Who Writes History?
Examine how historical narratives are constructed, contested and revised, and what monuments and memory disclose about a society's sense of itself.
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It is a commonplace that history is written by the victors, but the aphorism, like most commonplaces, contains a truth too tidy for the messiness of practice. The writing of history is rarely a single act of triumphalist composition; it is a slow, contested process by which competing accounts are weighed, archived, suppressed and revived, often by the same society at different stages of its self-understanding. To grasp how a historical narrative comes to feel inevitable — to feel, in the formidable phrase, like the way things were — one must attend not only to what is recorded but to what is left out, and to whose silences fill the record’s gaps.
Historiography, the discipline that studies the writing of history, has long since dispensed with the naive picture of the historian as a transparent reporter of bygone events. The materials with which the historian works are themselves products of human interest: official chronicles, court records, letters that survived because someone valued them, archaeological remains that endured because their materials happened to resist decay. Were we to imagine an alternative archive — composed of the documents and objects that did not survive — we would in all likelihood find a substantially different past. The selection bias is not incidental but constitutive; it shapes the very questions a later historian is in a position to ask.
This recognition has fuelled the contemporary unease over monuments. A statue is more than an effigy; it is an argument in bronze, a public claim about whose deeds deserve civic remembrance. The recent decisions, in cities from Bristol to Richmond, to remove or recontextualise statues of figures associated with slavery and conquest, have provoked predictably polarised reactions. The defenders of the monuments invoke the language of historical preservation: to topple a statue, they argue, is to erase the past. Their critics counter that public veneration is not preservation; the past survives in archives, museums, and scholarship, whereas the plinth confers honour. To remove a statue is not to forget but to decline to celebrate.
The deeper question concerns what historical revision is for. Revisionism, in scholarly usage, is not a slur but a description of normal practice; every generation re-examines its inheritance with the questions that pressed upon it most urgently. The historians of the mid-twentieth century who took seriously the experiences of women, of colonised peoples, of labourers, were not vandalising the historical record but extending it — making visible what earlier conventions had obscured. Where revisionism becomes tendentious is when it serves a present agenda by forcing the past into shapes the evidence cannot bear; the corrective for bad revisionism, however, is better revisionism, not the suspension of the practice altogether.
What is finally at stake in these debates is the relationship between memory and identity. A community’s sense of itself is partly constituted by the stories it tells about where it has come from; revise the story, and the self-conception shifts. This is why monument disputes generate heat disproportionate to their object: the marble figure is a stand-in for an account of who ‘we’ are. Were the contest merely about aesthetics or municipal aesthetics, it could be settled by a vote. It is not, and it cannot be. To argue about history is to argue about ourselves, and that argument, if it is to be conducted honestly, requires the difficult acceptance that no narrative is final, and that the privilege of telling the story is one no generation has held outright.
Questions
Why does the writer describe the saying 'history is written by the victors' as 'too tidy'?