1.5: A Better Way

Writing Better Histories

We would like to end this introduction by suggesting a couple of ways that we can practice a better version of history, one that, following Trouillot, exposes the roots of power.  We can do that by also making room for fundamentally different ways of seeing the world and highlighting voices of resistance. 

I earlier quoted Madi Williams writing about the need to examine the world from multiple perspectives, and it is indeed, as she has said, one of the great challenges of global history. Williams is both Maori (the people native to New Zealand) and a historian. As such she is at once trained to research, write, and think according to Western academic norms and concepts, while also being aware of how hostile those norms and concepts can be to Maori modes of thought. This was one of the consequences of the rise of Western global power in the 19th century. What had been a way of thinking that was particular to parts of Europe would come to be presented as a universal way of thinking for all people. This Western form of knowledge, or episteme, was spread directly with European imperialism and at other times more indirectly when it was adopted by native elites who saw it as part of the secret sauce of Western power. The anthropologist Bernard Cohn has argued that when the British colonized India they also colonized a space full of unfamiliar knowledge. They then attempted to make that knowledge familiar through translation into a way of thinking that made more sense to them. A minor but instructive example of this type of translation was the British habit in the mid-18th century of referring to Siraj-Ud-Daulah, the nawab of Bengal, under the much more familiar sounding name “Sir Roger Dowlett”. As small as this might seem, the fact is that his name was not Roger. In the translation something fundamental had been changed. If we imagine countless translations in this manner relating to all types of knowledge, then something more nefarious was happening. As Europeans spread around the world, they were not just recording information about the people they encountered, they were actually taking it upon themselves to be the sole people with the right to define and represent everyone else. Or as Jalal Al-I Ahmad described it, “We remain asleep, but the Westerner has carried us off to his laboratory…” (Ahmad, 33) The fact is that so much of our knowledge is tied up in this imperialist project of representation. We cannot fully disentangle our knowledge from its source, but we should always strive to be aware of the roots of our knowledge and the origins of our terminology so we do not end up reproducing the old imperialist power relations in our discussions of the past.

Finally, if we are to produce a better history, one that lives up to the promise of this textbook, then we must do our best to keep the voice of resistance alive. Traditional history tends to relegate failed acts of resistance into the category of “lost causes” which can safely be removed from the dominant narrative. I contend, however, that no cause is truly lost as long as we work to safeguard its memory. When I earlier discussed the prevalence of rebellions and escapes by enslaved people, the independent communities they established, the uprisings on enslavement ships it was not because these efforts “succeeded”. With the lone exception of Haiti, the rebellions were put down; most of those who escaped their enslavement were caught and punished or killed; sooner or later the independent communities were eradicated; in the vast majority of cases the slave ships safely delivered their human cargo into the nightmare of plantation slavery in the Americas. Nevertheless, these stories must be told because, most importantly, their descendants are still here, still fighting to find a place within societies that frequently signal hostility to their very existence. Thinking more generally than that particular example, the stories of the powerless standing up to the powerful always need to be heard because if we let them fade from memory we become collaborators with the system against which they had the courage to stand. We are seeing now in the 21st century United States that there are plenty of people  who would love to see such stories of resistance disappear. And that is nothing new. In the 1930’s, with the specter of Nazism haunting him, the philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that, “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious… Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.” (Blunden, n.d.) Resistance doesn’t fail because it’s defeated, but when it's forgotten. 

This textbook represents a lot of hard work by a group of dedicated scholars who believe deeply in the value of history. Our responsibility was not just to provide a free textbook, but to produce a work of value. One that would present you, the reader, with a different vision of the past. To show what history can look like when it contends with power instead of normalizing and justifying it. When history is centered on "the victors," to use Benjamin's term, the emphasis always ends up being on stories of competition, dominance, and violence. It is therefore no surprise that people believe that these are essential elements of human nature. There is also a hidden history, though, that does more than record what Gandhi called, “every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul.” Uncovering that hidden history will mean centering different kinds of stories focused on things other than the doings of the powerful. The more we do this, the better chance we have of redefining our own sense of ourselves as a species. In place of competition, dominance, and violence we can instead emphasize how pervasive resilience, creativity, community, and cooperation have been in our history. By telling better stories we can also create better selves. “We are much more than we are told. We are much more beautiful."