The Quest for Universal History: Methodological Tensions and the Future of Historiography

The fundamental mission of historical scholarship is to contextualize our contemporary world within the vast framework of human experience. Distinguished historians achieve this by providing profound insights into the contrasts between present and past human life. Practicing historians, however, often operate within strict methodological confines, focusing their expertise on narrowly defined areas such as a single nation, period, or theme to avoid accusations of dilettantism. This professional specialization inevitably means that the historical past we commonly engage with is merely a fragment of the totality of human history. Even collaborative projects among historians tend to maintain a relatively limited field of vision, constrained by the immense scope of the past.

The ideal of producing a comprehensive universal history—one that encompasses the entire human past—remains a powerful lure for the discipline. Historical attempts to create such syntheses, though less frequent in recent decades, persistently emerge. These undertakings face two monumental challenges: the practical impossibility of mastering all factual material and the inherent need for a selective narrative focus. To achieve coherence, any work aspiring to be universal history must prioritize one aspect of the past, whether it is the progression of Christian salvation, the development of productive forces, or the role of disease. The author then presents this chosen theme as a representative proxy for "history as a whole," a necessary but limiting conceptual maneuver.

Despite these practical and philosophical difficulties, the appeal of a unified human story endures. One could envision a future ideological convergence that might authorize a single, authoritative history of humankind. In the present, the Oxford History of Historical Writing (OHHW) offers a compelling alternative that adheres to modern methodological standards. Spanning five volumes and approximately 1.5 million words, its scale mimics that of a universal history. Furthermore, its roughly 160 contributor historians, all specialists subjected to rigorous peer critique, ensure scholarly depth and authority across a breathtaking chronological and geographical range.

The OHHW distinguishes itself from a mere collection of articles through its unique, unifying subject matter: it is a second-order analysis of historical representation itself. Instead of presenting the past directly, it examines how past cultures represented their own histories. This focus creates a coherent historical phenomenology, repeatedly asking a central question: How did people in specific times and places orient themselves toward the residues of the past in their present? This inquiry into past-time consciousness provides a consistent analytical thread throughout the disparate chapters, offering a meta-historical perspective on the human relationship with time.

A crucial dialectic emerges from this approach, deeply embedded within the OHHW. The first pole is the modern discipline's commitment to scientific standards of evidence and evaluation, which grant history its epistemic authority. The opposing pole is the commitment to understanding past realities "in their own terms," respecting the standards and worldviews of historical actors. The OHHW frequently explores pre-modern or non-Western modes of historical consciousness that are inimical to contemporary scientific methodology. This tension between present-day disciplinary norms and the authentic reconstruction of past mentalities remains fundamentally unresolved, creating a critical undercurrent throughout the work, especially in volumes dealing with eras far removed from modern professional historiography.

The modern historical discipline, born in nineteenth-century Europe and globalized in the twentieth, now sets normative standards worldwide. The OHHW's exploration of alien historiographical forms—from monumental inscriptions to poetic traditions—serves as a vital reminder of this discipline's recent and contingent nature. Engaging with these "other" historiographies is not an exercise in nostalgia but a critical tool. First, it provides unparalleled insight into the mental worlds of past cultures, highlighting both human continuities and differences. Second, it clarifies the unique "value added" by a discipline that marries empathy for the past's otherness with a rigorous evidentiary commitment.

A third benefit is fostering a critical attitude toward the historical discipline itself, acknowledging that meaningful reflection on the past occurs far beyond academic halls. Finally, by showcasing the multiplicity of human values, it critiques present-day prescriptivism that universalizes local mores. This is particularly relevant when confronting a dangerous form of prescriptivism that applies parochial prescriptions globally, often ignoring the complex tapestry of human historical experience revealed by comparative historiography.

The first volume of the OHHW effectively challenges restrictive definitions of historical writing. Chapters demonstrate that past-time consciousness can manifest monumentally, not just textually. Alison Cooley, in her analysis of ancient Rome, shows how architecture and monumenta provided a potent "sense of the past" before prose histories appeared. Similarly, John Baines argues that overlooking monumental inscriptions led to the mistaken belief that ancient Egypt lacked historiography before Alexander the Great. Piotr Michalowski makes a parallel case for early Mesopotamia. These examples underscore that many cultures possessed rich, non-prosaic traditions of engaging with history, expanding our understanding of historical representation.

These explorations create a reflective "yes, of course" moment, prompting us to examine the representation of the past in our own public sphere. The twentieth century saw both authoritarian and democratic states promote monumental historical narratives. Recently, public history has become more anarchic, often framed as "memory" rather than history. A prevalent early twenty-first-century view conflates history with the recovery and preservation of collective memory. While memory is an indispensable lens for understanding how people experienced their pasts, the scientific imperative of the discipline also demands a critical engagement with memory. We must recognize how memories, both preserved and transformed, shape present actions and unreflectively orient communities toward specific futures.

Modern historians possess sophisticated techniques for evaluating evidence, assessing probabilities, and uncovering latent assumptions in past societies. However, the discipline is generally poorly equipped to offer reflective critiques of the deep religious, metaphysical, or philosophical assumptions held by others or, crucially, by historians themselves. This highlights a necessary limit of the field. The fourth and fifth volumes of the OHHW, covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, facilitate this dual task of appreciation and critique. They reveal a persistent tension intrinsic to "official" history—research conducted within the institutional framework of the discipline—between scientific standards and existential commitments.

The evidential standards of history involve rigorous source criticism, logical argumentation, and engagement with scholarly debate, transforming storytelling into the crafting of well-justified narratives. Yet, this scientific endeavor is meaningless without an existential commitment that makes the past relevant to present and future communities. This aligns with the cynical adage that "history is the story told by the victor," which contains a kernel of truth about the authorization of certain memories in the public sphere. As Ernest Renan noted, national identity requires both shared memory and strategic forgetting. History's primary justification is often existential, not instrumental; without a community's need to understand itself through time, the discipline would not exist.

Considering the future of historiography, impulses exist to demote scientific commitment in favor of history that provides politically or psychologically beneficial memories. The powerful influence of new experiential media could potentially accelerate this trend. However, a full displacement of evidence-based history remains unlikely barring institutional collapse. The fifth volume of the OHHW highlights key twentieth-century themes: the intense tension between history-as-science and history-as-propaganda, a dramatic expansion into new fields like gender, environmental, and memory studies, and a growing concern with global and transnational perspectives. These themes will undoubtedly shape the near future of historical writing.

The future of historiography is, however, a normative question. Historians like Antoon De Baets advocate for a formal code of ethics. Another normative suggestion involves historians engaging more explicitly with the "might have been"—theoretical imagination about alternative pasts. This is not a category mistake but an extension of the counterfactual reasoning essential to causal analysis. It allows historians, like C. Vann Woodward critiquing segregation, to articulate critiques grounded in historical reality but aimed at envisioning different possibilities, blending historical and philosophical inquiry.

This imaginative questioning applies to the future of historical writing itself. The modern historical discipline has been predominantly driven by commitment to the nation-state, a theme exhaustively documented in the OHHW. This identitarian model, promoting a single national memory and identity, has often proven disastrous, especially where state consolidation followed the rise of conflicting national consciousnesses. The consequences continue to unfold in regions like the former Yugoslavia and Kurdistan, where borders are not naturally given but fiercely contested.

While historians have masterfully documented the horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide, lamentation is insufficient without critically examining the normative foundations of the identitarian nation-state. The OHHW helps us see that this state form occupies a tiny fraction of recorded human history, yet it remains the central, often unexamined, frame for most historical work. Moving beyond it requires a two-fold critique: investigating its contingent emergence not to justify but to denaturalize it, and seriously exploring pragmatic alternatives based on allegiance rather than homogeneous identity. A new historiography could support states that derive legitimacy from effectively managing contemporary pluralism rather than invoking a monolithic glorious past. In this endeavor, the quasi-universal perspective of works like the Oxford History of Historical Writing is indispensable, enabling us to think normatively about what we mistake for natural and eternal.