I’m just back from a weekend break in Croatia, a trip that was partly about the glorious food and excellent Zagreb craft beer scene, partly about the history and architecture, and mostly about giving a seminar and lecture at the University of Zagreb, hosted by Jelena Marohnic, and also being interviewed by the history students’ journal. The latter was especially nerve-wracking, with a strong sense of the risks of putting my foot in it inadvertently through sheer ignorance of local circumstances, without having had the opportunity to think about any of the questions in advance. Why are they so concerned about the chronological boundaries of ‘ancient history’? How does the ‘ethnicity in Roman Britain’ debate look from here – and was it a good or bad thing that I didn’t until afterwards think to chuck in a remark to the effect that Roman Pannonia and Dalmatia must have been equally multicultural?
The question where I knew to feel embarrassed was the one about the impact of Croatian research in current Roman historiography; sorry, guys, but the best I can do is make this about my own ignorance and limited perspective, given that throughout my career I’ve focused largely on Italy and points west rather than on the eastern Mediterranean (and even that is an unintended insult, characterising this westwards-looking, Catholic country, part of the Hapsburg kingdoms for centuries, a bastion against the Ottoman Empire, influenced by all the ideas coming via Vienna about Enlightenment and modernity and a free press and art and science etc, as ‘east’…).
It’s the usual language problem, magnified: if Croatian scholars don’t publish in one of the major European languages, I’m not going to know about it. But one suspects this is not just a matter of them choosing to get something translated (which may be tricky in itself), but also of getting it published somewhere that ‘western’ scholars will encounter it if they’re not looking for it in the first place – which may then also be a matter of conforming to expected idioms, showing awareness of current scholarly debates etc.
I’m reminded of the time – a fair while ago now – when I was invited by David Braund to be a respondent at a conference on the economy of the Black Sea in antiquity, involving scholars from Ukraine (and possibly other relevant countries; I don’t recall), where my main role became the development of tactful ways of saying “Yes, but have you come across Finley at all? Hasebroek?”) to people whose approach to economic history made Rostovtzeff look like a substantivist. But how reasonable was it of me to expect anything different? Not just because Ukrainian scholars might have different ideas of what’s important and relevant, rather than the Anglo-American tradition being the be all and end all, but because they might not even have been able to read Finley if they wanted to, without investing serious resources in doing so.
Things are, I imagine, a bit better in countries like Croatia today – but it’s still the case that keeping up with current international debates requires resources, at university level to buy books and pay JSTOR subscriptions, at individual level to travel to libraries and attend conferences. My connection to Zagreb began when a student simply wrote to me out of the blue to say, we’re working on issues in historical theory and methodology, you’ve written stuff that looks really relevant, but we don’t have it here; can you help? In other words, there are any number of invisible barriers to full international scholarly exchange, which we in the west are privileged not to have to worry about.
It’s a reminder that Open Access is not just about “making research available to wider public ‘cos they paid for it”, when the wider public is probably completely indifferent to what I have to say about Thucydides or Roman economic thought; it’s also, indirectly but more importantly, about making research available to less well-endowed institutions and countries. It’s an embarrassing coincidence that while I was waiting in Zagreb’s swanky new airport I received notification of the publication of an article that’s pay-walled to kingdom come until the year 3039 (you can’t say that the Springer corporation isn’t confident about its ability to survive the coming apocalypse) unless I pay over vast sums of money that I don’t feel inclined to do ‘cos it’s a subject marginal to my main interests and I’ve written better.
The article in question is about counterfactualism and anticipation, exploring ‘what if?’ scenarios not just as a means of exploring causation in the past and testing theories in the present but also seeking to anticipate – not predict or forecast – the future. I draw heavily on a brilliant blog post by Audra Mitchell, ‘Stumbling into Eternity’, in which she argues that this matters for our ethical duty towards the future: we must consider what kinds of futures we want, so we can try to work towards them, and what nightmare futures we need to work to prevent (echoes here of Peter Frase’s Four Futures).
It’s easy to imagine – if we try to take a bird’s-eye view of scholarly activity in classical studies, rather than our normal localised perspective – a continuation of the current centre-periphery situation, in which e.g. Croatian scholars continue working away on their local material, which may be incorporated into a few more general accounts (probably by non-Croatians, with their superior knowledge of what scholars in the ‘centre’ are interested in) and thus made available for the academic mainstream, with the synthesisers getting the credit – or it may simply be ignored. The alternative is to take full advantage of the power of the internet – and other tools for cooperation and collaboration, including EU funding – to set up proper exchanges, a full and equal dialogue. If that requires the occasional samizdat publication of an offprint about counterfactualism, well, that’s a small price to pay…
Update: and in a fascinating coincidence, I’ve just come across an interesting discussion of how conventional research quality measures systematically marginalise certain regions and subjects: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2017/10/30/research-assessments-based-on-journal-rankings-systematically-marginalise-knowledge-from-certain-regions-and-subjects/
Sphinx 
There is also the issue of how technology tends to concentrate our sources of information. Over time, technology in theory can open everything up, but in reality certain groups or people just snowball in their popularity. It was the technology of distribution that allowed the New York Times to become the “paper of record” for America. With TV, Americans started getting their news from a few TV stations instead of every city having two or three newspapers. The Internet has allowed Facebook to become the primary conduit of news for the majority of Americans.
Yes, network effects – the more people use a particular platform or privilege a particular journal, the more that *everyone* has to use them or be left out in the cold.
That was the most annoying thing about being a “returning student.” In the over twenty years between getting my BA and my MA, student organizations had come to assume everyone checked Facebook every half hour instead of like me who checks two or three times a day, so I’d show up for meetings at the wrong time if they’d been rescheduled on short notice.
On counterfactuals, my takeaway (amid many throways) from “The History Manifesto” is that, if we are to believe in an open future, we have to see that the past might have otherwise. That’s Not so far from Mitchell.
Thanks for the glimpse into how academics view paywalls, btw. I’m more than willing to pay for a JSTOR subscription, but I wasn’t above using sci-hub to get past some absurd pricing. To think that whole disciplines are locked up behind these barriers!
Whether this is how all academics view paywalls, I’m really not sure – I’m tempted to suggest that in most cases (certainly my own) attitudes are basically confused and inconsistent. In the affluent West, we take for granted access to published articles and other material (though I mourn the days when I *had* to travel to Munich or Berlin to access C18 historiography; now it’s all digitised); we worry about our own publications (imperative to publish Open Access for research evaluation purposes, at least in the UK, which can be a right pain, versus lingering belief in prestige of certain journals and its importance for our careers, versus vague suspicion and resentment of publishers), and we don’t spend much time worrying about anyone else except when confronted with the problem.