The Fiji Times at 150 is about the minutiae of history. The author of the book University of the South Pacific academic and historian Dr Anurag Subramani highlighted this during the launch of his history book The Fiji Times at 150, a scrapbook of Fiji’s history at Grand Pacific Hotel yesterday.
“It is about the minutiae of history, the bits and pieces of history, the odds and ends, the scraps,” he said.
“It’s not about the big events or the big players. The big players are there of course, the big events are there, but I deliberately as a historian, relegate them to the background for grounding the minor narratives and what I call the little voices of history.
“It is about those stories that mainstream historians either about feature or relegate to the footnotes.
“It is about the stories that get tucked away in the inner pages of newspapers.
“I call these dregs, or scraps of history, and hence the title of my book, The Fiji Times at 150, imagining the Fijian nation or the scrapbook of Fijian history.”
He said one of the labels him and the historians gave to this kind of history, was history from below.
“The term was first used by the French historian Lucien Febvre, and came into mainstream usage after the English historian EP Thompson, used it in his 1966 essay ‘History From Below’.
“History From Below is also known as history from the ground up, or people’s history, or subordored history, or even social history.
“And this is what I have written. “I have written a social history of Fiji, a history of a common people. This kind of history, what it does, it challenges the tenants of the big man school of history.”
