Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [169]
Extra-western history came into its own with the decolonization of the old empires and the simultaneous rise of the USA as a world power. World history as the history of the globe emerged in the 1960s, with the obvious progress of globalization. Historians from the Third World, notably a group of brilliant Indians, spun off from the local schools of Marxist debate, gained worldwide recognition only in the 1990s. The interests of world empire as well as the extraordinary resources available to US universities made the USA the centre of the new post-Eurocentric world history and, incidentally, transformed its history textbooks and journals. How could historical perspectives remain the same? Fidel Castro brought about the systematic development of Latin American studies in Britain in the early 1960s. Indeed we understood at the time that it was influenced by suggestions from President Kennedy’s Washington that it would be convenient to supplement locally distrusted North American experts on this region with the more acceptable Europeans. (If so, the project misfired. Latin American history overwhelmingly attracted young radicals.) However, the histories of Europe, the USA and the rest of the world remained separate from each other – their publics coexisting but barely touching. History remains, alas, primarily a series of niche markets for both writers and readers. In my generation only a handful of historians has tried to integrate them in a comprehensive world history. This was partly because of the almost total failure, largely for institutional and linguistic reasons, of history to emancipate itself from the framework of the nation-state. Looking back, this provincialism was probably the major weakness of the subject in my lifetime.
Nevertheless, around 1970 it seemed reasonable to suppose that the war for the modernization of historiography that had begun in the 1890s had been won. The main railway network along which the trains of historiography would roll had been built. Not that the modernizers, at least outside the French enemies of the ‘history of events’, necessarily proposed a hegemony of economic and social history, or even a relegation of political history, let alone the history of ideas and culture. The modernizers were far from reductionists. Though they believed that history must explain and generalize, they knew it was not like the natural sciences. However, they believed that history had a comprehensive project, whether it was Braudel’s ‘total’ or ‘global history, integrating the contributions of all the sciences of man’, or, if I may quote my own definition, of ‘what history in the broadest sense is about: how and why Homo sapiens got from the palaeolithic to the nuclear era’.9 Yet within a few years the scene had changed utterly. As Braudel himself complained about the Annales he no longer directed in the 1970s, the sense of priorities, the distinction between significance and triviality, which was essential to the old project, had gone. Just so old hands from Past & Present complained about Raphael Samuel’s new History Workshop Journal (the last remote offspring of the old CP Historians’ Group), that it discovered all sorts of corners of the past interesting to enthusiasts, but showed no sign of wanting to ask questions about them. History as the exploration of an objectively recoverable past had not yet been challenged. That only came with the fashion for ‘postmodernism’, a term which was virtually unknown in Britain before the 1980s, and which, fortunately, had made only marginal inroads into the field of serious historical writing by the start of the new century. Nevertheless, sometime in the early seventies the historiographical tide turned. Those who thought they had won most of the battles from the 1930s on, now found it running against them. ‘Structure’ was on the way down, ‘culture’ was on the way up. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the change is to say that the