The future of history

Historians, according to one of ourselves, share with psychoanalysts a predilection for moments of high drama. "It is the great upheaval," observed T K Rabb, "the explosion of new possibilities that arouses most attention." This predilection is partly a product of the nature of history; it is, after all, the study of change over time, so it is scarcely surprising that sudden changes or changes of great scale attract most attention. And it is partly a product of the nature of the historical record. Sudden upheavals often leave a better paper trail than the steady transformation of everyday life; there are more contemporary records and more commentaries explaining them. The great moment, therefore, can be explored in more detail, the processes that produced it more tidily (if not always more convincingly) explained. The result, then, is that historians, like psychoanalysts, often know more about the abnormal than that which they represent as normal.

Besides the comparative abundance of sources, historians' predilection for moments of high drama owes much to their profession's longstanding concern with the political sphere – including all things military – at the expense of the social and the cultural. "History," announced some Cambridge don in the 1800s, "is past politics; politics is present history". An average Barnes and Noble in smalltown, USA has shelves of books on the War of Independence, the Civil War, World War II, Korea and Vietnam; there are biographies of the founding fathers, Jack, Bobby and Ted, and histories of this or that president's administration. In France they have books on the Revolution, Vichy and the Third Republic, and biographies of Napoleon, Pétain and de Gaulle. Here, we have something similar. Recent years have seen the production of a substantial body of work on several major crises, most in the modern period. A reasonably good Irish bookshop (and they are scarce) has a row or two of books on "the 1798 Rising" and another on the Great Famine – usually approached as a crisis of political administration alone – and several shelves on twentieth century political history, particularly biographical works.

A dull sameness characterises much of this work. Two things change historical interpretation: new sources and new methods. Dust-jackets on recent Irish history books shout about new sources; few lay claim to methodological innovation of even the most rudimentary kind. In other words, they have more in common – certainly methodologically – than their authors might care to admit; an old-style political history that explains changes in that sphere largely by reference to political factors (not socio-economic or cultural forces) prevails. It evinces little concern for cultural theory or the methods and sources of literary criticism; there is rarely a nod to wider developments in history. And that may explain the persistence of self-consciously Revisionist or anti-Revisionist self-righteousness in that, admittedly large, corner of Irish History – political history – while people in other parts of the field have attempted to move on.

Popular politics in the late 1700s provides another example of the poverty of our history. Historians of France endlessly debate the origins of the French Revolution. Likewise American historians examine the coming of their Revolution in imaginative ways. For instance, a recent book ? T H Breen's The Marketplace of Revolution (2004) ? explores how consumer politics ? issues swirling around the consumption of home-produced goods and imports (mainly from Britain) ? helped to forge a national identity in America and empower the popular movement for independence. Fashionable clothes, books, cutlery, and teacups all shaped the expectations and attitudes that transformed ordinary decent colonists into American patriots. We could easily do the same type of history here but we don't. The deep causes of our great upheaval ? the radical patriot and later republican push for independence ? are skimmed over. The 1798 Rising is the flashy thing which the magpies pick over. Asked why it happened ? and I exaggerate slightly ? historians resort to an anti-revolutionary metaphor of disease: there was a revolution in America and another in France and we caught the disease. But a disease needs a receptive host; few consider the sociological and cultural factors that made this host receptive. And, as ever, there is the "how great thou art" school of political biography that separates the political individual ? indeed politics generally ? from the society and culture that produced him (and the individual is almost always "him"). Wolfe Tone, according to the standard biography, was great because he was not Danny Morrison. And Robert Emmet, according to more than one book, was Rommel Emmet, a military genius. Maybe. But we are measuring greatness not addressing the fundamental questions about the aspects of society and culture that made these people who and what they were. The daftest consequence of this approach is the degree of agency afforded to an organisation and its activists. The United Irishmen, we are told, created the public sphere; in other words, while historians the world-over see economy, society and culture producing political organizations, activists and ideas, here the world is upside down.

Certainly, political history ? even "this is was what the great man was really (italics) thinking" biography ? has its place and recent works have opened useful debates that have made valuable contributions to knowledge, particularly about the formation of "the state we're in". And Ireland is not America or France; we are a small country with few historians. Moreover, book-publishers, distributors and sellers like old-style political histories and they like them because élite biography, histories of political administrations, and militaria sell. And, frankly, there is nothing wrong with selling. Fintan O'Toole is confident that The Irish Times makes money so it can exist, rather than existing to make money. Perhaps, it does. But as Joe Cleary argued in a recent article in this series, "market and media criteria that emphasise short-term goals, rapid turnover, and sound-bite-celebrity relentlessly drive cultural production". For these reasons, the pressure for more pulp history will intensify. Ireland is in a period of rapid social and cultural transformation; it has been through wide-reaching transformations before. If history is to have any social function, it must illuminate how Irish people "lived the big changes" in the past. Angela Bourke's Burning of Bridget Cleary (1999) was an imaginative attempt to study state and society in a place experiencing profound change, that managed to reach a wide audience. So was Cork University Press's Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape (1997). But there have been precious few others in the last ten years. It is time for a change.