Does the Present Shed Light on the Past?

I thought it was an original discovery of mine—the notion that present-day concerns often direct historians to study particular aspects of history.

In the 1960s, for example, economists and politicians were trying to help newly independent, but underdeveloped, countries grow. Sidney Pollard, a historian, thought that a better understanding of the first great period of development, the Industrial Revolution, would “help forecast, and pave the way for, the next steps to be taken by living economies”; thus its study had “a severely practical basis.”[1]

While composing my post, however, I learned that historian David Cannadine had already written an essay detailing how present concerns shape investigations of the past. Writing in 1984, he identified four waves of historical analysis of the Industrial Revolution up to that time. He ingeniously tied each one of them to economic conditions at the time of writing.

While historians like Pollard had treated the Industrial Revolution as a model for future development, by the mid-1970s disillusionment about economic growth had set in. “[T]he British Industrial Revolution is now depicted in a more negative light,” Cannadine wrote, “as a limited, restricted, piecemeal phenomenon, in which various things did not happen or where, if they did, they had far less effect than was previously supposed.”[2]

Should such periodic re-investigation make us wonder about the validity of historical findings? That is, are those findings anachronistic (a word that historians dread)? An anachronism is something inappropriately included when depicting a particular period of time. For example, Shakespeare has a clock chime in Julius Caesar. Clocks did not chime in ancient Rome. [3] Academically, anachronism occurs when historians “pose the past in a form that would have been alien to the period we are describing.”[4]

So, is using the present to guide the past anachronistic or is it a way to enrich our understanding? Pollard defended his approach to the Industrial Revolution, because, “like all historical events of world-shaking importance, [it] attracts a new body of historians to interpret it afresh in every age. . . . each generation asks a different set of questions.”[5]

Here’s another example of a search into the past stemming from contemporary concerns. In his 1918 Yale dissertation (which became a classic), Edgar S. Furniss looked at British history in the light of what he saw around him after World War I:  a focus on national protection. “[T]he popular mind is colored by the point of view of nationalism,” he said. “This trend in modern thought reawakens our interest in the past experience of nations with the economy of nationalism.”[6] Thus, his book attempted to re-capture British mercantilism, the “nationalism” of the eighteenth century.

Another example: In 1988 feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott devoted a chapter of her book Gender and the Politics of History to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the Working Class, published more than twenty years earlier. (Originally a Marxist, the famed historian E. P. Thompson later eschewed Marxism but retained his sympathy for the poor.)

Scott praised Thompson’s book because it “embodied a scholarship that fit a New Left purpose” (perhaps offering another example of how the present affects historians’ choices). [7] But then  she upbraided him for taking so little account of women. “Except for textile workers, there is very little attention to working women in these pages. Women are without comment referred to as cheap labor used to substitute for men in the fields, workshops, and mills.”[8] She was in the avant-garde of feminist history.

Certainly, today’s preoccupations with race, feminism, sexuality, and environmentalism have stimulated investigation into historical studies, sometimes brilliantly. Perhaps that’s what makes history universally appealing: It never dies; someone is always asking “a different set of questions.”

But does a modern perspective sometimes turn into reading something into the past that isn’t there? I wonder.

[1] Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1.

[2] David Cannadine, “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880-1980.” Past & Present, no. 103 (1984): 131-72.

[3] Hat tip to “Anachronism,” Literary Devices, http://www.literarydevices.com/anachronism.

[4] Sami  Syrjämäki, Sins of a Historian: Perspectives on the Problem of Anachronism. Dissertation, University of Tampere (Finland), September 23rd, 2011. https://www.academia.edu/877475/Sins_of_a_Historian._Perspectives_to_the_Problem_of_Anachronism.

[5] Pollard, 1.

[6] Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism, 1920, p. 2.

[7] Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, ( [1988] 1999), p. 69.

[8] Scott, p. 74.