Objective: To understand-’History’ and ‘Prehistory’
• E. H. Carr. What is History. London: Mcmillan, 1961.
• Published in 1961 E. H Carr, What is History influenced generations of historians to revisit
historical thinking and practice.
• Carr (1892-1982) was a leading British historian of the mid-twentieth century. Carr is best
known for his master piece A History of Soviet Russia and What is History.
• What is History is the book version of the a lecture series Carr delivered at the University
of Cambridge in 1961. Because of his powerful interventions in revising the conventional
notions of history and historical events, Carr gained a reputation as a radical scholar.
• Carr’s intervention has a central place in Indian as well as European thinking about
historian and his/her facts:
• Can we consider the historical narrative as a story/fiction?
• What is a historical fact?
• How does the historian arrange the facts as derived from the evidence?
• How does a historian’s knowledge of the space and time constitute historical
meaning?
• Can we unravel the ‘truth’ while narrating?
• What is historical interpretation?
• Is it correct to argue that a historian’s motive is to re-tell the event of the past
with forms of explanation already in our minds create for us through our prior
research in the archive?
To answer these issues, consider the following observations
made by E. H. Carr:
• Chapter 1: ‘The Historian and His Facts”
• Core argument: History is not simply a matter of objective fact
• Carr revisits the nineteenth century [European] tradition of writing history
• Nineteenth century idea of History: The past should be studied on its own terms,
‘as it actually was.’
• Quotes Leopold von Ranke [known as the Father of Modern History]: ‘the task of
the historian was simply to show how it really was’
• This was called the Positivism: claim for history as a science
• Empiricist tradition: sense-impression- what is see/sense/smell is the truth [for
historians: facts or sources]
• History was understand as ‘corpus of ascertained facts.’ (p. 9)
Nineteenth Century idea of History
• History as a disciplined enquiry aims to sustain the widest possible definition of
memory, and to make the process of recall as accurate as possible, so that our
knowledge of the past is not confined to what is immediately relevant.
• Historicism: Historicism represented the academic wing of the Romantic
obsession with the past: Nostalgia presents the past as an alternative to the
present instead of as a prelude to it.
• Leopold von Ranke, professor at Berlin University from 1824until 1872:
• “History has had assigned to it the task of judging the past, of instructing the
present for the benefit of the ages to come. To such lofty functions this work does
not aspire. Its aim is merely to show how things actually were
What is a historical fact?
• Written documents, letters, deeds, administrative reports,
biographies, photographs, paintings, archaeological sites etc.
• We borrow from: archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics, anthropology
• These are “raw materials of the historian rather than of history itself”
(p. 11)
• “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them.” (p. 11)
• What all a historian select as historical facts?
• What is the process by which a mere fact about the past is
transformed into a fact of history?
Can we access ‘pure’ facts?
• Carr: “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: It is he who decides to
which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context” (Carr, What is History, pp.
11)
• How do we select facts: “The practical requirements which underlie every historical
judgements give to all history the character of “contemporary history”, because,
however remote in time events thus recounted many seem to be, the history in reality
refers to present needs and present situations wherein those events vibrate’. (B.
Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, Engl. Transl. 1941, p. 19) [As quoted in (Carr,
What is History, p. 21)
• “Historical interpretation’
• “The past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some
sense is still living in the present.” (Carr, What is History, p. 21)
• Carr’s critique of the nineteenth century historical methods: “Ranke piously believed
that divine providence would take care of the meaning of history, if he took care of
the facts” (Carr, What is History, p. 19)
• “the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, since they do not and cannot exist in
a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder.” (Carr,
What is History, p. 22)
• “The function of a historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself
from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of
the present.” (Carr, What is History, p. 26)
• For a historian “reading and writing go on simultaneously” (Carr, What is History,
p. 28)
• “The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their
historian are dead and meaningless” (Carr, What is History, p. 30)
• “My first answer to the question ‘What is history?’ is that it is a continuous
process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue
between the present and the past” (Carr, What is History, p. 30)
