History of Ideas HISTORIOGRAPHY

(1897) by Charles Victor Langlois (1863-1929) and Charles Seignobos (1854-1942) was soon translated or adapted into several other languages. The apparent confidence of some historians in the canons of historical method—soon to be seriously shaken—is best captured in the famous declaration of the Cambridge professor J. B. Bury (1861-1927) that history was a "science . . . nothing more and nothing less."

A related variant, postcolonial studies, often associated with the literary theorists Edward Said (1935-2003), Gayatri Spivak, and Homi K. Bhabha, has refocused scholarship concerned with former colonies such as India on the subjected masses rather than on the imperial rulers and their indigenous elite allies or political successors. The Subaltern School of Indian historiography (the term derives from Marx and from Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony) founded by Ranajit Guha is a prominent example, the academic foundation against which it rebels having been established with the rapid increase of university history departments following independence in 1947, and the development of social-science-influenced South Asian studies. Guha in particular has argued that the Renaissance assignment of non-Europeans to the realm of "peoples without history" was compounded by the subsequent imposition of Enlightenment ideas upon the various colonized areas of the world, in particular the notion that statehood, as well as writing, was essential for a people to achieve historical standing. The colonizers, using their control of language, education, and writing, subjected the Indian past, for example, to Western (and especially Hegelian) notions of "world-history," limited by European standards of chronology and narrative. In other words, they imposed a kind of imperial "dominance without hegemony" over a nation's true sense of its own history. "History" in the Western sense (projected backwards onto indigenous itihasa in an effort to make these seem protohistorical) thus permanently completed the displacement, commenced by the Persian-influenced histories of the Mughal era, of the ancient tradition and "old lore," as well as the sense of everyday experience, embodied in the poetic myths contained in purana and in epics such as the Ramayana. Vinay Lal, a critic of Subaltern Studies has adopted an even more radical position, asserting that the accommodation of Indian scholars to the very value of history, not simply adoption of its Western forms, is an acceptance of servitude. Sumit Sarkar, an early participant in the Subaltern project, has criticized it for a growing loss of focus on the very groups it was designed to rescue from oblivion and for its swing in the direction of cultural studies, while endorsing a microhistorical approach analogous to the practice of Europeans such as Carlo Ginzburg.

A very different creation of the interwar period was what has become known as the Annales school in France, so called after the journal that began publication in 1929 at the University of Strasbourg under the guidance of Marc Bloch (1886-1944) and Lucien Febvre (1878-1956), two French scholars much influenced by the earlier work of the sociologist Durkheim and the geographer Henri Berr, and with close ties to the Belgian medievalist Henri Pirenne (1862-1935). The journal and the "school" (rather a misnomer, albeit useful as a shorthand) have evolved considerably through successive generations but remain an influential force in France and much admired elsewhere, particularly in North America. The Annalistes' repudiation of the political history of previous decades—Febvre condemned Charles Seignobos for an obsession with events—in favor of an histoire totale that examined geography, climate, economy, and agricultural and trade patterns, as well as manners, still seems fresh after seventy-five years. It is, however, a further reminder of the recurrent swing of the pendulum of European historiographical taste between the social and the political, the broad and the particular, dating back to the Enlightenment—and beyond, as far back as Herodotus and Thucydides.

According to John N. Schumacher, there appears not to have been any formal historiography in the Philippines prior to the Spanish, despite the existence of writing. The first post-Conquest example is the Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, written by the Spanish official and unsuccessful warrior Antonio de Morga (1559-1636) and published in Mexico in 1609—the only early history to be written by a layman. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the various resident religious orders produced chronicles largely focused on their own missionary activities. As with the awits, however, western histories proved eventually an incitement to nationalism, particularly in the hands of young Filipino secular priests sent back to Europe for higher education in the 1860s. Published work on Filipino folklore and customs began to appear, along with previously unpublished chronicles put out in the Biblioteca Historica Filipina series in the 1880s; the journalist Isabelo de los Reyes would establish a Filipino identity in a number of historicallyoriented newspaper articles and books. A more sophisticated appeal to history would emerge from José Rizal (1861-1896), who had visited Germany and become aware of western historical methods. During an exile in London in 1887-1888, he provided a carefully annotated edition of Morga's work, stressing the achievements of pre-Spanish Filipinos and their moral decline under foreign rule. In this form, Rizal's views would both contribute to revolutionary sentiment following his execution, and ultimately to the continuation of historical study through the ensuing decades of American rule. This very short survey of a small selection of Southeast Asian historical traditions is far from exhaustive (we have said nothing of the South Sea Islands, for example, where a great deal of ethnographic work on historical memory has been done in recent years by anthropologists), but

African historiography has also proved a fertile field for the application of various interdisciplinary approaches, including archaeology and linguistics. In particular, it has welcomed the application of social science theories such as "modernization," "dependency," and the above-mentioned "underdevelopment." It has also provided a forum for Marxist concepts such as "modes of production" and "capital"; the work of Walter Rodney (a black radical historian assassinated in Guyana in 1980) has been especially significant in this regard. At the same time, the early focus on political history and the establishment of chronology has been displaced to a considerable degree by an interest in social, economic, and cultural issues, reflecting historiographic trends elsewhere in the world. In recent decades, "Africa" has proved too unwieldy an umbrella term, and the field has segmented into thematic subfields such as slavery and gender; postmodernism has also begun to make itself felt as the colonial and early postcolonial periods are revisited by a fresh generation. The popularity of African history has waned somewhat among North American students, but it remains firmly established as an area of research, sometimes conjoined with Afro-American studies

All of these works were ethnically based, that is devoted to recovering and telling the past of a particular tribe. Unsurprisingly, given the clerical careers of most authors except Kagwa, they were also Christian-influenced, and most were heavily reliant on European sources, as was the somewhat later work of the Xhosa missionary John H. Soga, The Southeastern Bantu (1930). In the areas colonized by Germans, such as Tanganyika (part of modern Tanzania), Swahili historical works in Roman script, as well as verse chronicles in adjami appeared in the early twentieth century, beginning with Abdallah bin Hemedi 'lAjjemy's (c. 1835-1912) Habari za Wakilindi (Chronicles of the Kilindi, completed in 1906); this was an extensive record of the Kilindi dynasty that ruled the area in the nineteenth century, derived from oral traditions of the Shambala, a non-Swahili-speaking tribe. A reminder that the traffic between spoken tradition and written history can run in both directions is provided by Kenya's Chronicle of the Kings of Pate. The original manuscript of this work, which covers the town's history from the thirteenth to the late nineteenth century, was destroyed in 1890, but knowledge of its contents was so vivid that several writers were able to produce new written versions in the decades thereafter.

Among indigenous forms of historical writing that differ from those of the West, none is as hard to grasp as, or more contentious than, those of pre-Islamic India. The values and style of Islamic and Chinese historiography differ from the European, but their products are nonetheless clearly recognizable as histories, and they share common concerns with matters such as chronology and the memorialization of particular facts about the past. For this reason, even the respect accorded to these traditions in most Western histories of history is often completely withheld from other modes of apprehending the past that seem much more remote. Early Indian historical writing is among these. India's very capacity to generate thought and writing about the past has often been rejected—al-Biruni commented on the Hindu lack of interest in "the historical order of things" as early as the 1020s; Edward Gibbon commented on general "Asiatic" lack of history in the eighteenth century; and the indictment was echoed by James Mill and by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the nineteenth century. This is a view that modern scholars of ancient India have fought hard to dispel, though from two very different directions. Some, like Romila Thapar, have argued that there is a historicity or at least historical consciousness in early Indian texts. More recently, scholars such as Vinay Lal have denied this but argued that the very notion of the importance of history is a Western imposition upon a colonized South Asia, an epistemological privileging of a category that should not be applied to other cultures such as the Indian. Certainly the complexity of ethnic groups and languages, and the rigidities of the caste system, did not permit anything like Western historiography to develop. Nor was there the central government apparatus that stimulated and systematized Chinese historiography, or the religious imperative underlying classical Islamic histories. It is arguable that Indian philosophy paid no special heed to history (though this was also true of the ancient Greeks) in part because the Hindu outlook is thought to have rejected the notion of individual causality and denied the significance of short-term events in favor of much longer epochs or periods. The most frequently cited exception, a twelfth-century text that actually resembles a chronological "history" is the Sanskrit-language Rajtarangini (c. 1148-1149) by Kalhana. This verse composition covered the history of Kashmir from remote antiquity to the author's own time and was derived from legends, oral traditions, written records, and inscriptions. Kalhana was followed by four other Sanskrit-language historians: Jonaraja (early fifteenth century), Srivara (later fifteenth century), Prajyabhatta (early sixteenth century), and Suka (early seventeenth century).

As in other regions, since the 1960s social and economic history have emerged in the Middle East as serious rivals to an older, politically focused narrative history. Islamic-focused women's history (which can be traced back to entries on women in an older form, the biographical dictionary or tabaqat) has also developed, with newer feminist approaches strongest in Egypt; the male-oriented and restrictive practices of the Muslim fundamentalist regimes have themselves become the subject of study. As Judith E. Tucker notes, recent feminist historians of Islam, some working outside the region, have restored women to roles of significant influence in the longer Muslim past, for instance in Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam and numerous works by the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, such as Women and Islam (1991). Recent collections of essays such as Guity Nashat and Lois Beck's Women in Iran from the Rise of Islam to 1800 have also explored the historical place of women in Islamic societies from very early times

At the start of the twenty-first century, there is a high degree of disintegration and remarkably little consensus as to what a "proper" historical method is, what phenomena constitute legitimate subjects of historical inquiry or whether any historical narrative merits "privileging" (a favored term of literary criticism) as true—or at least more true—over any other. But in facing our own postmodern confusion, we would be entirely wrong to project a nostalgic, supposititious, and comfortable uniformity of opinion onto the historical thought of earlier times. Let us in closing recall the differences between Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew historical writing; Thucydides' quick departure from the model established by Herodotus; the contemporary medieval critics of Geoffrey of Monmouth's invented British past; the Qing evidentiary debates; the pyrrhonist challenge to historical knowledge in early modern Europe; and the German quarrels about method in the late nineteenth century. These are but a few reminders that there have always been many mansions in the house of history and an almost infinite number of windows, each providing a fresh perspective on to the past.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the liberalism and positivism that had marked the first decades of postindependence historiography were under duress, in part owing to a growing alienation from America and Europe. The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, with its populist and agrarian origins, suggested that the historical role of Latin American masses and especially indigenous and mestizo populations had been seriously underestimated; moreover, the political and economic success of many of the liberal states had been mixed at best. Efforts turned to revisiting the history of Central and South America from a less Eurocentric perspective. Historians and ethnohistorians began to pay special attention to the role of the indigenous peoples and to the ethnic intermixture of populations that had produced a distinctive set of postcolonial societies. The kinds of anthropological excavation of native perceptions of the past applied in the South Pacific have also been employed in Latin America in recent decades. Some of the features of African historiography can also be observed here, in particular the application of Marxist and social science paradigms such as "dependency" and "modernization" theory. And, as with India, an antiimperialist scholarship has developed (encouraged by the ideologically controversial five hundredth anniversary celebrations of Columbus's 1492 expedition) that insists on the role of European and especially Iberian colonizers in the "invention" of historical categories such as "America."

China, Japan, and Korea. Western historiographical practices, often derived at second hand via Japan, began to influence late Qing scholars by the end of the nineteenth century. Chinese historical analysis had long been inclined to cyclical views of history as a series of alternating periods of order and disorder, throughout which individual dynasties rose and fell. In the face of rapid change, historians would turn instead to an explanation of the past as linear development over a series of periods. Liang Qichao, as Luke Kwong has shown, built on the previous generation's works and on the thought of Britain's Thomas Huxley in developing a five-stage, progressive theory of history (though he would express doubts as to progress and insist on the need for both cyclical and linear views). Liang and Zhang Taiyan advocated a general history (tongshi) based on Western practices (largely absorbed through Japanese and Chinese translations). Liang's own Xin shixue (New history) appeared in 1902, citing Edward Gibbon as an exemplary model. A few years further on, in the wake of the republican overthrow of the Qing, and the "May Fourth" New Culture movement that began in 1919, American-style academic history arrived with the translation of the Columbia University historian James Harvey Robinson's (1863-1936) The New History (advocating a broader inquiry into the past that went beyond politics) into Chinese by one of his admirers, He Bingsong (1890-1946). He, who had studied at Wisconsin and Princeton, also adapted Langlois and Seignobos into Chinese as a work on the writing of general history, Tongshi xinyi (1928). Another American-trained historian, Hu Shi (1891-1962) authored a history of Chinese philosophy, while Gu Jiegang (1895-1980) published a popular school textbook situating China in world history. At the same time, other Chinese scholars who were German-trained were introducing the very Rankean type of historical writing of which Robinson's New Historians had been critical, a fine distinction that seems to have mattered little to the Chinese readers of both

Conclusion This article has necessarily been selective, summary, and in places even cursory, in its treatment of the history of history around the planet. While the differences between various forms of historical writing—and different traditions—have deliberately been emphasized, some connecting points also exist. There has been a close relationship between the historical record and the exercise of power for much of the past four thousand years, power being taken in the ethnic, social, and economic as well as narrowly political sense. This is perhaps another way of putting the old saw, mentioned at the very beginning of the essay, that "history is written by the victors," although in fact it has just as often been written by the losers (consider Thucydides, the Indian Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, or the poet and historian John Milton, a failed revolutionary) and those bewildered by the specter of sudden or unwelcome change. There has been an ongoing, dialectic, and much-changing relationship between literature, legend, myth, and history, and firm and categorical divisions between these are by no means the hallmark of all historical cultures. One may also observe the recurrent influence of various forms of present-day self-identification in the construction of pasts, ranging from the Greek city-states through Renaissance debates about racial origins, through Spanish discussions of Visigothic foundations, to the competing global nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Now as then, current problems and perspectives often drive the most intense and searching investigation of the past: Where French and Spanish invasions of Italy drove Machiavelli and Guicciardini to the past for explanation, similar calamities inspired many of the chroniclers of Burma and Thailand in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Where the Reformation ignited a European debate over the history of the church, modern German historians have had to wrestle since 1945 with the problem of the country's aggressive twentieth-century past and the horror of the Holocaust.

During this period, efforts were made to print historical sources, and a number of learned societies were founded with historical interests. The Egyptian 'Abd al-Rahman al-Djabarti (1753-1825) anticipated this revival of historiography with his compelling account of the French occupation of Egypt, and a philosophy of history that echoed Ibn Khaldun's. Al-Djabarti's countryman Rifa'ah Rafi' al-Tahtawi (1801-1873), who had spent five years in Paris, became the channel through which modern European historiography began to enter the Arab world. He translated several French works into Arabic and authored a history of ancient Egypt that consciously emulated modern rather than classical Islamic historical forms; he was also instrumental in reforming the Egyptian school curriculum, which by the 1870s routinely included history. During the era of British rule in Egypt, the influential politician Mustafa Kamil further encouraged nationalist views of his country's past; this trend cut across and in many ways contradicted the Islamic views of most historical writing in the previous millennium

Europe and the Americas. The myriad developments of Western historiography over the past century could easily merit an article in their own right, but since they are readily accessible in other works, the principal developments will only be summarized briefly here. Broadly speaking, the trends outlined for the nineteenth century continued into the first half of the twentieth, though the Einstein-Planck challenges to Newtonian physics, closely followed by the horrors of World War I and the end of the old empires, severely shook whatever remained of the late-nineteenthcentury faith in progress and in science. The pessimism following the war's unprecedented slaughter produced some gems of Kulturgeschichte, built on the themes of civilization's decadence and decline, such as the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga's (1872-1945) brilliant and Burckhardtian HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxxv 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxxv aesthetic excavation of The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), which could be read as an allegory for pre-war cultural decadence. A longer and much less subtle example is the German Oswald Spengler's (1880-1936) multivolume speculative analysis of distinctive cultures through history. Hearkening back to Nietzsche, and at least superficially anticipatory of Nazism, The Decline of the West was a work of reactionary generalization and extreme intellectual relativism; largely completed before the beginning of World War I, it appeared to great fanfare just at its end. Among other things, Spengler's Decline would help to inspire the very different (if equally speculative and relativist) British take on comparative civilizations, Arnold Toynbee's (1889-1975) A Study of History (12 vols., 1934-1961), which its author began in earnest in 1920, after reading Spengler.

European-American historiography on Africa began in the nineteenth century—the celebrated American historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. DuBois (1868-1963) had provided inspiration for an early generation of black American scholars. Most early efforts were devoted to countering racist assumptions about the inferiority of Africans. These in turn were often derived from the so-called "Hamitic hypothesis" (the Bible-derived view that Africans were descended from Ham, son of Noah, or alternatively that only the "civilized" cultures of Egypt and North Africa sprung from European peoples such as the Phoenicians). It was not until after World War II, however, that the subject began to make its way, slowly, on to mainstream history curricula. Beginning in the late 1940s with the retreat of the European colonial powers and the establishment of independent nations in ensuing decades, a deeper interest in exploring their own past quickly emerged among African populations, stimulated by reaction to decades of education in an alien imperial historiography. With this came an urgent need to recast the historical record and to recover evidence of many lost precolonial civilizations. At the same time, European intellectuals' (especially British, Belgian, and French) own discomfort with the Eurocentrism of previous scholarship provided for the intensive academic study of African history, an innovation that had spread to North America by the 1960s. Foundational research was done at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London by scholars such as Roland Oliver (cofounder in 1960 of the Journal of African History), by the American economic historian Philip Curtin, and by the Belgian Jan Vansina (an authority on oral tradition). Francophone scholars have been as influential as Anglophones, in particular the Parisian social historian, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (b. 1935). But African historiography has not been the sole creation of interested Europeans. African universities have, despite the instabilities of politics and civil war in many areas, trained their own scholars and sent many others overseas for doctoral training (South Africa has been rather exceptional in having a number of powerful research-intensive universities). The pioneering Nigerian historian Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917-1983) studied at Durham, Aberdeen, and London, and SOAS alone has produced several African-born scholars, including the Ghanaian Albert Adu Boahen (b. 1932). Boahen in turn participated in the important early summary work of postcolonial historical writing, the UNESCO General History of Africa, directed by a "scientific committee" two-thirds of whom were Africans and written by over three hundred authors including the Kenyans Ali Mazrui (b. 1933) and Bethwell Allan Ogot (b. 1933), Joseph Ki-Zerbo (b. 1922) of Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), and the Nigerian J. F. A. Ajayi (b. 1929). Francophone African historians had until recently an especially close relationship with French universities, notes Matthias Middell, though African history generally is less prominent within France than in the English-speaking world

From 1947 to the 1960s, nationalist histories predominated in Burmese writing, accompanied by a few scholarly local histories and by an increase in biographical writing. The Burma Historical Commission was created in 1955, but has yet to generate the official national history with which it was charged. As Ni Ni Myint observes, thamaing displaced yazawin as the preferred term for a new kind of non-dynastic history in the years following World War II. HISTORIOGRAPHY lxx New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxx To the southeast, in Thailand, the premodern Siamese elite, who valued history from a very early period, produced historical poetry (for example, the fifteenth-century Yuan Pâi or "Defeat of the Yuan"), and generated an extensive series of chronicles in various forms. The Buddhistoriented tamnan (stories or legends), often written in Pali, the learned language of South Asian Buddhist culture, were composed from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. Thai-language phongsawadan (annals or dynastic chronicles) superseded them in the seventeenth century. The earliest and best, if briefest, example of the latter—which are more secular in interest though they still reflect Buddhist values—is the Luang Prasert (also spelled Prasoet) chronicle of Ayutthaya (or Ayudhya), the Siamese capital and associated dynasty destroyed by the Burmese in 1767. This work covers Siamese history from the fourteenth century and was composed about 1680; its name derives not from its author, who is unknown, but from its manuscript owner. Subsequent recensions of the chronicles of Ayutthaya, written in the late eighteenth century, extend its history to that time. Chronicle-writing was at its peak during a prolonged period of struggles with Siam's neighbors, especially Burma, from 1760 to 1828.

From the perspective of the West, it is often easy to lump subregions such as Indochina together and assume that proximity will have produced similar cultural developments. This can be a mistake, as the examples of Cambodia and Vietnam illustrate. Cambodia, despite over a millennium of literacy, developed relatively little that could be called historiography prior to the establishment of French colonial rule since the pangsavatar (sometimes rendered as bangsavatar), or chronicle texts of the medieval period, did not survive; there are a few specimens from the nineteenth century such as the 1818 Nong Chronicle, which covers the years 1414-1800 and refers to an earlier chronicle that had by then been lost. Late exemplars of this form survive from the end of the colonial regime, under King Sisowath Monivong (d. 1941) and his grandson Noradom Sihanouk. Such histories or palace chronicles (rajabangsavatar) as did exist were generally deemed unpublishable regalia, and the royal monopoly discouraged scholarship prior to the country's independence. Much of the earlier material they contain is of questionable accuracy and may in fact have been copied wholesale from Thai chronicles. The major work from the early twentieth century is the Tiounn Chronicle (so-named for Monivong's principal minister, who directed its compilation) composed from 1903 to 1907 and then from 1928 to 1934, which was based on a range of earlier materials. Under the French, European methods were introduced, but Cambodian history was given low curricular priority; the brief and terrible rule of the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s would pronounce an "end to 2000 years of history.

German historical thought was under duress from other directions in the years leading up to World War I. The historical agency of "spirit," "providence," "mind," and even God, so important for Hegel's or Ranke's predecessors and contemporaries, was fading fast in the age of the iconoclastic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), of Marxism, and of modern science. The nineteenth century ended on a quasi-positivist or at least "scientific" note with a variety of "method" books. Ernst Bernheim's (1850-1942) massive Lehrbuch der historischen Methode: Mit Nachweis der wichtigsten Quellen und Hülfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte (1889), which was quickly translated into languages such as Japanese, confidently avowed that many facts of history could be known with certainty, though he conceived that others could only be surmised as "probable." This trend toward a rather narrow preoccupation with method was also observable in fin-desiècle France. Earlier French historians such as Jules Michelet and Edgar Quinet (1803-1875) had indeed been affected by speculative philosophy, the latter by Herder and the former by Vico (for whose rediscovery Michelet was largely responsible); the Hebraist and religious scholar Ernest Renan (1823-1892), who developed his own Herderesque theory of nationhood as a "spirit," also flirted with materialism as a substitute for shaken faith. But as in Germany, this was increasingly a minority position. The apparatus of modern French historiography was established with the founding of the famous graduate research center, the École pratique des Hautes Études, in 1868 and of the major journal, Revue historique in 1876. Perhaps the most naïve expression of the evidentiary positivism at the root of scientific history—a belief in the methodological improvability and rock-solid documentary foundation of historical knowledge, without the Comtean reduction of all human knowledge to the natural sciences—can be found in a more concise French counterpart to Bernheim. A hugely successful manual on method, the Introduction aux études historiques

German philosophy and German practice were powerful, and traveled well, but were not in the end omnipotent. The great French ancient historian of the mid-nineteenth century, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830-1889), remained quite immune to Niebuhrian Altertumswissenschaft. In Britain, which has never highly valued speculative history (Arnold Toynbee being a notable, and oft-criticized, twentieth-century exception), little attention was paid to the philosophy of history. More surprisingly, even the reception of German scholarship and pedagogy was at best mixed. It was perhaps most influential in the area of the history of law, which enjoyed its HISTORIOGRAPHY lxii New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxii closest association with history since the days of John Selden in the seventeenth century. The legal historical scholarship of earlier jurists such as Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779-1861) on Roman civil law proved useful in the historical debate at the turn of the century regarding the origins of English law and of medieval land-holding practices. Lawyers played a similar role in Germany, Britain, and the United States in related arguments about the degree to which medieval villeinage (and by extension, more modern Anglo-American institutions) was descended principally from Roman colonial origins, as suggested by the lawyer Frederic Seebohm (1833-1912), in pioneering work on agrarian and economic history, or from Anglo-Saxon freemen whose liberties were disrupted before and after the Norman Conquest, as maintained by another lawyer-historian, the émigré Russian Sir Paul Vinogradoff (1854-1925). This was an old debate, going back to the seventeenth century, but it was now investigated through a much wider array of sources. Perhaps the greatest British historian of the beginning of the twentieth century was also a lawyer. The Cambridge scholar Frederic William Maitland (1850-1906), who in 1887 founded the Selden Society to publish medieval legal documents, held a professorship of law rather than history, continuing the long connection between those disciplines that had produced the sixteenth-century French érudits, Vico, and Maitland's immediate model, Savigny

Historical thought and scholarship was not, of course, invariably or even mainly devoted to the recovery of knowledge for its own sake. Propaganda has always been a significant part of historical writing, both in the sense of mining the past for evidence in support of current ideologies, practices, and regimes, and the use of formal accounts of the past to disseminate such support widely. As the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has commented, the past can be regarded as a "scarce resource," control over which must be fought for or negotiated. We have seen a variant of this in the Chinese approach to establishing Standard Histories, and it was true in different ways in the West. Much medieval historical writing had been undertaken as propaganda for one side or the other in disputes such as the long-running papal-imperial or Anglo-French rivalries. Various Renaissance courts had employed humanists to write elegant Latin histories explicitly favorable to their regimes and intended to cast their achievements in the best possible light to ensure that their positive image would be passed down as fame to posterity. Protonationalist sentiments stimulated the propagation of elaborate national myths of descent from Trojans, Gauls and Scythians. (Making the wrong assertion about one of these peoples or their modern heirs could have serious consequences. In Sweden, newly independent of Denmark, Gustav I Vasa condemned the historian Olaus Petrei [Olof Petersson] for apparent criticism in the latter's En Swensk Crönika [Swedish Chronicle]; asserting French descent from Germanic Franks as opposed to Trojans landed Nicolas Fréret in prison in 1714). Spanish historians from the time of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile to the twentieth century have periodically sought a basis for Iberian solidarity in a remote and imagined Visigothic past. In central and eastern Europe, subject ethnic groups such as Hungarians, Bohemians, Moldavians, and Croats developed historical writing in an effort to preserve and promote a sense of national identity, for instance in István Szamosközy's (1565-1612) history of his native Transylvania, Miklós Istvánffy's (1538-1615) treatment of Habsburg-controlled Hungary in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Pavao Ritter Vitezovic´'s Latin history of Dalmatia and Croatia (1666).

Historiography has changed enormously during the past hundred years, in ways that merit much fuller treatment than can be afforded here. This final section will be devoted to exploring some of these, including significant transformations in European-American and East Asian historical writing, and developments in other parts of the globe (for instance Africa and Southeast Asia) not treated in earlier sections. It is not the case—contrary to views once confidently held—that these regions had no forms of historiography prior to the arrival of Western imperial powers (any more than this is true of China or Japan). For convenience, however, the earlier history of historical writing in these understudied areas is included in the present section.

If irrationalism, skepticism, and pessimism were the dominant chords struck in Western Europe and, to a lesser degree, in North America, the dissonant sound from further east came in the form of Marxism. Just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Kliuchevskii's former pupil, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868-1932), developed a Marxist version of Russian history in his multivolume study History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism (1910- 1914; English trans. 1931). This was endorsed by Lenin and for a time Pokrovskii was the dominant force in early Soviet historiography; after his death, however, he was condemned by Stalin and abandoned by Party historians for his lack of nationalist sentiment. Initial tolerance of intellectual autonomy in the 1920s gave way to rigid Party control in the 1930s, and the state would have an overbearing influence on history-writing from the purges of scholars in the 1930s to the collapse of the Soviet Union seven decades later. This control spread far beyond the borders of the USSR to include the various Soviet satellite states and Warsaw Pact allies in Romania, Poland, Bulgaria, East Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

If anything, German influence was stronger outside western and central Europe than within. To the east, for instance, several generations of early-twentieth-century Romanian historians derived inspiration from Germany, including the archaeologist Vasile Pârvan (1882-1927) and the methodologist Alexandru Xenopol (1847-1920). To the north, the Dane Kristian Erslev (1852- 1930) and the Norwegian Gustav Storm (1845-1903) both spent extended periods in German seminars. Although some British and French historians trained in Germany (Lord Acton [1834- 1902], for instance, with the Catholic scholar Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger), it was American students who most frequently flocked to Germany, returning home to staff departments of history and new graduate schools at U.S. universities. Of those historians working at American universities in the 1880s and 1890s, roughly half had spent some period of time studying in Germany, though frequently too short a period to permit them really to absorb German historical method—much less the whole philosophy behind it—in detail. The "objectivity" mantra chanted in American historiography for many decades may be ascribed in large measure to the importation of a naïve version of Rankeanism that upheld Ranke himself as an idol while largely misunderstanding the more subtle aspects of his thought. Indeed, the myth of Ranke was far more influential in America than his methods, and Gabriele Lingelbach has argued persuasively that the concrete influence of German historiography among U.S. historians at this time has been overstated. Many American scholars, such as Henry Adams, who introduced a seminar at Harvard, even held the German university system in low esteem. Again, it was the aura of the "professional" that was most appealing. Professional standards that upheld a creed of "scientific history" were policed by influential academics like J. Franklin Jameson (1859-1937), editor of the American Historical Review (est. 1895) and upheld by the newly founded (1884) American Historical Association. The brief assault on the supremacy of political history by James Harvey Robinson (1863-1936) and the "New Historians" before and after World War I, and the work of the Progressive historians such as Carl Becker (1873-1945) and Charles Beard (1874-1948), did not endure, but it opened the door to the advent of social history in the 1960s. Becker and Beard's "relativist" doubts about objectivity were also rejected in the conservative search for certainties after World War II. The arrival of postmodernism has given them a new relevance in recent decades, though probably not one that either man would have welcomed.

In Britain, Enlightenment historiography took a rather different turn. William Robertson (1721-1793) was influenced by Voltaire (though critical of the latter's errors) in his History of Charles V. His fellow Scot David Hume (1711-1776)—who was better known as a historian than as a philosopher in his own time—tried to apply his own skeptical theory of causation (and an admiration of ancient historians, especially Thucydides) to England's past. Hume's multivolume History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James II struck a chord with contemporary audiences, and he is also noteworthy for having developed a "sentimental" approach to historical writing that he hoped would appeal to female readers, who found much of historical writing dry and unappealing. The outstanding figure of British historiography during the period, still read frequently today, was Edward Gibbon (1737-1794), whose The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) was a towering masterpiece synthesizing enormous erudition in literary, numismatic, and other antiquarian sources (albeit often at secondhand) with a philosophical and critical outlook. Gibbon was the late Enlightenment heir to two thousand years of thinking about historical problems such as the relationship between empire and liberty, virtue and power, citizenship and wealth, simplicity and luxury, and the nature and reasons underlying historical decline, themes that can be traced back, in different forms, through Renaissance humanists to post-Eusebian ecclesiastical history and beyond, back to Tacitus and Sallust. Gibbon was just as much the beneficiary of a hundred more recent years of enlightened history and erudition in the different modes of Tillemont, Muratori, Giannone, Voltaire, and Robertson. Though he was by no means an anticlerical in the style of Voltaire, Gibbon has become celebrated for his famous ascription of the fall of Rome to the triumph of "barbarism and

In East Africa, Kitãb al-Sulwa fi-akhbar Kilwa (The history of the town of Kilwa, in modern Tanzania) was recounted in an anonymous early-sixteenth-century work commissioned by the Sultan Muhammad b. al-Husayn. Royal chronicles in the ancient Ethiopian Ge'ez tongue first appear in the thirteenth century (at the very same time that secular chronicle writing was increasing in medieval Europe) and continue (sometimes in Amharic) into the twentieth. Other Ethiopian historical literature in Amharic appears in the sixteenth century, such as the History of the Galla, composed in the 1590s. Further south, the language of Swahili includes a preponderance of narrative poems (utendi), of which the earliest written example, Utendi wa Tambuk (1728), is a historical epic set during the life of Muhammed. At the other end of the Sahara, west African kingdoms developed an Arabic-language historical literature, such as the Ta'rikh-as-Sudan (Chronicle of the blacks) by 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di (fl. 1596-1656) and Ta'rikh al-Fattash (Chronicle of the researcher), initiated by Mahmud al-Ka'ti of Timbuktu, which was completed by a descendant about 1665

In Mexico, conquistadors and missionaries had documented the past since the sixteenth century, including the precolonial histories of the subjugated peoples, derived from native codices and oral information: the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún (d. 1590) presented his own survey in both Spanish and the Aztec Nahuatl tongue. Following independence from Spain in 1810, and during the political vicissitudes of the next hundred years, distinctive nationalist and liberal schools of history emerged. Portuguese Brazil, a nation of multiple ethnic groups, followed a similar pattern, as independence in 1822 produced a need for a national history. Early feeble efforts in this direction were transformed in 1838 by the foundation of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, which staged a competition in 1840 on the theme of how best to write a Brazilian history—a contest ironically won by the German naturalist Karl Friedrich Philip von Martius. The acknowledged founder of modern Brazilian history during this period was Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816-1878). Author of both a General History of Brazil and a history of Brazilian independence, Varnhagen made pioneering use of documents in European archives and opened up unstudied new subject areas, such as the relationship between Portuguese and native populations. Elsewhere in South America, as Allen Woll has shown, an intense debate concerning the proper method of history-writing followed the publication of Claude Gay's (1800-1873) political history of Chile. Gay, a French botanist, was commissioned by the Chilean government to write this work, and despite its endorsement by the respected Latin American academic and man of letters Andrès Bello, younger writers (including Bello's own one-time pupil, Lastarria) found its recitation of facts without a search for meaning unsatisfactory. Finally, there were those who sought meaning and instruction in the patriots of the South American past, drawing literary inspiration from across the Atlantic. Bartolomé Mitre (1821-1906), for instance, was initially enamored of H. T. Buckle's erudition. In the end, he gravitated toward Thomas Carlyle's "great man" interpretation of history, and Mitre's account of Argentine independence focused on the careers of its leaders, the revolutionary heroes Manuel Belgrano and José de San Martín.

In South Africa, an indigenous black African oral tradition included Xhosa oral narratives, a subset of which, amibali (sing. ibali), dealt specifically with historical events and genealogical details. These were marginalized in the late nineteenth century by the "Settler School" of white historians and by white imperially focused historians (principally British though including the HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxv 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxv occasional Afrikaner like Henry Cloete). Both of these groups advanced a negative view of the subordinated black culture. The earliest examples of colonial historical writing, in English, Dutch, or Afrikaans, appeared in the first third of the nineteenth century, but the Settler School really only consolidated with the work of the Canadian-born George McCall Theal (1837-1919), who, ironically, had compiled one of the earliest collections of Xhosa narratives. Although criticized for defects of scholarship such as a refusal to cite his sources and a reluctance to do more than recount events without analysis—like many of his contemporaries, he was not a professional historian— Theal proved hugely influential on subsequent historiography. The racist theme of European supremacy in his eleven-volume History of South Africa would be accentuated in the distinctive Afrikaner nationalist tradition after 1910, albeit with the center of gravity provided by events such as the Great Trek (the 1830s migration northward of Afrikaners in search of freedom from British Cape colony rule) rather than British imperial expansion.

In contrast, Vietnam has a much longer and richer experience of historical writing dating back nearly a millennium, with a great deal of genealogical activity occurring at the family level from the fifteenth century. Much of the early historical writing was Chinese-influenced (either Confucian or Buddhist) and written in now-archaic Sino-Vietnamese characters. Although successive Chinese invasions and domestic struggles are thought to have destroyed many early sources, an interest in the past extended down to local communities and clans that scrupulously maintained genealogical and biographical information (gia pha). Chinese-style dynastic histories or imperial annals, the Chanh-Su', record major events reign by reign, and were intended to celebrate the current ruling house, often at the expense of its predecessor. Vietnamese kings strenuously enforced an "authentic history" during the precolonial period. The most noteworthy distinctive historical texts include the Viet su luoc (Historical annals of Viet) from the fourteenth century, itself based on a thirteenth-century text by Le Van Hu'u, and the 1479 Dai Viet su ky toan thu' (Complete historical annals of Great Viet) by Ngo Si Lien.

In other contexts, German practices were less influential. England evolved independently a system for training historians (still based on the individual tutorial and without, as yet, the American emphasis on the Ph.D.), a professional journal in the English Historical Review, and a series of systematic publications or calendarings of documents such as the State Papers and the Rolls Series of chronicles, the last-mentioned essentially a counterpart to the German Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The most widely read historians, however, remained those of a more literary bent, outside the universities, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) and the positivist speculator on the history of civilization, Buckle. Despite the eventual impact of educational reformers such as Cambridge's Sir John Seeley (1834-1895) on the curriculum, the British university until near the end of the century occupied a much less important role in historical scholarship than in either Germany or the United States. Celebrated historians such as the medievalist William Stubbs (1825-1901), the exponent of Teutonism Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892), and the Reformation historian James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), spent significant periods of their careers in church, journalism, or government rather than in a university setting (Stubbs resigned the Regius professorship of history at Oxford to become a bishop; Freeman became his successor after several unsuccessful attempts at a chair; Froude abandoned the university early in his career and only returned as Freeman's successor late in life, after most of his work had been written). The author of scholarly and popular works on this history of the English people, John Richard Green (1837-1883), was a sickly parish curate turned Episcopal librarian, and never held a university appointment at all.

It is tempting to dismiss much postmodern theorizing, historiographically, as chaotic and intellectually anarchistic nonsense, perhaps even a sign of fin-de-siècle cultural decadence. There has recently been an extreme conservative reaction to it, epitomized in the work of the late British historian Sir Geoffrey Elton, and in the critiques of those who lament the loss of any sense of master-narrative. But the postmodern trend has been highly influential in academic settings (especially literature departments); and, while still a minority influence in history departments, it has found a receptive audience among historians of gender and many social and cultural historians for whom it has provided a set of codes and categories to replace those once derived from Marxism. While some of its arguments are virtually self-discrediting, postmodernism has at least provided a salutary reminder to all historians (if one were really needed) that, Ranke notwithstanding, documents and texts never "speak for themselves" but are interpreted by historians, and, more important, that even the most "neutral" document was ultimately the creation of a human being driven by the assumptions, social pressures, and linguistic conventions of his or her own time. HISTORIOGRAPHY lxxviii New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxxviii Few historians would now endorse the French ancient historian Fustel de Coulanges' optimistic admonition to group of applauding students that it was not he who spoke to them but "history, who speaks through me."

Malay-language historical genres, long influenced by Indian, Persian, and Arabic sources, have been well studied though most of their exemplars remain in manuscript. Originating in oral traditions, the first Malay writings about the past tended to be a mix of history and fiction intended principally for didactic purposes and to be orally performed rather than read in silence. The earliest surviving historical work is the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, which dates from the later fourteenth to the very early sixteenth centuries and begins with the reign of a thirteenth-century Sumatran ruler, Malik al-Sâlih. The quantity of verifiable material proliferates somewhat after the seventeenth century. Islamic ideas of historiography, present from two centuries earlier, can be observed

Many Western accounts of historical writing begin with the ancient Greeks rather than the Mesopotamians or the Hebrews, in part because the very word history is itself of Hellenic origin. The Greeks developed several different genres of writing about the past, including genealogy or mythography; ethnography; history "proper" or a continuous narrative of sequential events with their causal connections; horography, the year-by-year history of a particular city; and chronography, a system of time-reckoning. Moreover, it is in fifth-century Athens that one first encounters both the word history and two historians whose works have survived largely intact and who are known to us by name. Herodotus (c. 484-c. 420 B.C.E.), the first of these, certainly had his predecessors. Among these are numbered the mythographers Hesiod (fl. c. 700 B.C.E.) and (contemporary with Herodotus himself) Hellanicus of Lesbos, who was notable for his attention to the problem of reconciling multiple chronologies; and the murky ninth-century figure of Homer (to whom are ascribed the great epics the Odyssey and Iliad, first written down several centuries after the heroic events they purport to relate). More directly, these precursors also included the Ionic writer Hecataeus of Miletus (fl. c. 500 B.C.E.), one of a group of geographical writers and recounters of stories collectively known as the "logographers." Borrowing from Hecataeus, who first distinguished between mythical, genealogical, and "historic" times, and using something of the poetic force of the Homeric epics, Herodotus linked ethnography with history, coining the term historia in the sense of "inquiry," "discovery," or, in some renderings, "inventory" (the Greek verb historein means "to investigate"). His focus was the recent events of the Persian Wars, the origins of which he sought to explain. Herodotus relied to a considerable degree on oral information (although the veracity of that has often been called into question from antiquity to modern times), and in his ethnographic attention to other, non-Greek peoples and their customs he is often held to be the West's "father" of history in its broader, more inclusive, and nonpolitical sense. Herodotus's younger contemporary Thucydides (d. c. 401 B.C.E.), in his account of a particular event over a shorter period, namely the thirty-year struggle between Athens and Sparta known as the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.E.), can similarly be regarded as the progenitor of a narrower, politically focused history, though this dichotomy can be overemphasized. Thucydides also fully developed a device employed by Herodotus that would become a convention of much later historical writing, namely the semifictitious speech ascribed to a major figure (Pericles' funeral oration being a famous example). Zealous in his efforts to represent both sides in the conflict fairly and impartially, Thucydides' account of the arrogance and fall of Athens goes far beyond ascriptions to Olympian whims—it identifies actual and proximate causes of the Athenians' eventual humiliation by a city regarded as its cultural inferior; the arrogance of the Athenians, their flaw, is a more fundamental cause of their downfall drawn from Greek tragedy. Finally, unlike Herodotus, Thucydides proclaimed his own intention of writing for the edification of future ages as much as for those living in his own time.

Meanwhile, academic reactions to strict scientific history in the more narrow, positivist sense, echoing Dilthey's earlier qualifications, can be seen in the enormously influential Italian philosopher and historian, Benedetto Croce (1866-1952). Like Dilthey, Croce rejected both Rankean historical method and scientific positivism, arguing instead the autonomy of history from science, and the inseparability of history and life—records and documents only have significance insofar as living humans can reflect upon them and, indeed, relive them; conversely, we only make sense of life by thinking historically. A pronounced antifascist, he also held to a view of "history as the story of liberty." Croce's views appealed to many, including his younger British contemporary, the archaeologist turned philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943). Collingwood's posthumously published The Idea of History advanced the notion that "all history—is the history of thought" and suggested that the historian must empathize with his or her subjects, enter into the "interior" of a historical event (the thought of the agent behind the event), and mentally "re-enact" it in order to retell it. His book remains very widely read, and its concept of historical imagination has come back into vogue with the advent of postmodernism in the past twenty years. The Brazilian-born Spanish literary scholar and historian, Américo Castro (1885-1972) echoed both Collingwood and the American Carl Becker in his assertion that "To write history demands a historian willing (and able) to enter into the living consciousness of others through the door of his own life and consciousness" (p. 305). Castro, who fled to the United States following the Spanish Civil War further reflected historicist sentiments in his views upon the inseparability of a people and its history, and of the relationship between individual and general histories. In a very different focus on the human interior, the later works of Sigmund Freud, especially Moses and Monotheism (1939), applied his own psychoanalytic theories and clinical experience to the "diagnosis" of history. The process of civilization Freud envisaged as an endless struggle of love and hate, sex and death, arising from primal patricide, and carried forward by leader-figures such as Moses in conflict with the mobs whom they dominated—the irony of the similarity in this regard between a Viennese Jew and aspects of the thought of both Nietzsche and Hitler is difficult to escape. The European scholarly tradition had without doubt put some distance between itself and Ranke's history wie es eigentlich gewesen

Modern Korean historiography acquired a Western face through the intermediary of Meiji Japan, and Japanese scholarship dominated the study of Korea in the early twentieth century, during the period of occupation (1910-1945). One of the early consequences was a reactive rewriting of early Korean history on liberal, progressivist, and nationalist rather than dynastic lines by historians such as Sin Ch'ae-ho (1880-1936) and Ch'oe Nam-so˘n (1890-1957). Beginning in the 1930s and culminating in his acquisition of political influence in the north following World War II, the Marxist Paek Nam-un (1895-1974) featured prominently in the construction of a historical materialist past that integrated Korea within Marxist periodization. When Soviet de-Stalinization spread to allied countries in the mid-1950s, strictly deterministic materialism began to fall from favor among a younger generation of historians; beginning in the late 1960s, traditional international Marxism was largely abandoned in favor of a nationalist historiography of "selfreliance" (Juch'e) devoted especially to celebration of the personality and family of Kim Il Sung. To the south, in the Republic of Korea, a central thrust of historiography since World War II has been to dispel foreign and especially Japanese views of Korea as backward and servile. The most influential recent members of the nationalist school have been specialists on ancient history, who have used archaeology as well as history to promote the notion of the Koreans as an independent and homogeneous ethnic group (minjok). According to this view, which continues to be taught

Modern Western-style historical writing per se appears first in nineteenth-century colonial times—not a great deal later than its establishment in Europe. Initially, Western historical writing was largely the domain of the colonizers, especially missionaries, who were concerned to integrate African schoolchildren into a Christian and European past. There were some notable indigenous exceptions, such as Samuel Johnson (1846-1901), the Yoruba son of a Sierra Leone freedman who returned to his parents' home in Nigeria as a missionary. Johnson, strongly affected by classical historians such as Xenophon, authored a History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate (published posthumously in 1921). This was based largely on Yorubaland oral historical narratives (ìtàn) and eyewitness accounts, in addition to colonial documents; Johnson's purpose, as he announced at the start of his book, was to ensure "that the history of our fatherland might not be lost in oblivion, especially as our old sires are fast dying out." Carl Christian Reindorf (1834-1917), another African cleric, used both oral and written evidence for his 1895 History of the Gold Coast and Asante, and the Buganda (part of Uganda) politician Sir Apolo Kagwa (c. 1869-1927) provided an orally based history of The Kings of Buganda (1901). In the West Central African territory of the Bamum (modern Cameroon), its local sultan, Njoya (c. 1880-1933), created his own ideographic script, modeled on European writing, and then commissioned the writing of a 548-page manuscript on the history and customs of his people.

Most of the historians in this period tended to be non-academics: the Syrian Ilyas Matar (1857-1910) was an Ottoman official, physician, and lawyer, and his compatriot Jurji Yanni (1856-1941) an Orthodox Christian journalist and intellectual. The Lebanese-Egyptian Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914) was a journalist and a prolific author of historical novels in addition to a multivolume history of Islamic civilization (1902-1906). Academic historiography began slowly in the post-Ottoman era starting in the 1920s, initially in the hands of North American- and Europeantrained scholars, thus extending the dominance of Western-style academic history over the Islamic world's long distinct historiographic traditions. Asad Rustum, a historian of Syria, published an Arabic-language manual on Western historical method in 1939, largely drawn from Langlois and Seignobos's famous textbook, a work that was already fast losing ground in its homeland in the face of the emerging Annaliste (see below) historical revolution. A Lebanese Maronite, Philip Hitti,

Myanmar (Burma before 1989) and Thailand (Siam prior to 1939) also have distinctive historiographies although there are some common points in Tai-language areas of Burma. The study of Burmese historiography is complicated by the powerful influence of myths and stories upon historical writing during relatively recent times rather than in older indigenous sources. Research by Michael Aung-Thwin has demonstrated that a number of so-called historical events rest not on primary sources but on "retroactive myths" or misinterpretations, principally of modern and colonial rather than ancient and indigenous creation. Early Burmese sources include nonroyal historical records, generally concerning particular kingdoms, places, or towns and known as thamaing, which is also the modern Burmese word for history. Monastic chronicles such as the Padaeng Chronicle recount the arrival of Theravada Buddhism in the Shan states bordering on Siam and Laos during the fifteenth century and the establishment of the Padaeng Vat (Red Forest monastery) itself. The Jengtung State Chronicle begins with a legendary or semilegendary section before covering the history of that Shan state from the fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Much Burmese historical writing is devoted to specific dynasties and particular kings, in particular the prose chronicles collectively called Yazawin (literally, "genealogies of kings"), which are based on written and oral sources and employ literary devices not unlike the classical set speech. According to Aung-Thwin, the Yazawin date back at least as far as 1520, when the monk Shin Thilawuntha produced his Yazawinkyaw (Celebrated chronicle of kings); only a few such chronicles are extant.

One trend that began in the mid-1970s but has roots in literary theory and in continental philosophy (especially the French figures Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, and the Germans HansGeorg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger and, more remotely, Friedrich Nietzsche) is the so-called linguistic turn in historiography, often identified with the broader theoretical shift known as postmodernism. Influenced by cultural theorists such as Roland Barthes, Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul Ricoeur, and by the prewar German intellectual Walter Benjamin, postmodernism also draws extensively, if often superficially, from cultural anthropology. The thrust of this has been seriously to challenge conventional boundaries between history and literature, leading American exponents of this view being the Americans Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. It has also, as the historical theorist F. R. Ankersmit suggests, had the effect of "de-disciplining" and "privatizing" history—restoring the individual author, as opposed to the institutional structures erected in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the center of historical writing. In its most extreme version (which is articulated less frequently than postmodernism's most severe critics would have us believe), it hearkens back to Renaissance pyrrhonism in its radical denial of the fixity of any historical meaning, the existence of any external reality beyond language (there are only infinite floating "signifiers," and no definable or recoverable "signifieds"), and the impossibility of making "true" statements about the past. The position derived from this—that any version of history is no more or less valid than another—while seemingly liberal, also opens the door to the legitimation of morally repugnant positions such as Holocaust denial. This issue has come to the fore in recent years through a number of celebrated cases, most notoriously the 1990s libel suit brought by Holocaust denier David Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, who had charged him with gross fabrication and distortion of evidence to support his theories. A spectacle followed around the globe. The trial involved the historian Richard Evans and a team of graduate students scrutinizing David Irving's research intensively, the consequences of which were the utter demolition of his arguments and an overwhelming legal victory in the year 2000 for Lipstadt and her publisher.

Pre-Islamic India also developed other traditions of writing about the past, distinct from itihasapurana, especially Buddhist and Jaina, both centered in monastic institutions; the Pali-language chronicles from Sri Lanka for instance focus on the history of a particular Buddhist order or monastery but also stray into secular history and the history of earlier times. Writings such as the Rajavaliya, compiled by several hands between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Mahavamsa, a sixth-century work continued in the tripartite Culavamsa of the twelfth, fourteenth, and late eighteenth centuries, together represent a cumulative history of nearly two millennia. To India's north, in Tibet, Buddhist scholarship produced (in Tibetan and Sanskrit) the large history known as the Deb-ther sngon-po (Blue Annals, the work of the translator and compiler 'Gos lotsa-ba gzhon-nu-dpal (1392-1491) who used and frequently simply copied earlier sources such as rnam-thar (lives) by religious teachers, not all of which are still extant. The chronology of this work and the names of Tibetan rulers can be verified by comparison with events described in earlier Chinese annals from the Tang dynasty. Together with the slightly earlier "History of Buddhism" by Buston (composed c. 1322), the Blue Annals has become the source of information for most later histories of Tibet. Apart from language variations (Pali and Tibetan as opposed to Sanskrit), South Asian Buddhist historical writing parted from the Brahmanic in at least one important respect, its dating of events from a single point, the death of the Buddha c. 483 B.C.E. (a controverted date also used by some, but not all, Buddhist-influenced countries). There is an obvious analogy with Christian and Muslim dates A.D. and A.H., and the greater sense of time that one finds in a work like Kalhana's may well be attributable to Buddhist influences, though a comparably Buddhist "era" never achieved historiographical usage in either South or East Asia.

Russian historical writing continued to be influenced by Western European traditions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it had in the time of Schlözer. As elsewhere, considerable activity was devoted in the post-Napoleonic era to the collection and publication of source materials, especially government documents, under the leadership of the Chancellor Nikolai P. Rumiantsev (1754-1826). An "Archeographic Commission" undertook a nationwide survey of archives and repositories analogous to Britain's Victorian-founded Historical Manuscripts Commission. Various other archaeological and historical societies were established, such as the Russian Historical Society of Petersburg, whose Russian Biographical Dictionary (publication of which was interrupted by the October Revolution in 1917 and the society's dissolution), is again a counterpart of a British publication, the Dictionary of National Biography. Influenced by the German classicist B. G. Niebuhr, M. T. Kachenovskii (1775-1842) adopted a highly skeptical approach to the early, Kievan period of Russian history. Hegel's philosophy of history and the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854) were widely read among the intelligentsia of the 1830s and 1840s, influencing a "slavophilic" school of historians, but the general trend was toward Westernization of practical historical methodology in a "scientific" vein. The two outstanding historians of the second half of the nineteenth century were S. M. Soloviev (1820-1879) and V. O. Kliuchevskii (1841-1911). Soloviev had traveled in the West and heard lectures by the German Leopold von Ranke (see further below), as well as by Guizot and Michelet; he was personally acquainted with the great Czech Palacký. Soloviev's prodigious History of Russia since Ancient Times appeared in twenty-nine annual volumes beginning in 1851, accompanied by numerous monographs. Rather like Ranke, he had a vision of history as a unified and continuous story of organic development. In the following generation Kliuchevskii, Soloviev's pupil and successor, assigned a new prominence to the analysis of economic and social history, which would establish the groundwork for post-revolutionary Marxist historiography

Second, the rediscovery of particular historians, and ebbs and flows in popularity among them (the notable rise of Tacitus's popularity at the end of the sixteenth century being a good illustration), served to restore the writing of biography and history as continuous narrative, in neoclassical Latin and vernacular languages, in place of the religious and secular chronicles, annalistically organized, that had dominated for the past millennium or more. Leonardo Bruni, the earlyfifteenth-century chancellor of the Florentine Republic, was one member of a long line of learned civic officials who would combine public life with scholarly activity and in particular with the writing of history. His sixteenth-century successors, far too many to enumerate, included two who were also outstanding political thinkers, Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) and the more famous Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), both of whom wrote full-length histories. Each also authored works of political wisdom, in Machiavelli's case drawing inspiration directly from Livy (and, more ambiguously, from Polybius and Tacitus), and yoking together examples from the recent and remote past in The Prince and Discourses. Guicciardini, his more pessimistic contemporary, had as a young man written a history of Florence; but he grew less interested than Machiavelli in pursuing the history of his city back to barbarian times than in narrating the unfolding of its and all Italy's current troubles (the invasions by French and Spanish armies and the erosion and collapse of republican independence). Perhaps as a consequence of this Thucydidean focus on the very recent past, he was more attentive to detail (in particular the complexity of contemporary international relations among states), and, unusually for his day, more skeptical about the capacity of past examples to serve the present, owing to variations of circumstance between superficially similar historical situations. This latter point is an important insight that anticipates much later thinking on the uniqueness of discrete historical events and the incommensurability of different historical epochs, and it is no coincidence that Guicciardini eventually found a modern disciple (albeit a critical one) in the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke.

Southeast Asia. Our account has so far neglected much of Asia outside India, the Middle East, China, and Japan. Yet there exists a variety of historiographical traditions in other parts of the continent that deserve mention and which for ease of reference are summarized here in one section devoted to Southeast Asia. The region as a whole has been studied extensively by Western scholars (in particular Dutch, British, and French) since colonial times, but we will address our attention to select indigenous forms of history writing, and to those authors the Thai-American historian Thongchai Winichakul usefully calls "home" scholars. In nearly every part of Southeast Asia, local forms of history have arisen, most of which have been influenced at some point by Islamic, Chinese, or Western ideas. The perceptions of the past in most Southeast Asian countries are complicated by the multitude of languages and by the thorny heritage of regional conquests and foreign colonization; they are virtually invisible in standard histories of historical writing, even those that pay heed to China and Islam

South of Finland in the Baltic region, nationalist sentiments were much slower to develop. The history of Estonia and Latvia was written almost entirely by their Baltic German intellectual elites prior to their independence in 1918, national sentiments from the 1860s producing relatively litHISTORIOGRAPHY lvi New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lvi tle by way of historiography. Lithuanian historiography has been more fully documented thanks to Virgil Krapauskas, though its story is similar. Tied to Poland through much of the late medieval and early modern periods and dominated by Russia in the nineteenth century, Lithuania had actually lacked a written language prior to the late fourteenth century—early historical sources emanated from Russian, German, or Polish writers. Unlike other ethnic groups, Lithuanians thus had little by way of historiographical tradition prior to the romantic-era historian Simonas Daukantas (1793-1864), who wrote in Lithuanian and created a dubious pedigree for his people in a remote barbarian tribe. Earlier histories were rare. The "Bychovko chronicle," the long version of a pro-Lithuanian sixteenth-century text generally known as the Lithuanian Chronicle was not available till 1846, when it was published by Daukantas's contemporary, Teodor Narbutt (1784-1864). Another sixteenth-century Lithuanian chronicle, by Augustine Rotundus (c. 1520-1582), had long been lost. Daukantas had no immediate followers. As Krapauskas notes, between 1832, when the Russians closed the University of Vilnius, and the early twentieth century, Lithuania produced no academically trained historians of its own, though distinguished Poles such as Lelewel wrote about the Lithuanian past. The creation of a sense of national identity where none had existed fell to non-professionals: minor noblemen, poets and linguists, who were more interested in creating a heroic past than in following the canons of western historical scholarship; and the occasional parttime scholar like Bishop Motiejus Valanc ius (1801-75), whose historical work on his Samogitian diocese more closely approximates mainstream European critical historiography. Collectively, their work provided an essential ingredient for the establishment in 1918 of Lithuania's own short-lived independence. Beginning in 1883, with the publication of the nationalist newspaper Auszra, Lithuanian intellectuals increasingly took an anti-Polish tack. While they traced their linguistic and cultural heritage back, rather tenuously, to the remote centuries of the once-powerful Grand Duchy of Lithuania, they repudiated connections to that state's association with Poland in favor of a Herderian-style concept of the nation

The African Past. In order to appreciate twentieth-century African historiography, it is first necessary to examine earlier forms of history on the continent. It was once commonplace to assert that Africa had no past prior to colonial times—it was one of those regions, like the New World or India, that Hegel dismissed as "without history," a pronouncement that the late Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) notoriously repeated in the 1960s. In recent decades, this myth has been exploded, largely owing to the considerable efforts of historians to recover and compare oral traditions and to establish reasonably reliable chronologies of events, but also because of growing knowledge of the existence of writing outside Islamic North Africa before the arrival of Europeans. Poetry and folk tales from many regions have been demonstrated to possess a sense of the past and of historical events, with or without the presence of literacy. The oral tales of the Dinka of southern Sudan, for example, frequently begin with the standard assertion, "This is an ancient event." In some regions hieroglyphics also preserved a record of the early past. Writing was introduced not by European colonizers, but by Arab and Berber invaders in the centuries following the rise of Islam, and a number of west African non-Arabic writing systems appeared in later centuries.

The Annales historians also advocated a new modus vivendi between history and the social sciences, with Fernand Braudel (1902-1985) calling for the subjugation of histoire événementielle (short-term human actions, for instance in the political world) to the study of longer periods of social, material, and economic conjonctures and the much slower geographical and climatalogical changes that occurred over the longue durée of centuries; the classic expression of this layered periodization is Braudel's own study of The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II . The statistical tendencies of many members of Braudel's generation of Annalistes are most clearly evident in the work of Pierre Chaunu (whose history of Seville and the Atlantic established a subgenre often called "serial history" because of its attention to establishing continuous series of historical data on such matters as food prices). Intellectual historians such as Robert Mandrou and François Furet pioneered a quantitative approach to the history of mentalités, opening up what has since evolved into histoire du livre, the history of the book. In more recent decades, however, the Annales historians have veered away from quantification to the study of mentalités in Bloch and Febvre's mode, with considerably more emphasis being placed on individual and collective beliefs, and on life experienced in local settings. The "microhistory" genre of the late 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, including works like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (a study of a medieval Cathar village) and Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, has proved highly saleable in the academic and even popular book market and has spawned numerous European and North American imitators.

The German Aufklärung contribution to historical thought and writing may have had the most profound and lasting effects on the next century. In contrast to the gentlemanly tradition of a Gibbon or the journalism of a Voltaire, German historical thought and writing was intimately linked to the educational system, and especially to universities such as Göttingen. The list of achievements is considerable. Schlözer (1735-1809) returned from Russia to Göttingen and a prolific career as a historian in 1767. Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727-1799) pursued the development of a "universal history" and promoted erudite scholarship at Göttingen. Elsewhere, at Halle, Friedrich August Wolf (1759-1824) revolutionized Homeric studies and created a new term for the interdisciplinary study of antiquity, Altertumswissenschaft. Others worked without university appointments. Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768), a librarian at Dresden, put art history, and especially the study of Greek sculpture, on a new footing, refocusing attention away from artists' biographies and on to changing styles and their periods. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1833), a schoolmaster and clerical official, anticipated the historicism and nationalism of the next century with his notion that a Volk, or people, exhibited cultural characteristics, the product of language, climate, and experience, that transcended political boundaries. His Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791), in some ways a synthesis of the previous century's work, nonetheless marked a significant departure from the standard early Enlightenment rationalist view of an unchanging nature common to all humans at all times. Herder directed attention away from political and military history (the edificatory value of which he doubted) toward the "inner life" of humans discernible from art, music, and literature, an approach that would ultimately evolve into the later German idea of Kulturgeschichte.

The Islamic influence was especially strong in the north, the region known as Maghreb, Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah being its most famous historiographical product. Many indigenous tongues were represented with Arabic script (a practice known as adjami), for instance those of the Hausa of Sudan and the nomadic Fulani who conquered much of the Hausa territory in the nineteenth century. Historiographically, the Hausa were especially influenced by the Ta'rikh alHISTORIOGRAPHY lxiv New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxiv khulafa (History of the caliphs) by the prolific Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti (1445-1505): as late as the early twentieth century, for instance, Abubakar dan Atiku's Chronicle of Sokoto imitated the form and style of al-Suyuti. The Hausa also evolved a courtly tradition of contemporary historical writing, exemplified in Ahmad b. Fartua of Bornu's chronicle of the reign of the Sultan Idris III (1570-1602). In more recent times, Hausa communities have developed local chronicles written in either Hausa or Arabic and have focused on maintaining chronological lists of rulers; that of the town of Kano, to give one example, goes back to a legendary founder and ends with a latenineteenth-century emir, Mahammadu Bello.

The Latin American experience reflects both European and, more recently, North American trends, while some of its historical concerns have for decades anticipated the very issues raised in the 1960s by European Marxists such as E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, and more recently in South Asia by Subaltern scholars. Academic historiography was firmly established with the foundation of public archives at the end of the nineteenth century, and the creation of history departments at universities. The longest-standing graduate programs date back to the 1950s and include El Colegio de México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad San Marcos in Lima, and the Universidad de Chile, but a significant proportion of academics with doctorates have acquired them abroad at European (especially Oxford, Cambridge, and Madrid) and major American universities, many of which (the University of Texas and the University of California, Berkeley, for example) have first-rate library collections and strong graduate programs in Latin American studies.

The Middle East. After an eighteenth-century decline in Ottoman historical writing, and the temporary displacement of Arabic by Turkish as the dominant elite language of much of the Islamic world, Islamic historiography written in Arabic began to recover in the mid-nineteenth century. This occurred in the wake both of European expansion into the Middle East and Africa and of reforms within the Ottoman Empire itself, which gave rise to incipient Arab nationalism. Many areas had enjoyed some autonomy from Istanbul for a century, with the result that there were already some examples of Arabic-language histories focused on pan-Arab national identity. This was true in Tunisia and Lebanon as well as in Morocco, which historically lay outside Ottoman control. Arab intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century began to write histories as continuous narratives, rather than annals, devoted to establishing national pasts, which now also included the pre-Islamic periods. Older pan-Islamic cultural and religious impulses remained as important as newer Arab nationalism, as Muslims confronted the dilemma of how to coexist with Western infidel powers, and as modern Islamic thought, influenced by Western science and technology, itself began to take shape in the hands of activist-reformers like Sayyid Jamal al-Din Afghani (1838-1897), the author of a history of Afghanistan.

The Westernization of Japanese historiography in the late nineteenth century has been recounted above. The early twentieth century saw a considerable expansion of this trend after World War I, with Marxist and social science influences gathering momentum in the 1920s and 1930s; economic history of Japan was practiced by scholars such as Honjo Eijiro (1888-1973) and Otsuka Hisao (1907-1996), and local history by Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962). Extensive publication of sources also occurred. As we have seen, the period of the late 1930s and the war years marked a disastrous period for historiography, either silencing or co-opting those on the left. During the American occupation and after, Marxist interpretations would rebound, and an enormous effort was directed in the first postwar decades to the support of democracy by identifying the historic weaknesses in the imperial system that had brought the country to the brink of destruction: Maruyama Masao's (1914-1996) studies of Japanese political thought, for instance, exposed the roots of "ultranationalism" and fascism. The 1960s would see a reaction against "elitist" history (including the Marxist version) and the creation of a "people's history" (Minsushi). Although national devotion to the imperial past has never disappeared entirely, much of postwar Japanese scholarship reflects historiographical trends elsewhere, including the awareness of Eurocentrism. Since the 1970s, the same multiplication of subfields experienced in the West has also occurred in Japan.

The almost total neglect or disparagement of the black population continued into the apartheid era. Liberal historians such as W. M. Macmillan and C. W. de Kiewiet, beginning in the 1920s, began to integrate black and white experience, and to attend to social and economic history; they evinced concern for the treatment of indigenous blacks while maintaining the assumption of European civilized superiority. The writing of missionary-trained black historians, such as Soga, of the first half of the century, was notably inclined to a favorable view of the British. In the 1970s, however, more radical scholars, many of them Marxists, advanced a more serious attack on past historiography, likening colonialism and its apartheid aftermath to the class system. The works of British Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson and of the American Eugene Genovese seemed transplantable to Africa. Social theories such as André Gunder-Frank's "underdevelopment" thesis (originally developed with Latin America in mind) were similarly adapted by Africanists.

The early twentieth century would see some extensive reconsideration of the Chinese past. Archaeology produced alternative sources such as oracle bone inscriptions for the study of the most ancient dynasties, especially the Shang. Gu Jiegang authored a fundamental revaluation of ancient Chinese history that was so strong in its dismissal of some received myths that his works were declared unsuitable for students in the late 1920s. In the 1930s an extensive debate arose over the periodization of Chinese history; the outcome of this "Social History Controversy" was the adaptation of the Chinese past into European and especially Marxist period categories such as "feudalism." Even more than May Fourth scholarship, early Chinese Marxist historical thought, initially derived from Russian sources, produced a fundamental break with the Confucian didactic and moralizing practices that had dominated two-and-a-half millennia of history writing.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also produced major historical works, such as Le Quy Don's (c. 1726-1784) Dai Viet thong su (Complete history of Dai Viet, also known as the complete history of the Le Dynasty). Traditional Vietnamese historiography would survive the advent of Europeans, especially the French, from the mid-nineteenth century, although it was subject to official censorship: a popular general history was Tran Tron Kim's (1882-1953) Viet-nam su-luoc (1929-1930). However, French scholars working on the area (and French-educated Vietnamese HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxix 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxix returning home) gradually succeeded in introducing Western models of historiography during the 1900s, along with potent concepts such as nationalism and Marxism, with formidable effects on the country's subsequent development. The advent of the printing press in turn gave history a much wider public currency. Patriotic and anti-French historians like Phan Boi Chau (1867-1940), one of many Vietnamese intellectuals either jailed or exiled from 1908 until the 1920s, abandoned dynastic history and adopted Western historical categories, together with a concept of progress and social development derived from Sino-Japanese interpreters of Darwin and Spencer. The flurry of publishing in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s included a significant proportion of historical and biographical books and pamphlets, and Ho Chi Minh himself, after his 1941 return to Vietnam, authored a poetic history of the country. New histories, written by Vietnamese, followed the French withdrawal in the 1950s and signaled a further turn in scholarly historiography in the partitioned country. During the extended period of war prior to 1975, state-enforced Marxist interpretations in the north were met with equally fervent anticommunist historiography in the south, seriously constraining the range of topics that could be addressed. Since the introduction of an official policy of "renovation" in the late 1980s, some liberalization has occurred, including better exchanges of information with the rest of the world. However, an official history, subordinate to political ends, is still conveyed in textbooks, and certain subjects remain proscribed.

The great age of Burmese historical writing was the eighteenth century, beginning with the Mahayazawingyi written by the wealthy independent author U Kala (the first Burmese history thought to be sole-authored) during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. U Kala was followed in the late eighteenth century by an anonymous work, probably by a monk, the New Pagan Chronicle, devoted to the Pagan dynasty (1044 C.E.-1287 C.E.). The Twinthin Myanma Yazawinthit (The new history of Myanma, or Burma), written at the end of the eighteenth century by Twinthintaikwun Mahasithu, was the first to use inscriptions to verify facts in earlier chronicles such as U Kala's and to expand the meaning of Yazawin beyond the deeds of kings. This practice was not maintained in a series of nineteenth-century writings, generally under official sponsorship, which reverted to the older meaning. These included the Hmannan Mahayazawindawgyi (Great royal chronicle of the Glass Palace, so named after the meeting place of its authors), the collective work of a group of selected intellectuals. Essentially an updated version of U Kala's Mahayazawingy, the Glass Palace chronicle was extended in subsequent chronicles up to 1905. These works focused almost entirely on royalty and were intended to present a clear and uncontested record of events accompanied by moral lessons—the Maniyadanabon of the lateeighteenth-century monk Shin Sandalinka is a repository of historical examples illustrating pragmatic political principles worthy of Machiavelli.

The kings of the Chakri dynasty continued to support historical writing. King Rama I (d. 1809) commanded the revision of a number of phongsawadan, and his famous later successor, the Buddhist monk-turned-monarch Rama IV or Mongkut ([d. 1868] of Anna and the King of Siam) authorized the definitive Royal Autograph edition of the chronicles of Ayutthaya. Keenly interested in history, Mongkut also pursued the study of epigraphy. He and his heir, Rama V (d. 1910), commissioned the last in this tradition, a series of chronicles of his four Chakri predecessors by their long-serving administrator Chaophraya Thiphakorawong (1813-1870). Outside Bangkok, a particularly vigorous tradition of local chronicle-writing developed in northern Thai communities and subsidiary kingdoms. That of Chiang Mai (capital of the old kingdom of Lan Na), the work of an anonymous author who borrowed selectively and carefully from earlier sources, recounts its history from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. Usually written on palm-leaf manuscripts or bark-paper, these chronicles peaked in the early nineteenth century, although there are wellknown later examples such as the Nan Chronicle, compiled in 1894 by Saenluang Ratchasomphan, an official of the Nan king. Similar chronicles were written in Tai-language regions of Burma and what is now Laos.

The later nineteenth century also witnessed something else not seen before historiographically, namely the far greater involvement of women in historical writing in Europe and North America. Women had been readers of history for three centuries or more, and there had been a handful of notable female historians such as Ban Zhao, Anna Comnena, Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay (1731-1791), and Mercy Otis Warren, as well as numerous women authors of popular histories and biographies such as England's Agnes Strickland (1796-1874) in the mid-1800s; Germaine de Staël (1766-1817) offered an iconic figure of female "genius" and historical imagination outside the realm of scholarly research. J. R. Green's widow and collaborator, Alice Stopford Green (1847-1929), outlived her husband by nearly half a century, during which time she published several works on Irish history in her own right. Mary Anne Everett Wood (later Green; 1818-1895) abandoned an early career as a Strickland-like biographer of princesses to spend her life as a fulltime editor of documents at England's Public Record Office. With their admission to some universities women began to make even more significant contributions to scholarship: one of the most formidable economic historians of the first half of the twentieth century, Eileen Power (1889-1940) would proceed from Girton (a women's college at Cambridge) to postgraduate study at the École des Chartes. In the United States, late-nineteenth-century feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage compiled a History of Woman Suffrage, while Mary Ritter Beard (1876-1958) published what became the most important English-language survey of female agency and power, Woman as Force in History (1946). With all that, the career barriers to women in academic historiography remained daunting until at least the 1970s; the American Historical Association elected only one female president in its first hundred years of existence, although a number have been chosen since then.

These developments provided a backdrop to the writings of the first generation of republican historians. Unsympathetic to the decay of the later Ottoman Empire in the previous two hundred years, the republicans nevertheless embraced the successes of the empire's glory days from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. As Cemal Kafadar notes, the founder of modern Turkish historiography, Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (1890-1966), began to articulate this vision in the 1930s in a series of lectures at the Sorbonne, soon published as The Origins of the Ottoman Empire in French and Turkish. Köprülü focused on Osman (the eponymous founder of the Ottoman house) and the rise of the Turks in thirteenth-century Anatolia; his theories would be elaborated and revised by the Austrian Paul Wittek (1894-1978). The task of this generation of historians, sorting out legend from fact, and balancing ethnicity, religion, and other influences, is in some ways redolent of the romantic nationalist historiographies of the early and middle years of the nineteenth century and, more remotely, of Renaissance debates about national origins, albeit now approached with the tools of modern scholarship. The new work, to which non-Turks such as Wittek and the Greek George Arnakis (a severe critic of Köprülü) contributed, was carried out against a longstanding Western European historiography of the Ottomans dating back to the Englishmen Richard Knolles (c. 1550-1610) and Paul Rycaut (1628-1700) and including more recently the early-nineteenth-century Viennese Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856), and the American Herbert Gibbons (1880-1934). The opening of Ottoman archives in the 1940s redirected scholarship in newer directions of social and economic history, and since the mid-twentieth century, Turkey has continued to produce academic historians such as the left-leaning economic historian Mustafa Akdag˘ (1913-1972) and his critic, the distinguished historian Halil Inalcik (b. 1916), a student of Köprül

These previous contacts date from the eleventh century, when al-Biruni had traveled into India and reported back on its culture. The newcomers brought with them what was by then a mature Muslim historiography, and in the fourteenth-century, the Bengali official Ziya'-ud-Din Barani would remark of historians that they must be truthful and provide insight into virtuous behavior but also inquire into the reasons underlying change in human affairs, injunctions that would not have arisen in the context of itihasa-purana. By the sixteenth century, when Mongoldescended Islamic rulers from Turkestan (the Mughals) ruled much of India, Islamic and especially Persian, cultural influences on historiography became more widespread: the Sanskrit-language Kashmir chronicles were superseded by Persian-language works such as the anonymous Baharistan-iShahi (1614), or the sixteenth-century autobiographical history of the Central Asian Mughals, Tarikh-i-Rashidi (comp. c. 1541-1544) by the warrior Mirza Muhammad Haidar (c. 1500-1551). The latter's cousin, the Mughal conqueror Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad, known as Babur (1483- 1530), composed or dictated a detailed autobiographical history of his times, the Baburnama. Abu- 'l Fazl 'Allami (1551-1602), the minister of Babur's grandson Akbar, authored the Akbarnama, which brought together a variety of sources; it also contains many interesting reflections on the nature of history, which he conceived of as both rational and as a source of solace for grief in the present. At precisely the same period that court-sponsored histories were in vogue in Renaissance Europe, the same feature can be observed in Mughal India, and Akbar inaugurated with Abu-l Fazl the Persian-influenced practice of having an official historiographer write the history of the empire, a practice that was maintained until the last great Mughal emperor, or Aurangzeb 'Alamgir, in the following century. During the next two hundred years, Islam continued to dominate

Modern Malay historical writing began in the early twentieth century, when tawarikh (a modern, Muslim-derived term for history) was introduced into schools and a distinction made between it and the more literary content of the hikayats (though it maintained the preoccupation with dynasties and political elites). Abdul Hadi bin Haji Hasan published the three-volume Sejarah Alam Melayu, the first modern national history, during the 1920s, and a significant number of state and local histories appeared in the years leading up to and following Malaysia's acquisition of statehood in 1957. More recently, academic historiography has expanded considerably in Malaysia owing to the mandatory study of history in secondary schools since 1987.

Though it shares the Malay language with Malaysia as its modern lingua franca, the case of Indonesia is especially complex, because of its many constituent peoples and languages. Javanese historiographical forms, for instance, include the genre known as babad, historical poems generally relating the foundation and subsequent history of Java, or the relation of a particular event, usually a war. These babad, also featured in the literature of Java's neighbor, Bali, were often composed by court poets. They are generally of recent (eighteenth-century and after) origin, and scholars differ on the degree to which they may be relied upon for factual accuracy—though it has been argued that the Western dichotomy between fact and fiction is simply irrelevant since the concept of fiction does not exist, only a notion of degrees of veracity. Examples include the Babad Tanah Jawi (Chronicle of the land of Java), a group of texts covering the era from mythical times to the late eighteenth century, Babad ing Sakhala (written 1738), a two-thousand-line verse chronicle running from 1478 to 1720, and Babad Jaka Tingkir, a mid-nineteenth-century account in seven thousand lines of events that occurred in the sixteenth history, drawn in part from Dutch texts. There are also much earlier Javanese works like the fourteenth-century poem by Mpu Prapanca, the Desawarnana and the fifteenth-century (approx.) Pararaton (Book of kings), which covers thirteenth-century events.

To the northeast of Borneo lie the Philippine islands. Long under Spanish and then American rule, the peoples of the Philippines adapted early on to the historical interests of the conquerors, to the great detriment of pre-existing historical memory. Tagalog awits or metrical poems include the Historia famosa ni Bernardo Carpio, a romance derived from older stories of medieval SpanishMoorish conflict. Having largely eradicated precolonial forms of literature, Spanish missionaries used the awit as a tool of colonization; the awits became so familiar in both written and oral form that, Reynaldo C. Ileto notes, the average Filipino by the nineteenth century "knew more about Emperor Charlemagne, the Seven Peers of France and the destruction of Troy than of pre-Spanish Philippine rajahs and the destruction of Manila by the conquistadores" (Ileto in Reid and Marr, p. 381). Ironically, the chivalric and heroic figures in the awits would prove inspirational to Tagalogs dreaming of emancipation from Spanish rule at the end of the nineteenth century, as they transformed the legendary Spaniard Bernardo into a nationalist hero.

Western modes of history began to spread outside their European confines and exercise influence elsewhere, as both natives and missionaries constructed chronicles of the preconquest and conquest eras. By the seventeenth century, an Indian, Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (fl. 1613), and a Mestizo, Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca (1539-1616), both of whom were influenced by the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566), could be relatively comfortable writing history in the mode of the Spanish conquerors, as did the Texcocan Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl (1578- 1650). European expansion also moved east, and other missionaries contributed histories of China and Japan in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were uninfluenced by very different Chinese historical genres of the late Ming period. Nor, in contrast to their rapid subjugation of indigenous American traditions, did they exercise much immediate impact on the Chinese and Japanese. The great period of Western influence on Asian historical writing lay several centuries ahead.

Western non-chronicle histories and school textbooks first began to appear in the late 1920s. At the same time, the introduction of printing expanded the circulation of historical works, including many from abroad, among the Thai learned class. History-teaching at a university level also commenced in the 1920s, at which time a Westernized Thai historiography (prawatsat) emerged. A tradition of royalist-nationalist historiography was established by Mongkut's younger son Prince Damrong Rajanubhab (1862-1943). A prolific author and educational reformer, Damrong was also an admirer of Ranke and Western scholarship in general. His historical work embodied a use of source criticism while retaining the dynastic focus of the older phongsawadan. The long-serving Thai official Luang Wichit Wathakan (1898-1962) developed the nationalist view of the past in a twelve-volume history, Prawattisat Sakon, which appeared opportunely in 1931, just before the overthrow of the monarchy. This veered away from dynastic history in favor of an account of the Thai nation. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, left-wing historiography has been represented in recent decades by a number of economic historians who have built on a seminal study of Thai "feudalism" by Jit Phumisak (1930-1966), a Marxist who was killed while fighting with a guerilla movement. The 1973 overthrow of Thailand's military regime, and the recurrent instability of the next two decades, opened up historical scholarship to a range of new interpretations and to sources far beyond the traditional chronicles. Although the royalistnationalist tradition established by Damrong has remained intact (especially in school textbooks), it has been challenged in recent years by scholars such as Nidhi Eoseewong, in works of local history, and through mass media such as television and magazines.

With the advent of the People's Republic after the chaotic period of the Japanese occupation and the ensuing Communist-Nationalist civil war, Marxist historiography became state-sponsored orthodoxy. Fan Wenlan (1893-1969), whose Zhongguo Tongshi (General history of China) is a landmark of Chinese Marxist history, had been a Communist since the 1920s and was eventually appointed to head the Institute of Modern History—his close relationship with Chairman Mao Zedong probably saved his life during the Cultural Revolution. Early historiographical efforts were often Soviet-inspired, with textbooks translated directly from Russian. Beginning in the early 1950s and continuing into the 1970s, the focus of scholarship was the history of the peasantry and of capitalism, with the triumph of Communism depicted as inevitable. "Party" historiography became a significant subject in its own right, the texts produced by scholars carefully controlled and

Without state sanctions to support it, academic Marxism never attained a dominant position in the West, but had a profound influence nonetheless through the 1980s. Marxist, socialist, or left-leaning historiography began to appear in the Western democracies relatively early in the twentieth century; the leading Norwegian historian of the first half of the twentieth century, Halvdan Koht (1873-1965), for instance was an early self-avowed Marxist. The attraction of Marxism increased in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression, which seemed to bear out Marx's views of the inevitable collapse of capitalism. The dalliance of many HISTORIOGRAPHY lxxvi New Dictionary of the History of Ideas 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxxvi interwar British and some American intellectuals with communism provided the earliest examples of historiography that, in the 1960s, would evolve into Labor history, "radical history," and what is sometimes called "history from below." Several classics of late twentieth-century historical writing such as E. P. Thompson's (1924-1993) The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Georges Lefebvre's (1874-1959) many books on the French revolution were written from an explicitly Marxist, albeit more humanistic, perspective that emphasized the daily lives of the history's underclasses. A modified version of Marxism articulated by the Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), with its concept of cultural "hegemony," has retained an influence in much nonMarxist historical scholarship and literary history.

f any word most characterizes twentieth-century and especially post-1945 historiography, it would have to be fragmentation (a more optimistic descriptor might be diversity). Historians are now political, military, family, gender, women's, economic, social, environmental, intellectual or cultural, and the expansion of university history departments especially in the 1960s has encouraged a high degree of subspecialization, together with a proliferation of journals and book series (which the relatively recent introduction of the Internet shows no sign of slowing down given its capacity to offer cheap alternatives to conventional print). Although Marxism has by and large faded from most North American history departments, social history has been maintained, albeit now often dissolved into various components. Among these, women's history and its offshoot, the history of gender (now including masculinity studies) have perhaps been the most successful in reshaping the recent agenda of the entire discipline. The history of particular ethnicities and religions or sexual orientations has also become more firmly established in departments and often in specialty journals. Interdisciplinary approaches to history began seriously in the 1960s with historians looking to the social sciences, especially sociology and economics, for the theoretical HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxxvii 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxxvii underpinnings that appeared to be lacking from history itself (it is remarkable how often in the history of historical writing a great cataclysm has been followed by a search for new certitudes, a pronounced skepticism toward old ones, or both in combination). Among the more interesting if controversial experiments one must include psychohistory (best represented by Erik H. Erikson). Equally debatable has been the use of "counterfactuals" (the supposition that events in history occurred in ways other than they actually did, and the attempt to model mathematically a hypothetical projected course of events from that alternate starting point), especially in the "Cliometric" or New Economic History of American academics such as Robert W. Fogel. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the stock of sociology and economics began to fall in the judgment of historians, many turned instead to the work of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, Marshall Sahlins, and Victor Turner. (In contrast, social scientists, as Eric H. Monkkonen and others have argued, maintain a steadfast claim to the appropriation of history across their various disciplines, without necessarily intending by "history" the discipline that historians actually practice). Meanwhile, the "history of ideas" has been transformed at one end into cultural history (including most recently the history of the book), and at the other into the pursuit of the meaning of terms and of texts in their linguistic and/or social contexts. The latter stream is in turn divisible into a so-called Cambridge School of the history of political thought, associated with Quentin Skinner in Britain and J. G. A. Pocock in the United States, the Begriffsgeschichte (history of political and social concepts) approach associated with the German Reinhart Koselleck, and the "New Historicist" and "cultural materialist" movements in literary criticism

his solution to pyrrhonism in areas like mathematics and religion did little to buttress confidence that knowledge of the past could be similarly verified. In ensuing decades, others (such as Bacon's fellow Englishmen, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Joseph Glanvill, and William Chillingworth) sought to reaffirm the historical foundations of religious truth. Skepticism about received knowledge, and the belief that reason (we might say "common sense") must take precedence over the revealed truth in Scripture, is perhaps most famously represented in the Dictionnaire historique et critique by the exiled French érudit Pierre Bayle (1647-1706). The Dictionnaire, which appeared in several editions beginning in 1697, was enormously influential in the eighteenth century, but Bayle was scarcely alone in his doubts, especially with respect to the status of scripture as a historical source. Another Frenchman, Isaac de la Peyrère, had anticipated this position in 1655 (the very time at which Archbishop Ussher was confidently working out the date of Creation), after concluding that the Old Testament chronologies were irreconcilable with the existence of non-biblical peoples. The Dutch philosopher Baruch or Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) espoused the notion that the Pentateuch was the work not of Moses but of a much later, post-Exilic author. Churchmen were active participants in these discussions. The French priest Richard Simon (1638-1712) advanced Spinozan doubts as to Mosaic authorship in his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, published at Paris in 1678 and soon seized by authorities. The English cleric Thomas Burnet (c. 1635-1715) authored works of criticism in a similar vein, two centuries of philological refinement having now been reinforced by the physical evidence of fossils, bones and other artifacts collected by the "curious," the virtuoso assemblers of cabinets of marvels during the previous century. When Burnet later suggested that Genesis could be read "metaphorically," he was quickly dismissed from the office he held at court.

in school curricula, the Korean people and state can be traced back over four millennia to a mythic ancestor and state founder, Tan'gun (whose importance was first championed by Sin Ch'ae-ho in the 1930s), their unity having successfully endured generations of suffering from Chinese and Japanese oppressors. The various parallels with the oppression theme of European Romantic-era nationalist historical writing (Poland's Lelewel and Bulgaria's Paisiy, for instance), with modern Jewish historiography since Heinrich Graetz, and with the earlier foundation myths of late medieval and Renaissance Europe, would be worth further exploration

it provides a warning against assuming that history is exclusively the perquisite of Western nations, or even of highly bureaucratized Asian countries like Imperial China. It is perhaps worth offering the further cautionary observation that the types of recent political repression of historians, and attempts by governments to enforce a particular perspective on the past, are conversely not restricted to Indochinese totalitarian regimes or island military dictatorships (nor to older authorities like the Catholic Church and the ancient Qin emperors). In the world's largest democracy, India, the advent in 1998 of the BJP-led government (defeated in elections as this essay was going to press) posed a serious threat to historiography and historical pedagogy as the Hindu nationalist regime undertook measures that included the excision of material in school textbooks (a measure publicly condemned by historians such as Sumit Sarkar) and the encouragement of attacks upon distinguished scholars such as Romila Thapar who were deemed to hold disloyal views of the nation's past. Other examples can be found in the West, such as the controversy in the United States in 1995 over an exhibition to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, the virulent public reaction in Canada to a 1991 television series perceived as critical of the Canadian forces during World War II, or the ongoing "history wars" in Australia, turning in 2004 on sharp right-left disagreements over the past treatment of the aboriginal population by colonists and imperial authorities. Even more odious monthly additions to the list of historians suffering persecution of one sort or another across the globe make for uncomfortable reading

more clearly from that point on. The chronological fixity and sense of causality in histories after this date distinguish them from other varieties of Malay literature, though these too contain historical material, most of which is of courtly origin and is organized around dynasties, often beginning with an origin myth. The best-known Malay historical work is the Sulalat'us-Salatin (Genealogy of kings) which exists in plural versions, the earliest of which dates from 1612 and which may be a revision of a sixteenth-century text. It is most often attributed to an early editor, the obscure prime minister of the kingdom of Johor, Tun Seri Lanang, and was extended forward by subsequent writers. This work is more often known by the title Sejarah Melayu (rendered rather misleadingly as "Malay Annals") and reaches back several centuries. As with other such "palace" chronicles, its function is not to establish accurate dates in the Western style but to make a case, in this instance for the descent of the fifteenth-century Malaccan sultanate, predecessor of the Johor empire, from Iskandar Zulkarnain (Alexander the Great). The Hikayat Marong Mahawangsa (or Kedah Annals), from the Thai-influenced northwest Malay peninsula, is a didactic text relaying the arrival and triumph of Islam in that area, and its events are much less verifiable from external sources than those in the Sejarah Melayu. Other Hikayats vary considerably in the degree to which they contain verifiable historical events as opposed to myths and legends, and modern Malay scholars such as Sir Richard Winstedt subdivided them formally into historical and romance categories. (This now seems an artificial division, and we must once again guard against applying modern Western divisions of fact and fiction to other cultures' perceptions of their pasts. The anthropologist Shelly Errington has even commented that genres like the hikayat ought not be considered history at all since they appear not to arise from "an impulse to write history," cannot be assumed to relate events in chronological order, and rarely contain events that can be explicitly identified as having occurred). Examples include an anonymous eighteenth-century chronicle, the Hikayat Negeri Johor, which covers events in parts of the Malay peninsula since 1672, and the Hikayat Bandjar, a product of the south Borneo coastal Malay kingdom of Bandjar.

orchestrated from above in a manner that makes the bureaucrat-historians of the Tang era seem positively independent by comparison. Since 1949, historians at various times have suffered persecution for heterodox statements, while within the Communist Party itself, different factions have sought historical support for contending political positions. The Great Leap Forward (1959-1961) opened a rift among older and younger Marxist scholars and pressured academic historians toward a militant repudiation of "feudal" or "bourgeois" dynastic history, along with the construction of general histories on Marxist principles, and purged of reference to former dynasties, emperors, and events. This was accompanied by directives to subordinate past to present, history to theory, in a simplistic manner resisted by moderate academics such as Beijing University's Jian Bozan (1898-1968). The Cultural Revolution had an even more terrible impact a few years later, virtually beginning with an attack on the respected historian of the Ming era, Wu Han (1909-1969), who would die in prison. Wu was the first of many historians whose careers were destroyed in these years, including Jian Bozan, who was hounded into suicide (both Jian's and Wu's reputations were subsequently rehabilitated under Deng Xiaoping). Following Mao's death in 1976, the extremist Gang of Four even appealed to the memory of the despotic first Qin emperor in support of autocracy, while liberal critics looked to the ancient Zhou dynasty (eleventh to third centuries B.C.E.) for a model of democratic city-states along the lines of fifth-century Athens. Since the 1980s, entire eras have been rehabilitated, though a Party resolution of 1981 attempted to cut off ongoing historical discussions of the Maoist period in the name of unity. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Chinese historiography opened up again to the West, and many Chinese academicians have been trained in Western graduate schools and Western books translated into Chinese. This liberalization has largely continued, despite brief setbacks such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square reaction

published a survey of Lebanon in History in 1957; more recently, Kamal Salibi (b. 1929) has revised the history of Lebanon and made a close study of its earlier, medieval historiography. In Turkey itself, the collapse of the Ottoman regime and the institution of Kemal Atatürk's republic in 1923 occasioned a significant rupture with the recent past and with the longer tradition of Ottoman official historiography whose last great representative, Ahmed Cevdet Pasa (1822-1895), a remote disciple of Ibn Khaldun, had produced an enormous annalistic account of events from 1774 to 1826 (continued by Cevdet Pasa's successor Ahmed Lutfi up to the 1860s). Western scholarly methods had, however, begun to appear in Turkey, along with European texts, in the mid-nineteenth century; at the same time, new historical genres such as memoirs also appeared. The study of numismatics and sigillography arrived in Turkey about the same time, and the newer methods began to influence reference books, school texts, and popular histories. The Faculty of Letters at the University of Istanbul, established in 1900, became a training ground for historians, and institutions such as the Imperial Museum of Antiquities (1891, now the Archaeological Museums) provided the infrastructure.

ratives called attoriolong (Bugis for "that which concerns people of the past") which use lengths of reigns and elapsed times rather than dates to fix chronology. As these few examples illustrate, a proper survey of Indonesia's historiography must examine several distinctive literatures and traditions. The construction of a national sense of the past in the face of multiple ethnicities has been no less daunting than the establishment of the nation itself. In the first half of the twentieth century, Dutch-trained Indonesian historians concentrated on providing a background to support aspirations for Indonesian national independence. With the backing of Japanese occupiers at war with Western colonial powers, a nationalist-anticolonial historiography was introduced during the early 1940s. This was largely the work of the nationalist leader and future president Sukarno, the textbook writer Sanusi Pane (1905-1968), and especially the lawyer Muhammad Yamin (1903-1962). Yamin, an admirer of the Malay Tun Seri Lanang and a reader of the French historian Ernest Renan, popularized a romantic vision of history centered on Java. A number of academics such as Muhammad Ali criticized the nationalist bent in historiography in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it acquired new teeth with the advent of the Suharto regime after 1965. A more militaristic official nationalist history emerged under the direction of the historian, soldier, and minister of education, Nugroho Notosusanto; a virulently anticommunist and "patriotic" multivolume history of Indonesia prepared in the 1970s, Sejarah Nasional Indonesia, was an uneasy amalgam of official history with the work of university-based historians. During Suharto's "New Order," the nationalist tradition was strictly enforced on schools, even in outlying and problematic territories such as East Timor. Since Suharto's 1998 resignation, nationalist historiography has been openly challenged by a number of alternative visions of the past, including those representing different localities and submerged ethnic groups such as the Acehnese.

Early Ideas of History in the Western Tradition Arguments can certainly be made for a sense of the past in ancient Egypt, and in particular an effort to memorialize the successive dynasties of the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms. An early specimen is the so-called Palermo stone, a fragmentary stele inscribed with king lists from predynastic times to the fifth dynasty (mid-third millennium B.C.E.); this was probably used by the much later Hellenized Egyptian Manetho in his own Aegyptiaca, very little of which has survived. The later Turin papyrus (c. 1300 B.C.E.) extends to the sixteenth century B.C.E. However, the lack of a written alphabet imposed limits on the capacity to convey the past; nor is it clear that Egyptian efforts at record keeping, though certainly serious, were deliberately aimed at constructing accounts of the past for the benefit of present and future generations. Elsewhere in the ancient Near East, various historical inscriptions and texts are attributable to the Hittites, Syrians, and Phoenicians. It is in Mesopotamia, however, that one finds the clearest early evidence of a deliberate human intention to write about the past. The successive peoples that inhabited the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, especially the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians, generated the first type of writing in

Historical writing developed much less smoothly elsewhere in Europe. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire and its displacement by various barbarian kingdoms strained and obscured, but did not wholly break, the continuity with ancient models: a writer like Gildas, who recounts the last days of Roman Britain, sounds like an Old Testament prophet or a latter-day Tacitus in his moralizing criticism of British kings. The so-called Dark Ages from the fifth to the ninth centuries were no historiographic vacuum, for historians wrote significant accounts about the various Germanic peoples. Each was quite different in scope and content and each transcended the limits of annals, variously drawing on Eusebius and certain Roman and Byzantine historians. The most important of these "barbarian" works included histories of the Goths (Jordanes, summarizing a lost history by Cassiodorus), the Franks (Gregory of Tours, whose work is more accurately described as a history of his own times), the Lombards (Paul the Deacon), and the Anglo-Saxons (the Latin Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the early-eighth-century monk, Bede). Among these, Bede (d. 735) was arguably the greatest historian of the period. The author of several other historical works, he is also credited with first introducing into historical writing the chronological scheme whereby events were dated anno domini, from the birth of Jesus Christ, a system previously developed in the form of "Easter Tables" by scholars such as the sixth-century monk Dionysius Exiguus

writing about the past, often from non-Confucian perspectives. Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), an exponent of the "National Learning" school of history, rejected Chinese-influenced accounts of the past in favor of the earlier record of the Kojiki, which now achieved a status it had not enjoyed for a millennium. (Motoori conveniently overlooked the fact that it, too, was heavily indebted to Chinese histories). Like Japan (which it in turn influenced), Korea was strongly affected by Chinese historiography through much of the premodern period. Unlike Japan, Korea had distinct dynasties, and the annals of each reign (sillok) are analogous to Chinese Veritable Records. The chongsa or dynastic histories of early Korea are similarly comparable to the Chinese Standard Histories (which in fact provide the earliest source material for Korean history). Historical records were maintained from the fourth century C.E., and a history was compiled in 600 C.E. by Yi Mun-jin of the Koguryo kingdom, but these have not survived; Korean writings may even have influenced the Japanese Nihon shoki in the eighth century. The earliest example still extant of Korean history-writing, compiled in the Koryo period, is Kim Pu-sik's Samguk Sagi (History of three kingdoms) (1145 C.E.); this used both now-lost Korean sources and Chinese writings, and is clearly modeled on Chinese Standard Histories. The Koryo dynasty (918-1392), following earlier Tang Chinese practice, established a History Office in the tenth century; this bureaucracy was considerably expanded during the ensuing Yi or Choson dynasty (1392-1910), and in the fifteenth century a group of scholars led by Chong In-ji (1418-1450) completed the Koryosa (a dynastic history of the Koryo). Choson historians would eventually produce a whole series of sillok for each reign covering nearly five centuries up to 1863. As with the Chinese Veritable Records, sillok were carefully guarded so that even the reigning monarch was denied access to them in order to protect against interference. Again as with China, the presence of an official bureaucracy could not prevent alternate or private interpretations of the past from being written. A more Korean-focused tradition of historical writing also sprang from this Confucianism, for instance the thirteenth-century monk Iryon's Samguk Yusa (Memorials of three kingdoms). In the eighteenth century, a school of "practical learning" or sirhak developed that produced such works as An Chong-bok's distillation and analysis of Korean history, Tongsa kangmok, one of the first histories to be written by a private scholar independent of government support. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, both Western and Meiji Japanese historical scholarship would displace Chinese influences in Korean historiography

A consequence of the global dominance of Western academic historical practices is that not just history, but historiography, has been "written by the victors." None of the major histories of historical writing produced in the last century addresses other historiographical traditions, undoubtedly in part owing to linguistic difficulties. This has produced a thoroughly decontextualized and celebratory grand narrative of the rise of modern method that has only been challenged in recent years. It is thus critical that any new survey of historical writing not only pay serious attention to non-Western types of historical writing (and indeed to nonliterary ways in which the past was recorded and transmitted), but that it also steer clear of assuming that these were simply inferior forms awaiting the enlightenment of modern European-American methodology

A major goal of Enlightenment historiography may be described as the search for a synthesis and balance between erudite knowledge and philosophy. Some of the best examples show a turn away from the narration and description of political events toward the consideration of civilization, customs, and especially moeurs (the French word for "manners"). Having said that, it should immediately be admitted that the term Enlightenment is itself loaded and complex, and there exists a wide range of views of history and historical writing among the historians who subscribed to its principles. Moreover, far from every historian during the Enlightenment can be described as a practitioner of what J. G. A. Pocock has referred to as "enlightened historiography."

A number of other important genres of historical writing appeared during the period. Histories of institutions (Zhi guan), previously annexed to the Standard Histories and other works, were now presented as independent reference books. A preexisting form of local history or "gazetteer" dating back to the Song dynasty or earlier, the Fangzhi also proliferated, initially as a guide to local administrators who were often strangers to their region, intending to provide a complete history of all phenomena, natural and human, within a particular administrative area. Nearly one thousand Ming and five thousand Qing-era Fangzhi survive; although they have no exact Western counterpart, their local focus and emphasis on multiple sources bears comparison with the natural histories and "surveys" of late-seventeenth-century Britain, and, more remotely, with an outstanding German work of local history, Justus Möser's History of Osnabrück (1768).

Allowing for its very different circumstances, China under the late Ming and succeeding Qing dynasties experienced many of the same historiographical developments as the West. One leading authority on the period, Benjamin Elman, has characterized it as a transition "from philosophy to philology," as the Neo-Confucianism that had marked most of the previous half-millennium of Chinese historical writing, especially under the Song and Ming, was challenged and a new emphasis placed on evidentiary research—itself anticipated by many Song scholars centuries previously. Despite the strictures and quotas on civil service careers imposed by the Manchu Qing dynasty, which by and large adopted Chinese language and cultural practices, a higher degree of professionalization occurred in the eighteenth century. Philology and ancillary disciplines such as epigraphy, paleography, manuscript collation, and phonology were developed against the backdrop of an argument within Confucianism between Qing advocates of "Han Learning" (who had a preference for the texts and methods of Han-era scholars in studying the earlier Chinese classics) and their Neo-Confucian "Song Learning" opponents—an interesting if inexact analog to the slightly earlier European querelle of ancients and moderns. During this period, official academies supplanted the private schools of earlier years. Ming-era survivors such as Gu Yanwu (1613-1682) epitomized the careful attention to research among a wide range of sources of the

Although the general thrust of nineteenth-century historiography was toward critical scholarship and away from philosophical speculation, the period nevertheless gave birth to a number of schemes for the explanation of all of history, often by nonhistorians. Many of these had origins in German HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lxi 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lxi idealism, especially Hegel's philosophy of history as the gradual self-realization of mind in history through a process of "dialectic." His views, while distinctive, had roots in earlier Enlightenment thinkers, but Hegel firmly rejected—as Herder had earlier questioned—the longstanding classical notion that history was "philosophy teaching by examples." For Hegel, history was a process and simultaneously a coherent narrative of that process, rather than a well from which useful guides to morality and behavior could endlessly be drawn.

Among mature Roman historians, the outstanding figures include Sallust (86-35 or 34 B.C.E.), who described the Catilinian conspiracy that had ominous consequences for the republic; Julius Caesar (c. 100-44 B.C.E.), memorialist of his own campaigns; and Livy (59 B.C.E.-17 C.E.), the great Augustan narrator of Rome's history from its legendary foundation—ab urbe condita (c. 753 B.C.E.). "Universal" history along Ephorus's lines, eventually an all-purpose model for many medieval and Reformation historians, would find practitioners in the Sicilian Greek Diodorus Siculus (c. 90-c. 21 B.C.E.) and, much later, the imperial pagan Ammianus Marcellinus (c. 330-395 C.E.). No extant Roman historian, however, has been more praised by subsequent ages than Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56 C.E.-120 C.E.), narrator of the reigns of the Julio-Claudian emperors in his Annales and of the troubles leading to the accession of the Flavians in his Histories. An admirer of German tribal simplicity, as compared in his Germania with the luxury and corruption of imperial Rome, Tacitus continued the moral-decay theme detectable in Polybius, Sallust, and Livy; he also established a common motif of later historiography, the juxtaposition of the virtuous and hardy barbarian with the decadent city-dweller. This, along with his terse style, political acuity and epigrammatic comments on events would make Tacitus's works very popular in much later centuries.

Any account of nineteenth-century professionalization must begin with a colossus: the imposing figure of the German Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). Initially a student of ancient history and philology (which were themselves making considerable advances under the older contemporary whom Ranke admired, the philologist Barthold Georg Niebuhr), Ranke wrote a doctoral dissertation on Thucydides. He quickly expanded his interests to include the medieval and modern history of much of the world, beginning in The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 with the period tackled by Francesco Guicciardini three centuries earlier. Subsequent works traced the emergence of the European state system that this good German public servant much admired as the source of modern civilization and individual freedom; and with a gaze wandering steadily outward in expanding circles, his life closed with an unfinished multivolume Weltgeschichte. Staggeringly prolific as he was, however, Ranke is less important for any of his individual histories than for what he came to symbolize. Over his long career at the University of Berlin, which had displaced Göttingen as the epicenter of German scholarship, he thoroughly transformed the training of young historians (many of them foreigners), by focusing his research seminars on primary sources and their criticism. Among his pupils and associates, Ranke could include many of the great names of the mid- to late nineteenth century, such as Georg Waitz (1813-1886) and Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895); the latter deserves much of the credit for having converted Ranke's ideas into institutional form throughout Prussia and then Germany as a whole. Some of Ranke's students, to be sure, departed from the master's model. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), for instance, was an unusual apprentice whose great Kulturgeschichte, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) remains one of the most-read historical works of the entire century and is a forerunner of modern cultural history. The conservative Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), who was not a student of Ranke but succeeded him in the chair of history at the University of Berlin (an opportunity Burckhardt had declined), deviated in a different direction. Treitschke's multivolume history of early-nineteenth-century Germany (1879-1894) provided a celebration of the Bismarckian state and a script for later German imperialism—a development that Ranke, a European rather than a strict nationalist, would not have embraced.

Any account of nineteenth-century professionalization must begin with a colossus: the imposing figure of the German Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). Initially a student of ancient history and philology (which were themselves making considerable advances under the older contemporary whom Ranke admired, the philologist Barthold Georg Niebuhr), Ranke wrote a doctoral dissertation on Thucydides. He quickly expanded his interests to include the medieval and modern history of much of the world, beginning in The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 with the period tackled by Francesco Guicciardini three centuries earlier. Subsequent works traced the emergence of the European state system that this good German public servant much admired as the source of modern civilization and individual freedom; and with a gaze wandering steadily outward in expanding circles, his life closed with an unfinished multivolume Weltgeschichte. Staggeringly prolific as he was, however, Ranke is less important for any of his individual histories than for what he came to symbolize. Over his long career at the University of Berlin, which had displaced Göttingen as the epicenter of German scholarship, he thoroughly transformed the training of young historians (many of them foreigners), by focusing his research seminars on primary sources and their criticism. Among his pupils and associates, Ranke could include many of the great names of the mid- to late nineteenth century, such as Georg Waitz (1813-1886) and Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895); the latter deserves much of the credit for having converted Ranke's ideas into institutional form throughout Prussia and then Germany as a whole. Some of Ranke's students, to be sure, departed from the master's model. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), for instance, was an unusual apprentice whose great Kulturgeschichte, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) remains one of the most-read historical works of the entire century and is a forerunner of modern cultural history. The conservative Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), who was not a student of Ranke but succeeded him in the chair of history at the University of Berlin (an opportunity Burckhardt had declined), deviated in a different direction. Treitschke's multivolume history of early-nineteenth-century Germany (1879-1894) provided a celebration of the Bismarckian state and a script for later German imperialism—a development that Ranke, a European rather than a strict nationalist, would not have embraced.Any account of nineteenth-century professionalization must begin with a colossus: the imposing figure of the German Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). Initially a student of ancient history and philology (which were themselves making considerable advances under the older contemporary whom Ranke admired, the philologist Barthold Georg Niebuhr), Ranke wrote a doctoral dissertation on Thucydides. He quickly expanded his interests to include the medieval and modern history of much of the world, beginning in The Histories of the Latin and Germanic Peoples from 1494 to 1514 with the period tackled by Francesco Guicciardini three centuries earlier. Subsequent works traced the emergence of the European state system that this good German public servant much admired as the source of modern civilization and individual freedom; and with a gaze wandering steadily outward in expanding circles, his life closed with an unfinished multivolume Weltgeschichte. Staggeringly prolific as he was, however, Ranke is less important for any of his individual histories than for what he came to symbolize. Over his long career at the University of Berlin, which had displaced Göttingen as the epicenter of German scholarship, he thoroughly transformed the training of young historians (many of them foreigners), by focusing his research seminars on primary sources and their criticism. Among his pupils and associates, Ranke could include many of the great names of the mid- to late nineteenth century, such as Georg Waitz (1813-1886) and Heinrich von Sybel (1817-1895); the latter deserves much of the credit for having converted Ranke's ideas into institutional form throughout Prussia and then Germany as a whole. Some of Ranke's students, to be sure, departed from the master's model. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), for instance, was an unusual apprentice whose great Kulturgeschichte, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) remains one of the most-read historical works of the entire century and is a forerunner of modern cultural history. The conservative Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), who was not a student of Ranke but succeeded him in the chair of history at the University of Berlin (an opportunity Burckhardt had declined), deviated in a different direction. Treitschke's multivolume history of early-nineteenth-century Germany (1879-1894) provided a celebration of the Bismarckian state and a script for later German imperialism—a development that Ranke, a European rather than a strict nationalist, would not have embraced.

Any residual Chinese traditional influences on historiography were soon overwhelmed by Western scholarship, for in the meantime, the director of the office, Shigeno Yasutsugu (1827-1910) had arranged for one of Ranke's later disciples, the German Jew Ludwig Riess (1861-1928), to come to Japan in 1887 and teach at Tokyo Imperial University; he remained there until 1902. At the same time, reform-minded and pro-Western scholars such as Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901), a reader of Alexis de Tocqueville, Buckle, Spencer, and Guizot, formulated a theory of civilization espousing the superiority of the West and the need for Japan to catch up with the rest of the world after centuries of isolation. Others practiced the equivalent of British "Whig history," describing the restoration as a major milestone on the road to progress. The popular historian Taguchi Ukichi, another admirer of Western liberals and social theorists, epitomized this outlook in his multivolume Nihon kaika shoshi (Brief history of Japanese civilization, 1877-1882). As in Europe, not everyone accepted the value of academic historiography: Yamaji Aizan (1864- 1917), an outsider and popular historian highly critical of the sterility of scholarship at Tokyo Imperial, and of "dead history." Moreover, the consequences of the kind of source criticism that Riess's Japanese friends espoused were by no means always welcome, especially among conservative nationalists determined to maintain the tradition of a social and moral function in historiography. Shigeno (who was also president of the Historical Society established in 1889) was himself reviled as "Dr. Obliterator" for his attacks on historical verities. Another historian, Kume Kunitake (1839-1931) was forced to resign from his position in 1892 for using scholarly methods to undermine the historical basis of Shinto and thereby calling into question the historicity of the early myths; this in part occasioned the temporary closing of the Institute in the following year. In her authoritative study of the period, Margaret Mehl has argued (Mehl, p. 14) that in comparison with their German counterparts, scholars at the Historiographical Institute had scant influence on the national interpretation of the Japanese past.

As Islam spread into other regions, including its Western European beachhead in Spain, as well as sub-Saharan Africa and India, Muslim-authored histories of those regions appeared; the earliest history of Islamic Spain dates from the tenth century and was followed by others over the next half-millennium. Muslims in this period produced a great quantity of historical writing, most of which compares very favorably with the best chroniclers of the West and exceeds it in attentiveness to detail and accuracy, for instance the great biographical dictionary of Ibn Khallikan (1211-1282) and the travel writings (themselves a major source for Muslim social history) of the peripatetic Ibn Battutah (1304-1368 or 1369). Like the European invaders, Arabs such as the Damascene mayor Ibn al Qalanisi (1073-1160) and Saladin's minister 'Imad al-Din (d. 1201) also wrote about the Crusades, though it has been observed that most did not regard them as anything other than the latest in a series of struggles against the infidel. Ibn al-Athir (1160-1233), another chronicler of the Crusades, wrote his world history, the Al-Kamil fil-Ta'rikh in the wake of the Mongol invasions of the Muslim world during the early 1220s, an event that had a significant impact on history-writing. Half a century later, another Islamic historian, the Persian 'Ala' al-Din 'Ata-Malik b. Muhammad Djuwayni (or al-Juvayni, 1226-1283) served in the capital of the Great Khan before returning to Baghdad as governor and composing an incomplete History of the World Conqueror about Genghis Khan. Rashid al-Din, a Persian converted from Judaism to Islam, also served Persia's Mongol rulers until his execution in 1318; his Complete Collection of Histories is a vast world history especially full of details on the Mongol regime. The Mongols, a nomadic and warlike non-Muslim people who came into conflict with Islam to the West and China to the East in the course of the thirteenth century, developed their own tradition of historical writing, which includes the thirteenth-century epic known as the Secret History of the Mongols. There is little sign of historical writing among them for three centuries following, during a period of great internecine turmoil and division among the various descendants of the Khan, but

Beginning in the early fifteenth century, the newly rising Islamic power, the Ottoman Turks, produced significant historical works, commencing with 'Abdu'l-vasi Celebi's (fl. 1414) account of the accession of Mehmed I, and continuing with chronicles by Asikpasazade or Asiki (1400-after 1484) and the obscure Nesri (d. c. 1520), who synthesized many of the sources up to his own time. These "chronicles of the house of Osman," many more of which remain anonymous, are distinguished by having largely been written by authors who lived through many of the events they described. The chronicles are supplemented and in some cases overlaid by other sources. These include royal calendars (starting in the 1440s) containing historical lists, and poems and oral traditional accounts reaching back to an earlier heroic age of Islamic warriors, which provide a backdrop of legend, folklore, and pseudohistory. Examples of such works include the Iskendername by Ahmedi (c. 1334-1413), parts of which amount to a world history, the Danismendname and the later, more historically specific Dusturname (completed 1465 and attributed to one Enveri, about whom little is known). Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512) commissioned the first two histories devoted specifically to the Ottomans, one in Persian and the other in Turkish (Persian influences were especially potent on early Ottoman literature).

But Romanticism had more immediate outcomes. Initially a conservative or even reactionary movement that privileged nature over reason and revalued neglected periods such as the Middle Ages, it proved adaptable for many in the next generations into a creed for the advancement of liberty and for the promotion of the rising tide of nationalism that threatened the stability of postNapoleonic Europe. Romantic nationalism was often linked to a sense of identity built upon a shared sense of a people's ethnic or even political past—for an example one need only think of HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lv 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lv Lord Byron's fatal sortie into the Greek war against the Turks in 1824. The impact of nationalist historical consciousness was magnified, following the revolutions of 1848 and the return of progressive ideas in liberal or even radical political clothing, by national unification movements such as the Italian Risorgimento, and in the emerging independence of former satellites in Europe from imperial rule (already anticipated in the American Revolution sixty years previously) and that of other former colonies in North and South America.

But historical forms of some sort assuredly did exist in ancient India, indicating a sense of the past quite different from that in the West, but scarcely the happy ignorance suggested by James Mill. Much more typical than Kalhana's work was the combined tradition known as itihasa-purana, which by the mid-first millennium C.E. had become an authoritative source for the ruling Brahman caste. Itihasa translates as "thus it was" while purana refers to "that which pertains to ancient times" or "old lore." Early Indian historical tradition contains origin myths and extensive genealogical material on the descents of major families (which generally do not place the figures chronologically). There are also some biographies of individual rulers, beginning in the seventh century C.E. and peaking from the tenth to thirteenth centuries, as well as chronicles of ruling families (Vamsavalis, literally, "path to succession") in inscription or textual form, of which Kalhana's text is the best example and the one most familiar in its use of multiple sources, critically evaluated. An additional category is the collection of historical narratives or Prabandha, which again have a biographical orientation.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese historians had divided themselves into three formal fields: national (Japanese) history (kokushi or Nihonshi), oriental history (Toyoshi), and Western history (Seiyoshi). As the Kume affair illustrates, there was an uneasy tension in the application of what the Japanese themselves called "scientific history" to the construction of a national and Imperial-focused account of the past; in the decade leading up to World War II, the so-called "Imperial view of history" seriously constricted freedom of interpretation. Though actual incidents of government interference were not numerous, they have become well-known: for instance, the historian Tsuda Sokichi (1873-1961) was convicted in 1942 for undermining the still-revered national mythology of the Kojiki in work he had published nearly three decades earlier on the ancient imperial court. His doubts about the historicity of Jimmu and his immediate successors were entirely unacceptable in an aggressively militaristic state that had marked the founding emperor's 2600th anniversary in 1940 with national celebrations.

By the fifteenth century, in the context of the struggles of the French crown with English power and with Burgundian independence, one can discern a sharper political analysis in certain historians such as Thomas Basin (1412-1491) and especially Philippe de Commynes (c. 1447-1511), who anticipates in many ways the flavor of Renaissance humanist historiography already unfolding to the east in Italy. In an unrelated but parallel development, relatively late in the European Middle Ages, the growth of towns in Italy and in northern Europe (especially Germany, the Low Countries, and England) produced a distinct vernacular tradition of urban chronicle-writing. Often developing from lists of civic officials, and written by laity, these annals recorded local events in varying degrees of detail and were an important counterpart, for the emerging middling sort of merchants and townsmen, to the more learned Latin chronicles of the monastic and secular clergy, and the aristocratic works by the likes of Villehardouin and Froissart.

By the ninth century, though Islamic history was still written principally in Arabic, the religion's learned language, Islam had ceased to be predominantly a religion of the Arabs alone. The classical period of Islamic historiography, from the tenth century to the fourteenth, would see a great deal of historical writing by ethnic Persians, particularly under the Ghaznavid dynasty of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This succeeded a pre-Islamic Persian tradition of verse epic that culminated in the post-conquest Shahnama (Book of kings) by Firdawsi, which was completed in 1010 C.E. Persian Muslim historiography would also witness a departure from strict attention to the tradition of hadith and the adoption by many historians of rather more secular intellectual outlook characterized by adab, a moral and intellectual education for the elites beginning in the eighth century that is comparable in ambition to later European humanism. This proved liberating in the sense that it permitted departure from strict adherence to the narrowness of the isnad, which was never easily able to absorb foreign history; and histories written under the influence of adab provide more information as to the author's intentions in writing them. Historical thought was also influenced by philosophical concerns derived from the notion of hikmah (judgment or wisdom) and by a concept of research or inquiry (bahth). The work of the tenth-century historian al-Mas'udi reflects these tendencies and is notable both for its critical apparatus and its author's bald assertion of the superiority of history to all other sciences. The prolific scientist and polymath al-Biruni (973-1048), much of whose life was spent in India, deployed his mathematical and philological knowledge to the resolution of calendrical and chronological conflicts between the world's nations.

Early Chinese Historical Thought and Writing The second major tradition of thinking and writing about the past is the Chinese. It has been neglected or at best patronized in many modern accounts of historical writing. Despite the triumph in the twentieth century of Western approaches to the past, Chinese historical writing has a longer continuous tradition, and it developed much earlier than the West a clear and consistent set of rules and practices for the recovery and representation of the past. History was a major category of knowledge (along with philosophy, literature, and the "classics") from as early as the fourth century C.E., a status it would not acquire in Europe before the late seventeenth century. With some important modifications, Chinese historiography was to influence the historical thought and writing of neighboring nations such as Japan, Vietnam, and Korea. Significant Chinese thinking about the past can be dated back to ancient canonical texts such as the I Ching (Book of changes), which reached a definitive form about the end of the second millennium B.C.E. Earliest Chinese thought evinced the notion that there were discernible patterns in the flow of human affairs from which one could learn to govern oneself and navigate a world of continuous change. As this suggests, Chinese thought about the past was very quickly linked to philosophy and the search for the Dao (the "path" or moral order). The first significant independent work of

Enlightenment in the West With the close of the era of religious wars that had marked the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century, European historiography expanded its scope considerably beyond the political and ecclesiastical topics that had predominated since the Renaissance and Reformation. This does not mean that Enlightenment historiography was a radical departure from what came previously. To the contrary, it relied very heavily on many of the historiographical accomplishments of the previous two centuries, and in particular on the enormous corpus of erudite knowledge in the form of printed documents and texts, engravings of archaeological and architectural remains, and especially the study of different legal systems. Two centuries of travel and expansion also encouraged many of the historians of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to undertake a comparative approach to the study of the past.

European methods began to penetrate elsewhere in the world. Late Victorian notions of "scientific history" migrated into India during the first third of the twentieth century through Britishtrained Indian historians returning home to teach. In part owing to the influence of scholars such as the Sanskrit philologist Sir R. G. Bhandarkar (1837-1925), his son, D. R. Bhandarkar (1875- 1950, an epigrapher and numismatist), and the Mughal-period scholar Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958), the institutional apparatus of Western historiography gradually emerged, beginning with the Historical Records Commission of 1919 and the Indian History Congress established in 1937-1938. Early attempts at multivolume histories of India were aborted, but advocates such as the novelist Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi promoted Hindu rediscovery of their ancestral, preIslamic past. Following independence in 1947, Munshi called for a new history of India which, on this occasion, under the direction of the prolific historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, resulted in The History and Culture of the Indian People (11 vols., 1951-1969). In recent decades, India has continued to produce outstanding scholars of international reputation such as the historian of early India, Romila Thapar (b. 1931), and the social historian Sumit Sarkar (b. 1939).

Even more than in the Byzantine East, Christianity proved, despite internecine theological disputes, the closest thing to a unifying force in the development of a common vocabulary and shared set of standard themes for history-writing. Eusebius had been translated into Latin. Beginning with Saint Augustine of Hippo and his disciple Orosius (active 414-418), the author of a wideranging and much-read universal history, the Seven Books of History against the Pagans, a Western scheme emerged for narrating the unfolding of the divine will through history. Accompanying it was the Neoplatonic juxtaposition of "Two Cities," a heavenly and an earthly, a theme that would be revisited in the twelfth century by the pro-imperial Otto, bishop of Freising, (c. 1111-1158), who used it as the title of his major historical work. It was Otto who provided the classic formulation of a historical continuity argument in the translatio imperii, the thesis that the Roman empire had not, in fact fallen, but merely been "translated" from Rome to the Byzantine Greeks and thence, in 800, to the Frankish king Charlemagne, whose ultimate heirs were the Hohenstaufen emperors such as Otto's own nephew Frederick I, called Barbarossa. (The Ottoman conquerors of Constantinople would in turn appropriate this notion, stripped of its Christian association, in the fifteenth century).

Exact analogies between Chinese and Western historiography should be drawn with a high degree of caution since certain fundamental assumptions were quite different. Chronology was based in frequently changed era names (the practice used in many Asian countries until the twentieth century) rather than the single chronology ab orbe condito (from the founding of the world), ab urbe condita (from the founding of the city), or (especially since the seventeenth century), B.C. (B.C.E.) and A.D. (C.E.)—this accounts for the much earlier development of synchronous chronological tables in China than in Europe. Moreover, where "annals" in the European tradition have

First, more generally, a sense of remoteness from classical times and an accompanying aspiration to reconnect with them bestowed a temporal perspective that was largely (though not as completely as is often supposed) absent from much medieval writing. This took longer to mature than is usually acknowledged, but by the early seventeenth century this "sense of anachronism" is regularly discernible in various media, for instance in art and in drama: it was increasingly difficult to conceive of Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great as medieval Crusaders or Renaissance condottieri. A more period-specific visual sense of the past was slower to develop, though archaeological discoveries, especially the ruins of Rome and of former Roman encampments across Europe soon stimulated this too. Much more quickly, however, there developed a sense of linguistic change. The humanists of the fifteenth century were devoted above all to the restoration of Latin to its classical form after centuries of "barbarism," though the notion that a "pure" language could be transplanted in frozen form on to a different era actually negated 1500 years of change and introduced a different sort of anachronism.

Following a series of renamings and reorganizations, the Office of Historiography was transferred to the Tokyo Imperial University in 1888, and a department of Japanese history founded there in the following year. Closed in 1893 when the government disapproved of its research agenda, the Historiographical Institute, as it had become, was briefly closed. It reopened in 1895, by which time the plans to write a new national history had been all but abandoned: attention now focused on the narrower mandate of recovering and publishing documents.

Following several centuries of imperial decline, the Tokugawa Bakufu (1603-1868) was established whereby shoguns ruled the country on behalf of a figurehead emperor through regional daimyo or warlords. During this era, Japan was kept rigidly secluded from outside influences. Historical thinking achieved higher intellectual prominence to the extent that Ogyu Sorai (1667-1728) could confidently proclaim that history was "the ultimate form of scholarly knowledge." Official history-writing in the mode of the Six National Histories continued to flourish, often tied to a particular shogunal "domain" or feudal territory—the pro-imperial Dai Nihon Shi (Great history of Japan, begun in 1657 and only completed in 1906) was, for example, initiated in the Mito domain. Much of this work began to depart from the imperial mythology of Jimmu since it did nothing to support the case for shogunal primacy over a puppet emperor. Among shogunal officials, Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725) stands out for his Tokushi yoron (Essays on history), a series of lectures on the past intended to instruct the shogun through example while making use of a wide variety of sources and largely ignoring the early origin myths. Arai painted a progressive picture of Japanese history that validated noncentralized governance; it also subordinated individual action and choice to inevitable historical trends. Two generations earlier, Hayashi Razan (1583- 1657), an unabashed admirer of Chinese historical texts, had set the stage for a Neo-Confucian philosophy of history strongly allied to the shogunate. A number of private scholars were also

For all the importance that we now assign to these two Greek masters, history did not enjoy a high stature in the Hellenic world, in part because the Greeks were philosophically rather less interested in the past per se than in the realms of nature, ethics, and the mind. Historians nonetheless there certainly were: the authors of Hellenika that followed Thucydides focused, like him, on contemporary or recent history. The list of later Greek historians includes Ephorus (c. 405-330 B.C.E.), the first writer of "universal history"; the memorialist Xenophon (c. 431-c. 352 B.C.E.); Theopompus (b. c. 380 B.C.E.); Dionysius of Halicarnassus (fl. c. 20 B.C.E.); and the highly regarded Polybius (c. 200-118 B.C.E.). A Romanized Greek, Polybius is especially significant for articulating a theory of predictable constitutional cycles among three pure and three corresponding perverted forms of government and for postulating the stability of "mixed" regimes consisting of all three pure forms. This was to prove a powerful tool of historical analysis in later centuries.

Germany also produced other versions of thought about the unfolding of history, and about the nature of the historical discipline. The historian turned theoretician Johann Gustav Droysen (1838-1908), though a believer in the possibility of improved historical knowledge, argued in his Grundriss der Historik and elsewhere for a less naive view of the historian's relationship to sources. Droysen placed particular emphasis on the creative role of interpretation as guided by present-day circumstances and values and the need for firm and consistent methodological rules. He was just as hard on historical positivists like Britain's H. T. Buckle for their reduction of human actions and institutions to the categories of the natural world. A further late-nineteenth-century turning away from the post-Rankean fetish of the document can be seen in Wilhelm Dilthey's (1833-1911) assertion that history is a mental act of understanding (Verstehen) whereby the meaning of events must be intuited from our own inner experience, not simply narrowly read from the sources. Like Droysen's, Dilthey's position was antipositivist because it assumed historical acts could be apprehended in a way that did not apply to the natural world of science, owing to our essential human similarity with historical figures. Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) similarly poured doubt on the modish tendency across Western Europe to see history as a "science" (in a positivist mode that went well beyond anything that Ranke would have advocated) by defending its status as an "ideographic" (representative of the unique and singular) rather than a "nomothetic" (law-generating) practice.

If the first half of the West's nineteenth century is characterized by literary historical writing in a romantic and nationalist vein, the second half may be noted for a rapid growth in what may, with due caution, be loosely called "professionalization." Although this too has nationalist origins, it is associated less with the "nation" in any ethnic, linguistic, or cultural sense than with the political "state" and its bureaucratic apparatus. The romantic liberalism of national independence and unity rapidly transformed itself in much of Europe into the institutional conservatism of preservation and social stability. Changes were signaled by a number of developments: the expansion of university systems and the turning of many of them by the century's end to advanced training in historical scholarship; the systematization of public record systems in many countries; the advent of several new professional associations, frequently accompanied by a new style of high-standard periodical or journal; a further development of the longstanding trend to publish archival documents, often under government sponsorship and now with a considerably higher standard of accuracy than previously applied; and the systematic convergence of the erudite skills evolved over the previous three centuries (paleography, diplomatic, numismatics, and epigraphy) within an overarching science of the criticism of sources, for which the German term Quellenkritik provides the best shorthand descriptor. This is also significant as the period during which Western-style historiography first began seriously to have a lasting effect on its rival traditions in the Orient and the Middle East, starting it down a road to eventual hegemony in the twentieth-century world.

In Latin America, there had been a steady flow of historical writing in both Spanish and Portuguese areas since the conquests of the sixteenth century, a good deal of it by expatriate Spaniards such as the Jesuit historian of Paraguay, Pedro Lozano (1697-1752). The liberal values of the late Enlightenment dominated the writing of history during the nineteenth century, first in the form of constitutionalist historians who focused on the European-inherited legal institutions underlying independence, and later in a more independent and romantic kind of writing that, following Herder and Michelet, emphasized instead the importance of the spirit of the people itself in establishing well-functioning new societies in a postcolonial era: the Chilean Literary Society of the 1830s, for instance, had regular meetings in which selections from Herder and other eighteenthcentury historians were read. A third and later group emulated the positivism of writers like Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) to advocate a history that demonstrated the economic and scientific progress of the region along European industrial lines—knowledge of the past, said Vicente Fidel López in the 1840s, would allow planning for the future. The Chilean José Victorino Lastarria, who did not read Comte until the 1860s, nonetheless found in the Frenchman an endorsement of his own ideas from two decades earlier.

In North America, the British colonies diverged historiographically following the American Revolution. The northern colonies—the future Canada—remained firmly within the British imperial orb (despite the existence of a distinctive Francophone Catholic majority within the colony of Lower Canada, subsequently Quebec). A consciousness of Canada as a nation, historically, did not begin to mature until Confederation (1867) brought political unity and semiautonomous status within the empire, and even then Francophone historiography remained apart from its Anglophone counterpart, with recurrent sovereignty movements still building today on the belief in a historically separate Quebecois nation awaiting its rightful autonomy. To the south, the experience was very different. The prototype for a nationalist historiography had been established in HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lvii 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lvii colonial-era writings that acknowledged the colonies' place in the empire but also celebrated aspects of their differences—for instance, in Puritan writings marking New England colonists as reformed "saints" who had voluntarily separated themselves from the ungodliness of the Old World. A distinctive nationalist historiography (admittedly fragmented by ideological and sectional differences for a century or more) thus emerged quite quickly following the independence of the new United States. Early postindependence American historians such as Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) provided a history of the Revolution emphasizing democratic values, while the biographers of major figures such as George Washington helped establish a pantheon of national heroes. Historical novels on the model of Britain's Sir Walter Scott were emulated by the likes of James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851). Both American and world history were enormously popular among readers during the first half of the nineteenth century, but their writing remained the domain of gentlemen of leisure (and the occasional woman like Warren) or of journalists. Famous examples (both blind through most of their careers) include William Prescott (1796-1859), narrator of the Latin American conquests, and Francis Parkman (1823-1893), historian of the frontier. Internationally, the most widely recognized American historian was George Bancroft (1800- 1891), a former professor turned diplomat and one of the first of his country to earn a Ph.D. from a German university, a trend that would increase in the second half of the century

In addition to the Standard Histories and chronicles, a further major category of historical writing, closer to continuous narrative, was developed under the Song dynasty, the Jishi benmo (Histories of beginnings and ends of events). The first example, by Yuan Shu (1131-1205), was completed and published in 1174. This genre would later flourish under the Ming and Qing dynasties. Its specimens largely consisted of rearrangements of existing histories—Yuan's, for instance, built on Sima Guang's Comprehensive Mirror—but their attention to the cause and effect of particular occurrences was a significant development in Chinese thinking about the past.

In an interesting parallel with China's mandarin-dominated historical writing, as well as with the civic courtly historiography of many contemporary Italian states, the major Turkish historical works produced for the next two centuries were sponsored by the Sultan or composed by ministers or functionaries such as the grand vizier Karamani Mehmed Pasha (d. 1481), the secretary Tursun Beg (fl. 1453-1499), the chancellor Mustafa Çelebi Celalzade (c. 1490-1567), the poet and tutor to Sultan Murad, Hoca Efendi (or Sa'duddin bin Hasan Can, 1535-1599), and the provincial functionary Ibrahim Peçevi (1574-1650). The Istanbul bureaucrat Mustafa Naima (1655-1716) wrote an important history of the empire in the first half of the seventeenth century, which remains today one of the most cited sources for that period.

In northern Europe, Norway acquired a university in 1811, just prior to its establishment (1814) of a semi-independent state in union with Sweden. Most historical activity remained for a time the work of politicians, jurists and poets, such as Henrik Wegeland (1808-1845), author of Norges Konstitutions Historie (1841-1843). An academic historiography first emerged in the 1830s with Peter Andreas Munch (1810-1863) and Rudolf Keyser (1803-1864); it retained the romantic outlook of earlier writers, but made significant advances in source-editing. French liberal historiography (Michelet and Guizot) as well as Darwinian-Spencerian notions of progress introduced a more positivist climate in the next generation, which was dominated by the radical proponent of complete independence, Ernst Sars (1835-1917). In Finland, academic historiography had existed since the foundation of the University of Turku in 1640, and had flourished in the Enlightenment with historians such as Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804), who had mainly written in international Latin. The new nationalist impulse (Finland became an autonomous state in 1809) ensured that vernacular-language works eventually overtook in volume those written in Swedish; the first full-length Finnish-language history of Finland would be produced by Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen (1830-1903). Historical consciousness was further stimulated by authors such as the journalist, educator, and novelist Zacharias Topelius (1818-1898), a Finnish Sir Walter Scott, while foreign-authored histories from the south were also widely read. As in Norway, positivist historiography found an audience: England's Henry Thomas Buckle would have one of his strongest followings in Finland.

In some ways, however, the Chinese system of historical writing, and in particular the use of the dynasty as the basic unit of the Standard History, was ill-suited to Japan. From the Japanese point of view, all emperors belonged to the same dynasty, being directly descended from the sun goddess via Jimmu—the Kojiki in particular stresses the continuity of the imperial line rather than the cycle of dynastic rise and decay immanent in the Chinese Standard Histories. This linealism, and a degree of resistance to Chinese cultural dominance in spite of the influence of Confucianism, ensured that while its language was initially borrowed, the edifice of Chinese historical writing was not reconstructed wholesale, even in officially sponsored chronicles such as the Azuma kagami, a late-thirteenth-century product of the first, Kamakura, shogunate or military government, which is presented as if it were a diary compiled as events occurred. Moreover, beginning in the eleventh century during the Heian period, a different type of history, written in Japanese, began to appear in the Rekishi monogatari or historical tales, which were composed by independent scholars and departed considerably from the national histories; at least one of these, the Eiga monogatari (c. 1100), was composed by a woman. Many works in this genre were biographically organized; a number, such as the Gunki monogatari, dealt principally with war and were often recited orally (not unlike the Homeric epics, which they resemble in military values) before being committed to writing. Examples include the fourteenth-century Taiheiki (Chronicle of great peace). Most widely read among medieval Japanese historical writings were the Gukansho by the priest Jien (c. 1220), the Eiga monogatari and the twelfth-century Okagami or Great Mirror.

It was the Romans, however, who produced the next substantial corpus of European historical writing. They were initially much influenced by Greek models, turning such genres as the horography into official annales kept by the pontifex maximus, a religious figure. The earliest Roman historians such as Quintus Fabius Pictor (fl. 225 B.C.E.) were especially affected by Greek non-annalistic history, though eventually annalistic models were to predominate in a way that had not been true in Greece. The Romans would also introduce a close association of the act of history

Möser's Osnabrückische Geschichte has been praised by modern historians such as Friedrich Meinecke for its sensitivity to the uniqueness of the local community. When combined with Herder's understanding of the cultural differences among various peoples and the integrity of the Volk, and with the enormous influence of a cultural icon such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lateEnlightenment Germans had anticipated a number of coming trends in European historical thought. In the political aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, and amid the intellectual wake of the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, the nineteenth century saw a turn away from grand theories (philosophers such as Hegel being notable exceptions) and world histories and an increased focus on the individual—especially the heroic individual—and the nation. Early-nineteenth-century French historians such as François Guizot (1787-1874) and Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) postulated a unified past for their nation, while the more radical Jules Michelet (1798-1874) directed readers to the history of le peuple (the common people). Both the interest in individuals and the intuitive sympathy for the unique and distinctive contributions of past ages to modernity (the latter traceable to Herder and as far back as Vico) are hallmarks of a mode of apprehending the past that subsequent ages have called "historicism" (or, following Meinecke, "historism").

Not all of this erudite work was chorographical and peripatetic. In France, where the study of Roman legal tradition was especially sophisticated, philologists and antiquaries from Guillaume Budé in the early sixteenth century to Jacques Cujas and François Hotman a generation further on studied language and law, developing a "French school of historical study." There was a philosophical aspect to this too, in the belief of certain writers—contrary to the view of contemporary skeptics or "pyrrhonists" that the past could indeed be restored and represented accurately. One of these, Henri de la Popelinière, even wrote a complete "History of histories, with the idea of perfect history." Another, Jean Bodin (1530-1596), perhaps the most subtle of late-sixteenth-century European intellectuals, and a voice of secular moderation at a time of vicious religious warfare, wrote a widely read Methodus (Method) for the reading of history. This was intended to guide the reader through the thickets of past historians and in particular to dispel certain timeworn notions such as the "Four Monarchies" scheme of periodization, inherited from the Middle Ages and reappropriated by writers of apocalyptic literature (the notion that the return of Christ would follow the end of the four successive secular empires of Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans). Bodin was the most politically astute and philosophical among a number of writers determined to impose order on the proliferating species of writing about the past, which were threatening to bolt from their classical cages, and to offer guidance to bewildered readers. Describing the genres and forms of history according to well-defined categories, these late-sixteenth-century authors of artes historicae (arts of history) hearken back to Lucian's How to Write History in the second century

Other ancient peoples in the region authored historiographic documents of some variety. There are significant differences between these writings, but the focus of most was on maintaining a proper record of kings and their achievements—the Assyrian Eponymous Chronicle, for example, relays the annual military campaigns of its kings down to Sennacherib (r. 704-681 B.C.E.). While it would be foolish to impose modern Western standards of "objectivity" (themselves highly contested today) in assessing ancient forms of historical writing, subtle differences in this regard have been noted between Assyrian and Babylonian approaches. Assyrian royal annals are largely written in first-person bombastic prose, allegedly by the kings themselves. And whereas the Synchronous History of the Assyrians, in describing boundary disputes in the late second to early first millennium invariably blames the Babylonians, those accounts written by the Babylonians themselves are often more neutral. The neo-Babylonian and Chaldean periods produced further works such as the Babylonian Chronicle Series. The Persians, successors to Babylonian power in the sixth century B.C.E., would continue this historiographical activity, for instance in the multilingual Behistun Inscription erected by Darius I (r. 521-486 B.C.E.). The latest Babylonian work is that of Berossus, a contemporary of the Egyptian Manetho in the third century B.C.E.; nothing of Berossus's original work has survived though it was well known in Hellenistic and Roman times.

Others, however, continued to build new foundations for historical knowledge (in some cases literally) from the ground up, using erudition as the key to decoding and verifying the obscurities of the past. This was not strictly a Christian perquisite. Jewish historical writing, largely a vacuum since the first century C.E., experienced its own renaissance in the sixteenth century with the Iberian exiles Solomon ibn Verga (1460-1554) of Seville and Samuel Usque (fl. 1540-1555) and the messianic world historian Joseph ha-Kohen. But it was the Mantuan-born Azariah de' Rossi (c. 1511-1578) who most resembled the great Christian antiquaries in his attention to the sources of ancient Jewish history. Azariah's Me'or 'Einayim (Enlightenment of the Eyes) was roundly rejected by contemporary rabbinical scholars, but it pointed ahead to the more secure revival of Jewish secular historiography in the early nineteenth century.

Over the course of the twelve centuries from the end of the Later Han to the advent of the Ming (the last indigenous Chinese dynasty) in 1368, the basic genres of historical writing were set. In addition to the Standard Histories, one finds that various works in the chronicle format (originated in the Chunqiu) or Biannian shi, and the Standard Histories themselves, following Sima Qian, continued to combine annalistic sections with biographical accounts, along with accompanying sections such as chronological tables to establish common years for events in different areas (a practice that soon spread to other parts of Asia). A particularly notable example of writing outside the zhengshi model is Sima Guang's (c. 1085 C.E.) Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive mirror for aid in government), which recounts history from the late fifth century B.C.E. to the tenth century C.E., a work that in turn inspired numerous commentaries. Finally, universal histories (in the mode established by Sima Qian) were also compiled, in particular during the Song dynasty (960-1279 C.E.).

Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Europe A recurring theme in several of the traditions we have discussed is that history should be a useful guide to behavior, the past itself a vast ocean of examples from which the present could fish, often without much attention to the water itself. In the West, the classic exposition of this idea came from the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.E. ), who defined history as the magistra vitae or mistress of life. Cicero was among the classical authors known in part during the Middle Ages but rediscovered in full by the humanists of the Renaissance, who appropriated the authors of Greece and especially Rome as their models of style, genre, and suitable content. This was true across many areas of intellectual activity from the mid-fourteenth century on, but the rediscovery of classical texts and categories would have wide-ranging effects on historical thought and writing, not least because from the mid-fifteenth century, the advent of printing permitted the easy replication of texts in large numbers. Within two centuries this would create a larger reading public for historical writing than had ever existed previously anywhere in the world.

Since very early times, human beings have had some sense of the past, both their own and that of their community or people. This is something that has distinguished us from other species. Having said that, historiography in the narrower sense of "intentional attempts to recover knowledge of and represent in writing true descriptions or narratives of past events" has had a rather briefer career throughout the world, though one more complex and variegated than most accounts allow. It is not possible in the space of a brief essay such as this to convey the entire richness of the human effort to recapture the past, but an effort must be made to summarize the historiographical traditions of many different regions.

Such tendencies in evidentiary criticism could have unintended consequences in nurturing unbelief. The same skepticism that appears in earlier antiquaries' doubts about such myths as the Trojan descent, or in Jean Bodin's dismissal of the Four Monarchies periodization, soon produced doubts about the literal truth of the Old Testament as a historical source, and deistic views of rational religion. The skeptical tendency first notable in the later sixteenth century produced in the seventeenth both reactive affirmations of received traditions (the Discourse on Universal History, Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's splendid effort to rehabilitate medieval world history in a Christian context being a famous example), and more thoughtful attempts to address what was now an urgent problem, the very reliability of not just specific traditions, but of any historical knowledge. Some of these efforts had a secular focus: Francis Bacon's (1561-1626) empirical attempt to build truths from individually verified "facts" (it was in this period that the word "fact" acquired something like its modern meaning) applied in his judgment both to the realm of the past and the realm of nature, both of which were best represented by "histories"—echoes of the old Herodotean notion of a discovery or inventory can here be heard. Bacon also enumerated the various genres of history in a manner directly derived from the sixteenth-century artes historicae (although his only significant effort at history-writing, on the reign of England's King Henry VII (r. 1485-1509), was a rather conventional humanist "politic" history in the style of Tacitus and Machiavelli, intended to provide advice to the crown). The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) addressed the problem of knowledge from the interior to the exterior world, through deduction, but

Thanks to Ranke, his immediate disciples, and the celebrated German university seminar environment, German scholarship loomed large over many of Europe's nations in the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond; the Sorbonne historian Ernest Lavisse (1842-1922) was so impressed by Ranke's successes that he introduced the historical seminar into French higher education. In truth, many of the methodological practices were already practiced elsewhere in Europe. The real appeal of the German approach to historiography was its emphasis on the historian's calling as a professional (with the high status that it accorded in German society) rather than an amateur or "gentleman scholar."

The European Middle Ages Following the foundation of the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century at Constantinople (the former Byzantium) and the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of Europe, western and eastern European historical writing evolved in rather different directions. The continuity of the Byzantine Empire for another millennium facilitated the further evolution of classical historiography written to a high standard of accuracy, primarily in Greek. It comprised both secular history—represented initially by Eutropius, Zosimus, and Procopius—and, beginning with Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260-c. 339), ecclesiastical history.

The Israelites (or Jews as they later became) were the other major people in the ancient Near East to develop historiography. The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible is now known to have been the work of several hands, and much of it originates from later periods such as the Davidic kingship (tenth century B.C.E.) and the Babylonian Exile (late seventh-early sixth centuries B.C.E.). But in the early genealogies of Genesis and in the more chronological accounts of the Books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, one finds both an effort to memorialize the past accurately as a written record and a strong sense of the divine destiny of the Israelites as a chosen people, a linear progress through which oscillates a recurrent cycle of triumph and misery as God chastises an erring people for disobedience, sin, or idolatry, and then delivers them from oppressors such as the Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The Hebrew-Judaic view of history and of time is one of the foundation stones of Christian historiography of the past two millennia. It is

The Rise and Growth of Islamic Historiography Mention of the Crusader chroniclers brings us directly to the third great independent historiographical tradition, the Islamic. There are indigenous examples of historiography, genealogy, and oral traditions among both Arabs and Persians, such as popular stories about battles (Ayyam); and Julie Scott Meisami points out that the Sasanian dynasty of Persia (224 C.E.-651 C.E.) is known to have had both royal and priestly historical narratives. Islamic historiography, a highly elaborate and systematic development of historical writing and thought about the past, begins in the seventh century, its first subject being the life and deeds or expeditions (maghazi) of Muhammad himself, whose Hegira to Medina in 622 C.E. provided a firm date on which to anchor an Islamic chronology. From the very beginning, a zealous effort to record only true statements about or by the Prophet from authoritative testimony, beginning with eyewitnesses, led to careful attention to the chain of transmission (isnad ) whereby one successive authority passed information, often orally, down to the next: a hadith or report of the words of the Prophet generally consisted of an isnad followed by a matn (the actual text).

The Romans had a strong sense of the divine destiny of their city and its expanding empire, which provided a horizon for their history writing in the way that the known world as a whole had done for the Greeks. They also injected a teleological and progressive element that was lacking in Greek historiography. Where cycles of rise and fall and the random hand of Tyche (fortune) appear in many of the Greek historians, history becomes more purposeful and almost providential among the Romans: Livy, much of whose history has not survived, is both the celebrant of Rome's seemingly divine expansion and conquests over time, and among the mourners of the dissipation of its republican virtues and loss of liberty. Beginning in the first century B.C.E., a number of Romans also considered, as few Greeks had done, what we would call theoretical— or at least rhetorical—issues of historiography, including the question of what actually constituted history, what were its best models, and what pitfalls ought to be avoided in its composition. The great rhetorician and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.), who had an enormous influence on the Renaissance fifteen centuries later, wrote in De oratore (55 B.C.E.) about the uses of history, stressing again its utilitarian function. Cicero was not himself a historian. Nor was Lucian (c. 129-after 180 C.E.), who two centuries later penned a tract on How to Write History, thereby initiating a historiographical-method genre that would reappear with vigor in the sixteenth century.

The anticlericalism that appears in Giannone would be taken up by one of the period's most well-known figures, Voltaire (the pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778), whose Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations was an overview and critique of several centuries' worth of institutions and customs, including those of non-Western civilizations such as the Chinese. Less erudite than many other historians of the era, unsympathetically critical of the errors and folly of past ages, and at times positively hostile to "pedantic" scholarship and "useless obscurities," Voltaire praised features in other civilizations while still arriving at the conclusion that Western culture represented the triumph of human reason. He nevertheless contributed to public knowledge of other past societies, often employing contemporary travel accounts as sources; and in Le siècle de Louis XIV (1751) he offered a brilliant if uncritical analysis of civilization during the age of Louis XIV, which he aspired to establish as a benchmark for reform in his own time. The notion that there is a cumulative progress in human events had been a recurring theme in history for centuries, though typically ascribed to a divine plan as in the Judeo-Christian eschatological view of time. In the eighteenth century, progress as an organizing principle really came into its own, with the most optimistic views being espoused by the likes of Voltaire and especially his Revolutionary-era successor, Marie-Jean Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794). The latter, an ill-fated aristocratic philosophe, left at his death the introduction to a Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, a book that adumbrated a nine-stage history of humanity's progress, with a culminating tenth stage of reason and achievement to follow the Revolution

The earliest Muslim historians, many of whose works are only known to us fragmentarily or as part of subsequent works, include Ibn al-Zubayr and his successor, al-Zuhri (d. 742), who was probably the first to combine several accounts into one continuous narrative committed to writing. They were quickly followed by the first great and fully intact biography (sira) of the Prophet, by Ibn Ishaq (c. 704-767), and by the more critically and chronologically rigorous treatment of al-Waqidi (747-823), who also wrote several further works on Islamic history. In the early or "for

The most significant consequence of Hegel's philosophy of history and its dialectic engine was its inversion by the socialist Karl Marx (1818-1883) into a historical materialist philosophy of economic and social change leading from primitive times, through feudal and capitalist phases, to the triumph of the proletariat. With less obvious debts to the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach (whom he severely criticized), the scientific positivism of Auguste Comte (whom he viewed with contempt), and more remotely to such a theorist as Vico, Marx developed his views of history piecemeal through several theoretical works, beginning with The German Ideology (1846). He wrote at least one work that can be considered a political history, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). Without exception, no theory of history in modern times has had more influence, in terms of sheer numbers of adherents, especially among Marx's Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese admirers, and the citizens of their states.

The notorious Methodenstreit or "dispute about method" set off in 1891 by Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) presaged some of the uncertainties of the twentieth century. Critical of the neoRankeans of his day, but more sympathetic to positivism than Droysen or Dilthey, Lamprecht cast doubt on the usefulness of history conceived as the account of leaders and particular events, as opposed to larger groups, and invoked the need for an alliance with the incipient social sciences, including psychology. Though roundly denounced at the time, Lamprecht was not without adherents. His students included the leading Romanian historian of the next generation, Nicolae Iorga (1871-1940), and he was seen by a number of East German historians, following World War II, as having provided an "alternative to Ranke" (Chickering, p. xiii). At the same time, Lamprecht's historically minded contemporaries, the philosopher Georg Simmel (1858-1918), the political economist Max Weber (1864-1920), and a French former history student, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), were pushing the study of the past toward the emerging discipline of sociology, which has enjoyed a steady if troubled relationship with its parent discipline in the century since.

The pattern is similar elsewhere. In Hungary, Romantic historians such as István Horvat (1784-1846) created a popular if highly fictionalized remote past for the Hungarian people. The unsuccessful revolt of 1848-1849 was followed by nationalist histories (often authored by exiled liberals such as Mihály Horváth [1809-1878]) and by the foundation of the Historical Commission of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1854) and the Hungarian Historical Association (1867), as well as by the extensive publication of source material in the Monumenta Hungariae Historica (initiated 1857). Polish aspirations for independence and political reform are likewise reflected in the great quantity of sources published in the early nineteenth century, and in the liberal, pro-peasant multivolume history of Poland by Joachim Lelewel (1786-1861). The protoRomantic nationalism of the historian Father Paisiy of Hilendar (1722-1773) set his native Bulgaria on a century of historical nation-building leading up to independence in 1878, at first affirming in an uncritical manner the nation's Slavic affiliations and ancient descent from remote nomadic progenitors like the Scythians—a time-honored convention going back to medieval and Renaissance theories of mythical national descent from peoples like the Trojans. Romania, which achieved independence in 1877, established a national academy shortly thereafter, and history was introduced at its newly founded universities.

The separation of ecclesiastical from secular history, though not absolute, proved fundamental to medieval and early modern historical writing and to later Renaissance divisions among historical genres. Late antique ecclesiastical writers, before the sixth century, included Socrates, Rufinus, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius and, as the religious inspiration suggests, their work was often highly polemical. But ecclesiastical history (borrowing wholesale the sense of divinely guided destiny immanent in Old Testament historiography and turning it into a more explicit eschatology) had a strong focus on the foundation, growth, and triumph of the Christian religion, and a steady eye toward the eventual return of Christ and the ultimate end of history. This helped its Byzantine writers to develop, quite early, an attention to precise chronology and periodization. Ecclesiastical history was also, significantly, generally devoid of set speeches, its authors preferring

The tremors affecting thinking about the past, chronology, and history were undoubtedly magnified by two centuries of explorations overseas, for this was also the era of European expansion to the East and the West. The discovery of other peoples, especially primitive indigenous cultures, also complicated inherited schemes for the periodization of history and the Creation story, as la Peyrère had demonstrated. The conquistadors and the more learned clerical missionaries who followed them discovered advanced non-Christian civilizations in the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas. Many of these had developed their own sense of the past and non-alphabetic means to represent it—the Incas used the quipu or knotted cords combined with memorized traditions, and Mayan glyphs record a dynastic history for the period 250-900 C.E. This was also the first period at which

There are several other types of medieval historical literature, of which the Norse (Norwegian and Icelandic) sagas of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries (initially an oral record but committed to writing after about 1150) present an especially interesting departure from the prose chronicle and form a link between the world of the annalist and that of the heroic poet; they are the major source for Norway's medieval past. Culminating in Snorri Sturluson's (1179-1241) compendious Heimskringla (History of the kings of Norway), itself a reference point for Norwegian national consciousness in much later centuries, the sagas existed alongside Latin prose works such as Saxo Grammaticus's (c. 1150-after 1216) Gesta Danorum (Deeds of the Danes), and vernacular chronicles such as Aelnoth's Krönike (c. 1120), and Sweden's series of rhymed royal chronicles. Ultimately, however, prose annals and chronicles, and the occasional verse chronicle, would prove the most common form of historical writing through much of the Middle Ages, with the constraints that year-by-year accounts (without the Chinese convention of accompanying biographies) impose on representing the past as a series of continuous events. A good vernacular instance of this would be the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, initiated late in the ninth century and continued by successive writers until the mid-twelfth century.

Third, the above-mentioned discovery of physical ruins, statuary, coins, and buildings in Italy and elsewhere nurtured an ancillary branch of historical study often referred to by the generic title "antiquarianism." This took various forms in different countries, but beginning with Flavio Biondo (1392-1463) in the mid-fifteenth century and continuing through most of western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth, the antiquaries engaged in inquiries into what might be called the non-narrative past. Not bound by classical exemplars (there were no ancient antiquarian works extant except fragments of the late republican Roman Marcus Terentius Varro) they turned for a literary model to geography, as exemplified by Pliny the Elder (23-79 C.E.), rather than to history, and many of their works are thus organized by place rather than time. They were also considerably less concerned with using the past as a source of advice for the present, though a keen interest in great families and especially genealogy permitted many of these works to include extensive memorials of the great and their deeds. Among the most significant works in this genre outside Italy was William Camden's (1551-1623) Britannia (1586). This was a pathbreaking account, built on extensive personal travel around Britain (and on unpublished work by the early-sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland), of Roman and medieval British antiquities. Expanded and reprinted several times over the next century, Britannia became a virtual vade mecum for subsequent generations of antiquaries and for interested country squires. Bound by classical notions of form and genre, Camden was reluctant to consider such a descriptive, non-narrative survey as "history" (unlike the later Annales that he wrote about the reign of Queen Elizabeth), so he defined the Britannia as a "chorography," a term adopted by his many imitators in ensuing decades

This does not of course mean, as some later writers supposed, that historiography was simply frozen between classical antiquity and its Renaissance recovery. Historical writing matured considerably beyond simple annals during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Monasteries such as Saint Albans in England and Saint-Denis in France developed traditions of multigenerational continuous historical writing (the only Western analogy to the contemporary Chinese experience), in which a summary universal history was often affixed before a contemporary account, which in turn was extended forward by subsequent writers. A separate class of chronicles, more aristocratic in flavor, was influenced by earlier chivalric literature, especially the tales of King Arthur and the chansons of figures like Roland, and the biographical gesta of deeds of emperors and other rulers. The writing of aristocratic chronicles was stimulated by foreign events and especially by wars such as the ongoing Crusades in the Holy Land, generating such works as the history of the Fourth Crusade by Geoffroi de Villehardouin (c. 1150-c. 1213). Such writing appealed to both rulers and their fighting nobility and was often expressed in languages outside the learned Latin of clerical chronicles. Gabrielle Spiegel has even suggested that the aristocrats of thirteenth-century France, for instance, evolved a vernacular prose historiography in response to concerns about social change and the aggrandizement of royal power. Perhaps the most widely read aristocratic works both at that time and since have been the narrative by Jean Froissart (1333?-c. 1405) of the first phases of the Anglo-French Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) and the various vernacular Scots accounts, in verse and prose, of the Scottish wars of independence against the English. Finally, semifictional works in Latin providing elaborate accounts of the foundations of kingdoms and theories of racial descent were also produced, such as Simon of Kéza's (fl. late 13th century) Gesta Hungarorum, which celebrated the deeds of Attila and the supposedly ancestral Huns. The most notorious work of this sort was the History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100-1154), a major source for subsequent Arthurian literature, and already attacked as an imaginative fabrication by its author's younger contemporary, William of Newburgh (1136-c. 1198).

Though there had certainly been eminent historians in newly established kingdoms like Belgium prior to their independence, sovereignty or the drive toward it provided an urgent need to establish both the shape of a national past and the capacity to write about it. Even those regions such as Bohemia that did not achieve political autonomy during the period still celebrated their separate identity and marked out a distinctive past. Thus František Palacký's (1798-1876) fivevolume history of the Czech nation from earliest times to the Habsburg union of 1526 espoused a highly romantic and nationalist view of the Czech heritage, celebrating the Hussite religious reformers of the fifteenth century, for instance, as exponents of Slavic liberty against Germanic authoritarianism. European Jews, after centuries of rabbinically dominated treatments of their past, acquired a modern national history for the first time in the successive works of Isaac Marcus Jost (1793-1860) and Heinrich Graetz (1817-1891). The latter was a German whose Geschichte der Juden put Jewish history on a firm archival and philological basis while not losing sight of the connecting theme of endurance through centuries of exiles, persecutions, and massacres.

Two significant Italian contemporaries stand out at the beginning. The younger, Pietro Giannone (1676-1748), was a Neapolitan jurist who authored a Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (1723). This blended detailed knowledge of documents (often derived at second hand from the erudite works of earlier generations) with a focus on social history and a reform-minded and specifically antiecclesiastical outlook that would characterize much later Enlightenment thinking. The older and ultimately—though not immediately—more important was Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), like Giannone a jurist. The influence of Vico on subsequent European thought—

Various regions developed historiographic forms during India's "medieval" or Muslim-ruled period, which ended in the mid-eighteenth century. In the Rajput state, Mughal-inspired official chronicles or khyats (some of which contained information from earlier Hindu bardic literature) first appeared in the late sixteenth century. In the early eighteenth century a king of Assam, Siva Singha, ordered a history of his predecessors to be written, and a century later, Ramram Basu, at the behest of a British missionary, authored a vernacular history of the government of Bengal. There exists also a distinct tradition of historical writing among the Maratha people of Western India, including bakhars (chronicles and biographies) that continued to be written into the period of British imperial governance. While the reliability of some of these works as chronological sources for the periods they depict has been questioned by modern scholars, they nevertheless constitute intentional attempts to capture the past. It is thus important to recognize that the absence of the usual Western forms of historical writing through much of this period does not entail a lack of any such activity, much less the complete absence of historical thinking. However, European traditions would eventually prove effective in bringing the indigenous Indian tradition to a close, following its earlier encounters with Islamic historical thought introduced by Arabic and Persian visitors and Mughal conquerors.

Western influences were increasingly felt during this period, albeit inconsistently, and indeed the parallels with Renaissance humanism three centuries earlier are striking, including the considerable expansion of woodblock printing that began late in the Ming era, the frequent exchange of correspondence among scholars, and the particularly high valuation of ancient learning. A consequence of this was that certain venerable texts were held up to the kind of critical scrutiny that Renaissance philologists had applied to forgeries like the Donation of Constantine or the pseudohistories of Annius of Viterbo. And, as the humanism of the Renaissance had preceded the rationalist skepticism of the Enlightenment, so the Han Learning revival eventually produced a decline in the status of Confucianism. Methodologically, the "School of Evidentiary Research" (kaozheng or k'ao-cheng) as it is often called, is exemplified in works such as Yan Ruoqu's (1636-1704) exposure of selected chapters of the Shujing (the "Book of Documents," both a classic and a history) as a piece of later, post-Confucian authorship. This iconoclastic pursuit of truth had effected momentous changes in scholarship before the School itself declined in the nineteenth century. It would clear the way by the end of the Qing era in 1911 for Liang Qichao's (1873-1929) now Western-influenced call for a "new historiography" and for his associate Xia Zengyu's general history of China, itself affected by Western-style Japanese histories of China.

What truly puts these writings into the realm of the historical is the evidence that successive works had to be based on what we would now call research—the examination, selection from, and collation of multiple earlier sources—rather than on any tradition of continuous record keeping. Many went beyond that to aspire to provide advice, counsel, or cautionary tales, a recurring motive through much of the global history of historical writing. One of the best-known examples of early Mesopotamian history is the Old Babylonian Weidner Chronicle, reaching back to early times but largely devoted to the Sargonic dynasty of Akkad in the twenty-fourth century B.C.E. This is one of the first historical works clearly designed with a didactic purpose, to recover and preserve the past for the edification of present and future, with a lesson attached, in this case the propagation of the cult of the god Marduk. The Weidner Chronicle's account of Sargon I and his grandson Naram-Sin contrasts the godliness of the former with the disobedience to Marduk of the latter, with the consequence of the downfall of Akkad at the hands of Gutian barbarians. The alternation of divine favor and punishment, another frequent theme in historical writing, thus had an early start. It turned up again in the early seventh century B.C.E. when the later Assyrian defeat of Babylon was ascribed to Marduk's displeasure at recent kings, and it appears frequently throughout the travails of the children of Israel at the hands of foreign hosts depicted in the Hebrew Bible.

While it is easy to look back at such works and recognize their obvious slant, it would be a gross error to dismiss them as the worthless detritus of religious bigotry. Although openly hostile to alternative views, and often naively supposing (in the manner of la Popelinière or, somewhat later, England's Francis Bacon), that a correct or "perfect" version of the past was achievable, the strength of their convictions led many of these authors to undertake careful research in order to buttress their cases. Nor were the battle lines exclusively confessional, since a broad Latin republic of letters connecting Catholics and Protestants would develop through the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The savagery with which two Protestant chronologers, Thomas Lydiat and Joseph Scaliger, treated each other's works, or the scorn heaped by the great English lawyer and antiquary John Selden (1584-1654) on the Protestant critics of Historie Tithes (1618) illustrate this point well, as do the papacy's hostile reactions to the renegade Venetian priest Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623) for his critical History of the Council of Trent.

Willingness to subject to criticism documents and texts, and the received notions that derive from them, has often been taken as a sign of secularism or impiety by contemporary critics and later admirers alike: one recalls John Selden's experience in seventeenth-century England and the reaction to the Han Learning scholars of early Qing China, discussed above. The adulation now paid to earlier critics of Old Testament texts such as Richard Simon and Baruch Spinoza as heralds of modern secularism is not necessarily more accurate than the scorn heaped upon those scholars by conservatives of their own day. With Ranke we find a devoutly religious man, with intellectual debts to German idealist philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, attempting to find God's handiwork in history, as had so many historians before him, but with a focus on the mechanics of human action on the earthly stage to the degree that these could be recovered through careful criticism of sources. Ranke had a strong belief in divinely dictated progress, but also in the distinctive HISTORIOGRAPHY New Dictionary of the History of Ideas lix 69554_DHI_FM_ii_iv-clxx.qxd 10/15/04 5:11 AM Page lix value and contribution of each historical era and people, all "equal before God." He promoted a historiography that as far as possible could tell the story of the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. This famous phrase translates most accurately as "the past as it essentially was"—not, as some later students thought, "the past as it actually happened." Later admirers wrongly believed that this meant the complete avoidance of anything not based on a specific fact and the absolute repudiation of conjecture or interpretation, thereby ignoring the moral and philosophical side of Ranke's work.

With the religious Reformation in Europe this polemical dimension of historical writing reached new levels as not just particular perspectives but the beginnings of what we would now call "ideology" began for the first time to splinter historical writing into conflicting camps, now able to conduct their campaigns with print, the powerful new weapon of mass instruction. Early Protestant reformers, needing to blacken the papacy and the medieval church generally as one long decline from apostolic purity, provided histories such as the Magdeburg Centuries, directed by the Croat reformer Matija Vlac ic (Matthias Flacius), which recounted the survival of the true church over centuries of papist decay. While much of this work continued to be composed in Latin, historians were increasingly using local vernaculars in order to reach a wider domestic audience. Thus, notes P. K. Hämäläinen, sixteenth-century Finnish clerics, for instance, began for virtually the first time to write history in that tongue rather then the Latin or Swedish used in medieval annals and chronicles. The propaganda potential of such works, even an in era of restricted lay literacy, was enormous, and was maximized, in the age of religious persecution and intolerance, by a subset of

Yet the Chinese experience testifies to the vigor and achievement of a historiographical enterprise under official sponsorship. Under the Tang dynasty (618-907), historiography became elaborately bureaucratized and even more closely linked to the official civil service; it was also "promoted" within the four categories of learning to second place, behind the classics and before philosophy and literature. Under the Tang, seven new Standard Histories were produced, and by the end of the dynasty the Bureau of Historiography had become virtually an independent arm of government, with a fully worked out system of compilation. From a set of court diaries kept during the reign of an incumbent emperor, a recording of his sayings and actions, and an administrative record, a set of "Veritable Records" (shilu) would be developed at the end of the reign. These in turn, after the final eclipse of the dynasty, would form the basis of the Standard History of that dynasty. The latter was intended, at least in theory, to be the official and unchallengeable truth, not subject to rival versions or interpretations. This strategy did not always succeed—a new history of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) was composed in 1920, over five centuries after Ming historians had written an earlier version. Some dynasties such as the Tang and "Five Dynasties" (907-960) each have two Standard Histories. It was customary to destroy the earlier sources once the Standard History had been composed, which accounts for the rarity of surviving examples of Veritable Records, those of the Ming being a notable exception. The writing of Standard Histories would continue for every dynasty up to the final composition of the Draft History of Qing in 1927 and its 1962 Taiwanese counterpart, which are sometimes counted as a twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth zhengshi. All share the annals-biography form first adumbrated by Sima Qian two millennia earlier, often accompanied (as in the Shiji) by other elements such as chronological tables and treatments of hereditary houses.

by no means limited to historiography—has been profound, though it was to fall on deaf ears for a century. Vico's Scienza Nuova (1725; New science), which has aptly been called a virtual Newton's Principia for history, espoused an erudite synthesis of the human past—including the nonWestern. Vico erected this edifice on a postulated series of cycles of progress and decline, dividing the past into a series of recurring ages: of gods, of heroes, and of men (the historical age)—there had been two such cycles (corso e ricorso) up to his own time. Each age was characterized by distinctive modes of speech, thought, law, and government, and all unfolded against the imagined horizon of an "Ideal Eternal History." An admirer of Plato and Tacitus, of the empiricism of Francis Bacon and the legal scholarship of the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, Vico's application of philology and jurisprudence to the study of the past both echoes the Renaissance humanists and presages the work of later anthropologists, linguists, and comparative religion scholars. His ingenious insight that myths were an expression of an earlier mode of consciousness and of a language rooted in poetry, and that they needed to be understood metaphorically, was a powerful tool. It permitted him to embrace the biblical account of man's early history rather than dismiss or query it in the manner of French skeptics such as Bayle. He also provided an apparent answer to Cartesian skepticism in the notion that men can understand with certainty the things that they make, which include nations and their history. For Vico, verum (truth) was equivalent to factum (that which is made—or, we might add, done).

cuneiform and developed rudimentary forms for the representation of the past, such as king lists, annals, and chronicles. The oldest extant epic, that of the Uruk king Gilgamesh, though it recounts largely legendary episodes, probably has some connection to historicity. Closer to a recognizable historical document is the Sumerian King List probably initiated in the twenty-second century B.C.E., and existing in several recensions. It stretches back into mythical antiquity but goes beyond a mere list in later times to indicate inquisitive uncertainty about the historicity of some rulers expressed in the utterance "Who was king? Who was not king?" It is also a deliberate attempt to present the historical record in a particular light, necessitated by the circumstances of the author's own time. Various other forms of Sumero-Babylonian historical record exist, including building inscriptions, stele, and other durable media. Other genres, such as astronomical diaries, played a part in establishing a precise chronological grid against which to record events, and both the Babylonians of the second millennium and their neo-Babylonian or Chaldean successors of the middle of the first millennium were keen astronomers and devoted listmakers.

historians who focused on collecting the stories of early and more recent martyrs, as did the Englishman John Foxe, Huguenot Jean Crespin, and the Dutchman Adrian Cornelis van Haemstede. Catholic Europe responded in kind, for instance in the Ecclesiastical Annals of Cardinal Cesare Baronio, intended as an antidote to the Protestant version of the past. Partisanship would become virtually routine in historical writing during the religious wars across Europe and Britain during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although any individual author continued to stress his own impartiality and the bias or falsity of his opponents.

historical writing in India, producing works on various regions and localities, such as Ali Muhammad Khan's mid-eighteenth-century history of Gujrat over the previous seven hundred years. Early Japanese and Korean Historical Thought The story of Japanese historical writing begins with the influence of China and Korea and appears to have concluded in our own time with the impact of the West. History developed considerably later in Japan than in China, and then not in the same forms, despite the frequent use of Chinese as the language of composition. Historical writing can be found in the Japanese archipelago from the seventh century C.E. The emperor Temmu had ordered compilation of a chronicle in 681 in order to correct errors in and conflicts between imperial genealogies and the traditional origin tales of various great families The earliest extant texts are two official historical works, the Kojiki (Record of ancient matters, completed 712 C.E.) and Nihon shoki or Nihongi (Chronicles of Japan [Nihon], comp. 720 C.E.). These were both commissioned in 711, ostensibly by the empress Gemmei, as the preface to the Kojiki stated. Both texts relayed a powerful mythology of the creation of the world and the subsequent foundation of the empire by the first human monarch, Jimmu or Jinmu, a direct descendant of the sun goddess—belief in the emperor's divine ancestry would continue to be taught in twentieth-century Japanese schools. The Nihon shoki was composed in Chinese in an attempt to imitate Chinese historiography. The Kojiki was written in a commonly used mixture of Chinese and Japanese that grew unfamiliar to readers in later centuries, which led in part to the work's being neglected until the 1700s. By 901 C.E. the Nihon shoki had been augmented by five other Chinese-language works that with it form the Six National Histories (Rikkokushi)

history, the Chunqiu or Spring and Autumn Annals, is an account of events from 722 to 479 B.C.E. It is generally associated with the enormously influential philosopher Confucius or Master Kong (551-479 B.C.E.), though he may only have authored a commentary upon this work. Various collections such as the Zuozhuan and Guoyu, both sometimes attributed to a Confucian contemporary called Zuo Qiuming, drew on the Chunqiu and other early chronicles to present historical anecdotes and speeches in support of a Confucian outlook which, like the Buddhist, tended to a cyclical view of time that dominated Chinese historical thought until the nineteenth century. Other philosophical schools departed from the dominant Confucianism. The Daoists, pursuing harmony with nature and retreat from a world of cyclical but unpredictable change, did not accept that history had any discernible pattern or didactic value. The Mohists (followers of Mozi or Mo Di) and Legalists both saw discernible patterns of progress, though the latter, adherents of a totalitarian philosophy adopted by the brutal Qin dynasty (221-206 B.C.E.), asserted that such progress, enforced by state control over naturally evil individuals, made the past largely irrelevant.

physical as well as the textual, especially in his Rizhilu (Record of daily knowledge). As so often in historiography, contemporary issues proved a powerful stimulus for detailed and accurate research that could transcend polemical positions and, a century after Gu, Wang Mingsheng (1722-1798) would assert the responsibility of the historian to examine all available evidence. Together with Zhao Yi (1727-1814) and the respected teacher Qian Daxin (1728-1804), Wang was a member of a great trio of mid-Qing historical scholars who brought historical scholarship to a new level.

religion," meaning, respectively, the various migratory tribes and the Christian Church. It is less widely recognized that the majority of his famous book in fact dealt with the Eastern, Byzantine half of the empire, and thus is properly considered a work of medieval, not ancient, history. Eastern Europe first began to develop a substantive corpus of historiography at this time, often under foreign influence. The Hungarian-Slovak pastor Mátyás Bél (Matthias Belius; 1684- 1749) established the first learned society in Austria while publishing an extensive collection of the sources of Hungarian history. Russia had produced a sporadic tradition of chronicle writing, including its Primary Chronicle (early twelfth century) since the later Middle Ages. Beginning with the late-seventeenth-century Westernization under Peter the Great, a new national historiography emerged, first with Vasilii Nikitich Tatischev's (1686-1750) compilation from older chronicles into a Russian History from Most Ancient Times, and then with two national histories by Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-1765) on the earliest periods, and the seven-volume survey of Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Shcherbatov (1733-1790). Eighteenth-century Russian historical writing reached its highest achievement just after the Napoleonic struggles in the multivolume synthesis, based on a wide variety of sources, of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826). Western European philological scholarship had also arrived in Russia with two Germans, Gerhard Müller and his literary assistant August Schlözer, the latter of whom edited and published the Primary Chronicle.

to insert original documents and letters, which had not been a characteristic of most classical histories. The parallel line of Byzantine political historians and chroniclers was just as significant, though it dried up temporarily in the seventh century. A significant revival occurred in the eleventh century with Michael Constantine Psellus's memoirs of court life, and Byzantine historiography is widely regarded to have peaked in the next quarter-millennium under the Komnenian and Palaiologan dynasties. Notable authors included Anna Comnena (1083-c. 1153), one of the first great female writers of history, who composed an account of the reign of her father, the fourteenth-century emperor John VI Cantacuzenus (1292-1383), and the scholars George Pachymeres (1242-c. 1310) and Nicephorus Gregoras (c. 1295-c. 1359); Pachymeres is also significant as the earliest historical source for the rise of the Ottomans in nearby Anatolia.

usually been seen as the most rudimentary form of historical record, Chinese historiography regarded the annal as the highest form, the distillation of knowledge from other sources. Grant Hardy has further argued that the Western preference since the Renaissance for the single-voiced omniscient narrator and an internally self-consistent story fits ill with the multiple voices and often competing accounts of a single event included by Sima Qian in the Shiji. Perhaps most important, Western historiography places high value upon the independence of the historian from outside interference, though in fact that arms' length relationship has really only occurred in a minority of countries and in relatively recent times; official history, courtly history, and other variants have not fared well in the estimation of modern European-American historiographers.

By 1700, there was considerable overlap between the study of the erudite side of the past (numismatics, epigraphy, papyrology, paleography, and chronology) and the natural philosophy and natural history of the day. Leading intellectuals in other arenas such as Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who was keenly interested in chronology, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) participated in these erudite activities and corresponded with the antiquarian savants of the day. The atmospheric pressure and velocity of knowledge is well captured in the letters between scholars, and in the interconnected activities of the great many European academies and societies that were founded at this time, as well as in the earliest journals that circulated knowledge in print. There was also intense activity in the area of source publication and criticism. This included both ancient materials and (with an interest not shown previously) those from the Middle Ages, such as the sources of French history begun by the Maurists as Rerum Gallicarum et Franciscarum Scriptores, or the scholarship in hagiography and imperial Roman history by LouisSébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637-1698). Perhaps the outstanding examples of this Baroque source publication are provided by the works of the Modenese Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), including the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores and Annali d'Italia.

vBy 1700, there was considerable overlap between the study of the erudite side of the past (numismatics, epigraphy, papyrology, paleography, and chronology) and the natural philosophy and natural history of the day. Leading intellectuals in other arenas such as Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), who was keenly interested in chronology, and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) participated in these erudite activities and corresponded with the antiquarian savants of the day. The atmospheric pressure and velocity of knowledge is well captured in the letters between scholars, and in the interconnected activities of the great many European academies and societies that were founded at this time, as well as in the earliest journals that circulated knowledge in print. There was also intense activity in the area of source publication and criticism. This included both ancient materials and (with an interest not shown previously) those from the Middle Ages, such as the sources of French history begun by the Maurists as Rerum Gallicarum et Franciscarum Scriptores, or the scholarship in hagiography and imperial Roman history by LouisSébastien Le Nain de Tillemont (1637-1698). Perhaps the outstanding examples of this Baroque source publication are provided by the works of the Modenese Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672-1750), including the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores and Annali d'Italia.

The most important early figure in Chinese historical thought and writing, however, was the Han dynasty figure Sima Qian (145-86 B.C.E.). After the unification of various "Warring States" into a single empire by the violent but short-lived Qin (whose first emperor ordered an infamous book-burning and mass execution of scholars, virtually eliminating records of the conquered kingdoms), the succeeding Han emperors (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) created the stable conditions under which historiography could mature. Sima Qian, often known as the Grand Historian, did far more than write in his Shiji (Historical Records) a comprehensive account of Chinese history. He also evinced a clear sense of the historian's purpose: to record major and minor occurrences accurately in order to counsel the present and to bestow fame on the good and infamy on evildoers. Perhaps most important, his model for the compilation of facts about the past with its clearly worked out format, a combination of year-by-year annals and individual biographical treatments, influenced the next two millennia of Chinese historical writing. No Western historian, not even Herodotus or Thucydides, can claim that kind of influence, nor does Western historical writing display the continuity of a systematic and eventually institutionalized approach to the past that is exemplified by China. Sima Qian created various categories for the representation of the past that would be developed and augmented by subsequent writers. By the time he finished the Shiji that his father had begun, it was nearly four times the size of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. The Shiji would come to be regarded as the first in a long series of twenty-four "Standard Histories" (zhengshi), the official history of a dynasty written under its successor dynasty. (The Shiji itself, since it covered both the Han and their predecessors, is an exception to the rule that Standard Histories cover only one dynasty and are written after its fall). Sima Qian would most immediately be followed by the historian of the Former or Western Han dynasty, Ban Gu (fl. 1st century C.E.) and his sister and successor, Ban Zhao; their Hanshu set the pattern for a history covering only a single dynasty, followed three centuries later by Fan Ye's Hou-Hanshu (History of the Later or Eastern Han), which was left unfinished at its author's beheading for political conspiracy in 445 C.E.

vThe most important early figure in Chinese historical thought and writing, however, was the Han dynasty figure Sima Qian (145-86 B.C.E.). After the unification of various "Warring States" into a single empire by the violent but short-lived Qin (whose first emperor ordered an infamous book-burning and mass execution of scholars, virtually eliminating records of the conquered kingdoms), the succeeding Han emperors (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) created the stable conditions under which historiography could mature. Sima Qian, often known as the Grand Historian, did far more than write in his Shiji (Historical Records) a comprehensive account of Chinese history. He also evinced a clear sense of the historian's purpose: to record major and minor occurrences accurately in order to counsel the present and to bestow fame on the good and infamy on evildoers. Perhaps most important, his model for the compilation of facts about the past with its clearly worked out format, a combination of year-by-year annals and individual biographical treatments, influenced the next two millennia of Chinese historical writing. No Western historian, not even Herodotus or Thucydides, can claim that kind of influence, nor does Western historical writing display the continuity of a systematic and eventually institutionalized approach to the past that is exemplified by China. Sima Qian created various categories for the representation of the past that would be developed and augmented by subsequent writers. By the time he finished the Shiji that his father had begun, it was nearly four times the size of Thucydides' Peloponnesian War. The Shiji would come to be regarded as the first in a long series of twenty-four "Standard Histories" (zhengshi), the official history of a dynasty written under its successor dynasty. (The Shiji itself, since it covered both the Han and their predecessors, is an exception to the rule that Standard Histories cover only one dynasty and are written after its fall). Sima Qian would most immediately be followed by the historian of the Former or Western Han dynasty, Ban Gu (fl. 1st century C.E.) and his sister and successor, Ban Zhao; their Hanshu set the pattern for a history covering only a single dynasty, followed three centuries later by Fan Ye's Hou-Hanshu (History of the Later or Eastern Han), which was left unfinished at its author's beheading for political conspiracy in 445 C.E.

At least three major (in terms of their international scope, longevity, and influence) and a variety of minor independent traditions of historical thought and writing can be identified. The major ones are the Western (descended jointly from the classical Greek and Roman and, via the Old Testament, from the Hebraic), the Islamic (originating in the seventh century C.E.), and the Chinese. Minor ones include the various indigenous traditions of thinking about the past (not all of which involved writing), including ancient Indian, precolonial Latin American, African, and those arising in certain parts of east and Southeast Asia. The Western form (which would include modern Marxist Chinese writing) has predominated for a century or more in most of the world, but it would be a mistake to see that as either inevitable or as based on an innate intellectual superiority of method. Its hegemony springs much more from the great influence of Western colonial powers in various parts of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and perhaps even more from the profound effect in the last hundred years of Western, and especially North American, cultural, linguistic, and economic influences.

Moreover, ecclesiastical erudition in the cause of belief continued to drive some of the best scholarship of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as a defense against both alternative faiths and the potentially more serious threat posed by general "pyrrhonism" or skepticism towards the possibility of recovering the past. An intense search for a firm chronology for events before and since Christ climaxed in the sophisticated work of the French Huguenot philologer Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) and his Jesuit successor, Denis Pétau (or Dionysius Petavius, 1583-1652), as well as in more notorious attempts to fix with certitude dates such as the first day of Creation— most famously assigned by the Irish archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) to Sunday, 23 October 4004 B.C.E. Building on this chronological corpus, the Maurists, French Benedictines at Saint-Germain-des-Prés and other houses, produced editions of church fathers, based on original sources, but their principal contribution was in the development of systematic paleography (interpretation of historical scripts and hands) and diplomatic (knowledge of the structure, layout, and conventional formulae of documents) for the analysis of sources. This is best summed up by one of their leading figures, Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), in his treatise De re diplomatica libri VI (Six books on diplomatics), which focused on the authenticity of medieval charters. The Bollandists—Belgian Jesuits—commenced the Acta Sanctorum (Acts of the saints), organized as a month-by-month calendar of feast days, in order to set the lives and deeds of the historical saints on a sounder scholarly footing. Their project continues today and significantly improved the level of source editing then practiced

Perhaps the most interesting example of direct importation from the West and the profound change it could occasion is provided by Japan. Long closed to the West during the Tokugawa era, Japan rapidly opened up to international influence in the years running up to and following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, which brought an end to the age of the Bakufu. History had enjoyed considerable popularity through much of the nineteenth century, and the new regime established an official department of history and then, in 1875, an expanded Office of Historiography. Its initial purpose was to organize the compilation of the Dainihon hennenshi, a new history along the lines of the Six National Histories, and from a pro-Imperial perspective. A rival official history, the Taisei Kiyo (Outline of the Imperial Rule), to be written in Japanese, was also initiated by more conservative members of the new regime

an achievement all the more striking when one contrasts it with the relative dearth of Jewish secular historical writing during the millennium-and-a-half of Diaspora between Flavius Josephus (c. 37-c. 100 C.E.) and the sixteenth century when Jews, still stateless, began to rediscover the formal study of the past.

mative" period of Islamic historical writing (from the death of Muhammad to the early ninth century), one can identify subbranches respectively associated with the Western Arabian, Syrian, and Iraqi regions; the outstanding works of this period include the genealogical histories of al-Baladhuri (d. c. 892), the historical geography of al-Ya'qubi (d. 897) and especially the universal chronicle of al-Tabari (c. 839-923), Ta'rikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk (History of prophets and kings), which was translated into Persian (the lingua franca in much of the region) during the mid-tenth century. By the advent of the Baghdad-based Abbasid dynasty in the mid-eighth century, terminology to express the idea of an account of the past had also developed. A khabar (plural, akhbar, literally "information") was an account of the past composed for historical interest rather than to shed light on Islamic law, and often devoted to the relation of a single event. The term Ta'rikh, which first appeared about 644 C.E. and is the modern Arabic word for history, was initially used to describe various sorts of writing organized chronologically (it literally means "dating") whether by annals or by the reigns of caliphs. Both terms were used, often interchangeably, up to the midnineteenth century.

the early seventeenth century witnessed a revival and produced several specimens of chronicles. These included the Altan Tobc i (Golden Summary) which begins with the death of Genghis Khan and continues to the early seventeenth century, and the collection of chronicles known as Erdeniyin Tobc i (Precious Summary). At least one Muslim author, the fourteenth-century Tunisian Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), stands as among the most significant historical thinkers of that or any age, and as the culmination of the philosophical tendencies previously observed in al-Mas'udi. Although he was the author of a long history, Ibn Khaldun has become better known for that work's prolegomenon or Muqaddimah, an ambitious attempt to work out the many factors underlying historical change including customs, manners, climate, and economics; it has often led to his being considered the first sociologist of history. "It should be known that history, in matter of fact, is information about human social organization, which itself is identical with world civilization." So begins the Muqaddimah. "It deals with such conditions affecting the nature of civilization as, for instance, savagery and sociability, group feelings, and the different ways by which one group of human beings achieves superiority over another." Ibn Khaldun's idea that individuals and groups that come to power are animated by a group spirit or asabiyya has counterparts in much later Western writers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), while his belief that regimes once consolidated will almost inevitably become divided or corrupted and fall echoes the cyclical politics of the Greek Polybius.

writing with the experienced politician or general. This became prized in later times (and was frequently used as an argument to exclude women from writing history), despite having been only sporadically evident (Thucydides and Xenophon) among the Greeks. It signaled the priority of rhetoric and experience over research, with the result that the Herodotean association of history with inquiry now slipped into a Latin notion of historia as a "story" in the sense of a narrative, true or not. The Romans also celebrated the laudatory and exemplary value of history, and especially the lives of great men, a concept largely absent among most of the early Greek historians.

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