Download John Burrow. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances

Reviews of Books
METHODS/THEORY
JOHN BURROW. A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles,
Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides
to the Twentieth Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
2008. Pp. xviii, 517. $35.00.
John Burrow has given us an outstanding study of the
writing of history in the West, from virtually the earliest
time down to the present day. It is well written, comprehensive, and a pleasure to read. But it is confined to
what he calls the “known world,” and, beginning with
Heraclitus, it takes sides with Greece against Persia,
making an early contrast between East and West, between despotism and freedom, and also between ancient and modern, where “modern” means the open political life of the Greek polis. The contrast is with the
“despotic court” of the Persians.
It is perhaps unfair of me to point out that this book
is essentially a history of European endeavors (as the
subtitle but not the title makes clear). Under present
circumstances there is little else to expect. History as
written is essentially nationalistic, in most cases chauvinistic, limited to the boundaries of one nation (for
school, university, or national purposes) and given undue prominence (from a non-nationalistic standpoint)
to the achievements of the writer’s country. This characteristic is understandable but often misleading. One
thinks of Marxist writings about Europe, or Europeans
writing about Greece, or the many East-West contrasts
in demography, political, legal, or religious behavior. In
these spheres, Western historians have definitely misled the world: our institutions need to be seen in a world
perspective.
That is not to say a great deal cannot be achieved by
concentrating on a limited set of written materials (because what we call “history” is in effect the written, even
when based on oral evidence). The alternative is world
history, which is not well viewed by recent Europeanists, from Karl Marx onward. But if you can have a
World War I or II, you must surely have world history.
History—as with epics, chronicles, annals, and romances—depends essentially upon writing. That is not
to say that accounts (or visions) of the past did not occur
in purely oral societies; they did, despite the fact that
the recorded past, in predictable form, can only occur
with literacy. That is obvious. But history in this sense
can and does occur in all societies with writing, not simply the West, and to confine the history of histories to
Europe (and its extensions) is fundamentally an error
and only feeds into European conceptions, and misconceptions, about their own uniqueness. Of course, these
assumptions of uniqueness have a certain plausibility.
But European history is only unique in a very special
sense. Who could possibly deny the category to the
work of Ibn Khaldu៮ n or to Rashı៮d ad-Dı៮n’s history of
the world (early fourteenth century), or to the annals of
the Chinese, where every dynasty had to give an account
of their predecessor? To exclude these from the story
is possible in the context of “European Thought,” but
it only contributes to the errors of European ethnocentrism on a wider scale. There are many European historians contributing to this, from my standpoint, blinkered point of view, not simply through neglect but
through conviction. This conviction gives rise to assumptions of Asiatic “femininity,” servility, despotism,
and luxury that reinforce Eurocentered history and
does nothing to explain China’s (or India’s) contemporary position.
JACK GOODY
St. John’s College,
University of Cambridge
MARY JO MAYNES, JENNIFER L. PIERCE, and BARBARA
LASLETT. Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives
in the Social Sciences and History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2008. Pp. ix, 186. Cloth $55.00, paper
$19.95.
This collection of essays is coauthored by historian
Mary Jo Maynes and two sociologists, Jennifer L.
Pierce and Barbara Laslett. The five essays constitute
a cross-disciplinary examination of personal narratives
that aims, in the authors’ words, “to examine varieties
of individual selfhood and agency ‘from below’ and in
practice, as constructed in people’s articulated self-understandings” (p. 1). The authors made a choice to
write using the collective “we,” which not only gives the
project a unified voice and style but also allows for a
broad range of examples from the authors’ disciplines,
as well as from other disciplines and fields including
anthropology and psychology as well GLBT studies,
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