The oxford history of historical writing volume 3 1400–1800

Tai Lieu Chat Luong


THE OXFORD HISTORY OF
HISTORICAL WRITING


THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING
The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a five-volume, multi-authored scholarly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronological history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with
considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of
comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular
period, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodization, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, reflecting both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in
historical activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford
History of Historical Writing is the first collective scholarly survey of the history of
historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.
Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600
Volume 2: 400–1400
Volume 3: 1400–1800
Volume 4: 1800–1945
Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945


THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING
Daniel Woolf
GENERAL EDITOR

The Oxford History of
Historical Writing
VOLUME

3: 1400–1800

Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo,
and Daniel Woolf
VOLUME EDITORS

Ian Hesketh
ASSISTANT EDITOR

1


3

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Editorial matter # Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf 2012
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The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible by the generous
financial support provided by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research)
and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at the University of
Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently by Queen’s University,
Kingston, Ontario.

General Editor’s Acknowledgements
The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of several
years of work and many hands and voices. As general editor, it is my pleasure to
acknowledge a number of these here. First and foremost, to the volume editors,
without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their
willingness to sign on, and for their flexibility in pursuing their own vision for
their piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goals
and unity of editorial practices. The Advisory Board, many of whose members
were subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely of
their time and wisdom. At Oxford University Press, former commissioning
editor Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it through
the readership and approvals process. After her departure, my colleagues and
I enjoyed able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial
level and, editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, and
Stephanie Ireland. I must also thank the OUP production team and Carol
Carnegie in particular.
The series would not have been possible without the considerable financial
support from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan. At the
University of Alberta, where I worked from 2002 to mid-2009, the project was
generously funded by the Offices of the Vice-President (Research) and the
Provost and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kachanoski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offices, who saw the project’s
potential. The funding they provided enabled me to hire a series of project
assistants, to involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some of the
costs of publication such as images and maps. It permitted the acquisition of
computer equipment and also of a significant number of books to supplement
the fine library resources at Alberta. Perhaps most importantly, it also made the
crucial Edmonton conference happen. At Queen’s University in Kingston,
Ontario, where I moved into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding was

provided to push the project over the ‘finish-line’, to transfer the research library,
and in particular to retain the services of an outstanding research associate,
Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh. I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s meticulous
attention to detail, and his ability ruthlessly to cut through excess prose (including on occasion my own) in order to ensure that volumes maintained editorial
uniformity internally and together with other volumes, not least because the
volumes are not all being published at once. A series of able graduate students
have served as project assistants, including especially Tanya Henderson, Matthew
Neufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen, the last of
whom almost single-handedly organized the complex logistics of the Edmonton


General Editor’s Acknowledgements

vii

conference. Among the others on whom the project has depended I have to thank
the Office of the Dean of Arts and Science for providing project space at Queen’s
University, and the Department of History and Classics at Alberta. Melanie
Marvin at Alberta and Christine Berga at Queen’s have assisted in the management of the research accounts, as has Julie Gordon-Woolf, my spouse (and
herself a former research administrator), whose advice on this front is only a
small part of the support she has provided.


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Foreword
Daniel Woolf, General Editor
Half a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitled
Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia. Consisting of four volumes devoted to East

Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on conferences
held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in the
late 1950s, that series has aged surprisingly well; many of the individual essays are
still being cited in our own day. The books were also remarkably ahead of their
time since the history of historical writing was at that time firmly understood as
being the history of a European genre. Indeed, the subject of the history of history
was itself barely a subject—typical surveys of the early to mid-twentieth century by
the likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry Elmer Barnes, following Eduard
Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie [History of
Modern Historiography], were written by master historians surveying their discipline and its origins. The Oxford series provided some much needed perspective,
though it was not followed up for many years, and more recent surveys in the last
two or three decades of the twentieth century have continued to speak of historiography as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice. Since the late 1990s
a number of works have been published that challenge the Eurocentrism of the
history of history, as well as its inherent teleology. We can now view the European
historiographic venture against the larger canvas of many parallel and—a fact often
overlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or speaking about the past from
Asia, the Americas, and Africa.
The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit. It seeks to
provide the first collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the globe.
It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately seeks
neither to imitate nor to replace it. For one thing, the five volumes collectively
include Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for another, the
division among these volumes is chronological, rather than by region. We
decided on the former because the history of non-European historical writing
should, no more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed in isolation.
We chose the latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative narrative
(albeit with well over a hundred different voices), and in order to facilitate
comparison and contrast between regions within a broad time period.
A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order. First, while the series
as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, each

individual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particular
period in the history of historical writing. These periods shrink in duration as


x

Foreword

they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extant
materials and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter
to a fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume 1;
non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume 1 nor volume 2). Second, while the
volumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogue
both within and between its five editorial teams and the general editor, there has
been no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume.
In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teams
have been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘go
their own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—
with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither an
encyclopedia nor a dictionary. A multi-volume work that attempted to deal
with every national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easily
spread from five to fifty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that the
editors seek. We have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while every
effort has been made to balance coverage and provide representation from all
regions of the world, there are undeniable gaps. The reader who wishes to find
out something about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’s
more than 150 chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number of
reference books which have appeared in the past fifteen or so years, some of
which have global range. Our volumes are of course indexed, but we have

deemed a cumulative index an inefficient and redundant use of space. Similarly,
each individual essay offers a highly selective bibliography, intended to point the
way to further reading (and where appropriate listing key sources from the period
or topic under discussion in that chapter). In order to assist readers with limited
knowledge of particular regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certain
chapters have included a timeline of major events, though this has not been
deemed necessary in every case. While there are (with one or two exceptions) no
essays devoted to a single ‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian and
Herodotus to the present are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays with
dates of birth and death, these have been consolidated in each volume’s index.
Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are necessary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity. Towards that end, a
number of steps were built into the process of producing this series from the very
beginning. Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only were
scholars encouraged to communicate with one another within and across
volumes, but draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentary
and review by other authors. A climactic conference, convened at the University
of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, in September 2008, brought most of the
editors and just over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing and
exciting two days during which matters of editorial detail and also content and
substance were discussed. A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference


Foreword

xi

and series, is that it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work in
separate national and chronological fields, in order to pursue a common interest
in the history of historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways. As the
series’ general editor, it is my hope that these connections will survive the end of

the project and produce further collaborative work in the future. Several key
decisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most important of
which was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnecessary repetition of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with calendrical
years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renaissance’—remain somewhat arbitrary. Thus volume 1, on antiquity, ends about AD
600 prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor, volume 2,
on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and in China
(the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every volume), the
period from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties. Volumes 4 and 5 have a
similar overlap in the years around the Second World War. While 1945 is a
sensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in China,
again, 1949 is the major watershed. Certain topics, such as the Annales School,
are not usefully split at 1945. A further change pertained to the denotation of
years BC and AD; here, we reversed an early decision to use BCE and CE, on the
grounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; BC/AD have at least been
adopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian European
origins.
It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with two
sets of two volumes each (vols. 1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways
as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about
1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era. A further
decision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustrations very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusion
could be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographic
forms of commemorating the past. There are no decorative portraits of famous
historians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history of
historiography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern,
Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee.
This, the third volume in the series (and fourth to be published), spans the gap
between the first two volumes (covering antiquity and what is usually called—
problematically in the case of South Asia and Islam—the ‘Middle Ages’) and
volumes 4 and 5, which deal with modernity. The roughly four centuries covered

in the present volume encompass a period of enormous change, including the
Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, and French Revolution in Europe,
the Ming and early Qing dynasties in China, the rise and fall of the Mughal
Empire in India, and the vicissitudes within the other main Islamic powers, the
Persian and Ottoman Turkish empires. It is also the volume in which the
Americas enter fully into the history of history, and both European and


xii

Foreword

indigenous forms of historical writing are the subjects of several chapters; Africa,
too, absent from the preceding volumes (with the exception of North African
Islamic writers) receives its first extended treatment here. The editors of this
volume have assembled an international roster of authors with expertise in a
variety of different historical cultures, and they have also included thematic
chapters, many with a strong comparative dimension, addressing some of the
issues that arose over the period, from the application of philological techniques
to historical evidence, to the emergence of ‘antiquarianism’ and the relations
between history, myth, and fiction.
NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION
Non-Roman alphabets and writing systems have been routinely transliterated
using the standard systems for each language (for instance, Chinese using the
Pinyin system). For the transliteration of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac we
have followed the rules set out by the International Journal of Middle Eastern
Studies. Non-English book titles are normally followed (except where meaning is
obvious) by a translated title, within square brackets, and in roman rather than
italic face, unless a specific, published English translation is listed, in which case
the bracketed title will also be in italics.

Contents
List of Maps
Notes on the Contributors
Advisory Board
Editors’ Introduction
Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf

xvi
xvii
xxi
1

1. Chinese Official Historical Writing under the Ming and Qing
Achim Mittag

24

2. The Historical Writing of Qing Imperial Expansion
Pamela Kyle Crossley

43

3. Private Historiography in Late Imperial China
On-cho Ng

60

4. A Social History of Japanese Historical Writing

Masayuki Sato

80

5. Writing History in Pre-Modern Korea
Don Baker

103

6. Southeast Asian Historical Writing
Geoff Wade

119

7. Indo-Persian Historical Thoughts and Writings: India 1350–1750
Asim Roy

148

8. Persian Historical Writing under the Safavids (1501–1722/36)
Christoph Marcinkowski

173

9. Ottoman Historical Writing
Baki Tezcan

192

10. Islamic Scholarship and Understanding History in

West Africa before 1800
Paul E. Lovejoy

212

11. Philology and History
Donald R. Kelley

233

12. Major Trends in European Antiquarianism, Petrarch to Peiresc
Peter N. Miller

244


xiv

Contents

13. History, Myth, and Fiction: Doubts and Debates
Peter Burke

261

14. Historical Writing in Russia and Ukraine
Michael A. Pesenson and Jennifer B. Spock

282

15. Austria, the Habsburgs, and Historical Writing in Central Europe
Howard Louthan

302

16. German Historical Writing from the Reformation
to the Enlightenment
Markus Voălkel

324

17. Italian Renaissance Historical Narrative
William J. Connell

347

18. Italian Historical Writing, 1680–1800
Edoardo Tortarolo

364

19. History and Historians in France, from the Great Italian
Wars to the Death of Louis XIV
Chantal Grell

384

20. The Historical Thought of the French Philosophes
Guido Abbattista

406

21. Writing Official History in Spain: History and Politics, c.1474–1600
Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske

428

22. Historical Writing in Scandinavia
Karen Skovgaard-Petersen

449

23. Historical Writing in Britain from the Late Middle
Ages to the Eve of Enlightenment
Daniel Woolf

473

24. Scottish Historical Writing of the Enlightenment
David Allan

497

25. English Enlightenment Histories, 1750–c.1815
Karen O’Brien

518

26. European Historiography on the East
Diogo Ramada Curto

536

27. A New History for a ‘New World’: The First One Hundred
Years of Hispanic New World Historical Writing
Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske

556


Contents

xv

28. Mesoamerican History: The Painted Historical Genres
Elizabeth Hill Boone

575

29. Alphabetical Writing in Mesoamerican Historiography
Jose´ Rabasa

600

30. Inca Historical Forms
Catherine Julien

619

31. Historical Writing about Brazil, 1500–1800

Neil L. Whitehead

640

32. Spanish American Colonial Historiography: Issues, Traditions,
and Debates
Jorge Can˜izares-Esguerra

661

33. Historical Writing in Colonial and Revolutionary America
David Read

680

Index

701


List of Maps
1. East and Southeast Asia in the Seventeenth Century
2. The Muslim Empires of Central and Southern Eurasia and
Northern Africa c.1700
3. The Ottoman Empire c.1675
4. Africa to c.1600
5. Europe, 1648
6. The Indigenous Peoples of Pre-Conquest Latin America
7. Post-Conquest North and South America

25
149
193
213
303
576
662


Notes on the Contributors
Guido Abbattista is Professor of Modern History at the University of Trieste (Italy).
Among his recent publications are several essays on the politics and the ideology of
empire in late eighteenth-century Britain, Edmund Burke’s writings on empire, and the
representation of ‘otherness’ in modern European culture; on this topic he has edited the
volume Facing Otherness: Europe and Human Diversities in the Early Modern Age (Trieste,
at the University Press, 2011).
David Allan is Reader in Scottish History at the University of St Andrews. His recent
books include A Nation of Readers (2008), Making British Culture (2008), and
Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (2010).
Don Baker is Professor of Korean History and Civilization in the Department of Asian
Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Among his previous publications
are Korean Spirituality (2008). He was a co-editor of Sourcebook of Korean Civilization
(1996).
Elizabeth Hill Boone is Professor of Art History at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Among her single-authored books are The Codex Magliabechiano (1983), The Aztec World
(1994), Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (2000), and
Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate (2007).
Peter Burke was Professor of Cultural History, University of Cambridge, until his
retirement in 2004 and remains a Fellow of Emmanuel College. His studies of
historiography include The Renaissance Sense of the Past (1969) and The French

Historical Revolution (1990).
Jorge Can˜izares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the
University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of How to Write the History of the New
World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World
(2001), Puritan Conquistadors (2006), and Nature, Empire, and Nation (2006).
William J. Connell is Professor of History and holds the Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La
Motta Chair in Italian Studies at Seton Hall University. He recently edited (with Fred
Gardaphe´) Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice (2010).
Pamela Kyle Crossley is Professor of History at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire,
United States. Among her previous publications are The Wobbling Pivot (2010), What is
Global History? (2008), and A Translucent Mirror (1999).
Diogo Ramada Curto is Professor of History and Sociology at Univeridade Nova
de Lisboa (Portugal). Among his previous publications are (co-ed.) Portuguese Oceanic
Expansion, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2007), Cultura Polı´tica e Projectos Coloniais (1415–1800)
(Campinas, 2009), and Cultura Polı´tica no Tempos dos Filipes (1580–1640) (Lisbon, 2011).


xviii

Notes on the Contributors

Chantal Grell teaches history at the Universite´ Versailles-Saint-Quentin. Among her
previous publications on historiography are Le dix-huitie`me sie`cle et l’antiquite´ en France,
1650–1789 (1995) and Histoire intellectuelle et culturelle de la France de Louis XIV (2000).
Ian Hesketh (Assistant Editor) is a research associate in the Department of History at
Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. Among his publications are Of Apes and
Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (2009) and The Science of
History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak (2011).
Catherine Julien was Professor of History at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.
She was the author of Reading Inca History (2000) and Titu Cusi, History of How the

Spaniards Arrived in Peru: Dual Language Edition (2006). She died in 2011 after
completing this chapter.
Donald R. Kelley is James Westfall Thompson professor of history, executive editor
emeritus of the Journal of the History of Ideas, and author of many works, most recently a
three-volume history of historical writing, Faces of History (1998), Fortunes of History
(2003), and Frontiers of History (2006), and a survey of the history of intellectual history,
Descent of Ideas (2002).
Howard Louthan is Professor of History at the University of Florida. His previous
publications include The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation
Vienna (Cambridge, 1997) and Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic
Reformation (Cambridge, 2009).
Paul E. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor, Department of History, York
University, and holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History. His
recent publications include Slavery, Commerce and Production in West Africa (2005),
Ecology and Ethnography of Muslim Trade in West Africa (2005), Slavery, Islam and
Diaspora (2009), and Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2010).
Christoph Marcinkowski is Principal Research Fellow at IAIS, a policy and security think
tank in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Among his previous publications are Mirza Rafi ʿa’s
Dastur al-Muluk (2002), Persian Historiography and Geography (2003; trans. of a work by
the late Bertold Spuler), and Shi ʾite Identities (2010).
Peter N. Miller is a professor and Dean at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
He is the author of Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (2000)
and Peiresc’s Orient: Antiquarianism as Cultural History in the Seventeenth Century (2011),
and editor of Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural
Sciences (2007).
Achim Mittag is Professor for Chinese Studies at the University of Tuăbingen. His special
eld of interest lies in Chinese historiography and intellectual history of early modern
China. His latest publications include Conceiving the ‘Empire’: China and Rome Compared
(jointly edited with Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, 2008).
On-cho Ng is Professor of History, Religious Studies, and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania

State University. Apart from his co-authored book on Chinese historiography, Mirroring
the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (2005), he has published
extensively on Confucian religiosity and Chinese hermeneutics.


Notes on the Contributors

xix

Karen O’Brien is Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick. She is the
author of Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (1997)
and Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009). She is currently
co-editing The Cambridge Companion to Gibbon and volume 2 of The Oxford History of
the Novel.
Kira von Ostenfeld-Suske was recently awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada which she will hold at
Queen’s University, under Prof. Daniel Woolf. Her post-doctoral project will
investigate the political ideologies and methodologies behind the writing of ‘world
history’ in sixteenth-century Spain and England.
Michael A. Pesenson is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin. He has written extensively on early East Slavic literature
and culture. His forthcoming monograph is entitled: The Antichrist in Russia: Visions of
the Apocalypse in Russian Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to the Revolution.
Jose´ Rabasa teaches in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard
University. His publications include: Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and
the Formation of Eurocentrism (1993), Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The
Historiography of New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest (2000), and Without
History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (2010).
David Read is Professor of English at the University of Missouri. His publications
include Temperate Conquests: Spenser and the Spanish New World (2000) and New World,

Known World: Shaping Knowledge in Early Anglo-American Writing (2005).
Asim Roy, former Director of Asia Centre, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, is
currently Fellow, School of History and Classics there. His previous publications include
The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition of Bengal (1983), Islam in South Asia (1996), and (ed.),
Islam in History and Politics: Perspectives from South Asia (2006).
Masayuki Sato was born in Japan. He read Economics, Philosophy, and History at Keio
University and Cambridge University. After teaching in Kyoto, he was invited to the
University of Yamanashi and is Professor of Social Studies in the Faculty of Education
and Human Sciences. He was President of the International Commission for the History
and Theory of Historiography (2005–10).
Karen Skovgaard-Petersen is research librarian at the Royal Library, Copenhagen, and is
the managing editor of the Danish branch of the Danish-Norwegian digital editorial
project, The Writings of Ludwig Holberg (1684–1754). She is the author of Historiography at
the Court of Christian IV: Studies in the Latin Histories of Denmark by Johannes Pontanus
and Johannes Meursius (2002).
Jennifer B. Spock is Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond,
Kentucky. Her previous publications focus on the socio-economic, religious, and cultural
contexts of pre-Petrine Russian monasteries.
Baki Tezcan is Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of
California, Davis, and the author of The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social
Transformation in the Early Modern World (2010).


xx

Notes on the Contributors

Edoardo Tortarolo is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Eastern
Piedmont, Italy. Among his previous publications are L’Illuminismo: Ragioni e dubbi di
una modernita` europea (1999) and L’invenzione della liberta` di stampa: Censura e scrittori

nel Settecento (2011).
Markus Voălkel is Professor of European Intellectual History and Historical Methodology
at the University of Rostock, Germany. Among his previous publications are ‘Pyrrhonismus historicus’ und ‘fides historica’ (1987) and Geschichtsschreibung: Eine Einfuăhrung in
globaler Perspektive (2006).
Geoff Wade is a historian with interests in Sino-Southeast Asian interactions and
comparative historiography. Among his works are an online database of translated
Chinese references to Southeast Asia ( a six-volume
compendium China and Southeast Asia (2009), and the chapter on Southeast Asia,
800–1500 in The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010).
Neil L. Whitehead is Professor of Anthropology at the University of WisconsinMadison. He is author of numerous works on the native peoples of South America and
their colonial conquest, as well as on the topics of sorcery, violence, sexuality and warfare.
Daniel Woolf is Professor of History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. Among
his previous publications are A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (1998) and The
Social Circulation of the Past (2003). His A Global History of History was published in 2011.


Advisory Board
Michael Aung-Thwin, University of Hawaii
Michael Bentley, University of St Andrews
Peter Burke, University of Cambridge
Toyin Falola, University of Texas
Georg G. Iggers, State University of New York, Buffalo
Donald R. Kelley, Rutgers University
Tarif Khalidi, American University, Beirut
Christina Kraus, Yale University
Chris Lorenz, VU University Amsterdam
Stuart Macintyre, University of Melbourne
Juărgen Osterhammel, Universitaăt Konstanz
Ilaria Porciani, University of Bologna
Joărn Ruăsen, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen

Romila Thapar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi


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Editors’ Introduction
Jose´ Rabasa, Masayuki Sato, Edoardo Tortarolo, and Daniel Woolf

The period analysed by this, the middle volume of The Oxford History of
Historical Writing, is a transitional one between the ancient and medieval eras
covered by volumes 1 and 2, and the modern centuries after about 1800 which are
the subject of volumes 4 and 5.1 In keeping with the series plan, the temporal
scale of this volume shifts down again, to cover a ‘mere’ four hundred years, with
occasional glances ahead to the nineteenth century, and backward as far as the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, since meaningful historiographical periods
are not respecters of uniform and neat chronological boundaries. At the same
time, the series’ geographical scope here expands to embrace the Americas and
Islamic West Africa.
The temporal span of this volume may be only four centuries, but it is still a
long one, covering the period from Europe’s late Middle Ages/early Renaissance
to the end of its Enlightenment, from pre-Columbian America to the early postRevolutionary era (in the United States) and the eve of independence for many
Latin American nations, from the early decades of the Ming regime in China to
the middle part of the successive—and final imperial—Qing dynasty. The
European part of this story will already be familiar to many readers of this
book and has featured prominently in histories of historical writing. Less well
known, except to specialists, are the parallel—and, we assert, interlocking—
stories in the rest of the world. Europe has its place in this volume, but we
have deliberately de-centred it in our narrative, and have elected to follow the sun
from east to west. As with the roster of chapters itself, we begin this introductory

essay in East Asia.
‘East Asia’ is a historical concept, taken here to comprise the peoples and
cultures of China, Japan, Korea, and sometimes expanded to include China’s
frequent satellite Vietnam (the last studied in this volume by Geoff Wade in his

1
While the Introduction as a whole is the collaborative work of all four editors, the primary
authors of the individual sections are Sato (East and Southeast Asia), Woolf (the Islamic world and
Europe to c.1650), Tortarolo (Europe and the United States, 1650–1700), and Rabasa (the nonAnglophone continental Americas).


2

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

chapter on the neighbouring region of ‘Southeast Asia’). Early modern East Asia
revolved around the great, unified Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912)
empires, which were the political and cultural centre of gravity for the region
at large. Cultural Sinocentrism was the basso ostinato of East Asia for more than a
millennium: the classical Chinese language and writing system; ideological
frames of the Confucian social and familial order; legal and administrative
systems; Buddhism, which was transmitted to Korea, Vietnam, and China via
Chinese translations of canonical texts and Chinese versions of Buddhist practice; and the art of historiography itself.
East Asia had been among the first regions of the world to produce written
records of the past.2 Well into modern times Chinese script, the common script
across East Asia, served—with local adaptations and variations—as the normative medium of record-keeping and written historical narrative, as well as official
communication. This was true, not only in China itself, but in Korea, Japan, and
Vietnam. Just as shared use of the Roman alphabet and Latin classical corpus
bound Western Europe together as a civilization, the Chinese script and classical
corpus has mediated an East Asian ecumene for more than two millennia.

The technique of recording the past in writing has been shaped as well
by environmental factors. The written records that bind civilizations together
depend on a durable media complex—paper and ink—and technologies of
dissemination. Both print technologies and the mass production of paper were
already well established across East Asia by the fifteenth century, producing and
responding to the demands of a vast population of educated people.
When speaking of ‘historical writing’ we tend to emphasize ‘historians’, the
people who produce written ‘histories’; but it is worth remembering that the
existence of ‘history readers’ is equally crucial to the success of historical culture.
Kenji Shimada has estimated that the number of books published—printed—in
China alone prior to 1750 far exceeded the total world publishing output in all
other languages combined up to that time; moreover, he notes, works of history
were the most numerous of all genres in print.3 In this respect, China experienced
something like the same efflorescence of historical genres and their wider dissemination which occurred during the same period in other parts of the world.
Even in the East Asian states on China’s periphery, Japan and Korea, historical
narrative was dominated by the language and norms of classical Chinese historical writing, much as medieval and early modern European intellectuals wrote in
Latin. Some Japanese composed historical narratives and theoretical enquiry in
Japanese (at this time written with Chinese characters but utilizing Japanese word
order and pronunciation), but with a few exceptions, the major historical
2
See coverage in Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy (eds.), The Oxford History of Historical
Writing, vol.1: Beginnings to AD 600 (Oxford, 2011); and Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson (eds.),
The Oxford History of Historical Writing, vol. 2: 400–1400 (Oxford, forthcoming).
3
Kenji Shimada, ‘Chu¯goku’, in Heibonsha hyakka jiten, vol. 9 (Tokyo, 1985), 817–28.