Historiography as a Comparative Subject

A battle won, one might contend. We have a plethora of studies, especially multi-author collections complied from the work of experts, none more impressive than the five volumes of the Oxford History of Historical Writing. And these publications pride themselves on their global reach, thus bringing into Western historical consciousness narratives from China or India or Latin America. They seem, on first sight, ‘comparative’. In fact they are not.

What they do is to present a reader with a battery, sometimes a battering, of national historiographies and invite their audience to do the business of comparing. We have ‘transnational history’, ‘entangled history’, histoire croisée. But they are not comparative, either. They demonstrate how one culture might penetrate another and export ‘transfers’ to the host. They ask no comparative question and indeed often remain an answer looking for a question. We have endless German titles crafted in Bielefeld and ending ‘im Vergleich’ The Vergleich seems less obvious than the atomised exposition. We have had rammed down our throats the ‘global’. Yet what that achieves is a widening of subject-matter and modes of drilling down into it. Rarely does the genre rise to thinking horizontally across societies in a frame formed from questions. Comparative historiography, stripped of its casual claims, has been an absence more than a presence.

This short paper cannot remedy the deficiency but it seeks to point towards possible ways of reviving what Pirenne and Bloch meant by comparative history and to draw from the experience of attempting, over many years, a comparative history of modern historiography, a current project of mine (How History Happened: Western historiography since the Enlightenment. Princeton, forthcoming). It will lead to a questioning of ‘process’, a re-thinking of the ‘national’ and above all a revisiting of language(s) as the basis of historiographical enquiry.

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