And so farewell!* To Göteborg (and its unbelievable range of amazing imperial stouts, above all), to the European Social Science History Conference for another two years, and, slightly abruptly, to my role as one of the co-chairs of the Antiquity network of said conference. I think I’ve been doing that role for about ten years – the fact that it involves only short bursts of activity every other year, rather than anything more sustained, means I keep forgetting. On the one hand, it isn’t a huge task and it does offer the chance to try to gather ancient economic and social historians together to exchange ideas and, occasionally, remind historians of other periods that we exist, plus an excuse for visiting some great European cities; on the other hand, I can imagine that from the outside it might look a bit like an attempt at hanging onto a position of power and influence, gate-keeping and extending patronage etc. Which it never has been, but that still meant it was starting to feel like time to pass things on to someone else. It’s just been a bit quick, from an informal chat with a potential successor one day to realising next evening that this was my last time co-organising our bit of the conference. The dogs bark; the cavalcade moves on. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘historical theory’
Everyone Is Everybody Else
Posted in Musings, tagged ancient history, ESSHC, globalisation, historical theory on April 27, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Concepts, Methodologies and Theories
Posted in Publications, tagged ancient history, historical theory, historiography, social science on September 22, 2021| Leave a Comment »
I am celebrating – very quietly, as I very much doubt that any fees were paid to the original publishers – the appearance of the Iranian translation of my old Theories, Models and Concepts book; partly, it is nice that anyone still thinks it might be useful, and mostly I just find the script so beautiful even if I can’t understand a word of it. Apparently my name gets transliterated as Noobil, which I rather like… I did write a short preface for the translation, reflecting on the writing of the original, and since I imagine that few of the small number of people who might be interested in this will actually be able to read Farsi, it makes sense to reproduce it here…
Once More With Feeling
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged ancient economy, economics, historical theory, Josiah Ober, Kostas Vlassopoulos, social science on March 21, 2016| Leave a Comment »
I’ve spent the last couple of days in a fourteenth-century castle just outside Hildesheim, now the Kulturcampus of the university, at a colloquium organised by Roland Oetjen of Kiel to bring together ancient economic historians and economists with an interest in the ancient world. I originally proposed to give a paper on ‘The time of the ancient economy’, squashing together Braudelian conceptions of the speeds of historical change, patterns of intra- and inter-annual change in the environment, and Kondratieff economic cycles to see what would happen – but, predictably enough, ran out of time to do any actual work on this. Instead I offered a variant on an existing draft piece on Varro, frugality and Roman economic thought that I really, really am close to writing up for publication, honest (just in case any of the editors is reading this); which in various respects probably fitted the occasion better, but does deprive me of the opportunity to construct the opening of this post around the notion of repetitive cycles in ancient economic historiography… (more…)
The Principle of Moments
Posted in Musings, tagged Berlin Wall, climate change, historical narrative, historical theory, Late Antiquity, Richard III on November 13, 2015| 4 Comments »
Yes, long time since I had time to post anything here, for which I can only apologise to anyone who’s actually interested. It hasn’t all been the usual mid-term weight of teaching and admin, nor can I entirely blame the kittens, their various ailments and the way they’ve been behaving since they got better, that have made uninterrupted sleep a rare and precious commodity. No, there was also a trip to the First International Conference on Anticipation in Trento last week, plus writing the paper for that beforehand, a fascinating and stimulating event that I shall be blogging on in due course – but you’re going to have to wait a bit until I’ve caught up on the emails.
In the meantime, if you’re feeling bereft of history-related reading, I’d like to point you in the direction of Ned Richardson-Little’s latest blog post (he’s also well worth following on Twitter, @HistoryNed, for pictures and stories from the DDR), on The Long Fall of the Berlin Wall. (more…)
Who Are You?
Posted in Events, Musings, tagged historical theory, P.J. Rhodes, reception, Thucydides on April 13, 2015| Leave a Comment »
I confess: I am @CAConf2015. And yes, I’m afraid I am already married.
As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I’ve spent the last few days at the UK Classical Association conference, which we were hosting in Bristol; not just introducing speakers and chairing a few sessions, but also running the official conference Twitter feed. This has been a rather strange experience (though not completely new, as I did something similar for the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition last year for the Blackwell-Bristol lectures, and will probably be doing it again at the end of this month). The thinking is presumably that I know the system and style and so can be left to get on with it, but actually I wonder if giving the job to someone new to the whole thing might not be better – it doesn’t need or want someone with experience and confidence, and someone new to the whole thing and hence nervously feeling their way might find it easier to hit the right note, rather than someone like me having to un-learn some habits. Yes, I use Twitter in a relatively formal, work-related capacity, and so what I say there is pretty edited and filtered compared with many, but compared with what’s expected of the official voice of an institution or event, it feels like Hunter S. Thompson-esque stream of consciousness. (more…)
Parting of the Ways
Posted in Musings, Uncategorized, tagged historical theory, history, independence, referendum, Scotland, uncertainty on September 17, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Unlike certain other historians and classicists, I’m not proposing to offer my ha’penny worth on the Scottish Question, for all that it would probably do temporary wonders for my visitor stats. Rather, I run the risk of annoying people on both sides by declining, and/or being unable, to choose. I can see merits in the arguments of both sides, as well as serious flaws; I can feel something of the emotional and cultural charge of both; I have been inspired and energised, in quite contradictory ways, by passionate voices on both sides; and I am all too aware of how far my own situation and interests influence my evaluation of the debate – which is to say that, if I were living in Scotland and so actually had a vote, I suspect I would still be undecided, even at this late stage, but in rather different ways from my current uncertainty. It is, one might say, the stance of the typical historian; congenitally incapable of not seeing how complicated, ambiguous and uncertain everything is.
What I did want to comment on was a remark in one of the letters in the Grauniad this morning, addressing the article on Scotland and its relation with the Tories by Tom Devine.
Tom Devine seems to show that while historians are good at analysing the past, they are no better than the rest of us in making political judgements about the present or the future.
Well, yes. (more…)
Now Available in German
Posted in Musings, tagged Germany, historical theory on January 15, 2014| 1 Comment »
Jetzt kann man meine Kritzelei auch auf Deutsch lesen! Ja, ich habe schon ein paar Rezensionen geschrieben, und einen Aufsatz (im Druck), und ein paar Vorträge gehalten, aber jetzt ist die Übersetzung meines Buchs Writing Ancient History veröffentlicht (von Antike Verlag: erhältlich hier). Ich freue mich sehr darüber: ich fühle mich immer gezwungen, für die Sprachunkenntnis meiner Landsmänner zu entschuldigen, und versuche immer in Tagungen nicht nur auf Englisch zu sprechen, aber jetzt erscheine ich ganz klar als Europäischer Historiker, als einer, den auch deutsche Studenten lesen können, und vielleicht muss ich mich nicht soviel entschuldigen – oder am wenigsten nicht wegen meiner Sprachkenntnis…
‘Tis Pity Clio’s A Whore
Posted in Musings, tagged historical theory, history on September 7, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Strangest dream last night. In the middle of a thoroughly conventional sequence of wandering through empty rooms looking for something and being pursued by something equally ill-defined, I found myself reading a book; a book on historiography, indeed, and from the style I’d date it to the eighteenth or possibly early nineteenth century. Unfortunately I can’t remember the exact words, only an overall impression of beautifully modulated periods and cadences, but the gist was clear enough: messing about with historical theory, the history of scholarship and the like was all very well for a young historian who hasn’t yet learnt any sort of discrimination (the phrase used was something like “Clio suitably attired as a fine lady and Clio dressed as a serving wench or lady of the night will alike cause a young man to rise up”), but having sowed a few wild oats in such pastures the true historian will soon find a more suitable match for his station and will settle down in domestic bliss with ‘proper’ history. (more…)
Synchronicity
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, Uncategorized, tagged Germany, historical theory, Thucydides on June 18, 2013| 4 Comments »
I think I have previously mentioned on here the more or less constant fear that I suffered during my PhD studies, that I’d suddenly discover someone else working on exactly the same topic, or that they’d publish a book or article that pre-empted everything I had to say, and so I’d have to start all over again. (Even worse, of course, would be to discover that they’d done this only when I was in the viva, so that not only would my work be pointless but I’d have even failed to demonstrate adequate knowledge of relevant scholarship…). I worry much less about such things these days, but it’s not a completely unreasonable fear, given the tendency of academic topics to move unpredictably in and out of fashion; I remember how the ancient novel suddenly and mysteriously came into vogue in the early 1990s, which must have been a nasty shock to any number of people who’d thought, quite separately, that they’d come up with a brilliantly obscure topic with which to make their name. (more…)
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