is often mentioned as a core European value in calls, and anthropological research has shown that most EU policymakers like to think of themselves as open to other value- and truth-orientations,

 European Commission (Dimitri Corpakis), “Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities: First call for proposals (information slideshow),” 2006.  European Commission, “Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2016–2017,” 86–87.  For a general critique, see Charles Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial,” History and Memory 5 (1993): 136–151. More recently, empirical studies have also questioned this assumption: Lea David, The Past Can’t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Sandrine Lefranc and Sarah Gensberger, Beyond Memory: Can We Really Learn from the Past, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020).  European Commission, “Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2016–2017,” 100.

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and are eager to critically investigate their own assumptions.39 Still, as Le Boulay has shown for remembrance projects, such reflections are often first done outside the framework of European funding, before critiques can re-inform the writing of calls.40 The demand for reflexivity also seems to have become more prominent from 2014 onwards, and mostly in relations to questions about “identity”, “memory”, and “the public sphere”. Table 2: Overview of policymakers’ primary topics of concern per framework sub-programme for SSH (1994–2020). SSH SUB-PROGRAMME

POLICYMAKERS’ PRIMARY TOPICS OF CONCERN EXPRESSED IN CALLS & BROCHURES

TARGETED SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESEARCH PROGRAMME (FP)

Social exclusion and integration, education and training, science and technology policy options

IMPROVING THE HUMAN RESEARCH POTENTIAL Societal trends and structural changes, citizenship AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE BASE (FP) and European identity, European integration, and EU enlargement CITIZENS AND GOVERNANCE IN A KNOWLEDGE BASED SOCIETY (FP)

Governance, science and society/science in society

SOCIO-ECONOMIC SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES (FP)

Cultural and political identities, climate change, creativity and the economy, intolerance and the roots of conflict, Eastern Europe, migration

EUROPE IN A CHANGING WORLD – INCLUSIVE, INNOVATIVE AND REFLECTIVE SOCIETIES (H)

Migration, reflective societies, cultural and political identities, heritage, memory

The call brochures of the sub-programmes through which historical research has been funded also reveal how rapidly new priorities are formulated and eliminated (Table 2). Though concerns such as identity and migration last over several programmes, the issue of governance, which gained traction between 2002–2006, received much less attention afterwards. Also striking is the spike of projects on heritage in the Horizon 2020 programme (2014–2020). In total, eighteen out of 28

 Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000); Cris Shore and Marc Abélès, “Debating the European Union: An Interview with Cris Shore and Marc Abélès,” Anthropology Today 20, No. 2 (2004): 10–14. For other projects that value reflection on the process of representing itself, see e.g. GRINE (CORDIS ID: HPSE-CT-2001-00087) and GE.M.IC. (CORDIS ID: 216065).  Le Boulay, “EU Research Policy as a Transnational Memory Policy Instrument?,” 11–13.

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projects with a historical dimension funded through H2020 mention “heritage” in their titles and/or abstracts, whereas for FP7, only six projects mentioned heritage. In addition to these projects, there were at least another twenty-six technical heritage innovation projects funded within H2020 under the Commission’s call for “Reflective Societies: Cultural Heritage and European Identities”.41 Since 2018 was the European Year for Cultural Heritage, and the European Parliament played an important role lobbying for the importance of heritage awareness, it is likely that this heightened focus on heritage from 2014 was the result of successful lobbyists’ work.42 In general, these calls and changing topics show just how much historians are bound by the European Commission’s foci and how quickly those can change. The decision-making process for priorities and the way(s) in which lobbyists, but also the European Parliament, can influence topic choices would deserve a separate analysis. For now, we can conclude that both politicians and public interest representatives indeed affect which topics are recognized as “societal challenges”. Aware of the cultural stakes of funding, such actors are constantly shaping what historians (are asked to) work on. Less visible at first hand, but equally constraining for policy-oriented history, are methodological and practical admissibility and eligibility criteria for funding. In the five FPs in question, I detected five methodological demands that impact the practice and image of doing history for policy: the demand for international teamwork, for inter- and multi-disciplinary approaches, for dividing research and dissemination work into fixed “work packages”, for working within a pre-set timeframe, and the oft-repeated demand to work comparatively. First, the Commission only funds sufficiently large and international teams of scholars, and informally it is known that these should comprise scholars and universities from Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe.43 Because EU research policy goals also include bringing together European scholars and establishing a “European Research Area” (ERA), networking and collaboration have become necessary ingredients for any policy-supporting project.44 Unlike historians working

 European Commission, “Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2014–2015,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/wp/2014_2015/main/h2020wp1415-intro_en.pdf.  Markus J. Prutsch, “The European Parliament and the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018,” Santander Art and Culture Law Review 2, No. 4 (2018): 22–23.  Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, “Interview notes with SSH lobbyist (Zoom meeting),” 17 May 2021.  On the history of ERA, see Luca Guzzetti, “The ‘European Research Area’ Idea in the History of Community Policy-Making,” in European Science and Technology Policy, ed. Henri Delanghe, Luc Soete, and Ugur Muldur (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2009).

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with basic funding in universities, who have the liberty to work independently or in teams, scholars receiving EU targeted funding are always and a priori asked by the Commission to “Dream it! Team it! Make it happen!”, as the slogan for Horizon 2020 shows.45 Because the “Europeanization” of research has since c. 2000 been a strong policy objective, and because the rationale of European research policy is making research happen on a European level, intra-European collaboration is a must.46 This means that projects are only eligible if there are at least three partners from different countries included in the team, of which at least one needs to be an independent legal entity established in a Member State, and two can be established in different Member States or Associated Countries.47 Table 3: Average number of partners, average EU contribution per project (in ECU/EUR) and average duration of 98 selected projects (1994–2020). SSH SUB-PROGRAMME

AVERAGE AVERAGE EU AVERAGE TOTAL OF CONTRIBUTION DURATION INSTITUTIONS PER PROJECT IN MONTHS

TARGETED SOCIO-ECONOMIC RESEARCH PROGRAMME (FP)



,



IMPROVING THE HUMAN RESEARCH POTENTIAL AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE BASE (FP)



,



CITIZENS AND GOVERNANCE IN A KNOWLEDGE BASED SOCIETY (FP)



,,



 Often used in promo presentations: Litsa Kountouridou, “Horizon 2020 (powerpoint),” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://docplayer.net/9294791-Litsa-kountouridou-national-contactpoint-for-ict-and-fet-email-lkountouridou-research-org-cy-tel-22-205020.html; Luigi Raffo, “Gender Equity in Horizon 2020 (powerpoint),” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://www.slideshare.net/ LuigiRaffo/raffo-genderhorizon2020.  On the history of EU research policy, see Arthe Van Laer, “Research: Towards a New Common Policy,” in The European Commission 1973–1986, ed. Michel Dumoulin et al. (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the EU, 2014), 277–290; Eric Bussière and Arthe Van Laer, “Research and Technology, or the ‘Six National Guardians’ for ‘the Commission, the Eternal Minor’,” in The European Commission 1958–1972, ed. Michel Dumoulin (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the EU, 2014), 491–505; Veera Mitzner, European Union Research Policy (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020).  There exist catalogs, databases, partnering events (“brokerages”) as well as European Union initiatives to find partners, see “Partner Search,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.eu ropa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/how-to-participate/partner-search.

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Table 3 (continued) SSH SUB-PROGRAMME

AVERAGE AVERAGE EU AVERAGE TOTAL OF CONTRIBUTION DURATION INSTITUTIONS PER PROJECT IN MONTHS

SOCIO-ECONOMIC SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES (FP)



,,



EUROPE IN A CHANGING WORLD – INCLUSIVE, INNOVATIVE AND REFLECTIVE SOCIETIES (H)



,,



The reality for the historical projects discussed here has from the start been that there were almost always at least three and up to 45 partner institutions involved (see Table 3 for averages). Before Eastern European countries became member states of the EU, there were also specific budgets to collaborate with universities and institutes in countries that previously were part of the Soviet Union.48 On average, the 98 projects in my dataset have had between nine and twelve partners involved, depending on the specific framework programme. Most of these partners are universities and research centres, but there were also often national and/or regional historical institutes involved. A second methodological characteristic of policy-oriented historical projects ties in with this first one, and was likewise present throughout this whole period: policymakers prefer inter- and multidisciplinary methodologies. Calls and brochures explicitly demand multidisciplinary approaches to their predefined societal challenges, and in the discourse of lobbyists for the social sciences and humanities, it is often assumed that the SSH become societally relevant especially in interdisciplinary contexts.49 Specifically regarding lobbying for the Horizon Europe programme (2021–2027), the narrative centres on “interdisciplinary integration”, i.e. fostering the collaboration between scholars in the “hard sciences” and SSH scholars. The projects I selected from the timeframe 1994–2020, however, mostly combine history with sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, and contain literary scholars, specialists in cultural studies, and other humanists and social scientists. In a project on cultural opposition in former socialist countries (COURAGE),

 See e.g. European Commission, “First call for proposals for the specific programme for research and technological development, including demonstration, in the field of targeted socioeconomic research,” Official Journal of the European Communities C64 (15.3.1995): 17–18.  EASSH, “Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Horizon Europe,” April 2019, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://eassh.eu/Position-Papers/easshsshintegration4threportfnl.pdf.

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there was for example a team of about 150 associated researchers active, and the project was flagged as not only including history, but also film studies, computer and information sciences, as well as political science.50 A third, important, characteristic of historical research done for policy purposes is that each project is split up into particular “work packages” that have their own “work package leader”, and their own research goals and outputs. Every application should thus include a “work plan”, which provides a brief presentation of the overall structure of the project, indications of the timing, as well as a list of deliverables for each work package. In proposal forms, specific attention is also given to a so-called “plan for the dissemination and exploitation of the project’s results”, which would potentially “maximise the project’s impact” and facilitate “the possible follow-up of your project”.51 This organization of the research in WP’s is important because the way the project is pursued must be in line with the way it was presented – there seems to be little room for changes in how the research itself is organized and who will be working with who, on what, when. The project on “Cultural Opposition” mentioned earlier, for example, had at least eight work packages, and in their kick-off meeting at the start of the project, the team elaborately discussed the “tasks in the Working Packages”, the Work Manual that summarized these tasks, and the reporting requirements.52 The project synopses of finished projects in the EU CORDIS database, as well as the websites of projects themselves, show that the methodology of working with work packages, timetables, and deliverables is not just formulated in proposals, but actually carried out. Related to this is the fact that all projects within these framework programmes have a clear beginning and end, otherwise also called a “project lifecycle”.53 Contrary to the idealized timeframe of academic research, which (as Max Weber already noted in 1919) allows researchers to await further empirical research and postpone conclusions even until after their lifetimes, researchers working for policymakers must draw up conclusions and deliver results at the

 “COURAGE,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/ 692919.  European Commission, “H2020 Proposal template 2018–2020,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/call_ptef/pt/2018–2020/h2020-call-pt-riaia-2018-20_en.pdf.  “Kick-off Meeting Budapest,” COURAGE, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], http://cultural-opposi tion.eu/kick-off-meeting-budapest/.  On the idea of a “project lifecycle”, see Sebastian M. Büttner and Lucia M. Leopold, “A ‘New Spirit’ of Public Policy? The Project World of EU Funding,” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 3, No. 1 (2016): 53.

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end of a pre-established period.54 Since monitoring requirements are strict, researchers are under constant pressure to deliver results and adhere to the EU’s own evaluation criteria.55 Policymakers moreover expect guidelines for action, not meditations on further research. The temporal horizon of historians working within policy-contexts thus differs fundamentally from that of the academy. This has also been noted by scholars working within EU policy-oriented historical projects. In his discussion of the EU-funded RETOPEA project on “Religious Toleration and Peace”, in which cases of religious tolerance and settlement across time and space were compared, Bram De Ridder for example remarked that “the strict time limit for the first phase of the research” was an “immediate issue facing the researchers”. He continued: The historians involved in RETOPEA therefore quickly realized that there was no option to study these cases at the in-depth level that most of their academic colleagues would prefer. The timing allowed only for a basic study of the source documents involved (i.e., the actual settlement documents) and a glancing read of the related historiography. Although in certain cases direct contact with outside academics with more direct expertise offered an alternative path to information, the required deadline could only be realistically met by staying close to the existing academic consensus (or debate) on a particular case and by reducing the complexity of the historical events – an uncomfortable position for most of the historians involved.56

Admittingly, historians within EU funding schemes can and often do express reservations and bring up new research questions. Many projects also do not so much inform as execute EU policy, either by coordinating and bringing together other projects, setting up networks, or by communicating research to broader audiences. In line with Alix Green’s recommendation for “thinking with history in policy”, historians sometimes also produce reports that “focus less on briefing and informing policymakers and more on bringing their distinctive modes of thinking and reasoning into the policymaking process.”57 The RETOPEA policy report on religious coexistence, for instance, mentions reflexive ways of dealing with religious tolerance and intercultural dialogue, and touches on representation much

 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation (1919),” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 11.  Büttner and Leopold, “A ‘New Spirit’ of Public Policy? The Project World of EU Funding,” 60.  Bram De Ridder, “‘Clipping’ for the European Commission. Creating Digital Educational Tools to Reflect on the History of Religious Toleration,” The Public Historian, (forthcoming 2023). I would like to thank Bram De Ridder for sharing a draft of this article with me.  Alix Green, History, Policy and Public Purpose: Historians and Historical Thinking in Government (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 37.

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more than decisive action.58 Other projects, such as “Representations of Europe and the nation in current and prospective member-states” (2001–2004), do a bit of both. The 333-page policy report that summarizes the findings of this project consists of detailed, affirmative, descriptions of national identity formation and attitudes towards the EU in Austria, Britain, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, and Hungary, as well as three overarching chapters on Southern European identity, state and nation formation in Europe, and Europe as a symbol of modernity, democracy, and renewed international prestige. The report identifies opportunities and challenges for each case, and provides an overview of the literature that policymakers can easily access. While no reflexive historical reasoning is applied to the issues policymakers define and take for granted, the authors do suggest avenues for further research and postpone some conclusions.59 A fifth and last methodological aspect historians working for EU policymakers must deal with is the Commission’s strong preference for comparative studies. Out of the 98 projects identified for this chapter, about a third (explicitly) proceeded from comparative methodologies: five mention a “comparative perspective” in the project title, and another twenty-two mention comparative work in their abstracts. Most often, projects deal with a variety of cases that are geographically spread, rather than temporally, though projects such as RETOPEA do in fact compare religious peace treaties over the ages.60 In another project that asks how the history of communist rule has affected women’s current political position, scholars also promise to compile their “qualitative and quantitative results (. . .) into separate country reports and an over-arching comparative report”.61 Comparative work, however, does not mean that “analogical reason” is strongly present in the projects in question – even though many reflections on the value of history in policy contexts emphasize analogies.62 About 58 of all projects present their contribution to policymakers as one based on “contextual historical reasoning”, meaning that they promise to uncover links between the phenomenon in question

 “RETOPEA,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], http://retopea.eu/s/en/item/10296.  Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Bo Stråth, “Representations of Europe and the Nation in Current and Prospective Member-States. Media, Elites and Civil Society: The Collective State of the Art and Historical Reports” (Brussels: European Commission, 2003).  “RETOPEA,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], http://retopea.eu/s/en/item/10296.  “EGG,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/HPSE-CT2002-00115.  “Comparative work” of course encompasses a variety of methods and approaches. For an overview, see James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

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and its context.63 Rather than using comparisons to draw “lessons from the past” and assuming that situations are a priori comparable, most projects compare case studies to uncover how certain contextual factors influenced past events.64 Though all projects claim societal relevance, the working assumption is seldom that “history is repeating itself” or that policymakers are dealing with problems European society has seen before. Rather, most projects use historical context to inform policymakers about the possible backstories and difficulties they may overlook in current attempts to solve issues. Since those issues manifest themselves in various geographical contexts, comparative reports and overviews are often part of project deliverables. In general, these five constraints show that the methodological preferences and procedural framework provided by the European Commission strongly impacts the practice of historians (and other academics) working within these funding programmes. To quote Sebastian Delius and Lucia Leopold on the premise of projectbased policymaking: “we find a highly standardised and codified field of practice with distinctive procedural rules, regulations and organisational features substantially structuring the logics and timing of EU policy implementation.”65 Just like the overarching goals of the Commission, specific guidelines for project outputs, timelines, and collaborations indeed change the practice and premises of doing historical research when compared to conventional academic history. Though of course the very category of “academic history” can and must be subject to debate and deconstruction, historians working within the academy have different liberties as opposed to those scholars who wish to engage with the European demand to tackle “societal challenges” when it comes to organizing and communicating their work. So far, I have focused on the “demand-side” of this story, i.e., the priorities and guidelines set by the European Commission. In the following section, I will home in on what historians and other social scientists have supplied to the Commission in terms of deliverables and skills. I will first discuss what kind of “outputs” have been typical for policy-oriented history, then go over the “knowledge activities” that have been necessary to deliver such outputs, and end with a discussion of the specific expertise historians are using in this EU policy-oriented research context.

 The concept of historical reasoning has been dealt with mostly by educational specialists, who emphasize contextualizing as one aspect of historical reasoning. An influential approach can be found in Jannet van Drie and Carla van Boxtel, “Historical Reasoning: Towards a Framework for Analyzing Students’ Reasoning about the Past,” Educational Psychology Review 20, No. 2 (2008): 87–110.  See e.g. “EU-CONSENT,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://cordis.europa.eu/proj ect/id/513416.  Büttner and Leopold, “A ‘New Spirit’ of Public Policy? The Project World of EU Funding,” 54.

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Concerning deliverables, no two projects are alike. About thirty projects mention “academic publications” and “academic conferences” as outputs, yet academic output is only for four of these projects the only mentioned type of deliverable. Logically, to help solving “societal challenges”, policy-oriented history looks beyond the academy to disseminate results, and historians thus engage with several genres of writing that are atypical for the professional discipline of history. More than half of the projects result in detailed policy reports, policy recommendations, or policy reviews. Other projects deliver policy monitoring instruments, or specialize in the communication of their research results to a broader (stakeholder) public.66 Since many projects execute policy as much as they inform it, among the interesting types of output are prototypes of educational support packages or museological presentations that aim to set an (European) example for national initiatives.67 For such outputs, historians affiliated to universities often work together with education specialists and museologists, and thus take up a role that has been defined and theorized as that of the “public historian”. Other deliverables, which at least 16.32% of all projects promise, are large-scale databases. Such databases are supposed to either disclose data gathered within a project on a European scale, or to link existing databases into a greater European whole. Like research networks, databases contribute to the policy ideal of a unified “European Research Area”. For example, a project such as the SERVANT PROJECT on “The Socio-Economic Role of Domestic Service as a Factor of European Identity” (2001–2004) – which included 14 historians to make comparisons on the role of domestic workers in regional and national contexts – created “a bibliography and pan-European data banks” with search possibilities by country, by subject, and by author.68 A similar pan-European database was created by the earlier-mentioned COURAGE project on the legacies of cultural opposition in the former socialist bloc. Here, materials from all over Europe were connected to facilitate “a more nuanced understanding of how these collections work, what functions they serve in their respective societies, and how they represent their holdings and findings to the national and international public.”69 Underlying these and other database-driven projects is often the hopeful assumption that mega-databases will provide fuller,

 See e.g. the PEACE-COM (CORDIS ID: 506372), EUROPUB (HPSE-CT-2001-00069), CULTURALBASE (649454), and CHIEF (770464) projects.  See e.g. MEMEX (870743).  “SERVANT,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/HPSECT-2001-50012/.  “Collections (Registry),” COURAGE, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], http://cultural-opposition. eu/activities/collections/.

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more nuanced, and in the end, more objective, approaches to the described objects and to our knowledge of the past.70 In relation to project output, it is also noticeable that many projects’ selfdescriptions promise the creation of a kind of “contact zone” for policymakers and academics.71 While some projects deliver training for policymakers, others establish researcher-policymaker networks or organize research-to-policy conferences. A project with historians working on a comparative history of corruption (ANTICORRP, 2012–2017) mentioned in their application abstract that “the research findings [will be] spread to policymakers and the general public by using high profile multimedia and data visualisation tools as well as research-to-policy workshops at different levels and for different target audiences”.72 In 2017, that project concluded with a large conference in Brussels entitled “Containing Corruption: Final results dedicated conference”, where policymakers, international organizations, and scholars were brought together.73 Though the lifespan and institutionalization of such a contact zone probably varies according to each project, location-wise, a significant part of the work carried out within these funding schemes takes place in intermediary zones, between the state and the academy. Another characteristic of policy-oriented historical projects is that many scholars engaged in these projects spend a lot of their time doing “knowledge synthesis” activities rather than “knowledge production” activities. I borrow this differentiation from Sheila Jasanoff because it helps to pinpoint how academic insights are brought to policymakers.74 As Jasanoff notes, scholars working for policymakers spend a lot of time analysing knowledge that already circulates inside the academy. Contrary to work for intra-academic discussion, which often

 This dream about the use of computers has from the 1970s and 1980s been popular in panEuropean milieux and is now still underlying imaginations of “technological solutionism” in digital humanities. See Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, “Borgesian Dreams and Epistemic Nightmares: The Effects of Early Computer-Use on French Medievalists (1970–1995),” Storia Della Storiografia 75, (2019): 83–104; Andreas Fickers, “Veins Filled with the Diluted Sap of Rationality: A Critical Reply to Rens Bod,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 128, No. 4 Special Issue on Digital History (2013): 155–163.  On the concept of a ‘contact zone’: James Clifford, “Museums as Contacts Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188–219.  “How history can help us think about corruption and anticorruption,” ANTICORRP, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], http://www.anticorrp.eu/news/history-corruption-and-anticorruption/.  “Containing Corruption: final results dedicated conference,” ANTICORRP, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], http://www.anticorrp.eu/events/containing-corruption/.  Sheila Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisors as Policymakers (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1990), 77.

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discloses new data, scientists working for policymakers aim to “provide policymakers and the public with relevant and applicable knowledge that can premise political reasoning and deliberation.”75 In policy-oriented historical research, so-called “secondary activities” such as reviewing, screening, evaluation, and meta-analysis indeed play an important role. In total, 72.44% of the selected projects included a significant portion of knowledge synthesis activities. To provide policymakers with an overview of the state of the art on a specific (historical) topic, scholars (co-)summarize the findings of various disciplines and combine literatures on different areas and periods. Perhaps not unrelated to this more “distant” way of analysing knowledge is the fact that many of the projects on memory and identity also have an outspoken meta-historical intention, in the sense that they explicitly reflect on historiographical traditions themselves. The EUNAMUS project on “European national museums: Identity politics, the uses of the past and the European citizen” (2010–2013), for example, builds on a comparison of how various national museums engage with their pasts through object-choice as well as conflict management.76 Another project that reflects on uses of the past is IME, “Identities and modernities in Europe: European and national identity construction programmes and politics, culture, history and religion” (2009–2012).77 Though both these meta-historical projects do gather some “new data”, the contribution of both projects is pitched as bringing repositories of case study knowledge together in a new theoretical frame, rather than studying objects that have never been studied before. The fact that historians and other humanists and social scientists spend large chunks of time on knowledge synthesis activities, rather than analysing previously unstudied sources, has implications for the “types” of expertise that are necessary to do policy-oriented history. Borrowing concepts from Harry Collins and Robert Evans, I argue that academics working for EU policymakers need to draw both on their “contributory” as well as their “interactional expertise”.78 Contributory

 Torbjørn Gundersen, “Scientists as Experts: A Distinct Role?,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 69 (2018): 55.  “EUNAMUS,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/ 244305.  “IME,” CORDIS, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/215949.  I am aware that these concepts have been highly contested amongst sociologists of knowledge, yet I here borrow them simply as heuristic devices and not with Collins and Evans’s normative intentions. For influential critiques, see Rodrigo Ribeiro and Francisco P.A. Lima, “The Value of Practice: A Critique of Interactional Expertise,” Social Studies of Science 46, No. 2 (2016): 282–311; Arie Rip, “Constructing Expertise: In a Third Wave of Science Studies?,” Social Studies of Science 33 (2003): 419–434.

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expertise, which Collins and Evans define as being able to “do science”, i.e. having “enough expertise to contribute to the science of the field” is different from “interactional expertise”, which is defined as having “enough expertise to interact interestingly with participants and carry out a sociological analysis”.79 The difference is one of being able to generate new data and being able to understand the work of scientists reporting on their findings. This categorization is useful because many historians working within multidisciplinary EU-funded historical projects engage with disciplines and literatures that they themselves do not actively contribute to. As academics, they do however often judge the relative value of this work – like how Collins and Evans have connected the concept of interactional expertise to that of the “critic”.80 Because the drafting of policy reports and papers demands secondary knowledge activities such as screening and evaluating, this kind of critical work is a crucial part of policy-oriented history. In short, interactional expertise may be as important as, and at times even more important than, contributory expertise. Though further research is needed to reveal whether historians involved in EU targeted funding programmes indeed self-report needing such expertise, the growing conceptualization of the researcher as (part-time) project manager who needs skills related to communication, interaction, and adaptation is present in the way humanities and social science projects are thought and written about.81 Anyone who looks at the Twitter streams, websites, and newsletters from historical projects sponsored within the EU’s societal challenges programmes will see that scholars working for policy-makers are acting as entrepreneurial network-builders, highly active communicators, even as “innovators” who use their historical thinking to cosolve pressing issues. Especially since 2007, scholars actively report on the finishing of a “work package”, publish policy reports and briefs for both communication and

 Harold Maurice Collins and Robert Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,” Social Studies of Science 32 (2002): 254; Harry Collins, “Interactional Expertise as a Third Kind of Knowledge,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3 (2004): 125–143.  Collins and Evans, “The Third Wave of Science Studies: Studies of Expertise and Experience,” 244.  Consultancy firms offering management services within Framework Programmes have also picked up on this need for management capacities and have started to speak about the “coordination dilemma” researchers are faced with in EU funding schemes (see also footnote 28). This dilemma supposedly stems from the desire “to focus on research and [not wanting] to be distracted by the administrative burden” and can (unsurprisingly) be solved by hiring consultants to do management work within an EU-funded project. See e.g. “The Coordination Dilemma in Horizon Europe,” ENSPIRE, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://enspire.science/coordination-di lemma-in-horizon-europe/.

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EU monitoring purposes, and publicize networks through which academics and policymakers can interact.82 Undoubtedly, the constraints put on historians by the European Commission affect historical projects, both in terms of how they are imagined and how they are carried out.

8.3 Theorizing policy-oriented history In a discussion on the emergence of “post-academic science”, sociologist Helga Nowotny pertinently asked what exactly is “at stake” with the emergence of science-industry and science-state relations in the late twentieth and twentieth-first centuries.83 Is it “only” the “practice and image of science” that is changing in intermediary zones where scientists interact with policymakers and businesses, or is there – as her colleague John Ziman argued – a “core” of science that has been changed? While both sociologists discuss the emergence of hard sciences being done outside the academy, this chapter addresses the way humanities and social science, and history more specifically, is being carried out in policy contexts. Previous research has shown the way EU research policy is part of creating an (imagined) “memory community” and identity policy, thereby highlighting the cultural stakes of this type of sponsorship.84 But what is epistemically at stake with the EU’s injection of over 212 million euros in targeted historical research? Can we see a new “type” of history emerging? As the second section of this chapter has hinted at, the practice and image of history within EU schemes differs in important respects from practices and imaginations of conventional academic history. The timeframe of policy-oriented history is different, for example, from the idealized timeframe of academic history, and so are the types of deliverables that come out of policy-oriented projects. Of course, there are significant differences between the 98 projects discussed here, and no two academic historians are alike. But when assessing what is going on with the EU funding of policy-oriented historical research, contrasting “policyoriented history” with “conventional academic history” can prove valuable.

 See also the discourse of the network of National Contact Points on SSH; “Net4Society”, [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://www.net4society.eu/index.html.  Nowotny, “Real Science Is Excellent Science.”  See e.g. Oriane Calligaro, Negotiating Europe: EU Promotion of Europeanness Since the 1950s (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, “Remembrance: Can Europeans Remember Together?,” West European Politics 35 (2012): 1182–1202.

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To draw out the differences between policy-oriented and academic history, I end this chapter with an exercise mirroring the one done by sociologist Sheila Jasanoff in her description of scientists working within regulatory agencies. In the US Federal Regulatory Agencies for environment and public health, Jasanoff finds what she calls a type of “regulatory science” whose purpose it is to produce “techniques, processes and artifacts that further the task of policy development”, and which knows a “relatively heavy involvement of government and industry in the process of producing and certifying knowledge”.85 She remarks that scientists “working to meet policy needs are under constant pressure to deliver results quickly” and contrasts this kind of science to “research science” or “pure science” done in the academy.86 In an almost Weberian fashion, Jasanoff comparatively creates ideal-types that help describe the phenomenon of academically trained scientists working in trans- or para-academic zones. Those ideal types particularly prove their value when thinking about trust in experts and the legitimation of science in society, since these scientists are working in a “territory of its own that is subject to neither purely scientific nor wholly political rules of the game” and therefore vulnerable to attacks both from the academy and from politics.87 Table 4: Ideal-typical comparison of policy-oriented to conventional academic history. Policy-oriented history

Conventional academic history

Topic of research

Defined by policymakers, related to urgency

Defined by academics, “free”

Goal

Tackle societal challenges, create “truths” relevant to policy

Knowledge for knowledge’s sake, “truths” of originality and significance

Timeframe

Determined by FPs

(Relatively) open-ended

 Jasanoff, The Fifth Branch: Science Advisors as Policymakers, 80.  Sheila Jasanoff, “The Practices of Objectivity in Regulatory Science,” in Social Knowledge in the Making, ed. Charles Camic, Neil Gross, and Michèle Lamont (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 311.  Sheila Jasanoff, “Quality Control and Peer Review in Advisory Science,” in The Politics of Scientific Advice, ed. Justus Lentsch and Peter Weingart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 20.

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Table 4 (continued) Policy-oriented history

Conventional academic history

Output

Policy papers, creation of policy-research contactzones, databases usable by policymakers and academics, workshops, training

Academic publications (journals, monographs), academic conferences

Location

Policy-researcher contact zones (forums, consensus conferences), large (international) research networks

Academic institutions (research centres, universities)

Reward

Policy-pickup/implementation, policy citations, Peer citations, funding for basic structural collaboration, included in best practices research, prizes, awards, etc. or projects (appropriated by policymakers)

Primary knowledge activity

Meta-analysis, knowledge synthesis

Knowledge production

Central form of expertise

Interactional expertise

Contributory expertise

The characteristics of the historical projects I discuss here can likewise be activated in such a comparison. In Table 4, I borrow (most of) Jasanoff’s categories and apply them to this case study. This shows how many of the characteristics discussed above contrast to ways of working and thinking that are typical for academic historians. Indeed, with a strong emphasis on understanding and theorizing connections between past and future, resulting in a methodological emphasis on interdisciplinarity and teamwork, policy-oriented history differs from an older “ivory-tower” concept of history in which historians work for their (discipline’s) sake or for the greater good of understanding and conserving the past.88 Of course, the logic of “projectification” has also found its way into the academy, and competitive funding schemes for fundamental research also work with “work packages” and promote a rhetoric of “science in society”. But in terms of what historical knowledge is expected to do for policymakers, historians are here explicitly required to produce research results and outputs that are relevant to policymaking, which also explains why the very location in which results are communicated and (dialogically) brought into being is often outside universities. Because of this, historians often prescribe policy measures based on their specific interactional and critical expertise,

 A good exploration of this “ivory tower” ideal can be found in Jo Tollebeek and Tom Verschaffel, De vreugden van Houssaye. Apologie van de historische interesse (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1992).

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rather than, or in addition to, their contributory expertise – meaning that scholars in policy-contexts are mostly concerned with meta-analysing knowledge and connecting fields, research traditions, and stakeholders. All this demands specific skills, which in turn also allows increasing specialization. It should come as no surprise, then, that there is an emerging literature on “transnational professionals” as a new type of workers who hold a lot of social and cultural capital, a category to which many of the social scientists and humanists working for the EU could belong.89 Because of this opportunity for specialization, it also makes sense that many of the scholars who participated in one EU targeted research project also participated in later framework programmes. Given the importance of competitive funding to finance pre-and post-doctoral careers inside the academy, scholars indeed often specialize in a type of grant. While more in-depth tracking of the historians involved in these projects would have to be done to prove that to be the case here, a quick glance over the list of PI’s does show that several people engage in multiple projects.90 What this chapter describes may thus be the emergence of a new profession for academic historians: a job that is specifically international and interdisciplinary, which takes place both in academic and non-academic zones, and which has its own goals and ideals. There is, clearly, money going around in this business – lobbying organizations have since 2015 been gaining in strength, and consultancy firms target grant applicants in the social sciences and humanities. While the EU did not (and probably also will not) set up something like a “European Regulatory Agency for Historical Advising”, the way these projects have become a fixed part of EU research policy points to their institutionalization. A few projects, such as the HERA networks, have also been funded in multiple programme cycles.91 On a university level, these EU policy-oriented funding schemes are also leaving traces. Since “third-party funding” has in many countries gained importance, university administrations are increasingly hiring EU specialists and consultants to help scout opportunities for funding in EU calls for policy-oriented research.92

 Brooke Harrington and Leonard Seabrooke, “Transnational Professionals,” Annual Review of Sociology 46 (2020): 399–417.  On grant specialization and EU funding, see: Christoph Grimpe, “Extramural Research Grants and Scientists’ Funding Strategies: Beggars Cannot Be Choosers?,” Research Policy 41 (2012): 1448–60.  “Humanities in the European Research Area,” [Last seen: 24 November 2021], https://heranet. info/.  In Flanders, for example, all big universities have an elaborate “EU department” in the university administration.

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Especially in many Southern and Eastern European countries, nation-state funding for SSH has been declining, and the funding handed out by the EU is then crucial.93 More research would be needed to sketch the relative importance of this phenomenon in various national contexts.94 For now, it suffices to state that policy-oriented (historical) research is, in many contexts, being encouraged by university administrators. What, then, is to be made of this phenomenon of policy-oriented history? The historians who participate in these programmes may self-identify as “applied historians”, possibly borrowing the goal-oriented definition of the older CarnegieMellon program in Applied History as those historians wishing “to enrich policy research and formulation not only with historical data but with a historical mode of inquiry.”95 Others may see themselves as “public historians”, a category that is usually (sub-)characterized based on the specific audience one works for.96 Though both labels are anchored in previous academic reflection on these roles, both definitions also seem inadequate because they highlight either goals or publics as their defining characteristics. This chapter, however, shows that there is much more to the practice of doing history for (EU) policy. As a new “type” of doing history, policy-oriented history is not simply defined by its overarching goal, nor by its public. Instead, it is defined by a much more kaleidoscopic set of characteristics that allow us to understand, and ultimately, build trust in the historian striving to co-solve societal challenges.

 Poul Holm, “Humanities and Public Policy,” in Humanities World Report 2015, ed. Arne Jarrick, Dominic Scott, and Poul Holm (London: Palgrave MacMillan UK, 2015), 167.  Research shows that for many French humanities scholars, EU grants are not at the top of their mind: Michel Wieviorka, “The Crisis of the Humanities and Social Sciences in France Today,” in The Changing Face of Higher Education: Is There an International Crisis in the Humanities?, ed. Dennis A. Ahlburg (New York: Routledge, 2018). Since the data on non-selected applications is not available by the EU, it was not possible for me to see where most applications for funding come from (see also footnote 29).  Peter N. Stearns, “Applied History and Social History,” Journal of Social History 14 (1981): 533.  See e.g. Peter Novick’s differentiation between private and popular historians: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). See also Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (London: Routledge, 2016).

June Bam and Rafael Verbuyst

9 Indigenous History, Activism, and the Decolonizing University: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Struggle over the Khoisan Past in Post-apartheid South Africa 9.1 Introduction In September 2021, the San and Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, (hereafter ‘the Centre’) marked its one-year anniversary. A host of national and international guests, including Australian Aboriginal and Canadian First Nation academics and activists, attended the celebration, held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng, UCT’s Vice-Chancellor, emphasized how the Centre was one of the university’s answers to the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall protests, which firmly placed the decolonization of higher education and society on the agenda in South Africa and elsewhere. The Centre was indeed the end result of a long and difficult knowledge partnership established over many years with marginalised communities and activists at UCT’s Centre for African Studies (CAS), which culminated in the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum (hereafter ‘the Forum’): a broad-based representative group of San and Khoi (or ‘Khoisan’1) traditional leaders and civic activists. The Forum established a ‘term of reference’ with CAS, one of which was the co-establishment of a research and knowledge production Centre on the precolonial past that would address contemporary civic issues and silences in the prevailing interpretations of southern Africa’s history. The Centre was envisioned as a ‘go to place’ for global scholars interested in pursuing ‘decolonised historiography’ through decolonial methods, new archives, and research about land, language, African feminist knowledges,

 The term ‘Khoisan’ is controversial due to its provenance in twentieth century colonial anthropology. While various alternatives circulate to collectively denote South Africa’s indigenous people, they each come with drawbacks. The more acceptable term is ‘Khoi and San’ (or ‘San and Khoi’). We stick with ‘Khoisan’ for the sake of consistency and because of the historical use of the term by indigenous scholars themselves, notwithstanding its Eurocentric and racist genesis. Note: June Bam also writes as ‘June Bam-Hutchison’. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-009

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and decolonial ethics. Phakeng indeed concluded her speech by noting how having the Centre on historical Khoisan territory – an acknowledgement never made previously by someone in her position – poised it to break with centuries of colonialist science. Moreover, by recording, protecting, and validating indigenous forms of knowing and placing a premium on ‘community involvement and codesign processes, the Centre focuses in highly unprecedented fashion on a group that is often forgotten in such debates on decolonization and not popularly viewed by the South African public as integral to the ‘Black’ African majority: the Khoisan. Following their dispossession, decimation, and exploitation under Dutch and British colonialism, the Khoisan were racially designated as ‘Coloured’ by the apartheid regime – an ambiguously defined mixed-race category amalgamating various populations groups, including the Khoisan, but also enslaved people from Asia and other parts of Africa. Under racial segregation, ‘Coloureds’ received relatively better treatment than ‘Blacks’ (i.e., Nguni-speaking populations),2 but worse than ‘Indians’. ‘Whites’, for their part, sat at the top of the racist socio-economic and political pecking order as the ruling class and herrenvolk – chosen people. As we detail below, colonial and apartheid ideology spawned the still commonly held view that the Khoisan became virtually extinct as a distinct collective in the face of colonial onslaught. Khoisan identity and culture in fact survived; albeit in drastically altered forms, particularly in Cape Town, which knows the longest colonial history. Since the democratic transition of 1994, increasing numbers of ‘Coloureds’ in Cape Town and beyond reject their semi-official classification3 and its connotations of miscegenation, and identify instead as Khoisan.4 This process has been referred as “Khoisan  Though severely discriminated against and exploited with the longest indigenous history of experiencing colonial brutality, and genocide and slavery at the Cape, ‘Coloureds’ were not forced to carry passes under apartheid, and were not forced into the Bantu Reserve system as migrant labourers on the mines. In addition, the Cape Province was a ‘Coloured Labour Preferential Area’ under apartheid.  ‘Black African’, ‘Indian or Asian’, ‘Coloured’, ‘Other’ and ‘White’ are still used in the census and in the context of post-apartheid affirmative action policies, for instance – entrenching the apartheid race classifications. Affirmative action has been rejected by ‘Coloured’ intellectuals and activists such as Neville Alexander. See Neville Alexander, “Affirmative action and the perpetuation of racial identities in post-apartheid South Africa,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa 63 (2007): 92–108.  June Bam,“Contemporary Khoisan Heritage Issues in South Africa: A Brief Historical Overview,” in Papers From the Pre-Colonial Catalytic Project, ed. Lungisile Ntsebeza and Christopher Saunders (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 2014), 123–135; Rafael Verbuyst, “Claiming Cape Town: Towards a Symbolic Interpretation of Khoisan Activism and Land Claims,” Anthropology Southern Africa 39 (2016): 83–96; Justin Brown and Ana Deumert. “‘My Tribe Is the Hessequa. I’m Khoisan. I’m African’: Language, Desire and Performance among Cape Town’s Khoisan Language

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revivalism”,5 a term many activists take issue with as it reinforces the stubborn myth of Khoisan extinction and potentially neglects the fact that their activism extends centuries of anti-colonial resistance (see below).6 For the purposes of this text, ‘revivalism’ denotes both the devastating effects of colonialism and apartheid, as well as the manifest rise in Khoisan self-identification and activism, though embedded in centuries of resistance against settler colonialism. Khoisan activists constitute a diverse collective, sharing a claim to indigeneity but tackling a wide variety of issues on which there is widespread internal disagreement: cultural rights, socioeconomic development, historical justice, land claims, indigenous feminism, reclamation of indigenous knowledges and languages, etc. Some, though certainly not all, also voice controversial calls for official recognition as indigenous people and traditional leaders. These deeply conflicting contentions around the past are thus called upon to inform the diversely informed contemporary indigenous identities and to place various hopes for justice on the Forum, the Centre, its staff, and affiliated historians. As members of the Centre (Bam as founding interim-director and Khoisan activist; Verbuyst as a European Research Affiliate7), we want to critically reflect on how our positionality and work on Khoisan history, historiography, and activism relates to these hopes: how can the Centre respond to activist demands on the past while simultaneously rethinking academic historiographical rigour in a decolonizing university? This question is deeply embedded in ongoing debates about indigenous (academic) history, and our case study offers a unique vantage point to study the opportunities and challenges of decolonizing indigenous history as praxis. Reckoning with their discipline’s historical disregard for indigenous historical knowledge, indigenous and non-indigenous historians alike increasingly examine how indigenous people

Activists,” Multilingua 36 (2017): 571–594; Siv Øvernes, Street Khoisan: On Belonging, Recognition and Survival (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2019); Rafael Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness: Articulating Indigeneity in Post-Apartheid Cape Town” (PhD diss., Ghent University/University of the Western Cape, 2021).  Henry C. Bredekamp, “Khoisan Revivalism and the Indigenous Peoples Issue in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Africa’s Indigenous Peoples: “First Peoples” or “Marginalised Minorities”?, ed. Alan Barnard and Justin Kenrick (Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, 2001), 191–210.  It is important to note that there are non-racial former anti-apartheid activists and Marxists who may identify as Khoisan, but who do not necessarily consider themselves as ‘revivalists’. Such activists, such as June Bam, the co-author of this text, and Yvette Abrahams, which we come back to in Section Two, would rather define themselves as organic Africanists building on a long tradition of indigenous resistance to colonialism and conquest.  Rafael Verbuyst is a Research Affiliate at the Centre, but based primarily as a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium.

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engage with the past in their own right.8 These engagements vary widely, but often place different emphases, speak to lived experiences and affect, seek to instil pride in indigenous identity and become mobilized in campaigns for self-determination and historical justice.9 Such characteristics are commonly regarded as “incommensurable” with historians’ conventional emphasis on objectivity, source criticism and dispassionate analysis.10 Others believe academic historiography should be “provincialized [. . .] alongside many other ways of understanding the past”.11 Historians, it is argued, should not only pursue “verifiably true statements about the past”, but engage with “epistemological questions about the diverse ways truths might be known and told”.12 Nauyiu Australian elder Miriam-Rose Ungummer introduced the concept of “deep listening” – which we revisit later on – to indigenous research methodologies.13 Called dadirri, indigenous scholar Judy Atkinson developed it further as a scholarly method, which Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker and Ben Silverstein put forward as a “best practice” research methodology, meaning “respecting one’s interlocutor as having discrete responsibilities, as someone obligated to and capable of deciding what knowledge should be shared and with whom [. . .] deep listening requires exploring the connected pasts and entangled presents”.14 Getting academia to take such perspectives seriously comes with various challenges, even when decolonisation is purportedly being taken seriously both in the global north and global south. How do we avoid criticisms that this amounts to promoting essentialism or

 Laura Rademaker and Ben Silverstein, “Deep Historicities,” Interventions 24 (2021): 137–160, doi:10.1080/1369801X.2021.1972824; Ann McGrath, “People of the Footprints,” Interventions 24 (2021): 181–207, doi:10.1080/1369801X.2021.1972822; Julia E. Rodriguez, “Deep History and the Pitfalls of Periodization,” Interventions 24 (2021): 161–180, doi:10.1080/1369801X.2021.1972825; Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker and Ben Silverstein, “Deep History and Deep Listening: Indigenous Knowledges and the Narration of Deep Pasts,” Rethinking History 25 (2021): 307–326, doi:10.1080/13642529.2021.1966201.  Shino Konishi, “First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History,” Australian Historical Studies 50 (2019): 285–304, doi:10.1080/1031461X.2019.1620300; See also Ronald Niezen, The Rediscovered Self: Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2009).  For a thorough exploration of “incommensurability”, see Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (2012): 1–40.  Rademaker and Silverstein, “Deep Historicities,” 139, 146.  Rademaker and Silverstein, “Deep Historicities,” 149.  Mariam-Rose Ungunmerr, “Dadirri story,” Compass Theological Review 22 (1988): 1–2.  Judy Atkinson, Trauma Trails, Recreating Song Lines: Transgenerational Effects of Trauma in Indigenous Australia (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2002); McGrath, Rademaker and Silverstein, “Deep History,” 314, 319.

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simply presents a kind of inclusive history tokenism which relegates it to ‘native studies’ or ‘indigenous studies’ in the academy?15 Tackling this question requires being cognizant of the fact that indigenous people hold diverse views about their varied pasts, mobilize history in non-homogenous ways in multiple political struggles and are increasingly establishing themselves as part of mainstream academia. Unlike anthropologists and archaeologists, historians have rarely explored such issues. Drawing on indigenous conceptualizations of history and advocating for an “indigenous archaeology”, Native American anthropologist Sonya Atalay has for instance laid bare diverse interpretations of the past among indigenous people, noting how these points of view are often neglected by academics or misinterpreted as conflict.16 Similarly, archaeologists Shadreck Chirikure and Gilbert Pwiti have explored how indigenous community controversies and expectations towards archaeology have informed projects such as ‘The Living Landscape Project’, where the local Khoisan community’s knowledge of the landscape and oral traditions are foregrounded in an attempt to right epistemological wrongs on the interpretation of the past.17 Atalay, Chirikure and Pwiti agree that academics need to take into account multivocality, as indigenous communities are just as diverse as any other, though Chirikure and Pwiti fear this could provoke a “free-for-all” and negatively impact the archaeological discipline, while Atalay believes multivocality is integral to a decolonial archaeology. The challenges for indigenous history and historiography in academia are not dissimilar. As we will show, Khoisan activists have an ambiguous attitude towards, and involvement in, academic historiography and the various stakeholders in the South African decolonization debate complicate the binary ‘indigenous’/ ‘non-indigenous’ within an African context. Both of these dynamics come to a head in the contested space of the university, where indigenous history and activism interface with academic history. Our goal is not to conjure up solutions to the “persistent and unresolvable question of the place of the scholar in producing

 For critical perspectives see Roger M. Keesing, “Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific,” The Contemporary Pacific 1 (1989): 19–42; Jonathan Friedman, “The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity,” American Anthropologist 94 (1992): 837–859; Adam Kuper, “The Return of the Native,” Current Anthropology 44 (2003): 389–402, doi:10.1086/368120.  Sonya Atalay, “Multivocality and Indigenous Archaeologies,” in Evaluating multiple narratives, ed. Junko Habu, Clare Fawcett and John M. Matsunaga (Springer: New York, NY, 2008), 29–44.  Shadreck Chirikure and Gilbert Pwiti, “Community involvement in archaeology and cultural heritage management: An assessment from case studies in Southern Africa and elsewhere,” Current Anthropology 49 (2008): 467–485, doi:10.1086/588496.

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histories of others”, but to critically explore the concrete opportunities and challenges the Centre embodies.18 To do so, we first describe how the rise of post-apartheid Khoisan revivalism and activism can be plotted along a series of developments that sought to take debates on Khoisan history out of the ivory tower. While Khoisan activists’ engagements with the past are highly diverse, due to a violent history manifested in ongoing various present-day inequalities and injustices that have not been meaningfully addressed in the post-apartheid era, most share a necessarily activist and present-oriented mode of engagement with history, which differs in many respects from academic history and conforms in many ways to the abovementioned characteristics of indigenous historical engagements. We also lay bare tensions within Khoisan activism and the various ideological currents they draw on. We then give a detailed account of the Centre and the Forum’s founding, their ambitions and the institutional, intellectual and socio-political challenges they have to contend with. We end in the final section by drawing on the literature on decolonization, public history and indigenous history to contemplate ways the Centre can best navigate challenges and capitalize on the opportunities it embodies. We draw on key questions raised by South African historians, including Bam, the co-author of this chapter, in Whose History Counts: Decolonising Precolonial Historiography (2018), an edited collection which emerged out of a 2017 interdisciplinary conference at Nelson Mandela University exploring what a decolonized (precolonial) history could look like in a South African context. Despite the challenges this inevitably gives rise to, we conclude that if the Centre is committed to breaking with colonial ways, it should not be put in the inappropriate and misinformed position to judge or to ‘other’ Khoisan activists, but that it should work in partnership with them as a non-negotiable integral decolonial point of departure.19 This means navigating deliberately unsettling terrain, as well as disrupting preconceived notions of valid historical scholarship, which we believe will greatly benefit the discipline itself.

 Rademaker and Silverstein, “Deep Historicities,” 156.  June Bam, Lungisile Ntsebeza, and Allan Zinn, eds., Whose History Counts: Decolonising African Pre-Colonial Historiography (Cape Town: African SUN Media, 2018).

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9.2 Khoisan revivalism, activism, and the role of (academic) history In 1975, the Institute for Historical Research at the ‘Coloureds’-only University of the Western Cape (UWC) appointed Henry Charles Bredekamp as a lecturerresearcher.20 Bredekamp became its first ‘Coloured’ faculty, and in fact South Africa’s first academic historian of colour. The intention was for Bredekamp to reify apartheid conceptions of ‘Coloured history’, i.e., ‘Coloureds’ as a group borne out of miscegenation and protracted cultural intermixture, lacking clear identity markers.21 However, after immersing himself in the Africanist revisionist historiography of the 1970s, notably the work of Canadian historian Richard Elphick, he decided to develop new perspectives on Khoisan history and rethink notions of ‘Coloured’ identity.22 Rather than diminishing the agency of the Khoisan as historical actors, as was common in South African academia at the time, Bredekamp focused his writings on the Khoisan’s resistance to colonialism, encounter with missionaries and treatment by settlers; betraying what one reviewer described as “a particular sympathy towards the indigenous people”.23 ‘Particular’ because of its critical positioning – during the height of apartheid – towards centuries of attempts to literally and figuratively erase the presence of the Khoisan.24 The Khoisan at the Cape were the first to encounter European settlers in the mid-seventeenth century and hence experienced colonialism and apartheid over a longer period and in different ways.25 While all Africans were violently subjugated and exploited by colonial regimes as the frontier expanded, the Khoisan uniquely faced forceful assimilationist and genocidal policies, which resulted in profound cultural conquest, including deliberate erasure of indigenous epistemologies and languages.26 Across centuries, the Khoisan were amalgamated as ‘Coloureds’ alongside African and

 Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness,” 100–110.  Hattingh, “Geskiedskrywing,” 41.  Richard Elphick, Kraal and Castle: Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (New Have: Yale University Press, 1977).  Hattingh, “Geskiedskrywing,” 55.  Michael Besten, “The Ghost of Theal: Representation of the Khoe-San in SA School History Books,” African Studies 70 (2011): 67–88, doi:10.1080/00020184.2011.557576.  Lorenzo Veracini and Rafael Verbuyst, “South Africa’s settler-colonial present: Khoisan revivalism and the question of indigeneity,” Social Dynamics 46 (2020): 259–276, doi:10.1080/ 02533952.2020.1805883.  Mohamed Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

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Asian enslaved people, children borne from ‘mixed-unions’, and many others. Sourced from centuries of derogatory representations and racist science, British imperialist and apartheid propaganda and indoctrination in schooling led ‘Coloureds’ to aspire European ways of life and downplay non-European ancestry.27 Most internalized a sense of inferiority and saw themselves as a “people without history”, devoid of indigeneity.28 The term ‘Coloured’ was only eagerly embraced by a small group of apartheid collaborators, especially in the 1980s, as part of the much-rejected Tricameral Parliament, i.e. the addition of a chamber to Parliament by the apartheid regime, ostensibly to increase the representation of Coloureds and Indians in government. Moreover, it is important to add that European civilisation and missionary education which attempted to inculcate these perceptions were resisted from the onset and throughout the centuries through Black intellectual thought and literature. This was particularly so at the Cape amongst predominantly ‘Coloured’ intelligentsia, through a Marxist historiographical perspective that emphasised a class and non-racialism analysis (i.e., a deliberate rejection of the omnipresent emphasis on ethnicity or ‘tribe’ during apartheid). This historiographical orientation served as the foundation for the antiapartheid movement deep into the 1980s and early 1990s. However, it also inadvertently sustained certain colonial tropes concerning the Khoisan, which Bredekamp and others took issue with. Well-meaning liberal scholarship promoted an ‘extinction discourse’ by exaggerating the devastating effects of the smallpox epidemics of the 1700s on local Khoisan populations at the Cape.29 Black Marxist historical scholarship in turn viewed an emphasis on the ‘Khoisan’ with suspicion and frequently approached the Khoisan in the Cape colony within the collaborationists and ‘quislings’ discourse (see below).30 The result was an ongoing lack of awareness about the Khoisan, not least among ‘Coloureds’. Indeed, anticipating the end of apartheid and sensing that few ‘Coloureds’ were aware of their Khoisan ancestry, Bredekamp to a significant extent went against the grain of both pro- and anti-apartheid historiographical traditions by introducing Khoisan history and identity to the general public. He did so by

 Mohamed Adhikari, “Hope, Fear, Shame, Frustration: Continuity and Change in the Expression of Coloured Identity in White Supremacist South Africa, 1910–1994” (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2002).  J L Hattingh, “Geskiedskrywing Deur Bruines,” Kronos 13 (1988): 41.  See for example Shula Marks, “Khoisan Resistance to the Dutch in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” The Journal of African History 13 (1972): 55–80; Richard Elphick, Kraal and Castle: Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).  See for example Mnguni, Three Hundred Years (Cape Town: APDUSA, 1988 [1952]).

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publishing in Afrikaans – the mother tongue of most Khoisan,31 but even more so through organizing conferences, an idea that came to him during a Khoisan Studies conference in Germany in 1994.32 After realizing he was the only African delegate, he made the following intervention during the plenary session: This meeting has a great deal of significance for me because . . . [t]here are millions of South Africans like me who trace their ancestry back to the Khoi and the San peoples. These are our histories, our languages you are discussing. Under Apartheid we lost much of our culture. Now we want to work closely with you in recovering our past and our traditions.33

Bredekamp reportedly “energized the meeting” and it was decided to hold the next conference in Cape Town. Bredekamp insisted that Khoisan representatives join the organizing committee and that invitations be sent out to communities across Southern Africa. As a result, the 62 Khoisan delegates outnumbered academics at the 1997 Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference.34 In contrast to the preceding “last colonialist conference”, historian Robert Ross encountered an “at once academic symposium, cultural manifestation and political forum” in 1997.35 Khoisan delegates indeed assertively participated and critiqued academia’s modus operandi. One Khoisan spokesperson stressed that people like him too were “experts concerning [Khoisan] issues and should thus be involved in research from the planning stage”, including evaluating research proposals.36 In this way, academics could make “a more valid contribution [. . .] to the journey of our people”. The conference also acted as a platform to voice land claims and carry out cultural performances and campaigns to be recognized as indigenous people by the South African state. Joseph Little, then a ‘Coloured’ lecturer in mechanical engineering at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology and a leading figure in Khoisan revivalism at the time, capitalized on the occasion to ceremoniously induct traditional leaders, who in turn made “impassioned speeches” about unsung Khoisan heroes and the need to reclaim Khoisan heritage.37 Bredekamp had indeed announced at  Afrikaans developed as a creole after the systematic erasure of their indigenous languages.  See also Henry Bredekamp, ed., Afrikaanse Geskiedskryving En Letterkunde: Verlede, Hede En Toekoms (Bellville: Instituut vir Historiese Navorsing, 1992).  Richard Lee, “Indigenous Rights and the Politics of Identity in Post-Apartheid Southern Africa,” in At the Risk of Being Heard. Identity, Indigenous Rights, and Postcolonial States, ed. Bartholomew Dean and Jerome M. Levi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 96.  Andrew Bank, ed., The Proceedings of the Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference: Organised by the Institute for Historical Research, University of the Western Cape, Held at the South African Museum, Cape Town, 12–16 July 1997 (Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, 1998).  Robert Ross, “‘Khoisan Identities and Cultural Heritage Conference’,” Kronos 24 (1997): 154.  Bank, The Proceedings, 31.  Lee, “Indigenous Rights,” 101.

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the onset that the conference signified “a beginning for a battle for identity”.38 Similarly, for Little, it enabled the rebirth of “a proud and honourable nation”.39 The organizing committee took things one step further at the 2001 follow-up conference in Oudtshoorn by scheduling a majority of Khoisan presenters, addressing topics ranging from the historical “internationalization of Coloured identity”, to the complicated relationship between Christianity and Khoisan spirituality.40 One historian observed how this made that year’s meeting even more about Khoisan “selfaffirmation and multi-dimensional empowerment”.41 Not coincidentally, many of the presenters belonged to the Cape Cultural Heritage Development Council (CCHDC), a Cape Town-based non-profit organization set up by Little in 1996 to “foster unity among historically coloured people and give them pride in their [indigenous] origin”.42 The CCHDC grew organically as a result of friends recruiting friends, most of them prominent ‘Coloured’ academics, amateur historians and activists.43 During their weekly meetings, they debated and exchanged historical literature, perused Khoisan language dictionaries and scrutinized primary sources, some of them borrowed from or donated by non-Khoisan academics sympathetic to their cause. The latter also facilitated their fieldtrips to archaeological sites and archives. During an interview with Rafael Verbuyst, who studied how and why Khoisan revivalists engage with the past in his PhD research (see below), Little spoke passionately about the CCHDC’s research endeavours and the Eurocentric bias they had to contend with: We wanted to find out about our history, going as deep as possible [. . .] One of the major discoveries I made in the books was that there were a lot of untruths written about us and taught to us at school [. . .] so we had to swing the history more in our favour.44

In Tears of the Praying Mantis, a semi-autobiographical critique of missionaries and colonialism, another CCHDC member similarly describes the difficulties they encountered in getting their message across to their community:

 Bank, The Proceedings, 14.  Bank, The Proceedings, 7.  Willa Boezak, “Khoisan Geloof!,” in Institute for Historical Research, ed. National Khoisan Consultative Conference Oudtshoorn: 29 March to 1 April 2001 (Cape Town: University of the Western Cape, 2001), 1–11; Basil Coetzee, “Khoisan Identiteit,” ibid., 17–26.  Michael Besten, “Transformation and Reconstitution of Khoe-San Identities: AAS le Fleur I, Griqua Identities and Post-Apartheid Khoe-San Revivalism (1894–2004)” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2006), 223.  Besten, “Transformation and Reconstitution,” 288, 295.  Besten, “Transformation and Reconstitution,” 286.  Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness,” 120.

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[T]he denialism and lack of knowledge existent in our people were so fervently ensconced that we had to devise specific stratagems to sway our people with our message [. . .] We held informative meetings at the residences of people in various communities and at schools with fairly reasonable success.45

However, the CCHDC ceased functioning sometime in the mid-2000s. While the reasons are unclear, a major factor were disputes over traditional leadership positions.46 As early as the 1997 conference, Little and others were appointing (themselves as) traditional leaders in anticipation of potential legislation granting them the ceremonial and political powers the state had earlier bestowed upon non-Khoisan traditional leaders. Some aimed to ‘revive’ seventeenth-century tribes for cultural purposes. Others overtly desired political power and claimed to be direct descendants from traditional leaders mentioned in centuries old sources. Claims to Khoisan traditional leadership across the board proved “disquieting” to historians such as Robert Ross.47 In his capacity as consultant for the South African government, Bredekamp also flagged that a lack of “credible written and oral sources” meant there is “almost no proof yet that most of the current incumbents represent a legitimate bloodline to occupy the office of traditional Chief”, a situation he described as “extremely problematic”.48 He similarly warned that some were seeking indigenous people’s status in order to trump the rights of others. Many believe the root cause of competitive traditional leadership claims was then Deputy-President Jacob Zuma’s promise at the 2001 conference to pass legislation to recognize and remunerate Khoisan traditional leaders – a law which only passed in 2019 (see below).49 Confronted by the ensuing incessant infighting and the mushrooming of revived tribes and Khoisan-related organizations – a dynamic which continues till this day – Bredekamp decided to play a less prominent role in the movement. It is important here to note the long tradition in non-racialism and anti-tribalism among ‘Coloured’ intellectuals, predating Khoisan revivalism and embodied for instance in the Non-European Unity Movement (founded in 1943) and the non-racial and anti-tribal pedagogies in ‘Coloured’ schools through the work of its affiliated Teachers’ League of South Africa (TLSA). The gravitation towards ‘traditionalism’

 Basil Coetzee, Tears of the Praying Mantis. The Christian Church and the Conversion of the Khoikhoi to ‘Coloured’ Christian Identity (Cape Town: Mbana Publishing and Printing, 2019), 150; Besten, “Transformation and Reconstitution,” 296.  Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness,” 139–140.  Ross, “‘Khoisan Identities’,” 155.  Henry C. Bredekamp and N. Olivier, Khoisan Communities in South Africa. Background, International Context, Constitutional Framework and Proposals on Accommodation (Pretoria: Department of Traditional Affairs, 2000), 46, 95–96, 170–171.  Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness,” 130–131.

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is widely perceived in radical circles as a betrayal of this ideological tradition and an instance of ‘divide and rule’ in reference to the historical complicit nature of tribalism under colonialism. As a result, traditional leadership claims and contemporary ‘tribes’ remain deeply contentious issues among Khoisan activists. Importantly, this rejection is shared by non-racial anti-apartheid activists who identify as Khoisan but are equally extremely sceptical of contemporary tribalism claims as part of their own deeply rooted Marxist historical materialist positioning. A perfect illustration of this is Yvette Abrahams, a veteran indigenous feminist Khoisan activist, student of Bredekamp and academic historian with training at both UWC and UCT. Like Bredekamp, Abrahams decided to take a backseat in the Khoisan revivalist movement after being put off by the competition over traditional leadership positions and the blatant promotion of patriarchal values under the guise of ‘Khoisan culture’. She argues both were in fact absent in precolonial Khoisan society and incorrectly reproduced in mainstream academic historiography and popular representations.50 One of Abrahams’ main drives is therefore inserting indigenous feminist Khoisan perspectives – not least her own – into public and academic debates about Khoisan history, particularly concerning two Khoisan women: Sarah Baartman, who was exhibited across Europe as an ‘exotic specimen’ in the nineteenth century, and Krotoa, who acted as a mediator and translator for Dutch colonialists in the seventeenth century. The details of her arguments fall beyond the scope of this chapter, but her methodological approach preludes Khoisan revivalist engagements with the past at large. In a 1996 seminal essay, Abrahams reads the colonial archives against the grain and aims for a “speculative history” to try and understand Krotoa’s point of view, which is excluded from the sources.51 Drawing on Rape Trauma Syndrome, she alleges that Krotoa was sexually assaulted by the Dutch and suffered from posttraumatic stress. This, Abrahams argues, explains her behaviour towards the Dutch which was misinterpreted as collaborationist by both historians and Unity Movement intellectual writings about early Cape history.52 Crucially, Abrahams concedes that her hypothesis is not falsifiable through the “ordinary rules of  Yvette Abrahams, “Resistance, pacification and consciousness: a discussion of the historiography of Khoisan resistance from 1972 to 1993 and Khoisan resistance from 1652 to 1853” (MA thesis, University of Cape Town, 1994); Yvette Abrahams, “‘Take me to Your Leaders’: A Critique of ‘Kraal and Castle’,” Kronos 22 (1995): 21–35.  Yvette Abrahams, “Was Eva Raped? An Exercise in Speculative History,” Kronos 23 (1996): 4, 5.  Early Khoi leaders in the Cape, such as Krotoa, were often ridiculed as collaborators in antiapartheid historiography, linking them to the pro-apartheid ‘Coloured’ representatives of the 1980s, but this was also part of an overall critique by Cape Radicals of the colonial empty land myth. See June Bam, “The development of a new history curriculum for the secondary level in South Africa: considerations related to the possible inclusion of themes drawn from Unity Movement history” (Master’s thesis, University of Cape Town, 1993). For discussion on the Cape intellectual

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evidence”, but argues for its likelihood in part because Krotoa’s experience was later shared by “thousands of Khoisan women”.53 She drew even more explicitly on her own experience in her doctoral dissertation on Baartman: Personal experience as a historical datum poses a peculiar epistemological challenge. From my point of view, it offers certainty [. . .] My historical experience is such that I yield to none a better claim to expertise on sexism and racism. If I say an event in Sarah Bartmann’s life, or my own, is racist, it is so because I believe that I know it. It does require some effort from the reader to function as a historian. You have to make the decisions a historian normally makes about evidence: Am I qualified to testify about racism and sexism?54

Abrahams makes the case here that experience is part and parcel of historical understanding. Anticipating future Khoisan-identity affirmations as resistance to ongoing colonialism and exclusion from academia, she correctly predicted almost 30 years ago that, if mainstream historiography did not accommodate such ‘experiences’ and purge itself of stereotypes, the Khoisan would reject it, refuse to join history departments and look for their history “elsewhere”.55 After failing to secure a permanent academic post in South Africa as an indigenous scholar with an indigenous perspective on research methodologies at the time, Abrahams herself consciously acted upon establishing a decolonial ‘elsewhere’. She currently revives indigenous knowledge as a farmer and through her soap and health products company Khoelife. Abrahams is involved in designing a memorial centre for Sarah Baartman at her burial site in Hankey. The centre includes a garden complex with space for “the people to roam and wander as the KhoeSan did of old” and experience what precolonial life might have been like.56 The garden is also intended to work towards healing “trauma”; illustrating an omnipresent emphasis in Khoisan re-imagination on history, healing and the tackling of socioeconomic predicaments. Various other examples exist, but the community newspaper Eerste Nasie Nuus [First Nation News] (ENN) illustrates this emphasis in particular.57 Founded in 2013 by two prominent Khoisan activists and journalists, Zenzile Khoisan and

tradition see Crain Soudien, ed., The Cape Radicals: Intellectual and Political Thought of the New Era Fellowship, 1930s to 1960s (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019).  Abrahams, “Was Eva Raped?,” 3.  Yvette Abrahams, “Colonialism, Dysfunction and Dysjuncture. The Historiography of Saartjie Baartman” (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2000), 75.  Abrahams, “Resistance,” 77; Abrahams, “Take me,” 22.  Yvette Abrahams, “‘My Tongue Softens On That Other Name’: Poetry, People, and Plants in Sarah Bartmann’s Natural World,” in Representation and Black Womanhood: The Legacy of Sarah Baartman, ed. Natasha Gordon-Chipembere (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011): 40–44.  For more examples, see Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness.”

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Debbie Hendriks, ENN appears monthly when funding permits.58 ENN reports on the news, indigenous knowledge or history in an overtly pro-Khoisan revivalist register. This entails rejecting ‘Coloured’ as a derogatory assimilationist label and promulgating a widely held view regarding compensation for past injustices, which boils down to validating the Khoisan as the earliest victims of colonialism and as facing specific predicaments as a result. As evident in early political and military uprisings against colonialism, Khoisan grievances far predate apartheid, which dominate debates about historical justice and decolonization in South Africa. As Zenzile Khoisan explains in one of his columns, these debates frequently lack the temporal reach to be able to tackle “a much bigger problem that is embedded in the foundation of our society [. . .] the dispossession of the indigenous people that became the root of all evil that took place”.59 As indicated earlier, this emphasis on Khoisan resistance to colonialism has long been foregrounded in oppositional (underground) Black historiography.60 As also mentioned earlier, for many, including critically engaged scholars and civic activists from the non-racial movement who are interested in addressing socio-economic justice for all, the emphasis on the oppression of the Khoisan is an organic response rooted in a long-established intellectual tradition going back at least a century and finding more explicit expression in de-Africanised regions of South Africa – not simply as ‘revival’. For many others, affirming their indigeneity and campaigning against racialized affirmative action inequality is primarily linked to political ambitions and the Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act (2020), which provides for official recognition of Khoisan traditional leadership and other envisioned reparative measures. We return to Khoisan political aspirations and calls for justice in the last section. Decades old critique of academia continues to feature heavily among Khoisan revivalists, which has led some to write history books of their own. One example is Willa Boezak’s Griqua Hero, an account of A.A.S. Le Fleur I (1867–1941) of the Griqua Khoisan subgroup. The foreword lauds the book as a tremendous accomplishment because of the author’s Khoisan background: Until now [. . .] the history of South Africa has only been revealed by researchers and historians outside the domain of the Griqua people’s movement. This frequently led to mistrust of the factual content of the work by Griqua readers. It is still a well-known fact that most

 It should be noted that Zenzile Khoisan currently heads an activist collective that supports a highly controversial property development at the Liesbeeck River heritage site for indigenous cultural empowerment against the bitter opposition from many leading activists within the San and Khoi Centre.  Zenzile Khoisan and Debbie Hendriks, “SA sal brand tot KhoiSan herstel is,” Eerste Nasie Nuus (November 2016): 1–2.  June Bam, Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter (Jacana Media: Johannesburg, 2021).

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authors still lean heavily on Eurocentric sources and consciously or subconsciously give a version that represents the dominant group in history.61

The reach of these books is hard to gauge. One of them, however, managed to be included in the curriculum of a historically White and academically top high school in Cape Town, and a copy was donated to all public schools in the Western Cape province.62 In Bastaards or Humans, prominent ‘Coloured’ former fitter and turner, businessman and sometime academic Ruben Richards – who holds a PhD from UCT in Religious Studies – states that his aim is not to “re-write history”, but to make it “come alive” and “construct a narrative that is meaningful to our present”.63 To this effect, among others, Richards idealizes the precolonial Cape as a “garden of Eden”, and recuperates Khoisan individuals from the margins of history as seminal historical actors.64 It is hopefully evident at this point that Khoisan activists in their diversity engage with the past to reclaim an identity and bolster socioeconomic and political claims within a social justice framework; not dissimilar to indigenous movements elsewhere. With this highly diverse group of Khoisan activists among its primary constituents, the San and Khoi Centre presents a unique opportunity in the face of present political and intellectual developments, not least those embodied in the ongoing debate on decolonization in South Africa. Whether it can and should accommodate particular Khoisan activists’ tribalized, racialized and heavily political party-aligned views and agendas is a highly complex matter, however, and tensions do exist around these issues within the intellectual and civic movements. In order to appreciate this complexity, we now detail the founding of the Centre and the academic and societal context it has to contend with.

9.3 The San and Khoi Centre: founding and ambitions While the Centre itself was founded recently in 2020, the first discussions about rethinking Khoisan historiography and dedicating an institution to it at UCT date

 Cecil Le Fleur, “Foreword,” in Griqua Hero: The Remarkable Life of A.A.S. Le Fleur I, ed. Willa Boezak (Cape Town: Bidvest Data, 2019), vi.  “Coloured origins book to be available in Western Cape schools,” Independent Online (13 March 2018), [Last seen: 30 November 2021, https://www.iol.co.za/entertainment/books/col oured-origins-book-to-be-available-in-western-cape-schools-13762084].  Ruben Richards, Bastaards Or Humans: The Unspoken Heritage of Coloured People Vol. 1 (Sunnyvale: Indaba Publishing, 2017), 552.  Richards, Bastaards Or Humans, 130–133.

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back to 2013 and the precolonial project at CAS, led by Prof. Lungisile Ntsebeza, who until his recent retirement held the South African National Research Foundation chair on land and democracy as a critical engagement with undemocratic chieftainships established through colonialism.65 Ntsebeza’s work is part of the Centre’s emphasis on ‘Rethinking African Historiography’, of which decolonising Khoisan historiography is key and spearheaded by Bam, the present co-author. The aim of the NIHSS (National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences) fund established in 2013 by the Minister of Higher Education to enhance scholarship and ethical research, is (amongst others) aimed at catalysing decolonial southern African historiographies in general. Out of this initiative, two conferences were held respectively in March 2014 at CAS and in March 2017 at Nelson Mandela University, held in partnership with the Centre for Non-racialism and Democracy (CANRAD). Its first conference of 2014 attracted archaeologists and historians nationally – predominantly White scholars – and it was clear that a radical paradigm shift was required. This became even more evident after the Rhodes Must Fall Movement (RMF) that erupted on UCT’s campus in the following year in March 2015. RMF was ignited on the university’s upper campus when a leading student in the Humanities faculty, Chumani Maxwele, flung poo at the Rhodes statue on 9 March 2015 to symbolise the ongoing stench of pervasive colonialism that led to indignation in the townships and reflected in ongoing untransformed colonial and Eurocentric curricula. The carefully choreographed protest action catalysed student protests nationally and globally; further expressed in the Fees Must Fall Movement that formed quickly thereafter to protest a hike in student fees in South Africa. Ongoing material inequalities were linked to land dispossession, persistent systemic racism in scholarship and various ongoing forms of exploitation and oppression. The RMF students studying at CAS at the time found particular resonance in the writings of historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot on the silencing of the Haitian Revolution by historians.66 Another influential work in the students’ choice of readings was Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Provincializing Europe’.67 It was in the aftermath of 2015 when students identified with these debates on decoloniality and the disciplines, that the Khoisan-identified communities entered the university space for dialogues on what it means for Rhodes to ‘fall’ in historically White universities established

 Lungisile Ntsebeza, Democracy Compromised: Chiefs and the Politics of the Land in South Africa (Leiden, Brill 2005).  Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Poduction of History (Boston, Beacon Press, 2015).  Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the critique of history,” Cultural Studies 6 (1992): 337–357. Bam and the late Harry Garuba taught these readings in the postgraduate courses on ‘Problematising the Study of Africa’ in African Studies at the time.

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on indigenous land lost through conquest, enslavement and genocide. RMF activist students participated with the communities in these debates at CAS often facilitated by Bam as then-Acting Head of Department; many of the student leaders being in her class or studying under her supervision for a number of years. These dialogues and contestations on interpretations of the past and present with the RMF students in the CAS public gallery, influenced the intellectual discourse amongst the Khoisan communities in the period leading up to the formation of the Centre. The influence impacted on thinking around ‘co-design’ of curricula, repatriation of unethically acquired Khoisan human remains held by the university, reading and interpreting cartography, exploring interdisciplinary ways of interpreting the past from a bottom-up perspective and questioning colonial research methods and approaches to ‘subjects’ and ‘informants’. Whose knowledge matters in the disciplinary canon of history and why? Who validates knowledge of the past? Whose knowledge and interpretation of the past has been ignored at universities and how does this correlate with structural and systemic power? How does knowledge and power correlate with land and language? How do we unlearn colonial history and historiography? Calling themselves, in Gramscian terms, organic intellectuals, the civic activists who identified as ‘Khoisan’ or ‘Khoi’ or ‘San’ crafted a new path for research and knowledge production in African Studies and historiography at UCT. For these intellectuals, decolonization meant revisiting Khoisan historiography; diversifying staff to accelerate the increase of non-White staff; tackling the predominance of Eurocentric scholarship on the precolonial; problematising ‘the study of Africa’; and holding academics accountable for their failure to challenge systemic racism and their enduring promotion of an extinction discourse which compromised rightful indigenous Khoisan claims to land. Reflecting on the students’ passionate appeals for decolonization and her own potential role in meeting their concerns, Bam presented a seminar paper in 2016 on UCT’s complicities in colonised spatiality as an institution occupying indigenous land without acknowledgment and the need for ‘deep listening’ in which she problematized the Rhodes statue as part of this larger spatiality and complicity.68 Drawing on the aforementioned work of Ungunmerr, Bam argued for an elaboration of adopting this research methodology for a decolonised approach to oral history as pertaining not only to listening to accounts of events in the past but also to accounts of landscape, visions, prophecies, dreams and rituals.

 See also June Bam, “Epistemicide in the Cape: Symbolic and Restorative Justice in South Africa,” in Gender, Transitional Justice and Memorial Arts, ed. Jelke Boesten and Helen Scanlon (London: Routledge, 2021), 1–18.

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The second NIHSS precolonial catalytic conference – as a response to the Minister of Higher Education’s call to open up new decolonial interpretations to southern Africa’s past before 1652 – was held at Nelson Mandela University in 2017 in the aftermath of the RMF protests. With greater representation of African academics and local communities, the 2017 conference highlighted the importance of rethinking precolonial historiography for decolonizing higher education for epistemic and social justice. The interdisciplinary and largely indigenous representation questioned the ongoing metaphoric persistence of ‘Rhodes’ in scholarship, especially in the hugely contentious disciplines of ‘history’ and ‘archaeology’, which are dominated by White males and their one-sided interpretations of the past. A typical example of such a one-sided interpretation is their promotion of the aforementioned ‘extinction’ trope, i.e., that Khoisan are only found in the northern regions of the present Cape due to genocide and smallpox. Moreover, in his keynote address, leading African historian Toyin Falola discussed the “ritual archive” to make a broader point about respecting and acknowledging different sources and ways of knowing for historical interpretation.69 Picking up on Falola’s call, delegates discussed how historical knowledge, knowledge of landscape, trade, livestock management, etc. continues to be side-lined at the margins as superstition. These knowledge forms often take the form of stories told over generations and should not be consigned to the gaze in anthropological studies, it was argued.70 More fundamental and tangible decolonial processes commenced at UCT in the wake of the 2017 conference, such as the renaming of Jameson graduation Hall to honour the aforementioned Sarah Baartman after lengthy Khoi and San community consultation processes held at CAS. The strategic consolidation of all previous consultation processes culminated in the aforementioned establishment of the A/Xarra Restorative Justice Forum, comprising of volunteered representatives of traditional formations and civic organisations, including from Namibia and Botswana, at CAS by October 2018. From the onset, the Forum echoed Falola’s critique of the archive, demanding that historians work outside of the colonial archive’s primary sources and treat the institutional archive as a site of historical knowledge production as any other; not as the definitive source for objectivity and interpretation on the past. The Forum asked for more attention to rituals, oral traditional

 Toyin Falola, “Ritual archives,” in The Palgrave Handbook of African Social Ethics, ed. Nimi Wariboko and Toyin Falola (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 473–497.  Carine Zaayman, a direct descendant of Krotoa, who grew up as a ‘White’ South African and studied under the supervision of leading historian Carolyn Hamilton, argues that ‘seeing what is not there’ in the archive (i.e. the ‘anarchive’) can be much more telling and equally useful in interpreting the past. Carine Zaayman, “Seeing what is not there: Figuring the Anarchive” (PhD diss., University of Cape Town, 2019).

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knowledge systems and rock paintings in this respect. The call by the Forum for a decolonised Khoisan historiography was a history from below, advanced by workers, the unemployed and civic activists. Indeed, the dialogues with the Forum often revealed a direct connection with South Africa’s people’s history movement of the 1980s – in other words, nothing fundamentally new was evolving in its decolonial scholarship demands.71 The major difference to past history from below approaches was that it was now systemically centred in the academy and no longer outside of it in working class neighbourhoods or in politicised TLSA and other schools in Cape Town. Aside from the aforementioned critique of archive, current debates also centre on ‘knowledge’ (who decides how we know and what are valid ways of knowing) and Africa-centric ways of revisiting the disciplines within African realities and philosophies drawing from the scholarship of Archie Mafeje and others against extroversion (i.e. the application of Eurocentric theories as unproblematic universalisms on African realities) and extraction (i.e. treating data in Africa as ‘raw material’ to be analysed and theorised in Europe).72 Seeking to put these critiques into action, the Forum agreed to a ‘Terms of Reference and Values’ with UCT in 2018. Three areas of acknowledgement by UCT are subsequently considered fundamental to restorative justice for Khoi and San communities: (1) land dispossession, (2) loss of memory and belonging due to displacement in landscape and the loss in oral tradition, and (3) that UCT has been built on Khoi and San and slave burial grounds (which include sacred objects). CAS was identified by the Forum as responsible ‘Archive Custodian’ and intellectually trusted decolonial home, and therefore approached to lead the process of transformation in a partnership. The Forum with CAS now comprises twelve regular traditional and civic structure representatives of civil society in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana. The Forum has several commissions – including on land reform. The Forum is now in its fourth year of existence and its work is well integrated into the existing CAS structures, and the new department of African Studies and Linguistics, headed by Bam, and across departments and faculties. Academics participate in the forum discussions on various knowledge production issues, and their impact in the present. This interface also creates a space for regular reference points for the forum members on getting advice on archival resources for interpretation of the past and debates, contemporary policy, land reform, and democracy issues; the complex issue of human remains, repatriation and museums. The communities determine the reference points, which are based on burning contemporary issues as a catalytic

 See Bam, “The Development”.  Jimi O. Adesina, “Archie Mafeje and the pursuit of endogeny: Against alterity and extroversion,” Africa Development, 33 (2008): 133–152.

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point – and not a specific/particular disciplinary approach, such as history. The community may, for instance, start with a question on something like, “who says this land was empty?”, “can we believe the evidence the archaeologist provides?”. They trouble established notions of knowledge about a site in the light of intergenerational knowledge that may exist and contradict the interpretations of academics. Community questions often lead to complex discussions with academics, typically regarding the rights to land in the absence of conventional evidence. The community would for instance foreground oral tradition, rock paintings, African feminist knowledges and burial sites as ‘title deeds’ to disputed land. Given the devastating impact of colonial education, this type of intergenerational knowledge helps to fill the knowledge gaps that have existed for over 300 years, contributing to a richer and fuller understanding of the precolonial past in particular. On the other hand, academics typically trouble such claims to land by emphasizing linguistic and cultural similarities among groups claimed by many to be radically distinct. A more nuanced understanding of ‘indigeneity’ does not always satisfy contemporary political agendas. Sustaining inclusivity as decolonial praxis is delicate, as the objective is not to exclude one form of knowledge in favour of the other but to arrive at a deeper less distorted understanding of the past and its impact on the present through co-designed honest dialogue and to admit to uncertainties and the existence of marginalized indigenous epistemologies. Many who claim traditional leadership positions want the university to assist them with their land claims through the cartographic archive it may hold in its collections. They are often left disillusioned in the partnership and find it difficult to trust the process and the institution. Concomitantly, academics who struggle with alternative research methodologies (such as deep listening, see above) regularly fall back on familiar, less risky, theoretical frames of reference. In this context, the recent fire that destroyed the African Studies collection in April 2021, remains understandably the subject of conspiracy theories amongst Khoisan traditional leadership structures, i.e., “the White institution destroying evidence for land claims as a way out”. Taking all of these pressures into account, the current aims and objectives of the Centre include: 1. establishing relevant decolonial interdisciplinary socially engaged teaching and research programmes across faculties; 2. language education; preservation of the ritual archive and indigenous knowledge systems; new research exchange links with global indigenous-identified communities and scholars; 3. intellectual self-determination and intellectual property protection 4. development of an indigenous research ethics framework

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By working closely with the Forum, the Centre seeks to extend the tradition initiated by Bredekamp and others of bridging the dialogue between academia and activism, i.e., bringing the community physically into the university space to speak safely and openly in the languages of their choosing and without fear of being ridiculed as having unfounded ‘fantasies’ of ‘indigeneity’ or promoting opportunistic political agendas. However, as we show below, just like Bredekamp, Abrahams and others, we are aware that decolonizing along these lines runs into various challenges.

9.4 Decolonizing history, unsettling spaces: opportunities and challenges Before discussing the opportunities and challenges that we believe the Centre presents, we want to underscore that ‘decolonizing’ is a necessarily unsettling and tense, if productive and creative, process without a clear-cut endpoint.73 We believe that addressing the critique of academia by Khoisan activists is long overdue. This requires scholars to be open to radical change, as well as the fact that indigenous people have valid ways of knowing the past, if embodying standards or truth and authority that differ markedly from conventional academic practices.74 However, in our estimation, for Khoisan activists and historians, including ourselves, it is not desirable for a decolonizing university to abandon all nonindigenous scholarship practices and swing towards a new exclusivity. It is important to recognize the Khoisan’s diverse recurring critiques of academia and pleas for Khoisan-authored research, but also not to adopt Khoisan activists’ positions uncritically. Rather, we advocate for an ongoing and institutionally endorsed dialogue between diverse stakeholders, resulting in tangible institutional and intellectual changes that are inclusive, and indeed more educational and more rigorous than what the current model based solely on Western education offers. We make the case below that the Centre in fact functions as a place for rigorous research precisely because of this take on decolonization. And yet, we also recognize that breaking with the status quo is an infinite process of trial and error, a continuous struggle with the open-ended and unresolvable question fiercely put forward by RMF and other stakeholders in the decolonization debate: “what and for whom is a university for?” We address this question at several

 McGrath, “People,” 203.  Rodriguez, “Deep History,” 174.

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points below, but we do not (and cannot) offer a conclusive answer. Nor do we have airtight ‘solutions’ to the problems concerning indigenous (academic) history we raised in the introduction. We rather chose to reflect on the Centre and our own past and present work on the Khoisan precisely because of the complexities associated with the messiness of decolonization as praxis. With these caveats in mind, a rather obvious way in which the Centre embodies opportunities is by recording, publicly spreading and validating indigenous historical knowledge which is unknown in academic circles or has been neglected and distorted for centuries by colonial science. We see two interrelated dimensions to this: researching indigenous knowledge itself and studying the ways in which the Khoisan themselves engage with their past. The first dimension offers countless possibilities for research, some of which the Centre is currently embarking on. The Centre’s flagship achievement is instituting Khoekhoegowab language classes as a fully accredited course at UCT. In the context of forceful assimilationist policies, colonial and apartheid regimes actively sought to erase the Khoekhoegowab language, which results in a vastly diminished number of native speakers in South Africa today. Significantly, it is argued by numerous scholars that understanding and learning African languages is a requirement for an in-depth historical interpretation of precolonial African history.75 The Khoisan revivalist movement has expressed a strong desire since circa 2000 to learn the language, not only as a mode of communication, but also as a gateway to Khoisan indigenous knowledge. In this spirit, the course, taught by Bradley Van Sitters, who has worked as an indigenous language activist researcher for over 20 years and is now a staff member at the Centre, combines historiography, sites of memory and language, working with case studies of erased place names and oral tradition. Indeed, a vast project involving numerous Khoisan communities that is currently underway is utilizing mapping software to visually represent how the Khoisan called certain areas in Khoekhoegowab and N|uu (a Khoisan language that is considered to be one of the oldest in the world) across Southern Africa, many of which now have other names. It is intended as a “living map”, a collaboration with communities and a number of university researchers in South Africa and abroad, so that communities can continue to add new information to enrich geographical and historical understanding of the region and reveal the violent legacies of toponymicide (i.e., erasure through colonial cartography). A related project constitutes a broader oral history survey of the Western Cape province,

 Pamela Maseko, “Language as Source of Revitalisation and Reclamation of Indigenous Epistemologies,” in Whose History Counts: Decolonising African Pre-colonial Historiography, ed. June Bam, Lungisile Ntsebeza and Allan Zinn (Cape Town: African SUN Media, 2018), 35–55.

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whose Khoisan presence is often assumed in the literature to have disappeared entirely due to a narrow conception of historical continuity that precludes notions of adaptation and change. This presents a particular challenge as many living knowledge keepers are dying out and the oral history research in often remote areas require urgent funding frustrated by tedious funding applications. The situation is exacerbated by COVID-19, the precarious funding environment and the recent tragic loss of the African Studies Library and Collections due to the devastating fire in April 2021. Capturing the experiential experiences of the past from elders becomes even more urgent though precarious. A final example we want to highlight are academic publications that take an indigenous feminist perspective on Khoisan history to emphasize the pivotal role of women in history, for instance as intergenerational knowledge holders, which in turn constitutes a critique of the archive as the only location of historical knowledge.76 In a first book of its kind in the region, Bernedette Muthien and Bam in their edited collection Rethinking Africa: Indigenous Women Re-Interpret Southern Africa’s Pasts attempt to capture experiential marginalised feminist knowledges and interpretations. They argue that indigenous women should write their own ‘herstories’ and theories on how we have come to understand African pasts, to provide new and different ‘herstorical’ lenses as women from matricentric societies. Bam develops the discourse further in Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter, which critically engages Western classificatory binaries in identities of the ‘Khoisan’, which leave out the narratives, stories and voices from the officiallygoverned archive. This omission, Bam argues, has impacted on how knowledge of South Africa’s pasts is validated and that new methodologies (such as working with African feminist intergenerational knowledge of plants, astronomy, the wind and ancient healing methods) to engage these voices on the deep pasts can be found in the interpretation of plants, rituals and knowledge of the indigenous cosmologies. How can we reimagine hybridised precolonial pasts which trouble the official history of the Cape as beginning in 1652 through the voice of the ‘Ausi’ (first-born indigenous knowledge keepers in ‘Coloured’ families)? When it comes to how the Centre can productively and innovatively study how Khoisan engage with the past, within and outside of academia, Khoisan activists themselves show how anti-colonial histories are given shape in practice. Verbuyst, co-author of this text, studied such engagements with the past from an emic (i.e., insider, from-below) perspective by engaging in ethnographic fieldwork among Khoisan revivalists in Cape Town, laying bare various tensions with

 Bernedette Muthien and June Bam, eds., Rethinking Africa: Indigenous Women Re-Interpret Southern Africa’s Pasts (Cape Town: Jacana, 2021).

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academic historiography along the way (see below). Such histories create the decolonial ‘elsewhere’ through activists’ own diverse agencies (see Section Two) in both conventional and unconventional forms. These creative forms are expressed in history textbooks, social media chat groups, community newspapers, and countless other ways.77 Coincidentally, this embodies an important critique of ‘Khoisan Studies’ as practiced in academic institutions because the field eschews urban areas in favour of Khoisan communities in remote areas such as the Kalahari Desert.78 This approach is embedded in an extinction discourse, which inadvertently reinforces the ‘empty land’ myth and promotes the stubborn notion that ‘Coloureds’ have no history to speak of or valid claim to African identity. Not examining the full breadth of Khoisan revivalists’ and activists diverse engagements with the past not only limits historians’ understanding of how diverse people experience and know the past, it also impedes them from addressing contemporary concerns.79 This point echoes pleas made by South African historians to study forms of “history-making” in the broad sense, as it is outside the walls of academia that the past seems to be most passionately contested in the post-apartheid era.80 As a result, UWC historian Ciraj Rassool noted that historians who do not take such contestations seriously have not understood “the changed nature of their field”.81 To be sure, complete mutual cooperation and understanding between diverse academics and equally diverse non-academics is not necessary, it is perhaps more productive for different ways of engaging with the past to relate to each other in “a state of dynamic friction”, innovating the historical discipline in intellectually challenging ways in the process.82 Historians would have for instance not taken the call for decolonization as seriously if it was not for the unrelenting pressure of activists and students demanding change. Similarly, through publications such as ENN, Khoisan activists have worked both within and outside of academia to reframe the way their history is narrated and their indigenous knowledge is validated, prompting new perspectives on the Khoisan past that break with colonialist framings. A concrete example is Bam’s aforementioned study of the Ausi. Conversely, as the engagements between academia and Khoisan activists initiated

 For a more comprehensive overview see Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness.”  Frans Prins, “Secret San of the Drakensberg and Their Rock Art Legacy,” Critical Arts 23 (2009): 193.  Rodriguez, “Deep History,” 172.  Ciraj Rassool, “The Rise of Heritage and the Reconstruction of History in South Africa,” Kronos 26 (2000): 21.  Rassool, “The Rise of Heritage,” 21.  McGrath, “People,” 191, 203.

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by Bredekamp show, Khoisan activists also potentially greatly benefit from exposure to academic historiography. Just as the conferences Bredekamp organized did, the Centre fulfils an important role precisely for facilitating such academic debates in the first place and by making connections and hosting consultations with indigenous scholars across South African borders. As the history of both Khoisan revivalism and historical activism shows (and this distinction is important), and particularly the active participation of Khoisan activists in academic conferences, there is both an academic and societal compelling decolonial desire for such debates and the Centre can act as a prime facilitator and indigenous safe space in this regard. The challenges here are in being open to ways of engaging with the past that drastically differ from academic conventions, but also not to fall into the essentialist trap and superimpose an intransigent type of incommensurability on Khoisan engagements with the past, or offensively presuppose that a critical dialogue with indigenous people is neither possible, appropriate or productive.83 As we have shown, not unlike indigenous people elsewhere today, Khoisan revivalists and activists are eager to engage in (academic) debates about their history, critically utilize academic sources and write historical texts of their own, but there is always an underlying criticism and suspicion of academic historiography, borne from the long history of colonialism and its resulting grossly distorting, ‘representative’ and exploitative works of Khoisan history.84 This ambiguous attitude towards academic history is indeed typical of postcolonial settings and shows how academia remains a significant battleground. Ashcroft has described this as a desire to ‘interpolate’ the historical discourse: “not simply the insertion of a contestatory voice, a different version, or a radical perspective, although it may involve all these, but an entry into the discourse which disrupts its discursive features and reveals the limitations of the discourse itself”.85 Historians can try to resist such pushes, but this risks alienating a marginalized demographic, as well as depriving their discipline from crucial insights into the past.86 However, as noted previously, we believe it is more productive to engage in dialogue, which can be done in various ways and which the Centre can facilitate, thereby directly contributing to methodological innovations in the field. Historians can facilitate access to sources, archives and information in general, as some for instance did

 Yin Paradies, “Beyond Black and White: Essentialism, Hybridity and Indigeneity,” Journal of Sociology 42 (2006): 360.  James Clifford, “Looking Several Ways: Anthropology and Native Heritage in Alaska,” Current Anthropology 45 (2004): 5.  Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London: Routledge, 2002), 103.  Rodriguez, “Deep History,” 168.

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for the CCDHC, and now with the Forum. This can help remedy a widely felt sense among the Khoisan that history is ‘hidden away’ or that the ‘true history’ is deliberately suppressed. Greater access to information can also help uncover truths about injustices or traumatic episodes.87 In a country with a “vast archive of suffering” and with intergenerational trauma a sad reality for indigenous people worldwide, it would be appropriate for historians to be cognizant of their role in this context and ponder whether histories that instil pride and emphasize the interrelated between past and present necessarily run counter to their craft.88 Another opportunity is increasing the current virtual absence of Khoisanidentified academics and involving them and non-academic Khoisan stakeholders in more sustained and ethical ways in research, from the planning stages to the write-up, and to provide them with much deserved tenure at universities – a longstanding demand in both the Black intellectual movement and taken further in the Khoisan activist movements. By empowering Khoisan participation in the academic debates that concerned them, the 1997 and 2001 conferences for instance constituted major public affirmations of Khoisan revivalism and its political ambitions. The Centre should continue hosting such conferences, if funding is available. Practically implementing ‘co-design’ has been far more difficult than envisaged as scholarship on the precolonial, which the Centre seeks to promote, often gets clouded by important political urgencies, such as environmental protection. As a result, there is an engagement with the archive as a useful source for political and environmental urgencies rather than as a site of infinite knowledge production for further research. This is so because in order to address urgencies in the present, communities are compelled to use the past rather than to produce new knowledge on that past, promoting archival instrumentalist rather than decolonial historiographical paradigms – though their activism, it can be argued, represents formidable decolonial living histories. The lack of funding is another impediment to such projects, as well as ambitions to transition activists into academia as staff (notable exceptions are activist Tauriq Jenkins, who is conducting research on the historiography on the Liesbeeck River as a PhD student, and the aforementioned Bradley Van Sitters, who pursues a Masters’ degree in Linguistics based on Recognition of Prior Learning offered by UCT). The Centre has sought to initiate history reading groups as per tradition of the Peoples Education movement of the 1970s and 1980s, but funders are reluctant to fund dialogical education activities that are not matched with an outcome, such as an archive  McGrath, “People,” 203.  Christopher J. Colvin, “Trauma,” in New South African Keywords, ed. Nick Sheperd and Steven Robins (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2008), 223; Gerald T. Alfred, “Colonialism and State Dependency,” International Journal of Indigenous Health 5 (2009): 42, 49.

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on precolonial history. And yet, engaging in the community and recognizing local knowledge holders is vital for the Centre to show that it is serious about reaching out to non-academic stakeholders and tackling Eurocentrism in Khoisan historiography. Being unable to offer tenured positions due to lack of long-term funding remains an additional challenge, even if the majority of the Centre’s staff is of Khoisan or enslaved descent. Despite the Vice Chancellor’s interventions in establishing the Centre in 2020, because of its historical privileged position in the South African higher education landscape, UCT in particular, is viewed by indigenous communities with immense distrust and suspicion as a prejudiced gatekeeper rather than facilitator. Impoverished communities consequently put pressure on the Centre to act as a place for social welfare, to provide jobs and to immediately solve various problems in society (including demands to stop the killing of children on the gangster-ridden Cape Flats area of Cape Town, where most ‘Coloureds’ reside). Criminal elements see the community partnerships as a ‘way in’ to access funds – which the Centre had to protect itself from over the last year with public defamation of key academics and even death threats and various forms of intimidation. The Forum understands that we are dealing with generations largely bereft of academic historians, and that the community’s frustrations with academia are entirely understandable. However, this does not absolve the Centre from taking a decisive stand against some reactionary and destructive tendencies within the movement, suspiciously similar to ‘third force’ gangster style intimidation tactics deployed by the apartheid security services against ‘people’s education’ political activists in the 1980s. The work of the Centre is scholarly, socially engaged and necessarily subversive. The Forum recognises that academia, culture and activism are different spaces, but if they meet at the Centre, they have to abide by its rules of engagements or follow democratic procedures to amend them. Khoisan activism has to figure itself out and the Centre has to be open to multiple perspectives and widespread disagreement, including from activists that are not (currently) represented in the Forum, but it cannot tolerate anything that violates its values of anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-violence, and anti-patriarchy. Importantly, fully-fledged participation in academia and claims to academic expertise requires training which cannot be bypassed. When Abrahams made her plea to take “experience” seriously as a factor in historical understanding, she was foreshadowing a vibrant academic debate on the subject among historians about how this both has inclusive and democratizing aspects (i.e. recognizing that experience informs certain interpretations about the past) and exclusionary features (i.e. those without that experience

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can never understand).89 In this sense, the (historical) experience of the Khoisan has hardly been taken seriously in academic circles. However, Abrahams was also explicitly countering those who mobilize “experience” to trump the voices of others. This includes Khoisan activists who seek an academic seal of approval for their patriarchal, racialized, xenophobic or otherwise exclusionary claims – a tendency which sadly persists and has made academics such as Bredekamp decide to play less prominent roles, and other scholars to become highly sceptical of the movement as a whole and reduce Khoisan activism to its excesses and most radical claims. In the tradition of CAS’ critical research on democracy and traditional leadership, as well as pioneer Khoisan revivalists like Bredekamp and Abrahams (who has now taken over as interim director of the Centre in April 2022), the Centre explicitly pushes back against those types of abuses of Khoisan history. All the while, it is important to distinguish critically working within traditional frameworks, which many Khoisan activists explicitly desire, from a reactionary ideology of ‘tribalism’, i.e., advancing an exclusionary agenda or power grab under the guise of traditional leadership claims. This line of reasoning often underpins claims that non-Khoisan people should leave the Cape as they are historically foreign to the region. The government already consulted with Bredekamp on the matter of traditional leadership over two decades ago, and the Centre is likely to be approached by the recently appointed Commission on KhoiSan Matters, which will vet Khoisan traditional leadership claims in the context of the 2019 Traditional and Khoi-San Leadership Act. In its potential future communications with the Commission, it is important that the Centre avoids any potential conflict of interest, and only provides historically accurate information, rather than value judgements. While the Centre can be supportive of campaigns for justice – for instance in the case of the reburial of Khoisan remains kept at UCT or intellectual property rights campaigns – it cautiously avoids entitlement claims or picking sides between conflicting parties of Khoisan activists, which includes the Forum. Despite facing various pressures on the contrary, the Centre’s focus is decidedly on scholarship and research – to produce new knowledge. Indeed, infighting was reportedly what made the Centre for Khoekhoen and San Studies at the University of the Free State dysfunctional soon after being founded in 2007, although some also blame the lack of involvement of the Khoisan as active agents in its research.90

 Joan W. Scott, “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Identity,” October 61 (1992): 12–19; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “History and the Politics of Recognition,” in Manifestos for History, ed. Sue Morgan, Keith Jenkins, and Alun Munslow (New York: Routledge, 2007), 77–87.  Piet Erasmus, “‘Vote for Real People’: The Making of Griqua and Korana Identities in Heidedal,” Anthropology Southern Africa 33 (2010): 71; Priscilla De Wet, “The KhoeSan Early Learning

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A failed attempt in the past at establishing a Khoisan Studies Centre holds an additional valuable lesson. Indeed, Bredekamp and Abrahams were ultimately not completely successful in their attempt at UWC because the majority of their colleagues were steeped in Unity Movement and Marxist historiography and felt a focus on ethnicity was inappropriate for the post-apartheid era.91 However, though such critics otherwise fulfil an important role by continuing to lay bare troublesome elements of Khoisan activism that seem intent on promoting a neo-apartheid agenda, they missed an important decolonial moment in Khoisan historiography. Khoisan history and identity as a cover for reactionary identity politics or exclusionary racist agendas should be challenged,92 but such critics often tend to foreclose other ways of, and motives for, engaging with the past. Critics also often conflate top-down apartheid-era manipulations of ethnicity and ‘tribes’ with the organic historical evolution of diverse working-class identities as they are culturally expressed from-below, and the importance of acknowledging historical facts of prior occupancy. As we have shown, this leaves out a vast range of other aspects which historians neglect to the detriment of their discipline. Indeed, as Chirikuru and Pwiti point out, heated debates over indigeneity, particularly in the realm of land claims, should not detract scholars from engaging in correcting past wrongs, such as giving voice to the ‘voiceless’.93 The Centre does not aspire to be the sole platform where Khoisan history can be discussed. It does however assert itself as an unashamedly Africanist platform to do so, thereby advancing the tradition of Black anti-apartheid historiography, as well as honouring the countless Khoisan colonial resistors who struggled over hundreds of years, Khoisan-identified antiapartheid activists and more contemporary ‘revivalists’ involved in their diversity in the grassroots struggles which have made the Centre possible.

Center Pilot Project: Negotiating Power and Possibility in a South African Institute of Higher Learning,” Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education 5 (2011): 109.  Verbuyst, “Khoisan Consciousness,” 138.  Ciraj Rassool, “The Politics of Nonracialism in South Africa,” Public Culture 31 (2019): 343–371.  Chirikure and Pwiti, “Community Involvement”.

Part Four: Public History in New Media

Alexandra Kolesnik, Boris Stepanov, and Irina Savelieva

10 Russian Public Historians in the New Media (The Case of Telegram) The rapid development of new media makes academic discussion of their role increasingly relevant.1 From this perspective, one of the most important issues for public history is the question of the transformation of a historian’s professional identity.2 In Russia, where public history as a sphere of intellectual work and practical activity is still at a formative stage, this issue has not yet received any fullfledged attention. In our chapter, we attempt a pilot study of this subject using the examples of Russian history projects on Telegram, a platform that has been rapidly gaining popularity in recent years, primarily among young Russian historians.3 According to our estimates, Telegram in the Russian media space plays a role similar to Twitter in English-speaking countries, and its popularity is growing every year. The emergence of history projects on this online platform indicates a certain increase of interest in stepping outside the limits of professional communication and in launching new public platforms to discuss history. Analysing this phenomenon is relevant for understanding the evolution of the role of a public historian in Russia. In particular, it allows us to ask questions about how people, who make history the subject of their professional studies, use new media for public communication; what attracts them to a certain media platform; and what topics and forms of activity are preferred by the historians who use Telegram. Our discussion of this subject will start from two points: an outline of public history as a field in Russia, and an overview of how history is represented in the

 *The book chapter was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program in 2021. Alexander Tokar, Michael Beurskens, Susanne Keuneke, Merja Mahrt, Isabella Peters, Cornelius Puschmann, Timo van Treeck, and Katrin Weller, Science and the Internet (Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf University Press, 2012); Katrin Weller, and Isabella Peters, “Scholarly Communication in Social Media,” in The SAGE handbook of social media, ed. Jean Burgess et al. (London: Sage, 2018), 592–613; Mark Carrigan, and Lambros Fatsis, The Public and Their Platforms: Public Sociology in an Era of Social Media (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2021).  Fien Danniau, “Public history in a digital context: back to the future or back to basics?” BMGNLow Countries Historical Review 128.4 (2013): 118–44; Meg Foster, “Online and plugged In?: Public history and historians in the digital age,” Public History Review 21 (2014): 1–19.  After Russia started the war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, some of the most popular social media (Facebook, Instagram) were banned in Russia. The legality of many social media and messengers (primarily YouTube and WhatsApp) is currently in question in Russia. This has led to a huge increase in the number of Telegram users. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-010

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Russian media. Next, we will proceed to analyse the characteristics of Telegram as a media platform. In the last section, we will turn to Telegram channels on history, and present and analyse interviews with their creators, which will lead on to some conclusions about the new role of a historian as a public intellectual in the context of the advance of new media platforms.4

10.1 Russian historians and public history Public history as a professional activity in Russia is at its early stages. Many aspects are still missing: there is no association of public historians or a specialised journal, no corps of professionally-trained public historians or a system of evaluation and licensing, no fixed ethical norms, and no public recognition of the profession or clear payment schemes. The same applies to unresolved specific issues: the need for special education for public historians, positioning oneself as a professional, and the communication patterns between them and the public for disseminating history. For most Russian historians, public history is not a profession, but rather an activity seen as a part of their academic vocation, or a hobby. We found evidence for this in 2013 while interviewing 44 leading Russian historians from various universities.5 The vast majority of them understood publicity as an educational activity, which has long been characteristic of their profession, assuming that the logic of education initially puts the ‘educator’ in a position of power rather than cooperation. The academic historians surveyed viewed their public activity mainly as exposing the general public to scholarly knowledge of the past. Communication with the public was considered useful because, on the one hand, it protected them from the danger of withdrawing into a small professional circle (several respondents used the metaphor of ‘hiding themselves in an ivory tower’) and, on the other hand, it allowed them to determine whether the ideas expressed were understandable and consistent. Some academic historians also presented their task as a kind of moral

 Data collection was carried out in August–October, 2021, after which the text was edited. We did not have the opportunity to double-check the data after the Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022.  In 2012–2014, a study of the attitude of Russian historians to public history was conducted. 44 interviews with leading Russian historians from universities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Kazan, and Volgograd were recorded. All of the respondents were actively engaged in scholarly activity and teaching at the time, and many of them had experience of speaking in the media, on television, radio, and online resources: Zarina Gatina, and Irina Saweliewa, “Academic historians in Russian media: a selfie-session,” Rozprawy z Dziejów Oświaty LI (2014): 11–33.

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imperative: to influence the historical consciousness of their listeners, to clarify the meaning of sensitive questions posed by society, to develop immunity against antihistorical or falsifying tendencies, and to fill in the gaps of history. It was noted that historians do not just educate, they help listeners to navigate social and political space, protecting them from the danger of ‘manipulated history.’ The idea that public history is a special historical practice that implies ‘leaving’ academia and working with the public, who are not recipients but co-creators of history along with professional historians, was hardly present in the answers of our respondents. Also, nobody mentioned that it would be possible to re-present and create relevant historical knowledge about the past in an open, constructive dialogue between professionals and the public outside the university. In the respondents’ answers, we found almost no understanding of the importance of public history as a profession that involves working with the public outside the traditional media (TV, newspapers, etc.). All this is not surprising in a situation where the profession of a public historian is officially non-existent in the country. Only a small group of historians in our surveys addressed the problem of specialising in public history in Russia, talked about a salary or the specifics of this work, and distinguished public history as a non-academic activity from history as an academic profession. But even then, they did not consider the importance of such factors as special university training and expertise. We have to note, however, that we interviewed some leading historians, which means, to put it mildly, not the youngest ones. Exposure, for many of our respondents, is an opportunity for self-promotion in a different sphere, additional to the objectives of their teaching careers. In recent years, many university administrations have been encouraging the desire of lecturers to communicate with the public, both offline and online. In a number of universities in Russia, active popularisation of knowledge became one of the criteria for faculty evaluation. However, it appears that encouragement of these initiatives by academic scholars is driven by the desire of administrations to increase the university’s visibility outside academia, rather than by understanding the importance of history as a public profession. We can only support this assertion by administrative directives available in our own practice and references to texts on universities’ goals. There is little understanding that academic history and public history are very distinct and discrete fields, which is especially evident at the institutional level. As a result, instead of creating educational programs in public history and encouraging relevant practices of working with the public, educational activity is mostly encouraged in traditional forms. Considering the situation, it is not surprising that higher education in the field of public history in Russia is in its infancy. Public history, as a profession and as an academic discipline, is settling down with difficulty. Perhaps the

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academic community is wary of the excessive influence of the political situation on representation of the past. At the same time, there is an active prejudice against the commercialisation and medialisation of history. Master’s and Bachelor’s degree programs in Public History in Russia are long overdue, with the first Master’s program opening in 2012, “Public history: Historical Knowledge in Modern Society,”6 at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES), a non-state university founded in 1995 by Teodor Shanin, a renowned sociologist, historian, and professor at the University of Manchester. According to the Public History Portal, in 2017 there were only six Master’s programs in public history in Russia.7 Three of these programs were opened by the new Russian universities founded in the early 1990s in Moscow and St. Petersburg, those that were more oriented towards the Western model of teaching history (MSSES, HSE, EU).8 However, in two of the three cases mentioned, the programs lasted literally one two-year cycle, which was also the case in the regional Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad.9 Programs in the old regional universities such as Perm State University and Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University, named after K.D. Ushinsky,10 turned out to be stable. These are in cities that are generally distinguished by a high dynamic of cultural initiatives and a broad front of work on the protection and development of cultural heritage. All programs offered a rather loose interpretation of the new subject, and the label of ‘Public History’ could be a façade for something more general or different, offering a focus on Digital Humanities, for example. There are currently four Master’s programs available in Russia in 2022: at MSSES, Perm State University, Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University, and Kazan Federal University,11 but until now, graduates everywhere receive a diploma with the specialty ‘historian’, without any additional specification. In 2018, the website of one of the Russian Master’s programs in Public History, which was later closed, featured the following paragraph: “What is public history? – you might ask. We can’t define it ourselves yet!” This is a perfect example of the imprecision in even the most general understanding of the term ‘Public History.’

 “Public History. Istoricheskoe znanie v sovremennom obschestve,” https://www.msses.ru/pro fessionalnaya-perepodgotovka/public-history-istoricheskoe-znanie-v-sovremennom-obshchestve/ [Last seen: January, 28, 2022].  “Portal publichnoj istorii,” https://www.rupublichistory.ru/index.html [Last seen: January, 28, 2022].  Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES) (founded in 1995); Higher School of Economics (HSE) in St. Petersburg (1992); European University in St. Petersburg (1994).  Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad (1967).  Perm State University (1917); Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D. Ushinsky (1918).  Kazan Federal University (1804).

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The almost complete absence of professional training does not mean that public history is not practised in Russia – quite the contrary. It seems that almost all the known types and spheres of activity of public historians are present here: various museums and archives are created by bottom-up initiatives, urban history and popular local history are developed, as well as historical sites, reconstructions, and amateur archaeology. The core of enthusiasts involved in these activities consists de facto of two categories: representatives of various humanities professions (school and university teachers and students, employees of museums and archives, librarians, and tour guides), and enthusiastic amateurs, professionally distant from the humanities. All of them promote public history in different cities of Russia, but they do not have professional status, and many of them are not even aware of the existence of such a phenomenon as public history. However, their very activity, its prevalence and the broad popular demand for it indicate the existence of a public necessity for such activities, while the supply of qualified specialists is almost non-existent. Still, no matter how public history is interpreted in Russian academia and outside the academic community nowadays, there is an obvious consensus among historians of different generations about the media as a place of operation for public historians.

10.2 Russian historians and the media The mutual interest of historians and media can only be discussed starting from the 2010s. The alienation of historians from the media, typical for the 2000s,12 was determined both by their desire to distance themselves from the trivialisation of historical discourse, which occurred as a result of historical subjects becoming of interest to broadcasters, and the struggle against various kinds of pseudo-historical theories, the public significance of which was fuelled by their broad media demand.13 In the context of this period, we can mention the lack of media channels that would allow historians to consistently shape mass historical perceptions, which led to a significant alienation of historians from the public.14 The situation

 Elena Racheva, and Boris Stepanov, “Zhurnalistika,” in Vse v proshlom: teoriya i praktika publichnoj istorii, ed. Andrei Zavadsky et al. (Moscow: Novoe izdatel’stvo, 2021), 99–111.  Vera Zvereva, “Istoriya na TV: Konstruirovanie proshlogo,” Otechestvennye zapiski 5 (2004): 160–168; Aleksandr Kamenskij, “Rossijskaya istoricheskaya nauka v usloviyah perekhodnogo obshchestva,” in Istoricheskoe znanie v sovremennoj Rossii: diskussii i poiski novyh podhodov, ed. Iren Ermann et al. (Moscow: RGGU, 2005), 57–67.  Russian state channels were more willing to invite journalists who took on de facto the function of public historians. It is sufficient to mention the documentary series “Russian Empire” by

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with popular history publications is indicative in this case: of these periodicals, only the journal Rodina15 could claim the status of a national journal. The emerging Internet environment during this period was also amorphous and not regarded as a reliable platform for the self-realisation of historians.16 In the following decade, the relationship between the professional community and media underwent a significant transformation. Growing popular interest in history led to the formation of a system of specialised media (popular history magazines, TV channels, radio programs) presenting historical topics to the general public.17 The Internet was beginning to play an increasingly important role. First, it became a medium providing the space for confronting the growing tendencies of ideological monopolization and instrumentalization of historical knowledge. Second, the embeddedness of Internet culture in everyday life prompted its use to create new educational, entertaining, and archival projects. Striking examples of such initiatives are the projects by the journalist, Mikhail Zygar, which were created in active cooperation with expert historians. The first project, “1917. Free History”,18 presented the events of the Russian Revolution as if they were taking place in the era of social networks. Another one, “1968.DIGITAL”,19 conveyed the events of 1968 in the format of a series available on a smartphone.20 Of all the social networks, YouTube plays, perhaps, the most important role, making it possible to bring the past into the contemporary world and popularise historical knowledge. In Russia, YouTube has become the place where conflicts over the past unfold most vividly today. A significant event for the Russian public sphere in recent years has undoubtedly been the heated discussion around the film, “Kolyma – Birthplace of Our Fear”,21 released in April 2019 on YouTube by a popular journalist and blogger, Yuri Dud.22 The film

the famous Russian journalist Leonid Parfyonov, which aired on the public federal television channel NTV in 2001–2003. An exception may be the state channel “Culture,” which regularly broadcasts historical programs with the invitation of Russian historians.  Rodina is a popular Russian illustrated monthly magazine that was founded in 1879, closed in 1917, and reopened in 1989.  Irina Kaspe, “Predstavlenie istorii i predstavleniya ob istorii v russkom internete,” in Istoricheskie issledovaniya v Rossii-P. Sem’ let spustya, ed. Gennadij Bordyugov (Moscow: AIRO-HKH, 2003), 15–34.  Racheva, Stepanov, “Zhurnalistika.”  “Project 1917,” www.project1917.ru [Last seen: 26 October 2021].  “1968,” https://1968.digital/en/main [Last seen: 26 October 2021].  Mariëlle Wijermars, “Project ‘1917–Free history’: Reliving the Russian revolution in the digital age,” Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 18 (2018): 45–65.  “Kolyma – rodina nashego straha,” YouTube, Vdud, https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=oo1 WouI38rQ [Last seen: 26 October 2021].  On history conflicts in Vkontakte, see Daria Khlevnyuk, “Narrowcasting collective memory online: ‘liking’ Stalin in Russian social media,” Media, Culture and Society 41:3 (2019): 317–31.

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focuses on the memory of the victims of Stalin’s repressions. In the 1930s–1950s, according to various sources, from 120 to 130 thousand prisoners died during the camps in the Kolyma. The film contains interviews with the descendants of the victims, activists, and current residents of the Kolyma, developing one main idea – the memory of the victims of Stalinist repressions in modern Russia is an extremely little-known topic for an average Russian. However, apart from blogging or journalistic activity, for professional historians who attempt to act as public intellectuals, Telegram has become an important space for this kind of public communication in recent years. This is an interesting phenomenon that demonstrates the growing interest of historians to explore different media platforms, and their willingness to use them to communicate outside of professional interactions.

10.3 Telegram and its place in the media landscape Despite the fact that television in Russia still plays a dominant role (according to sociological surveys of the Levada Centre, TV remains the main source of information for 44% of the population), the role of the new media – social networks and messengers – is steadily growing, especially among younger audiences.23 Telegram occupies a rather specific place among these media. Telegram was created as a messenger for exchanging text messages and photos in 2013 by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, who was also a creator of one of the most popular social networks in Russia, Vkontakte (VK). For a long time (and perhaps even now), the predominant type of content in the messenger was text with a link, similar to Twitter.24 Nevertheless, in recent years, its resources have expanded significantly: it allows not only voice and high-volume video messages, but it also supports video calls. Unlike social networks, Telegram does not have a news feed. At the same time, unlike other messengers, Telegram has a facility for creating channels, which are an analogue of a public page in social networks or a blog. For a long time, an important difference between a channel and a blog was the lack of a commenting function.25

 Denis Volkov, and Stepan Goncharov, “Rossijskij medialandshaft – 2020: televidenie, internet, social’nye seti i messendzhery,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniya. Dannye. Analiz. Diskussii 1–2 (2020): 142–45.  Daria V. Sokolova, “Distribuciya novostnogo kontenta v messendzhere Telegram,” Mediaskop 4 (2017), http://www.mediascope.ru/2380 [Last seen: 28 October 2021].  This function has been available starting from 2020.

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Due to the interconnection and easy conversion of private publications into public ones, as well as the availability of a view counter for each message, Telegram, as a means of communication, has a largely hybrid nature compared to other media platforms, in some ways combining the capabilities of traditional and new media.26 In terms of user popularity, VK leads among social networks in Russia, and WhatsApp occupies first place among messengers.27 However, Telegram demonstrates a steady and intensive growth in demand: in a period of five years (from 2016 to 2020), the demand for Telegram increased 12 times (from one to 12 percent of users of all available messengers in Russia),28 while other messengers (including those associated with social networks, VK and Facebook) either demonstrated a slowdown or general decline in user interest.29 At the same time, according to the Telegram Analytics study conducted in the summer of 2021, the average age of Telegram users was 25–34 years old, with an approximately equal number of users in the ‘older’ age groups (35–44 years old and 45–64 years old). On the whole, among Telegram users, more than 40% were over 35 years old.30 Telegram’s rise to the leading position, in terms of media content distribution, is even more indicative. According to Brand analytics, Telegram is the leader here: “The citation rate of the (Telegram) messenger (9.4 million links) has been exceeding the citation rate of all other media resources in the TOP 100 for several months now.”31 It can be assumed that Telegram’s growing popularity is defined by both the messenger’s communication characteristics and its specific image in the eyes of Russian users.32 According to some researchers,33 the key feature that predetermines the communicative potential of this messenger and distinguishes it from Twitter and WhatsApp, can be considered as the specific combination of private and public communication formats. Since its creation, Telegram has not only acted as one of the channels for personal communication, but also accentuated its reputation as a

 For a more detailed characterization of the Telegram features, see: Arash Dargahi Nobari, Malikeh Haj Khan Mirzaye Sarraf, Mahmood Neshati and Farnaz Daneshvar, “Characteristics of viral messages on Telegram: The world’s largest hybrid public and private messenger,” Expert Systems and Applications 168 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2020.114303 [Last seen: 18 October 2021].  Volkov, Goncharov, “Rossijskij medialandshaft,” 142–145.  “Telegram Audience Study,” https://tgstat.ru/research-2021 [Last seen: 11 October 2021].  Volkov, Goncharov, “Rossijskij medialandshaft,” 142–145.  “Telegram Audience Study.”  “Top-platformy i 100 viral’nyh russkoyazychnyh mediaresursov, NOYABR’ 2020,” Bran Analytics, https://br-analytics.ru/blog/top-media-platforms-november-2020/ [Last seen: 11 October 2021].  Ksenia Ermoshina, and Francesca Musiani, “The Telegram ban: How censorship ‘made in Russia’ faces a global Internet,” First Monday 26:5 (2021), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i5.11704.  Nobari et al. “Characteristics of viral messages on Telegram.”

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medium that offers a higher level of personal data security compared to other messengers, in particular, WhatsApp (the platform’s original slogan was “Taking back our right to privacy”).34 This feature of Telegram was particularly evident during the conflict between the messenger’s creators and the Russian authorities that unfolded between 2017–2020, when the Federal Security Service (FSB) tried to gain control over communications sent via the messenger, just as it had once gained control over Pavel Durov’s previous media project, VK.35 The refusal to cooperate with the Russian secret services, which the creators of the messenger explained by the technical principles of communication in Telegram, led to it being officially banned in Russia until 2020. This definitely contributed to the halo of an independent communication platform attractive for ‘advanced’ audiences. While “Facebook is perceived as a very public platform, where appropriate conduct means demonstrating conformity and agreement within the already existing social groups”,36 Telegram is perceived as a ‘serious’ media platform. Olga Lazicki notes that, in the context of increasing distrust of the state media in recent years, many Russians “started to consume news from local groups in messengers (WhatsApp and Telegram) and social networks, where they also published their information about what they have seen and heard. They trust content created by peer users much more than they trust the mainstream media content.”37 Much of the perception of Telegram’s “seriousness” also stems from the fact that, after the conflict with the Russian authorities, Telegram became “a pivotal application for activists challenging the powers of the Russian state”38 and currently remains one of the few internet platforms where publications by political activists cannot be banned, technically due to the specifics of the custom encryption protocol and end-to-end encryption in

 “Taking Back Our Right to Privacy,” Telegram, https://telegram.org/blog/unsend-privacy-emoji [Last seen: 11 October 2021].  Nathalie Maréchal, “From Russia with crypto: A political history of Telegram,” paper presented at the Eighth USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet, 2018, https://www.usenix.org/conference/foci18/presentation/marechal [Last seen: 23 December 2022].  Tom McDonald, Nicolescu Razvan, and Jolynna Sinanan, “Small Places Turned inside-out. Social Networking in Small Communities,” in The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography, ed. Larissa Hjorth et al. (London: Routledge, 2016), 92.  Olga Lazicki, “Proryvayas’ skvoz’ t’mu: al’ternativnaya professional’naya zhurnalistika v sovremennyh rossijskih publichnyh sferah,” in Nesovershennaya publichnaya sfera. Istoriya rezhimov publichnosti v Rossii, ed. Tatiana Vajzer et al. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2021), 594.  Markku Lonkila, Larisa Shpakovskaya, and Philip Torchinsky, “Digital Activism in Russia: The Evolution and Forms of Online Participation in an Authoritarian State,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Digital Russia Studies, ed. Daria Gritsenko et al. (London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 137.

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secret chats. This makes it impossible to automatically block posts on Telegram, unlike other media platforms. Noteworthy is the example of the Instagram channel, HISTORY (@okno_v_proshloe),39 which in September 2021, informed its public that it was moving to Telegram.40 The reason behind it was the frequent blocking of Instagram posts because of the labelling of photographic materials as pornographic by Instagram algorithms. Unlike other messengers and social networks, Telegram provides more opportunities for publishing information. This not only has to do with the volume of text messages and data transmitted, but also with the opportunities to create channels with a potentially very wide audience and to run programmed bots that implement a specific algorithm for distributing information. Together with the reliability and data transmission speed, these characteristics have made Telegram an attractive platform for various information agents, both individuals and media agencies. However, Telegram’s popularity is not only related to the information acquisition parameters that the network provides to its users, but also to the way it regulates the news flow.41 The tools for flexible topic-related filtering of incoming information and regulation of the information flow intensity, the simplicity of communication design, and easy news sharing, prove attractive for users in a situation of increasing information overload.42

10.4 Russian-language history telegram-channels Russian-language Telegram channels on historical or near-historical topics are relatively new. Although the messenger has been actively used by the Russian and Ukrainian media almost from the very beginning of its existence, and quickly gained popularity among foreign news media,43 specialised channels devoted to  As of October 2021, the channel has 243,000 subscribers.  The channel (over 12,000 subscribers) has existed since 2017, but it was less active before: “History| History,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@oknovproshloe [Last seen: 27 October 2021].  Chen Lou, Edson C. Tandoc Jr., Li Xuan Hong, Xiang Yuan (Brenda) Pong, Wan Xin (Rachelle) Lye, and Ngiag Gya (Trisha) Sng, “When Motivations Meet Affordances: News Consumption on Telegram,” Journalism Studies 22:7 (2021): 934–52  Tellingly, many researchers point out that in case of Telegram, the intensification of information flow by news providers is not the key to success of the respective channel, see Sokolova, “Distribuciya novostnogo kontenta”; Nobari et al. “Characteristics of viral messages on Telegram.”  In particular, Telegram is widely used by news media in South Korea, Iran, Brazil, and Italy: Saied Reza Ameli, and Hamideh Molaei, “Election Journalism: Investigating Media Bias on Telegram during the 2017 Presidential Election in Iran,” Digital Journalism 8:8 (2020), 975–991; Chen et al. “When Motivations Meet Affordances”; Abolghasem Bayat, Mohammad Fathian, Naser

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narrower topics began to appear only a few years ago. Nevertheless, today, the range of these channels is quite extensive: broad audience groups; official channels of museums, libraries, galleries, archives and arts spaces; author-designed original channels focused both on specific issues and on certain disciplines (History, Anthropology, Sociology, Urban Studies, Museum Studies, etc.). Having described the characteristics of Telegram as an information platform, we now turn to the description of Telegram history channels, which will allow us to open the discussion of how this platform is being used by Russian historians and is thus becoming one of the segments of the field of public history. Our analysis included several stages. The first stage involved the observation of history channels in the Russian segment of Telegram. As part of this process, we analysed the topics and forms of presenting content, as well as statistics of content consumption by users. We used the Telemetr44 analytical resource and the results of Telegram Statistics for 202145 as the sources of statistical information. Along with the number of subscribers, we also took into account the criterion of average readership rate – Engagement Rate (ER), the average engagement of readers per publication. Based on this observation we developed a typology of Telegram history channels, which allowed us to contextualize the field of activity of professional historians within this platform. The main subjects of our study were the Russian-language Telegram channels of historians and researchers from related disciplines involved in historical research, which are popular across a wide audience and/or read by fellow historians.46 Anonymous channels were not analysed separately, and were used only for a better understanding of the topics of Telegram history channels. In this paper, we did not examine the official Telegram channels of various scientific, educational and cultural institutions, and focused on the channels created by one author or a group of authors that allowed us to study their professional ideas about the role of a historian in the media. In order to include different types of channels in the sample group and to determine different roles of their authors, we varied the criteria for selecting channels: in some cases, we focused on popularity, in

Bagheri Moghaddam, Amirali Saifoddin, “The adoption of social messaging apps in Iran: Discourses and challenges,” Information Development (2021), https://doi.org/10.1177/02666669211022 [Last seen: December, 26, 2022].  Telemetr is a Russian analytical resource for statistical data on Telegram channels. It has been available since 2017 “Telemetr,” https://telemetr.me [Last seen: September 10, 2021].  “Telegram Audience Study.”  Among them were channels with up to 1,000 subscribers. They are no less popular than channels with several thousand subscribers according to their average Engagement Rate (ER) or more significant for the authors of Telegram channels.

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others on the author’s narrative about their research, in still others on recommendations by other Telegram authors. Following our observations, we analysed more than 30 large-scale Telegram channels and identified 13 original channels (i.e., Telegram-based with no analogues on other media platforms), producing their own Telegram content, with open contact information on their authors or moderators. In studying these channels, we relied on the combined methods of digital ethnography.47 In addition to participant observation in online communities and content analysis,48 we conducted a series of in-depth semi-formalized interviews with informants, who were sent a list of questions in advance. Interviews were conducted orally (with the exception of one interview, where the answers were sent by the informant in a written form). For this study, we recorded interviews with the authors of 9 Telegram channels (7 men and 2 women) between late August and early October 2021. Eight of the 9 informants were 30–36 years old, one informant was over 40 years old. The authors live in different Russian cities: from Kaliningrad to Tyumen, although the majority of the informants were from Moscow (4 respondents). One informant was from Kyiv. The authors of 4 other channels either declined the interview or did not respond to the offer. The list of interviews used is available in Appendix 1 of this article.49 To develop the typology of Telegram channels, we tried to take into account the following indicators: the number of subscribers, the subject and format of publications, the originality of the published material, authorship of the channels, presence of the channel on other media platforms (Facebook, VK, Instagram, Twitter). Based on this, we identified 3 types of Telegram history channels. 1. Duplicate channels. These are channels that originally appeared on other media platforms (primarily VK and Facebook) and were later adapted to Telegram’s functions. These channels make up the vast majority of Telegram history channels. They have several thousand subscribers each. The readership is largely made up of subscribers coming from other platforms. The thematic coverage of the channels is as broad as possible – history in general without thematic specification, presented through recognizable events (wars, revolutions, etc.), personalities (politicians, movie stars, writers, etc.), places and cultural monuments (the Egyptian pyramids, cathedrals, etc.), etc. These channels include mass entertainment channels:

 John Postill, and Sarah Pink, “Social media ethnography: the digital researcher in a messy web,” Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy: Quarterly Journal of Media Research and Resources 145 (2012): 123–34.  At the same time, we did not analyze comments in Telegram channels separately, but we took notice if the comment function was on.  The authors of the channels gave us permissions to indicate their names.

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History50 (about 400,000 subscribers, this channel in VK has 2.8 million subscribers), History porn51 (about 10,000 subscribers, VK – 1.4 million), Che, history52 (more than 630,000 subscribers, VK – more than 14,000), The Suffering Middle Ages53 (more than 14,000 subscribers, VK – about 500,000).

Besides these, there are channels that follow the format of Internet media: – Vatnikstan54 (more than 15,000 subscribers, VK – 27,000), – It fell apart55 (more than 11,000 subscribers, VK – more than 152,000), – Junta56 (more than 5,000 subscribers, VK – more than 51,000). These channels demonstrate a high publication activity (8–15 posts a day). Due to the specifics of the published material, the channels have a fairly high advertising potential. For example, one of the largest Telegram history channels, Vatnikstan (launched in 2017 as a duplicate of the same-name community in VK), as of October 2021, has more than 15,000 subscribers with ER of 15.4% and about 2,000 mentions on other channels, which allows the readership of Vatnikstan to expand several-fold.57 The creators of such channels are a group of authors who write original texts (often reviews) on various subjects. Frequently, texts are additionally commissioned from guest authors to prepare publications on specific topics, materials search, copywriting and adaptation of original posts to the Telegram platform. These channels do not aim to familiarize readers with the specifics of the published sources and, in general, rarely problematize the topic. At the same time, the authors may use personal archives and unique sources that have not been published before. For example, the creator of Vatnikstan, Sergei Lunev, pointed out that he had inherited, from his parents, an impressive collection of photographs and postcards from the early twentieth century.58 The desire to digitize them was one of the reasons why he started his first VK group, and later his

 “History,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@history_0o [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  The name was given by analogy with the term ‘food porn.’ The idea of the channel is that history can be consumed like any other information through beautiful pictures. “History porn,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@history_porn [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  “Che, history,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@che_history1 [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  “The Suffering Middle Ages,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@pophistory [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  “Vatnikstan,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@vatnikstan [Last seen: 18 October 2021].  “It fell apart,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@ussrchaosss [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  “Junta,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@juntaex [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  “Vatnikstan.”  Interview with Sergey Lunev, September 9, 2021.

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Telegram channel. Communication with readers is not a priority for the channel: comments are disabled and feedback is only possible via chatbot59 or private messages to the administrator. It should be noted that often the publications in the Telegram duplicate channels are not completely identical to the original publications on other platforms, and the authors try to take into account the specifics of each target platform while making a publication. Either the best publications are selected for Telegram, or special visual material is selected that has not been used on other platforms. For example, Konstantin Meftakhudinov, one of the creators of the largest Telegram history channel, The Suffering Middle Ages,60 notes that only the best jokes, memes, and materials that are interesting and dear to the authors of the channel are posted on Telegram.61 2. Theme-based aggregator channels. These channels rarely make new and original publications, with 90 to 100% of their content consisting of reposts from other Telegram channels. They exist only on Telegram and do not overlap with other media platforms. The authorship of such channels is mostly anonymous, often only chatbot contacts are given for advertising purposes, and comments are closed. Such channels act as a kind of digital digest with a selection of the most relevant and recent publications on a given topic, collecting publications from other Telegram channels. Examples include Gumkonvoy62 (meaning “humanitarian convoy,” a channel devoted to history and culture in broad sense, which has more than 4,000 subscribers); ChVK Media63 (meaning “private military company”, a military and political feed-reader, with more than 9,000 subscribers); and The Soviet Union64 (which collects various publications on the history of the USSR, and has less than 1,000 subscribers).

 In the most general sense, a chatbot is a computer program that interactively simulates human speech (oral or written) and allows user to communicate with digital devices as if they were real people. This helps the authors of the Telegram channels to answer a large number of often similar questions.  The Suffering Middle Ages channel first appeared on VK in 2014 (as of October 2021, it has over 465,000 subscribers). It was created by at that time undergraduate history students of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. Its specificity is the publication of original memes created on the basis of a variety of medieval sources (manuscripts, miniatures, frescoes, icons, etc.). The Telegram channel The Suffering Middle Ages was launched in November 2017 and as of October 2021 has about 14,000 subscribers, “The Suffering Middle Ages.”  Interview with Konstantin Meftakhutdinov, September 27, 2021.  “Gumkonvoy,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@gumkonvoy [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  “ChVK Media,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@chvkmedia [Last seen: 30 October 2021].  “The Soviet Union,” Telegram, https://t.me/allaboutussr [Last seen: 30 October 2021].

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3. Original author-designed channels. The creators of such channels are historians or scholars from other disciplines (philology, anthropology, sociology, journalism, cultural studies) engaged in historical research or interested in historical topics. These channels have no analogues on other media platforms, but their authors may have accounts and be active users of other media platforms (mostly Facebook and Twitter). Nevertheless, their publications rarely overlap with their Telegram channels. They are thematically focused65 and closely related to the immediate research interests and current work of the authors, many of whom work or study at universities and publish in academic journals. The most visible and readable channels are USSResearh66 (over 3,400 subscribers), Corgi-Komsorgi67 (over 1,000 subscribers), A Spy in the Archive68 (more than 3,400 subscribers), Immortal Gender69 (over 1,500 subscribers), Never/Again70 (over 1,500 subscribers), Red Frontman 71 (over 4,000 subscribers), The Fifth Point 72 (over 2,000 subscribers), Whose Shoe, Sportive73 (about 2,000 subscribers), and Retrofood74 (about 2,000 subscribers). They focus on the cultural, social and gender history of the USSR, history of memory, history of Jews in the Russian Empire and the USSR, etc. Some original channels deal with local history and the history of Russian cities, with special attention given to the Soviet period: Moscow Past/Present75 (about

 Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish a number of original channels devoted to history in the broadest possible sense: from Antiquity to the 20th century. In general, they often repeat other sites and groups of the author and are arranged according to the principle of duplicate channels. An example is a rather popular author-designed channel of the historian Alexander Svistunov Lace Wars (about 4,000 subscribers), “Lace Wars,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@lace wars [Last seen: 25 October 2021].  “USSResearh,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@ussresearch [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “Corgi-Komsorgi,” Telegram, https://t.me/komsorgi [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “A spy in the archive,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@spyinthearchives [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  The title of this channel plays up the name of the annual memorial action taking place on the Victory Day (celebration of the victory in World War II) on May 9 throughout Russia, “Immortal Regiment.” “Immortal gender,” Telegram, https://t.me/bessmertnyipol [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “Never/Again,” Telegram, https://t.me/nieundwieder [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “Red frontman,” Telegram, https://t.me/rotfront_1917_1945 [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  An anonymous channel about the history of Jews in the Russian Empire and USSR, “The Fifth Point,” Telegram, https://t.me/PiatyiPunkt [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  A channel of the Moscow culture researcher Ekaterina Kulinicheva about the history of sports fashion, primarily in the USSR, “Whose shoe, sportive,” Telegram, https://t.me/culturalhistorys neakers [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  A channel of the Moscow local historian Alexei Mitrofanov, “Retrofood,” Telegram, https://t. me/zastolje [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “Moscow past/present,” Telegram, https://t.me/ecoyase [Last seen: 19 October 2021].

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8,000 subscribers), The Soviet Leningrad76 (more than 7,000 subscribers), ArchiEkat77 (about 1,200 subscribers), etc. Some are devoted to specific phenomena directly or indirectly related to Russian history: Russian emigration (Alien Land,78 about 5,000 subscribers), Soviet aviation (Main Airfield,79 about 3,500 subscribers), political movements (Nechaevshchina,80 about 6,000 subscribers). The author-designed channels become visible and attract readers primarily by recommendations from colleagues and students of the authors. The published materials are selected on the basis of the current state of the author’s research, rather than an external agenda. A significant feature of such channels is the high degree of reliability of the published information and accurate references to sources, since most of the materials posted are authors’ own findings. Most of the channels have the comments function available, and the authors’ contacts are openly listed in the channel description. As most of our informants noted, despite the fact that not all publications were actively commented on publicly, the authors received quite a lot of personal messages from readers, both with questions and requests about the published sources and with a desire to share their own information. Nevertheless, anonymous channels are not rare – their authorship remains unknown even to the professional historians in the field. For example, several of our informants mentioned The Archive Worm81 as an important channel, but no one was able to find out who had created it. Two things which characterise these channels should be noted. First, when assessing their relevance, one should take into account not only the audience coverage, but also the indicator of average reading density. Aggregator channels often have a wider audience coverage and are more popular than original and thematically narrower ones. Nevertheless, aggregator history channels are less engaged with and have a changing and less engaged audience than original channels. According to Telemetr statistics, one of the largest Russian-language aggregator channels, Gumkonvoy, which has existed since 2017 and is dedicated to cultural history (mainly about, but not limited to, Russia), had about 4,000 subscribers as of October 2021 and  “The Soviet Leningrad,” Telegram, https://t.me/sovietleningrad [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  A channel about Yekaterinburg history, “ArchiEkat,” Telegram, https://t.me/arhiekat [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “Alien Land,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@chuzhbina [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “The Main airfield,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@main_aerodrome [Last seen: 19 October 2021].  “Nechayevshchina,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@nechaeveverywhere [Last seen: 20 October 2021].  As of October 2021, the channel had only 517 subscribers with little reader growth and zero ER, “The Archive Worm,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@archiveworm [Last seen: 19 October 2021].

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showed a steady decline in the number of readers, (by about 60 people per month over the period of July–November 2021), reposts, and views (with an ER of 0%).82 Duplicate channels have an even greater outflow of subscribers: several thousand subscribers per month with a low ER. Thus, the number of subscribers of such mass channels as History and Che, History is decreasing by 860 and 2,200 per month, respectively, with an ER of 7–8%.83 Author-designed channels demonstrate a steady increase in subscribers and readership. For example, the channel of the Tyumen historian, Alexander Fokin, USSResearch which appeared in early 2020 and is devoted to the cultural history of the USSR, has about 3,500 subscribers and a steady increase of about 80 readers per month as of October 2021 (with the ER of 28.1%).84 A channel about Soviet queer history A Spy in the Archives by Ira Roldugina, a Russian postdoctoral researcher currently at the University of Pittsburgh, demonstrates similar statistics. As of October 2021, the channel had about 3,500 subscribers and the number is steadily increasing by over 50 readers per month (with an ER of 8.8%).85 Second, the work of original channels is associated with specific strategies for selecting and presenting material. A distinctive feature of duplicate channels is that their publications consist mainly of visual material (rare photos, posters, pictures, memes, etc.) with little explanation. The representation of historical material takes place through its explicit or implicit connection to the present (quite often historical photographs, posters, newspaper and magazine covers are aimed to resonate with current events in Russia and the world). Author-developed Telegram channels create original copyright content. Authors share their archival and library discoveries (many sources are often ‘published’ on Telegram for the first time), compile lists of useful research literature on the channel’s topic, and sometimes offer selections of films, television series, music clips, etc., share information about upcoming conferences, or report on past but important academic events, prepare reviews of academic articles and books. It is noteworthy that the most popular channels are devoted to reviews and full or partial publications of archival sources. For example, the Telegram channel KGB files in Russian86 is one of the most popular among the Russianlanguage ones (more than 10,000 subscribers with an ER of 19.1%). It publishes declassified documents from the archives of the Ukrainian Security Service. To sum up, original channels have proved to be in high demand, they also define different formats of talking about the past and set the standards for publication and

 “Gumkonvoy.”  “History”; “Che, history.”  “USSResearch.”  “A spy in the archives.”  “KGB files in Russian,” Telemetr, https://telemetr.me/@kgbfiles_rus [Last seen: 19 October 2021].

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broadcasting. Next, we turn to the analysis of author-designed channels, how they present knowledge about the past, and what attracts professional historians to Telegram.

10.5 Telegram channels as an example of public history A significant feature of the author-designed Telegram channels is their orientation to the publication of various sources that are directly or indirectly related to the author’s main research87 or non-academic88 activities. For example, Dmitry Kozlov notes that his Telegram channel Corgi-Komsorgi publishes materials that, for one reason or another, were not included or will not be included in forthcoming research texts – “curiosities”89 not related to his main area of study. These are interesting items (documents, visual materials, periodicals) accumulated over years of work and not previously used in the author’s papers; and the materials newly found in libraries and archives, which the author considers interesting for his audience. Roldugina notes: “In Telegram, I don’t post materials in full or give archival numbers, which is unprofessional. I give ‘previews’ of the sources that will be or have already been used in the texts I’m working on. And often these materials are so cool that I want to share them, but I don’t yet know how or where I will use them.”90 In some cases, authors of the channels purposefully seek out materials to add to their collections and publish them on Telegram. Notably, it is a common practice to post not only the archival finding itself or information about it, but also related documents. Publications on the KGB files channel can serve as an example. For instance, on October 7, the author of the channel published in full “documents from the case of Raphael Petrushansky, the mayor91 of Kiev in 1934–37, who was shot shortly after his retirement: 1. The indictment. 2. Sentence. 3. Opinion of the prosecutor’s office on posthumous rehabilitation, 1956.

 Interview with Alexander Fokin, 9 September 2021; Interview with Ira Roldugin, 16 September 2021; Interview with Sasha Talaver, 9 September 2021; Interview with Eduard Andryushchenko, 9 September 2021; Interview with Nikolay Epple, 6 September 2021.  Interview with Ivan Markov, 15 September 2021.  Interview with Dmitry Kozlov, 30 August 2021.  Ira Roldugina.  Obviously, the author was referring to the position of the chairman of the City Council, but in the Telegram publication he used the word “mayor” which is more understandable to a modern reader.

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4. Daughter’s report on her father’s fate, 1990.”92 The authors of the channels, however, adhere to research ethics and strive to preserve the culture of scholarly citation. As Fokin notes, “if I have taken the material from someone, I try, if possible, to indicate the authorship, to put a reference. [. . .] If I see a cartoon from, let’s say, Crocodile,93 I’m more likely to find the very issue and cite it.”94 According to Roldugina, “archival fetishism” can become a problem for the authors. The researcher points out that in many of the archives she works in, photographing documents is forbidden, but the desire to share an archival finding and discuss it with colleagues and readers is a priority.95 Because of this, probably not all channels focusing on archival documents openly indicate authorship (an example might be the The Archive Worm channel mentioned earlier). Archival documents, especially those related to the history of Soviet law enforcement agencies, and previously classified, become the subject of heated political discussions among subscribers. Eduard Andryushchenko points to regular disputes about the problem of falsified documents discussed in his posts, which contain archival documents: “There are those who believe that archival documents about repression, both published earlier and now, including those from Ukrainian archives, have been massively falsified, starting as early as Khrushchev’s time, to smear Stalin’s name. Some subscribers believe that SBU is producing fakes about the Soviet era. The evidence to support that may be the fact that the stamps were on the right side of the document, while they are confident, they saw somewhere that the NKVD documents from 1936 were to have the stamp or signature on the other side.”96 For many authors, the Telegram channel becomes a way not only to promote but also to develop their research. In particular, keeping a channel can be a tool for structuring work, or for storing notes and abstracts. In this capacity, they can be used in different ways: acting as a “journal of fieldwork”97 or a “notebook,”98 i.e., as a space to present findings significant to the project, or, conversely, to store everything incidental or marginal to the research. The preparation of publications for Telegram can also be perceived as a playful format of intellectual work. Kozlov notes: “I like preparing Telegram posts as a form of exercise. You have to break the text into small pieces, make headings, sticking to the size of a phone screen.

 “KGB files in Russian.”  Crocodile (Krokodil) is a Soviet and Russian illustrated satirical literature and arts magazine published since 1922.  Alexander Fokin.  Ira Roldugina.  Eduard Andryushchenko.  Sasha Talaver.  Nikolai Epple.

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Telegram helps to keep it brief.”99 Publications in Telegram channels have a hybrid nature: they are fundamentally important for a number of informants to be able to present their research to a wide audience. For several informants, the publication of materials that are not directly related to the author’s research, but have social significance, is also seen as an important political task. Sasha Talaver explains: “At some point I started publishing materials that were not directly related to my topic, but were important to me. For example, one of the last texts I wrote specifically for my Telegram channel was about women’s university education in Europe. They were radical women from the Russian Empire who had emigrated to Europe, and in many European universities they were the pioneers of women’s higher education.”100 The only case when a Telegram channel contained a reference to a research project, is Fokin’s channel USSResearch, which was created as a part of his grant “Institutional and Non-Institutional Rituals in the Structure of Late-Soviet Society (1956–1985)” funded by the Russian Science Foundation (№ 20-18-00342). Author-designed Telegram channels extend scholarly communication beyond academia, offering different genres. The authors often make posts from various kinds of events of cultural life, announcements of upcoming events, or reports on past ones. In this case, the author of the Telegram channel adopts the function of structuring the flow of cultural and intellectual life. For example, in a post from March 9, 2020, Kozlov published excerpts from an article about a current exhibition and recommended visiting it: “Here is a very good article about some amazing exhibitions at the Garage Museum. Two exhibitions open the doors to unseen and/or forgotten artistic (and other) worlds. The author of the review, Tolstova, notes that the exhibition ‘We Keep Our White Dreams. The Other East and Supersensible Cognition in Russian Art. 1905–1969,’ dedicated to the intertwining of esotericism, mysticism, and artistic creation of the first half of the twentieth century, ‘reminds us that Soviet modernism had alternative versions, doubly repressed – both politically and in art history’. The same topics, unrevealed parallels, and dividing paths are covered by the exhibition ‘Secrets. Delving into the Soviet Underground. 1966–1985’ featuring uncensored Soviet art. The exhibitions run through May – find time to get acquainted with the artists who, at best, were sitting on the bench at the USSR Championship.”101 In some cases, Telegram channels serve as a platform for translating current news of academic life in Europe and the US into Russian. For example, Talaver systematically translates from English

 Dmitry Kozlov.  Sasha Talavera.  “Korgi komsorgi.”

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into Russian announcements of conferences on gender studies from Europe that do not get into the Russian-language academic media.102 In addition to the role of a scholar specialising in a particular topic, who shares their research and comments on the work of colleagues, many authors write reviews on films or music, share travel notes, or talk about their hobbies. As Roldugina notes, any interesting Telegram channel “is not just about the sources, it’s about the author and their interests.”103 Nevertheless, any published material is updated through the author’s main topic (in most cases, it is their research). Thus, in a post from October 21, 2021, Fokin shared his observations about the urban architecture of the Soviet period in Rostov-on-Don, where the researcher went to work in a library: “Also Rostov-on-Don hosts the most brutal library in Russia (I have not been to all the regions, so you are welcome to give your options). The construction of the 16-story concrete building began in 1974, but was not finished until 1994. The top corner is decorated with [. . .] a stylized set of image-signs, including images of ‘the faces of the geniuses of mankind’ between the book pages.”104 Often the focus is on the author’s personal collections and the various practices associated with adding new items. Ivan Markov notes that the idea of his channel came from a desire to share his collection of badges, and as a result he began to intentionally seek out new badges and later postcards at flea markets in Kaliningrad and other cities he visited.105 One of the author’s hobbies was connected with this: “At one time I had such a hobby – I went ‘lofting.’ I got into attics to look for old newspapers and I was interested specifically in the 1920s and 1930s and some artefacts (all of this could be found in the attics of old buildings).”106 The language of these publications also becomes the subject of a separate set of reflections. The authors note a significant difference in ways of expression from strict academic texts, apart from the need to write in a simplified way without losing meaning, namely the possibility of expressing oneself emotionally, including personal judgments, posing questions, using different tones and ironic stylistics in a conversational manner, to express their views on various issues (including political ones) and to make their statements more suggestive. Nikolai Epple started his channel as a parody on the language of academic publications. Here is an example of his ironic comment that borrows the form of an academic text but criticizes the subject of conversation. On October 23, 2021 Epple posted a short but ironic and emotional review on Gleb Panfilov’s new film Ivan Denisovich (2021), based on

    

Sasha Talaver. Ira Roldugin. “USSResearh.” Ivan Markov. Ivan Markov..

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich: “I finally managed to watch Gleb Panfilov’s Ivan Denisovich. Many people wrote on Facebook and other platforms that it was a slogan, a whitewashing of Stalinism, playing along with the current trend for heroic war memory (there are some war scenes missing in the original Solzhenitsyn’s book). I found it hard to believe that Panfilov could make a film that was opportunistic, and I even thought of why the war episodes were there (to integrate memories of repression and memories of war into a single narrative, without opposing them), but I had to watch the film to test this hypothesis.”107 Telegram seems to be an attractive platform for many authors of history channels for two reasons. First, low-cost entry into the field, which does not require a large investment as in the case of YouTube or Instagram, where the preparation of video and photo content requires “infrastructure and special technical skills”.108 It is interesting to note that, according to the authors, most of the Telegram channels were launched as experiments and without any pre-designed concept or strategic goal. This is also related to the fact that Telegram is less commercialised in comparison to Instagram, Facebook and other social media, and that there is “no like-related algorithm of winning popularity,”109 although all the informants recognize recommendations as a mechanism that increases the number of subscribers. Some of our informants110 even distance themselves from the forms of networking that are practised in Telegram (e.g., cross-reposts or publishing a selection of Telegram feeds). However, alternative examples are also available. So, in the summer of 2020, Clio, a community of “young talented people who popularise knowledge about the past,”111 was formed on Telegram. This is currently a virtual community that does not have a separate Internet page and is de facto supported only by being mentioned or mentioning themselves in the posts of the Clio member channels. This includes channels of all types (duplicate channels, aggregator channels, and author-designed channels) united by the theme of history. In interviews, informants mentioned112 that the main goal of this community is solely mutual promotion. Second, Telegram is seen by most authors as a medium that has more “fine tuning”113 options than other scholarly platforms for scholarly communication in

 “Never/Again.”  Alexander Fokin.  Ivan Markov.  Ira Roldugina.  This is the only description of the community repeated regularly whenever it is mentioned in Telegram.  Alexander Fokin; Sasha Talaver; Ivan Markov.  Ira Roldugina.

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Russian, and with more flexibility. We are referring to Facebook (in comparison with Telegram), which is seen by informants as a platform for creating and maintaining academic networking, and Twitter, which is used for personal notes. The peculiarity of Telegram is the specific configuration of publication and broadcasting provided by this medium.114 An attractive feature is the lower degree of personal involvement in the functioning of Telegram channels compared to other social media. An expression of this is that the authors of Telegram channels felt that they have less social-communicative obligations to their subscribers. In particular, it was typical for the majority of informants to emphasise the attractiveness of the possibility to disable comments on the posts. The reason for this is the recognition of their low value115 or lack of time or emotional resources to engage in discussion of the published stories.116 Only a few authors regularly ask questions of their subscribers and ask for feedback. Andryushchenko gives an example: “I recently came across information in an article about inserts in Soviet passports. I did not know what kind of inserts these were and decided to write to my readers with this question. There are a lot of people who are well informed on the subject, or remember the time, and they helped me.”117 Many of the informants emphasised their preference for indirect communication via private messages or email. For the readers of a Telegram channel, unsubscribing is a much more neutral and instrumental action than in the case of Facebook, where quite a significant part of communication has its basis in personal acquaintance or is realised in the form of personal contact. These features of communication in Telegram make it an attractive tool for translating professional activities into the public sphere. In Telegram, the historian/ researcher does not appear as a public intellectual responding to the current agenda and claiming universal competence, but as a specialist whose publicity is predominantly set by the development of their own research search or the existence of their own personal archive,118 although it may echo other current agenda.119 It is worth mentioning that there are differences between author-designed channels and the duplicate channels associated with other media. This is facilitated by the thematic  In this sense, we can say that the example we are considering can serve to confirm the concept of Henry Jenkins, who insisted that media convergence is related to the active involvement of users in finding and making connections between disparate media content, Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York; London: New York University Press, 2006).  Ivan Markov; Ira Roldugina; Sergei Lunev.  Ira Roldugina; Nikolai Epple.  Eduard Andryushchenko.  Sasha Talaver.  Ivan Markov; Sergei Lunev.

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nature of the sub-channels and the greater ‘archival potential’ of Telegram, noted above, compared to other media. Telegram is also friendlier to traditional professional formats. Compared to traditional professional communication formats, Telegram gives the researchers access to a much larger audience. In this sense, this messenger provides the maintenance of existing professional networks and the expansion of the network beyond professional circles.

10.6 Conclusion As our study has shown, the emergence of history Telegram channels not only indicates the formation of a new platform for presenting knowledge about the past in public space, but also demonstrates the emergence of new trends in understanding the profession of historian. This is primarily associated with the arrival of a new generation of historians, who demonstrate a willingness to combine different communication channels and to develop new media formats. The emergence of Telegram contributes to the creation of favourable conditions for overcoming the alienation of professional historians from the media and transferring the product of research to the public sphere. Unlike other platforms (in particular, YouTube), it does not require large investments – financial, temporal and emotional – to establish communication with a wider audience. The examples we analysed allow us to pinpoint different strategies of interaction between historians and the media. Author-designed Telegram channels show examples of broadcasting academic projects to a broader audience as well as including representatives of other professions (cultural studies, philology, etc.) and journalists in the development of their own historical projects. Meanwhile, duplicate channels present examples of the inclusion of historians in the development and promotion of media projects. For the creators of original channels, public communication is neither a priority nor can it be described by means of the language of public history.120 Most of them state that running a channel is additional to their own research projects. Informants ironically describe this activity as a hobby and “not a serious occupation”121 or as a

 Alexander Fokin notes: “Historians need to turn their faces to public. It is not necessary for everyone to have their own Telegram-channel, but there must be some form of public activity. It is also important to teach how to do this [. . .] Many historians get pedagogical education, but not skills in public history. [. . .] How to make a video, how to make a post, where to publish your material – all of this should be taught at universities”. Alexander Fokin.  Nikolai Epple; Dmitry Kozlov.

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way to reach educational goals.122 Here we can see some obvious similarity with the responses of the older generation of historians 7 years earlier. It is indicative that most authors rarely participate in traditional forms of public activity (radio and TV appearances, public lectures, etc.). In their Telegram communications, they do not seek to increase the number of subscribers. As the interviews demonstrated, many authors are not ready to spend a lot of time on preparing posts or working to expand their audience. They do not strive to respond to comments, engage readers in discussions, or analyse their requests, preferring private communication. Maintaining a Telegram channel in this way becomes the preferred way to go beyond the boundaries of an exclusively professional audience. The Telegram platform allows historians to share their archival findings and make visible the ‘kitchen’ of their research, and it is acceptable on Telegram to disregard strict academic requirements, to present the stories in a more relevant context, to use the genres of recommendations and reviews of the actual cultural process. For contemporary Russian-speaking audiences, the topics of the author-designed Telegram channels are connected with one of the most significant (if not the most significant) periods of the ‘relevant past’ – the Soviet period. The emergence of Telegram channels devoted to this period contributes to popularisation of the tools relevant to academic history. By broadening thematic horizons (e.g., addressing the topics of gender and queer culture,123 the history of dissidence, and popular culture), introducing new contexts of reflection, and publishing new sources, Telegram channels form a space alternative to traditional media, and increase the potential for reflection on the image of the past that they broadcast. History Telegram channels form a new specific sphere of historians’ public activity. YouTube and VK remain the most important new media channels that influence the history worldview of broad audiences in Russia, while Facebook is often used for the professional communication of historians. Telegram is a platform that creates an attractive niche for historians to combine the implementation of a research project with opportunities to address a wider audience. The impact of this platform today, in terms of influencing mass historical consciousness and creating platforms for conducting a dialogue about the past can hardly be exaggerated. It certainly contributes to the interaction between professional and non-professional communities, in which professional historians master the formats of communication with the public, and the public receive material for making sense of the relevant past.  Sergey Lunev; Alexander Fokin; Ivan Markov.  In her interview, the historian Ira Roldugina notes that the most popular publication on her Telegram channel was a story about persecution of gay people in the USSR (published on February 18, 2021), Ira Roldugina.

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Appendix 1. The list of interviews with the authors of the Telegram-channels No Channel

Author

Launched

Subject

Interview date

.

CorgiKomsorgi

Historian from St. Petersburg, Dmitry Kozlov

March 

Cultural history of the USSR

 August 

.

USSResearh Historian from Tyumen, Alexander Fokin

January 

Social and cultural  September history of the USSR 

.

Vatnikstan

Historian from Moscow, Sergei Lunev

October 

Soviet and Russian history

 September 

.

Never/ Again

Philologist from Moscow, Nikolai Epple

August 

Difficult and traumatic pasts

 September 

.

Immortal Gender

Culture scholar who is studying on a PhD program in Europe, Sasha Talaver

June 

Gender history of the USSR

 September 

.

KGB files in Historian from Kiev, Eduard June  Russian Andryushchenko

Archival documents of the Security Service of Ukraine

 September 

.

Red frontman

.

A Spy in the Historian working in the Archive USA, Ira Roldugina

.

The Suffering Middle Ages

Journalist from Kaliningrad, November  Communist  September Ivan Markov movements history  January 

Queer history of the USSR

Historians from Moscow, November  History of the Yuri Saprykin and Middle Ages in Konstantin Meftakhutdinov memes

 September   September 

 Nikolai Epple is the author of the widely discussed in Russia book, “An inconvenient past. Memory of state crimes in Russia and other countries,” Nikolai Epple, Neudobnoe proshloe. Pamyat’ o gosudarstvennyh prestupleniyah v Rossii i drugih stranah (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2020).

Flávia Florentino Varella and Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo

11 Practices of Popular Science and Digital Curation in Theory of History on the Portuguese Edition of Wikipedia Despite being frequently visited, Wikipedia continues to be a foreign land for most historians. Managed by rules created by its user community, the free encyclopaedia presents a form of knowledge production based on collective writing, unfinished publishing, and validation practices by lay editors that are somewhat different from those carried out by scholars. This can generate scepticism from specialists who question the quality of its content. Wikipedia’s particular way of producing and distributing information of the most diverse types is sometimes perceived as promoting the suspension of gatekeeping because the platform does not favour those who “have technical skills” and the “necessary training to make sense of the past as history”.1 In some instances, this may lead to an atmosphere of distrust and even hostility towards Wikipedia, which could be seen as central to a general feeling of estrangement between the academic and Wikipedian worlds.2

 Jurandir Malerba, “Os historiadores e seus públicos: desafios ao conhecimento histórico na era digital,” Revista Brasileira de História 74 (2017): 143, doi:10.1590/1806-93472017v37n74-06; Mark Poster, “History in the Digital Domain,” Historein 4 (2003): 26, doi:10.12681/historein.82.  Jim Giles, “Internet Encyclopaedias go Head to Head,” Nature 438 (2005): 900–901; Marli Fátima V. Vieira, “A Wikipédia é confiável? Credibilidade, utilização de uma enciclopédia online no ambiente escolar” (Master thesis, Universidade do Vale do Itajaí, 2008); Aline Luli Romero Ribeiro and Cláudio Gottschalg-Duque, “Wikipédia e enciclopédia britânica: informação confiável?,” Revista Brasileira de Biblioteconomia e Documentação 7 (2011): 172–85, [Last seen: 6 November 2021]; Imogen Casebourne et al., Assessing the Accuracy and Quality of Wikipedia Entries Compared to Popular Online Encyclopedias: A Comparative Preliminary Study Across Disciplines in English, Spanish and Arabic (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2012); Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source?”, The Journal of American History 93 (2006): 130. Note: Some parts of this text have previously appeared in two Brazilian journals: Flávia Florentino Varella and Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo, “Todos podem ser divulgadores? Wikipédia e curadoria digital em Teoria da História,” Estudos Ibero-Americanos 47 (2021), doi:10.15448/1980-864X.2021.2.38806; Flávia Florentino Varella and Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo, “Negociando autoridades, construindo saberes: a historiografia digital e colaborativa no projeto Teoria da História na Wikipédia,” Revista Brasileira de História 85 (2020), doi:10.1590/1806-93472020v40n85-08. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-011

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Numerous initiatives associated with Wikipedia at universities seek to break the stereotype of unreliability, while opening a responsible dialogue between these two worlds. In 2010, the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation in charge of overseeing the online encyclopaedia and its sister projects, started the Wikipedia Education Program which engaged universities in online entry editing. The initiative took place on the Portuguese edition of Wikipedia between 2011 and 2014, and produced a variety of outcomes. This chapter discusses some practices of popular science and digital curation through the development of the outreach project “Theory of History on Wikipedia”, which benefited from the Wikimedia initiative. The project “Theory of History on Wikipedia” was active between 2018 and 2020 at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), located in the city of Florianópolis, Brazil. It was launched by professors Flávia Florentino Varella and Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo, who wanted to bridge the gap between Wikipedia and academia to foster a dialogue between the disciplinary rules of historiography and the pillars of digital encyclopaedism, as expressed by the free encyclopaedia. Its general objective was to provide access for Portuguese-speaking audiences to entries on the theory of history and the history of historiography, edited by students under the curatorship of Varella and Bonaldo. The project contemplated writing content, contacting Wikimedian users, reorganising information on the platform, and increasing the visibility of theory of history on Lusophone Wikipedia. We argue that the notion of curatorship has a relevant heuristic position to understand the mediation of professional historians in digital media.3 A curator historian would be able to recognise “several actors and their local productions and epistemologies”4 and convey scholarly epistemic virtues to an amateur audience. In addition to the dissemination of content through the platform, the project also targeted a more general public, including undergraduate and graduate students who consult the encyclopaedia. Thus, the project bet on the hypothesis that popular representations of the past – such as the ones on Wikipedia – could reach a wider

 Pedro Toniazzo Terres and Lucas Tubino Piantá, “Wikipédia: públicos globais, histórias digitais,” Esboços: histórias em contextos globais 27 (2020): 264–285, doi:10.5007/2175-7976.2020.e68391. Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008); Christian Vandendorpe, “Wikipedia and the Ecosystem of Knowledge,” Scholarly and Research Communication 6 (2015), doi:10.22230/src.2015v6n3a201.  Valdei Araujo, “O Direito à História: O(A) Historiador(a) como Curador(a) de uma experiência histórica socialmente distribuída,” in Conversas sobre o Brasil: ensaios de crítica histórica, ed. Rodrigo Perez (Rio de Janeiro: Autografia, 2017), 209.

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audience and have a much greater impact on people’s perceptions of history than the studies disseminated in traditional academic forms.5 As we shall see, the project’s characteristics point to a history produced with the public, leaning towards “a collaborative history, in which the idea of ‘shared authority’ is central”.6 The notion of “shared authority”, as conceptualised by Michael Frisch, has been often misinterpreted as if it suggested abandoning scholarly authority. However, our experience has shown how the practice of public history demands – in the form of the negotiation of authority between academic historians and Wikipedians – a “dialogue between experience and expertise”.7 We consider, on the one hand, that the craft of any written history is the elaboration of a “legitimate discourse on a certain historical experience”, and that the criteria of discursive legitimacy must be negotiated around the relationship between “an author, a story and a receiver”.8 On the other hand, professional historians are responsible for “seeking honest and methodical truth in history”.9 Following these two premises, we discuss the particularities that this relationship between authors, narratives, and readers assumes within Wikipedia through the analysis of the interactions between the academically-trained participants of the project “Theory of History on Wikipedia” and amateur Wikipedians. Therefore, it is paramount to realise that “shared authority” may, in this case, describe tensions and negotiations between different disciplinary modalities: the scholarly historiography and encyclopaedic digital writing. At the beginning of the project, Varella and Bonaldo assembled a team and obtained two scholarships for which Danielly Campos Dias and Sarah Pereira Marcelino were selected, two former students of Varella already familiar with the basics of Wikipedia editing. However, this know-how needed to be deepened due to the challenges of the project. Felipe da Fonseca, who was then a Wikipedia administrator, took on the task of tutoring, assuming the role of Campus Ambassador. Through

 Sylvia Paletschek, “Introduction: Why Analyse Popular Historiographies?,” in Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices, ed. Sylvia Paletschek (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011), 1–3; Petros Apostolopoulos, “Producing Historical Knowledge on Wikipedia,” Madison Historical Review 16 (2019): 24.  Ricardo Santhiago, “Duas palavras, muitos significados,” in História Pública no Brasil: Sentidos e Itinerários, ed. Juniele R. Almeida et al. (São Paulo: Letra e Voz, 2016), 28.  Fien Danniau, “Public History in a Digital Context: Back to the Future or Back to Basics?,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 128(4) (2013): 123, https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.9355.  Fernando Nicolazzi, “Os historiadores e seus públicos: regimes historiográficos, recepção da história e história pública,” Revista História Hoje 15 (2019): 207–8, doi:10.20949/rhhj.v8i15.525.  Antoon de Baets, “Uma teoria do abuso da História,” Revista Brasileira de História 65 (2013): 27, doi:10.1590/S0102-01882013000100002.

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a mentoring program, he trained the scholarship holders in advanced editing, image management, and codes of conduct on the platform. With knowledge acquired through this program, Dias and Marcelino then trained groups of volunteer editors recruited from the local university community. During the first meeting, participants introduced themselves, and the project managers shortlisted relevant entries for the field of Theory of History that did not have broad thematic coverage on the encyclopaedia. However, the volunteers were not entirely restricted to editing only the articles that had been chosen by the professor. They were also encouraged to pick other entries. The volunteers of the outreach program shared a strong interest in mastering potential public history platforms. Nonetheless, most of them did not have prior experience with practices and media of this kind. In addition to this team, 16 students participated as entry writers during the two years the Project Theory of History was running. The group also decided to focus on writing potential featured articles, the best of its kind in style, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. This promotion is granted by vote from experienced editors and is indicated by a small bronze star icon on the top right corner of an article’s page. As we shall see below, the Wikipedian community raised a series of questions in the nomination process that forced project participants to negotiate their historian authority. The result of the project was the production of 10 main entries, extensive articles that could be featured: Antiquarian; History of the Present Time; Scriptorium; École méthodique; Global History; Historicism; Conceptual History; Public History; Historical Novel; and Philosophy of History. Of these, six were considered by the team to fulfil the community criteria and were also nominated by the Wikipedia editors as featured articles. The volunteers also published 111 secondary articles which helped in the reading of the main entries. Wikipedia works with a reading structure that relies on internal links designed to complement and expand its users’ understanding and to improve the readability of the main entries; thus, it was necessary to create small articles. Collaborative production of entries between professors and students began in the so-called ‘sandboxes’, testing environments within Wikipedia. Once ready, the articles were published on the online Encyclopaedia. Then, students and professors had some time to complement and rework the content to further open the nomination trial for featured articles. The featured article candidacy (FAC) process entails another level of collaboration, this time between students and the Wikipedian community. It is our contention that such dialogue opens up space for rethinking the practices of professional historians, while also helping to strengthen “the ties

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between university and society”.10 At this point, Valdei Araujo’s call for historians to engage in the recognition of diverse agents and their respective epistemologies appears as a seminal inspiration for our project. Listening to these voices, responding to their demands, negotiating epistemic values and selecting possible contributions also opens up the possibility of understanding the social function of the historian – to follow Araujo’s suggestion – as a “curator of histories”.11 In this light, we argue that writing history in a collaborative digital encyclopaedia transforms academic supervision into digital curation. Moreover, it shows a potential to resync scholarly practices and social demands for representations of the past. The notion of digital curation was initially associated with the preservation of digital materials throughout their life cycle, ranging from the present to the obsolescence of its media support.12 In recent decades, however, the practice has evolved from an emphasis on “passive preservation” to “active curation”.13 This reframing expands the heuristic function of digital curation to encompass an epistemic interaction with digital objects through the documentary criticism required for the use of these items.14 Thus, we can understand the practices of categorisation, administration, and rewording of entries done by the members of the project in a new light, considering Wikipedia as a conducive environment for the transfer of epistemic values and standards of history as an academic discipline. To demonstrate this, we analyse a set of actions carried out by students and supervisors of the project Theory of History on Wikipedia. Our intention is to understand the online encyclopaedia as a dissemination platform through the notion of digital curation. Our arrival point, however, translates less into a euphoric statement about the possibilities opened up by the digital turn than into a thoughtful reflection on the limits of historians’ ability to employ new technologies to spread scholarly knowledge. In this state of affairs, the maintenance of scientific authority increasingly depends on the ability to reach out to the public and the domain of new

 Francisco G de Sousa et al., “Uma lágrima sobre a cicatriz: o desmonte da Universidade Pública como desafio à reflexão histórica,” Revista Maracanan 17 (2017): 72, doi:10.12957/revmar.2017.28598.  Araujo, “O Direito à História,” 206–9.  Daisy Abbot, “What is Digital Curation?,” DCC Briefing Papers: Introduction to Curation. 2 April 2008. Edinburgh: Digital Curation Centre, https://www.dcc.ac.uk/guidance/briefing-papers/ introduction-curation/what-digital-curation.  Sarah Higgins, “Digital Curation: The Emergence of a New Discipline,” International Journal of Digital Curation 6, (2011): 84, doi:10.2218/ijdc.v6i2.191.  Costis Dallas, “Digital Curation beyond the ‘Wild Frontier’: A Pragmatic Approach,” Archival Science 16 (2016): 421–457, doi:10.1007/s10502-015-9252-6.

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media and digital languages – but professionals in the field of the theory of history have found it challenging to articulate scholarly and popular spheres.15

11.1 Negotiating authority to popularise the theory of history Wikipedia is a free and collaborative project aimed at compiling and organising information in several different languages. As of March 2022, the online encyclopaedia is available in 325 editions, with 314 being active. It is possible to say Wikipedia acts today as a federation of wikis supported and coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation language committee, a Meta-Wiki branch tasked to manage policies for the creation of new projects.16 Wikipedia was created back in 2001. One year earlier, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger developed an early version of the online encyclopaedia called “Nupedia”. At first, the creation of entries was quite slow, and the founders decided to adopt the “wiki” technology.17 In Hawaiian language, “wiki” means to hasten or to hurry, conceptualising a website with pages that anyone can edit quickly or update with ease.18 Since then, generalists from all over the world have created more than 55,000,000 entries.19 Among those entries, there are many articles dedicated to history. As early as 2006, Roy Rosenzweig had already praised Wikipedia for becoming perhaps “the largest work of online historical writing, the most widely read work of digital history, and the most important free historical resource” available on the Internet.20 Wikipedia, as any Google user may notice, has an outstanding performance on search engines, meaning it tends to be accessed extensively.

 Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho, “Onde fica a autoridade do historiador no universo digital?,” in Que história pública queremos?, ed. Ana Maria Mauad et al. (São Paulo: Letra e Voz, 2018), 173.  “Wikipedia: List of Wikipedias,”: Wikipedia, last modified 12 March 2022, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias.  Amy S. Bruckman, Should you Believe Wikipedia? (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 35–36.  Diego Leonardo Santana and Dilton Maynard, “O portal Metapedia: revisionismo histórico e negacionismo no tempo presente,” Transversos: Revista de História 11 (2017): 26, doi.org/10.12957/ transversos.2017.31586 [Last seen: 22 February 2020].  “Wikipedia: Size of Wikipedia,”: Wikipedia, last modified 14 March 2022, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia.  Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source?, 119.

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The Portuguese edition of Wikipedia is the fifteenth most visited website in Brazil and the sixth in Portugal. On the one hand, scholars have expressed concern about the quality of writing procedures and research quoted on Wikipedia, which may not always be scientific. On the other hand, there is a certain discomfort in seeing generalist editors writing about history. This double misgiving has led us to ask ourselves how we could “better negotiate the roles of scholarly specialists” and “establish quality control without discouraging” the involvement of experienced Wikipedia editors.21 After all, when one of the entries edited in the project “Theory of History” was submitted for appreciation by the Wikipedia community in an FAC, all users were aware that the production under review was carried out by a group of trained and in-training professionals. However, without the community’s approval, it would not be possible to achieve the Project’s goal of featuring some of the edited articles. Among the ten main entries in “Theory of History on Wikipedia”, six were nominated and promoted by the community to featured article status. The Lusophone Wikipedia has some article grades based on quality criteria. The highest grades are those of “good” and “featured” articles, which must pass through a voting process among experienced platform users to reach these statuses. Between 2018 and 2020, the featured articles needed to receive at least seven votes and a qualified majority in favour (≥75%) within a minimum of 21 days from the candidacy date. All best quality entries chosen by the community receive a star icon in the upper right corner of the main page. The featured entry receives a gold star and the good entry receives a silver one. This visual markup confirms that the content has been rigidly reviewed by Wikipedia’s editors, and is considered one of the best articles on the platform.22 In 2021, there were 1,303 featured articles on the Wikipedia Portuguese language edition, representing 0.1% of all its content.23 To participate in a FAC, the registered user must be logged in, has been on Wikipedia for 90 days, and with at least 300 valid edits in the main domain.24 Therefore, experience on the platform is the essential criterion to participate in the nomination process, rather than in-depth knowledge of the subject. These initial clarifications are important in analysing the discussion found in the nominations

 Kenneth M. Price, “Social Scholarly Editing,” in A new companion to digital humanities, eds. Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2016), 137.  “Wikipédia: Escolha do artigo em destaque,” Wikipédia, last modified 20 July 2017, https://pt. wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Escolha_do_artigo_em_destaque.  “Wikipédia: Artigos destacados,” Wikipédia, [last seen: 29 November 2021], https://pt.wikipe dia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Artigos_destacados.  “Wikipédia: Direito a voto,” Wikipédia, [last seen: 29 November 2021], https://pt.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Wikipédia:Direito_a_voto.

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of the featured articles in the project “Theory of History on Wikipedia”, and they help us to think of how to negotiate the authority and tradition of the discipline of history with an interested and generalist public. One central issue raised in this authority negotiation process may be perceived as addressing an epistemological question. The second of the five pillars of the encyclopaedia states that “Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.” In this sense, the second pillar recommends the description of “multiple points of view, presenting each accurately and in context rather than as ‘the truth’ or ‘the best view’”.25 The defence of a “neutral point of view” (NPOV) presented in this pillar may be the most liable to disagreement between disciplined historians and the principles governing Wikipedia, leading to a double confusion. First, it carries expressions (“impartiality”, “neutrality”) that professional historians tend to distrust, generally associated with a certain “Victorian naïveté” or even with the derisory jargon of “positivism”, touching on the old discussion of objectivity in history.26 Second, this Wikipedia pillar seems to foster historical revisionism by encouraging the writing in of marginal views on every subject, although, as the pillar text makes clear, “Wikipedia policy does not state or imply that every minority view or extraordinary claim needs to be presented along with commonly accepted mainstream scholarship as if they were of equal validity”. Conversely, “claims that the Earth is flat, that the Knights Templar possessed the Holy Grail, that the Apollo Moon landings were a hoax”, along with historical denialism in its multiple forms, should be omitted “where including it would unduly legitimise it”.27 The problem of biased information appeared in the FAC of the “Public History” entry, written by volunteer Pedro Toniazzo Terres, in which the image of the article’s lead section was questioned by Wikipedian reviewers. In the background of the photograph – which mixed photos of demonstrations from 2018 with those from older events – three flags from Fernando Haddad’s presidential campaign appeared.28 This image was accompanied by the caption “Public history project through rephotography, mixing protests from 2018 with those from

 “Wikipedia: Five Pillars,” Wikipédia, [last seen 3 May 2022], https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki pedia:Five_pillars.  Thiago Lima Nicodemo and Oldimar Cardoso, “Metahistory for (Ro)bots: Historical Knowledge in the Artificial Intelligence Era,” História da Historiografia 29 (2019): 35, doi:10.15848/hh.v12i29.1443; Murray G Phillips, “Wikipedia and History: A Worthwhile Partnership in the Digital Era?,” Rethinking History 20 (2016): 533, doi:10.1080/13642529.2015.1091566.  “Wikipedia: Neutral point of view,” Wikipedia, [last seen: 3 May 2022], https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view.  Haddad was the left-wing candidate who ran in place of Lula after the former president was considered ineligible for the 2018 Brazilian general election.

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the 1979 Novembrada, in Florianópolis”. Both the photo and the caption generated unease, vocalised by one of the voters, who said: There are no “2018 protests” in the rephotograph used as the main image, as stated in the caption. Instead, as far as the elements of the figure allow us to identify, it contains electoral campaign scenes. In addition to this decontextualized description, I believe that another image should be selected to figure as the main one, deviating from political trends and maintaining alignment with the principle of impartiality. –HVL

In the 5:20 pm revision of 12 June 2019, the image was replaced by user Pedro Toniazzo Terres with a new rephotograph, free from political allusion and showing the façade of the Cruz e Souza Palace. In response to HVL at the FAC, Terres stated: “Dear @HVL: I switched the image to another one from the same rephotographic project, I hope it would not allow such political interpretation, see what you think”.29 Apparently, without intention, Terres placed the main image of the entry more to the left, not only for highlighting a re-photography that contained political-partisan elements but also for calling the electoral campaign “protests”. In the process, he mixed the ideals of Novembrada – a 1979 protest against military dictator João Figueiredo – with those of the 2018 Workers’ Party electoral campaign. In the view of the experienced Wikipedian, this was considered favouring a point of view, and Terres had to revise his choice of imagery.30 During the nomination of the “Antiquarian” article written by volunteer Alexandre Fiori, user Tetraktys also argued in favour of respecting a neutral point of view, this time with a more heuristic problem in mind. The final section of the entry was dedicated to describing literary figurations of the antiquarian, and abandoned the generalist tone in order to point to particular examples in the writings of Thomas Rowlandson, Walter Scott, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Montague Rhodes James. With that in mind, the Wikipedian reviewer wrote: “are these four authors especially relevant or were they the only ones to write about the topic, or was it simply a sample?”.31 In this case, however, the discussion ended with the explanation that “the chosen figurations are not the only ones, of course, but they are certainly among the best known, judging by the extensive bibliographical

 “Wikipédia: Escolha do artigo em destaque/História pública”, Wikipédia, https://pt.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wikipédia:Escolha_do_artigo_em_destaque/História_pública [Last seen: 29 November 2021].  The political and semantic context of this possible “point of view” could be clarified by stating that many exponents in the Brazilian left-wing view Dilma Rousseff’s Impeachment in 2016 and the subsequent hindrance of Lula’s candidacy as a staged coup, based on law-fare practices which ultimately lead to the return of the military class to power under Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency.  “Wikipédia: Escolha do artigo em destaque/Antiquário,” Wikipédia, last seen: 29 November 2021, https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Escolha_do_artigo_em_destaque/Antiquário.

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research we carried out. Thanks again! – Alexandre Fiori”. Whether he was satisfied with the answer or not, Tetraktys voted for featuring the entry, arguing that it was “certainly a high-level work”. In the outreach project, the Wikipedian community often demanded the insertion of multiple points of view and not just the major ones or the “best known”. At the beginning of the project, the recommendation for its members was to bracket the historiographical discussions on the subject by country in a section of the article titled “national contexts” (Figure 1). However, the Wikipedia community faced a serious problem of bias in this practice. After all, the pillar indicates that “the different views on an issue” should be presented “giving due weight to their prominence”.32 During the nomination of the entry “History of Concepts”, written by volunteer Alexandre Fiori, Wikipedians requested the inclusion of the state of the art relating to countries that had not been covered. The first question appeared as follows: “in History_of_concepts#National_contexts_, only four countries appear: Brazil, South Korea, Spain, and the Netherlands. At first glance, this seems like a completely random and arbitrary choice. Is there any reason to mention just these four? JMagalhães”.33 Two days later, user Estranho no Ninho questioned the absence of Portugal, Latin America and Germany in that same section, highlighting that the founders of Conceptual History were German. Moreover, on 17 April, Gabriel Bier pointed out Italy’s absence. User Alexandre Fiori responded to the questions and made some reformulations, leading to the end of the discussion. However, this situation seems to have caused a stir within the community, considering that it reappeared in the FAC of the entry “Public History”. This time, the debate was much fiercer: JMagalhães (discussion) 11:07 am, May 27, 2019 (UTC) I vote here for a violation of WP:NPOV (WP:WEIGHT) and because the text is manifestly incomplete. There was a vote that I ignored, but this is already becoming a habit: what is the reason why only half a dozen countries were chosen? Is there no public history in others? One of the two: or 1) this article is limited to defining the concept of a neutral and global perspective, without going into detail by country; or 2) if you are going to address each country individually, then do it for every country where the topic exists, not only half a dozen of them. What you cannot go into is excessive detail for some, while others are totally ignored.34

 “Wikipédia: Princípio da imparcialidade.”  “Wikipédia: Escolha do artigo em destaque/História dos conceitos,” Wikipédia, last seen: 29 November 2021 https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipédia:Escolha_do_artigo_em_destaque/ His tória_dos_conceitos.  HVL user’s comment appears crossed out as per the original. Striking out a message in Wikipedia discussions means the user has changed their mind.

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Figure 1: Section organisation of the article Conceptual History in Portuguese with our translation to English. Source: Wikipedia, “História dos Conceitos” entry, version 14:34 April 13, 2019.

JMagalhães was not the only user dissatisfied with the resolution of the issue in the nomination of the “History of Concepts” article. Gabriel Bier also expressed his dissatisfaction with the editorial model based on “national contexts”, arguing that: I have to agree with JMagalhães. As a matter of fact, there was a similar case recently in this vote on the entry History of Concepts, in which I asked the author in question, but I did not get an answer about the case. For the time being, I will avoid making the same mistake in voting rashly and I will wait for the bidder to speak up.

In the case of the “Public History” entry, the solution found in dialogue with the community was to create a new article called “Public History by Countries”, as

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suggested by user JMagalhães, and the problem of impartiality was interpreted as having been solved. However, the discussion was not so easily circumvented in the nomination of the entry “History of the present time”, written by volunteer Igor Lemos Moreira. On 5 August 2018, a voter wrote: Unfortunately, I found what in my view is a relevant gap in the entry: there is no perspective or report on what the History of the present time in Portugal is and how it is [. . .]. So, if there is a history of the present time in the perspective and history/historiography/academic of Brazil, it would be recommended (even for the editors of Portugal in this community, after all, they do exist), a history of the present time from the perspective of Portugal [. . .]. Greetings. –Zoldyick.

The research carried out for the writing of the entry did not indicate an extensive range of books or of articles published in Portugal on the subject. Therefore, the project team chose not to include a section dedicated to that country, even though it was part of the Portuguese edition of Wikipedia. However, what Zoldyick was arguing was that the assembled structuring of the entry privileged certain countries, while erasing others and rendering them invisible. The project “Theory of History on Wikipedia” was violating the principle of a neutral point of view by not giving due weight to marginal views on the subject. The bibliography consulted by the members of the project indicated that there were some places with a greater profusion of debate on the subject, but this could not lead to the exclusion of places where the debate was small but existent. When the discussion on this topic had exhausted itself in the comments and suggestions section, Zoldyick returned to assert that the entry violated the Manual of Style, recommendations and conventions used to standard style entries. He argued that “some notes have the page information, which is a requirement [for featured articles], while others neglect it. It is something important that needs to be reviewed for proper verification of the entry”. Although user Igor Lemos Moreira stated that he would correct this mistake, he ended up not doing so. Bearing in mind, therefore, that the entry did not use the Manual of Style guidelines entirely, Zoldyick voted for it to be nominated merely as “good”. In situations like these, members of the project “Theory of History on Wikipedia” had to negotiate their scholarly authority with the community and also rethink their professional practices. It is not new that the collaborative premise is one of the central aspects in the production of entries by the Wikipedia user community.35 This collaborative dimension of the open encyclopaedia challenges how researchers – including those working in the fields of theory of history and history of historiography – have traditionally developed their work. The rationale of  Phillips, “Wikipedia and History,” 538.

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editing articles in Wikipedia therefore also brings pragmatic challenges to the historian, especially by destabilising the modern notion of authorship through the “proliferation of subjects and places of historical knowledge production [. . .], beyond specialized circles”.36 These observations proved to be coherent, especially through the community’s request for changes and incorporations in the FACs. However, collaboration ran through the entire project, as the writing of entries was done collectively by all team members. First, volunteer editors wrote the content of the entry on one shared sandbox. Next, professors and scholarship holders reviewed the material, making additions to it. Afterwards, they communicated on the sandboxes about the edited content, finally resuming the discussion during face-to-face meetings with the project’s group. Therefore, there is a history of collaborative knowledge construction in the writing of entries between the project members as well as between them and Wikipedia users. Modes of collaborative work, such as co-writing and peer review, are well known to scholarly production, not to speak of traditional encyclopaedic or handbook endeavours. Nevertheless, there is a point made, not for peer review, but for peer production, coming from management science, that should not escape our discussion. In management science, peer production is a notion often used to conceptualise the work of non-specialised volunteers drawing on many forms of creative collaborations such as citizen science, open-source software, and also free-content publishing such as Wikipedia. In that sense, “peer production” may be perceived as a synonym for “crowd sourcing”. As Amy S. Brucker put it, “peer production relies on decentralised information gathering to reduce uncertainties”, being a mode of production in which “individuals (who know their capabilities) selfidentify for tasks”. But this only works, she adds, if judgments are correct, meaning peer production also relies on some sort of peer review.37 The case for “Theory of History on Wikipedia” is that the peer reviews received during FAC assessments were given not by fellow historians, but by amateurs. Edit on Wikipedia forced us onward to generalist writing, and our academic credentials and expert authority on the subject were softened as we were considered Wikipedians editing in a “swirling ecosystem of social construction of knowledge in action”.38 This led the project’s participants to confront different values, different semantic contents – such as an arguably different meaning attributed to neutrality – and to establish a

 Marcelo Abreu, Guilherme Bianchi and Mateus Pereira, “Popularizações do passado e historicidades democráticas: escrita colaborativa, performance e práticas do espaço,” Tempo e Argumento 24 (2018), 283–284, doi:10.5965/2175180310242018279.  Brucker, “Should you Believe Wikipedia,” 47.  Brucker, “Should you Believe Wikipedia,” 87.

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common ground with those values through the search for basic evidence extant on a subject’s state of the art. It is in this sense that peer production may displace traditional writing practices, straining the modern notion of authorship, or at least a notion of authorship linked to expert authority and a disciplinary tradition. Faced with this framework composed of diverse voices – united in the collective authorship that negotiates authorities beyond a delegated function of disciplinary power – we can understand the NPOV principle not as a naive realistic atavism, nor even as an axiological ideal at the service of pluralism without referential commitment, but as a condition of possibility. Perhaps it allows the possibility of the emergence of alternative histories, of narratives whose measure of “indiscipline” is also an indication of approximation and exchange with social demands for the past, demands that are nonetheless guided by ethical principles supporting the responsible use of history: the rigour in seeking the truth, and the sincerity to tell it.39 These are principles, as we have seen, that are in no way contradictory, neither with the pillars of Wikipedia nor with the practices of its digital community. In any case, the debate analysed showed how wiki devices are characterised by horizontal hierarchies which are not reliant on historiographical tradition.40 For that, the editors establish something like a “stigmergic negotiation”,41 keeping mutual, horizontal, and independent communication. This is how we understand Wikipedia as an editorial product seeking to reconcile the tradition of the old Encyclopaedias of the Enlightenment with the new horizons of publication opened up by computer technology. The entries available for consultation and editing on the platform are works in continuous development, constantly rewritten, and not seeking perfection as a condition for publication.42 The possibility opened up by the immediate contribution of readers is a phenomenon quite particular to Wikipedia, as it changes the relationships between authors, readers, and texts previously established in the printed medium.43 Its logic organises volatile and dispersed data on the internet, promoting a reordering, through hyperlinks, between private information of the “microcosm of the structures of the wider Web”.44 Furthermore, to follow the vocabulary of

 De Baets, “Uma teoria do abuso,” 23.  Dilton Cândido Santos Maynard, “Passado eletrônico: notas sobre história digital,” Acervo 29 (2016), Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source?,” 136–140.  Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, 110.  Carlos Frederico de Brito D’Andréa, “Processos editoriais auto-organizados na Wikipédia em português: a edição colaborativa de ‘Biografia de pessoas vivas’,” (PhD diss., Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2011), 43–54.  D’Andréa, “Processos editoriais,” 55–56.  Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, 102.

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Pereira and Araujo, the credibility of Wikipedia articles often depends on the compilation’s ability to reproduce a reality that is constantly being “updated”.45 The digital culture in which Wikipedia is immersed, as we have seen in the FAC debates, bypasses many of the traditional practices “of expert readers and referees in publishing houses and journals”, by allowing information to be made available to the general public for consumption, and also by controlling its content.46 Collective control of information “combines ease of use, transparency, and automatic archiving of every edit”.47 The platform thus reconciles a community engaged in the vigil of the entries with instant records of edits, offering security against vandalism and unverifiable additions, which can be quickly reversed. As “any information posted in an article [. . .] [is] scrutinised by a variety of contributors”, Wikipedia presents itself as a source endowed with mechanisms of scrutiny to ensure information reliability.48 The novelty brought by Wikipedia is the proposal to offer these safeguards through the dialogue of “multiple voices competing within the encyclopaedia”.49 A competition, even so, is regulated by norms of conduct. Thus, the knowledge produced on Wikipedia is part of a social process of interaction and editing among Wikipedians, according to which it is expected that the user community states what is a valid entry, no matter what the academic credentials of its author.

11.2 Popularising theory of history through digital curation The broad readership provided by Wikipedia makes the platform an attractive option for scientific and humanities’ dissemination. Therefore, we understand the online encyclopaedia as one of the possible “bridges of communication between scholarly knowledge and the work of communicators”.50 A bridge is a good metaphor: as an image, it can help structure the “shared authority” argument from the

 Valdei Araujo and Mateus Pereira, Atualismo 1.0: como a ideia de atualização mudou o século XXI (Vitória: Editora Milfontes/ Mariana: Editora SBTHH, 2018), 55.  André Pereira Leme Lopes, “Virada digital? Pesquisa histórica no ciberespaço,” Tempo e Argumento 24 (2018), doi:10.5965/2175180310242018136; Poster, “History in the Digital Domain”, 25–26.  Vandendorpe, “Wikipedia and the Ecosystem,” 3.  Vandendorpe, “Wikipedia and the Ecosystem,” 5.  Dan O’Sullivan, Wikipedia: A new Community of Practice? (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 125.  Sara Albieri, “História Pública e Consciência Histórica,” in Introdução à história pública, eds. Juniele Rabêlo de Almeida and Marta Gouveia de Oliveira Rovai (São Paulo: Letra e Voz, 2011), 23.

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trails of a “two-way street”; a route through which producers, consumers, audiences, historians, researchers and readers may travel.51 Wikipedia can indeed be a very effective dissemination tool because its ease of access, combined with a wide reach of readers, conspires to make it an efficient communication vehicle. Nonetheless, there are many aspects apart from editing entries, which include improving the quality of data and organising information. To understand it, we draw attention to the creation of the Theory of History Portal and the remodelling of the category Theory of History carried out by members of the project “Theory of History on Wikipedia” in the light of digital curation. More than isolated actions, they become curation practices, in the sense that they involve recurrent gestures, repeated as social patterns,52 constituted in the dialogue with the Wikipedia community’s expectations. We understand that curation practices of this type have the fundamental mission of ensuring the maintenance of digital content for future use. The first Wikipedia Portal was launched in 2005 in the English edition. Portals allow readers to browse Wikipedia by topics of interest, key articles, categories, and images. In addition, portals can help editors improve Wikipedia by mustering content that should be updated. By the end of 2021, there were 710 portals just on Portuguese Wikipedia, with 134 of them featured, in the most varied themes. The portals range from book characters and famous artists to more specific subjects such as biochemistry and information technology. The portals dedicated to history on the Lusophone Wikipedia, catalogued together with those of philosophy, are few, adding up to just ten: Ancient Egypt; Ancient Greece; Ancient Rome; Archaeology; Aztecs; Cultural and Historical Heritage; Extinct States; History of Science; Mythology; and Theory of History. The Theory of History Portal was created on 17 October 2018, by fellow project user Sarah Pereira Marcelino. It should be noted that this portal, unlike the overwhelming majority, does not exist in any language other than Portuguese. This singularity shows the importance of the collective participation of the members of the Theory of History on Wikipedia for the organisation and visibility of theory of history content on the platform. The portal has a header with its name and an image of Clio, and a set of boxes filled with Theory of History-related content. The most prominent is a small provocation, right below the Muse of History,

 Michael Frisch, “A história pública não é uma via de mão única: ou de A Shared Authority à cozinha digital, e vice-versa,” in História pública no Brasil: sentidos e itinerários, eds. Ana Maria Mauad, Juniele Rabêlo de Almeida and Ricardo Santhiago (São Paulo: Letra e Voz, 2016), 59.  Angelika Epple, “Calling for a Practice Turn in Global History: Practices as Drivers of Globalization/s,” History and Theory 57 (2018): 396, doi:10.1111/hith.12071.

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in the form of a question: “What is Theory of History?”. To this much-disputed question, the portal randomly presents several definitions so that the user can constantly be testing and updating their knowledge on the subject. Other organising boxes on the Portal are filled with featured entries and biographies placed in the category Theory of History, such as Theory of History Associations, a list of things to do to improve the quality of content, along with other information. These boxes seek to offer basic information to the user interested in Theory of History, as well as to facilitate their navigation in the vast content of the platform, whilst encouraging the editing of themes related to this field of research. In addition to the creation of the Portal, the reorganisation of the category Theory of History was another important data structuring intervention. Categories help readers to navigate Wikipedia as they provide an alphabetically-organised list of every entry classified as belonging to a particular domain within the platform. Thus, anyone interested in a particular topic can benefit from this resource, finding other related entries, and having a broader notion about the subject. The categorisation tree serves as a kind of index for the novice and experienced reader alike, because it allows navigation by subtopics, called subcategories. The entries organised into categories are part of the platform’s encyclopaedic nature, and uncategorised pages are rare. Theory of History was created as a category in the Lusophone Wikipedia on 24 May 2005 by user 555. This Wikipedia editor also edited the article “Historiography” for the first time and created the entry “Theory of History”, a page to this day only available in three languages: German, Italian and Portuguese. Since then, the category has gone through some conceptual reformulations, having received additional content as Wikipedia grew and gained new interested editors. As of March 2022, the category hosts 218 entries and has three subcategories: Portal: Theory of History; Micro-history; and Historical Revisionism. This category is available in 42 languages, with the Portuguese Wikipedia having the highest number of entries, followed by the English, with 178 entries, contradicting the tendency of the latter to have the or bigger and better version. The project’s intervention is significant for this scenario, as it produced 43 new entries for the category, which is equivalent to 20% of all content. It seems, therefore, that the intervention of the project “Theory of History on Wikipedia” goes beyond the production of prominent entries, expanding the overall content available to users. In addition to content production and improvement, the project activities also entailed digital curation. Scholarship holder Danielly Campos Dias classified 141 entries in the category Theory of History. Aggregating all project members in the count, we see that 74% of all entries within the category were included in it by its

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members.53 In this way, digital curation continues causing “epistemic interactions”54 with the Lusophone community by directly intervening in the way knowledge is organised on the platform. However, the entries produced or reformulated by project participants did not necessarily become popular or widely viewed. Initially excited by the opportunity to publish information on one of the most accessed websites in the world, the project participants had to contain their enthusiasm when comparing the page views of their entries with the most popular articles within the category “Theory of History”.55

Graph 1: The five most accessed entries in the Theory of History category.

The five most accessed entries in the Theory of History category in a 60-day interval between 20 December 2021 and 17 February 2022 (Graph 1) are well above the views of the project’s five most accessed entries (Graph 2). None of the most read

 Information available at: https://paws-public.wmflabs.org/paws-public/User:He7d3r/analysis/ category-history.ipynb#N%C3%-BAmero-de-categoriza%C3%A7%C3%B5es-feitas-em-cada-dia,-etotal-acumulado [Last seen: 21 January 2023]. Data processed by Helder Geovane Gomes de Lima, whom we thank for this kindness.  Dallas, “Digital Curation,” 29.  Data extracted using the tool PageViews: https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/massviews/?plat form=all-access&agent=user&source=category&start=2021-12-20&end=2022-02-17&subjectpage= 0&subcategories=0&target=https%3A%2F%2Fpt.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FCategoria%3ATeoria_ da_hist%25C3%25B3ria&sort=views&direction=1&view=list&target=https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Categoria:Teoria_da_história [Last seen: 21 January 2023].

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entries, therefore, were edited by the Theory of History Project and, beyond that, the list of the most popular entries suggests that there is a broad audience interest in biographies, a phenomenon already highlighted by public historians working in other media.56 Although the editing of smaller biographical entries was in the end an unavoidable task, the project’s creators did not consider editing lengthy biographies aimed for the Featured Article nomination.

Graph 2: The five most accessed entries edited by the Theory of History Project.

Even the most viewed entries created within the project (Graph 2) still do not have a significant reading impact compared with the most read entries in the category, and they are quite below the category average of 5,589 views in the 60-day period. On the other hand, of the five least-seen entries in the Theory of History category (Graph 3), two were created by the Theory of History Project on Wikipedia as secondary articles. The Friedrich Rehm page was written to improve the readability of the entry on Historicism, while Walter Bryce Gallie was connected to Philosophy of History because these are relatively little-known authors outside their fields of study. These

 Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho, “Café História: Divulgação científica da História na internet,” in História pública e divulgação de história, eds. Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho and Ana Paula Tavares Teixeira (São Paulo: Letra e Voz, 2019); Icles Rodrigues, “História no YouTube: Relato de experiência e possibilidades para o futuro,” in História pública e divulgação de história, eds. Bruno Leal Pastor de Carvalho and Ana Paula Tavares Teixeira (São Paulo: Letra e Voz, 2019).

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Graph 3: Five least viewed entries in the Theory of History category.

short biographies have a number of views considerably below the category-average views in the 60-day period. Calculations for the number of hits for an entry are complex and it is not our intention to speculate on the matter. Based on the data presented, what we can say with relative certainty is that there does not seem to be a necessary relationship

Graph 4: Five largest entries in bytes in the Theory of History category.

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between the breadth of coverage of the entry and its number of views. The average size of entries in the Theory of History category is 16,561 bytes, comprising texts and images. Entries written within the Theory of History Project appear as the top five longest articles in the category and are close to the limit of 194,560 bytes for Featured Articles; articles with wikitext code greater than this must be dismembered. The project’s commitment to prominent articles generated an increase in the size of the entries, and, in theory, in their quality, as they compile a large volume of information (Graph 4). Excluding those produced within the scope of the project, the largest entry in Portuguese Wikipedia is Revolution, with 100,974 bytes. In this way, the quality of the content of an entry, which we suggest is measured through the evaluations of a featured or good article by the community, is not necessarily related to its access rates nor to its length in bytes. This creates a limitation in the Project, which seeks to contribute excellent content to the Platform rather than to level up Theory of History’s general content available on Wikipedia and impact more precisely on the theoretical training of its users. We also have to bear in mind that a significant part of the entries developed aimed to fulfil the requirements for the nomination of featured articles which should not have red links (indicating non-existent Wikipedia pages). Internal redirects, written as links in blue, contribute not only to content value but also to Google’s search algorithms, because links increase page authority (PA), an important marker for ranking the overall authority of the Wikipedia domain (DA) in search engines. Although fulfilling the role of feeding and enriching the considered main entries, these pages also instigate the public to recognise “marginal” content as if it had “as much to offer as the central”.57 The practice of reading in this way is not new – eyes wandering from entry to entry, in dictionaries or in encyclopaedias, is an old bibliophile hobby. However, studies on the history of reading and books emphasise how the use of hyperlinks can transform the modes of discursive organisation of an argument. To some extent, to read a text in quick and direct relation to another via hyperlinks is also an invitation to understand its arguments as transcendent, rather than immanent, as its completion and assessment quite naturally go beyond a particular entry on the encyclopaedia. This practice changes non-specialised reading paths because it turns what was a hobby into a serious endeavour, dealing with reader acceptance and rejection criteria as it invites them to check other evidence, exercising a logic “which is no longer necessarily linear or deductive” – one

 Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 8.

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which “allows an open, decomposed and relational articulation”.58 These reading practices have become typical of the digital world, and respond to the metaphor of imprecise browsing or surfing on the web. The phenomenon has been stimulating debates about the possibility of new languages “facilitating more complex narratives of the past”; narratives possibly more faithful to the always plural realities of history.59 It also serves us to question ways of channelling readers’ attention to a specific subject within a world of dispersion. On the other hand, one of the major obstacles concerning digital curation faced throughout the project was the limited attention given to data curation. The interface with the wiki sister project Wikidata, an important medium launched in 2012 for structuring information on Wikipedia, could have contributed to the multilingual reach of digital curation carried out by members of the outreach project. The dynamics in which information is organised on Wikipedia makes use of templates created by the encyclopaedia’s users. By itself, this dynamic tends to make data curation difficult, since a user who is not aware of the existence of a template can create a similar one and, therefore, make it difficult to systematically organise this data using different parameters or properties. By way of illustration, the birth date display can have different syntactical patterns such as “1879-03-14” or “March 14th, 1879”. In addition, templates can become obsolete over time, which leads to errors in informational presentation.60 This problem of heterogeneity in Wikipedia’s templates becomes dramatic from the point of view of information management and data curation when we realise that in most cases the templates are not the same across more than 300 Wikipedia language editions (WPLE). Therefore, editing on Wikidata is essential because it is a repository of structured data that allows “systematically querying and inserting factual data into WPLE templates and therefore only curate each fact once centrally”, contributing to the homogeneity of information in all languages of the encyclopaedia and enabling the search in them. Thus, carrying out digital curation at the factual data level by editing items on Wikidata would enable us to cross-check information by binding relations to the article on Wikipedia in several languages at the same time (and not just in Portuguese, as has been the case).61

 Roger Chartier, A mão do autor e a mente do editor (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2014), 75.  Stefan Tanaka, “Pasts in a Digital Age,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 44.  Sebastian Hellmann et al., “Towards a Systematic Approach to Sync Factual Data across Wikipedia, Wikidata and External Data Sources,” Proceedings of the Conference on Digital Curation Technologies. (2020), available at: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2836/qurator2021_paper_18.pdf [Last seen: 26 November 2021].  Hellmann et al., “Towards a Systematic”.

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Reflecting on the interrelationship between public history and digital humanities would help to embed all Wikipedia editions with a greater level of homogeneity of information, avoiding knowledge imbalance access and contributing to data reuse. Exploring the implications of working on data curation beside content curation is a challenge, not just to scholars of the theory of history, but also for all future historians.

11.3 Conclusion Wikipedia can organise and manage knowledge and information dispersed across the web. Its language allows quick access to content, which brings the encyclopaedia closer to the accelerated way in which information is consumed on the web. Within its entries, the platform hosts the largest collaborative writing project on history available online. In them, the entire edition, all the debate, and all the changes, are registered, in turn constituting an archive about its writing processes and conflicts.62 Governed by an encyclopaedic discourse, and supported by mechanisms of control and reproduction linked to the phenomenon of Internet 2.0, the platform is an ally in the dissemination of knowledge, and is also an environment to rethink professional practices. The experience of the Theory of History on Wikipedia outreach project invites us to consider the possible impacts and exchanges between professional scholarship and digital encyclopaedic entries, when both aim – in contingent ways and through autonomous rules – to produce and present legitimate representations of the past. The objective of the aforementioned outreach project was to make scholarship holders and volunteers, under the guidance of university professors, write qualified entries in the areas of theory of history and the history of historiography. This goal in itself, however, already presupposes a negotiation: qualified from an academic point of view, when launched for the feature nomination, the entries also need to adapt to the legitimacy criteria stated by the Portuguese Wikipedia community. Thus, the guidance becomes a kind of curatorship, a moderation of the writing of history in digital environments in which practices of “social editing” prevail.63 This contact with potentially unskilled users led the project participants to enter into dialogue with a community holding different values to the scholarly

 Mateus Henrique de Faria Pereira, “Nova direita? Guerras de memória em tempos de Comissão da Verdade (2012–2014),” Varia Historia 57 (2015), doi:10.1590/0104-87752015000300008; Bruckman, “Should you Believe Wikipedia,” 49.  Araujo, “O Direito à História,” 209; Terres and Piantá, “Wikipédia,” 282.

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one. Wikipedia is a “community of practices”, a community formed “when a group of people work together to accomplish a task”,64 with peer production of knowledge at its foundation.65 Because of these characteristics, the platform has a dynamic content production that makes the traditional print pattern – based on authorship and the preparation and revision before publication – unfeasible. This does not mean that community members are not concerned about the quality of the entries, but that the entries are constantly being updated. As seen throughout this chapter, the dialogue with the community was not restricted to suggestions of incorporation or exclusion of information, or remodelling sections, but it directly affects the way knowledge is constructed. If we read the demands received by the project from community members as part of a broader negotiation of authority, we would understand that a considerable portion of those demands relates to epistemological concerns. The practices of digital curation, data preservation, and classification fulfil a fundamental epistemological role, starting with the structure of Wikipedia. Wikipedia already acts as a curator, gathering and organising dispersed textual and audio-visual information,66 and the intervention of professional historians in these media can prove to be strategic. This requires, on the one hand, a certain familiarity with digital textuality. On the other hand, it touches on the tension between formal simplicity and intellectual simplicity. It seems to us that the development of the epistemic virtues necessary for the digital dissemination of history, requires an efficient response to the new forms of knowledge consumption in the digital world, since digital languages have changed the forms of tracking the discourse: an interested reader may fetch the books, and sometimes the documents quoted in a text, check them and, maybe compare them with other sources. We got used to this possibility. As we have seen, the relationship between the “three classical aids to proof in history – the footnote, the bibliographical reference, the quotation”67 – is not absent in the Wikipedian environment, even if its form of presentation and consumption is altered due to the use of resources such as hyperlinks and immediate access to online databases. The rules of the digital encyclopaedia, associated with moderateness and the engagement of its users and collaborators, demands referentiality, clarity, and broad representation of an issue’s state of the art. Although scholarly authority needs to be renegotiated in the digital environment, there may not be so many contradictions between the pillars of Wikipedia and the rules of disciplinary

   

Bruckman, “Should you believe Wikipedia,” 5. O’Sullivan, Wikipedia, 3. Dallas, “Digital Curation,” 4. Chartier, A mão do autor, 75–76.

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history. Moreover, the jargon of academic language is left out in the writing of an entry, as a degree of digital literacy is built by encyclopaedists. And, alongside these practices, we have seen the emergence of “new dynamics and subjective relationships”.68 If we are correct, the free and collaborative encyclopaedia could also play an important role in the hereafter of the “three classical aids to proof in history,” combining with them a wide public to the benefit of popular science. Thanks to a collaborative effort, we can declare that the best content in the field of theory of history available on Wikipedia – “the most important free historical resource on the World Wide Web”69 – is allocated in its Portuguese language edition.

 Anita Lucchesi, “Por um debate sobre História e Historiografia Digital,” Boletim Historiar 2 (2014): 63.  Rosenzweig, “Can history be open source?,” 119.

Part Five: Perspectives: Moral, Epistemic, and Political

Antoon De Baets

12 Historians and Human Rights Advocacy In 2007, the American Historical Association (AHA) decided to streamline its activities in situations involving “the rights and careers of individual historians, historical practice in diverse venues, or the role of history in public culture.” It adopted Guiding Principles on Taking a Public Stance to help it set a course when public or private authorities, in the United States or elsewhere, exert inappropriate pressure on the historical profession.1 The Principles identified three risk areas: 1) when these authorities threaten the preservation of, or access to, historical sources; 2) when these authorities censor practices of history or punish historians for conclusions they reach and for evidence they unearth as a result of legitimate historical inquiry; and 3) when these authorities restrict the freedom of movement of historians. The frequency with which the Principles have been applied between 2007 and 2021 is documented in the AHA archive. Between 2007 and 2013, there were only a few annual advocacy activities, but then the trend went upward from twelve activities in 2014 to fifty-two in 2021.2 Advocacy activities specifically on behalf of historians abroad rose from one in 2014 to eleven in 2021. Commenting on this trend in late 2019 – a year in which the AHA had issued twenty-three advocacy letters and statements and signed onto three amicus curiae briefs – AHA executive director James Grossman saw “an upsurge” and addressed a frequently asked question: “How do we decide when to speak, and what to say? And why spend time and energy on activity that might be dismissed as merely political, or marginal to the AHA’s mission?” Referring to the Principles for answers, he emphasized that “the centrality of historical thinking to all aspects of public culture and policy is why we are speaking out,” adding that “as historians, we should call out egregious and unethical invocations of ‘history’ that undermine democratic practices and peaceful congregation.”3

 The 2007 principles (last updated in 2017) at: https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/ aha-advocacy/guiding-principles-on-taking-a-public-stance. I am grateful to Ruben Zeeman, my colleague at the Network of Concerned Historians since 2020, and the editors of this collection for their comments on this chapter. All websites were last revised on 27 March 2023.  The AHA advocacy page at: https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy; the AHA advocacy archive at: https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/news-and-advocacy-archives.  James Grossman, “The Megaphone at 400 A Street SE” (21 October 2019), https://www.histori ans.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2019/the-megaphone-at-400a-street-se-historians-voice-in-public-culture. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-012

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Among national historical associations, the AHA may have the oldest tradition in deploying advocacy activities, but it was not the only one. When, for example, the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands (VHD; Association of Historians of Germany) discovered that since 2019, and even previously, several of its members had been targeted by SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation) – abusive lawsuits filed by a private party (in this particular case the head of the Hohenzollern family) with the purpose of silencing critical speech – it launched a website in June 2021 documenting these legal cases one by one.4 Likewise, the Associação Nacional de História (ANPUH; National History Association) of Brazil, struggling with its response to the assault on history by the Bolsonaro government, has recently shored up its defence of historians, archives, and cultural heritage against all sorts of attacks.5 What these examples from the United States, Germany, and Brazil have in common is their defence of the rights of historians – both their human rights (such as freedom of expression) and their professional rights (such as academic freedom). Another striking similarity is their relative recency. Traditionally, historians and human rights advocates have tended to operate separately. For a very long time, many historians have perceived advocacy, including human rights advocacy on behalf of colleagues, as an intrusion of ideology and politics into their scholarly work. Conversely, human rights initiatives with obvious historical dimensions have shown a surprising underrepresentation of historians. As members of truth commissions dealing with transitional justice, as court witnesses testifying about the historical background of crimes, or as experts consulted for the drafting of so-called memory laws, they have, with few exceptions, only played a secondary role.6 The fact that historians need lots of time to do their research and write their works, and therefore fit uncomfortably into the quicker rhythms of human rights advocacy, does not explain everything. Despite this traditional distance, there has been a rapprochement from both sides since approximately 2010. I will demonstrate this in several steps. I will first show that the relationship between historians and human rights advocacy is bidirectional. It can be read as the ways in which human rights activists have incorporated

 The website “Die Klagen der Hohenzollern,” at: https://wiki.hhu.de/spaces/viewspace.action? key=HV, includes scores of cease-and-desist letters, injunctions and/or lawsuits involving dozens of historians, politicians, and journalists over their portrayal of the Hohenzollern family, its past, and its public actions.  At: https://anpuh.org.br.  See Antoon De Baets, Responsible History (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 157; Stefan Berger, “Historical Writing and Civic Engagement: A Symbiotic Relationship,” in Stefan Berger, ed., The Engaged Historian: Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 19.

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notions of history into their work or as the ways in which historians have invoked human rights on behalf of historical writing and its practitioners. I will give an overview of the first direction, but my main subject will be the second. In looking at these relationships, I will evoke quite some lesser-known facts that are not only revealing in themselves but also necessary as evidence for the explanation of the turning point of 2010. Subsequently, I will focus on one small initiative, the Network of Concerned Historians, which will enable me to reflect upon some practical and theoretical problems that arise when historians want to advocate human rights. In conclusion, I will offer a set of good practices. Readers should be warned that this chapter does not cover the usual discussions of human rights history. The relationship between history and human rights is different from the relationship between historians and human rights. The relationship between history and human rights consists of two branches: a conceptual branch (dealing with the history of the idea of human rights) and a substantive branch (dealing with the history of the practice of human rights). Both branches have been studied profusely.7 The relationship between historians and human rights, in contrast, has barely been studied at all.8 Its basic concept, “the advocacy of human rights in the field of history,” can be defined as the public defence of history and of the human and professional rights of historians. A historian myself, I have been an avid observer of this bidirectional relationship between historians and human rights advocacy for half a century. Much has changed. As a budding history student in the mid-1970s, I could but make random observations. These became more systematic in 1995, when I established the Network of Concerned Historians. Even then, my observations were hampered by slow communications. I remember that in those years I wanted to consult a report written by the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on states of emergency. It arrived six months later by inter-library loan. In contrast, when I wanted to see a report of the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief on “freedom of thought” in 2021, it was one click away; I had read it three hours after I had learned of its publication the previous day. The current abundance of human rights data is a blessing and a curse: a blessing, because it is now possible to be well-

 A good starting point is Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History,” Past and Present 232 (2016), 279–310. On p. 280, Hoffmann writes that “historians have begun to concern themselves with human rights only recently – essentially only since the late 1990s.”  Scores of historians have written on topics that are the object of human rights advocacy, but very few on the idea of human rights advocacy for historians itself. Exceptions are Nina Schneider and this author. See Nina Schneider, “Professional Historical Writing and Human Rights Engagement in the Twenty-First Century: Innovative Approaches and Their Dilemmas,” in Berger, ed., Engaged Historian, 205–220.

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informed about ongoing cases (although even today crucial details may be obstinately lacking), a curse because it is a never-ending flood to process. In the following discussion, I had to limit myself to initiatives with an international scope while omitting national examples. Even so, my observations are far from complete because the field to cover is vast and cluttered. I may easily have overlooked relevant developments, perhaps misjudged others, or seen connections where there were none. I must also note that I will not discuss cases in which the engagement of human rights activists with history or of historians with human rights was of secondary importance to the historical profession. Indeed, human rights institutions and networks have often defended historians, but for reasons unrelated to history. Likewise, historians have often defended human rights in general, as did many other intellectuals, but this range of political, human rights or peace activism is not discussed here if it was unrelated to their profession.

12.1 The turn to history in human rights circles Human rights advocacy is as old as the idea of human rights itself, but strangely enough we have had to wait until the turn of the millennium for its conceptualization. Around 2000, it dawned upon human rights circles that the international struggle for human rights necessarily included the protection of those who defended human rights domestically and were persecuted for it. From that moment, civil society activists, among them vocal historians, were increasingly perceived as “human rights defenders,” defined as persons who, individually or in association with others, act to promote or protect human rights peacefully.9 We should keep this conceptual shift in mind when we discuss how non-governmental organizations (NGOs), followed in their wake by the UN and other intergovernmental organizations, gradually developed an interest in the historical background of ongoing human rights issues. The conceptual shift of 2000 was not a precondition for this historical interest, but it paved the way for its broader acceptance. The earliest human rights NGO to draw attention to the fate of persecuted historians was Amnesty International, who from its foundation in 1961 mentioned

 See at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/srhrdefenders/pages/srhrdefendersindex.aspx. The concept of human rights defenders had long been in the making. I recall commenting on an Amnesty International (AI) draft memo about human rights defenders as early as 1983. At the time, AI perceived imprisoned trade-unionists (such as Lech Wałęsa in Poland) as frontline human rights defenders and rightly reasoned that by advocating their release, the latter, once freed again, would use their right to free expression to defend the human rights of workers.

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historians occasionally in its annual reports and newsletters, and mounted urgent actions for prisoners at immediate risk of torture from 1973, some of which were dedicated to historians.10 Index on Censorship, an activist free-expression journal established in 1972, also carried regular news items about censored historians11 and incidental theme issues devoted to the censorship of history.12 Human Rights Watch has paid (infrequent) attention to historians in its World Reports since 1989; but perhaps most systematic in this regard was PEN International, whose casework was oriented to the protection of writers, including historians.13 Finally, Scholars at Risk started publishing global annual reports on academic freedom around the world in 2015, in the process touching on historical issues from time to time.14 Initially, the attention of these NGOs was almost exclusively focused on the defence of individuals. This trend continues until today, but after roughly 2010 it was increasingly supplemented with details on the contextual aspects of human rights violations, for the understanding of which a look at the past was often necessary. Since 2008, the NGO Article 19 has published a series of critiques of memory laws (laws that prescribe or prohibit certain views of historical events).15 In what was probably its first historical report, Human Rights Watch issued a 75-page document on the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in 2020.16 And in 2021 the International Federation of Human

 In fact, the subject of the first such urgent action, on 19 March 1973, was Luiz Basílio Rossi, a Brazilian history professor.  See the so-called Index Index section, inserted in every issue of Index on Censorship between 1972 and 2012. This record-keeping was abandoned in 2013 during a redesign of the journal.  See Index on Censorship, 14 No. 6 (December 1985), 1–54; 15 No. 2 (February 1986), 9–22; 15 No. 4 (April 1986), 24–30; 24 No. 3 (May-June 1995), 24–98; 30 No. 1 (January–February 2001), 38–96; 34 No. 2 (May 2005), 23–82; 47 No. 1 (April 2018), 1–73.  PEN International has published (bi-)annual case lists since at least 1996. The post-2010 collection is at: https://www.pen-international.org.  Scholars at Risk, Free to Think: Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project (New York: Scholars at Risk; annually, 2015–2022), at: https://www.scholarsatrisk.org/by type/free-to-think. See for a comparable initiative, Endangered Scholars Worldwide, at: https:// www.endangeredscholarsworldwide.net.  See Article 19 reports and press releases on memory laws in Cambodia, France, Russia, and Rwanda at: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/to. For another example, a report written by an anonymous historian for the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, see Toward the Emancipation of Egypt: A Study on Assembly Law 10/1914 (Cairo: CIHRS, 2017; 95 pages), analyzing a crippling 1914 law still in force.  Human Rights Watch, The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma: A Human Rights Argument (New York: HRW, 2020).

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Rights presented a comprehensive report about the rewriting of history under President Vladimir Putin under the ominous title Russia: Crimes against History.17 International governmental organizations may have been slower than NGOs in developing a historical interest at first, but in recent times their performance is impressive. It is impossible to mention all their initiatives, let alone give them due credit. I will limit myself here to some noteworthy UN actions.18 Foremost among them are the resolutions of the UN General Assembly. Those resolutions that were of direct interest to the historical profession – around a hundred between 1946 and 2023 – often reflected major UN debates on past atrocities and how to deal with them. They were dedicated to such topics as the Second World War, Nazism, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, slavery and the slave trade, colonialism, reparations, the right to the truth, and time bars for crimes, to name but a few.19 They were complemented by resolutions of the UN Commission on Human Rights and its successor, the UN Human Rights Council. History also attracted the attention of UN Special Rapporteurs because of its potential as a tool for promoting democracy and preventing the repetition of human rights violations. Perhaps as a sign of the times, the first UN Special Rapporteur on cultural rights was appointed in 2009. As history obviously fell within this Special Rapporteur’s mandate, her reports about cultural heritage (2011 and 2016), the writing and teaching of history (2013), and memorialization processes (2014) were not entirely unexpected.20 UN Special Rapporteurs with a different focus started integrating reflections on history into their reports for the UN Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly as well. So did, significantly, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence, active since 2011, in reports about archives and guarantees of non-recurrence of human rights violations (2015) and memorialization (2020).21 Reflections on history were also contained in a study on the contribution of transitional justice to the prevention of human rights violations by the

 International Federation for Human Rights, Russia: “Crimes against History” (Paris: FIDH, 2021), available in English, French, and Russian. It was directly inspired (see pp. 4–6 of the report) by this author’s book, Crimes against History.  In addition to the work of the United Nations (UN), the reports of the Council of Europe in which totalitarian regimes in Europe were condemned, should be mentioned. At this writing, the High Commissioner on National Minorities of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe was preparing Recommendations on Contested Histories and Inter-Ethnic Relations, of which this author has seen a draft.  A register of history-related UN General Assembly resolutions (1946–2023) at: http://www.con cernedhistorians.org/re.  At: https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/culturalrights/pages/srculturalrightsindex.aspx.  At: https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/truthjusticereparation/pages/index.aspx.

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same UN Rapporteur, jointly with the UN Special Adviser on the prevention of genocide (2018),22 in a report about the role of education in the prevention of atrocity crimes by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education (2019),23 and in a report about academic freedom by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression (2020).24 In addition, there has been a series of UN reports on colonialism and slavery (2019–2021).25 The UN Special Rapporteurs also deployed another tool, the so-called allegation letter, in which they jointly formulated complaints about long-standing unresolved human rights violations to either perpetrator states or their successors. They did so for issues such as the impending closure of Memorial in Russia (2014) and the official Russian attitude towards the Sandarmokh mass graves from the 1930s and their discoverer, historian Yuri Dmitriev (2021),26 the destruction of Shia cultural heritage in Bahrain (2015), Japan’s sexual slavery system during the Pacific War (2016),27 the official Turkish attitude towards the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire (2019),28 the large-scale 1988 prison massacres in Iran (2020),29 and British repression during the colonial period in Western Kenya (2021).30 In addition, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion of truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence devoted a report to the Spanish Civil War (2014).31 Finally, Special Rapporteurs jointly expressed concerns about the murder of Lebanese archivist Lokman Slim (2021)32 or the British plan to grant blanket impunity for crimes committed during “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland (2021).33 It is noteworthy that

 UN Doc. A/HRC/37/65.  At: https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/education/sreducation/Pages/SREducationIndex.aspx.  At: https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/freedomopinion/pages/opinionindex.aspx. See also General Comment 25: Science and Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (2020).  UN Docs. A/74/321; A/HRC/EMRIP/2019/3/Rev.1; A/HRC/45/38; A/HRC/47/53; A/76/180. For a precursor, see UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/8.  UN Docs. AL RUS 9/2014; AL RUS 10/2020.  UN Doc. CEDAW/C/JPN/CO/7-8 and its 2016 follow-up press release: https://www.ohchr.org/en/ press-releases/2016/03/japan-s-korea-long-awaited-apology-comfort-women-victims-yet-come-unrights. The UN have raised this issue regularly since 1996: see UN Docs. E/CN.4/1996/53/Add.1; A/ HRC/22/14; A/HRC/35/22/Add.1. See also, AI, Still Waiting after 60 Years: Justice for Survivors of Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery System (ASA 22/012/2005; London: AI, 2005).  UN Doc. AL TUR 1/2019.  UN Doc. AL IRN 20/2020.  UN Doc. AL GBR 5/2021.  UN Doc. A/HRC/27/56/Add.1; see also UN Doc. CCPR/C/132/D/2844/2016.  At: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/03/lebanon-intellectuals-murder-needsdepth-inquiry-dispel-doubts-over-justice.  At: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/08/uk-un-experts-voice-concern-proposedblanket-impunity-address-legacy. See also UN Doc. A/HRC/48/60/Add.2.

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many of these reports extensively covered historical periods before the states concerned joined the UN or before the UN even existed. In addition, the judgments of international human rights courts constituted essential sources of human rights protection for historians themselves. The European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights in particular have ruled in many cases involving historians or history. For example, since 1982, the commission has systematically rejected applications of Holocaust deniers who argued that their freedom of expression was violated. The court also ruled in cases of denial of the Armenian genocide, and increasingly took into consideration cases about atrocity crimes committed in World War II. In dozens of these cases, it defended robust rights to seek historical truth and to contribute to historical debates, and pointed to the importance of the passage of time in evaluating free-expression limits. In addition, in 2017–2023, it published a series of studies of its case law regarding cultural rights, memory laws, hate speech, reputation, and data protection.34 In their turn, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee developed jurisprudence about the right to know the truth about past human rights violations. In 2019, the American Commission of Human Rights published principles on public policies on memory.35 In 2021, the International Criminal Court developed a policy for dealing with the intentional destruction of cultural heritage.36 History and memory issues have also been regularly brought before national courts. The collection of jurisprudence currently (2023) found on the Network of Concerned Historians website contains some 770 history- and memory-related legal cases from all over the world.37 The above avalanche of examples may mislead the reader into thinking that human rights circles have been occupied with history-related matters all the time. In fact, these examples represent only a small fraction of the total work they have done.38

 European Court of Human Rights, Cultural Rights in the Case-Law of the European Court of Human Rights (2017); Memory Laws and Freedom of Expression (2018); Hate Speech (2023); Protection of Reputation (2022) and Data Protection (2022), and Prohibition of Abuse of Rights (2022), at: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/to.  Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 3/2019: Principles on Public Policies on Memory in the Americas (2019).  International Criminal Court, Policy on Cultural Heritage (2021).  At: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/le.  In addition, human rights sources have also produced much indirect information about historians by highlighting their proxies (such as journalists and writers).

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12.2 Human rights advocacy of historians Before we turn to the other side of the relationship, a word should be said about the ethics of historians and the relationship between their rights, duties, and virtues. To begin with, the ethics of historians should be distinguished from the ethics of history. The ethics of history deal with moral judgments about historical figures and with our relationship with the dead. In contrast, the ethics of historians is an umbrella term for the ethical and professional conduct of historians: when historians act, they are protected by rights, limited by duties, and guided by virtues. Historians have two types of rights. First, they have human rights (as everyone has), and some of these are of vital interest for the exercise of their profession, in particular the freedoms of thought, opinion, information, and expression, and the rights of peaceful assembly and association. All human rights are universal, but most are not absolute: they have limits. The freedom of expression of historians, for example, can be restricted under carefully determined circumstances and narrowly formulated conditions in the service of a few permissible interests.39 Historians specifically working in an academic environment are additionally protected by academic freedom, the freedom to teach and do research without internal or external interference. However, academic freedom is not a human but a professional right. It has the same limits as human rights, but on top of these come duties. The protection of academic freedom can only be invoked if it is used in a search for the truth and if this search for the truth is submitted to peer review.40 All historians have further duties regarding their subjects of study, their fellow historians, and society at large. Whereas enforceable duties set floors, scholarly virtues are aspirations that set best practices. Honesty and accuracy would be duties; curiosity, modesty, open-mindedness, impartiality, and reliability would be intellectual or epistemic virtues. Duties and virtues are complementary in that both contribute to a culture that fosters responsible history.41 Given the correlation between duties, virtues, and rights, changes in one dimension also cause changes in the other dimensions and, consequently, in the entire domain of the ethics of historians. When historians become more aware of their duties, the likelihood that they will become more aware of their rights increases.

 See special issue: “Limits to the Freedom of Expression about the Past,” Storia della Storiografia, 79 (2021), 1–135.  See UNESCO, Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher-Education Teaching Personnel (Paris: UNESCO, 1997), § 33.  See Toby Mendel, “Reflections on Media Self-Regulation: Lessons for Historians,” Storia della Storiografia, 59–60 (2011), 60–62.

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With this conceptual background, it will be easier to understand how the human rights-related advocacy of historians evolved. Although it is a recent phenomenon, it has a long prehistory. In the unique internationalist atmosphere of the fin de siècle, diplomats and politicians encouraged professional historians to establish international historical congresses and history teachers to submit their national history textbooks to international scrutiny.42 Both initiatives made a slow start, were brutally interrupted by the First World War, but briefly flourished in the years 1926–1933. The international historical congresses organized since 1900 were supplemented by the establishment in 1926 of an International Committee of Historical Sciences (best known under its French acronym CISH). Between 1934 and 1936, it was nominated four times for the Nobel Peace Prize.43 The international campaign to eradicate national prejudices in history textbooks received the support of the League of Nations. Here also, the year 1926 was pivotal in that the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation adopted a resolution that kick-started systematic international history textbook revision. For our purposes, it is sufficient to observe that incipient initiatives such as these were framed as activism in the service of peace and international understanding rather than as human rights advocacy. Meanwhile, cooperation among historians was reinvigorated after the Second World War. UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the World Council of Churches took the lead in the history textbooks revision work,44 while the main international organization of historians, CISH, did so in general historical work. In the first four

 See Karl Erdmann, Toward a Global Community of Historians: The International Historical Congresses and the International Committee of Historical Sciences, 1898–2000 (originally German 1987; New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), 1–11; UNESCO, A Handbook for the Improvement of Textbooks and Teaching Materials as Aids to International Understanding (Paris: UNESCO, 1949), 9–23, 156–160; Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf, “History of Textbook Revision 1945–1965,” in Otto-Ernst Schüddekopf et.al., eds., History Teaching and History Textbook Revision (Strasbourg: Council for Cultural Co-operation of the Council of Europe, 1967), 13–22; Edward Dance, History the Betrayer: A Study in Bias (originally 1960; London: Hutchinson, 1964), 126–150.  At: https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=1914. Over the years, seven “historians” were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), Christian Lange (1921), Ludwig Quidde (1927), Lester Pearson (1957), Henry Kissinger (1973), and Elie Wiesel – a historian in all but name (1986). Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (1980) was a secondary-school teacher of philosophy, history, and literature at one time, Desmond Tutu (1984) a high school teacher of English and history in 1955. See Antoon De Baets, “The HistorianKing: Political Leaders, Historical Consciousness, and Wise Government,” in Berger, ed., Engaged Historian, 106–108 (“Appendix 3: Historians as Nobel Peace Prize Laureates and Nominees, 1901–2018.”)  Among plenty of Council of Europe initiatives, see History and the Learning of History in Europe: Recommendation 1283 (1996) and the report The Misuses of History (2000).

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decades of its existence, the CISH adopted a “soft” strategy in defending the profession: it acknowledged the existence of abuses of history in the abstract, and when some (mostly famous) historians were persecuted, it took discreet steps, but overall, it avoided high-profile activities. A breaking-point was the large-scale attack on Czechoslovak historians after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. The mass dismissal of historians which followed this “normalization” triggered more sustained attention to the plight of historians in totalitarian countries, albeit in slow motion. In all these decades, the historical profession was characterized by a paradoxical attitude towards the ethics of its practitioners. On the one hand, academic historians shared the Ciceronian notion that their profession had to be practiced responsibly – in good faith and with respect for facts – and many among them were vaguely aware (though underinformed) about the plight of historians living under dictatorships. On the other hand, almost never did such an awareness trickle down in their works, mostly because of a strong but sterile conviction that explicit attention to the adverse political contexts in which many colleagues lived would make the authors of these confessions vulnerable to accusations of bias and partisanship. Many did not believe that values and ethics were a legitimate part of historical writing.45 Often, then, ethics and human rights were at the back of their minds but seldom on the tip of their tongues: with the exception of some extracts in the classical handbooks of historical criticism about the lies and distortions found in historical sources (since 1890) and some discussions about the necessity of Holocaust denial laws (after 1980), the ethical debate stayed largely subliminal in the community of historians until the late 1980s. Activist historians would say that if the historical profession had any transcendent goal, it was to be at the service of peace and the promotion of understanding among nations.46 Human rights were either absent or played a secondary role in that reasoning. This would slowly change around 1990 under the influence of the worldwide collapse of dictatorships and the resulting transitions to democracy. These developments brought improved conditions for writing history responsibly and created a favourable climate to think more deeply about the political context in which historians operated. A first threshold was passed when the ethics of historians were embraced as an acceptable point on the historians’ agenda in the 1990s.47 Important steps were taken in 1992, when the CISH expanded the first article of its constitution with a sentence about freedom of thought and expression in

 Jörn Rüsen has refuted this argument in “Engagement: Metahistorical Considerations on a Disputed Attitude in Historical Studies,” in Berger, ed., Engaged Historian, 33–43.  As reflected in article 26 (right to education) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Hoffmann, “Human Rights and History,” 308, speaks about “the ethical turn of the ‘global nineties’.”

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the fields of historical research and teaching, and in 2005, when the same article was again amended with a clause saying that the CISH was opposed to the abuse of history. The abuse clause was inserted after alarming news about the difficult political climate for historians working under the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government in India between 1998 and 2004 had reached the CISH.48 The amended Article 1 of the CISH Constitution thus reads: It [CISH] shall defend freedom of thought and expression in the field of historical research and teaching, and is opposed to the misuse of history and shall use every means at its disposal to ensure the ethical professional conduct of its members.

In addition, against the background of a reinvigorated international debate about genocide denial laws, memory laws, and hate speech laws, the CISH adopted a motion in 2007 in which it expressed deep concern over the intrusion of the power of the law into historical research.49 The constitutional clauses of 1992 and 2005 and the motion of 2007 were unambiguous but also laconic steps forward. They did not lead to any new working groups or campaigns on the part of the CISH. Neither did they crystallize into an international code of ethics for historians. Nevertheless, this timid, fresh attention to ethics and law inevitably put the human rights of historians more into the spotlight. When we turn to particular initiatives, the Network of Concerned Historians, established in 1995, is the oldest surviving network. It will be discussed in some detail below. Evidently, it is not the only initiative in the field of human rights. Founded in 2002, the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at EuroClio, The Hague, seeks to address unresolved historical legacies in multicultural societies with the goal of promoting understanding. “Contested Histories in Public Spaces” is its current major project.50 Historians against the War (since 2003; called Historians for Peace and Democracy from 2017) has mainly focused on American foreign policy.51 From 2011, the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability, first in Melbourne, and later in New York, has sought to address the historical legacy of conflicts, and particularly the impact of the memory of violence. The alliance hosts the Historical

 For the full story, see De Baets, Responsible History, 37–38.  General Assembly of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (Beijing, 17–18 September 2007), point 6, at: https://www.cish.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/EN-Assembly-Beijingsept2007.pdf.  The institute at: https://ihjr.org.; the contested histories project at: https://contestedhistories. org.  At: http://historiansagainstwar.org (superseded) and https://www.historiansforpeace.org.

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Dialogues, Justice and Memory Network, among others.52 In 2015, Historians without Borders was founded in Helsinki to promote the use of historical knowledge for peace-building and conflict resolution. Though universal in appeal, it mainly focuses on Europe.53 Among the dormant initiatives are Academia Solidaria in Santiago de Compostela, active between 2000 and 2017 and working for historians in Ibero-America,54 and Liberté pour l’histoire in Paris, founded in 2005 and focusing on memory laws in Europe (and particularly in France).55 And so, a curious situation arose after 2010 and continues to this day. Reference to ethics, including human rights, is now common in conversations among historians. Reflection on basic ethical principles has become a default ingredient in debates about the profession. It has trickled down to some university curricula, typically as the first or last unit in a broader class on the theory of historical writing, rarely as a stand-alone subject. Historians working on these principles are not met with polite silence any more. More recently, the old debate on scholarly virtues has sparked a moderate new interest in professional ethics. In their turn, individual affairs and local scandals have certainly accelerated processes of reflection about the abuses of history, but by and large the wider debates about violations of academic freedom and scientific integrity, which have exploded internationally in recent decades, have not had an enduring resonance within the community of historians. Conceptual thinking among historians about their professional ethics tends to lag behind in comparison to other professions. Work on codes of ethics in neighbouring disciplines with more direct contact to their subjects of study or to the latter’s representatives – archives, museums, archaeology, and anthropology – has been far more advanced.56 Likewise, subdisciplines of history working with  The alliance at: http://www.humanrightscolumbia.org/ahda; the network at: http://historical dialogues.org.  At: https://historianswithoutborders.fi/en.  At: https://h-debate.com/academia-solidaria-2.  The website is not online anymore. Archived snapshots at https://web.archive.org/web/✶/ http://www.lph-asso.fr/✶. Liberté pour l’histoire continued an older tradition initiated by historians such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Madeleine Rebérioux.  The International Council on Archives adopted a code of ethics in 1996. Its Section on Archives and Human Rights was founded in 2009. The latter’s monthly newsletter, Archives and Human Rights, has existed since 2008 (at: https://www.ica.org/en/sahr-newsletters). See also Archivists without Borders at: https://awbuschapter.wordpress.com, http://www.archivistessansfron tieres.fr and www.arxivers.org/es-es (since 1998), and Archives & Dealing with the Past at: https:// www.archives.swisspeace.ch (since 2012); ICOM, Code of Ethics for Museums (2015) (an update of versions of 1986, 2001, and 2004); “2020 Statement on Anthropology and Human Rights” (an update of 1947 and 1999 statements) at: https://www.americananthro.org/ParticipateAndAdvocate/ AdvocacyDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=25769; for archaeology, see the overview at: http://www.con cernedhistorians.org/ethic.

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oral testimonies or confidential written materials have shown more sensitivity to ethics than others.57 No more than ten national historical associations have codes of ethics today, probably on account of a stiffened attitude that such codes tend to freeze the profession and are repression-oriented, whereas their roles as tools of education and prevention, as catalysts for debate about basic principles, as longterm strategies to counter abuses, and as instruments to demonstrate historians’ professionalism to the outside world, including plaintiffs and judges, are neglected. All in all, the change in 2010 was substantial but timid.

12.3 Turning points The lines of development depicted above lead to some tentative conclusions. The following overview offers two plausible timelines: Timeline of the turn to history in human rights circles Since 1946 Since 1961 Since 2000 Since 2010

Occasional history-related UN General Assembly resolutions Occasional NGO coverage of historians Appearance of the concept of human rights defenders (including vocal academics) Modest turn to history and memory: human rights NGOs produce research of direct interest to historians; UN Special Rapporteurs draft history-related reports and allegation letters; increasing numbers of history-related cases before international human rights courts

Timeline of human rights advocacy of historians Since 1900 Since 1945 Since 1990 Since 1995 Since 2010

International historical congresses and history textbook scrutiny (first peak: 1926–1933) Rebooting of history-related initiatives in the service of peace and international understanding Increasing attention to the ethics of historians (changes in CISH constitution: 1992, 2005) Multiple human rights activities by history NGOs (with upsurge from 2010) Enduring but moderate attention for ethics, including human rights advocacy, in the historical profession

 At: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/ethichist.

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At the risk of crudely simplifying an intensely complex reality, it seems reasonable to suppose that the community of human rights activists has seen a modest turn to history and memory since 2010: its traditional presentist attitude did not disappear but it was increasingly supplemented by longer-term views which included more frequent retrospectivity. Around the same time, the community of historians has seen a mild upward trend in embracing ethics, including human rights-related advocacy, as a focus. It shoved aside an old aversion for big principles and developed greater sensitivity to the problem of its rights and duties. The recent mutual interest is not the result of a trompe-l’oeil effect provoked by an accidental rise of pertinent reports and actions: rather, the evidence for a critical moment in 2010 is overwhelming.58 How can this turning point be explained? Given that a turning point emerges in both areas – human rights circles and the community of historians – at approximately the same time, 2010, the answer probably lies in broad societal developments. My hypothesis is that the turning point of 2010 correlates with an earlier one, the crisis of democracy since 2005, and a later one, the crisis of human rights since 2015. Democracy is an important subject of political theory and as such it has been watched by many think tanks and scientific institutes in the world. Among them, four stand out for their regular, often annual, reports about the state of democracy in the world, based on empirical research that is summarized in democracy indicators: Freedom House in Washington (since 1973), the Economist Intelligence Unit in London (since 2006), the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) in Stockholm (since 2017), and the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute in Gothenburg (since 2017). Although differing in their typologies of political regimes and in some of their findings, they all agree about one trend: democracy has been in retreat since roughly 2005 and up to the present day.59 Their estimates

 The upsurge of interest in human rights and ethics among historians around 2010 was unintentionally captured in a special issue of Storia della Storiografia about “History and Human Rights” (Nos. 59–60, September 2011, 43–149), which was the outcome of a panel organized at the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences in Amsterdam in August 2010.  See, for example, the editions since 2020: Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2020: A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy (2020), Freedom in the World 2021: Democracy under Siege (2021), Freedom in the World 2022: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule (2022); The Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2019: A Year of Democratic Setbacks and Popular Protest (2020), Democracy Index 2020: In Sickness and in Health? (2021), Democracy Index 2021: The China Challenge (2022); IDEA, The Global State of Democracy in Focus: Special Brief (2020), The Global State of Democracy 2021: Building Resilience in a Pandemic Era (2021); V-Dem Institute, Autocratization Surges – Resistance Grows: Democracy Report 2020 (2020), Autocratization Turns Viral: Democracy Report 2021 (2021), Autocratization Changing Nature? Democracy Report 2022 (2022).

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for the percentage of the world population that lived in democracies in 2019–2020 (based on different regime typologies) range from 46% (V-Dem Institute) to 49.4% (Economist Intelligence Unit) and 57% (IDEA). The present trend of democratic backsliding took off in 2005. This is how Freedom House described it in 2019: In states that were already authoritarian . . . governments have increasingly shed the thin facade of democratic practice that they established in previous decades, when international incentives and pressure for reform were stronger. More authoritarian powers are now banning opposition groups or jailing their leaders . . . and tightening the screws on any independent media that remain. Meanwhile, many countries that democratized after the end of the Cold War have regressed in the face of rampant corruption, antiliberal populist movements, and breakdowns in the rule of law. Most troublingly, even long-standing democracies have been shaken by populist political forces that reject basic principles like the separation of powers and target minorities for discriminatory treatment.60

According to IDEA, “the value, viability and future of democracy are more contested now than ever before in modern history, or at least since the 1930s.”61 After calling populism “a threat for democracy” and noting that non-democratic countries have begun to export their governance model to other countries, it added that: “The COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to some of the processes of democratic reform observed before the pandemic, while entrenching or accelerating processes of democratic backsliding and deepening autocratization.”62 In the same vein, the V-Dem Institute spoke about “a third wave of autocratization”.63 At the same time, all these observers noted the emergence of a marked trend of citizen protest and reform movements all over the world. IDEA emphasized that, when looking at the data, democracy remained the best system to create the conditions necessary for sustainable development.64 Nevertheless, the main conclusion of the four democracy watchers stands: there is a global crisis of democracy today; the downward trend started in 2005 and has not yet ended.

 Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2019: Democracy in Retreat (Washington: Freedom House, 2019), 1.  IDEA, The Global State of Democracy 2019: Addressing the Ills, Reviving the Promise (Stockholm: IDEA, 2019), x.  IDEA, Global State of Democracy in Focus, 1. Similar conclusions in Freedom House, Democracy under Lockdown: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Global Struggle for Freedom (Washington DC: Freedom House, 2020), 1; Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2021, 10–14; The Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index 2020, 3–4.  V-Dem Institute, Autocratization Surges, 6, 9.  IDEA, Global State of Democracy 2019, xi. Also Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2021, 14–16.

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The 2015 crisis of human rights is more difficult to pinpoint. To this author’s knowledge, the end of human rights has not been predicted before 2013.65 In his book The Endtimes of Human Rights,66 Stephen Hopgood argued that we have slowly arrived in a neo-Westphalian world with the reaffirmation of national sovereignty, the resurgence of religion, and the stagnation or rollback of universal human rights. These ideas were the subject of a critical assessment in a collection of essays in the following year. On the whole, Hopgood’s book was considered controversial and several authors contested his analysis.67 But the idea that human rights was in crisis stuck. It was taken up in other contexts, most famously by the UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein in 2017, when he sounded the alarm bell in addresses at two universities.68 In some corners of the world, autocrats and populists have not only questioned the value of democracy, but the notion of human rights altogether. Since 2015 the very idea of human rights has come under sustained attack, and some even talk about a “post-humanrights world.”69 On the other hand, this attack has mobilized many intellectuals in defence of human rights. My hypothesis, then, is that the global crisis of democracy since 2005 and the global crisis of human rights since 2015, in combination with the reactions these provoked provide the broader historical context in which the upward trend of interest of historians and human rights advocates in each other’s work since 2010 should be understood. Although the correlation between the turning point of 2010

 Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Thought at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart, 2000), was not about the end but rather about the ends of human rights. The much quoted article by Michael Ignatieff, “Is the Human Rights Era Ending?,” New York Times (5 February 2002), 25, written in the wake of 9/11, reflected on some exceptional human rights successes in 1989–2001 without any notable pessimism for the future.  Stephen Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013).  Doutje Lettinga and Lars van Troost, eds., Debating The Endtimes of Human Rights: Activism and Institutions in a Neo-Westphalian World (Amsterdam: AI, 2014) (my characterization of Hopgood’s work is taken from p. 8.)  Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, “Global Challenges to Human Rights” (speech at Vanderbilt Law School, Nashville, 5 April 2017), https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2017/04/global-challengeshuman-rights; Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, “Global Challenges to Human Rights” (speech at Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights, 12 April 2017), https://www.ohchr.org/en/state ments/2017/04/global-challenges-human-rights-0. Despite similar titles, these are two different speeches. See also “UN Human Rights Chief Condemns Western ‘Demagogues’,” BBC News (6 September 2016), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37281738 and Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, “L’ONU doit parler haut et fort” (interview), Le Monde (2 August 2018).  For example, Imogen Foulkes, “Are We Heading Towards a ‘Post Human Rights World’?” BBC News (30 December 2016), https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-38368848.

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and the crises of 2005 and 2015 is striking, it is not certain to what extent the 2005 crisis caused, and the 2015 crisis strengthened, the 2010 turning point. If this analysis is correct, it follows that, with a breakthrough as recent as 2010, the roles of historians in the public space related to human rights advocacy have barely been configured. To shape their history-related human rights advocacy, they may find inspiration in the paths taken by colleagues in more advanced neighbouring disciplines (such as archival sciences), in the roles they fulfilled themselves before 1990 as activists in the service of peace and international understanding, or in the roles they still fulfil as human rights activists outside the historical profession. Nevertheless, they need to largely invent such roles in a field which is relatively new to them. In defining these roles, clues may be found in history’s core mission to search for truth(s) about the past – as in so many countries with autocratic regimes the mere creation of archives, the mere writing of academic history, and the mere teaching about the dark sides of the past are already forms of human rights activism requiring much courage.

12.4 A case study It is time to leave this general level of analysis and delve into the specifics of one case, the case of the Network of Concerned Historians (NCH). The portrait that follows is not an independent appraisal, as it is written by its founder and coordinator.70 NCH was informally established in 1995 at the margins of the history department of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, with a dual purpose. The first consists in providing a bridge between the global community of historians and international human rights organizations campaigning for persecuted historians and against the censorship of history. During more than a quarter of a century, NCH has participated in many such campaigns on all continents.71 Currently, more than 3,800 historians and others concerned with the past are on the NCH mailing list. A very international list, it is nevertheless skewed towards countries of the global North and only moderately representative of the total of those interested. When campaigns are launched, people on the list are encouraged to  The case study is based on the articles, press reports, and blogs that I or others wrote about the Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) over the years, and interviews about it (in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States). For an independent assessment, see David Gaunt, “Growing Threats: Report from the Network of Concerned Historians,” Baltic Worlds (October 2019), 10–11. See also at: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/nchinthenews.  At: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/ca.

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participate in their professional capacity. NCH’s second purpose is to serve as a small observatory about human rights issues of interest to historians around the globe. To that end, NCH has produced an uninterrupted series of Annual Reports containing source-based country entries about the domain where history and human rights intersect.72 In addition, it assembles four unique collections, often in multiple languages: human rights documentation of special interest to historians, history-related resolutions of the UN General Assembly, history-related legal judgments, and codes of ethics for historians and related professions.73 NCH culls the data from reliable sources, particularly newspapers, websites, newsletters, and reading suggestions from personal contacts. Thus, NCH is heavily dependent on outside information sources, which it tries to diversify in order to compensate for gaps. Before it materialized in 1995, the idea for a network had simmered in this author’s mind for fifteen years. But originally, I could not find a format for the idea. It gradually sprang from three successive factors. The earliest was my research into the censorship of history and my lectures about that subject from the 1980s onwards. I quickly realized that some of the censorship cases before me were still ongoing, and clearly called for more than research: they also called for action and immediate response. The second factor was the proliferation of email in academic milieus since the mid-1990s, making communication with colleagues easy, quick, and cheap. The final factor accelerated everything: the 1995 world congress of CISH scheduled a roundtable on “Power, Liberty, and the Work of the Historian,” at which I gave an overview of the censorship of history on three continents. Immediately after that congress, in Montréal, I drafted a short mandate for a network, dubbed Network of Concerned Historians, and urged colleagues I had met there to join. A few weeks later, in October 1995, the network was effectively created with the help of a few colleagues. NCH is informal: it has no membership in the strict sense, no office, no personnel, no subscription fees, no donations, no budget, no board, no social media. Until recently, I managed the network virtually alone, and since 2020 my colleague and I have divided the work, using a common drive and an occasional meeting as our main tools. NCH’s only assets are a short and simple mandate that has never changed,74 spare time, an austere website, and a mailer. Three tasks are performed on a daily basis: the scrutiny of sources, the examination of cases for potential appeals, and administrative network maintenance. NCH has developed informal ties with similar networks over the years, Scholars at Risk, Historia  At: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/ar. A complete set (1995–2023) at: https://www.concer nedhistorians.org/ar/compilation.pdf.  The collections are accessible via NCH’s main menu at: https://www.concernedhistorians.org.  At: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/va/mandate.pdf.

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a Debate, and the Global Network of Psychologists for Human Rights, among others, and with organizations such as the European Association of History Educators (EuroClio), the International Students of History Association (ISHA), and some national associations of historians. Its consultancy role, both formal and informal, has grown rapidly in recent years.75 The operation rests on four principles. According to the universality principle, NCH works for historians in countries with diverse political and ideological regimes. The impartiality principle means that NCH adheres to no ideology except the human rights ideology and works for historians regardless of who they are, famous or unknown, mainstream or marginal. Most of the victims featuring in NCH campaigns are only locally or regionally known; sadly, some became famous because of their very persecution. The independence principle stipulates that NCH receives no subsidies. Finally, the distance principle says that NCH does not necessarily share the views of historians and others mentioned in its circulars and reports; crucially, it defends the freedom of expression for historians without necessarily agreeing with the opinions that result from it. NCH’s motto is article 1 of the CISH Constitution, quoted above. The focus of reporting is on events of censorship and persecution, but the laws preceding and the lawsuits following these forms of repression, if any, come within NCH’s purview as well. As it is not always clear whether a given case is a case of censorship, NCH also reports about broader constraints upon historians. That is the reason why topics featuring in the Annual Reports can be divided into five categories. First, of course, are those directly related to the censorship of historians, sources, archives, archaeology, history teaching and textbooks, and to the obstruction of popular channels for the transmission of history, such as cinema, television, theatre, exhibitions, novels, and the internet. Occasionally, the flip side of historical censorship – historical propaganda – is highlighted as well. This first category is NCH’s “unique selling point,” so to speak: it is at the heart of its mandate, with nobody else reporting on it as systematically as NCH does. The second category is memory-related, concentrating on the disturbance of commemorations and the destruction of cultural heritage, including gravesites and memorials. The third grasps broader freedom of information and expression issues: freedom of information and archive laws; archival access and state secrecy; and defamation and invasion of privacy cases. The fourth refers to questions of impunity, historical injustice, truth commissions, tribunals, forensic anthropology, and reparations

 Examples at: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/about.

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for victims. The final category covers cases of historians who are active in politics, journalism, and human rights activism.76 Over the years, there have been shifts of emphasis in concepts and platforms. For example, the concept of “historical nihilism” (a Chinese term for the work of independent historians who are critical of the official history of the Communist Party and its heroes) has popped up since 2013, “fake news” (including fake news of a historical nature) since 2015, and “critical race theory” (used as a generic label for teaching about racism and slavery) since 2020, but these were merely new concepts for old phenomena. A really new trend since 2015, though, has been the staggering increase of harassment of historians on social media platforms: cases were identified in, for example, China, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States.77 Lack of balance in reporting on single topics and concomitant overreporting from certain countries, although unavoidable to a certain extent (and even preferable from NCH’s viewpoint if it regards topics of the first category), has been a permanent point of attention. This is no simple feat for two reasons. First, a key NCH characteristic is to patiently keep track of topics over time in order to transcend the accidental, meaning that some are mentioned repeatedly. Second, a regime paradox is at work: given the unequal tolerance of criticism in different regimes, there is less information about more censorship in repressive societies and more information about less censorship in democratic societies.

12.5 Case study discussion At this point, critical questions may be asked and – with some soul-searching – answered about NCH’s biases, index function, and impact. Despite its lofty principles, NCH – and human rights advocacy in general – has some strong biases: it tends to coerce the complex personalities of historians into the straitjacket of either victims or perpetrators; it prioritizes the plight of historians who are victims to the relative neglect of those who are bystanders or perpetrators; it tries to conceptualize historical crimes in legal terms such as genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes; it tends to encourage groups who want to transform history into a platform for reparation claims; and it emphasizes the dark side of historical writing without supplementing it with news about human rights improvements for historians. These biases

 Excluded are FFP-cases (cases of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism).  See Alexandra Levy, “Trolling History: Social Media Harassment from Abroad,” Perspectives on History (14 February 2022), at: https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspec tives-on-history/march-2022/trolling-history-social-media-harassment-from-abroad.

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are mainly the result of the basic decision to keep NCH’s mandate simple and complementary to, but not overlapping with, the mandate of similar networks. Another problem is to what extent the NCH database, which is far from exhaustive, constitutes a reliable index of the real levels of persecution of historians. The best hypothesis is that it gives a plausible impression of the real persecution levels of the historical profession in the world as far as the most egregious attacks are concerned. Elsewhere, I have called such attacks “crimes against history.” Crimes against history can be defined as any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack pursuant to or in furtherance of a state or nonstate policy: the assassination and disappearance of history producers; public personal attacks on history producers through hate speech, defamation, and malicious prosecution; intentional destruction of cultural heritage; and disinformation, including genocide denial, and censorship of history.78 As a logical consequence of its systematic reporting on crimes against history – above all, those of the first category (assassination and disappearance) – NCH has established, in 2021, a Provisional Memorial for Historians Killed for Political Reasons from Ancient Times to the Present.79 As for the less visible types of repression not amounting to crimes against history – from harassment to hidden forms of discrimination and denial of career possibilities – NCH’s ignorance is huge. It is certainly underinformed about cases of unjust dismissal – which is probably the most common sanction against historians around the globe. When measuring NCH’s impact, one should distinguish the impact upon persecuted historians from the impact upon third parties and upon network participants. The successive campaigns for persecuted historians draw attention to the latter’s plight and usually give them a semblance of additional shelter and immunity. The campaigns also generate small waves of interest in the press or within specialized history groups. NCH is a loose network of addressees of which only a small part (five percent or less is my guess) reads the reports and participates in the campaigns. However, it has very low rates of annulled subscriptions, meaning that NCH information is generally not unwelcome. Colleagues occasionally express their appreciation for NCH.80 Thus, NCH is not only a light and flexible network but also a vulnerable undertaking without any real authority. When all is said and done, its impact is

 See Antoon De Baets, Crimes against History (London: Routledge, 2019), 3.  The Memorial, containing the names of 525 history producers in 77 countries (as of 27 March 2023), at: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/memorial.  The list of NCH patrons is another indicator, at: https://www.concernedhistorians.org/patrons.

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small.81 But it is not alone: it joins and amplifies initiatives from others and it is a bridge leading subscribers to original initiatives. It demonstrates that the censorship and persecution of historians are not things of the remote past or distant countries only. The record of the present age is one of the worst in absolute numbers, even taking into account the greater accessibility of today’s sources. NCH has preceded the surge of interest in human rights among historians with roughly fifteen years. However, its foundation in 1995 was not dependent on big turning points such as the catastrophic situation of the profession in certain countries or the crisis of the political system, but on the accidental circumstance of a historian with a research topic – censorship – in search of a format to act. As a tool of awareness, NCH has discreetly contributed to the transformation of a wait-andsee and defensive attitude into one of indulgence towards, and activism on behalf of, the ethics of historians.82

12.6 Broader reflections Deeper questions raised by the bidirectional relationship between historians and human rights advocacy touch upon the concepts of “historians,” “past,” and “facts.” Defining these concepts is important to determine the scope of the relationship. To begin with, from a human rights perspective, the concept of “historian” is too narrow. To assume that professional historians are the only ones who deal with the past is not acceptable, all the more so in countries outside the West. Everywhere, plenty of individuals and groups participate in the production or practice of history. It is therefore preferable to speak of history producers rather than historians to designate all those involved, professionally or otherwise, in the collection, creation, or transmission of history. Excluding all those who are not officially historians (for example, journalists who write works of contemporary history, directors of historical films, historical novelists, members of truth commissions, history students) and yet dealt systematically with the past, is not an option. We would miss a substantial chunk of cases worth watching.

 NCH’s title page was hit 324,000 times between July 2010 and March 2023. Since 2011, the NCH website has regularly been archived on the Human Rights Web Archive of Columbia University Libraries at: https://wayback.archive-it.org/1068/✶/http://www.concernedhistorians.org.  Reactions to NCH have generally been positive, sometimes critical, but never negative, except in one very early instance. Until today, I do not know whether my strong association with NCH has harmed or advanced my career as a historian.

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And what exactly is “the past”? We already noted that human rights activists tend to report about ongoing or very recent events. Their activism has an inherent presentist bias. But how can human rights advocates in the field of history know which of the current events selected for action have undeniable historical interest? When do events become “historical”? The question itself is ambiguous, because whereas all events become historical, that is, part of the past, not all events that pass possess epochal quality. With no satisfactory answer to the question, activists have often signalled current events that later appeared to possess only anecdotal interest and, conversely, initially did not report other recent events that later came to be seen as important or even epochal. Intuition based on experience in recognizing patterns is often the sole decider – with all the risks that this entails. Finally, a persistent attribute of human rights activism is its fact-centeredness. The corroboration of facts in individual cases is a basic operation, but this emphasis is often to the detriment of contextualizing and explaining them. Such a narrow approach is motivated by three factors. Human rights activists act with a sense of urgency, and their messages must be brief in order to keep their strength. In addition, it is usually easier and more effective to unite activists over the facts of human rights violations than over their causes. Last but not least, facts are important since the very purpose of much censorship is to obscure facts in order to twist the interpretation of the past. All atrocity crimes are privileged targets for repressive regimes and obstinate liars and deniers who argue that these crimes never occurred. A fact-based approach substantially helps counter such pseudohistorical views. The former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, threw light on this problem when he addressed the universities in 2017: Critical thinking is what you do; the truth is what you seek. And in this, I think there is a direct congruence with human rights principles. . . . But in a broader sense, we also share a bedrock attachment to clarity and truth. . . . We seek to establish the facts about human rights violations – which means we often operate in a zone of official obfuscation or denial. We do this because only clarity about the facts, respect and redress for victims and just punishment for the perpetrators can enable durable reconciliation – and the prevention of new cycles of conflict.83

These are strong reasons to focus on facts. However, a fact-oriented approach should not be confused with full-fledged historical writing. The analysis of deeper causes of human rights violations, although not absent, has never been an outspoken hallmark of human rights activism. In this, it diverges from the approach of historians, who study not only individuals but also structures, and do not only collect facts but also analyse them in a historical context. Nobody disputes that

 Al Hussein, “Global Challenges” (5 April 2017).

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getting the facts straight is hard work, and that this is required to properly contextualize, interpret, and explain historical events, in short, to develop a narrative about the past. But it does not replace these further stages. Historians merely trying to uncover historical facts without any interpretation – if that is possible at all – are good historians from a human rights perspective, but poor historians from a professional perspective. Be that as it may, it is comforting to know that whatever they are engaged in – data collection or data analysis – historians are robustly protected by the freedoms of opinion, information, and expression.

12.7 Good practices If we want to draw recommendations from the preceding analysis, a few principles of good practice for historians wishing to operate within a framework of respect for human rights can be stated. The first, at the ethical and professional level, is to respect and protect the integrity of history. This principle of integrity is worth pausing on: it means being honest and not acting corruptly. Respecting the integrity of history means writing history responsibly. Historical writing is responsible when it is accurate and sincere, in other words, when it represents a critical and – in the words of UNESCO’s Recommendation – “honest search for truth.”84 Protecting the integrity of history means shielding it against destructive attacks, especially crimes against history, by others. This presupposes constant vigilance and courage. Integrity implies that being a historian is coterminous with working in good faith; historians acting in bad faith are not historians. Although the integrity principle is clear, evaluating the good or bad faith of specific conduct is not always easy in practice, because degrees of intention are sometimes notoriously difficult to interpret.85 In addition, there is the problem that accusations of bad faith can be uttered in bad faith themselves. A second good practice can be found at the level of rhetoric: we should create favourable conditions for a responsible and dignified public debate about past atrocities, that is, a public confrontation of adversarial opinions about past atrocities during which the evidence and the logic of arguments are assessed. Lamentably, many

 UNESCO, Recommendation, § 33.  Mala fide conduct is a subgroup of irresponsible conduct. The intent accompanying irresponsible conduct can be characterized as careless, reckless, knowing, or willing; the intent accompanying mala fide conduct is knowing or willing. In this respect, it should be noted that NCH only campaigns for bona fide historians. Mala fide historians (such as genocide deniers) deserve protection as human beings, not as professionals.

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debates about past atrocities are distorted by political power and manipulated, if not hijacked, by lobby groups. They are thus transformed into debates about the present, in which history is but a pretext for political or other gain. A third good practice is located at the social level. Historians should express solidarity with history producers whose human and professional rights are violated in situations of coercion and repression, for two reasons. In the first place, tokens of solidarity give hope and a voice to those persecuted, and benefit them in symbolic, and sometimes practical, ways. In the second place, such actions help those who show solidarity themselves. This is so because if the right to free expression of some historians is at risk, the rights to information and free expression of all remaining historians are simultaneously jeopardized: their right to information, because they are deprived of the works which their endangered colleagues could have produced had they not been persecuted; their right to free expression, because they are now required to write their own histories on the basis of restricted flows of information, reduced exposure to diverse views, and poorer debates. A final good practice is political. Historians should vigorously support a democratic society. Although history as a craft can survive everywhere, it only flourishes in a society that respects and protects the human rights necessary for responsible historical writing, in particular the freedoms of thought and expression and the rights to peaceful assembly and association. That society is a democratic society, the preferred political locus to help guarantee enduring respect for human rights – on condition that it is infused with the rule of law.86 One is reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous statement from 1947: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time . . . ”87 It would be a serious mistake, however, to believe that democracies are immune to assaults on the integrity of history and memory. The difference with autocratic regimes is not that democracies endure fewer attacks on the historical profession but rather that these are less fatal and usually exposed and countered at an early stage and with less fear of retaliation. The paramount cause for this difference is, of course, the stronger position of freedom of expression in democracies. A democratic society

 Democracy is defined in Article 21.3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as “The will of the people” which is “the basis of the authority of government.” The rule of law is defined by the UN Secretary General as “a principle of governance in which all . . . are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards” (UN Doc. S/2004/616).  Speech of 11 November 1947 in the Commons, at: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/ commons/1947/nov/11/parliament-bill.

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is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for sustained responsible historical writing that respects and protects the integrity of history. In turn, responsible historical writing has the ability to strengthen a democratic society, if and when it presents critical accounts of the history of democracy and its struggles, and of the history of injustices. Such critical accounts are necessary, though not sufficient, preconditions for the nurturing of a democratic historical awareness, that is, for an enduring sense of continuity with democratic precedents and discontinuity with nondemocratic precedents. Democratic historical awareness is a pillar of any true democratic culture. Tomáš Masaryk, the first president of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, was conscious of this problem when he observed: “Now we have a democracy, what we also need are democrats.”88 In short, the best services that historians as historians can render to history from the perspective of human rights advocacy are to maintain the integrity of history by respecting and protecting it, to enable favourable conditions for a responsible public debate about past atrocities, to express solidarity with persecuted colleagues, and to support democratic forces in their societies.

 Quoted in Jiří Pehe, “Czech Republic and Slovakia 25 Years after the Velvet Revolution: Democracies without Democrats” (Brussels: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 15 September 2014), at: https://eu. boell.org/en/2014/09/15/democracies-without-democrats.

Jakob Tanner

13 The Politics of Memory and the Task of Historians 13.1 History as a weapon Putin’s attack on Ukraine is also a propaganda war that is being fought around the globe.1 Russia prepared far in advance the ideological terrain on which the armored units advanced toward Kiev on February 24, 2022. The attempt to conquer the neighboring country was based on a military-historical projection of power in which words and actions worked together synergistically. According to the model of a self-fulfilling prophecy, a manipulated historical narrative and the military foray were designed to mutually assist each other in achieving a breakthrough. The latter was supposed to settle the matter by force of arms, the former had to legitimize the annexation and make it appear indispensable for the thriving of Russia’s own nation. Imperial great power ideology and armed intervention turn out to be two sides of the same coin. Images of the past, present actions, and expectations for the future merged under the sign of internal repression and external expansion. History is “weaponized for war”.2 The Russian state leadership conceived the invasion of the neighboring country as a “special military operation” in order to “denazify Ukraine.” This language is based on a multifaceted reframing of Russia’s past. Putin portrayed the implosion of the Soviet Union in late 1991 as the “greatest catastrophe of the 20th century.” Stalinism was rehabilitated through the lens of imperial greatness and a glorified Red Army. The celebrations and military parades held annually to commemorate the Red Army’s victory against Hitler’s Germany on May 9, 1945, became ever more lavishly staged, and with this war cult, the underlying message was reversed: a “Never again!” changed to “We’ll do it again!” The former peace demonstration was transformed into a parade of military offensive strength. This

 This essay is a reworked version of my keynote lecture at the Delhi conference from which this edited volume originated. The war in Ukraine brought the topics of the lecture to a head. So I decided to include the new constellation in the print version (September 2022).  Simon Schama, “When history is weaponized for war,” Financial Times (6 May 2022), https:// www.ft.com/content/25a57741-34e6-403b-b216-1704448afc0a [Last seen: 29 November 2022]. See also: Gwendolyn Sasse, Der Krieg gegen die Ukraine: Hintergründe, Ereignisse, Folgen, (München: C. H. Beck 2022); Mark Mazower, “Russia, Ukraine and Europe’s 200-year quest for peace,” Financial Times (24 March 2022), https://www.ft.com/content/567107fa-2760-452b-8452-e656ca5ca478 [Last seen: 29 November 2022]. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-013

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instrumentalization of the history of the Second World War corresponded to an encroaching interpretation of the emergence and the scope of Russianness.3 In July 2012, Putin published an essay “on the historical unity and Russians and Ukrainians,”4 in which he declared that, together with the Russians, the Ukrainian “Little Russians” and the Belarusians would belong to the “triune historical nation” and be bound together by a common heritage and destiny. The aim of this statement was to extinguish Ukraine as a state and nation. By depicting Ukraine as a fascist-ruled country and a bastion of enemy forces directly on the border with Russia, Putin triggered a sense of urgency.5 In an eerie invocation of the war the Red Army had waged during World War II to liberate Europe from the yoke of Nazism, Russian troops were now set on the march against the alleged fascists of today. Contemporary patterns of perception, historical misrepresentation, and imperial aspirations merge in military violence. Putin’s war in Ukraine is based on a flagrant distortion and instrumentalization of history. This goes hand in hand with the brutal suppression of a methodically reflective independent historical science. It is no coincidence that just before the invasion of Ukraine, the NGO “Memorial International” was compulsorily dissolved by a court, and the state-controlled media now only disseminate the official version of the past justifying the war.6 The question of the role of historians in politics and of new forms of public use of history must therefore be supplemented by the search for possible responses to a situation in which critical historical scholarship is suppressed and repressed from the public sphere of perception under the threat of severe penalties in the case of non-compliance with official viewpoints.7 To elaborate upon this problem, the next section of my chapter presents some facets of a personal, public, and commercial use of history. A third section asks about the relationship between lies and truth in politics and historiography.

 Sergej Medwedew, “Krieg im Namen des Sieges von 1945,” Dekoder (12 April 2022). https:// www.dekoder.org/de/article/krieg-ukraine-9-mai-tag-sieges [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  Article by Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, http://en.krem lin.ru/events/president/news/66181 [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  Concerning the anti-Semitic charges of this accusation, cf: Jason Stanley, Der Antisemitismus hinter Putins Forderung nach „Entnazifizierung“ der Ukraine (Geschichte der Gegenwart, on-linePlattform, 9 March 2022). https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/der-antisemitismus-hinter-putins-for derung-nach-entnazifizierung-der-ukraine/ [Last seen: 20 December 2022].  Manuela Putz, Memorial, in: dekoder on-line-platform 2022 https://www.dekoder.org/de/gnose/ memorial Information is still available on the website of MEMORIAL Deutschland. Mitglied des internationalen MEMORIAL-Netzwerkes (Moskau). https://www.memorial.de/index.php/ueber-me morial/memorial-international Last seen: 19 December 2022].  See the reports of the Network of concerned historians on Russia: http://www.concernedhistor ians.org/content/ar.html [Last seen: 29 November 2022].

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A fourth section introduces the distinction between historiographic revisions and historical revisionism. Section 5 looks at the invented traditions of the nation. This is followed by a brief analysis of the competing interpretations of the history of the EU (section 6) and the temptation of a politically conformist historical revisionism (section 7). In the concluding two sections, the contentious concept of “information warfare”, which also encompasses historiography, is problematized (section 8) and, against this background, the task of the professional historians in the current global imbroglio is reconsidered (section 9).

13.2 Ambivalent uses of historical narratives In a broader perspective, it is evident that the relationship between historiography and politics is contradictory. There are countries in which scientific freedom is basically respected, and others in which the results of historical research are suppressed. Nevertheless, it is not possible to draw a clear line between scientific statements and political pronouncements. The distinction between “free science” and “controlled propaganda” does not answer the questions of whether and how historians should interfere in public disputes and whether there can be any nonpolitical historiography at all. Rather, multiple entanglements between political power and historical narratives come to the fore. These exchanges between history and society have changed considerably over the past times – and they have always been ambivalent, oscillating between enlightenment of the democratic public, fixation of state power, and obfuscation of the mind. Of particular interest are the intertwinements between the professionalizing of history and state-building processes. Both directions of impact can be observed: the grip of state authority on history as a legitimating resource on the one hand, and a phantasmagoric self-imagination as well as historical criticism of origin legends, of the pretexts of power politics, and of official justifications on the other. History has always been in public use, long before it established itself as a discipline in the matrix of academic sciences in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The First World War marked a decisive threshold for modern propaganda. In these war years, historical images and prejudices became important weapons in the fight against the enemy, and without such a pervasive emotional mobilization, this carnage could not have been dragged on for so many years and sustained to the bitter end. Heroic legends about the entrenchment of one’s own nation in history and about its exceptional character fueled the long-lasting war effort. Even more than in the decades before, national identity and the imagination of a historical mission became spiritual elixirs of endurance.

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On the other hand, historiography and the archives on which it was based underwent a boost in professionalization and scientificisation in the period around 1900. Historians presented studies that provided new and groundbreaking insights into the past, and questions were raised concerning the “lessons to be learned”: Did history hold any lessons at all? Did historians have to intervene directly in politics – or should they keep their distance from current political events and rely simply on the power of their research results? These questions and arcs of tension have permeated the entire twentieth century. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been some significant shifts and innovations in the public use of history. I might mention, for example, the governmentmandated expert groups which were, along with truth commissions, set up in the 1990s to come to terms with past wrongdoings and – in some manner – to make reparations, issue apologies or offer atonement,8 or the flourishing contract research in the field of corporate history, which has been discovered by big and small firms alike to be an effective marketing vehicle. For example, a German “agency for applied history,” which also has commissioned corporate histories in its program, advertises with the slogan “History Marketing. Since 1999”.9 And the English-speaking consulting historians write on their platform: “Commissioned histories are one of the most popular and effective ways to represent the past.”10 In parallel, there are also many offers for privatized family and ancestor research, which impacts the public sphere and benefits from the new possibilities offered by net-based platforms such as Ancestry, My Heritage, Family Tree DNA or Find a Grave.11 Besides that, there is a wide range of popular stories displayed by magazines that want to sell their readers upscale entertainment and thrills. The exoteric news coverage on deep history and the Anthropocene in the alarming context of global warming and ecological crisis are also part of this. In the twenty-first century, the reliance on history as a medium of national identity has continued to grow in importance. Myths of origin and the assertion of an earlier golden age now unfortunately lost, which had been “deconstructed” by critical historiography in decades before, are once again rearing their heads, not only in nationalist movements and parties, but also in nation-states that are turning away from the rule of law and a pluralistic democratic public sphere, and instead

 Berber Bevernage, Nico Wouters, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History after 1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Jeremy Sarkin, ed., The Global Impact and Legacy of Truth Commissions (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2019).  https://www.geschichtsbuero.de/ [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  https://www.waybackwhen.com.au/comissioned-histories [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  Jerome De Groot, Consuming history: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2016).

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championing ideals of ethnic-cultural homogeneity.12 Under these circumstances, the past is domesticated by powerful restoration narratives, which merge the retrospective valorization of a glorious history with a scenario of present-day decline and disintegration, promising to make the country “great again” or “to take back control.” At the same time, history is being falsified with increasing blatancy. This is promoted by the amplification of state propaganda and its proliferation around the globe. With social media, gatekeepers who as a rule strove for some quality control and undertook fact-checking more seriously were eliminated, and at the same time, the craving for novelty grew significantly. An unsettling fake news dynamic arose as a result.13 I might mention just one small episode that took place in tiny neutral Switzerland in 2015. At that time, the national right was rewarming an old myth according to which Switzerland had followed the maxim of neutrality since the legendary battle of Marignano 500 years ago, while it also celebrated a medieval victory against the arch-enemy, the Habsburgs, another 200 years earlier still. When asked how one could meticulously describe a war that took place in 1315 despite the lack of sources or evidence, a member of the right-wing Swiss Peoples Party countered with the message: to hell with your outdated belief in facts; and then claimed: “We simply have the juicier stories”.14 And indeed, it was a challenge for professional historians to outperform the blood-soaked and virile imaginings of triumph and mastery with their sober descriptions of medieval power struggles and calls for reassessment, neither of which were easily accessible to the broader public.

13.3 History between scientific practice and literary storytelling Such occurrences are not new, however. In her telling 1971 text on the Pentagon Papers, “Lying in Politics”, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Secrecy – what diplomatically is called discretion as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government –  Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The quest for Understanding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); In his history of European integration, Kiran K. Patel indicates that in the meantime the classical right-left schema is becoming increasingly overlaid by contrasts between authoritarian-ethnocentric and liberal-cosmopolitan conceptions. Kiran K. Patel, Europäische Integration: Geschichte und Gegenwart (München: Beck, 2022), 108.  From a slightly optimistic but empirically well founded perspective: Adrienne Fichter, Smartphone-Demokratie: Fake News, Facebook, Bots, Populismus, Weibo, Civic Tech (Zürich: NZZ Libro, 2017).  Guy Krneta, “Saftgeschichten,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30 March 2015). https://www.nzz.ch/mei nung/debatte/saftgeschichten-1.18512693 [Last seen: 29 November 2022].

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and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings”.15 She goes on: “The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or class, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion”.16 But what can the science of history – in full knowledge of the vulnerability of the fact-based narratives it presents – do about the ongoing instrumentalization and misuse of the past by political power, how can it uphold its scientific claims to validity? And what are these claims to validity anyway? How can the “truth regime” of historiography be defined in an adequate way? It is obvious that historians, too, have to tell stories and can be seduced by their own imagination. The great French historian Jules Michelet, for example, saw himself as a researcher “with great imagination” who “drank too much of the black blood of the dead”. On his gravestone in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris it is written: “L’histoire est une resurrection” (History is a resurrection). But even a historian as prone to flights of the imagination as Michelet knew that some methodological principles must be respected. He sought to combine the skills of historical craft with the art of storytelling, and was thus able to create captivating narratives. What was attractive about his interpretations was not that he fictionalized history, but that he recognized a productive, historically empowering force in people’s fictions. Instead of presenting arbitrary histories, he was concerned with the factual force of the normative, i.e., the incorporation of emotional factors and ideational motivations into the writing of history.17 The same concerns were shared by historians such as Jacob Burckhardt and, since the 1920s, the Annales historians, in particular Lucien Febvre and Marc  Hannah Arendt, “Lying in Politics”, The New York Review of Books, 18 November 1971. https:// www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/11/18/lying-in-politics-reflections-on-the-pentagon-pape/ [Last seen: 29 November 2022]. Here quoted after: Hannah Arendt, Crisis of the Republic (San Diego: Harcourt, 1972), 4.  Arendt, Crisis of the Republic, 6.  See: Roland Barthes, Michelet par lui-même: images et textes présentés (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1954); When Michelet, a staunch republican, lost his job at the Collège de France and the archives under Emperor Napoleon III, he turned away from historiography and wrote popular moralphilosophical tracts. Gerd Krumeich, “Jules Michelet (1798–1874)”, in Klassiker der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Lutz Raphael, Vol. 1 Von Edward Gibbon bis Marc Bloch (München: Beck, 2006), 64–87.

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Bloch. The role of fictional fantasy resurfaced in the 1968 movement, with which the slogan “Soyons réalistes, exigeons l’impossible” (Let’s be realistic and demand the impossible) gained resonance. With it, the protesters wanted to insert fictional energies into the real. They pointed out that there is no cultural reality without the imaginary dimension. At the same time, the rebellion was rubbing up against the social facts of society, in accordance with the motto “La réalité dépasse la fiction” (Reality goes beyond fiction). Social history, which was burgeoning at the time, did well to take an in-depth interest in social structures and processes of change, which encompassed visions of the future, images of the past, and traditions that impinged on social conflicts and class struggles. While many activists made up their own version of the past, it was at all times clear to professional historians that the past could not be an open space for fictitious back-projections of current viewpoints. However, this did not mean that the historical interpretation was unambiguously determined by the sources. As always, there were rival and competing readings of past events. But beyond these differences, there was a consensus that the proposed explanations had to be grounded in methodologically robust research. This restriction has on the flip side an indeterminacy: the facts reconstructed from the sources do not lead to a single truth, to an uncontested version of the past. Rather, it is precisely the recognition of the complexity and opacity of past times that goes hand in hand with the recognition of different, even conflicting historical interpretations. On the one hand, this is because each narrative inserts the individual facts into a plot, and then this “emplotment” (the insertion of facts into a plot) generates effects of meaning that cannot be traced back to factually supported statements. On the other hand, historical accounts are not homogeneous in terms of their factual density; there are areas in which the narrative closely follows fact-based propositions, and others in which more fictional connectors and hypothetical bridging are necessary. In general, it can be said that the traces of the past, however random they may be and no matter how many attempts at manipulation or carelessness they are subjected to, nevertheless bear witness to events that are gone and are therefore unchangeable. Despite the diversity of accounts and pluralism of perspectives, written sources, visual traditions and material artefacts (the vestiges of the past) limit the range of interpretation. This is because all these traces of the past, material or symbolic, have the epistemic capacity to exert resistance to nonsensical, preposterous, or freely made-up narratives. As some historians have emphasized, they have a “veto power” or a “veto right” which revokes certain versions of the past and excludes them from the spectrum of historical scholarship.

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An instructive example of this epistemic double bind was provided by the Spanish journalist and author Javier Cercas (✶ 1962) who became renowned as “champion of reparative justice” in a land that has purchased a relatively bloodless transition from fascism to liberal democracy since the mid-70s at the cost of political amnesia about Franco’s victims, which also implied concealing crimes and granting amnesty to the perpetrators. In 2001 Cercas published his best-seller “Soldados de Salamina” (Soldiers of Salamis), dealing with an event in the early years of the Spanish Civil War.18 His book “was widely embraced as a timely moral intervention in the Spanish public”. But it exhibits an irritating one-sidedness. The fascist protagonist is painstakingly researched, whereas his opponent on the republican side “is largely a product of the author’s imagination”. When later asked about this asymmetry, Cercas stated: “My aspiration was to lie anecdotally, in the particulars, in order to tell an essential truth.”19

13.4 Historiographic revisions versus historical revisionism Javier Cercas’s “faction”, viz. the combination of facts and fiction, tells us a true, valid and comprehensible story about the brutal warfare and repression undertaken by Franco’s troops. In the introduction, the first-person narrator of the novel thanks his interlocutors for giving him insight into the history of the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent repression by the Franco regime. In the course of his research, he gets deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of the history of that period and decides to write a “narrative after reality”. This ambition to immerse himself in his story and then to draw readers into it and give them an inside view of events was also the basis of his account, published in 2009, of the failed coup in Spain on February 23, 1981, by parts of the Guardia Civil and the military.20 The essay-novel “Anatomy of a moment” is based on the reconstruction of the facts as exact as it can be, but the story could not have been written

 Javier Cercas, Soldados de Salamina (Barcelona: Tusquets ed., 2001).  Giles Harvey, “Why a Champion of Reparative Justice Turned on the Cause. A Critic at Large,” The New Yorker (6 January 2020, 13 January 2020); https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/ 01/13/why-a-champion-of-reparative-justice-turned-on-the-cause [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  Javier Cercas, Anatomía de un instante (Madrid: Debolsillo, 2009).

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from the sources alone. Although Cercas is not a professional historian,21 his work reflects basic problems of historical scholarship as a whole. Today we rightly assume that global and transnational history, and the greater sensitivity to historical entanglements, have deepened and broadened our understanding of the past, just as gender studies, queer studies, subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, critical whiteness studies, disability studies, environmental history as well as deep history have enormously widened our knowledge horizons. And if history as a scientific discipline is to continue to exist in the future, new generations will also need curious, skilled, and technically well-trained researchers who are able to astound us with new hypotheses and findings. Despite the tensions and animosities that always accompany such debates, these ruminations will continue to manifest themselves within the context of scientific discussion – in journals, at conferences, in workshops, research cooperation, reviews, and media appearances. Even though, as is sometimes emphasized, the results of historical research have often been revised, these historiographic revisions have nothing to do with the “historical revisionism” which today appears with increasing impertinence. According to a useful typology by Aviezer Tucker, three forms of revisionism can be differentiated: Evidence, significance, and values are the three drivers of revisionist reinterpretation of history.22 Since they start from completely different presuppositions and have different levels of legitimacy, they must be clearly distinguished. Insofar as new source-evidence comes into play, a new interpretation conforms to the methodological rules of historical science. A revised history, based on previously unknown or unnoticed facts & figures, drives historical research forward, and the idea that this process can be stopped at any point because “everything” is now known and correctly presented is profoundly unscientific. To be separated from this are significance- and value-driven revisions. These are also unavoidable, but regularly lead to fierce disputes both inside and outside science. Revisionism as “ism” manifests itself when the care for facts that characterizes revised historiography is thrown overboard and a new interpretation is claimed against the source material and archival evidence. Tucker puts it this way: “One of the chief revisionist strategies has been to “fuzzy” epistemological issues, to make

 After earning a doctorate in Spanish philology in the 1980s, Cercas taught for two years as a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Since 1989 he has been a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Girona. After 2017, he was severely criticized as an opponent of Catalan separatism, which pushed him to write a trilogy of crime novels entitled “Terra Alta”. The first novel was awarded the prestigious Spanish literary prize Premio Planeta.  Aviezer Tucker, “Historiographic Revision and Revisionism. The Evidential Difference,” In Past in the Making. Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, ed. Michal Kopecek (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), 1–14.

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the distinction between evidence-based probable knowledge of history and fiction vague and unclear.”23 Applying this statement to Cercas, we observe that his fictionalization of historical account escapes this problem by keeping his narrative compatible with the findings of professional historiography. He represents a kind of borderline case that demonstrates the problem of a historical “truth regime” in a particular way. His narrative strategy strives to give readers a way to identify with the actors in the story and empathize with their experiences. Cercas wants to elaborate his stories with gripping details to arouse emotional involvement. To get his message across, he employs meticulously invented adornments. This is, of course, out of the question for a professional historian. Nevertheless, Cercas remains within a fact-based, evidence-supported historiography, and his interpretation retains its validity and credibility. At this point, a semantic gap between the concept of revisionism in Europe and in the USA becomes apparent. According to European standards, Cercas, with his concern to relate historiography to ideas of justice, is not a revisionist. To label him as such would overlook the central fact that his narratives, enriched with fictional elements, are consistent with the results of historical research. In the USA, on the other hand, he would be classified among the revisionists. Here, revisionism exhibits a clear leftward twist due to its egalitarian stance insisting on human rights. A changed understanding of society and the accompanying engagement to finally take the history of racism and colonialism seriously, promoted the examination of previously neglected sources and the unlocking of neglected or overlooked archives. The strategy of this revisionism is to provide fresh evidence for new historical interpretations. It is significance- and value-driven, but pays, as a rule, careful attention to maintaining the methodological practices of professional historiography. Its persuasiveness results from the blatant one-sidedness of previous narratives of progress, which adopted the ideology of “manifest destiny” as the guiding principle of research. When a proponent of this revisionism refers to an “ever-changing past,” he does not mean – and this is another semantic difference from European linguistic usage – the past as an ontological status, but rather of the different narratives that can be recounted about it, depending on perspective, archival collections, and document availability.24

 Tucker, “Historiographic Revision”, 3.  James M. Banner, Jr., The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

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13.5 The invented narratives of the nation How to narrate the emergence of a nation: This problem was solved by nationalists who wanted to anchor their forward-looking ideology in the past. For this reason, nationalism in its various manifestations was and is a problem for historiography, and the self-representation of nation states are often at odds with historical truth. At the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when many historians fancied that they could fully endorse “their” state and thus contribute to its legitimacy, the French historian, archaeologist, orientalist, and religious scholar Ernest Renan offered a revelatory account of the epistemic problem of political engagement in historical scholarship. In his Sorbonne lecture “What is a Nation?” in 1882, he referred to the nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle”, which short-circuits the present and the past.25 “Being a people” means for Renan “having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present”. A nation is bound together by a deep sense of “having made great things together and wishing to make them again”: In other words: the nation as institutionalized compulsive repetition, which perpetuates an imagined self-referential community through recurrent ritual action and thus colonizes the future. It’s a clear-cut collectivity, and, as such, “a great solidarity constituted by the feeling of sacrifices made and those that one is still disposed to make. [. . .] A nation’s existence is (please excuse the metaphor) a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.” Even if a daily plebiscite can also constantly reopen the future and create dayby-day possibilities to break with the past course of things, Renan brought to the fore the affirmative impact of this daily manifestation of a public will. He described a community of synchronized emotions and shared mental models, which at the same time represents an “always brutally manufactured [. . .] unity”. This does not tolerate views that deviate from, differentiate from, or relativize this unity. Therefore, it is also at loggerheads with professional historical research, which disrupts the homogeneous picture. The super-elevated self-image that unites the national community is reinforced, rather, by forgetting and forgery. In Renan’s words: “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation and it is for this reason that the progress of historical studies often poses a threat to nationality.” By making “the violent acts that have taken place at the

 Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?,” text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11th, 1882, in Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris, Presses-Pocket, 1992) (translated by Ethan Rundell). http://ucparis.fr/files/9313/6549/9943/What_is_a_Nation.pdf [Last seen: November, 29 2022]. All following Renan-quotations from this text, which does not contain page references.

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origin of every political formation” disappear, the nation empowers itself to continue to act violently in an unreflective, and as it were unconscious way. More than six decades later, at the end of the Second World War, the journalist and democratic socialist George Orwell, in a similar vein, albeit more thoroughly argued, drafted his “Notes on nationalism”, in which he presented nationalism as a “state of mind” and an “emotion” that goes far beyond the identification with a nation-state.26 The act of sacrificing one’s individuality for a greater unity, devoting oneself to it flesh, skin, hair and all, can – according to Orwell – be made for any kind of collective claim, from that of a political nation, to religion or large-scale ideologies such as communism and pacifism, to class and race. In all these cases there is an intrinsic logic of enhancement at work. In the mental pattern of nationalism, the accumulation of power is constantly perceived “in terms of competitive prestige”, i.e., of “victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations”, and translated into the agonal model of “rise and decline”. As the main characteristics of nationalism, Orwell firstly mentions obsession, secondly instability, and thirdly indifference to reality. In the following, I concentrate my remarks on the last criterion, because it is here that Orwell makes some particularly captivating remarks. According to him, the analysis of nationalists is not based “on a study of probabilities but on a desire”; it is not a matter of “an appraisal of the facts but [. . .] the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties”. Thus, the nationalist tries to clutter the past and deny the most obvious facts: he “not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them”. What is epistemically decisive, according to Orwell, is that “every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered” and “spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should”. Thus, propaganda takes on a new quality. It is no longer simply a pretense concerning false facts, but its promoters begin to believe in a kind of sympathetic magic whereby “they are actually thrusting facts into the past”. They no longer know that they are lying, because they are deceiving themselves. Consequently, they manifest a penetrating and self-righteous “indifference to objective truth”, which gives rise to the feeling “that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly”.

 George Orwell, Notes on nationalism (first published in: “British Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics” Polemic, in October 1945). All following Orwell-quotations from this text, which does not contain page references. http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/George_ Orwell,_Notes_on_Nationalism_(1945).pdf [Last seen: November, 29 2022].

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These new types of propaganda create an unprecedented sense of cognitive insecurity. The decisive distinction between truth and untruth, between facts and lies, is hollowed out and erodes. A feeling of unreality begins to shape the social mood: Hannah Arendt would later refer to this as an “Alice in Wonderland atmosphere of reality”. Orwell at this point turns to the categories of psychiatry, writing that there is “no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind”. And he diagnoses those who are “living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world” as “not far from schizophrenia”: “The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs”.

13.6 Competing interpretations of the European Union Against this background, the promotors of the “United States of Europe” and other supporters of a European integration sought to overcome the nationalist regression of politics and the belief that history is a fungible resource for power strategies. Emerging from the partisan and resistance movements and embedded in a broad public debate, which had a particularly strong resonance among the younger generation, new European perspectives were devised. An important first milestone was the Ventonene Manifesto of 1941 which called for “the abolition of the division of Europe into national, sovereign states”. Written by anti-fascist activists (Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi and Eugenio Colorni) on an Italian prison island, it launched “the movement for a free and united Europe” at the very apex of the war.27 The main thesis of the manifesto was that the nationalist competition for power would transform the state from a “guardian of civil liberty [. . .] into the master of vassals bound into servitude” in order “to achieve the maximum warefficiency”. In such an interpretation, the process of European integration was indeed a self-imposed project of liberating the minds of Europeans from historical hallucinations and securing peace on the continent. This flattering blueprint, which fitted later self-portrayals of the EU, came under the shadow of criticism from two sides: from the right, the EU (in common with its predecessor-organizations, the EEC and the EC) was rejected as an “artificial

 Altiero Spinelli, Il manifesto di Ventotene (con un saggio di Norberto Bobbio) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991).

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construction” directed against “natural nationalism” or primordial “European culture”, and was also branded as a conspiracy of the elites against “the peoples”.28 On the left, there was talk of a “Europe of the corporations”, which was promoting the Europeanization of capitalism at the behest of corporate power.29 In both cases, the supranational and intergovernmental institutions of the EU were vilified as a sinister “Brussels bureaucracy”, with tentacles reaching into national polities, seeking to undermine their sovereignty and the very essence of democracy.30 These generalized judgments have been rebutted by historical research that addresses the multifaceted history of the European Union with a variety of questions. The economic historian Alan S. Milward refers to a European Rescue of the Nation State and this diagnosis fits the facts. Milward accurately predicted that the political geography of the nation states would not dissolve in the course of European integration, but that they would be fundamentally transformed in this process toward a model of shared, cooperative sovereignty.31 Against teleological versions of a progressive, irreversible integration process, it has been emphasized that integration was improbable in various respects and shaped by many contingencies. For the historian Kiran K. Patel, the EU is a “compromise and enabling machine”.32 In particular, he points out that the paramount standing of the EC, and from 1992 onward the EU, became apparent only from the 1970s onward. In the 1990s, the emphasis of the integration process shifted from peace to freedom, which became the normative parenthesis between Western and Eastern Europe after the Cold War. Since the 2010s, however, the EU has been evolving very much in the vein of a security project. A break with the logic of openness in the decades around 2000 became evident. The goal of “strategic autonomy” under the sign of sovereignty, protection and safety moved into the foreground and gained dominance.33

 Barbara Rosenkranz, Wie das Projekt EU Europa zerstört: eine überzeugte Europäerin rechnet ab (Graz: Ares-Verlag, 2013); Jan Drees Kuhnen, Die Zukunft der Nationen in Europa: ist das Zeitalter der Nationen und Nationalstaaten in Europa vorüber? (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2009).  Johan Galtung, Kapitalistische Grossmacht Europa oder Die Gemeinschaft der Konzerne?: “A Superpower in the Making” (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973); Stephanie Sand, 1992: Das Europa der Konzerne (München: Heyne, 1990).  For an overview: Kiran K. Patel, Project Europe: a History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).  Alan S. Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 2000); Alan S. Milward, Politics and Economics in the History of the European Union (London: Routledge, 2005).  Patel, Project Europe, 118.  Patel, Project Europe, 114–115.

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The EU as a whole responded with resolve to various challenges – the financial market crisis of 2008/09, the Euro-crisis 2010–2012, the Brexit of 2016–2018, the Corona pandemic since 2020. But the internal conflicts have not lost their virulence. Russia’s violent attempt to eradicate Ukraine is the most recent and foremost political-transnational stress test for EU cohesion. The sanctions not only have a long-term effect on the Russian economy and society, but also a negative short-term impact in European countries dependent on Russian energy supplies. Solidarity with Ukraine is not free but comes at a price. It is obvious that Putin is betting that the provision problems will drive a wedge between regions and population strata and divide Europe from within. The danger of internal tensions and rifts was an ongoing issue in the EU’s predecessor organizations. Since the EU’s eastward extension in 2004 and 2008, these centrifugal forces have been gaining momentum. The picture is not uniform; the Eastern European countries, propelled into a full-scale economic transformation, have positioned themselves quite differently against the comparatively prosperous Western European members that have built the very first European institutions during the Cold War. The drive for demarcation results not only from a disparity in material wealth that also determines the balance of labour migration, but primarily from historical experiences within the violent power constellation of the Cold War. The Soviet-dominated satellite-countries perceived the implosion of the Eastern bloc and the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 as a significant step toward national self-determination. In this region, and especially in the Baltic states newly established at the beginning of the 1990s and in Ukraine, Russia continued to be considered as an acute menace. In order to hold an expanded, inwardly heterogeneous EU together, the invocation of “western values” became a mantra of internal cohesion. This appeal to the “European community of values” is not without problems. It neglects the fact that Europe refers basically to human rights, i.e., universal values. The insistence on these values as being “western” or “European” can be regarded as exclusionary, according to the all-too-well-known colonial formula: “The West and the rest”. It was a major flaw in the European strategy against Putin that the EU and the NATO did not cooperate and coordinate more with the United Nations and other international organizations, thereby striving for a language that could have broadened the defensive line against Russia’s flagrant violation of international law.

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13.7 A “new narrative for Europe” and the temptation of revisionism This narrowing to an exclusive self-perception, which at the same time constitutes a normative self-nobilization, was already evident earlier. Parallel to the revaluation of the idea of security, the quest for a common European history also became more intensive. Thus, in 2012, the European Commission mandated the initiative “for a new narrative for Europe”.34 The initiative was launched in Brussels in 2013 with a fanfare of trumpets and was subsequently substantiated by a series of conferences. Political differences, however, soon devolved into a struggle over the interpretative authority of this great narrative. While from the right, the triad of “Christianity, (heteronormative) family and fatherland” was strongly promoted as value-drivers of European history, the political center and the left relied on a narrative model that presented Europe as an area of peace, freedom, security, stability and justice. A consensus could not be reached on the guidelines of a history bridging different value-attitudes and integrating national past-policies. A recent and more promising project focusing on World War II and the Holocaust was started in 2021 with MemAct! (Memory, Agency, and the Act of Civic Responsibility). Fueled by the intention to counter the rise of right-wing extremism in a variety of EU countries, MemAct! aims at moving toward a cross-European perspective in Holocaust education. Citizens with diverse backgrounds, and above all too-often-passed-over voices from East- and South East Europe, “will be encouraged to define their own meaningful questions on the Nazi past and connect them with challenges of our current Europe to approach the ethics of civic responsibility”. MemAct! aims at building and coordinating networks among historians, teachers and activists in the field of civic education from a European perspective, thereby integrating people of all ages and lifestyles communities, migrants, disadvantaged people. It is particularly interested in how these different people mediate their own history within a European context. Such a project, with a new approach to the history of World War II, also offers the opportunity to overcome the revisionist approaches that, after the eastward enlargement, have appeared in historical statements of the EU. This was particularly noticeable in the case of the European Parliament Resolution of 19 September 2019 “on the importance of European remembrance for the future

 In German: “für ein neues Leitmotiv für Europa”; Bernhard Forchtner and Christoffer Kølvraa, “Narrating a ‘new Europe’: From ‘bitter past’ to self-righteousness?,” Discourse and Society 23 (2012/4): 377–400; Melina Fäh, “Die ‘New Narrative for Europe’- Initiative der Europäischen Kommission: eine kulturanalytische Betrachtung” (Zürich, Universität Zürich: master’s thesis, 2015).

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of Europe”.35 While this resolution may aim at creating a cohesive European culture of remembrance, and thus pursues a goal that is diametrically different to, for example, that of the German AfD (“Alternative für Deutschland”) with its demand for a “historical-political turnaround by 180 degrees”, it contains annoying elements of a revisionist historical rectification and concessions to the demands of day-today politics.36 To be sure, the resolution invokes “respect for human rights and the rule of law both inside and outside the European Union”. However, the document is not intended to highlight problems, but to use historical memory as a malleable catalyst for cultural integration. Europe is presented as a unity that has overcome a totalitarian past. Clearly and succinctly, the text discloses the dangerous “efforts of the current Russian leadership to distort historical facts” and to divide the continent with an “information war waged against democratic Europe [. . .]”. To conjure up a “common culture of remembrance” it “rejects the crimes of fascist, Stalinist and other totalitarian regimes of the past as a way of fostering resilience against modern threats to democracy, particularly among the younger generation”. On the same lines, the Resolution mentions “the historical revisionism and the glorification of Nazi collaborators in some EU Member States”,37 and expresses dismay “about the increasing acceptance of radical ideologies and the reversion to fascism, racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance in the European Union”. But when it comes to the outbreak of the Second World War, the text exclusively refers to 23 August 1939, i.e., the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Historical research has shown repeatedly – and thus established a consensus across all differences of interpretation – that this so-called “non-aggression pact” (which included a secret protocol that regulated, among other things, the division of Poland) was indeed an infamous gambit and notable event in the lead-up to war. Nevertheless, the conclusion that this pact “paved the way for the outbreak of the Second World War” is misleading. Hitler would have brought the war off the fence without this pact, he would have found

 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2019-0021_EN.html [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  Suzanne Kristkoiz, “The Utilisation of Historically Revisionist Narratives by the FPÖ and the AfD,” E-International Relations, 21 April 2021, https://www.e-ir.info/pdf/91269 [Last seen: 29 November 2022]; Meron Mendel, “Geschichtsrevisionismus der AfD: Es genügt nicht, defensiv zu sein,” Column in: taz-tageszeitung 9 November 2020. https://taz.de/Geschichtsrevisionismus-derAfD/!5725048/ [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  On blatant revisionism in Poland, see: Todd Carney, “Can European Law Stop Historical Revisionism?,” OpinioJuris, 17 February 2021, http://opiniojuris.org/2021/02/17/can-european-law-stophistorical-revisionism/ [Last seen: 29 November 2022]. In paradoxical reversal, it is the task of the European Union to hold accountable nationalist governments that whitewash their own country’s past.

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other ways and means to launch it. The road to military conquests was already taken after he was appointed Chancellor of the Reich at the end of January 1933. The Resolution conceals this insight, which has been well established by historical research,38 because it seeks to reduce internal tensions in the European Union. Even though the EU Resolution is tied to the proclamation of noble values – such as “peace, freedom and democracy” – such historical revisionism is a symptom of an underlying tectonic shift in the institutional use of history. So, in a strange role reversal, a fake news-prone Russian government can credibly defend the historical facts. In “Foreign Policy”, the historian Sergey Radchenko held firm: While he [Vladimir Putin] is right to criticize a recent EU Parliament resolution, his historical revisionism doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.39 This way, the EU resolution complicates a straightforward critique of Russia’s historical revisionism, which has since exhibited its immediate violent propensity. Moreover, as Zoltan Dujins observes, the “Europeanization of an antitotalitarian ‘collective memory’ of communism” also “reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism” that is “seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives”.40 In the meantime, the European Union is confronted with dangers of a new factor from within. In Italy, but also in France, post- or neo-fascist parties are seizing power or trying to do so. They share many of the values of Putin’s Russia and consequently sympathize with the warmongering policies of the autocratic regime.

13.8 “Information war” as information war If such occurrences become more frequent, the impression will be created that historical discussion is simply a matter of “opinion against opinion”. False reports and brazen lies also claim to be taken seriously as opinions, and obviously such disinformation campaigns work surprisingly well. The targeted manipulations through social media of political decision-making and national elections, which have been

 Benjamin Carter Hett, The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2020).  Sergey Radchenko, “Vladimir Putin Wants to Rewrite the History of World War II,” Foreign Policy, 21 January 2020) https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/21/vladimir-putin-wants-to-rewrite-thehistory-of-world-war-ii/ [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  Zoltan Dujisin, “A history of post-communist remembrance: from memory politics to the emergence of a field of anticommunism,” Theory and Society 50 (2021): 65–96, https://doi.org/10. 1007/s11186-020-09401-5, published online: 8 July 2020).

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conducted since 2016 on a large scale, have shown how in this emerging field creative online activists who want to generate some cash make common cause with state-financed troll-factories. As Orwell emphatically described three-quarters of a century earlier, a proliferation of confusion destabilizes the normative certainties and the epistemic robustness of scientific knowledge. It seems that everything, even the most improbable and implausible, can be true. If every conviction is bombarded with opposing opinions, every political figure is declared untrustworthy, a general hullabaloo will eventually ensue. And this in turn promotes the impression that all statements about the past are in principle the outcome of a power game and as such irreparably contaminated with interests. Historiography then appears merely as a succession of purpose-bound, arbitrarily malleable opinions and as such just another axis of a strategic parallelogram of forces in the merciless battle for power.41 If this perspective prevails, the concept of a “historical fact” itself will become critical. The journalist McKay Coppins recently broached this problem in an article in The Atlantic entitled “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President” in the following, conclusive way: “The problem we are confronted with is not about telling the truth or lying, but we observe the emergence of a heightened state of suspicion that undermines truth itself because ‘reality’ is more and more difficult to locate. The very notion of observable reality drifts further out of reach.”42 The British journalist and network analyst Peter Pomerantsev points out the same embarrassing state of affairs. His new book bears the Magrittian title This is Not Propaganda and examines “The disinformation architecture” with its toplevel chief architects and the “community-level fake account operators” who use trolls, bot-herders and cyborgs to spread fabricated claims virally.43 Pomerantsev focuses on Russia and “the Kremlin’s rulers [. . .] precisely because they had lost the Cold War”. Confronted with this unsettling condition, “Russian spin doctors and media manipulators managed to adapt to the new world quicker than anyone in the thing once known as ‘the West’”.44 This opens  There are also more “technical” definitions of information warfare, which is described as a variant of cyber warfare. In addition to techniques of profile falsification and data collection, information flooding also attracts attention here. Through the mass proliferation of false news via algorithms (social bots), “censorship through noise” is exerted.  McKay Coppins, “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President,” The Atlantic, March, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinforma tion-war/605530/ [Last seen: 29 November 2022].  Peter Pomerantsev, This is not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (London: Faber and Faber, 2019).  Pomerantsev, This is not Propaganda, 9.

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new prospects for a word-view “that wants to see everything through the frame of information war”: “In this vision all information becomes, as it is for military thinkers, merely a means to undermine an enemy, a tool to disrupt, delay, confuse, subvert”.45 The main message is: “facts don’t matter”, they are irrelevant, and whoever has the power can say whatever he wants and, moreover, can expect that even absurd and vicious statements will create a mood in the alarmstricken electorate and thus, as it were, be disseminated voluntarily until they have ascended to hegemonic public opinion. In such a situation, the question is not whether we are able to distinguish lies from truth but “how can we win an information war when the most dangerous part could be the idea of information war itself?”46 This question is of crucial importance today in view of Russia’s military assault on Ukraine. In such a situation, information warfare becomes a weapon in a war fought with modern armament systems. Its main purpose is to sabotage other countries’ moral and material support for Ukraine. When Russian state media claim that the reason for the war is a fascist regime in Kiev, which in turn serves as a bridgehead for a Western offensive, this is, according to all scientific criteria of truth, quite frankly false, and not simply a position in an “information war” in which everyone is working with distortions and falsities. On the contrary, it is necessary to stick to the distinction between information and statements against facts. This is particularly important for historiography, precisely because it is so difficult to substantiate facts epistemologically.

13.9 The task of the historians If we take this problem seriously – and there seems to be no other choice – we should sharpen our reflection philosophically. An essentialist concept of truth, which sees the past as a thing that can be objectively and unambiguously represented, has served its time in historiography for a long while. Historians such as Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch – to name just two French innovators in the science of history – made it clear nearly a century ago that the “factum” literally means what has been made. The fabrication of a fact always kicks off with a question. And once it is available as a datum, i.e., as “the given”, it has to be arranged into meaningful statements and conclusive interpretations. It is always concatenations of facts and narrative connections that create the meaning

 Pomerantsev, This is not Propaganda, 112.  Pomerantsev, This is not Propaganda, 114.

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of the story and make up the significance of what has gone before.47 Although facts are by no means arbitrary, but the result of source-criticism and controlled methodological operations, they can provide different answers to the questions posed. In any case, inquisitiveness is the very ferment that keeps science moving, and since inquiring curiosity can go in a variety of directions, the writing of history is subject to continued revision. Here we come to the central philosophical problem that Immanuel Kant attached to “the thing in itself”. For Kant, the “thing in itself” exists, but is as such inaccessible. Its intelligibility depends on its contact with a perceptive faculty. Although it is unchangeably there, and may resist human plans and purposes, it cannot manifest itself before it has in some way been prepared. Even if it plays a massive role in human experience as mute resistance and resilient presence, it cannot be integrated into the realm of culture until it has been imbricated into symbolic systems and inserted into empirical relations by a knowing agent and thus made real.48 Kant thus formulated the following contradiction: Things are exactly as they appear (they always coincide with their data) but never as they are seen (they are never identical with their data). With a semantic shift this antinomy can be reformulated as follows: The past is exactly as it appears (it always coincides with traces and sources) but what has happened can never be comprehensively represented (it is never equivalent to those traces). Kant refers to the transcendental conditions of cognition and distinguishes the synthetic from the analytical unity of apperception. This means that the subject is constantly oscillating between a pole of identity and a pole of the objects. The conceptions present in the self-consciousness, which correspond to perceived things, cannot link themselves, but require an I, which establishes connections by remembering.49 This contradiction is inherent throughout the scientific truth regime and must also be faced up to within the field of historical research. The idea that a regression to pre-Kantian essentialism can only be avoided by fleeing into an airy Anything Goes is not particularly helpful.50 The recognition that historical interpretations cannot be anchored directly in the facts distilled from documents and vestiges does not  Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft: Introduced by Joseph R. Strayer, trans. P. Putnam, (New York: Knopf, 1963). Lucien Febvre, Michelet, créateur de l’histoire de France: cours au Collège de France, 1943–1944 (Paris: La Librairie Vuibert, 2014), 38.  See e.g. Gernot Böhme, Philosophieren mit Kant: zur Rekonstruktion der Kantischen Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1986).  Rainer Schäfer, Ich-Welten: Erkenntnis, Urteil und Identität aus der egologischen Differenz von Leibniz bis Davidson (Münster: mentis, 2012).  On this pretension, which was introduced into scientific debate by Paul Feyerabend, cf: Philipp Sarasin, „Anything goes“: Paul Feyerabend und die etwas andere Postmoderne (Berlin: Geschichte der Gegenwart, on-line-Plattform, 2019).

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unlock the door to arbitrariness. Rather, interpretations float within a corridor of different possible propositions whose common feature is that they are all supported by differently arranged and weighted facts. The scope for historical storytelling is thus limited by the irrevocable veto power of the sources.51 However this intricate problem is conceived, one point is nevertheless clarified: The fallacious juxtaposition of historical realists, who cling to a pre-critical understanding of factual evidence and reality, and postmodern relativists, who confuse a constructivist position with trashy arbitrariness, has never been illuminating and does not deserve to be rehashed. It is more productive to assume that modern societies are always inventing traditions but are also always questioning them and consciously engaging with their past. The flip side of this view is that history is used as a manipulative resource for self-legitimation and propaganda campaigns. That this often happens can be observed from the fact that in the social conflicts of modernity the rival interests usually fight intensively for the hegemony of their own understanding of the world. Any incumbent in a position of power and any major social movement provides new versions of the social fabric of society and advances new claims, whether these are universal human rights or particular privileges. And every community that constitutes and establishes itself in a modern society provides offers of identification and embeds itself in a vivid culture of remembrance. As Maurice Halbwachs showed already in the 1920s, families, religions, nations, professional associations and groups of any kind proceed in a similar way and are comparable in this respect.52 With the French historian Pierre Nora, it can be assumed that there is an irresolvable tension between “history” – understood as historical science – and “memory” – considered as popular culture of remembrance.53 While the former pursues a methodologically guided “working through” and proceeds in a methodical manner, the latter practices a repetitive “acting out” with which a sense of self-esteem and an approach to the world is regularly reaffirmed, regardless of whether it is a matter of previously experienced situations or sheer mental projections. In such a constellation, professional historiography can make a credible claim to truth despite – or precisely because of – its manifold conflicts of interpretation and reinterpretation. It

 Reinhart Koselleck, “Einführung,” In Auch Klio dichtet oder Die Fiktion des Faktischen: Studie zur Tropologie des historischen Diskurses, ed. Hayden White (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1991), 1–6; Edward P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and other Essays (London: Merlin, 1978).  Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 6th ed., 2006).  Pierre Nora; in collab. with Charles-Robert Ageron et al., Les lieux de mémoire, 7 vol. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992).

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can reflect the gap between the two approaches and thus also recognize its own dependence on vantage points in the present. This task in many countries has recently become more difficult. Yet reflections on the public use of history have never been simply an interesting aspect of social communication; indeed, they are a very serious matter, because political repression, ideological propaganda, and the struggle for financial resources have always been the order of the day. Since the transition to the twenty-first century, however, these problems have worsened. All over the world, historians are coming under political pressure precisely because of their hitherto-independent scientific research, and in some countries, they are also threatened existentially. At the same time, information wars are being accompanied by the reallocation of vast financial resources. Governments generously fund their own world views and, in many cases, invest large sums in Internet-based manipulation campaigns. This at the expense of highly respected research projects, renowned scientific institutes, but also indispensable archives and databases, which are confronted with an increasing shortage of money. Transnational networking among professional historians and social scientists is an integral part of the solution to this political problem and its associated epistemological conundrums. The commitment to scientific freedom and the independence of research, together with the claim for an appropriate share of public funds, become central. To achieve this, however, historians must insist on the importance of their professional skills, and collaborate closely and transnationally. This is not only for political-organizational considerations, but because international cooperation is of crucial importance from an epistemic viewpoint. The endeavor must always be to relate historical research with a local or national focus to a global problem horizon.

Benjamin Zachariah

14 Languages of Legitimation and the Registers of Legitimate History 14.1 Introductory remarks As history loses confidence as a discipline, it is other disciplines, such as law, and other processes, such as truth and reconciliation commissions, which appear to have a clearer idea of what history needs to be about. There are also popular, and populist, demands upon history: what should historians tell us? Is there a core ‘national’ or ‘community’ story to tell? Is history to be invoked in the service of the self-respect of particular groups whose appearance in the historical record has so far not been recognised by history? These demands, often generated outside the discipline, have had a profound effect on the internal understanding of history. What can legitimately be said? What is a suitable subject for research? What words, phrases, or episodes in history are best avoided, sensitively dealt with, or expunged from the record altogether? Every public space, every historical culture, nationally (by which is of course meant state-wise), regionally, communally, or otherwise organised, has different answers to the question of what history should be. This set of expectations is often implicit, and it is hard to indicate whether public expectations of history are shaped by professional historiography at all, whether professional historiography responds to public expectations of (or public demands for) history, or whether they are mutually influential, interacting, and reciprocally entangled. Minimalistically, we can suggest (and certainly we can agree about the normative expectation that it do so after the ‘history from below’ debates of the latter half of the twentieth century),1 that public domain arguments have a bearing on what historians can legitimately write about, in what tone, rhetorical frame, or authorial positionality. We might want to paraphrase this statement in terms of the concept of ‘languages of legitimation’ – the ways in which certain subjects can be legitimately talked about, which is again dependent on who is talking to whom – and its relationship to the registers of legitimate history. I identify three registers of legitimate history in present-day public domain arguments: I propose that we call them a truth and reconciliation register, a historical conscience register, and a sensibilities of representation register.

 See in particular Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso, 1994), for this positioning. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-014

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The premise and starting-point of this series of reflections was this question: what are the roles of history outside of professional history? But I’d like to ask a question that is a corollary: what are the mutual roles of professional history and public domain debates on ‘history’? The second case of ‘history’ I place within inverted commas, but I might as well have used the inverted commas for the first one: the question of what history is, under current conditions of disciplinary and epistemological uncertainty, is one that does not invite a confident answer. It is domains outside of professional history that increasingly act as the conscience of the historians’ craft, demanding of history that it deliver certain judgements and maintain certain standards that the profession itself has thrown into doubt: is it true? did it happen? what is the historical consensus on the subject? In a legal sense, the disputes that occasionally are accompanied by the presentation of historical evidence (the Irving-Lipstadt trial, to provide a well-known example)2 are subject to stringent rules of evidence, such that the professional historian might be somewhat nervous at being subjected to an unaccustomed form of scrutiny, without resort to epistemological obfuscation and with a rigorous injunction to take into account that which the profession has already taken account of as well as that which s/he has already encountered. (In the film Denial, based on that trial, a minor character, an unnamed professional historian who fleetingly appears on a television screen in the background, is heard to express the fear that if all historians were held to similar standards, the profession would be found wanting as a whole and would collectively discredit itself).3 There are also demands upon history that are heritage- and memory-related, which make it difficult to write histories that counteract these demands without damaging a public consensus that is dearly believed. Not all of these are nationstate-centric and therefore naturalised, because minorities and new entrants into public domains bring with them the demands that ‘their’ histories be recognised, which does not mean merely written about, but indeed often demands to be written about in a positive light, with key aspects of the narrative endorsed by ‘history’.4

 Richard J. Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History, and the David Irving Trial (London: Verso, 2002); Eva Menasse, Der Holocaust vor Gericht: der Prozess um David Irving (Berlin: Siedler, 2000).  Denial (2016), dir. Mick Jackson.  See Kanad Sinha’s contribution to this volume, in which an ancient Indian past is mobilised to serve a modern-day palingenetic argument about the resurgent Hindu nation: but it is not at all clear that professional historians would endorse many of these claims – nonetheless, as the political formation that pushes these forms of ‘history’ gains in strength, dissent among professional historians becomes fraught with personal danger, and leads to a silence on their part which would have been considered a dereliction of duty in an earlier age.

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This is connected to a crisis of the humanities. History, among other subjects in the humanities and social sciences, appears to now have neither the methodological nor the epistemological capabilities to talk across its ever-narrowing specialisms. These specialisms no longer seek to communicate outside their own circles. Internal controls have all but vanished, and the sense in which the profession now relates to its past as a self-regulating guild that did, in fact, take that self-regulation seriously, is difficult to establish. Among other things, the profession of historians appears to have lost recourse to another question: what if the inconvenient bits that are not good to talk about are actually true? The profession, backed by procedures of source criticism, proper referencing, double-blind peer review, and the consensus about the difference between ‘fact’ and ‘opinion’, was once able, without self-censorship, to address at least itself without fear, and if it had doubts about the attainability of absolute truth, it at least knew what a deliberate lie was, even if it didn’t always spot one. With these procedures failing, and the basics of the profession ignored by professionals, the falsification or repeated miswriting of footnotes does not discredit a professional historian, nor is the wilful ignoring of published work of relevance prevented by the refereeing process, various public manifestations of at least apparently historical argument have led the question of legitimacy away from professional self-regulation and towards public fora, including social media campaigns, personal attacks on nonconforming or counter-consensual views – one could go on, but this is not primarily a discussion on the decline and fall of the self-regulating discipline of peers: here, the point is more that the agenda for historians is increasingly, and often, set outside the profession of history.5 Thus, as increasing pluralism and specialisation within the fields of professional history interrupts mutual intelligibility across an allegedly self-regulating profession, and ‘epistemological’ uncertainty is clumsily translated into scepticism about truth or ‘facts’, a crisis of verification and internal regulation, and a simultaneous demand for a ‘history’ that is available for various public spaces and public purposes, sets up an awkward situation. We are faced with what we might call, borrowing from a famous French philosopher, competing “regimes of

 This, perhaps, is a phenomenon that has not been seen since the professionalization of history in the 19th century and its claim to disinterested expertise, internal cohesion, and self-regulation: thus, even if the agenda of research was set by (for instance) nation-state-centric institutional structures, the special role of historians in addressing the agenda in a professional manner, and the trustworthiness of their internal collective conscience, was not questioned. See Lutz Raphael and Benjamin Zachariah, “Intellectual Honesty and the Purposes of History,” Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method (2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350970885.076.

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truth”: historical, legal, and, increasingly, populist-public.6 But it is not at all clear if the populist-public regimes of truth have a concept of truth – except perhaps the legal, which requires it for instrumental purposes of making judgements that have a bearing on civil or criminal cases. The case of public histories might actually be better addressed by the idea of a ‘regime of memory’, though it is not enough to consider this separately, as most public demands upon history have perhaps a greater need for legitimation through history as the basis of their truth-claim and it is the telling of a group’s collective memory as history, with its claims to truth, that they wish to achieve – a promotion of memory to history, if you like. Thus, public domain arguments, even if their consumer-choice-style resorts to the ‘history’ they prefer, need history to contain a truth-claim of some kind. Differing time-frames might also make a strong difference: the location in time of the historical resource that is wished to be used, and its distance from relevance might play a role in its usage in the public domain. Here again, as in golden age myths, it is not so much a distance from the present but a distance from mobilizational relevance that plays a role: thus, a chronologically remote ‘history’ (the myth of ‘Aryan’ civilisation, or of ancient Greece as the origin of ‘Europe’) might be far more important than a more recent ‘history’. We might want to call this a question of ‘regimes of relevant time’.7 There is a participant-observation aspect to writing about history in the public domain during one’s own time in the profession. As a result, although footnotes to actually existing texts remain, in accordance with my disciplinary training, a central aspect of the scholarly apparatus of this chapter, the observations are influenced by my having spent two dozen years as a licensed professional historian, observing the transformations and journeys of history in public. These experiences are also drawn upon in this chapter, and where I have been conscious of using personal observation or experience as evidential basis for any analysis, I have tried to indicate that in the footnotes.

 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 109–133.  I am indebted to Antoon de Baets’ comments on this piece for the terms ‘regimes of time’ and ‘regimes of memory’, in response to which the discussion on those terms has been included here. I take the opportunity here also to thank Lutz Raphael and Berber Bevernage for their comments.

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14.2 Three registers of legitimate history in the public domain We can now return to the three registers of legitimate history that I identified in present-day public domain arguments: a truth and reconciliation register, a historical conscience register, and a sensibilities of representation register. It is necessary to elaborate slightly on these three registers, in order that they make sense as we apply them to specific cases. There are public domains in which the demands of new forms of historical consciousness, which since the 1980s and 1990s have dominated some aspects of academic history, come into conflict with a public understanding of history as ‘what really happened’, where historians play somewhat of a role as public conscience. As we shall see below, this is at the crux of the juxtaposition of the relative place of the Holocaust and of colonialism in the German public imagination; but any former colony is particularly sensitive about ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘colonialist’ uses of their history, and is likely to demand that its version be given some form of primacy. The uses of history in public, and in particular by states, require usable or instrumentalisable forms of history, or of historical forgetting. A usable history that creates a sense of cohesion in a state or community is greatly to be desired. We may call this the truth and reconciliation register, after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa.8 That Committee was notoriously less interested in the former term, and the latter term appeared to have meant at best a form of Christian forgiveness pioneered by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was not present in his capacity as historian,9 and of amnesty for various violent apartheid era whites, while discrediting or erasing armed struggle as a part of the South African movement against apartheid, in the process reinventing the African National Congress as a ‘Gandhian’ non-violent movement, and discrediting Winnie Mandela for good.10 Truth and reconciliation, it is

 I specifically refer to the South African TRC, and am aware that other Truth Commissions had different approaches to the factual content of their remit.  See Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999); see in particular Chapter Two, ‘Nuremberg or National Amnesia? A Third Way’.  Critical studies of the TRC and of the ANC after the end of apartheid stress these points – see for instance Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC)’, diacritics 32.3–4 (Fall-Winter 2002): 33–59 – but my summary comes from having participated in and listened in on the discussions in real time along with friends and fellow-students among the South Africans in Cambridge, and the anti-apartheid emigres and activists in London, c. 1994–2000. This is therefore a register of public engagement with history that I describe via a public engagement with history, and not

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relatively clear, is interested in a useable form of ‘history’ that can serve as official state memory, particularly in situations of ‘transitional justice’, often steering attention away from looking at inconvenient, divisive moments in its history, and memorialising, also often in the name of that ‘history’, something quite far from the ‘truth’.11 This is, in effect, a conscious or deliberate attempt at getting the past wrong in the interests of a viable collective memory. But it is an attempt, at least, at intersubjective understanding: in October 1994, at the height of the misplaced optimism around the Oslo Accord and the potential for a sudden outbreak of peace, at a joint meeting of the Israel and Palestine Societies in Cambridge, an impassioned speaker put this possibility to the audience: “we know our histories”, she said, “and they are fiercely divisive. The point of this moment is to forget those histories.”12 This, I think, is a more honest description of the truth and reconciliation register than the South African version, with its claim to truth without (or beyond?) history: it maintains the link between history and truth, while claiming the need to move away from both. There is also a sensibilities of representation register of history-in-public, a mode informed by identitarian concerns about the particular histories of (victim) communities, or (more problematically) the inheritors of victimhood; and it is particularly concerned with the possibility of offending the sensibilities of groups by referring to histories that do not conform to the framing of history demanded by the ‘victim’ communities. This is a register that has seen its ascendancy in the era of postcolonialism, though its origins might be older than we think, and could in fact be thoroughly colonial.13 It is also a register well-suited to moral panics in

via its academic retellings. To slightly differing extents, this statement also applies to the other two registers I identify; there is a participant-observation aspect to having to write about history in the public domain during one’s own time in the profession.  Berber Bevernage makes a similar point about leaving the past out of the present in truth commissions: see for instance Berber Bevernage, “Writing the Past Out of the Present: History and the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice,” History Workshop Journal 69 (2010): 111–131; Berber Bevernage, “Transitional Justice and Historiography: Challenges, Dilemmas and Possibilities’,” Macquarie Law Journal 13 (2014): 7–24. Bevernage and Temoney further suggest that historical accuracy can be an obstacle to reconciliation: “there is regrettably very little measurable proof for a causal relation between historical understanding and reconciliation”, and appeal instead to a Hayden White-inspired ‘re-emplotment’ of a narrative that can create reconciliation. Berber Bevernage and Kate E. Temoney, “Historical understanding and reconciliation after violent conflict,” in Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Lars Deile (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 185–194.  Joint meeting of the Israel Society and the Palestine Society at Cambridge University, October 1994, at which I was present (this footnote is one more anthropological gesture).  “I have ventured to make certain slight alterations in certain passages which might hurt the susceptibilities of Indian readers”, the historian and theologian H. G. Rawlinson wrote in his 1920

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public, when a ‘community’ sees itself as insulted, and historians self-censor lest they write something considered inappropriate in the light of present-day concerns projected into the past. A corollary principle is that a group that wishes to demand sensitive treatment must depict their collective memory as history in victimhood mode.14 The sensibilities of representation register is one that is resolutely subjective, with the community’s gestures of intersubjectivity only made towards other victim communities, unless these other victim communities have histories or memory-claims (and it is in their interest to blur or deny the distinction between history and memory-claims) that can come into conflict with theirs. Individuals need not apply for such treatment, only collectives may do so, and this has the effect of throwing the individual back into some sort of collective. Dissonant histories cannot be told if one chooses this register: an individual’s history might not conform to the narrative expectations of his group’s sensibilities, or a sub-group’s history might not conform to the narrative expectations of the larger part of the group who control the narrative; and those histories cannot be told, in this mode, legitimately and in public.15 It is a matter of debate whether social media has exacerbated this tendency and actually sets the agenda at the lowest common denominator; but the tendency predates social media. The understanding of history as ‘what really happened’ has long been the German model of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, coming to terms with the (difficult) past, and of Erinnerungskultur, the question of public remembering, both of which are to some extent state-centric and incorporated into an understanding of the new German states’ reckoning with the then-immediate National Socialist state and its atrocities. We can call this a historical conscience register of public engagement with history, in which a state or an entire people takes responsibility for historic wrongs apparently perpetrated by their fellow-countrymen or countrywomen,

Preface to his revision of Vincent A. Smith’s Oxford Student’s History of India – reprinted in the fourteenth edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), 6. This also indicates that the sensibilities of representation register is older than we might have thought, although its ubiquity and its being considered a progressive way of writing history is relatively new. It also indicates that those who might have been identified as ‘colonialist’ were happy to make concessions to those sensibilities.  Benjamin Zachariah, After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 48–55.  See Ruth Franklin, ‘“The Lucky Ones”’, The New York Review of Books, Vol. LXVIII No. 16, 21 October 2021, in which she suggests that the stories of Polish Jews in Soviet Gulags were relatively neglected because the stories didn’t fit the framing of the fate of Jews during the Second World War by Nazi concentration camps, and by the Auschwitz model. To make it clear: I think (and the author of the piece cited here thinks) that the Gulags do not belong in the same framework of analysis as the Nazi concentration camps.

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with professional historians playing a reasonably central role in the process, and in fact being called upon to do so, as ‘expert witnesses’ or arbiters in a process that is distinct from, but not completely unrecognisable to, a legal regime of truth. In this register, the professional historian has a higher role than that of the group to whom history or memory belongs or has happened: the affective or the phenomenological is not disavowed, but their capacity to be spoken for by a subjective representative is not automatically legitimised (in the Goldhagen debate, for instance, which hinged on the extent to which “ordinary Germans” were complicit in Hitler’s murder of Jews, Goldhagen was debated with in his capacity as professional historian, with little or no consideration for his subjectivity as a Jewish child of a Holocaust-affected family).16 What is of course axiomatic in the (now singular) German state’s historical culture and the education of a citizen is still much-contested in the public domain in countries like Australia or the United States of America: that the victims of state persecution and state violence must remain unforgotten in public memory. Here, the tension between public or collective memory and history might be noted for further discussion: some political orders believe that history is a necessary corrective to collective memory, while others let collective memory, as affective bonds among people, lead the way, with history having to catch up. In the former case, we can call this a historical conscience register; the latter case is quite comfortably a part of the sensibilities of representation register. We could also consider it necessary for a ‘truth and reconciliation’ register to function in such a context: surely a comforting intersubjective remembering, which dispenses with history-as-truth in favour of history-as-useful-myth-to-live-by, a glossing over of conflictual details that would otherwise disrupt intersubjective communication, could play a useful role here? It is an open question as to whether state apologies to the ‘successors’ of dispossessed peoples, victims of genocide, or colonial massacres, accompanied or unaccompanied by restitution of stolen goods or artefacts, or reparations, contribute towards a truth and reconciliation register or whether they perpetuate a sensibilities of representation register, in which the successors of victimhood and the successors of perpetratorhood remain distinct.

 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); Geoff Eley (ed.), The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism – Facing the German Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Johannes Heil and Rainer Erb (ed.), Geschichtswissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit: der Streit um Daniel J Goldhagen (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1998); a particularly apt rendering of the tone of public interventions can be read in Mitchell G. Ash, “Review Essay: American and German Perspectives on the Goldhagen Debate: History, Identity, and the Media,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies ll, No. 3 (Winter 1997), 396–411.

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Obviously, these schematic outlines, while hermeneutically useful, do not purport to be comprehensive descriptions of historical engagement outside of professional history. They assign differing emphases to affect, methodology, rationality, and collective or identitarian sentiment. And as we shall see, there are plenty of instances of the overlapping of these models. All three registers are confronted with the problem of history as a past that is inherited, aspects of which must be acknowledged or denied, or are at any rate not equally available for scrutiny. We might want to call these shibboleths and taboos. There is an identitarian tendency – who can tell what ‘history’, and to whom, on whose behalf – or a trap, if we see it as one – inherent in all three registers.

14.3 Possessing history, possessive histories, and the identitarian trap Here it might be important to further introduce the ideas of possessing history and of possessive histories. These ideas and their connections need some elaboration. At the heart of many of the disputes around remembering moments of collective violence is the idea that there are identifiable historical inheritors of the perpetrators, and that there are inheritors of the victims. The inheritors, therefore, either of victimhood or perpetratorship, are seen to possess ‘their’ history (unto how many generations?) in a way that is almost Biblical in visiting the sins of the (great-grand-)fathers upon the (great-grand-)children, and in a way that absolves the inheritors of historical wrong of suspicion of wrongdoing unto several generations. This is premised on a prior assumption, which we have already discussed: the possession of a particular history becomes that of a particular group of people, and not of human beings at large; and consequently, histories make possessive claims upon ‘their people’ – in a self-perpetuating and circular logic. This makes ‘the Jewish people’ in possession of, and possessed by, the Holocaust, as its victims, and ‘Germany’ similarly in possession of and possessed by the Holocaust as its perpetrators; the same applies to the descendants of slaves and of slave-holders; and we can add to these examples, in which the general pertinence of these histories are lost to the possessive mode – which creates competing subjectivities underpinned by what each group of protagonists must consider the only appropriate way of looking at ‘their’ history. The Holocaust used to be the axiomatic example of that which was a universal standard of evil to all of humanity, and thus needed to be known and acknowledged by all humans, independent of time or place, as well as a German and Jewish question; this is lost to the possessive/possessing mode.

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This tendency has been intensified, though it did not originate in, what we might call an identitarian view of history and politics. There are clearly, and in a direct sense, inheritors: uprooted people, occupiers of stolen property, or residual racisms are some of the historical debris of these moments of collective violence. With states, and legal entities, identified as (or self-identifying as) inheritors, and with the need to adjudicate between victimhood or perpetrator claims in individual cases, mental or emotional conditions, or general questions of historical interpretation, must be placed in a context that adjudicates at a material level: of compensation to be paid, the restitution of property or works of art to rightful owners.17 Whether this is a desirable or undesirable outcome is often decided on pragmatic grounds and on the basis of particular (legal) cases (on the basis, that is, of a contending ‘regime of truth’, as we put it earlier), even as the larger moral overtones that inform discussions tend to be foregrounded. Now, as particular groups within existing political entities are said to be addressed differently by these historical questions (persons who have possessive claims to different histories, and to different perpetrator and victim narratives), unless forced to speak to one another by, say, state policy, resistance to state policy (the Shoah over the Nakba) or a court of law, there can exist parallel narratives which make no attempt to speak to one another, without attempts to create compromises or hierarchies among the different narratives. None of these manoeuvres help us to break out of the question of possession: is there an inheritor) group to whom particular histories belong as of right? And do those histories then exercise a possessive claim upon those to whom they allegedly belong, and to what extent can these possessive histories bind their subjects’ alleged inheritors?

14.4 Comparison, analogy, and polemic: the public use of historical reasoning We could try to assess the questions at work by looking at a set of really existing public domain arguments, centred ostensibly on Germany, but travelling as ideas across other public contexts. There was something of a grammar to the debates that ensued. By ‘grammar’ I mean to suggest a way of reproducing a host of structurally similar debates that are based on the idea of a particular group to which

 See for instance Bain Atwood’s contribution to this volume; Bianca Gaudenzi, “The ‘Return of Beauty’? The politics of restitution of Nazi-looted art in Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany and Austria, 1945–1998,” European Review of History 28, 2 (2021), 323–346.

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pertains a certain type of history: a group that possesses a certain history, and is in turn possessed by it. This grammatical approach can take us out of the specifics of a particular set of outrages, towards an understanding of the deeper structures that underly the particularities. Let us introduce the distinction between comparison, analogy, and polemic, which are relatively typical operations in public domain arguments about history. As I see it, comparison requires one to know and compare two or more cases, more or less multidirectionally, without one case necessarily standing out as the central, paradigmatic or idealtypical one. In this approach, all the comparators would need to be brought into play. Analogy uses the resonances or connotations of one case to reflect upon another, which is more what I think is at stake in the statements that use the (il)legitimacy of one set of arrangements to (dis)credit another, and the analysis can very well proceed with a meagre knowledge of one or both sets of examples. And there are of course many varieties of polemic, which may or may not be based on debased or populist comparison or analogy: but a recognition of what one is putting together in that polemic, by oneself and by listeners, recognising the registers in use and the language of legitimacy behind it, needs to be clear. We can ground this in a particular case study, based in a public domain or historical culture that we have already identified as belonging to the historical conscience register: In the debates that have emerged in the recent past surrounding what can or cannot be said about that particular historical experience, the Holocaust – is it firmly and singularly German, as well as singular? – a tendency for contending parties to pit one set of possessive histories (of the Holocaust) against another (of German? colonialism) has shown itself. In some public interventions, this has taken the shape of contending memory cultures: Germans mit Migrationshintergrund complaining that the specifics of Holocaust remembrance do not relate to them (it wasn’t their grandfathers who did it), but colonialism does (it happened to their grandparents). And yet the historical conscience register has had a tendency to centre the Nazi period, perhaps because of a general acknowledgement that it is perhaps the most blatant historical example of evil (a word that historians do not use lightly) that we know. What we might want to note as well is that at least implicitly, the specifically German nature of Holocaust remembrance, which is also identitarian, has been pushed to the foreground. Here, in terms of shifting registers of legitimate history, is a movement between a historical conscience register and a sensibilities of representation register. In the sensibilities of representation register, we might recall, contending subjectivities cannot talk to one another except in terms of parallel victimhoods; contending victimhoods cannot be acknowledged within it, because they would compete for legitimacy (and resources). A contending victimhoods narrative would require a

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‘truth and reconciliation’ model. But this is somewhat at odds with what German historical culture has long practiced, requiring the adjudication of the historian and the use of ‘scientific’ evidence for a historical conscience register to apply. The new entrants, therefore, according to the historical conscience register, have to mobilise history and historians, and cannot, as they can in other systems, rely on either of the other two registers alone. But the other registers are nonetheless co-mobilised in public: how can historians ignore the subjectivities of AfroGermans? Of German-Palestinians? And without abandoning a commitment to defend Jewish life in the ‘new’ Germany? We are faced, here, with a palimpsest that overwrites (West) German and Israeli reasons of state onto all Jewish histories, massacres in Namibia onto Nazi genocides, European refugees onto Zionist pioneers and displaced Palestinian Arabs, apartheid regulations and Bantustans in the former South Africa onto daily lives in Israel/Palestine today. If this amounts to a history of the world since the Scramble for Africa, the slow dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the age of imperialist rivalries that sparked off the Great War, it can scarcely be hoped that an unambiguous group of perpetrators and victims, least of all their inheritors, can be found. Nevertheless, each of these themes can be divided by the loyalties of various people addressed by their particular identitarian markers, and the comparative frameworks that are morally normative take on the work of historical scrutiny: describing one set of arrangements in terms of another that has strongly negative overtones in public does the job of effectively discrediting that arrangement. ‘Comparison’ is probably an overstatement: it would require too much rigour and too many professional historians of an old-fashioned archival kind; analogy and polemic are what we get.

14.5 The Holocaust and colonialism Here’s how Aimé Césaire framed it in 1955: “colonisation works to decivilise the coloniser, to brutalise him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism.”18 Furthermore, ‘the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century’ needs to be told that: without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him . . . what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is

 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972) [1955], 13.

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the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.19

Césaire uses the Holocaust as the ultimate marker of inhumanity, and equates colonialism with that ultimate inhumanity. He is not, thereby, an historian of the Holocaust, but perhaps a higher-level polemicist or analogist. He is also using the Holocaust and the inhumanity of Hitler’s regime as a contrast to the ‘innocence’ of the colonized, which is far more questionable: he stresses the importance of understanding ‘the value of our old societies’: They were communal societies, never societies of the many for the few. They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anticapitalist. They were democratic societies, always. They were cooperative societies, fraternal societies. I make a systematic defence of the societies destroyed by imperialism.20

“One legacy of what happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945 has been the establishment of a standard by which historical enormities are measured and outrage registered,” Blackbourn and Eley wrote in 1982. “That moral dimension is now one of the peculiarities of German history.” 21 As a consequence, the (West) German state, which must (as a state) do penance for the Holocaust, is ill-positioned to criticize the state of Israel for its policies.22 This is an effect of the central importance of a truth and reconciliation register in which conflicting, or formerly conflicting, perspectives are reconciled by an averaging-out of potential or actual differences behind a formulaic consensus – both states require the stabilisation of history and public memory around the idea of the responsibility of Germany for the murder of Jews and the new Germany’s responsibility after 1945 to defend Jewish lives, including the right to existence of the state of Israel, which in turn can remind Germany of this responsibility as part of its own language of legitimation. But it doesn’t follow that the citizens of either country are banned from criticism of the Israeli state’s policies, or indeed its basic racialized arrangements – if that stops short of

 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 14.  Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 23.  David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1.  If reasons of state required the West German state to write a defence of Israel into its selfdefinition, defining Israel as settler colonialism required the East German state to support the Palestinian cause: but that is a longer story of a Cold War effect that we shall not, for reasons of space, consider here.

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denying a really existing state the right to exist on the basis of an alleged historical mistake – all states lack justification or have them in pretty much the same way, and their legitimacy is a matter of degree. Taking a step further in the direction of the self-denial of that right of criticism, we are within the sensibilities of representation register, which requires far more of an acceptance of separable collective memories, variant subjectivities, and the lack of a collective binding force of history upon all who are merely human. This, while allowing for the acknowledgement of widely divergent or even irreconcilable perspectives, has the effect of dividing rather than uniting people, who not only do not have common concerns, but also, apparently, have no common basis of discussion. The man who coined the term ‘genocide’, Raphael Lemkin, at least, wanted comparison. Was the Holocaust a ‘genocide’? Prototypically, yes; and he wanted his definition to be used as a yardstick for other ‘genocides’, beginning his engagement with the problem of accounting for the attempted extermination of entire peoples from the time of the Armenian genocide. Retrospectively recognized or applied as well as applied to future events that hopefully would not happen, “Never Again” was a hope, not a rule that ruled out other events being defined in that framework.23 That the Holocaust should not be compared with anything else makes no sense – if we know that it is incomparable, it is because many have indeed compared it to other things, and found it to be unique in a number of ways. The point should not be that comparison is taboo (and if it really was, it clearly didn’t stop people from making the comparison). The point is how the comparison is made. Moral equivalences are not historically sound, and in many ways, can only achieve what no one claims to want: to take one atrocity and measure it against others, such that there is a hierarchy of atrocities produced, each of which acquires its possessed historical followers, informed by the histories that possess them and not by others’ histories, subjectivities, or collective memories, whatever you want to call them: let us return to the distinction among comparison, analogy, and polemic. Even the word ‘holocaust’ wasn’t reserved for special use – it stood at least for the targeted extermination of native Americans in the so-called New World, or the expected nuclear catastrophe that awaited mankind during the Cold War. The argument that it was colonial violence that was the precursor to the Holocaust is in danger, in some versions, of being a German exceptionalist argument (it was German colonial massacres and violence that had a continuity with the

 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redressal (Concord: Carnegie Endowment, 1944), 79–98.

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Holocaust).24 One might have thought that we were past Sonderweg arguments; do we need to reinstate them? The original Sonderweg thesis, which appeared to have been overthrown by the 1980s, was that there was something peculiar about German national development that made Germans, and Germany, prone to genocidal thinking, extreme outbursts of Blut und Boden-based national pride, and hatred of internal enemies.25 A Sonderweg argument contains within it the danger of a peculiar (and circular) sensibilities of representation register: there are none so bad as we are, and we refuse to surrender that claim to anyone who isn’t us and doesn’t know what it’s like to be us. If it is a Sonderweg argument, then does the fact that the Holocaust was successfully German requires us to project that success back in history and appropriate a specifically German past to a specifically German future? What would it look like if British suppression of the Kenyan uprisings in the 1950s and their forcible incarceration and forcible sterilisations in ‘concentration camps’ (or more politely, ‘internment camps’, although the term ‘concentration camp’ dates at least back to the South African war of 1898 to 1902) were considered? This happened after the Holocaust, of course; and at least one book on the subject probably deliberately uses an inappropriate analogy: “Britain’s Gulag”.26 Why Gulag? If British colonialism doesn’t quite give us the same level of Holocaust, is it because of the scale and success of Auschwitz?27 And why not US responsibility for the Holocaust? James Q Whitman makes a case for the Nazis drawing upon southern US Jim Crow laws in the Nuremberg trials.28 “From Alabama to Auschwitz?” Or why not a more direct history of collaboration and ‘entanglement’ that is not ‘German’? Edwin Black writes of Zionists collaborating with Nazis to transfer Jews to Palestine in 1933, of American philanthropists funding eugenics research that fed into Mengele’s experiments, and IBM supplying machines and punch cards to identify and round up Jews in Germany.29 Stefan Ihrig writes of the influence of Mustafa Kemal on the Nazi

 Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Berlin: Lit, 2011).  Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History.  Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).  See Ruth Franklin, ‘“The Lucky Ones”’.  James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).  Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (expanded edition, Washington, D.C.: Dialog Press, 2012) [2001]; Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine (25th anniversary edition, Washington, D.C.: Dialog Press, 2009) [1984];

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movement, and of the Armenian genocide as a model for the Nazis to follow. From Ankara to Auschwitz?30 The selective selection of comparison and of selective moral outrage might well be a subject worth studying in itself.

14.6 The inheritance of memory and the partitioning of history History-as-memory is an inherited tradition that no one is conscious of inheriting, either as “collective unconscious” in the Jungian sense, or as “collective memory” in Maurice Halbwachs’ sense,31 and the latter makes it clear that collective memory, in the words of Oscar Hammerstein II, has “got to be carefully taught”.32 The literary critic Michael Rothberg, in a book from 2009 which was published in German in 2021, notes “the uncomfortable overlap and complicities that mark histories of genocide and colonialism” and proposes a “model of multidirectional memory, a model based on recognition of the productive interplay of disparate acts of remembrance and developed in contrast to an understanding of memory as involved in a competition over scarce public resources.”33 Is this assimilable to the truth and reconciliation register? Rothberg was read as appearing to say that different groups remembered history differently, and each remembering should be accommodated. But he seems to miss the significance of (or he does not sufficiently give weight to) the fact that the Holocaust becomes, in many of the acts of

Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and the American Attempt to Create a Master Race (expanded edition, Washington, D.C.: Dialog Press, 2012) [2003].  Stefan Ihrig, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2014); Stefan Ihrig, Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016) – which contains a slight hint of a teleology.  Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).  Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught,” from the musical South Pacific (1949).  Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonisation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 308, 309. Incidentally, was the ‘age of decolonisation’ the time of the formal ending of the European colonial empires (merging into the Cold War and the age of American neo-colonialism and Soviet patronage)? That’s what I would have thought – see also Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ‘Decolonisation’ used to be the term used by the colonising powers to describe an orderly retreat – and to efface the histories of struggle that had led to the liberation of colonised territories. It is now being used as an abstract term of moral and emotional self-emancipation, which seems to be a strange displacement – but that’s a different can of worms, which we shall not open here.

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analogy he records, the ultimate Verbrechen or crime against which other terrible acts are measured. He also appears only very grudgingly to acknowledge that there are cases “where memory’s multidirectionality functions in the interests of violence or exclusion instead of solidarity.”34 ‘Collective memory’ is carefully taught – and it is often schools that do the teaching. Do German schools really only teach the incomparable evil of the Nazism that ends in Auschwitz? The current assertion that no one thought of the Herero and Nama in the framework of genocide or of German history till they discovered it in the present century leaves out a long tradition of 68-er critiques and the history-teaching of the former German Democratic Republic.35 And historians are themselves “sites of memory”, as Pierre Nora pointed out once, somewhat reluctantly.36 If it is true that anything short of Holocaust-denial or Nazi levels of racism are not recognized in a number of public domain debates in Germany as racist at all, because there seems to be an understanding that the Holocaust must remain the benchmark of evil that must not be disrupted too often, there is also a contrary tendency: to understate the damage caused by Nazism in the past, present and future, in order to place the experiences of persons of colour (POCs) in Germany at a similar level, or to denounce the crimes of the state of Israel. Let us keep in mind the distinction we proposed earlier: comparison, analogy, and polemic.37 And we might wish to raise the question of whether we are talking here of German history taught by Germans to Germans, and only that – in which case, many of the discussions we are having here are redundant or irrelevant. The avowed purpose of much of the polemicisation that juxtaposes German colonial atrocities with German Nazi atrocities is to suggest that the sensibilities that the rest of the world has about the crimes of colonialism has yet to reach a prepostcolonial German public debate: it is an attempt to introduce an Anglophone sensibility into the German public domain, thereby challenging something of the undoubted authority still enjoyed in Germany, and by something of an act of extension the Germanophone world, of the historian as qualified expert, with the right  Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 12.  Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Girous, 2019).  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Representations 26 (Spring, 1989), 7–24; esp. 14, 16.  Blackbourn and Eley were conscious of this in their critique of the Sonderweg positions in 1982 when they wrote: “During the first drafting of this Introduction, the Prime Minister of Israel was likening Beirut to Berlin and Yasser Arafat to Hitler. At the same time, a domestic critic of Mr Begin described Israeli policy in the Lebanon as ‘Judaeo-Nazism”’. The Peculiarities of German History, 1.

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to contribute to the historical conscience of an integrated, state-wide, public domain. An attempt to turn the historical conscience model into a sensibilities of representation model by acts of polemical public blackmail, dividing Menschen mit from those ohne Migrationshintergrund, cannot be a sensible strategy. The arguments have the effect of partitioning memory between biodeutschers and Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund, both of whom will claim that they have no responsibility to know others’ histories, because histories must be produced from ‘their own’ collective memories. Moral responsibility is thereby replaced by identity: in terms of registers, historical conscience is replaced by sensibilities of representation; and truth and reconciliation remains frozen at the level of the state, available for use as attempted stabiliser, in the manner of sulphites in a bottle of wine. In the Anglo-American world such an approach has created academic as well as public taboos and the fragmenting of history to the extent that certain themes are overspecialised and identitarianised: ‘slavery’ is ‘black history’ or ‘AfricanAmerican history’, and there are active attempts to silence those outside of belonging from talking at all about things that are ‘not their history’. The effect this has had is that the (residual) British or American histories are rendered as ‘white history’, at least implicitly, and become ‘safe spaces’ for conservatives. A nonacademic, public domain, equivalent example (though one that has been supported by some academics) might be that of the artist Dana Schultz, whose work has sought to be hunted down and cancelled by moral vigilantes since 2017, when she exhibited a painting of Emmett Till, whose racially-motivated murder in 1955 was a significant catalyst in the Civil Rights movement, because she was not black.38 And in the academic world, the President of the American Historical Association (AHA) recently argued for a more nuanced and less identitarian understanding of history, using examples from his specialisation, African history; he had not taken the elementary precaution of being black, was beaten back by ‘public’ outrage, and he responded by apologising for suggesting “that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those

 The protests were spearheaded by a Berlin-based ‘artist/writer’ (her self-description), Hannah Black (who identifies as black), and called for the painting, Open Casket, to be removed and destroyed: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/arts/design/painting-of-emmett-till-at-whitney-bien nial-draws-protests.html [Last seen: 14 January 2023] and for a reproduction of the statement https://news.artnet.com/art-world/dana-schutz-painting-emmett-till-whitney-biennial-protest897929, [Last seen: 14 January 2023]. Subsequently, Schultz’s shows have generated protests alongside calls for her not to be allowed to exhibit her work at all, although she has not tried to exhibit the ‘cancelled’ painting: https://ncac.org/news/blog/demands-to-cancel-dana-schutzs-ica-ex hibit-dont-help-the-cause-for-social-justice-cause [Last seen: 14 January 2023].

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posed from positions of power.”39 Somewhere in the course of the time taken from the online publication of his article to moral outrage in the populist-public domain that he had not observed the niceties of the sensibilities of representation register, he had been persuaded to caricature his own article and to present the historical discipline as a space of therapy for self-proclaimed inheritors of historical trauma. Now, on the AHA website, one can only get to the article after scrolling past (or reading) Professor James Sweet’s abject apology for writing it (and in an ironic act of mercy for which we should probably have to be grateful, the cancelled article has at least not been removed and destroyed). Here, then, is an identifiable space for professional history to reassert itself against the tendency towards the sensibilities of representation model’s tendency to produce moral-identitarian (historiographical?) traditions that refuse to talk to one another. Attempts to bring them into contact, when coupled with the inevitable possessing/possessive histories framework of which group’s collective memory is being anointed as and upgraded to history, produce unfortunate separations. The separation and compartmentalization of human history achieves nothing more than mutual misunderstanding. I reproduce below what I said in a book published in 2011: A somewhat peculiar and instructive example of the dangers of national thinking can be provided by post-Second World War German history and historical remembering, and intimately intertwined with Jewish remembering of the destruction of European Jews by the Nazis. Among other things, the appropriation of the Holocaust as Jewish, and to a Zionist cause, has been made possible by its being remembered at least predominantly as a Jewish tragedy. Other victims are less talked about, and indeed not even recognised in the numbers game that has become shorthand for those events: six million, not nine or eleven; and the human aspect, in its universalistic horror, can be ignored. In the process, there is a danger of a nationalisation of the Holocaust by the state of Israel. Again, the particularly German guilt at this, and the anti-Nazi education received by all Germans, on both sides of the erstwhile border and thereafter in the ‘new’ Federal Republic, reinforces a sense of Germanness-in-guilt that can paradoxically perpetuate the very nationalism that Germans in particular learn to view with suspicion at a time when many other ‘nationals’ are learning to wave their flags with pride . . . This makes it perfectly possible to forget that many states had their nasty nationalisms that were on the verge of fascism, if not actually fascist, and the Germans were simply the ones with the greater success at being fascists – a success that now hides the endeavours of other states and movements to achieve fascism(s). [T]here is also a historical paradox to national remembering (negative national solidarity), state forgetting (after all, the myth of Stunde Null, a completely new start to the post-Nazi states, has been integral to post-war politics, despite the presence of Nazis in prominent positions in

 https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september2022/is-history-history-identity-politics-and-teleologies-of-the-present [Last seen: 14 January 2023.]

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the West German state) and nonetheless a legal continuity (compensation to victims is still paid by the German state as taking legal responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi state).40

This is where we might be tempted to get a little prescriptive about history and collective memory. If certain histories are possessed by particular people, these particular people must be dispossessed, and ‘their’ histories given freely to others, with others’ histories also given to them. Remembering histories that do not belong to you is a matter of decoupling history from identity, without which decoupling you cannot achieve mutual understanding.

14.7 Some conclusions We might usefully remind ourselves here that the term ‘languages of legitimation’ is derived to some extent from Quentin Skinner’s formulation that those wishing to intervene in public domain arguments must explain themselves in a language intelligible to their audience, and that consequently, changes in a language of political legitimacy can only be gradual, referring to a settled number of terms and concepts rather than being able to determine its own terms, slowing down radical innovation.41 There might of course be contending languages of legitimation available at the same time, and one has a choice of what one’s primary reference points are in that context. The question of the three registers examined here, and the possibilities of developing them as hermeneutic devices for a language of public politics, is a consideration that might be worthwhile to look at. At stake is the wider question of the space of ‘history’ in the public domain, and the question of whether a professional discipline of historians is still relevant. Where we are now chasing morally safe positions (what can be said, outside US classroom politics, which is increasingly a protected space away from the requirements of a public?), methodological or epistemological questions, and political questions even more so, are difficult to ask. The three registers, truth and reconciliation, sensibilities of representation, and historical conscience, tend to all appear to varying degree in many cases of live political argument: the truth and reconciliation register has often been used

 Benjamin Zachariah, Playing the Nation Game: The Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (Delhi: Yoda Press, 2011), 258–259.  The extent of my borrowing from Skinner in this regard, and why in following Koselleck and Begriffsgeschichte terms and concepts should not be confused, are outlined in Benjamin Zachariah, “Moving Ideas and How to Catch Them,” in Zachariah, After the Last Post, 129–148.

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by states or other institutional custodians of collective memory to stabilise a public argument or stop it from causing serious damage to the functioning of social stability, at the expense of what an earlier generation of historians might have called historical accuracy. Similarly, sensibilities of representation have been the cause of the revision of historiography to conform to public sensibilities and to calls to accommodate the lives and experiences of hitherto excluded people – and there were other registers that were capable of doing this already, but this has come to be the preferred one. Where sensibilities of representation stresses belonging and authenticity, affect and collective memory, there is a danger that it does a job of separating historical experience into insider-outsider communitarianism, and there can be no historical conscience register to provide collective civic belonging within a shared political order, without an imposed truth and reconciliation register of enforced historical and historiographical neatening. There have been moments of optimism when it was imagined that a robust historicised public domain was not incompatible with the formation of strong solidarities or national identities, which would nevertheless be inclusive. If we were to consider India after independence, for instance, the use of history as national remembrance or national narrative was expected to function as the binding force of a wider national public, because the scientific overlapped with the national, reinforced a scientific spirit, and promoted a non-discriminatory narrative based on equality. (All universalist narratives run into the question, at one point or another, of who gets imperfectly included or excluded from its ambit.) We shall not venture here too deeply into the history of postmodern and postcolonial takes on history, nor the partisanship involved in reading history from a single standpoint and defending that standpoint on the grounds that it is a victim-oriented perspective rather than a perpetrator-oriented perspective. That’s something that has worked for too long, and plenty of critiques of that set of positions exist. The connections and complicity of scholarship and politics must be opened up to scrutiny here; for it is clear that we are not, in this context, talking about a separation of academic and political spheres of communication. The continuum of conservatism in community-family-culture-nation formations is in the ascendant. This is not particularly country-specific, as ‘history’ of some description is used in public to buttress sectarian arguments, demands, or violence. We are now also forced to worry about something more insidious. In many states, historians now speak in hushed tones with much self-censorship and write down very little of what they might have done before. There appears to be a very serious set of disputes about what history is and about what material about the past can be brought to bear on public arguments. Contrary to the demands of what we now laugh at as ‘scientific’ history and its pretensions, among which were the claims to ‘objectivity’ beyond positionality that were the hallmark of historians’ self-

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legitimation until the 1960s, and whose loss of legitimacy has been swift and inexorable, the rise of history as collective memory and of history as public engagement with the past, has proceeded apace. The corollary, that of collective memory being written up as history, and thereby achieving a promotion to a higher epistemological status, has gone relatively unnoticed, though the significance ought to be clear: it is its being promoted to history that gives collective memory the status it requires. As for professional historians: you write within a constituency in terms of how you think you will be received. And it appears that public-domain ‘history’ can proceed quite happily without historians.

Biographical Notes Bain Attwood is Professor of History at Monash and has held fellowships at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. His research focuses on the history of relations between indigenous and settler peoples in Australia and New Zealand. He is the author of several books including Rights for Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003), Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005) and Empire and the Making of Native Title: Sovereignty, Property and Indigenous People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), and is the co-editor of Protection and Empire: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). His book Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2009) won the 2010 Ernest Scott Prize for the most distinguished contribution to the history of Australia or New Zealand or colonial history, and his Empire and the Making of Native Title was the joint winner of the 2021 W. H. Oliver Prize for the best book on any aspect of New Zealand History. June Bam /-Hutchison holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Oppositional Historiography, Education and Sociology (Stellenbosch University, 2001). Associate Professor in African Feminist Studies at the University of Cape Town, she is the outgoing founding director of its San and Khoi Centre. She has held previous positions internationally for several years: as visiting professor in ‘Sites of Memory’ for Stanford University’s Overseas Programme, research associate at York University (Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past) and at Kingston University (in Human Rights and Heritage). Her current research interests are in African Feminist indigenous knowledges, San and Khoi historiographies, decolonisation, archival and heritage studies. Her recent work includes two coedited peer reviewed volumes: Rethinking Africa Volume 3, Whose History Counts (African SunMedia, 2018) and Rethinking Africa Volume 4, Indigenous Women Re-interpret Southern Africa’s Past (Jacana, 2021). Her latest single-authored book is titled Ausi Told Me: Why Cape Herstoriographies Matter (Jacana, 2021). Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movement at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He is also Executive Chair of the Foundation “History of the Ruhr” and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has had visiting professorships in Sydney, Paris and Changchun. His research focusses on the history of historiography, historical theory, labour history, deindustrialization studies and memory studies. His recent publications include History and Identity: How Historical Theory Shapes Historical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015); Dynamics of Emigration: Émigré Scholars and the Production of Historical Knowledge in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2022 (co-edited with Philipp Müller); The Engaged Historian: Perspectives on the Intersection of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2020). Berber Bevernage is Associate Professor of historical theory at the Department of History at Ghent University (Belgium). His research focuses on the dissemination, attestation and contestation of historical discourse and historical culture in post-conflict situations. He has published in journals such as History and Theory, Rethinking History, Memory Studies, Social History and History Workshop Journal. Berber is (co-)founder of the interdisciplinary research forum ‘TAPAS/Thinking About the PASt’ which focuses on popular, academic and artistic dealings with the past. Together with

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colleagues he established the International Network for Theory of History (INTH) which aims to foster collaboration among theorists of history around the world. Rodrigo Bragio Bonaldo is Professor of Theory and Philosophy of History at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. Currently he is visiting scholar at Freie Universität Berlin (2022–2023), affiliated with the Research Area “Global History”. His research focusses on theory of history and history of historiography, ancient and modern history, conceptual history, as well as the interweavings between digital and public history. He is co-founder of the project “Theory of History on Wikipedia”. His recent publications include Performances do passado: drama social e conceito de história nos últimos anos de Alfonso X de Castela (História da Historiografia, 2020); and together with Flávia Varella, Negociando autoridades, construindo saberes: a historiografia digital e colaborativa no projeto Teoria da História na Wikipédia (Revista Brasileira de História, 2020); Todos podem ser divulgadores? Wikipédia e curadoria digital em Teoria da História (Estudos ibero-americanos, 2021). Antoon De Baets is emeritus professor of History, Ethics and Human Rights at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is the author of many publications, particularly on the censorship of history, the ethics of historians, and the history of human rights, including books such as Responsible History (New York / Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009) and Crimes against History (London: Routledge, 2019). His latest major publication is “The View of the Past in International Humanitarian Law (1860–2020),” International Review of the Red Cross, 104, nos. 920–921 (November 2022), 1586–1620. Since 1995, he has coordinated the “Network of Concerned Historians”. He is the President of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography (2022–2026). A complete curriculum vitae is at concernedhistorians.org/va/cv.pdf. His ORCID is 0000-0002-5734-8193. Alexandra Kolesnik, PhD in History, is Senior research fellow at the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI). She is Associate Professor at School of History, Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation. Since 2019, member of the International Advisory Board of the journal International Public History. Her major fields of research are history of popular music, public history, history and sociology of knowledge, sociology of culture. Fernando Nicolazzi is Professor of Theory of History and History of Historiography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil), Coordinator of the Laboratory on the Political Uses of the Past (Luppa/UFRGS), and Researcher in the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). He was Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona (2018–2019). His research interests include theory of history, Brazilian historiography, and uses of the past in contemporary societies. Among his publications are Um estilo de história: a viagem, a memória, o ensaio. Sobre Casa-Grande & Senzala e a representação do passado (São Paulo: Edunesp, 2011); editor and co-auhor of História e historiadores no Brasil: do fim do Império ao alvorecer da República (Porto Alegre: PUC-RS, 2015); and, with Arthur Lima de Avila and Rodrigo Turin, co-editor and co-author of A história (in)disciplinada: teoria, ensino e difusão do conhecimento histórico (Vitória: Milfontes, 2019). Larissa Schulte Nordholt is a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen University & Researching, where she is working on the colonial and postcolonial history of knowledge of Wageningen University in Suriname and Indonesia. She completed her PhD-thesis, Africanising African History. Decolonisation of Knowledge in UNESCO’s General History of Africa (1964–1998) in December 2021. She has previously published articles in History in Africa, History of the Humanities and co-edited a special

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issue for the Journal for the Philosophy of History alongside Herman Paul. She is interested in the global history of colonial and postcolonial knowledge productions and histories of emancipation and activism therein. Vladimir Petrović is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History, Belgrade. He holds a PhD in history from Central European University and has completed postgraduate training at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam. His book The Emergence of Historical Forensic Expertise: Clio takes the Stand (Routledge, 2017) examines the role of historians and social scientists as expert witnesses in some of the most dramatic legal encounters of the twentieth century. Petrović was also working in this intersection between history and law, both in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and in the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office. He published extensively on ethnic “cleansing” and explored strategies of confrontation with its legacy. He teaches at Boston University and is an affiliate of UMass Boston’s Applied Ethics Center. Lutz Raphael is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Trier. Recently he has been Visiting Fellow at the European Studies Centre of St Antony’s College Oxford, and Gerda Henkel Guest Professor at the German Historical Institute London and the London School of Economics. In 2013, he received the Wilhelm-Gottfried-Leibniz-Prize of the DFG. His research focusses on the contemporary history of historiography in time of globalisations and the social history of deindustrialisation in Western Europe since the 1970s. His recent publications include Jenseits von Kohle und Stahl. Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte Westeuropas nach dem Boom (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2019) English translation: Beyond Coal and Steel. (London: Polity Press 2023), Ordnungsmuster und Deutungskämpfe. Wissenspraktiken im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts, (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht 2018); (as editor and co-author): Poverty and Welfare in Modern German history (Oxford: Berghahn 2017); and together with Anselm Doering-Manteuffel and Thomas Schlemmer, eds., Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2016). Irina Savelieva is Doctor of Sciences in History, and Chief research fellow at the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI). She is Professor at the School of History, Faculty of Humanities, Tenured Professor, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russian Federation. Since 2019, member of the Executive Board of the journal Public History Weekly. Her major fields of research are methodology of history, sociology of knowledge, history of ideas, social history (19th-20th centuries), European and American historiography. Kanad Sinha is Assistant Professor of Ancient Indian and World History in The Sanskrit College and University, Kolkata. He read History at Presidency College, Kolkata, and Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research interests include early Indian textual and intellectual traditions with focus on the itihasa-purana tradition, social and cultural history of early Indian cities, and the political ideas and institutions of early India. In 2016 and 2017, he received the Vijay Kumar Thakur Memorial Prize awarded by the Indian History Congress. He is author of State, Power and Legitimacy: The Gupta Kingdom (New Delhi: Primus, 2018, as co-editor and author) and From Dāśarājn͂a to Kurukṣetra: Making of a Historical Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021). Boris Stepanov, PhD in Cultural Studies, is Deputy Director at the Poletaev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI), and Associate Professor at the School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities, National Research University Higher School of

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Economics, Russian Federation. His professional interests include cultural sociology, cultural studies, theory of history, intellectual history, urban studies, and soviet and post-soviet culture. Jakob Tanner is Professor emeritus of Contemporary History at the Research Institute for Socialand Economic History at Zurich University. From 1996 to 2001 he was a member of the Independent Commission of Experts “Switzerland-Second World War”; 2001/02 he received a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin; 2004 he was invited to the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris; From 2004 to 2009 he was a Permanent Fellow of the Collegium Helveticum (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology/UZH), followed in 2011 by a Senior Fellowship at the FRIAS (Freiburg i.B.) In 2015, he was awarded an Honorary doctorate from the University of Lucerne. As a founding member of the Centre for the History of Knowledge he was also an editor of the Yearbook Nach Feierabend Among his research interests are the financial and economic history of Switzerland, the history of eating habits and popular forms of knowledge and the theory of history. 2015 he published Geschichte der Schweiz (Munich: Beck Verlag). Flávia Varella is Associate Professor of Theory of History at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal História da Historiografia: International Journal of Theory and History of Historiography, and Vice-President of the Brazilian Society of Theory and History of Historiography. Since 2015, she is developing outreach and pedagogical activities related to editing on Wikipedia, the main one being the Project Theory of History on Wikipedia. Her research focusses on history of historiography, national history-writing, and digital humanities. She is the author of Um Brasil Medieval: Clima, Raça e Teorias Civilizacionais na História do Brasil de Robert Southey (Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço, 2021). Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt is a PhD Student at Ghent University (2018–2023) working at the intersection of the history of historiography, the history and sociology of knowledge, and the history of European integration. Her current work focuses the history of European funding for historical research between 1970 and today. She has obtained her BA in History at the University of Leuven (2016), holds an MA in History from Ghent University (2017) and an MA in the Social Sciences from The University of Chicago (2018), where she held a Fulbright Grant and B.A.E.F. Baillet Latour Fellowship (2017–2018). In 2018, Marie-Gabrielle received the André Schaepdrijver Prize for best MA thesis at Ghent University; in 2021 she received a Vibeke Sørensen Grant from the European University Institute (2021). Her recent publications include “On the Emergence of Anti-relativism in the EU’s Historical Culture (2000–2020)” (International Journal of of Politics, Culture and Society, 2021) and “Borgesian Dreams and Epistemic Nightmares: The Effects of Early Computer Use on French Medievalists (1975–1995)” (Storia della Storiografia, 2019). Rafael Verbuyst has a joint PhD in History (Ghent University, 2021) and Anthropology (University of the Western Cape, 2021). He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University’s History Department and a visiting research fellow at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies (2022–2024). His research centres on the revival of indigenous identity in post-apartheid South Africa, land claims, settler colonialism, ethnographic methodology, the political uses of the past and the concept of indigeneity. He has regularly conducted ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa since 2014. Among others, his work has appeared in Anthropology Southern Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies and Social Dynamics. He is the author of Khoisan Consciousness: An Ethnography of Emic Histories and Indigenous Revivalism in Post-Apartheid Cape Town (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2022). He sits on the advisory board of Afrika Focus and is a section editor of Journal of Organizational Ethnography.

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Benjamin Zachariah is Senior Research Fellow at the DFG Leibniz Research Group ‘The Contemporary History of Historiography’ at Trier University. He read history at Presidency College, Calcutta, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His current research interests include historiography and historical theory, the movements of ideas in the twentieth century, international revolutionary networks, and global fascism. He is the author of Nehru (London: Routledge, 2004); Developing India: an Intellectual and Social History, c. 1930–1950 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005; 2nd edn 2012); Playing the Nation Game: the Ambiguities of Nationalism in India (Delhi: Yoda 2011; 2nd edn 2016); and After the Last Post: the Lives of Indian Historiography in India (Berlin: De Gruyter 2019). He is co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views 1917–1939 (Delhi: Sage 2015).

Selected Bibliography on ‘Public Uses of the Past and the Role of Professional Historians in the Public Sphere’ Apostolopoulos, Petros. “Producing Historical Knowledge on Wikipedia”. Madison Historical Review 16 (2019): 1–24. Arthur J. Ray. Telling it to the Judge: Taking Native History to Court. Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2011. Attwood, Bain. “In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, ‘Distance,’ and Public History.” Public Culture 20, 1 (2008): 75–95. Bam, June, Lungisile Ntsebeza, and Allan Zinn, eds. Whose History Counts: Decolonising African PreColonial Historiography. Cape Town: African SUN Media, 2018. Banner, James M. Jr, Being a Historian. An Introduction to the Professional World of History.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Banner, James M. Jr., The Ever-Changing Past: Why All History Is Revisionist History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. Barkan, Elazar and Alexander Karn, eds. Taking Wrongs Seriously. Apologies and Reconciliation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Barkan, Elazar. “Introduction: Historians and Historical Reconciliation.” The American Historical Review 114, no. 4 (2009): 899–913. Bédarida, François. “The Modern Historian’s Dilemma: Conflicting Pressures from Science and Society.” The Economic History Review 40, no. 3 (1987): 335–348. Belavusau, Uladzislau, and Aleksandra Gliszczyńska-Grabias, eds. Law and Memory: Towards Legal Governance of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Berger, Stefan, ed. The Engaged Historian: Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019. Berger, Stefan, and Chris Lorenz, eds. Nationalizing the Past. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe. Basingstoke, Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Bevernage, Berber. “Transitional Justice and Historiography: Challenges, Dilemmas and Possibilities’. Macquarie Law Journal 13 (2014): 7–24. Bevernage, Berber. “Writing the Past Out of the Present: History and the Politics of Time in Transitional Justice.” History Workshop Journal 69 (2010): 111–131. Bevernage, Berber, and Kate E. Temoney, “Historical Understanding and Reconciliation after Violent Conflict,” in Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Lars Deile. 185–194, London: Bloomsbury, 2022. Bevernage, Berber, and Nico Wouters, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History after 1945. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. Bevernage, Berber, Eline Mestdagh, Walderez Ramalho and Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt, eds. Claiming the People’s Past: Populist Engagements with History and the Challenges to Historical Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Bevernage, Berber. History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice. New York: Routledge, 2012. Bhambra, Gurminder K., Kerem Nişancioğlu and Dalia Gebrial, Decolonising the University. London: Pluto Press, 2018.

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Selected Bibliography

Borda, Aldo Zammit. Histories Written by International Criminal Courts and Tribunals Developing a Responsible History Framework, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020. Carvalho, Bruno, Leal de Pastor, and Ana Paula Tavares Teixeira, eds. História Pública e Divulgação de História. São Paulo: Letra & Voz, 2019. Cauvin, Thomas. Public History: A Textbook of Practice. London: Routledge, 2016. De Certeau, Michel de. The Writing of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Public Life of History: An Argument out of India.” Public Culture 20 no.1 (2008): 143–68. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Politics and Possibility of Historical Knowledge: Continuing the Conversation,” Postcolonial Studies 14 (2011): 243–50. Collins, Harry, Robert Evans, Darrin Durant, and Martin Weinel, eds, Experts and the Will of the People: Society, Populism and Science. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020. Combs, Nancy A. Fact-Finding without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiary Foundations of International Criminal Convictions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Conboy, Martin, ed. How Journalism Uses History. Routledge, 2013. Currie, Adrian, and Daniel Swaim. “Past Facts and the Nature of History.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 (2021): 1–28. Danniau, Fien. “Public History in a Digital Context: Back to the Future or Back to Basics?”. BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 128 (4) (2013): 118–144. Daston, Lorraine. “Objectivity and Impartiality: Epistemic Virtues in the Humanities.” In The Making of the Humanities, Volume III, edited by Rens Bod, Thijs Weststeijn and Jaap Maat, 27–42. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. David, Lea “Moral Remembrance and New Inequalities.” Global Perspectives 1 (2020): 1–15. De Baets, Antoon. Crimes against History. London: Routledge, 2019. De Baets, Antoon. Responsible History. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2009. De Groot, Jerome. Consuming history: historians and heritage in contemporary popular culture. London, New York: Routledge, 2016. Delafontaine, Ramses. Historians as Expert Judicial Witnesses in Tobacco Litigation: A Controversial Legal Practice. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2015. Donia, Robert J. “Encountering the Past: History at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal”, The Journal of the International Institute, Volume 11, Issue 2–3. Dumoulin, Olivier. Le rôle social de l’historien. De la chaire au prétoire. Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. Echternkamp, Jörg, ed. Experience and memory: the Second World War in Europe. Oxford: Berghahn, 2010. Eltringham, Nigel. “Illuminating the broader context’: Anthropological and Historical Knowledge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute Vol. 19, No. 2 (June 2013), 338–355. Evans, Richard J. Eric Hobsbawm, A Life in History. New York: Little Brown, 2019. Evans, Richard J. Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History, and the David Irving Trial. London: Verso, 2002. Falola, Toyin. Nationalism and African Intellectuals. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001. Førland, Tor Egil. Values, Objectivity, and Explanation in Historiography. New York: Routledge, 2017. Forsdick, Charles, James Mark and Eva Spišiaková. “Introduction. From Populism to Decolonisation: How We Remember in the Twenty-First Century,” Modern Languages Open, 1 (2020): 1–34.

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Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon. 109–133, New York: Pantheon, 1980. Frei, Norbert, Dirk van Laak and Michael Stolleis, eds. Geschichte vor Gericht: Historiker, Richter und die Suche nach Gerechtigkeit. München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000. Friedman, Jonathan. “The Past in the Future: History and the Politics of Identity,” American Anthropologist 94 (1992): 837–859. Friedman, M., and Paul Kenney, eds. Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics. Springer, 2005. Fronza, Emanuela. Memory and Punishment: Historical Denialism, Free Speech and the Limits of Criminal Law, T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague 2018. Gardner, James B. and Paula Hamilton, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Public History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of Justice. London: Verso, 1999. Goodman, Maxine D., “Slipping through the Gate: Trusting Daubert and Trial Procedures to Reveal the Pseudo-Historian’ Expert Witness and to Enable the Reliable Historian Expert Witness – Troubling Lessons from Holocaust-Related Trials.” Baylor Law Review, Vol. 60, Issue 3 (2008), 824–879 Grafton, Anthony, and Grossman, James. “No More Plan B.” Perspectives on History, October 1 (2011). Accessed October 4, 2021. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectiveson-history/october-2011/no-more-plan-b-a-very-modest-proposal-for-graduate-programs-inhistory Green, Alix. History, Policy and Public Purpose: Historians and Historical Thinking in Government. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Gudonis, Marius and Benjamin T. Jones, eds. History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis. New York: Routledge, 2020. Harrington, Brooke and Leonard Seabrooke, “Transnational Professionals.” Annual Review of Sociology 46 (2020): 399–417. Hetland, Per, Palmyre Pierroux, and Line Esborg, eds. A History of Participation in Museums and Archives Traversing Citizen Science and Citizen Humanities, London: Routledge, 2020. Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig, “Human Rights and History,” Past and Present, no. 232 (August 2016), 279–310. Jansen, Jonathan D., ed. Decolonisation in Universities. The Politics of Knowledge. Johanesburg: Wits University Press, 2019. Kapell, Matthew Wilhelm and Andrew B. R. Elliott, eds. Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Karn, Alexander M. “Depolarizing the Past: The Role of Historical Commissions in Conflict Mediation and Reconciliation.” Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 1 (2006): 31–50. Karn, Alexander. Amending the Past Europe’s Holocaust Commissions and the Right to History. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. Kohl, Christoph, Barbara Christophe, Heike Liebau and Achim Saupe, eds. The Politics of Authenticity and Populist Discourses. Media and Education in Brazil, India and Ukraine. Cham: Springer Nature, 2021. Konishi, Shino, “First Nations Scholars, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous History.” Australian Historical Studies 50 (2019): 285–304. Koposov, Nikolay. Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

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Landsberg, Alison. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. Columbia University Press, 2015. Leersen, Joseph Theodoor, and Ann Rigney, eds. Historians and Social Values. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000. Lowenthal, David. The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country- Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Maerker, Anna Katharina, Simon Sleight, and Adam Sutcliffe, eds. History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present. London; New York: Routledge, 2018. Mamdani, Mahmood. “Introduction: The Quest for Academic Freedom.” in Academic Freedom in Africa, edited by Mamadou Diouf and Mahmood Mamdani, 1–16. Dakar: CODESRIA, 1997. Martin, Jonathan D. “Historians at the Gate: Accommodating Expert Testimony in Federal Courts.” New York University Law Review 78 (2003): 1518–1543. Mauad, Ana Maria, Almeida, Juniele Rabêlo de, and Santhiago, Ricardo, eds. História Pública no Brasil. Sentidos e Itinerários. São Paulo: Letra & Voz, 2016. Mooney-Melvin, Patricia. “Professional Historians and the Challenge of Redefinition.” In Public History. Essays from the Field, edited by James B. Gardner and Peter S. Lapaglia, 5–21. Malabar: Krieger Publishing Company, 1999. Niesser, Jacqueline, and Juliane Tomann. “Public and Applied History in Germany. Just Another Brick in the Wall of the Academic Ivory Tower?” The Public Historian, (2018): 11–27. Niezen, Ronald. The Rediscovered Self: Indigenous Identity and Cultural Justice. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2009. Neumann, Klaus, and Janna Thompson, eds. Historical Justice and Memory. University of Wisconsin Pres, 2015. Moses, A. D. “Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History.” History and Theory 44, no. 3 (2005): 311–32. Noiriel, Gérard. Sur la “crise” de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Norton, Claire, and Mark Donnelly. Liberating Histories. New York: Routledge, 2018. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Ohara, João. “The Disciplined Historian: ‘Epistemic Virtue’, ‘Scholarly Persona’, and Practices of Subjectivation. A Proposal for the Study of Brazilian Professional Historiography.” Práticas da História 1, 2 (2016): 39–56. Paletschek, Sylvia. “Introduction: why Analyse Popular Historiographies?” In Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Centuries: Cultural Meanings, Social Practices, edited by Sylvia Paletschek, 1–18. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011. Pallí-Asperó, Cira, Clarifying the Past: Understanding Historical Commissions in Conflicted and Divided Societies. New York: Routledge, 2022. Paul, Herman. “What is a Scholarly Persona? Ten Theses on Virtues, Skills, and Desires,” History and Theory 53 (2014): 348–371. Paul, Herman. “Distance and Self-Distanciation: Intellectual Virtue and Historical Method Around 1900.” History and Theory 50 (2011): 104–16. Paul, Herman. “Performing History: How Historical Scholarship is Shaped by Epistemic Virtues.” History and Theory 50 (2011): 1–19. Pendas Devin O. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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383

Petrovic, Vladimir. “Slobodan Milošević in the Hague: Failed Success of a Historical Trial.” In Remembrance, History and Justice, edited by Vladimir Tismaneanu, Bogdan Iacob, 296–310. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2015. Petrović, Vladimir. The Emergence of Historical Forensic Expertise: Clio Takes the Stand. New York: Routledge, 2016. Petrović. Vladimir.”Swinging the Pendulum: Fin-de-Siècle Historians in the Courts.” In Understanding the Age of Transitional Justice edited by Nanci Adler, 21–36. Ithaca, NY: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Phillips, Murray G. “Wikipedia and History: a Worthwhile Partnership in the Digital Era?”. Rethinking History 20 (2016): 523–43. Poster, Mark. “History in the Digital Domain”. Historein 4 (2003): 17–32. Rademaker, Laura and Ben Silverstein, “Deep Historicities,” Interventions (2021): 1–24. Raphael, Lutz, and Benjamin Zachariah, “Intellectual Honesty and the Purposes of History,” Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method (2021), DOI:10.5040/9781350970885.076. Evans, Richard J. “History, Memory and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness,” History and Theory 41 (2002) 326–345. Rosenzweig, Roy. “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” The Journal of American History 93 (2006): 117–46. Rosenzweig, Roy, and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. New edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Rousso, Henry. The Haunting Past: History, Memory, and Justice in Contemporary France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Rousso, Henry. The Latest Catastrophe: History, the Present, the Contemporary. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Samman, Amin. History in Financial Times. History in Financial Times. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Samuel, Raphael. Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso, 1994. Sander, Barrie. Doing Justice to History: Confronting the past in International Criminal Courts.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Sarat A. and T. Kearns, eds. History, Memory and the Law. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Scott, Joan Wallach. On the Judgment of History. New York, Columbia University Press, 2020. Soen, Violette, and Bram De Ridder. “Applied History in The Netherlands and Flanders: Synergising Practices in Education, Research, and Society.” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 136, no. 4 (2021): 27–57. Southgate, Beverley C. Why Bother with History? Ancient, Modern and Postmodern Motivations. London: Pearson Education, 2000. Torpey, John, ed. Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004. Tosh, John.“Public History, Civic Engagement and the Historical Profession in Britain.” History 99, no. 2 (335) (2014): 191–212. Torstendahl Rolf. The Rise and Propagation of Historical Professionalism. New York: Routledge 2015. Tozzi, Verónica. “The Epistemic and Moral Role of Testimony.” History and Theory 51 (2012), 1–17. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1997.

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Tucker, Aviezer. “Historiographic Revision and Revisionism. The Evidential Difference,” in Past in the Making. Historical Revisionism in Central Europe after 1989, edited by Michal Kopecek, 1–14. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008. Turner, Mathew. Historians at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: Their Role as Expert Witnesses. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Valencia-García, Louie Dean, ed. Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories. London: Routledge, 2020. von Lünen, Alexander, Katherine J. Lewis, Benjamin Litherland, and Pat Cullum. Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian. New York: Routledge, 2019. Wilson, Richard Ashby. Writing History in International Criminal Trials. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Wouters, Nico. “The Use of History in the Field of Transitional Justice: A Critical Introduction.” In Transitional Justice and Memory in Europe (1945–2013), edited by Nico Wouters. Cambridge: intersentia, 2014, 1–24. Zachariah, Benjamin, After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.

Index Abrahams, Yvette 215, 224, 225, 233, 239–241 Academic – Academic freedom 28, 78, 300, 303, 305, 307, 311 – Academic institutions 10, 114, 210, 236 – Academic training 169, 174, 175, 179, 180 Activism 6, 24–26, 44, 63, 68, 76, 80–82, 87–88, 215, 217–219, 224, 226, 229, 233, 234, 237–241, 302, 308, 316, 319, 321, 322 (also see Advocacy) – Activism, human rights 302, 303, 309, 316, 319, 322 (also see Advocacy, Human rights) Africa 66, 69, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 81–88, 213–241, 362, 363 – Africa, general history of (GHA) 14, 23, 24, 65–88 – Africa, South 26, 71, 213–241, 355, 362 – Africa, North 41, 42, 67, 73 African studies 24, 66, 68, 69, 77, 88, 213, 229, 231, 232, 235 African-American 69, 72, 368 Agency 45, 129, 211, 219, 342 Al Hussein, Zeid Ra’ad 315, 322 Algorithms 254, 266, 291, 345 Allcock, John 131 American Historical Association (AHA) 29, 299, 368 Amin, Idi 79 Amnesia 3, 334 Analogy 202, 360–362, 364, 365, 367 Ančić, Mladen 132 Anderson, Benedict 56 Anthropologists 32, 123, 142, 217 Anthropology 93, 142, 199, 213, 255, 259, 311, 318 Apartheid 214, 215, 218, 219, 220, 221, 224, 226, 234, 236, 239, 241, 355, 362 Apologies 5, 16, 330, 358, 369 Archaeology 104, 106, 109, 112, 217, 230, 249, 286, 311, 318 Archeologists 105, 106, 111, 217, 228, 232, 337 Archives 5, 6, 14, 175, 213, 222, 224, 237, 249, 255, 257, 261–263, 300, 304, 311, 316, 318, 330, 332, 336, 349

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111186047-017

Arendt, Hannah 331, 339 Art 6, 31, 96, 110, 264, 332, 360 Aryans 89, 93, 99, 110, 113 Asia 23, 29, 106, 214 – Asia, Central 112, 113 – Asia, South 106, 107, 112, 113 Associação Nacional de História (ANPUH, Brazil) 168, 170, 176, 300 Australia 7, 141, 142, 316, 358 Austria 39, 202, 316 Authenticity 22, 69, 70, 78, 88, 99, 103, 118, 176, 371 Authoritarian 11, 15, 30, 32, 314, 331 – Authoritarian regimes 8, 9, 15, 79 (also see Autocratic regimes) Authority 3, 9, 24, 30, 31, 38, 42, 58, 63, 65, 82, 88, 119, 144, 146, 148, 152, 153, 157, 233, 291, 294, 320, 324, 342, 367 – Authority, expert 17, 23, 29, 30, 58, 88, 172, 182, 273, 274, 275, 278, 282, 283, 284, 294 – Authority, state 20, 21, 329 – Authority, shared 27, 273, 285 Autocratic regimes 71, 78, 316, 324, 344 (also see Authoritarian regimes) Autonomy 9, 11, 27, 32, 45, 170, 340 Ayodhya 105, 106, 108 Baartman, Sarah 224, 225, 230 Bam, June 215, 218, 228, 229, 231, 235 Banner Jr., James M. 163, 164, 166 Belgium 16, 132 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 89, 113, 114, 310 Bloch, Marc 333, 346 Boahen, Adu 80, 85 Bosnia and Herzegovina 124, 128, 131, 132, 138 Botswana 230, 231 Boym, Svetlana 77, 82 Brazil 7, 25, 27, 163–184, 254, 271–295, 300, 316 Bredekamp, Henry Charles 219–221, 223, 224, 233, 237, 240, 241 Brexit 12, 341 Buddhism 96, 98–100, 103, 107, 108 (also see Religion) Budding, Audrey 133, 134–135

386

Index

Burckhardt, Jacob 332 Burke, Edmund 22, 118–119, 121 Calic, Marie-Janine 131 Canada 132, 141, 142, 316 Cantemir, Demetrius 119–121 Cape Town 26, 213–215, 221, 222, 227, 231, 235, 239 Capitalism 42, 44, 47–53, 55, 57–59, 62, 63, 340 – Capitalism, anti- 59 Carl Becker 29 Čavoški, Kosta 135 Censorship 8, 15, 264, 299, 303, 316–322, 345 – Censorship, self- 28, 353, 357, 371 Cercas, Javier 334–336 Césaire, Aimé 362, 363 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 25, 81, 142, 147 China 46, 55, 92, 102, 319 Christianity 222, 342, 355 (also see Religion) Chroniclers 117 – Chroniclers, official 92 (also see History, official) Chronicles 92, 98, 100, 103 Citizenship 93, 196 Civilizations 92, 111 – Civilization, ancient Egyptian 72, 73 – Civilization, Asiatic 90 – Civilization, classical Greek and Roman 93 – Civilization, Harappan 89, 110, 111, 113, 114 – Civilization, Indian 91, 93, 94, 96, 101, 104, 109 – Civilization, Indus-Sarasvati 109, 111 – Civilization, oriental 92 – Civilization, Vedic 93, 110, 111 Colonialism 5, 16, 22, 23, 25, 28, 32, 39, 41, 42, 65, 74, 78, 81, 85–88, 89–105, 109–110, 114, 119, 141–143, 157, 213–220, 224–241, 304, 305, 355–358, 361, 362–367 – Colonialism, anti- 24, 66–67, 74–76, 80, 86, 225–226, 235 – Colonialism, de- 213–214, 217, 218, 225, 228, 230–232, 236–238, 241 – Colonialism, post- 15, 23, 32, 80, 83, 86, 335, 336, 341, 356, 371 Commissions of inquiry 16, 25, 141, 143, 147, 240 Commissions, truth and reconciliation 16, 355 Communism 37, 39–49, 51–54, 57, 63, 187, 319, 338, 344

Congo, Democratic Republic of the 70, 77–78 Consultancy 13–14, 174, 179, 185–187, 193, 207, 211, 318 Council of Europe 187, 304, 308 Courts – Courts of law 24, 105, 117–140, 144, 187, 300, 306, 328, 360 (also see Tribunals) – Courts, royal 100, 103 Croatia 124, 132 Curricula 12, 21, 87, 89, 224, 227–229, 311 Curtin, Philip 69 Czechoslovakia 325 Czech Republic 46, 202 Dar-es-Salaam 71 Data curation (see Digital curation) de Certeau, Michel 154, 164–166 Decolonization 23, 65, 68, 104, 213–214, 217, 218, 226, 227, 229, 233, 234, 236 Defamation 239, 318, 320 Del Ponte, Carla 113 Democracy 3, 9, 46, 48, 51, 93, 122, 202, 228, 231, 240, 304, 309, 394, 313–315, 324, 325, 334, 340, 343, 344 – Democracy, social 37, 38, 48, 49, 51–53, 58, 59, 61 Democratization 5, 8, 9, 18, 29, 54, 88 Denialism 15, 21, 124, 181, 182, 223, 278, 306, 309, 310, 320, 322, 352, 367 Dictatorships 10, 15, 170, 173, 174, 182, 279, 309 Digital 27, 171, 178, 250, 258, 273, 275, 276, 285 – Digital curation 27, 271–295 – Digital ethnography 256 – Digital history 276 – Digital humanities 205, 248, 293 Dilthey, Wilhelm 135 Diop, Cheikh Anta 69, 72–75 Disinformation 320, 344, 345 Donald Trump 12 Donia, Robert 124, 130, 131, 136 Dreyfus, Alfred 121 Durie, Edward (Eddie) Taihakurei 144, 150 Education 119, 147, 171, 173, 174, 194, 196, 204, 220, 238, 239, 246, 268, 272, 305, 312, 342, 358, 369 – Education, basic 170, 175

Index

– Education, colonial 92, 232 – Education, higher 21, 78, 169, 170, 174, 175, 177, 180, 189, 213, 228, 230, 232, 239, 247, 264 – Education, secondary 3 – Education, Western 233 Egypt 6, 37, 39, 70, 92, 286 Empires 38, 41, 55, 56, 61, 65, 66, 67, 81, 91, 97, 98, 119, 128, 168, 259, 264, 305, 362 Empiricism 17, 59, 62, 92 Engagement 20, 23, 27, 32, 49, 65, 68, 88, 218, 228, 255, 294, 302, 336, 337, 355, 357, 359, 372 Entertainment 256, 330 Epistemic 8, 18, 19, 26, 27, 28, 32, 73, 88, 288, 333, 334, 337, 345, 349 – Epistemic authority 9 (also see authority) – Epistemic colonization 68 – Epistemic justice 230 – Epistemic turns 4 – Epistemic uncertainties 19 – Epistemic values 11, 20, 32, 75, 272, 275, 294, 307 – Epistemic virtues (see epistemic values) Epistemology 272, 275, 165 – Epistemology of testimony 18 – Epistemology, indigenous 219, 232 Ethics 31, 32, 59, 140, 214, 232, 263, 307, 309, 310, 311, 312, 312, 317, 321, 342 Ethnicity 19, 220, 241 Eurocentrism 55, 61, 68, 70, 88–91, 104, 239 Europe 3, 15, 44, 61, 71, 80, 84, 91–93, 98, 111, 142, 185–212, 224, 231, 264, 265, 270, 304, 308, 311, 328, 336, 339–343, 354, 363 – Europe, Eastern 51, 57, 59, 112, 129 – Europe, Southern 60, 130 – Europe, Western 55, 101, 130 Evans, Richard 40, 130 Evans, Robert 206, 207 Evidence 5, 42, 105, 109, 110, 113, 119, 119, 123, 127, 128, 128, 129, 131, 139, 140, 155, 184, 225, 232, 232, 246, 263, 284, 291, 299, 301, 313, 323, 331, 335, 336, 348, 352, 362 – Evidence, admissibility of 126 – Evidence, forensic 127, 135, 136 – Evidence, law of 127 – Evidence of experience 18 – Evidence, standards of 20, 29, 225, 352

387

Experts 167, 179, 191, 250, 285, 330, 367 – Expert authority (see Authority, Expert) – Expert reports 16 (also see Commissions of Inquiry) – Expert witnesses 117–140, 151, 358 Expertise 3, 7–9, 13, 16, 18, 22, 24–26, 29–32, 123, 126–128, 130, 142, 187, 189, 194, 201, 203, 206, 207, 210, 211, 225, 239, 247, 273, 353 Facebook 245, 252, 253, 256, 259, 266, 267, 269 Fascism 10, 24, 29, 41, 182, 328, 334, 339, 343, 344, 346, 369 Facts 14, 18, 21, 24, 28, 30, 32, 58, 59, 62, 90, 103, 104, 108, 123, 124, 133, 154, 155, 175, 176, 178, 226, 241, 301, 309, 321, 322, 223, 292, 331–335, 338–340, 343, 346–348, 353, 355 Falola, Toyin 230 Fanon, Frantz 81 Fascist (see Fascism) Feminism 18, 213, 215, 224, 232, 235 Fiction 6, 14, 333, 334, 336 Fictionalization 336, 332 Film 13, 87, 179, 200, 250, 251, 265, 266, 352 First Nations (see Indigenous peoples) France 4, 14, 41, 43, 44, 54, 59, 66, 83, 121, 129, 132, 166, 303, 311, 316, 332, 344 Freedom 4, 20, 27, 301, 313, 314, 340, 342, 344 – Freedom of expression 300, 305, 306, 307, 309, 310, 318, 324 – Freedom, academic 28, 78, 129, 299, 300, 303, 305, 307, 311, 329, 349 Funding 14, 66, 77, 78, 114, 169, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192–194, 196–198, 201, 203, 205, 207, 208, 210–212, 226, 235, 238, 239, 365 (also see Grants) Games 6, 13, 26 Gellner, Ernest 56 Gender 19, 194, 195, 259, 265, 269, 270, 335 Genocides 5, 15, 16, 18, 24, 124, 304, 306, 319, 358, 362, 364 Germany 3–5, 14, 15, 40, 46, 122, 130, 132, 202, 221, 280, 300, 316, 327, 359, 360, 362, 363, 365, 367 Gibbon, Edward 96 Ginsburg, Carlo 129 Governance 15, 185, 191, 196, 198, 314, 324

388

Index

Gow, James 127, 128 Gramsci, Antonio 52 Grants 20, 89, 101, 186, 188, 212 (also see Funding) Great Britain 37, 40, 42, 43, 45–52, 55–57, 59, 60, 66, 118, 202 (also see United Kingdom) Greece 202, 286, 354 Griffith, D. W. 14 Gupta Chandra II 103 Gupta Samudra 94, 97–98, 101 Gupta, S. P. 91 Halbwachs, Maurice 348, 366 Hall, Stuart 62 Hastings, Warren 22, 118 Hayden, Robert 128 Heritage 4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 72, 90, 113, 124, 177, 179, 196, 197, 221, 222, 226, 248, 286, 300, 304, 305, 306, 318, 320, 228, 330, 352 Herodotus 92, 95, 102 Hindu – Hindu nationalism (see Hindutva) Hinduism 89, 94, 109 Hindutva 12, 89–114 – Historians, task of (also see Historians, duty of) Historical – Historical consciousness 3, 28, 95, 96, 98–100, 102, 247, 269, 355 – Historical culture 351, 358, 361, 362 – Historical narratives (see narratives) – Historical studies (see Historiography) – Historical thinking 207, 299 – Historical, facts (see Facts) – Historical, forensics 25, 118, 139, 140 – Historical, practice (also see Historiography) Historicism 274, 289 Hitler, Adolf 343, 362 Hobsbawm, Eric 23, 37–64 Holocaust 5, 15, 18, 28, 129, 142, 304, 306, 309, 342, 355, 358, 359, 361–367, 369 (also see Genocides) Human rights 27, 33, 138, 299–325, 336, 341, 343, 348 – Human rights advocacy 299–302, 305, 307, 308, 312, 313, 316, 319, 321, 325 (also see Activism, human rights) Hungary 7, 202

Identitarian 28, 356, 359–362, 368, 369 Identity 10–12, 17, 27, 28, 32, 37, 38, 44, 59, 62, 65, 69, 81, 85, 95, 109, 111, 166, 168, 171, 172, 182, 184, 188, 193, 196, 202, 204, 206, 208, 214, 216, 219–222, 225, 227, 236, 241, 245, 329, 330, 347, 368, 370 Ideology 57, 61, 71, 72, 74, 78, 97, 104, 214, 240, 300, 318, 327, 336, 337 Impartiality 20, 278, 279, 282, 307, 318 (also see Objectivity) India 12, 22, 24, 50, 51, 89–114, 118, 119, 143, 310, 319, 363, 371 Indigeneity 215, 220, 222, 226, 232, 233, 241 Indigenous 87 – Indigenous Activists 78, 224, 227–229 – Indigenous cosmologies – Indigenous knowledges 114, 214, 215, 216, 219, 226, 232, 233, 234 – Indigenous histories 86, 213, 215, 217, 218, 234 – Indigenous peoples 26, 110, 112, 113, 141–143, 150, 213, 217, 221, 226, 237, 238, 239 (also see First Nations) – Indigenous rights 223 – Indigenous scholars 213, 216, 225, 230, 237 – Indigenous studies 217 Indonesia 14 Instagram 245, 254, 256, 266 Integrity 155, 311, 323–325 Internet 7, 10, 250, 253, 257, 266, 276, 284, 293, 318, 349 Islam 89, 93, 95, 102 (also see Religion) Isreal/Palestine 356, 362, 363, 367, 369 Italy 5, 44, 59, 60, 132, 254, 344 Jainism 98, 108 (also see Religion) James, C.L.R. 81 Japan 316, 319 Jasanoff, Sheila 188, 205, 209 Jewsiewicki, Bogumil 70, 71, 75 Job market (see Labour market) Juridification 142, 155 Kant, Immanuel 248, 347 Kashmir 98, 100, 103 Kenya 132, 305, 365 Khoisan, Zenzile 225, 226

Index

Kimambo, Isaria 71 Ki-Zerbo, Joseph 80, 82, 83, 85 Kocka, Jürgen 63 Kolyma 250, 251 Kosovo 132, 138 Krotoa 224, 230 Labour market 164, 166, 167, 175, 182, 183 Latin America 23, 29, 50, 59, 60, 280 Law 15, 25, 31, 79, 127, 131, 135, 138, 142, 151, 153, 164, 168, 169, 173–177, 180–183, 223, 263, 306, 310, 351 – Law, colonial 142, 144 – Law, common 126 – Law Courts (see Courts of law) – Law, international 127, 130, 131, 138, 139, 150, 341 – Law, rule of 125, 314, 324, 330, 343 Lefebvre, Henri 47 Legal 6, 26, 32, 105, 117, 121, 124, 126, 131, 139–145, 155, 157, 175, 189, 198, 300, 316, 317, 319, 352, 354, 358, 360, 370 (also see Law) – Legal expertise (see Expertise) – Legal firms 13 – Legal instruments 142 – Legal power 24 – Legal procedures 22, 24, 118, 129 – Legal regulations 15, 24, 32, 163–184 – Legal scholars 128, 150 – Legal rulings 150 – Legal understanding 129 Legislation 144, 173, 178, 223 (also see Law and Legal) Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 40 Lord Acton 121 Mamdani, Mahmood 78 Manetho 92 Manu Smriti 94 Markets 12, 13, 20, 23, 31, 52, 179, 184, 265, 341 Marketing 330 Marx, Karl 38, 45, 52, 58, 61, 101 Marxism 37–64, 91 Marxist 23, 40, 41, 44–47, 49–52, 59, 71, 81, 82, 97, 101, 104, 220, 224, 241 – Marxist, anti- 41 – Marxist, neo- 70

389

Mazrui, Ali 79, 81, 82 McCaskie, Tom 71 McDonnald, Gabrielle Kirk 128 Media 7, 17, 26, 27, 30, 45, 51, 52, 83, 172, 205, 236, 245–271, 272–295, 314, 317, 319, 328, 331, 335, 344, 346, 353, 357 Memory 5–7, 18, 21, 27, 32, 100, 143, 184, 185, 188, 195, 196, 206, 208, 231, 234, 251, 259, 266, 311–313, 318, 324, 342, 344, 345, 348, 352, 354, 356–358, 361, 363, 366–372 – Memory laws 5, 15, 187, 300, 303, 306, 310, 311 Meštrović, Stjepan 132 Mexico 7 Michelet, Jules 332 Middle East 112 Migration 16, 110, 111, 113, 173, 185, 196, 214, 341, 361, 368 Mill, James 94, 95, 98 Miller, Nick 131 Milosevic, Slobodan 124, 132–136 Modi, Narendra 12 Moldavia 119–121 Monod, Gabriel 124 Muller, F. Max 94 Museologists 204 Museums 10, 178, 255, 264 Myths 57, 91, 113, 143, 144, 215, 224, 236, 331, 354, 358, 369 Namibia 132, 230, 231, 362 Nandy, Ashis 90 Narratives 5, 11, 18, 20, 21, 24, 32, 51, 65, 79, 81, 84, 86, 89–93, 96, 99, 106, 114, 122, 125, 136, 138, 148, 158, 187, 199, 227, 235, 256, 266, 273, 284, 292, 323, 327, 329, 331, 332–334, 336, 337, 342–344, 346, 352, 356, 357, 360, 361, 371 Narrativism 18, 19, 62 National Socialism (see Nazism) Nationalism 37, 38, 54–63, 87, 97, 133, 337, 338, 340, 369 Nation-states 4, 10, 15, 21, 33, 38, 55, 65, 81, 90, 141, 151, 157, 184, 185, 212, 330, 337, 338, 340, 353 (see also State) Nazism 304, 328, 367 Netherlands 14, 16, 130, 132, 280, 316, 319

390

Index

New Zealand 25, 33, 132, 141–159 Nice, Geoffrey 133 Nietzsche, Friedrich 117, 279 Niezen, Ronald 11 Nigeria 79, 87 Nowotny, Helga 188, 208 Objectivity 17–19, 38, 65, 72, 86, 92, 129, 176, 198, 205, 216, 230, 232, 247, 272, 278, 338, 346, 371 Oliver, Roland 73 Oliver, W.H. 153–156 Orwell, George 338, 339, 345 Pacific 23 Papon, Maurice 129 Pargiter, F.E. 96, 98, 99, 104, 106 Participatory turn 8 Partisanship 10, 11, 20, 23, 27, 41, 63, 309, 371 Peer review 28, 48, 49, 114, 131, 189 Periodization 94, 98, 101, 104 Pocock, J.G.A. 156 Poland 7, 132, 302, 319, 343 Policy – Policy reports 202, 204, 207 – Policy-makers 4, 5, 16, 19, 26, 185, 187–189, 194, 195, 199–203, 205–208, 210 – Policy oriented history 26, 185–212 Popov, Čedomir 134 Populism 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 18, 29, 30, 32, 63, 185, 314, 315, 351, 354, 361, 369 Positionality 18, 26, 66, 215, 351, 371 Positivism 8, 19, 92, 102, 278 Postan, Mounia 40–43 Power, Eileen 41, 43 Presentism 3, 153, 313, 322 Professionalization 20, 22, 65, 121, 330, 353 Propaganda 12, 124, 125, 220, 318, 327, 329, 331, 338, 339, 345, 348, 349 Public – Public history 10, 17, 23, 24, 26, 27, 31, 32, 145, 147, 149, 151, 167, 171, 180, 182, 187, 218, 249–270, 273, 274, 278, 280, 281, 293 – Public opinion 15, 63, 121, 135, 346 – Public sphere 21, 30, 31, 181, 196, 250, 267, 268, 328, 330 Putin, Vladimir 30, 304, 327, 328, 341, 344

Qian, Sima 92 Racism 16, 69, 73, 76, 83, 213, 214, 220, 225, 228, 229, 239, 241, 319, 336, 343, 360, 367 Ranger, Terence 56, 70 Ranke, Leopold von 121, 134 Rata, Matiu 149, 150 Recognition 10, 15, 28, 33, 43, 51, 58, 62, 86, 91, 102, 142, 180, 181, 183, 184, 215, 226, 238, 246, 267, 275, 333, 347, 361, 366 Relativism 18, 155, 348, 362 Religion 10, 21, 89, 90, 93–96, 98, 99, 101–106, 108, 109, 193–195, 201, 202, 227, 337 Remembrance 5, 76, 77, 79, 157, 196, 342, 343, 348, 361, 366, 371 (also see Memory) Renan, Ernest 337 Responsibility 15, 16, 58, 76, 85, 150, 152, 153, 316, 342, 357, 363, 365, 368, 370 Revisionism 28, 45, 124, 219, 278, 287, 329, 334–336, 342–344 Ricoeur, Paul 7 Rodney, Walter 71, 81, 82 Ross, Robert 74, 221, 223 Ross, Ruth 145–150 Russia 4, 27, 30, 41, 132, 245–270, 303–305, 327, 328, 341, 343–346 Rwanda 123, 132, 303, 304 Samuel, Raphael 46 Sartre, Jean-Paul 47, 66 Schultz, Dana 368 Science – Science, citizen 10, 283 – Science, colonial 234 – Science, modern idea of 163 – Science, popular 272, 295 – Science, regulatory 209 – Science, social 3, 10, 169, 170, 186, 188, 190–192, 199, 207, 208, 211, 228, 353 Serbia 124, 125, 127, 132–136 Shinnie, Peter 70, 72, 73 Slavery 5, 12, 14, 16, 101, 214, 220, 229, 231, 239, 304, 305, 319, 359, 368 South Africa 26, 33, 49, 74, 87, 132, 213–241, 355, 356, 362, 365 Soviet Union 44, 51, 53–55, 199, 327, 341 Spain 3, 41, 51, 60, 280, 305, 316, 334

Index

391

Sri Lanka 6, 99 Stakeholders 10, 191, 193, 204, 211, 217, 233, 238, 239 Stalin, Jozef 40, 44, 251, 263, 343 Stalinism 29, 251, 266, 327, 343 State 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 20, 25, 50, 53, 107, 108, 126, 135, 141, 142, 144, 150, 151, 157, 168, 174, 175, 181, 185, 186, 198, 205, 208, 223, 248–250, 253, 318, 320, 327–329, 331, 339, 346, 351, 355–358, 360, 362–364, 367–370 – State archives 67 – State-building 22, 23, 67, 101, 202, 329 – State, colonial 143, 157 – State, head of 132 – State, nation- 10, 21, 33, 38, 90, 151, 157, 184, 185, 212, 338, 340, 353 – State power 27, 32, 70, 329 – State propaganda (see Propaganda) – State-sanctioned 17, 26 – State-sponsorship 14, 345 Sweet, James 369 Switzerland 132, 316, 331

Tribunals 6, 22, 24, 25, 117–140, 141–159, 318 (also see Courts and Trials) Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 228 Truth 5, 8, 9, 12, 17–19, 21, 24, 28, 30, 59, 62, 76, 90, 102, 105, 114, 122, 129, 141, 184, 195, 209, 222, 233, 238, 273, 278, 284, 304–307, 316, 322, 323, 328, 332–334, 336–339, 345–348, 351–356, 358, 360, 362, 364, 368, 370, 371 – Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (see Commissions, truth and reconciliation) – Truth, post- 8 – Truth, right to the 304 Twitter 30, 207, 245, 251, 252, 256, 259, 262

Tacitus 98 Tadić, Duško 127 Tawney, R. H. 40, 42–44 Taylor, Talford 122 Telegram 27, 30, 245–270 (also see Media) Television 7, 13, 172, 178, 179, 246, 250, 251, 261, 318, 352 Terzić, Slavenko 134 Thapar, Romila 51, 91, 102–104, 107, 109, 113 Thatcher, Margaret 52, 56 Thompson, E. P. 45, 46, 50 Thucydides 92, 98 Till, Emmett 368 Tourism 6, 179 Trials 5, 107, 119, 121–124, 127–129, 132, 133, 135–137, 352, 365 (also see Courts and Tribunals)

Valla, Lorenzo 118 Vansina, Jan 70, 84–86

Uganda 79 Ukraine 245, 246, 270, 327, 328, 341, 346 United Kingdom (UK) 7, 16, 18, 67, 68, 120, 129, 132, 316 (also see Great Britain) United Nations (UN) 5, 16, 301, 304–306, 312, 317, 324, 341 United States of America 66–69, 79, 84, 129, 132, 141, 145, 299, 300, 316, 319, 358

Weber, Max 200, 209 WhatsApp 245, 252, 253 Wikipedia 27, 30, 271–295 World Wide Web (see Internet) YouTube 245, 250, 266, 268, 269 Yugoslavia 24, 117–140 – Yugoslavia, International Criminal Tribunal for the former (see Tribunals) Zaire 70, 73 Zola, Emile 121 Zuma, Jacob 223