The historiography of the years between 1870 and 1914 could best be compared to a section of ocean whose tranquil surface was increasingly disturbed by the effects of swift and turbulent undercurrents. On the surface the Golden Age of historiography continued to the First World War. The discipline of history was well represented at the universities, the historical approach pervaded other disciplines, and the still largely unbroken tradition helped maintain a confident historical sense.
A constant stream of works on political, military and diplomatic history poured forth, reflecting and affirming the preoccupations of the world of nationstates. That type of historical writing fit with the contemporary historical science and also served well the European power system that was temporarily at an equilibrium. Germany and Italy had achieved national unity, France had settled on the republican form of government, the United States had become one nation free of slavery, and England continued on a steady course as a world power. All of them were exuberantly expansionist, and seemed to have gained access to perennial power, to be able to assure an ever-increasing well-being for more and more of their citizens, and to have reached a stable compromise between tradition and innovation. Yet four broad forces—science, industrialization, the emancipation of the masses, and the emergence of a global world—were already reshaping contemporary life. Historiography was affected because, since the 1700s, it increasingly undertook the ambitious task of reconstructing the past without any aid from existing traditions. That, by necessity, involved historians in formulating their own philosophical explanations of the world’s order and the methods of finding that order. Thus, the proliferation of philosophical explanations of the world had a marked impact on historiography. The latter had exchanged the limits put on it by tradition for an unlimited freedom of explanation; it proved a complex, often troublesome, exchange.
The pull of the sciences. By 1880 the sciences enjoyed immense prestige. Many scholars were enthusiastic about the image of a nonmysterious world without essences and spiritual entities and about the scientific method as a way to certain and timeless truth. The public was impressed by science’s ofT-spring, technology, with its promises of more food, products, health, comfort, and mobility. Not surprisingly, scholars in all fields, including history, felt impelled to emulate so successful an endeavor and transfer its views and methods from the inquiry into nature to the inquiry into human phenomena. Historians soon found that historiography could not simply be made to conform to the natural science model by undergoing a few adaptations here and there. They would have to accept not only the research methods but also the basic views of the world of the sciences. The emulation of strict scientific empiricism would exact a high price by dislodging from dominance the unique phenomena and their idiosyncratic contexts and putting in their place general and predictable phenomena or forces. Historians would have to abandon indeterminism in favor of determinism. This explains why in the six decades prior to 1914 an increasingly fierce battle raged between those who were ready to make the change—Auguste Comte, Henry Buckle, Hippolyte Taine, Karl Lamprecht, and some American historians—and those who opposed historiography’s absorption into a unified science. Among the latter were the large majority of historians who found the methods of history that had been developed earlier in the nineteenth century fully adequate to insure the scientific standing of history. They, as George M. Trevelyan put it bluntly, considered the idea of history becoming a science harmful if not grotesque.
In the 1880s, even German scholars grew aware of a precarious situation in the German historical science that had been brought about when Ranke’s successors had discarded the philosophical and theological elements the master had used in his synthesis. But Ranke’s system had gained its persuasive power from the correspondence between form, methods, and the perceived order of the world—stable, divinely ordered, and with ideas as mediators between the transcendent and the mundane. The scholars also understood that historians under the obligation to reconstruct the past but having left only the modem version of erudition and the narrative form, to master the task could no longer avoid speculating on the nature of the world, particularly on its human phenomena. While in the ancient and medieval periods history’s limited purpose required only a methodology equally limited in sophistication, the ambitious ideal of reconstructing the past independent of and often against traditional views of the historian’s society now demanded an elaborate methodological and epistemological apparatus. Historians who tmly stripped themselves of all traditional views (seen as prejudices) had to reconstruct the world from scratch on the basis of sources and a philosophical explanation of the world as a substitute for tradition. But the resulting multitude of views would threaten the truth value of history and that in turn prompted an agonizing stmggle to ward off the specter of relativism. Positivist historians, who were sure of the world’s nature and the methods for its study, had, of course, no such problems.
Positivist historians, relying on a “scientific” explanation of the world that drew on Ranke as well as Newton, Comte, and Darwin, saw the problem simply as one of using appropriately scientific methods in their research. They took an ambivalent stand on the existing traditions. Mostly employed by public institutions, they left unsaid, often unthought, that science knew neither a fatherland nor cultural preferences. They also continued to adhere to or even affirm national traditions and the progress view of the Enlightenment period.
The industrial age discovers the “real force” in history. The age of the machine had begun for many Western countries centuries ago. But in the second half of the nineteenth century industrialization proceeded at a staggering pace and triggered changes vast in number and scope. Factories and cities grew in tandem, destination points of a migration from the countryside that dwarfed the famous Germanic migrations. These migrants saw the industrial cornucopia as a promise of betterment for all. The hardships and sufferings caused by long and hard work at low pay were real enough, but so were improvements and a hope for a steadily growing affluence in which even the masses would share. By midcentury economic activities were perceived as sufficiently important for a few German historians to create economic history, although they held fast to the view that economic forces were only one component in a field of forces. Their restraint was shattered by Karl Marx, who, inspired by Hegel, built a historical theory on a grand scale. Critics pointed out that with its strict determinism and its prediction of a “historyless” ideal end stage, the theory was destructive to the existing social order, to empirical research, and to a truly historical view of the world. By the late 1800s a process of revision and interpretation began in an attempt to adjust Marx’s historical theory to the fullness of life.
As for non-Marxist economic studies, they took a completely ahistorical turn when in the late 1800s economics began its spectacular rise as a science based on the assumption of a pure homo oeconomicus, timeless mechanisms, and the isolation of the economic sphere from all other human phenomena. Economic history as a field remained weakened by the defections of Marxists and the new economists, but a general assertion of economic forces as dominant pervaded not a few subsequent historical works, particularly some by historians of the American “New History” school.
The masses at the gates of historiography. The industrial workers of Europe found in Marxism a rallying point, but their march to equality was enhanced by their sheer numbers, improving education, and concentration in the urban areas, as well as by the willingness of some societies to ameliorate hardships. When the age of the masses began, somewhere in the late 1800s, historians were hardly prepared for it. So far, peasants and workers had gotten little attention in historical works. Theirs had been an anonymous presence marked by no more than the routine cycles of birth, growth, work, marriage, reproduction, illness, and death. Intermittently the “common” people had revolted or had been victims of catastrophes and on those occasions had received brief mention. Even when nineteenth-century historians spoke of “the people,” they usually referred to distinct collectives, the nations, who found their proper acknowledgement in national histories. Their access to the story of “the common people” was blocked by the types of sources they consulted—diplomatic, political, and military records. Undoubtedly most historians also were among the supporters of the existing order in Western societies prior to 1914 and were suspicious of the masses. Thus institutional histories dealt with the development of social roles, rules, and customs that held society together. Only Marxists celebrated industrial workers as the great antithesis to capitalist societies that in the end would transform those societies. However, orthodox Marxism, too, defined the common people as a group with given characteristics. The empirical study of the masses took only tentative steps in the decades prior to 1914. John Green’s celebrated History of the English People did no more than replace political and military history with cultural history. It was in the United States, during the Progressive period, that the first democratically oriented historiography appeared in the works of the “New History” school.
The triumphant West and its world histories. The world had been known to be a globe since 1522, but only by the late 1800s did the global world become a part of everyday life. Accordingly the need to write world history should have grown more and more urgent. It did not. In fact, as long as the flags of Western countries still flew over vast expanses of the globe, those areas remained essentially appendages to Europe and therefore the past of Africa and Asia was mainly treated in the context of colonial and imperial histories. For Marxists, world history was simply a generalized Western experience with its perceived development proceeding toward the eternal socialist-communist stage. Christian scholars were severely handicapped because theological higher criticism and empirical archaeology put essential parts of their traditional universal history into doubt. Those who wished for world histories based on new images of human life and the world were not successful either. Darwinians provided little more than a general suggestion of evolution as the developmental model for world history. The view of human beings as purely biological entities yielded the basis for racial histories, and the concept of the “survival of the fittest” served other historians as the justification of imperial ventures. That left a few scholars who simply studied civilizations comparatively while putting aside the question of a truly unitary world history. In sum, at its peak of world dominance. Western culture betrayed little firm grasp or keen analysis of world history together with much uncertainty, doubt, and confusion. Some historians would take that as a reflection of an insufficiently developed data base while others were moved to describe decay.
World History
