Historical Censorship: State Control, Academic Pressure, and Practices Across Regimes

As media law scholar Eric Barendt cautions, the term ‘censorship’ risks losing meaning if applied to any social convention hindering communication. Therefore, analysis must focus on the coercive and tutelary practices of the state. Even with this crucial delineation, distinguishing state censorship from other restrictions on historians remains complex across all regime types.

A broad context of war, colonization, poverty, and systemic violence can profoundly deteriorate historians' working conditions, creating an environment conducive to control. The primary censors in any society are governments. In dictatorships, the complete state machinery enforces control, whereas in other regimes, censorship is more fragmented and indirect. All governments impose constraints, particularly through excessive archival secrecy designed to conceal sensitive information and reduce accountability.

Control extends through public libraries, state-dominated historical museums, and official source editions. Governments or parliaments may also disrupt controversial commemorations or mandate history teaching in a majority language. The judiciary can overreach by attempting to adjudicate historical truth itself, scrutinizing a historian's methodology rather than legal matters. These multi-branch interventions blur the line between legitimate regulation and systematic censorship.

Educational policies represent a potent channel for indirect control, governing university funding, research grants, employment, and infrastructure. Within history specifically, censorship often disguises itself as pressure from the historical establishment, campus political correctness, or the rejection of theses and manuscripts. It manifests as career sanctions: withheld promotions, revoked degrees, travel restrictions, and outright dismissal—the most common global sanction against historians.

Unofficial groups, whether allied with or opposed to the state, also engage in censorship. They may loot archives, destroy monuments, or boycott publications. Radical pressure groups attack historians on religious or ethnic grounds. More subtly, hidden censorship occurs when historians advise against publishing a colleague's work due to ideological disagreement or professional rivalry. Furthermore, market mechanisms and publishing strategies can structurally exclude valuable historical genres.

Large-scale sexism, nationalism, and ethnocentrism lead to the negligence or denial of victim groups' histories. This extends to discriminatory hiring practices and can involve direct censorship, such as destroying historical traces for nationalistic reasons or rejecting work based on the author's identity. Finally, historians' own autobiographical biases can induce excessive myopia, further distorting the historical record.

PRACTICE OF HISTORICAL CENSORSHIP. Censorship of history permeates all genres, fields, and periods. It operates through two primary modes. Pre-censorship regulates research proactively by cleansing archives, classifying documents, and rewriting manuscripts without consent. Post-censorship reacts to publications by banning them, altering authorship, boycotting lectures, or interfering with teaching content. While pre-censorship is a hallmark of dictatorships, both forms exist across societies.

All historical genres are vulnerable, including source editions, biographies, textbooks, maps, and digital documents. Even seemingly neutral formats like bibliographies, encyclopaedias, and statistics are targeted. No genre is inherently safe from manipulation, regardless of its perceived independence from ideological systems.

The scope of censorship encompasses every historical field—not just political and military history, but also economic, social, and cultural studies. Censors target any fact or opinion deemed dangerous, regardless of the author's qualifications. Consequently, popular history in film, television, commemorations, and song is often targeted more aggressively than academic work, due to its profound influence on collective memory.

Every historical period is subject to control. Archaeology is closely monitored as it engages with sensitive national origins. Contemporary history, however, is frequently the most dangerous field because living witnesses and immediate political ramifications make it intensely sensitive to power. This demonstrates the censor's core aim: to control the past in service of present authority, targeting any narrative that challenges its legitimacy.

Reference: Eric Barendt, Freedom of Speech (1985; Oxford, 2005), p. 151.