There is too much focus in the academic community on national histories. Look at the curricula vitae of the professors, as well as the classes offered, in the history department of any university and you will see that their areas of focus are devided by the subject of nationality. This approach to the study of history is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways, and has consequences which reach further than a simple mistake in the distribution of information. The most obvious flaw is that the world was not always constructed in terms of what we know today to be nations. In fact it has only been within the last four hundred years that the modern nation-state began to take shape as a prominent feature of world politics. So does studying French history imply the study of the nation called France, or does it include the history of that geographic area from the onset of human habitation? I would hardly call Gauls Frenchmen, and the region has been through so many changes in affiliation since antiquity that at any one period of time it housed French-speaking people who held quite different opinions about what it meant to be French. And the same is true of any territory which we today consider a sovereign nation. But that problem is merely in the classification - the history itself is the same regardless of whether it is studied by someone whose focus is in French history or English or whatever else.
So why distinguish academic departments in this manner? Because the alternative, while more academically honest and accurate, is far too broad. The alternative of which I speak, and of which I am a bigger fan than of national history, is thematic history. To focus not on the history of France or England, but the history of technology, of the military, of religion, of economics. It is these sweeping themes which in encompass and direct the politics of any and all nations, and a full understanding of the history of a nation cannot come without taking a look at how these forces work. National history tells a story, but the theme always outweighs the plot. Not only that, but you can never understand what went on in France without looking at contemporary Germany or Spain. The French Revolution, for example, didn't just happen and now we have to talk about it because we're studying France; no, it happened because of the forces at work all over Europe. Regardless of the time period, though, international technology, religion, and trade, were always broader and more significant than any one of the groups of people involved.
For a thousand years, Christendom and the papacy governed the kings as well as the peasants of Medieval Europe. I could go on all night with examples from the cultural and intellectual revivals during the Renaissance, or the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, or the Atlantic World System of the seventeenth, or the liberalism movement of the eighteenth, or industrialization and imperialism in the nineteenth, or take your choice of technological, military, economic, or social movements that wrote the histories of the entire world at any time.
The reason I bring this up is that I had a delightful conversation with Prof. Townend yesterday and it made me feel important to bring something up that sounded important, and he happened to agree with me. His resume will say that he is a historian of Early Modern Brittain and Ireland, but he will tell you he is a social historian, which means his primary focus is on the everyday lives of individuals at that time in those places, rather than political movements or military or whatever. He is especially knowledgeable about the shift to the Atlantic World System during the seventeenth century, and the economic impact it had on ordinary Irish and British people. Anyway, he agreed with my point that themes such as trade, especially in his feild, are more important than nationality because they transcend national borders. His response to my argument was that thematic approaches, even when limited to be time-frame specific (which national approaches are as well), would still be too broad to effectively research and write about. And besides that, the academic community is too deeply rooted in its approach that it would be impossible to take any other that did not easily fit into the paradigm. All the academic sources and documents to be found are written and catagorized to fit this mold because the researchers doing the writing, as well as the librarians doing the catagorizing, are themselves trained in a national approach of whatever nation and period, and they expect their audience to have a similar academic background. This is the biggest problem. It's easy to contemplate on the influence and patterns of broad themes, but it's an entirely different matter to do research and write concisely in such a vein. Townend equated it to the difference between being served a nice meal in a restaurant and going back in the kitchen to make it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
