An Anglo angle on history

These two large, handsomely produced volumes offer an encyclopedia not of history or historical topics but of historians and historical writing. They aim to provide, in the words of an editorial note, "a guide to influential historians and historical debates since the writing of history began". This guide is to go "beyond the western historical canon to include writers from other cultures and traditions".

A three-page chronological list of historians is followed by some hundreds of entries, placed alphabetically, 52 pages of titles of principal writings of authors selected for inclusion, 124 pages of titles of other works in lists of "further reading" and a modest 23 pages of brief notes on the contributors.

The editor and publishers must be congratulated on a collection that shows evidence of a great deal of hard work and devoted application. The work does, however, make considerable claims and wide-ranging value judgements that inevitably lay it open to questions about standards, criteria and audience.

The first question concerns the audience to which the volumes are addressed. Historiography has taken its place among first-year courses in some universities these days, and for students whose acquaintance with actual historical writing is limited the guide could be valuable. Historiography students do not read Ranke anyway, and here they will find the essentials outlined for them without the need to examine any texts. Freud, Nietzsche, Vico and many other philosophers and "theorists" whose take on historical method has been held to influence the subject receive similar treatment in single-page pieces, many of them by doctoral candidates.

As a guide for a specialist readership, however, the volumes have other problems. It may well be that in fields other than my own, the editorial policy emerges differently, since the list of editorial advisers seems to give little indication of the way in which different fields of study have been covered. But in later modern history, the direction is clear enough. It is Anglo-centred and Euro-centred; even among transatlantic scholars more are scholars of Europe than of the Americas. Judy Walkowitz is included, Christine Stansell is not, to give one example.

But not only is it Anglo-centred, it is very much metropolitan-centred. History Workshop and its journal and writers have a lot of space, but there is no mention of the much more influential Past and Present Society or of the journal except as the location of some listed articles. The Society for the Study of Labour History gets a passing mention in a general piece about labour history throughout the world, but its long history of conference work and publications gets nothing like the space of the much shorter-lived History Workshop. There is a lucid account by Pat Hudson of the development of economic history but no mention of the Economic History Society. I am not suggesting that History Workshop was not of interest and importance, but the space given to it and the omission of other meeting places and publication loci for historians suggest a limited view of the profession in recent decades. Other important subjects get rather cavalier treatment, or none. There is no entry for Wales, and the work of modern Welsh historians gets no mention. Irish history, one of the most vigorous and expanding fields of modern writing, gets one short entry with Lecky and Moody as the "see alsos". One might have expected an entry on the historiography of the Great Famine alone. Modern Indian history is given a short entry and rather more titles, but of the 30 books listed only eight are by Indian writers, even though here, as with Ireland, there is a plethora of new and innovative writers and problems of translation rarely arise.

The small lists of further reading given with some entries raise the question of bibliographies that are never mentioned or offered as part of further reading. Of course bibliographies are not for reading, but where a specialist bibliography does exist it should surely be part of the recommended follow-up to any subject.

Among the topics are included some whose provenance is distinctly dubious. "History from below" - surely a joke? - is given a section separate from "Social history" and "Popular history". Perhaps some combined efforts and longer entries might have produced a clearer set of questions than these titles raise.

As to the list described simply as "historians" at the beginning, the criteria for inclusion, particularly of contemporary and near-contemporary writers, are not given and are not easily discernible.There are however some surprising omissions, which again suggest an editorial tone. David Williams and D. J. V. Jones and other Welsh historians are not listed, nor are Hans Meddick and Jack Goody, both writers of greater influence than many of the "theorists" included; no mention, other than a list of some of his books in the labour history section, is made of Patrick Joyce, whose work - for good or ill - is probably as widely discussed among students of modern British history as that of any contemporary scholar.

There are, then, quite serious criticisms to be made of the arrangement and selection of these volumes. A clearer indication of the audience might have removed some confusions. Leafing through the entries one is undoubtedly struck by the clear and comparitively jargon-free style of most of them. They provide a good read for an afternoon in the library but their purchase, at the cost of some six or seven historical monographs, is not to be strongly recommended.

Dorothy Thompson is at the institute of advanced research in arts and social sciences, University of Birmingham.