As Marx wrote in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, more or less: People write history, but they do not write it just as they please; not under conventions chosen by themselves, but under conventions directly encountered, given and handed down. Especially once the publisher starts weighing in about what readers expect from heavyweight-yet-accessible attempts at encapsulating entire periods of time…
At the risk of dragging this whole thing out well beyond its sell-by date (though it does seem to be very good for my viewing statistics), I wanted to offer a quick response to the blog post that C. Trombley* published yesterday on recent exchanges between Brad DeLong, Branko Milanovic and me (see here for links). The minor and uninteresting point is to reiterate that I didn’t think I was defending or otherwise endorsing Hobsbawm’s take on the ‘Short Twentieth Century’, but rather offering some metahistorical musings on why an economist like DeLong wants to get embroiled in such arguments in the first place; my argument was less that the Long rather than Short 20th Century makes better sense, but that thinking in terms of centuries at all may be largely unhelpful (whereupon I’d normally start evoking Braudel and la longue duree, except that, as one commentator on my post remarked, he too seemed to be stuck in conventional chronological divisions, whether the 16th century or the reign of Philip II).
The major point that I wanted to pick up on is Trombley’s observation that Hobsbawm’s conception, insofar as he can comment on it without having read Hobsbawm (Chapeau!), seems to sit very oddly with Hobsbawm’s well-known Marxism. Yes! Surely one of the most attractive features of an economic or social approach to history, including historical materialism, is its forthright rejection of conventional political events (let alone the names of kings or dynasties) as an adequate framework for true historical understanding; rather, we need to focus on the very different (and often but not invariably slower) rhythms of economic cycles, technological development, shifting relations of production etc.? Let’s go back to arguing about the different phases of capitalism rather than all this nonsense about the special snowflake nature of the 20th Century!
Which does indeed make it odd that Hobsbawm – editor, don’t forget, of the English translation of Marx’s 1857-7 writings on pre-capitalist economies – should end up offering a version of events that’s so strongly dominated by politics and ideology rather than economics. Trombley suggests that it’s a very back-handed way of admitting the complete failure of the Stalinist project, without being willing to admit that the awful juggernaut of capitalism was in any way right. I can’t help wondering about the continuing power of the inherited conventions of historiography, especially British historiography, especially when it comes to writing the sort of heavy-weight-yet-accessible narrative that can happily sit on the shelves of the large airport bookshops and feature on ‘Best Books of the Year’ lists…
*Who also deserves kudos for quoting Ghost in the Shell…
Well, to me the stories that it makes the most sense to tell are, for western Eurasia at least:
* Modern Economic Growth (1870-?)
* Industrial and Democratic Revolutions (1750-1870)
* Commercial Revolution and Age of Conquest (1450-1750)
* The Medieval Era (800-1450)
* “Late Antiquity” (400-800)
* Roman Hegemony (150 BC-400)
* The Classical World (750 BC-150 BC)
* Deeper Antiquity…
Brad DeLong
The question would be: why those stories? For antiquity, at least, I’d divide things up differently: in economic terms, at least, Roman hegemony builds on early ‘globalisation’ of the Hellenistic period – so, case for starting around 300 BCE – and arguably starts running into trouble in mid-C3 rather than waiting until 400…