The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600

673 Pages·2011·6.2 MB·English

by  Andrew Feldherr

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF
HISTORICAL WRITING
THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING
The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a fi ve-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, refl ecting 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 fi rst collective scholarly survey of the history of historical
writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.
Volume 1: Beginnings to ad600
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 1: beginnings to ad 600
Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy
volume editors
Ian Hesketh
assistant editor
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3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp
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© Oxford University Press 2011
Editorial matter © Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy 2011
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Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2011
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Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
ISBN 978–0–19–921815–8
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible
by the generous fi nancial support provided by the Offi ces of
the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost and Vice-President
2005 2009
(Academic) at the University of Alberta from to 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 are the volume editors,
without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their will-
ingness to sign on, and for their fl exibility 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 reader-
ship 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 Bestley in
particular.
The series would not have been possible without the considerable fi nancial
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 Offi ces of the Vice-President (Research) and the
Provost and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kach-
anoski and Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offi ces, who saw the project’s
potential. The funding they provided enabled the project 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 signifi cant number of books to supplement
the fi ne 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 ‘fi nish-line’, to transfer the research library,
and in particular to retain the services for two years 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 main-
tained 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
General Editor’s Acknowledgements vii
Edmonton conference. Among the others on whom the project has depended
I have to thank the Offi ce 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, South East 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 indi-
vidual essays are still being cited in our own day. The books were also remark-
ably ahead of their time since the history of historical writing was at that time
fi rmly 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 1911Geschichte der Neuren
Historiographie, 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 historiog-
raphy 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 fi rst 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 fi ve volumes collec-
tively 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 histor-
ical 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 cumula-
tive 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