Historiography can be defined as the body of techniques methods, theories and principles of historical research and presentation. In short, one can say historiography is methodological moment of history. Without historiographical tools, it would simply not be possible to construct history which is nothing but knowing and understanding the past based on available evidences.
History is nothing but metaphor for time. Hence the primary problem in any history writing is to determine and calculate time. Without circumscribing any event physical or historical in time and space, knowing it is impossible.
Therefore, the first historiographical problem which has got no intrinsic value is how to reckon time, i.e. linear time in contradistinction to cyclic time.
Linear time can be reckoned only when one take a point arbitrarily to cut the time line into two so that time can be reckoned with reference to that point before it and after it.
A society chooses the point of time of an event which had most salutary effect on it. For the Christian world, most of the things took dimensions from cultural and religious point of view from the birth of Christ.
Hence the moment of Christ’s birth is taken as the point to bisect linear time. Similarly, Islamic civilisation takes the migration of the prophet from Mecca to Medina as the point to reckon history.
The second historiographical problem is to determine the phases of history, i.e. to carve out the epochs. To think history is to divide it into periods. So what becomes more problematic in any diachronic study is not the point of reckoning linear time but the determination of phases or epochs of history.
Temporal variations
There are two traditions on the epoch of history — idealist and materialist. Idealists have divided the whole history of man into three phases — ancient, medieval and modern. Ancient phase has been characterised as the epoch of “reason”. Medieval begins with the 7th century AD and ends with 14th century AD.
Medieval has been called the “dark ages” by the “encylopaedists” precisely because the light of Greek “reason” was put off, almost for a millennium. During the “dark ages”, society’s world view was provided by the revealed truths of “the Books”.
Human reason had no place in the scheme of revealed truths. That is how the whole of medieval society was plunged into darkness. Modern period begins with the 15th century AD with the rebirth of Greek Reason. What enlightened the modern period was the recovery of “Greek Reason”. Reason once again became the sovereign of the universe. The sovereign, Reason, invested every individual with sovereignty and thus were born sovereign states, sovereign citizens and sovereign consumers.
The second stream is materialistic division of history. They characterise the epochs on the basis of technological changes and thereby the changes in the possibility of transforming the nature, matter and thereby changing the very foundation of the economy. According to materialist division the first phase of human history is Paleolithic, a stage of food fathering and hunting.
Second phase is the phase of settled agriculture — a new stage of development when tools went under change from stone, bone and wood and thereby the mode of economic production and distribution. This has been called the Neolithic age.
And the third epoch begins with the coming of the industrial revolution. Industrial revolution begot new forms of tools and weapons and a new form of society. It was industrial revolution which engendered the first international division of labour.
Thus, we have three arches of history so far no matter which tradition we follow. Dating and periodising history belongs to the realm of historian’s autonomy.
A historian may take the advent of information technology as the reference point to write history and thus the whole of human history will get divided into two epochs — one prior to the information revolution and one posterior to it.
Historian’s epistemic autonomy goes beyond this and can even cut short fixed magnitudes of time, i.e. century or decade etc, “The age of extremes: The short 20th century 1914-1991” by Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm (June 9, 1917 to October 1, 2012) is a celebrated example of this.
For Hobsbawm, 20th century begins in 1914 and ends in 1991. The first 13 years belong to 19th century itself whereas the past nine years belong to the 21st century. Therefore, every periodisation has both “relative and absolute value”. Like all thought, periodisation is intrinsic to thought and therefore relative and absolute at once.
Historiography as an indispensable tool
Thus we see that without historiographical rudder, we cannot even move an inch as far as historical construction or reconstruction is concerned.
It is historiography which gives us the clue in collecting and collating the historical evidences.
Which remnant can be treated as evidence or not will be determined by the periodisation we follow and the historical questions we raise.
Historical method which is part of historiography equips us in the interpretation and verities of historical evidences; otherwise history writing would amount to myth making.
It is the developments in historiography which has come to reveal that indeed, history exists at three different levels:
* First is the history of events which works itself in the short term. It is a sort of micro history.
* The history of conjunctures. It follows a broader, slower rhythm. The history of conjuncture includes in addition to the economic conjuncture, social and demographic conjunctures and all the other concomitant situations of the expansion or contraction. It is the weaving together of a variety of simultaneous conjunctures which brings about a viable sociology.
* And over and above the recitative of the conjuncture, structural history, history of the longue durée (long duration), which enquires into whole centuries at a time.
Moreover historiography gives us the tools to interpret history. After all history assumes its significance only when we interpret it.
In other words, history is interpretation, a discourse and therefore an ideological venture and adventure.
To conclude one can say that history and historiography are inexorably linked with each other and one is not possible without the other. They exist only in tandem and relation with each other.
* Dr Mumtaz Alam is head of department of social science and an assistant professor in history at the FNU. Views expressed are his own and not of this newspaper or his employer. For comments or suggestions, email: mumtazalig@gmail.com.
