importance of historical analysis essay

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1.2: What is Historical Analysis?

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• Page ID 174463

• Stephanie Cole, Kimberly Breuer, Scott W. Palmer, and Brandon Blakeslee
• University of Texas at Arlington via Mavs Open Press

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The principal goal of students in history classes and historians in practice is to master the process of Historical Analysis . History is more than a narrative of the past; the discipline cares less for the who, what, where, and when of an event, instead focusing on how and why certain events unfolded the way they did and what it all means. History is about argument, interpretation, and consequence. To complete quality historical analysis—that is, to “do history right”–one must use appropriate evidence, assess it properly (which involves comprehending how it is related to the situation in question), and then draw appropriate and meaningful conclusions based on said evidence.

The tools we use to analyze the past are a learned skill-set. While it is likely that the history you enjoy reading appears to be centered on a clear and direct narrative of past events, creating that story is more difficult than you might imagine. Writing history requires making informed judgments; we must read primary sources correctly, and then decide how to weigh the inevitable conflicts between those sources correctly. Think for a moment about a controversial moment in your own life—a traffic accident perhaps or a rupture between friends. Didn’t the various sources who experienced it—both sides, witnesses, the authorities—report on it differently? But when you recounted the story of what happened to others, you told a seamless story, which—whether you were conscience of it or not—required deciding whose report, or which discrete points from different reports—made the most sense. Even the decision to leave one particular turning point vague (“it’s a he said/she said unknowable point”) reflects the sort of judgment your listeners expect from you.

We use this same judgment when we use primary sources to write history; though in our case there are rules, or at least guidelines, about making those decisions. (For precise directions about reading primary sources, see the sections on “Reading Primary Sources” in the next chapter). In order to weigh the value of one source against other sources, we must be as informed as possible about that source’s historical context, the outlook of the source’s creator, and the circumstances of its creation. Indeed, as they attempt to uncover what happened, historians must learn about those circumstances and then be able to evaluate their impact on what the source reveals. Each actor in a historical moment brings their own cultural biases and preconceived expectations, and those biases are integral to the sources they leave behind. It is up to the historian to weave these differences together in their analysis in a way that is meaningful to readers. They must compare differences in ideologies, values, behaviors and traditions, as well as take in a multiplicity of perspectives, to create one story.

In addition to knowing how to treat their sources, historians and history students alike must tell a story worth telling, one that helps us as a society to understand who we are and how we got here. As humans, we want to know what caused a particular outcome, or perhaps whether a past actor or event is as similar to a present-day actor or event as it seems, or where the beginnings of a current movement began. (“What made Martin Luther King, Jr. a leader, when other activists had failed before him?” “Were reactions to the Civil Rights Movement similar to those of the current Black Lives Matter movement?” “How similar is the Coronavirus pandemic to the 1918 flu pandemic?” “Who were the first feminists and what did they believe?”) Even small aspects of larger events can help answer important questions. (“How did the suffrage movement (or Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, or the gun rights movement, or …) play out in my Texas hometown?”)

The very essence of historical analysis is about analyzing the different cause-and-effect relationships present in each scenario, considering the ways individuals, influential ideas, and different mindsets interact and affect one another. It is about figuring out what facts go together to form a coherent story, one that helps us understand ourselves and each other better. But such understandings, or indeed what exactly counts as “coherent,” can change with each generation. That’s where you and your interests as a student of history come in. Of key importance to the discipline is that our analysis of an event or individual is tentative or impermanent. The job of historians is to study the available evidence and construct meaningful conclusions; therefore, when new evidence and perspectives (including yours!) present themselves it may very well alter our understanding of the past.

As the section on historiography pointed out, a significant part of historical analysis is integrating new understandings of past events and actors with history as it already written. We don’t want to “reinvent the wheel” or simply retell the same story, using the same sources. Even as scholars provide new perspectives or uncover new evidence, revising what was thought to be known, they cannot simply ignore previous historical writing. Instead they need to address it, linking their new understanding to old scholarship as a part of building knowledge. Sometimes the linkage is a direct challenge to past explanations, but more likely new historical writing provides a nuance to the older work. For example, a scholar might look at new evidence to suggest a shift in periodization (“actually the rightward shift in the Republican Party began much earlier than Ronald Reagan’s campaigns”) or the importance of different actors (“middle-class Black women were more critical in the spreading of Progressive reforms in the South than we once thought”). Because historians are concerned with building knowledge and expanding scholarship, they choose their subjects of research with an eye toward adding to what we know, perhaps by developing new perspectives on old sources or by finding new sources.

For another view on historical thinking, this one offered by the American Historical Association, see “What does it mean to think historically?”

• 3. Historical Analysis and Interpretation

One of the most common problems in helping students to become thoughtful readers of historical narrative is the compulsion students feel to find the one right answer, the one essential fact, the one authoritative interpretation. “Am I on the right track?” “Is this what you want?” they ask. Or, worse yet, they rush to closure, reporting back as self-evident truths the facts or conclusions presented in the document or text.

These problems are deeply rooted in the conventional ways in which textbooks have presented history: a succession of facts marching straight to a settled outcome. To overcome these problems requires the use of more than a single source: of history books other than textbooks and of a rich variety of historical documents and artifacts that present alternative voices, accounts, and interpretations or perspectives on the past.

Students need to realize that historians may differ on the facts they incorporate in the development of their narratives and disagree as well on how those facts are to be interpreted. Thus, “history” is usually taken to mean what happened in the past; but written history is a dialogue among historians, not only about what happened but about why and how events unfolded. The study of history is not only remembering answers. It requires following and evaluating arguments and arriving at usable, even if tentative, conclusions based on the available evidence.

To engage in  historical analysis and interpretation  students must draw upon their skills of historical comprehension . In fact, there is no sharp line separating the two categories. Certain of the skills involved in comprehension overlap the skills involved in analysis and are essential to it. For example, identifying the author or source of a historical document or narrative and assessing its credibility (comprehension) is prerequisite to comparing competing historical narratives (analysis). Analysis builds upon the skills of comprehension; it obliges the student to assess the evidence on which the historian has drawn and determine the soundness of interpretations created from that evidence. It goes without saying that in acquiring these analytical skills students must develop the ability to differentiate between expressions of opinion, no matter how passionately delivered, and informed hypotheses grounded in historical evidence.

Well-written historical narrative has the power to promote students’ analysis of historical causality–of how change occurs in society, of how human intentions matter, and how ends are influenced by the means of carrying them out, in what has been called the tangle of process and outcomes. Few challenges can be more fascinating to students than unraveling the often dramatic complications of cause. And nothing is more dangerous than a simple, monocausal explanation of past experiences and present problems.

Finally, well-written historical narratives can also alert students to the traps of  lineality and inevitability . Students must understand the relevance of the past to their own times, but they need also to avoid the trap of lineality, of drawing straight lines between past and present, as though earlier movements were being propelled teleologically toward some rendezvous with destiny in the late 20th century.

A related trap is that of thinking that events have unfolded inevitably–that the way things are is the way they had to be, and thus that individuals lack free will and the capacity for making choices. Unless students can conceive that history could have turned out differently, they may unconsciously accept the notion that the future is also inevitable or predetermined, and that human agency and individual action count for nothing. No attitude is more likely to feed civic apathy, cynicism, and resignation–precisely what we hope the study of history will fend off. Whether in dealing with the main narrative or with a topic in depth, we must always try, in one historian’s words, to “restore to the past the options it once had.”

HISTORICAL THINKING STANDARD 3

The student engages in historical analysis and interpretation:

Therefore, the student is able to:

• Compare and contrast differing sets of ideas , values, personalities, behaviors, and institutions by identifying likenesses and differences.
• Consider multiple perspectives  of various peoples in the past by demonstrating their differing motives, beliefs, interests, hopes, and fears.
• Analyze cause-and-effect relationships  bearing in mind  multiple causation including (a)  the importance of the individual  in history; (b)  the influence of ideas , human interests, and beliefs; and (c) the role of chance, the accidental and the irrational.
• Draw comparisons across eras and regions in order to define enduring issues as well as large-scale or long-term developments that transcend regional and temporal boundaries.
• Distinguish between unsupported expressions of opinion and informed hypotheses grounded in historical evidence.
• Compare competing historical narratives.
• Challenge arguments of historical inevitability  by formulating examples of historical contingency, of how different choices could have led to different consequences.
• Hold interpretations of history as tentative , subject to changes as new information is uncovered, new voices heard, and new interpretations broached.
• Evaluate major debates among historians  concerning alternative interpretations of the past.
• Hypothesize the influence of the past , including both the limitations and opportunities made possible by past decisions.

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19 Standards of Historical Writing

In this chapter, you will learn the basic expectations for writing an undergrad history research paper. At this point in your college career, you’ve likely had a great deal of instruction about writing and you may be wondering why this chapter is here. There are at least three reasons:

• For some of you, those lessons about writing came before you were ready to appreciate or implement them. If you know your writing skills are weak, you should not only pay close attention to this chapter, but also submit early drafts of your work to the History Tutoring Center (at UTA) or another writing coach. Only practice and multiple drafts will improve those skills.
• Those of you who were paying attention in composition courses know the basics, but may lack a good understanding of the format and approach of scholarly writing in history. Other disciplines permit more generalities and relaxed associations than history, which is oriented toward specific contexts and (often, but not always) linear narratives. Moreover, because historians work in a subject often read by non-academics, they place a greater emphasis on clearing up jargon and avoiding convoluted sentence structure. In other words, the standards of historical writing are high and the guidelines that follow will help you reach them.
• Every writer, no matter how confident or experienced, faces writing blocks. Going back to the fundamental structures and explanations may help you get past the blank screen by supplying prompts to help you get started.

As you read the following guide, keep in mind that it represents only our perspective on the basic standards. In all writing, even history research papers, there is room for stylistic variation and elements of a personal style. But one of the standards of historical writing is that only those who fully understand the rules can break them successfully. If you regularly violate the rule against passive voice verb construction or the need for full subject-predicate sentences, you cannot claim the use of sentence fragments or passive voice verbs is “just your style.” Those who normally observe those grammatical rules, in contrast, might on occasion violate them for effect. The best approach is first to demonstrate to your instructor that you can follow rules of grammar and essay structure before you experiment or stray too far from the advice below.

Introductions

Introductions are nearly impossible to get right the first time. Thus, one of the best strategies for writing an introduction to your history essay is to keep it “bare bones” in the first draft, initially working only toward a version that covers the basic requirements. After you’ve written the full paper (and realized what you’re really trying to say, which usually differs from your initial outline), you can come back to the intro and re-draft it accordingly. However, don’t use the likelihood of re-writing your first draft to avoid writing one. Introductions provide templates not only for your readers, but also for you, the writer. A decent “bare bones” introduction can minimize writer’s block as a well-written thesis statement provides a road map for each section of the paper.

So what are the basic requirements? In an introduction, you must:

• Pose a worthwhile question or problem that engages your reader
• Establish that your sources are appropriate for answering the question, and thus that you are a trustworthy guide without unfair biases
• Convince your reader that they will be able to follow your explanation by laying out a clear thesis statement.

Engaging readers in an introduction

When you initiated your research, you asked questions as a part of the process of narrowing your topic (see the “Choosing and Narrowing a Topic” chapter for more info). If all went according to plan, the information you found as you evaluated your primary sources allowed you to narrow your question further, as well as arrive at a plausible answer, or explanation for the problem you posed. (If it didn’t, you’ll need to repeat the process, and either vary your questions or expand your sources. Consult your instructor, who can help identify what contribution your research into a set of primary sources can achieve.) The key task for your introduction is to frame your narrowed research question—or, in the words of some composition instructors, the previously assumed truth that your inquiries have destabilized—in a way that captures the attention of your readers. Common approaches to engaging readers include:

• Telling a short story (or vignette) from your research that illustrates the tension between what readers might have assumed before reading your paper and what you have found to be plausible instead.
• Stating directly what others believe to be true about your topic—perhaps using a quote from a scholar of the subject—and then pointing immediately to an aspect of your research that puts that earlier explanation into doubt.
• Revealing your most unexpected finding, before moving to explain the source that leads you to make the claim, then turning to the ways in which this finding expands our understanding of your topic.

What you do NOT want to do is begin with a far-reaching transhistorical claim about human nature or an open-ended rhetorical question about the nature of history. Grand and thus unprovable claims about “what history tells us” do not inspire confidence in readers. Moreover, such broadly focused beginnings require too much “drilling down” to get to your specific area of inquiry, words that risk losing readers’ interest. Last, beginning with generic ideas is not common to the discipline. Typical essay structures in history do not start broadly and steadily narrow over the course of the essay, like a giant inverted triangle. If thinking in terms of a geometric shape helps you to conceptualize what a good introduction does, think of your introduction as the top tip of a diamond instead. In analytical essays based on research, many history scholars begin with the specific circumstances that need explaining, then broaden out into the larger implications of their findings, before returning to the specifics in their conclusions—following the shape of a diamond.

Clear Thesis Statements

Under the standards of good scholarly writing in the United States—and thus those that should guide your paper—your introduction contains the main argument you will make in your essay. Elsewhere—most commonly in European texts—scholars sometimes build to their argument and reveal it fully only in the conclusion. Do not follow this custom in your essay. Include a well-written thesis statement somewhere in your introduction; it can be the first sentence of your essay, toward the end of the first paragraph, or even a page or so in, should you begin by setting the stage with a vignette. Wherever you place it, make sure your thesis statement meets the following standards:

A good thesis statement :

• Could be debated by informed scholars : Your claim should not be so obvious as to be logically impossible to argue against. Avoid the history equivalent of “the sky was blue.”
• Can be proven with the evidence at hand : In the allotted number of pages, you will need to introduce and explain at least three ways in which you can support your claim, each built on its own pieces of evidence. Making an argument about the role of weather on the outcome of the Civil War might be intriguing, given that such a claim questions conventional explanations for the Union’s victory. But a great deal of weather occurred in four years and Civil War scholars have established many other arguments you would need to counter, making such an argument impossible to establish in the length of even a long research paper. But narrowing the claim—to a specific battle or from a single viewpoint—could make such an argument tenable. Often in student history papers, the thesis incorporates the main primary source into the argument. For example, “As his journal and published correspondence between 1861 and 1864 reveal, Colonel Mustard believed that a few timely shifts in Tennessee’s weather could have altered the outcome of the war.”
• Is specific without being insignificant : Along with avoiding the obvious, stay away from the arcane. “Between 1861 and 1864, January proved to be the worst month for weather in Central Tennessee.” Though this statement about the past is debatable and possible to support with evidence about horrible weather in January and milder-by-comparison weather in other months, it lacks import because it’s not connected to knowledge that concerns historians. Thesis statements should either explicitly or implicitly speak to current historical knowledge—which they can do by refining, reinforcing, nuancing, or expanding what (an)other scholar(s) wrote about a critical event or person.
• P rovide s a “roadmap” to readers : Rather than just state your main argument, considering outlining the key aspects of it, each of which will form a main section of the body of the paper. When you echo these points in transitions between sections, readers will realize they’ve completed one aspect of your argument and are beginning a new part of it. To demonstrate this practice by continuing the fictional Colonel Mustard example above: “As his journal and published correspondence between 1861 and 1864 reveals, Colonel Mustard believed that Tennessee’s weather was critical to the outcome of the Civil War. He linked both winter storms and spring floods in Tennessee to the outcome of key battles and highlighted the weather’s role in tardy supply transport in the critical year of 1863.” Such a thesis cues the reader that evidence and explanations about 1) winter storms; 2) spring floods; and 3) weather-slowed supply transport that will form the main elements of the essay.

Thesis Statement Practice

More Thesis Statement Practice

The Body of the Paper

What makes a good paragraph.

While an engaging introduction and solid conclusion are important, the key to drafting a good essay is to write good paragraphs. That probably seems obvious, but too many students treat paragraphs as just a collection of a few sentences without considering the logic and rules that make a good paragraph. In essence, in a research paper such as the type required in a history course, for each paragraph you should follow the same rules as the paper itself. That is, a good paragraph has a topic sentence, evidence that builds to make a point, and a conclusion that ties the point to the larger argument of the paper. On one hand, given that it has so much work to do, paragraphs are three sentences , at a minimum . On the other hand, because paragraphs should be focused to making a single point, they are seldom more than six to seven sentences . Though rules about number of sentences are not hard and fast, keeping the guidelines in mind can help you construct tightly focused paragraphs in which your evidence is fully explained.

Topic sentences

The first sentence of every paragraph in a research paper (or very occasionally the second) should state a claim that you will defend in the paragraph . Every sentence in the paragraph should contribute to that topic. If you read back over your paragraph and find that you have included several different ideas, the paragraph lacks focus. Go back, figure out the job that this paragraph needs to do—showing why an individual is important, establishing that many accept an argument that you plan on countering, explaining why a particular primary source can help answer your research question, etc. Then rework your topic sentence until it correctly frames the point you need to make. Next, cut out (and likely move) the sentences that don’t contribute to that outcome. The sentences you removed may well help you construct the next paragraph, as they could be important ideas, just not ones that fit with the topic of the current paragraph. Every sentence needs to be located in a paragraph with a topic sentence that alerts the reader about what’s to come.

Transitions/Bridges/Conclusion sentences in paragraphs

All good writers help their readers by including transition sentences or phrases in their paragraphs, often either at the paragraph’s end or as an initial phrase in the topic sentence. A transition sentence can either connect two sections of the paper or provide a bridge from one paragraph to the next. These sentences clarify how the evidence discussed in the paragraph ties into the thesis of the paper and help readers follow the argument. Such a sentence is characterized by a clause that summarizes the info above, and points toward the agenda of the next paragraph. For example, if the current section of your paper focused on the negative aspects of your subject’s early career, but your thesis maintains he was a late-developing military genius, a transition between part one (on the negative early career) and part two (discussing your first piece of evidence revealing genius) might note that “These initial disastrous strategies were not a good predictor of General Smith’s mature years, however, as his 1841 experience reveals.” Such a sentence underscores for the reader what has just been argued (General Smith had a rough start) and sets up what’s to come (1841 was a critical turning point).

Explaining Evidence

Just as transitional sentences re-state points already made for clarity’s sake, “stitching” phrases or sentences that set-up and/or follow quotations from sources provide a certain amount of repetition. Re-stating significant points of analysis using different terms is one way you explain your evidence. Another way is by never allowing a quote from a source to stand on its own, as though its meaning was self-evident. It isn’t and indeed, what you, the writer, believes to be obvious seldom is. When in doubt, explain more.

For more about when to use a quotation and how to set it up see “How to quote” in the next section on Notes and Quotation.”

Conclusio ns

There exists one basic rule for conclusions: Summarize the paper you have written . Do not introduce new ideas, launch briefly into a second essay based on a different thesis, or claim a larger implication based on research not yet completed. This final paragraph is NOT a chance to comment on “what history tells us” or other lessons for humankind. Your conclusion should rest, more or less, on your thesis, albeit using different language from the introduction and evolved, or enriched, by examples discussed throughout the paper. Keep your conclusion relevant and short, and you’ll be fine.

For a checklist of things you need before you write or a rubric to evaluate your writing click here

How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cole; Kimberly Breuer; Scott W. Palmer; and Brandon Blakeslee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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History Matters: The Critical Contribution of Historical Analysis to Contemporary Health Policy and Health Care

Sally sheard.

University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

History is popular with health policymakers, if the regularity with which they invoke historical anecdotes to support policy change is used as an indicator. Yet the ways in which they ‘use’ history vary enormously, as does its impact. This paper explores, from the perspective of a UK academic historian, the development of ‘applied’ history in health policy. It draws on personal experience of different types and levels of engagement with policymakers, and highlights mechanisms through which this dialogue and partnership can be made more efficient, effective, and intellectually rewarding for all involved.

History is popular with health policymakers, if the regularity with which they invoke historical anecdotes to support policy change is used as an indicator. Yet the ways in which they ‘use’ history vary enormously, as does its impact. This paper explores, from the perspective of an academic historian, the development of ‘applied’ history in health policy. It demonstrates, through UK case studies, that historical analysis can improve policymaking and service delivery. By focusing on the actual process of policymaking and implementation, especially what happens when earlier policies have been forgotten or deliberately side-lined, historical analysis helps to open up wider opportunities. The paper highlights the similarities between history and improvement science: both disciplines are concerned with change over time, and have developed methodologies to cope with complexity. There is a case to be made for a greater use of historians in health policy and health care, but this requires policymakers and service providers to be aware of what they offer and where to find them, and to routinely engage with them at the start of new policy or service planning. It requires the development of shared objectives, language and planning schedules.

The paper first outlines how history has become a key component of popular culture, especially in the UK, and suggests that this has enabled UK some health policymakers to feel they can ‘do it themselves’ to the exclusion of professional historians. Second, it sets out some of the methodological issues and challenges around historical analysis, especially in the setting of periods of study, in comparison with improvement science. Third, it discusses how historians of healthcare in the UK have chosen their research topics, and crucially, the style of output, and how this has facilitated or hindered their engagement with policymakers and service providers. Fourth, it provides two case studies which demonstrate how history can be used at different scales: at the local level using an anniversary (of the first UK public health team in 1847) to provoke a city (Liverpool) to reflect on what has enabled population health to improve; at the national level (UK Department of Health) to demonstrate the impact of cuts in medical expertise in the civil service (1980s–1990s) on the ability of the government to respond to emerging infectious diseases (HIV/AIDS; BSE; MRSA).

Fifth, it outlines how UK historians are using new methodologies (witness seminars) and new modes of engagement and dissemination (the History and Policy organisation) to become more proactive in working with policymakers. Although history students are now often taught that their discipline is ‘useful’, or has practical significance, because ‘intelligent action’ invariably draws on past experience, some academic historians are unwilling to see historical ‘lessons’ applied to current ‘real-world’ situations. 1 They would suggest that the uniqueness of a historical event cannot translate perfectly to the present, and so has limited relevance. And, as the US historian Richard Hirsh puts it: ‘More practically, many historians realise that universities rarely provide rewards for work that has direct application outside the ivory tower’. 2 Yet in the UK historians have been developing external work for many years across policy, creative and other arenas, and indeed ‘impact’ is now a key indicator of success for research councils and for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that helps determine state funding allocations for universities.

Challenges of Using History

There are multiple challenges for historians attempting to engage with non-academic audiences, perhaps the first (in terms of importance and sequence) is the issue of superfluity or irrelevance. I have already noted how historians themselves have been reluctant to let their work be used as crude analogy to contemporary circumstances, but equally, some policymakers do not naturally see history as ‘relevant’ to their work, unless provoked to do so. This is due to a number of factors. They will have an understanding of history based on their personal ‘history’—recollections of their school curricula (which in the UK invariably included the stock favourites of Tudors and Stuarts, and the Second World War)—and they will also draw on how they encounter history as entertainment. It has come to dominate TV scheduling in the UK, from mammoth series such as Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation to the new generation of international ‘telly dons’ such as Mary Beard and Simon Schama. History as a genre regularly features in publication bestseller lists (often tied to TV series). This history as entertainment is passive: delivered to the audience, and requiring/allowing little interaction with the historians producing it. Even when historians are invited to deliver serious academic content, their raison d’etre can be misinterpreted. The well-known historian David Starkey gave a keynote speech at the 2006 NHS Confederation conference, but one of the organisers later commented that ‘to some extent, he was there as entertainment’. 3

The enthusiasm for mainstream history, as evidenced through its presence in the media and bestseller lists also occasionally surfaces within the policymaking community, where policymakers feel confident, perhaps because they have a history degree, that they can identify and apply historical analogies to current policy issues. Sometimes this is well-intentioned, but can also be seen as ‘history as pancea’. Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Minister of Health who oversaw the introduction of the NHS in 1948, has been regularly name-checked by his successors, usually to support politically contentious policy changes, such as hospital closures and service reorganisations. 4 The repetition of popular historical vignettes, such as the Black Death or the 1918 global influenza pandemic serves to retain and gain them cultural purchase. They also demonstrate preoccupations of their users that are ‘more gothic than historical’. 5

A second challenge—that of ‘time’—causes concerns for both historians and policymakers. Much of the history that is presented as ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’ by historians when consulted by policymakers (or history self-selected by policymakers themselves) can be labelled ‘contemporary history’. Every period has its own contemporary history, and historians differ on how to set our contemporary history’s parameters: whether it covers things within living memory, or as Francis Fukuyama suggests, can be dated from the nineteenth century advent of liberal democracy, in which technology and military competition acted as the twin engines of historical change, as opposed to Marxist theoretical mechanisms of class conflict, politics, and tensions between the individual and the state. 6 Geoffrey Barraclough provides yet another definition: ‘ Contemporary history begins when the problems which are actually in the world today first take visible shape’ (original italics). 7 Historians such as John Gaddis and Peter Catterall have championed contemporary history as a way to deepen the historian’s active engagement in the production of history—someone on the ‘inside’—in contrast to E H Carr’s view of the role of the historian as a general watching from the edge of the battlefield as ‘events’ march past him. 8

Irrespective of how historians conduct their intra-professional debates, for policymakers—especially those politically appointed—the main benefit of using contemporary history context is that it will be familiar to their intended audience: colleagues and/or the public. The supremacy of the recent recognises that ‘every age thinks itself to be the most important age that ever occurred’. 9

This is more than academic turf wars. It determines how history is ‘done’, both by historians and policymakers, as it delimits what is acceptable evidence, how the analytical frameworks handle it, and its potential for further application. Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), editor of Annales and one of the great French historians of the twentieth century, opened a significant debate with his 1958 essay History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée . 10 He highlighted the limitations of the historian’s conventional strategy of working with ‘unilinear’ time: in which historical development is presented as continuous on a single (and invariably short) time-scale. This approach, for Braudel, neglected the structures within which change occurred, and prioritised the very recent past. He proposed using an alternative ‘plurality of social time’ in which history operates on three simultaneous levels: the long term (la longue durée: fundamental conditions of life, including the environment); medium term (for social, economic and political systems); the short term (for analysing the individual and the l’histoire événementielle—the ‘event’).

In 1970 an academic symposium on ‘Time’ was convened by the Society for Values in Higher Education that brought together biologists, physicists, psychologists, philosophers and historians. As Dale Porter provocatively stated in his summary of the event, it was the historians who appeared to be least confident in working with the concept of time: ‘In short, historians are working without a viable theory of explanation. Their individual investigations cannot be related to each other in any systematic way, and they are largely irrelevant to studies in other disciplines’. However, their focus on narrative explanations, Dale suggested, were actually similar to the more analytical ‘explanatory models’ used by these other disciplines, and with a bit of effort could be re-purposed to effectively meet the challenges of complex temporal developments, working in a similar way to the ‘process’ philosophy that Alfred North Whitehead had developed earlier in the twentieth century in response to the breakdown in scientific positivism. 11

A third challenge for using history in policymaking centres on how historical explanation requires relative degrees of abstraction, generalisation and complexity. The main difficulty with narrative accounts is that they involve two kinds of understanding of events. The first is gained by following a sequence of incidents of a given duration, and any pattern abstracted from that narrative is therefore only meaningful by reference to what actually happened. The second kind of understanding—analytical—emerges from a natural tendency to use the pattern abstracted from the story as a heuristic device that prompts questions about the similarity or difference between one sequence of events and another. 12 These two modes of understanding—by following and by analysing—appeared to be antithetical, and Porter suggested that this duality within traditional historical narrative accounts was at the root of ‘a great deal of anxiety among historians and their critics in recent years’, whereas in other disciplines, especially in the social sciences, these two modes of understanding had been pursued separately. He proposed a conscious re-balancing in which the reciprocity between hypothesis and empirical evidence would validate the historians’ traditional prioritisation of the narrative form of understanding. 13

Thinking about history as change—of historical events as dynamic relationships between causes and effects that happen ‘over time’—raises a fourth challenge which relates more directly to the concept of ‘improvement’, which also has an inherent dynamism. Some weak history—generally that which is uncritical—is branded ‘Whiggish’: it assumes that the present is always better than the past; that there has been progressive, cumulative, ‘improvement’. 14 In health history/history of medicine, this is often an accurate (if superficial) observation, depending on what measurements are used: life expectancies have improved since the mid-nineteenth century (the upward trajectory only just flattening in the first decade of the twenty-first century). In the fifteenth century more than half the British population were aged under 20; in the early twenty-first century we are already seeing some countries where half the population are over 60. It is tempting to attribute these historical patterns to specific historical events: the introduction of anaesthesia, antisepsis, antibiotics, etc. But when crude national patterns are unpicked it is possible to see that improvement has been relative or unequal: lower mortality rates from the classic infectious diseases such as cholera and smallpox have been paralleled by rising mortality rates for chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Cancer is in essence a disease of modernity, becoming more visible to society as more human bodies now survive long enough into the new ‘middle ages of 50+’ to allow cell mutations. Underneath Whiggish national improvements in health is an enduring inequality that has been clearly linked to socio-economic factors for nearly two hundred years: Edwin Chadwick, Friedrich Engels and other early nineteenth century reformers were able to demonstrate a significant positive correlation between poverty and ill-health.

Yet ‘long’ health histories—those that begin with the early nineteenth century epidemic disease—are easier, perhaps lazier, and in some ways more politically acceptable, than more recent health history. Politicians are comfortable drawing on the triumph of scientific advances such as anaesthesia and the discovery of germ theory in their rhetoric as evidence of long-term ‘improvement’ in health. To shift to short term history, for the politician, and possibly their policymakers, is more risky. Even using the creation of the NHS in 1948 as a historical era marker raises the potential for political debate on its performance and sustainability. ‘Short’ historical analysis might also be more problematical for historians because it exposes their academic fiefdom to other academic disciplines, especially political scientists and sociologists. It returns us to the first challenge of relevance, and opens up the debate on how to make history useful to policymakers, which requires discussion of historians’ motive, language and agency.

The Emergence of History of Health and Medicine

The history of health and medicine did not emerge as a distinct sub-discipline before the twentieth century. Rankean historians consolidated their professional identity and status through studies of nation states, in which biographical information on the life (health) and death of key players was a by-product of the bigger narrative. 15 Studies of the health of populations by professional historians required source material. The introduction of the decadal census in the UK in 1801, and of vital civil registration (births, marriages and deaths) in England and Wales in 1837, enabled a more comprehensive analysis than was possible using the earlier religious archives. Histories of patients, as well as of the great men of medicine, were now possible. There is an irony to this: doctors have always ‘taken histories’ from their patients.

In the US there was an active community of health historians from the 1920s (united through the American Association for the History of Medicine which was formed in 1925, primarily by physicians with an amateur interest in the discipline). US pioneers in the early years, up to the 1960s, included Henry Sigerist, Erwin Ackerknecht and Owsei Temkin. A second generation responded to the concept of a ‘social construction’ of medical authority and the development of medicine as an industrial and commercial activity. Key scholars included Susan Reverby, Charles Rosenberg, Judith Levitt, David Rosner and Rosemary Stevens, to name some of the most prominent proponents. In European countries there were smaller communities of medical/health historians. In Germany it was primarily the province of medical professionals.

Yet a community of historians of health and medicine was not visible in the UK until the 1950s. 16 The watershed moment of creation of the full British welfare state in 1948 played a critical role in permitting more robust ‘before and after’ historical analysis. Indeed, many of the leading historians working in this area have focused on the achievements of 1948 within their work to support their personal political values. This is not the place in which to digress into a detailed history of the history of health and medicine, but it is useful to outline the leading UK scholars, and a broad split into sub-genres, as this impacts on the UK case studies provided in this paper.

Some, such as Roy Porter and W.F. [Bill] Bynum, focused on science and medicine in the period before the NHS. Others, such as Asa Briggs and Anthony Wohl would be more properly classified as social historians, but their classic books Victorian People and Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain are defining works in the history of public health and early state medicine. 17 Some historians moved into this area having previously worked on related themes. Charles Webster’s early interests were in early modern science. He then widened his scope to consider medicine in the same period, but it was not until the 1980s that he shifted his focus to the twentieth century, and in particular the health of the working classes. 18 He was then invited to write the official history of the National Health Service, which appeared in two volumes in 1988 and 1996. 19

Webster is a ‘proper’ historian, in that he was trained and employed as an academic historian throughout his career. But it is interesting that some of the most influential UK health history books have been written by scholars for whom history was not their ‘day job’. Brian Abel-Smith, a health economist and professor of social administration, produced histories of the British nursing profession and hospitals which remain definitive texts. 20 These were important political and policy histories of aspects of health care: they were written in support of his socialist principles that a universal free health care system was an intrinsic component of social justice in a civilised society, and a basic human right. Abel-Smith actively used historical context and historical analysis in his work as one of the first special advisers to the British government. He worked closely with Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and David Ennals, when they served as Secretaries of State for Health during the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79. 21 He routinely incorporated history into his briefing papers, and produced anniversary accounts of the NHS to help secure its position at times of increasing financial attacks from the Treasury. 22

Geoffrey Rivett also used his considerable insider knowledge of the NHS and the DHSS/DH as a former general practitioner and civil servant to write comprehensive histories of the British NHS. 23 Other health care (service) historians with different backgrounds who were writing in the first phase include Rudolf Klein who initially approached health care from a contemporary public policy perspective, and Nicholas Timmins, who was social policy editor for the Financial Times. 24 It has also attracted comparative historical analysis through the work of Dan Fox, a US health policy adviser. 25

‘Applied’ History and Historians in the UK

All of the British health care histories noted above, most of them produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, share common features: they are substantial books (most of them more than 300 pages) and their target audiences were primarily the academic community, although some sought wider policymaking and public audiences. Some, such as Abel-Smith, wished to use their work to consolidate and secure the history and future of the NHS; some of the anniversary histories have also been appropriated by politicians and used to legitimise their revisions to Health Minister Aneurin Bevan’s founding principles, while at the same time canonising him within political history (see for example Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreword to Geoffrey Rivett’s history of the NHS on its 50th anniversary).

Yet it is labour-intensive to take these ‘gold standard’ comprehensive histories of British health care and to use them to support contemporary health policy making. Policymakers prefer short briefing papers and find synthesis of key analysis into bullet points helpful. It is difficult to take even standard academic papers, focusing on specific health care issues, to generate useful ‘policy-applicable’ history. Health care historians, responding to and building on the pioneers listed above, have increasingly chosen to focus on smaller, more manageable themes: hospitals, diseases, clinical innovations, staffing. There has been a trend since the 1990s to push back the period of study to before the creation of the NHS in 1948—to properly examine the ‘mixed economy’ of health care in the inter-war period, which had traditionally been written up as universally bleak. 26 Another trend has been to look specifically at the history of health care policy development, rather than its delivery and impact. 27

Alongside this trend for thematic health care histories, has been the emergence of overt ‘policy applied’ health historians. The case studies presented below draw on my personal experiences. Other historians who have increasingly adopted this mantle include Virginia Berridge, whose success is evidenced by her creation and leadership of the first Centre for History in Public Health, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2003. Berridge’s career has included significant advisory roles to policymakers working on AIDS, drugs and alcohol policy. 28 What policy-applied health historians have collectively experienced can be grouped as three key issues: the role of networking to gain access to policymakers; synchronicity with policymaking schedules; style of engagement. These are common issues in the expert/policymaking arena, as evidenced by policy theory literature. 29

Case Study 1: Public Health in 1847 and 1997

Liverpool experienced some of the worst epidemics of infectious diseases (cholera, typhus, typhoid) of the early nineteenth century. Its image as a dangerously unhealthy place finally persuaded the urban authority to take action. In 1846, a local Act of Parliament was passed which created the first British public health team, and three men were appointed to start work on 1 January 1847 to deliver a radical programme of sanitary reform (Dr William Henry Duncan as Medical Officer of Health, James Newlands as Borough Engineer, and Thomas Fresh as Inspector of Nuisances). Liverpool continued to develop and implement radical policy solutions through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the first public housing schemes, clean air legislation and attempts at introducing a local ban on smoking in public places. In 1995, John Ashton, then Regional Director of Public Health for North West England, who had previously been a professor of public health at the University of Liverpool, and who had a keen amateur interest in history, commissioned a ‘year of public health’ for 1997 to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of professional public health in the UK.

Ashton supported the creation of a research post in the history of public health at the University of Liverpool, to which I was appointed (later converted into a lectureship). Together we discussed how Liverpool’s health history could be used to generate public debate on the changing determinants of health, especially income levels, unemployment, access to healthcare, and lifestyle factors such as smoking, exercise and diet. This deliberate public engagement policy was intended to be used as leverage with national policymakers on the negative impact of cutting benefits and health services, which had had a disproportionate effect in Liverpool since the election of a Conservative government (under Margaret Thatcher) in 1979. I used the history of local health and healthcare to develop an exhibition with the Museum of Liverpool Life and a programme of ‘celebratory events’, including artistic commissions and activities with local schools. The evaluation at the end of 1997 demonstrated that local awareness of the relative role of health determinants had improved. The city council and local NHS authorities were stimulated by understanding how major policy developments had been achieved by three pioneers in 1847, despite a lack of local funding, staffing or national support. They were encouraged to draw contemporary comparisons and to think more broadly and creatively about solutions to Liverpool’s chronic poor health.

The collaboration between myself and local health policymakers in Liverpool was reported to the UK Department of Public Health. As Liverpool’s pioneering 1846 Sanatory Act was also the foundation for the first national legislation: the 1848 Public Health Act, I was invited to brief the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Sir Kenneth Calman, and to write a section for his annual report. Working with the US health historian Chris Hamlin, I also presented this history to a wider medical professional audience in an article in the British Medical Journal which drew comparisons between the 1848 Act and the plans to re-structure public health in 1998. 30

Case study 2: The Decline of the UK Medical Civil Service

Policymakers’ knowledge of where to go for health history is also highlighted through this second case study, which directly leads from the first. When I presented my analysis of the 1848 Public Health Act and its relevance to the 1998 Act at Calman’s final report launch I met the in-coming CMO, Sir Liam Donaldson. He wrote to me afterwards, expressing an interest in the history of the role of the CMO, and inviting me to write a joint research application, which was subsequently funded by the Nuffield Trust.

Between autumn 1998 and the publication of The Nation’s Doctor: the Role of the Chief Medical Officer 1855 – 1998 in 2006, Donaldson and I met regularly in his Department of Health office in Whitehall, London. We agreed a work plan in which I conducted the historical analysis and wrote the draft chapters, which he then commented on. As the research progressed we discussed emerging issues such as completeness of sources, strengths and weaknesses of oral history, balancing chronological progression with thematic analysis, and historiography: how previous historians had written about CMOs and their work. It emerged that most of the CMOs had faced similar recurrent problems, especially control of adequate staff; relations with the wider civil service and the medical profession; Whitehall culture; the right to speak independently of the government on health issues. These were also issues that Donaldson was then experiencing as the current CMO.

Over the course of 6 years I learnt a lot about how Whitehall works, from reading archive materials deposited by former CMOs, civil servants and politicians, and from discussions with Donaldson about how to achieve policy change, especially on contentious issues such as banning smoking in public places. This was one of his key objectives as CMO, but one which the UK government found tricky as it risked accusations of ‘nanny state-ism’. I researched how previous CMOs had handled the initial discovery of the association between smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s, and then worked towards effective policies to reduce smoking. I demonstrated, through analysis of the archives of the Ministry of Health and the Treasury, that the Conservative governments of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan were reluctant to run effective health education campaigns partly because the relatively new NHS was heavily reliant on revenue from tobacco tax. Sir John Charles, the CMO in post when the association was established, was persuaded not to be too pro-active on this issue. He was allowed to stay in post beyond the usual civil service retirement age because he was ‘amenable’ to pressure from the Treasury, who anticipated that his nominated successor, Sir George Godber, would not be so malleable. Godber did indeed take a much tougher line, and got around the issue of Whitehall policy intransigence by taking it outside government to his medical colleagues in the Royal College of Physicians. He persuaded them to run a hard-hitting, plain English campaign in 1962, which had significant impact in reducing the high levels of smoking in the UK. 31

The policy lessons from the 1950s history of smoking and lung cancer were indirect but helpful. They illuminated the importance of involving external expertise, and of ensuring senior medical civil servants were not intentionally side-lined by other government departments when financial concerns competed with scientific evidence. These were common ‘history lessons’ that emerged from other research for The Nation’s Doctor . One of the case studies that had significant ‘impact’ was on the history of the CMO’s access to medical expertise. From Sir John Simon in 1855 onwards, the CMO had direct line management of medical civil servants, and was able to direct them to conduct rapid investigations into emerging health crises, such as the outbreak of epidemics. This regularly caused friction with the rest of the civil service, especially the Permanent Secretaries in the Ministry/Department of Health, some of whom resented the CMO being able to directly access the Minister without their approval. Sir Arthur Newsholme (CMO between 1908 and 1919) later recorded his frustration that there was:

…an honest belief, common to many government departments, that technical advice is advice not to be given until called for by the secretariat [lay civil service] who, it is assumed, are entirely competent to decide whether such advice is needed. Second, when such advice is on record, it is assumed that it can be safely reapplied in what are regarded by the secretariat as analogous circumstances. 32

Many of the fourteen men who held the CMO role between 1855 and 1998 found ways to manage this issue, but the last two, Sir Donald Acheson (1984–91) and Sir Kenneth Calman (1991–98) came up against a more substantial obstacle: the successive Whitehall efficiency reviews that from 1979 onwards aimed at shrinking the civil service. These culminated in 1994 in the merger of the previously parallel medical and ‘lay’ civil service reporting hierarchies in the Department of Health, effectively reducing the CMO’s capacity to call upon the support of medical civil servants, at a time of several significant new health threats, including HIV/AIDS, BSE and MRSA. At the peak of the medical civil service in the early 1970s, the CMO had direct line management of over 170 medically qualified civil servants, who provided expertise on the development and implementation of new medical treatments as well as on broader health protection and promotion issues. By the time Calman gave evidence to the BSE enquiry in 1998, he was left with, in his own words, ‘a secretary and a mobile phone’. 33 I demonstrated, through analysis of archive papers (made available to the Phillips Enquiry on BSE, which would have been otherwise closed under the government’s 30 years rule), and through a series of oral history interviews with senior civil servants, medical professionals and politicians, that there had been a longer decline in medical manpower in Whitehall, and that this had restricted the effectiveness of responses to emerging health crises.

I used the historical evidence I collected on the issue of the shrinking of medical civil service in several ways. First, it formed sections of The Nation’s Doctor , co-written with Sir Liam Donaldson. Second, I was approached in 2008 by a medically qualified member of the House of Lords, who had read The Nation’s Doctor and wished to use the recent history of the decline of the medical civil service to push the government to invest in staffing and return some of the traditional mechanisms for soliciting external expertise, which had been damaged in the successive Whitehall culls. I re-drafted the analysis for a policy paper published on the website History and Policy . 34 This generated coverage in the Guardian newspaper, and a letter from Lord Ara Darzi, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (2007–09). I later learnt from senior civil servants in the Department of Health that the issues I had raised had generated internal debate and an investigation into how to improve institutional memory. Third, I published a longer version of the paper in the academic journal Social Policy and Administration , in a more conventional academic format. 35

Synchronicity and Styles of Engagement

These personal case studies illuminate the core issues of engagement: the role of networking to gain access to policymakers; synchronicity with policymaking schedules; style of engagement. I have discussed the need to be flexible (accommodating to policymakers’ schedules for meetings, deadlines and focus of outputs). It is worth saying more about the issues of synchronicity and styles of engagement. From my other experiences of working with policymakers I have come to appreciate the need to respond quickly: policymakers work on much shorter timescales, often looking for analysis results within weeks or months. Historians, especially those engaged on large projects, will be more comfortable with planning their research over years rather than months. The conventional format of outputs as monographs (prioritised by the periodic Research Excellence Framework [REF]), and academic journal articles take months or years to write and then work their way through rigorous peer review systems, which then need to be fitted into publishing schedules.

History and Policy, a UK web-based academic organisation, was founded in 2002 partly in response to this ‘constipated’ academic output culture. 36 It now has a membership of over 500 historians, who are encouraged to work up their research into short Policy Papers and Opinion Pieces. These go through quick peer review for rapid web-based publication. The papers are carefully targeted at policymakers and journalists by the organisation’s press officers. Where possible, publications are scheduled to coincide with anticipated government policy statements. The policy papers begin with executive summaries, in the style of policy briefing papers. They contain essential historical context, and provide suggested further sources. History and Policy has developed from its early focus on presenting academic history in a new format, to deliver bespoke services to government departments (seminar series and workshops). It engages directly with policymakers; responds quickly to invitations to collaborate, for example, providing historical content for the No. 10 Downing Street [Office of the Prime Minister] website; and supports historians in preparing written submissions to parliamentary enquiries. 37

Other new styles of engagement between historians and policymakers have been developed within the last couple of decades. Witness seminars provide opportunities for people who were involved in significant policy decisions to come together and reflect on the process and outcomes. The Wellcome Trust has been one of the most active pioneers of this format, convening more than 50 witness seminars on a wide range of health policy issues, from development of hip replacements to epigenetics. 38 Early career historians are offered training in public and policy engagement (History and Policy regularly run workshops, funded by the main research councils), and some are able to take up placements in government departments.

The issue of location of historians is also critical. While most historians are based within traditional university history departments, there is a strong case to be made for ‘embedding’ historians within other academic departments and in external policymaking environments. This provides more opportunities for serendipitous encounters, and encourages policymakers to seek advice. For historians, the benefit of having other homes is that they are there at the moments when policy shifts become apparent, and can respond efficiently. They can develop the necessary language of the policymaking organisation and knowledge of how policy ‘gets done’: the complexities of local and national government committees and reviews, the importance of knowing key staff. These issues are of course not specific to historians, but relevant to all expert policy advisers, and are analysed in Richard Freeman and Steve Sturdy’s excellent edited book, Knowledge in Policy: Embodied, inscribed, enacted . 39

Despite the considerable progress made by historians in engaging with health policymakers in the UK, it is important to be realistic on the authority of historical knowledge in the policy arena. It competes with analyses of the current situation, and predictions of possible future scenarios. The mode of engagement—usually crisis-driven if initiated from the policy community—de-limits a ‘context-only’ or ‘passive–reactive’ response from the historian. Yet history used to be the default policy science. 40 Although historians are still often asked for ‘facts’ rather than analysis, they are getting better at initiating a more useful mode of engagement. 41 Good examples come from the recent health and social care scandals of Mid-Staffordshire Hospital and those triggered by the exposure of Jimmy Savile’s abuse of vulnerable children and adults. Historians from the History and Policy organisation were invited to give evidence to the Savile public inquiry, and several opinion pieces were written that addressed the ‘never again’ issue behind these scandals. 42 However, we rarely reach a critical tipping point that permits policy change on the primary basis of historical evidence. 43 Historical analysis has not yet become an integral and initial part of policy planning process.

Robust and routine historical analysis of new policy issues can add real value. 44 It permits discussion of some of the bigger, or neglected questions in health and health care, such as choice of funding mechanisms, expectations and responsibilities (by both the public and the state). It can illuminate more fundamental issues, such as health as a human right, and demonstrate the implications of politicising access to health care, that may have evolved over centuries, rather than the years which usually delimit the frame of reference for policymakers. Historical analysis can explain the persistence of institutional structures (the NHS) and cultural attitudes (the British public’s love for the NHS) and expose how policymakers use history to reinforce or disrupt the status quo. Its preference for subjective, intuitive analysis (of texts, oral history) can cope with the finer nuances involved in policymaking: the ‘what if’ and ‘so what’ quandaries. It enables a better understanding of the policy development process, and through specific case studies show what happens when potential policies get forgotten or deliberately side-lined. 45 Historians are skilled at handling complexity: there are significant similarities between what historians, improvement scientists and policymakers do. What needs to be further developed are the shared objectives and language to enable a more rewarding collaboration.

1 J. Tosh and S. Lang, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (New York 4th edition, Longman Pearson, 2006), p. 1–2.

2 R. Hirsh, ‘Historians of Technology in the Real World: Reflections on the Pursuit of Policy-Oriented History’, Technology and Culture 52; 1 (2011); 6–20.

3 V. Berridge, ‘History Matters? History’s role in health policymaking’, Medical History 52 (2008); 311–326.

4 See for example how the historian Charles Webster took the Labour government to task in 2002 for rewriting NHS history to suit its current reform plans: C. Webster, ‘The Parable of the Incompetent Steward’, British Journal of Health Care Management 8; 3 (2002); 113–14.

5 A. Bashford and C. Strange, ‘Thinking historically about public health’, Medical Humanities 33 (2007): 87–92. ‘Gothic’ is used here to mean a preoccupation with events that are portentously gloomy or horrifying.

6 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992); P. Catterall, ‘What (if anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, Journal of Contemporary History 32; 4 (1997); 451.

7 G. Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), p. 20.

8 J.L. Gaddis , On contemporary history. An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford 18 May 1993 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995); P. Catterall, ‘What (if anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, Journal of Contemporary History 32; 4 (1997); 444–52.

9 J.L. Gaddis , On contemporary history. An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford 18 May 1993 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 21.

10 F. Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: la longue durée’ , 1958, reprinted in F. Braudel, On History (trans. Sarah Matthews) (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also J. Tosh (with S Lang), The Pursuit of History (Harlow, Pearson Education Ltd, 1984).

11 D. Porter, The Emergence of the Past. A Theory of Historical Explanation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. ix.

12 Porter, Emergence of the Past , pp. 29–31.

13 Porter, Emergence of the Past , p. 2.

14 The term comes from the Whigs—a British political party active from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

15 The German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) was influential in setting standards for historical methodologies, especially the use of primary sources and an emphasis on narrative history and international politics.

16 As one reviewer pointed out, this was also the period when medical ethics, bioethics and medical law emerged as distinct disciplines. See D. Wilson, ‘What can History Do for Bioethics?’, Bioethics 27;4 (2013); 215–223; J. Harrington, Towards a Rhetoric of Medical Law (London, Routledge, 2016).

17 A. Briggs, Victorian People (1983); A.S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London, Dent, 1983).

18 C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York, Holmes & Meier, 1975); C. Webster, Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979); C. Webster, Biology. Medicine and Society 1840-1940 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981); C. Webster, ‘, ‘Healthy or Hungry Thirties?’, History Workshop Journal , 13, 1 (1982); 110–29.

19 C. Webster, Problems of Health Care: the National Health Service Before 1957 (London, HMSO, 1988); C. Webster, Government and Health Care: the National Health Service 1958–1979 (London, The Stationery Office, 1996).

20 B. Abel-Smith, A History of the Nursing Profession (London, Heinemann, 1960); B. Abel-Smith, The Hospitals 1800-1948 (London, Heinemann, 1964).

21 S. Sheard, The Passionate Economist. How Brian Abel-Smith shaped global health and social welfare (Bristol, Policy Press, 2013).

22 A. Abel-Smith, The National Health Service: the First Thirty Years (London, HMSO, 1978).

23 G. Rivett, The Development of London’s Hospital Systems (1986); G. Rivett, From Cradle to Grave: 50   Years of the NHS (London, King’s Fund, 1998).

24 R. Klein, The Politics of the National Health Service (London, Longmans, 1983); N. Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (London, Fontana, 1996).

25 D. Fox, Health Policies, Health Politics: the British and American Experience, 1911–1965 (Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1986).

26 S. Szreter, ‘Health, Class, Place and Politics; social capital and collective provision in Britain’, Contemporary British History 3(2002); 27–57; J. Stewart, ‘Ideology and Process in the Creation of the British National Health Service’, Journal of Policy History 14 No. 2 (2002); 114–134; M. Gorsky and S. Sheard (eds), Financing Medicine: The British Experience since 1750 (Routledge, 2006); A. Levene, M. Powell, J. Stewart and B. Taylor, Cradle to Grave: Municipal medicine in Inter-war England and Wales (Peter Lang, 2011); M. Gorsky, ‘Local Government Health Services in Interwar England: Problems of Quantification and Interpretation’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2011 (85), 384–412; M Gorsky, ‘The British NHS 1948–2008: A review of the historiography’, Social History of Medicine 21 (2008), 437–60.

27 V. Berridge (ed.), Making Health Policy: Networks in Research and Policy after 1945 (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005).

28 Berridge, ‘History Matters?’ (2008); V. Berridge and J. Stewart, History: a social science neglected by other social sciences (and why it should not be), Contemporary Social Science 7; 1 (2012); 39–54.

29 E. Perdiguero, J Bernabeu, R. Hertas and E. Rodriguez-Ocana, ‘History of health, a valuable tool in public health’, J. Epidemiology and Community Health 55 (2001); 667–673; S. Sheard, ‘History in health and health services: exploring the possibilities’, J. Epidemiology and Community Health 62 (2008); 740–744; R. Freeman and S. Sturdy (eds), Knowledge in Policy: Embodied, inscribed, enacted (Bristol, Policy Press, 2015).

30 C. Hamlin and S. Sheard, ‘Revolutions in public health: 1848, and 1998?’, British Medical Journal 317 (1998); 587–91.

31 Royal College of Physicians of London, Smoking and Health: report of the Royal College of Physicians of London on smoking in relation to cancer of the lung and other diseases (London, Pitman, 1962).

32 A. Newsholme, The Last 30   Years in Public Health (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1936), p. 62.

33 British Medical Journal editorial, ‘Staff cuts would leave the CMO stranded’ , British Medical Journal 317 (1998); 232.

34 S. Sheard, ‘Doctors in Whitehall: how the government manages medical advice at the 60 th anniversary of the NHS, www.historyandpolicy.org.uk (last accessed 27.12.16).

35 S. Sheard, ‘Quacks and Clerks: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Structure and Function of the British Medical Civil Service’ , Social Policy and Administration 44;2 (2010), 193–207.

36 http://www.historyandpolicy.org/ . Last accessed 2.2.17.

37 M. Gorsky, Memorandum submitted to the Health Select Committee Inquiry into Public and Patient Involvement in the NHS. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/hp/docs/gorsky_memo.pdf/ . Last accessed 2.2.17.

38 https://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/09/24/21-years-wellcome-witness/ . Last accessed 2.2.17.

39 Freeman and Sturdy, Knowledge in Policy .

40 V. Berridge and J. Stewart, ‘History: a social science neglected by other social sciences (and why it should not be)’, Contemporary Social Science 7; 1 (2012); 39–54; E. Fee and D. Fox, ‘Introduction: AIDS, public policy and historical enquiry’, in E. Fee and D. Fox (eds ), AIDS and the burdens of history (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1988), 1–11.

41 V. Berridge, Public or Policy Understanding of History? Social History of Medicine 16; 3 (2003); 511–523.

42 See also the US historian Allan Brandt’s contributions as an expert witness in a landmark 2006 court case involving tobacco companies, in which he explained how they manipulated the scientific debate over the risks of smoking in the 1950s. A.M. Brandt, ‘From analysis to advocacy: crossing boundaries as a historian of health policy’, in F. Huisman and J.H. Warner (eds), Locating Medical History (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). A. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York, Basic Books, 2009).

43 C. Hilton, ‘Whistle-blowing in the National Health Service since the 1960s’, History and Policy paper published 26.8.16. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/whistle-blowing-in-the-national-health-service-since-the-1960s . Last accessed 2.2.17; S. Sheard, Can we never learn? Abuse, complaints and inquiries in the NHS’, History and Policy paper published 26.2.15. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/why-we-never-learn-abuse-complaints-and-inquiries-in-the-nhs . Last accessed 2.2.17; A. Bingham, L.Delap, L. Jackson and L. Settle, ‘” These outrages are going on more than people know”’, History and Policy paper published 26.2.15. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/these-outrages-are-going-on-more-than-people-know . Last accessed 2.2.17.

44 For a US perspective see J. Zelizer, Clio’s Lost Tribe: Public Policy History since 1978’, Journal of Policy History 12 (2000); 369–94.

45 R.E. Neustadt and E.R. May, Thinking in Time: the Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York, Free Press, 1986).

How to Write a History Essay with Outline, Tips, Examples and More

Samuel Gorbold

Before we get into how to write a history essay, let's first understand what makes one good. Different people might have different ideas, but there are some basic rules that can help you do well in your studies. In this guide, we won't get into any fancy theories. Instead, we'll give you straightforward tips to help you with historical writing. So, if you're ready to sharpen your writing skills, let our history essay writing service explore how to craft an exceptional paper.

What is a History Essay?

A history essay is an academic assignment where we explore and analyze historical events from the past. We dig into historical stories, figures, and ideas to understand their importance and how they've shaped our world today. History essay writing involves researching, thinking critically, and presenting arguments based on evidence.

Moreover, history papers foster the development of writing proficiency and the ability to communicate complex ideas effectively. They also encourage students to engage with primary and secondary sources, enhancing their research skills and deepening their understanding of historical methodology. Students can benefit from utilizing essay writers services when faced with challenging assignments. These services provide expert assistance and guidance, ensuring that your history papers meet academic standards and accurately reflect your understanding of the subject matter.

History Essay Outline

The outline is there to guide you in organizing your thoughts and arguments in your essay about history. With a clear outline, you can explore and explain historical events better. Here's how to make one:

Introduction

• Hook: Start with an attention-grabbing opening sentence or anecdote related to your topic.
• Background Information: Provide context on the historical period, event, or theme you'll be discussing.
• Thesis Statement: Present your main argument or viewpoint, outlining the scope and purpose of your history essay.

Body paragraph 1: Introduction to the Historical Context

• Provide background information on the historical context of your topic.
• Highlight key events, figures, or developments leading up to the main focus of your history essay.

Body paragraphs 2-4 (or more): Main Arguments and Supporting Evidence

• Each paragraph should focus on a specific argument or aspect of your thesis.
• Present evidence from primary and secondary sources to support each argument.
• Analyze the significance of the evidence and its relevance to your history paper thesis.

Counterarguments (optional)

• Address potential counterarguments or alternative perspectives on your topic.
• Refute opposing viewpoints with evidence and logical reasoning.
• Summary of Main Points: Recap the main arguments presented in the body paragraphs.
• Restate Thesis: Reinforce your thesis statement, emphasizing its significance in light of the evidence presented.
• Reflection: Reflect on the broader implications of your arguments for understanding history.
• Closing Thought: End your history paper with a thought-provoking statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader.

References/bibliography

• List all sources used in your research, formatted according to the citation style required by your instructor (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago).
• Include both primary and secondary sources, arranged alphabetically by the author's last name.

Notes (if applicable)

• Include footnotes or endnotes to provide additional explanations, citations, or commentary on specific points within your history essay.

History Essay Format

Adhering to a specific format is crucial for clarity, coherence, and academic integrity. Here are the key components of a typical history essay format:

Font and Size

• Use a legible font such as Times New Roman, Arial, or Calibri.
• The recommended font size is usually 12 points. However, check your instructor's guidelines, as they may specify a different size.
• Set 1-inch margins on all sides of the page.
• Double-space the entire essay, including the title, headings, body paragraphs, and references.
• Avoid extra spacing between paragraphs unless specified otherwise.
• Align text to the left margin; avoid justifying the text or using a centered alignment.

Title Page (if required):

• If your instructor requires a title page, include the essay title, your name, the course title, the instructor's name, and the date.
• Center-align this information vertically and horizontally on the page.
• Include a header on each page (excluding the title page if applicable) with your last name and the page number, flush right.
• Some instructors may require a shortened title in the header, usually in all capital letters.
• Center-align the essay title at the top of the first page (if a title page is not required).
• Use standard capitalization (capitalize the first letter of each major word).
• Avoid underlining, italicizing, or bolding the title unless necessary for emphasis.

Paragraph Indentation:

• Indent the first line of each paragraph by 0.5 inches or use the tab key.
• Do not insert extra spaces between paragraphs unless instructed otherwise.

Citations and References:

• Follow the citation style specified by your instructor (e.g., MLA, APA, Chicago).
• Include in-text citations whenever you use information or ideas from external sources.
• Provide a bibliography or list of references at the end of your history essay, formatted according to the citation style guidelines.
• Typically, history essays range from 1000 to 2500 words, but this can vary depending on the assignment.

How to Write a History Essay?

Historical writing can be an exciting journey through time, but it requires careful planning and organization. In this section, we'll break down the process into simple steps to help you craft a compelling and well-structured history paper.

Analyze the Question

Before diving headfirst into writing, take a moment to dissect the essay question. Read it carefully, and then read it again. You want to get to the core of what it's asking. Look out for keywords that indicate what aspects of the topic you need to focus on. If you're unsure about anything, don't hesitate to ask your instructor for clarification. Remember, understanding how to start a history essay is half the battle won!

Now, let's break this step down:

• Read the question carefully and identify keywords or phrases.
• Consider what the question is asking you to do – are you being asked to analyze, compare, contrast, or evaluate?
• Pay attention to any specific instructions or requirements provided in the question.
• Take note of the time period or historical events mentioned in the question – this will give you a clue about the scope of your history essay.

Develop a Strategy

With a clear understanding of the essay question, it's time to map out your approach. Here's how to develop your historical writing strategy:

• Brainstorm ideas : Take a moment to jot down any initial thoughts or ideas that come to mind in response to the history paper question. This can help you generate a list of potential arguments, themes, or points you want to explore in your history essay.
• Create an outline : Once you have a list of ideas, organize them into a logical structure. Start with a clear introduction that introduces your topic and presents your thesis statement – the main argument or point you'll be making in your history essay. Then, outline the key points or arguments you'll be discussing in each paragraph of the body, making sure they relate back to your thesis. Finally, plan a conclusion that summarizes your main points and reinforces your history paper thesis.
• Research : Before diving into writing, gather evidence to support your arguments. Use reputable sources such as books, academic journals, and primary documents to gather historical evidence and examples. Take notes as you research, making sure to record the source of each piece of information for proper citation later on.
• Consider counterarguments : Anticipate potential counterarguments to your history paper thesis and think about how you'll address them in your essay. Acknowledging opposing viewpoints and refuting them strengthens your argument and demonstrates critical thinking.
• Set realistic goals : Be realistic about the scope of your history essay and the time you have available to complete it. Break down your writing process into manageable tasks, such as researching, drafting, and revising, and set deadlines for each stage to stay on track.

Start Your Research

Now that you've grasped the history essay topic and outlined your approach, it's time to dive into research. Here's how to start:

• Ask questions : What do you need to know? What are the key points to explore further? Write down your inquiries to guide your research.
• Explore diverse sources : Look beyond textbooks. Check academic journals, reliable websites, and primary sources like documents or artifacts.
• Consider perspectives : Think about different viewpoints on your topic. How have historians analyzed it? Are there controversies or differing interpretations?
• Take organized notes : Summarize key points, jot down quotes, and record your thoughts and questions. Stay organized using spreadsheets or note-taking apps.
• Evaluate sources : Consider the credibility and bias of each source. Are they peer-reviewed? Do they represent a particular viewpoint?

Establish a Viewpoint

By establishing a clear viewpoint and supporting arguments, you'll lay the foundation for your compelling historical writing:

• Review your research : Reflect on the information gathered. What patterns or themes emerge? Which perspectives resonate with you?
• Formulate a thesis statement : Based on your research, develop a clear and concise thesis that states your argument or interpretation of the topic.
• Consider counterarguments : Anticipate objections to your history paper thesis. Are there alternative viewpoints or evidence that you need to address?
• Craft supporting arguments : Outline the main points that support your thesis. Use evidence from your research to strengthen your arguments.
• Stay flexible : Be open to adjusting your viewpoint as you continue writing and researching. New information may challenge or refine your initial ideas.

Structure Your Essay

Now that you've delved into the depths of researching historical events and established your viewpoint, it's time to craft the skeleton of your essay: its structure. Think of your history essay outline as constructing a sturdy bridge between your ideas and your reader's understanding. How will you lead them from point A to point Z? Will you follow a chronological path through history or perhaps dissect themes that span across time periods?

And don't forget about the importance of your introduction and conclusion—are they framing your narrative effectively, enticing your audience to read your paper, and leaving them with lingering thoughts long after they've turned the final page? So, as you lay the bricks of your history essay's architecture, ask yourself: How can I best lead my audience through the maze of time and thought, leaving them enlightened and enriched on the other side?

Create an Engaging Introduction

Creating an engaging introduction is crucial for capturing your reader's interest right from the start. But how do you do it? Think about what makes your topic fascinating. Is there a surprising fact or a compelling story you can share? Maybe you could ask a thought-provoking question that gets people thinking. Consider why your topic matters—what lessons can we learn from history?

Also, remember to explain what your history essay will be about and why it's worth reading. What will grab your reader's attention and make them want to learn more? How can you make your essay relevant and intriguing right from the beginning?

Develop Coherent Paragraphs

Once you've established your introduction, the next step is to develop coherent paragraphs that effectively communicate your ideas. Each paragraph should focus on one main point or argument, supported by evidence or examples from your research. Start by introducing the main idea in a topic sentence, then provide supporting details or evidence to reinforce your point.

Make sure to use transition words and phrases to guide your reader smoothly from one idea to the next, creating a logical flow throughout your history essay. Additionally, consider the organization of your paragraphs—is there a clear progression of ideas that builds upon each other? Are your paragraphs unified around a central theme or argument?

Conclude Effectively

Concluding your history essay effectively is just as important as starting it off strong. In your conclusion, you want to wrap up your main points while leaving a lasting impression on your reader. Begin by summarizing the key points you've made throughout your history essay, reminding your reader of the main arguments and insights you've presented.

Then, consider the broader significance of your topic—what implications does it have for our understanding of history or for the world today? You might also want to reflect on any unanswered questions or areas for further exploration. Finally, end with a thought-provoking statement or a call to action that encourages your reader to continue thinking about the topic long after they've finished reading.

Reference Your Sources

Referencing your sources is essential for maintaining the integrity of your history essay and giving credit to the scholars and researchers who have contributed to your understanding of the topic. Depending on the citation style required (such as MLA, APA, or Chicago), you'll need to format your references accordingly. Start by compiling a list of all the sources you've consulted, including books, articles, websites, and any other materials used in your research.

Then, as you write your history essay, make sure to properly cite each source whenever you use information or ideas that are not your own. This includes direct quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. Remember to include all necessary information for each source, such as author names, publication dates, and page numbers, as required by your chosen citation style.

Review and Ask for Advice

As you near the completion of your history essay writing, it's crucial to take a step back and review your work with a critical eye. Reflect on the clarity and coherence of your arguments—are they logically organized and effectively supported by evidence? Consider the strength of your introduction and conclusion—do they effectively capture the reader's attention and leave a lasting impression? Take the time to carefully proofread your history essay for any grammatical errors or typos that may detract from your overall message.

Furthermore, seeking advice from peers, mentors, or instructors can provide valuable insights and help identify areas for improvement. Consider sharing your essay with someone whose feedback you trust and respect, and be open to constructive criticism. Ask specific questions about areas you're unsure about or where you feel your history essay may be lacking. If you need further assistance, don't hesitate to reach out and ask for help. You can even consider utilizing services that offer to write a discussion post for me , where you can engage in meaningful conversations with others about your essay topic and receive additional guidance and support.

History Essay Example

In this section, we offer an example of a history essay examining the impact of the Industrial Revolution on society. This essay demonstrates how historical analysis and critical thinking are applied in academic writing. By exploring this specific event, you can observe how historical evidence is used to build a cohesive argument and draw meaningful conclusions.

FAQs about History Essay Writing

How to write a history essay introduction, how to write a conclusion for a history essay, how to write a good history essay.

Samuel Gorbold , a seasoned professor with over 30 years of experience, guides students across disciplines such as English, psychology, political science, and many more. Together with EssayHub, he is dedicated to enhancing student understanding and success through comprehensive academic support.

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What Does It Mean to Think Historically?

Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke | Jan 1, 2007

Introduction

When we started working on Teachers for a New Era, a Carnegie-sponsored initiative designed to strengthen teacher training, we thought we knew a thing or two about our discipline. As we began reading such works as Sam Wineburg's Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts , however, we encountered an unexpected challenge. 1 If our understandings of the past constituted a sort of craft knowledge, how could we distill and communicate habits of mind we and our colleagues had developed through years of apprenticeship, guild membership, and daily practice to university students so that they, in turn, could impart these habits in K–12 classrooms?

In response, we developed an approach we call the "five C's of historical thinking." The concepts of change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency, we believe, together describe the shared foundations of our discipline. They stand at the heart of the questions historians seek to answer, the arguments we make, and the debates in which we engage. These ideas are hardly new to professional historians. But that is precisely their value: They make our implicit ways of thought explicit to the students and teachers whom we train. The five C's do not encompass the universe of historical thinking, yet they do provide a remarkably useful tool for helping students at practically any level learn how to formulate and support arguments based on primary sources, as well as to understand and challenge historical interpretations related in secondary sources. In this article, we define the five C's, explain how each concept helps us to understand the past, and provide some brief examples of how we have employed the five C's when teaching teachers. Our approach is necessarily broad and basic, characteristics well suited for a foundation upon which we invite our colleagues from kindergartens to research universities to build.

Change over Time

The idea of change over time is perhaps the easiest of the C's to grasp. Students readily acknowledge that we employ and struggle with technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we live by different laws, and that we enjoy different cultural pursuits. Moreover, students also note that some aspects of life remain the same across time. Many Europeans celebrate many of the same holidays that they did three or four hundred years ago, for instance, often using the same rituals and words to mark a day's significance. Continuity thus comprises an integral part of the idea of change over time.

Students often find the concept of change over time elementary. Even individuals who claim to despise history can remember a few dates and explain that some preceded or followed others. At any educational level, timelines can teach change over time as well as the selective process that leads people to pay attention to some events while ignoring others. In our U.S. survey class, we often ask students to interview family and friends and write a paper explaining how their family's history has intersected with major events and trends that we are studying. By discovering their own family's past, students often see how individuals can make a difference and how personal history changes over time along with major events.

As historians of the American West and environmental historians, we often turn to maps to teach change over time. The same space represented in different ways as political power, economic structures, and cultural influences shift can often put in shocking relief the differences that time makes. The work of repeat photographers such as Mark Klett offers another compelling tool for teaching change over time. Such photographers begin with a historic landscape photograph, then take pains to re-take the shot from the same site, at the same angle, using similar equipment, and even under analogous conditions. 2 While suburbs and industry have overrun many western locales, students are often surprised to see that some places have become more desolate and others have hardly changed at all. The exercise engages students with a non-written primary source, photographs, and demands that they reassess their expectations regarding how time changes.

Some things change, others stay the same—not a very interesting story but reason for concern since history, as the best teachers will tell you, is about telling stories. Good story telling, we contend, builds upon an understanding of context. Given young people's fascination with narratives and their enthusiasm for imaginative play, pupils (particularly elementary school students) often find context the most engaging element of historical thinking. As students mature, of course, they recognize that the past is not just a playful alternate universe. Working with primary sources, they discover that the past makes more sense when they set it within two frameworks. In our teaching, we liken the first to the floating words that roll across the screen at the beginning of every Star Wars film. This kind of context sets the stage; the second helps us to interpret evidence concerning the action that ensues. Texts, events, individual lives, collective struggles—all develop within a tightly interwoven world.

Historians who excel at the art of storytelling often rely heavily upon context. Jonathan Spence's Death of Woman Wang , for example, skillfully recreates 17th-century China by following the trail of a sparsely documented murder. To solve the mystery, students must understand the time and place in which it occurred. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich brings colonial New England to life by concentrating on the details of textile production and basket making in Age of Homespun . College courses regularly use the work of both authors because they not only spark student interest, but also hone students' ability to describe the past and identify distinctive elements of different eras. 3

Imaginative play is what makes context, arguably the easiest, yet also, paradoxically, the most difficult of the five C's to teach. Elementary school assignments that require students to research and wear medieval European clothes or build a California mission from sugar cubes both strive to teach context. The problem with such assignments is that they often blur the lines between reality and make-believe. The picturesque often trumps more banal or more disturbing truths. Young children may never be able to get all the facts straight. As one elementary school teacher once reminded us, "We teach kids who still believe in Santa Claus." Nonetheless, elementary school teachers can be cautious in their re-creations, and, most of all, they can be comfortable telling students when they don't know a given fact or when more research is necessary. That an idea might require more thought or more research is a valuable lesson at any age. The desire to recreate a world sometimes drives students to dig more deeply into their books, a reaction few teachers lament.

In our own classes, we have taught context using an assignment that we call "Fact, Fiction, or Creative Memory." In this exercise, students wrestle with a given source and determine whether it is primarily a work of history, fiction, or memory. We have asked students to bring in a present-day representation of 1950s life and explain what it teaches people today about life in 1950s America. Then, we have asked the class to discuss if the representation is a historically fair depiction of the era. We have also assigned textbook passages and Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall , then asked students to compare them to decide which offers stronger insights into the character of Cold War America. 4 Each of these assignments addresses context, because each asks students to think about the distinctions between representations of the past and the critical thinking about the past that is history. Moreoever, each asks students to weave together a variety of sources and assess the reliability of each before incorporating them into a whole.

Historians use context, change over time, and causality to form arguments explaining past change. While scientists can devise experiments to test theories and yield data, historians cannot alter past conditions to produce new information. Rather, they must base their arguments upon the interpretation of partial primary sources that frequently offer multiple explanations for a single event. Historians have long argued over the causes of the Protestant Reformation or World War I, for example, without achieving consensus. Such uncertainty troubles some students, but history classrooms are at their most dynamic when teachers encourage pupils to evaluate the contributions of multiple factors in shaping past events, as well as to formulate arguments asserting the primacy of some causes over others.

To teach causality, we have turned to the stand-by activities of the history classroom: debates and role-playing. After arming students with primary sources, we ask them to argue whether monetary or fiscal policy played a greater role in causing the Great Depression. After giving students descriptions drawn from primary sources of immigrant families in Los Angeles, we have asked students to take on the role of various family members and explain their reasons for immigrating and their reasons for settling in particular neighborhoods. Neither exercise is especially novel, but both fulfill a central goal of studying history: to develop persuasive explanations of historical events and processes based on logical interpretations of evidence.

Contingency

Contingency may, in fact, be the most difficult of the C's. To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently. Lee could have won at Gettysburg, Gore might have won in Florida, China might have inaugurated the world's first industrial revolution. Contingency can be an unsettling idea—so much so that people in the past have often tried to mask it with myths of national and racial destiny. The Pilgrim William Bradford, for instance, interpreted the decimation of New England's native peoples not as a consequence of smallpox, but as a literal godsend. 5 Two centuries later, American ideologues chose to rationalize their unlikely fortunes—from the purchase of Louisiana to the discovery of gold in California—as their nation's "Manifest Destiny." Historians, unlike Bradford and the apologists of westward expansion, look at the same outcomes differently. They see not divine fate, but a series of contingent results possessing other possibilities.

Contingency demands that students think deeply about past, present, and future. It offers a powerful corrective to teleology, the fallacy that events pursue a straight-arrow course to a pre-determined outcome, since people in the past had no way of anticipating our present world. Contingency also reminds us that individuals shape the course of human events. What if Karl Marx had decided to elude Prussian censors by emigrating to the United States instead of France, where he met Frederick Engels? To assert that the past is contingent is to impress upon students the notion that the future is up for grabs, and that they bear some responsibility for shaping the course of future history.

Contingency can be a difficult concept to present abstractly, but it suffuses the stories historians tend to tell about individual lives. Futurology, however, might offer an even stronger tool for imparting contingency than biography. Mechanistic views of history as the inevitable march toward the present tend to collapse once students see how different their world is from any predicted in the past.

Moral, epistemological, and causal complexity distinguish historical thinking from the conception of "history" held by many non-historians. 6 Re-enacting battles and remembering names and dates require effort but not necessarily analytical rigor. Making sense of a messy world that we cannot know directly, in contrast, is more confounding but also more rewarding.

Chronicles distill intricate historical processes into a mere catalogue, while nostalgia conjures an uncomplicated golden age that saves us the trouble of having to think about the past. Our own need for order can obscure our understanding of how past worlds functioned and blind us to the ways in which myths of rosy pasts do political and cultural work in the present. Reveling in complexity rather than shying away from it, historians seek to dispel the power of chronicle, nostalgia, and other traps that obscure our ability to understand the past on its own terms.

One of the most successful exercises we have developed for conveying complexity in all of these dimensions is a mock debate on Cherokee Removal. Two features of the exercise account for the richness and depth of understanding that it imparts on students. First, the debate involves multiple parties; the Treaty and Anti-Treaty Parties, Cherokee women, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, northern missionaries, the State of Georgia, and white settlers each offer a different perspective on the issue. Second, students develop their understanding of their respective positions using the primary sources collected in Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents by Theda Perdue and Michael Green. 7 While it can be difficult to assess what students learn from such exercises, we have noted anecdotally that, following the exercise, students seem much less comfortable referring to "American" or "Indian" positions as monolithic identities.

Our experiments with the five C's have confronted us with several challenges. These concepts offer a fluid tool for engaging historical thought at multiple levels, but they can easily degenerate into a checklist. Students who favor memorization over analysis seem inclined to recite the C's without necessarily understanding them. Moreover, as habits of mind, the five C's develop only with practice. Though primary and secondary schools increasingly emphasize some aspects of these themes, particularly the use of primary sources as evidence, more attention to the five C's with appropriate variations over the course of K–12 education would help future citizens not only to care about history, but also to contemplate it. It is our hope that this might help students to see the past not simply as prelude to our present, nor a list of facts to memorize, a cast of heroes and villains to cheer and boo, nor as an itinerary of places to tour, but rather as an ideal field for thinking long and hard about important questions.

—Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews are both assistant professors of history and Teachers for a New Era faculty members at California State University at Northridge. Burke is working on a book for the University Press of Kansas tentatively entitled Longing and Belonging: Mabel Dodge Luhan and Greenwich Village's Avant-Garde in Taos . Andrews is completing a manuscript for Harvard University Press, tentatively entitled Ludlow: The Nature of Industrial Struggle in the Colorado Coalfields .

1. Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

2. Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William L. Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron G. Wolfe, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004).

3. Jonathan D. Spence, Death of Woman Wang (New York: Viking, 1978); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001).

4. Don DeLillo, Pafko at the Wall: A Novella (New York: Scribner's, 2001).

5. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation , ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Random House, 1952).

6. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

7. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents 2nd ed. (Boston and New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005).

Tags: K12 Certification & Curricula Teaching Resources and Strategies

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The Importance of Historic Context in Analysis and Interpretation

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• M.Ed., Education Administration, University of Georgia
• B.A., History, Armstrong State University

Historical context is an important part of life and literature, and without it, memories, stories, and characters have less meaning. Historical context deals with the details that surround an occurrence. In more technical terms, historical context refers to the social, religious, economic, and political conditions that existed during a certain time and place. Basically, it's all the details of the time and place in which a situation occurs, and those details are what enable us to interpret and analyze works or events of the past, or even the future, rather than merely judge them by contemporary standards.

In literature, a strong understanding of the historical context behind a work's creation can give us a better understanding of and appreciation for the narrative . In analyzing historical events, context can help us understand what motivates people to behave as they did.

Put another way, context is what gives meaning to the details. It's important, however, that you don't confuse context with cause. Cause is the action that creates an outcome; context is the environment in which that action and outcome occur.

Words and Deeds

Whether dealing with fact or fiction, historical context is important when interpreting behavior and speech. Consider the following sentence which, devoid of context, sounds innocent enough:

"Sally hid her hands behind her back and crossed her fingers before she answered."

But imagine that this statement comes from a transcript of court documents in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 during the famed Salem Witch Trials . Religious fervor was at an extreme, and villagers were nearly obsessed with the devil and witchcraft. At that time, if a young woman were to tell a lie, it was fodder for hysteria and a violent reaction. A reader would assume that poor Sally was a candidate for the gallows.

Now, imagine you're reading a letter from a mother that contains this sentence:

"My daughter will be heading to California shortly after she marries."

How much information does this statement give us? Not much, until we consider when it was written. Should we discover that the letter was written in 1849, we will realize that one sentence can sometimes say a lot. A young woman heading for California in 1849 might be following her husband on a treacherous treasure-seeking expedition for the gold rush. This mother would probably be quite fearful for her child, and she would know that it would be a very long time before she'd see her daughter again, if ever.

Historical Context in Literature

No work of literature can be fully appreciated or understood without historical context. What may seem nonsensical or even offensive to contemporary sensibilities, might actually be interpreted in a completely different manner by considering the era it is from.

A good example is Mark Twain's " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ," published in 1885. It is considered an enduring work of American literature and a biting social satire. But it is also criticized by modern critics for its casual use of a racial epithet to describe Huck's friend Jim, a freedom-seeking enslaved person. Such language is shocking and offensive to many readers today, but in the context of the day, it was​ the commonplace language for many.

Back in the mid-1880s, when attitudes toward newly liberated enslaved African Americans were often indifferent at best and hostile at worst, the casual use of such racial epithets wouldn't have been considered unusual. In fact, what is actually more surprising, given the historical context of when the novel was written, is Huck's treating Jim not as his inferior but as his equal—something rarely portrayed in the literature of the time.

Similarly, Mary Shelley's " Frankenstein"  cannot be fully appreciated by a reader who is unaware of the Romantic movement that took place in art and literature in the early 19th century. It was a time of rapid social and political upheaval in Europe when lives were transformed by the technological disruptions of the Industrial Age.

The Romantics captured the public's sense of isolation and fear that many experienced as a result of these social changes. "Frankenstein" becomes more than a good monster story, it becomes an allegory for how technology can destroy us.

Other Uses of Historical Context

Scholars and educators rely on historical context to analyze and interpret works of art, literature, music, dance, and poetry. Architects and builders rely on it when designing new structures and restoring existing buildings. Judges may use it to interpret the law, historians to understand the past. Any time critical analysis is required, you may need to consider historical context as well.

Without historical context, we are only seeing a piece of the scene and not fully understanding the influence of the time and place in which a situation occurred.

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Historical Research Approaches to the Analysis of Internationalisation

• Research Article
• Open access
• Published: 29 September 2016
• Volume 56 , pages 879–900, ( 2016 )

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• Peter J. Buckley 1  

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Historical research methods and approaches can improve understanding of the most appropriate techniques to confront data and test theories in internationalisation research. A critical analysis of all “texts” (sources), time series analyses, comparative methods across time periods and space, counterfactual analysis and the examination of outliers are shown to have the potential to improve research practices. Examples and applications are shown in these key areas of research with special reference to internationalisation processes. Examination of these methods allows us to see internationalisation processes as a sequenced set of decisions in time and space, path dependent to some extent but subject to managerial discretion. Internationalisation process research can benefit from the use of historical research methods in analysis of sources, production of time-lines, using comparative evidence across time and space and in the examination of feasible alternative choices.

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1 Introduction

The title of this focused issue is ‘About Time: Putting Process Back into Firm Internationalisation Research’. It would therefore seem obvious that historical research methods, whose primary concern is the role of time, would be at the forefront of the analysis. This is not necessarily the case, as these methods are neglected in internationalisation research, and in international business more generally. Historians face many of the same research problems that business researchers do—notably questions related to the analysis of process—but they have produced different answers, particularly in relation to the nature of causation. As a field, international business researchers need to question our research approaches more deeply.

This paper seeks to examine the types of research approaches from history that might aid in a more rounded analysis of internationalisation. Issues of sequencing, path dependence, contingent choices and the evaluation of alternatives are all critical in the internationalisation process and are grist to the mill of historical research. An examination of historical research methods leads to a new approach to the concept of internationalisation itself.

1.1 Historical Research Approaches: The Challenge of Different Underlying Philosophies

It is the difference in underlying philosophy between history and social science that presents the keenest challenge in integrating the temporal dimension with international business research. The contrast between the philosophy underlying history and that of social science—an issue for over a century (e.g., Simiand 1903 )—is put by Isaiah Berlin:

History details the differences among events, whereas the sciences focus on similarities. History lacks the sciences’ ideal models, whose usefulness varies inversely with the number of characteristics to which they apply. As an external observer the scientist willingly distorts the individual to make it an instance of the general, but the historian, himself an actor, renounces interest in the general in order to understand the past through the projection of his own experience upon it. It is the scientist’s business to fit the facts to the theory, the historian’s responsibility to place his confidence in facts over theories (Berlin 1960 , p. 1 (Abstract). Footnote 1

Gaddis ( 2002 ) suggests that a particular contrast between history and social science is that history insists on the interdependence of variables, whilst mainstream social science methods rely on identifying the ‘independent variable’ which affects (causes) changes in dependent variables (Gaddis 2002 , particularly Chapter 4). He suggests that this parallels the distinction between a reductionist view and an ecological approach ( 2002 , p. 54), and that this arises from the social scientists’ desire to forecast the future ( 2002 , p. 56). This also implies continuity over time—the independent variable persists in its causative effect(s). It is also connected with assumptions of rationality, which also is assumed to be time-invariant. Social scientists would counter that historians are theory resistant, at least to the kind of independent variable/rationalist/context-invariant reductionist theory that (perhaps stereotypically) characterises economistic approaches.

Compromises are possible. Recognising sensitive dependence on initial conditions brings ‘narrative’ and ‘analysis’ much closer together, as does dividing time into manageable units—perhaps ‘short-term and long term’ or ‘immediate, intermediate and distant’ (Gaddis 2002 , p. 95). Causality, interdependence, contingency and moderating variables are more manageable when the time-frame is defined. Research in history therefore demonstrates the importance of time, sequencing and process. It also highlights the role of individuals and their decision making. These elements are particularly important in examining entrepreneurship and individual (manager’s) decisions and their outcome in contexts such as the internationalisation of the firm. Footnote 2

How, then, would we recognise if genuinely historical work had been accomplished in internationalisation studies (or indeed in any area of the social sciences)? Tilley ( 1983 , p. 79) gives us an answer:

By ‘genuinely historical’, I mean studies assuming that the time and place in which a structure or process appears makes a difference to its character, that the sequence in which similar events occur has a substantial impact on their outcomes, and that the existing record of past structures and processes is problematic, requiring systematic investigation in its own right instead of lending itself immediately to social-scientific synthesis.

History matters—the importance of historical effects in international business—is illustrated by Chitu et al. ( 2013 ), who document a ‘history effect’ in which the pattern of foreign bond holdings of US investors seven decades ago continues to influence holdings today. Holdings 70 years ago explain 10–15 % of the cross-country variation in current holdings, reflecting the fixed costs of market entry and exit together with endogenous learning. They note that fixed costs need not be large to have persistent effects on the geography of bilateral asset holdings—they need only to be different across countries. Evidence was also found of a ‘history effect’ in trade not unlike that in finance. The history effect is twice as large for non-dollar bonds as a result of larger sunk costs for US financial investments other than the dollar. Legacy effects loom large in international finance and trade.

It is argued in this paper that time and place (context) do make a difference to the structure and process of an individual firm’s internationalisation, that past structures and processes do influence outcomes and that proper acknowledgement of context is vital in understanding and theorising internationalisation. It is further argued that attention to these issues leads to a new conception of internationalisation.

2 Research Methods

Reflecting on the purpose of his methods in his book Bloodlands , on Eastern Europe in the period 1933–45, the historian Timothy Snyder ( 2010 , p. xviii) states that:

…its three fundamental methods are simple: insistence that no past event is beyond historical understanding or beyond the reach of historical enquiry; reflection upon the possibility of alternative choices and acceptance of the irreducible reality of choice in human affairs; and chronological attention to all of the Stalinist and Nazi policies that labelled large numbers of civilians and prisoners of war.

This paper follows similar principles. These are: (1) that the methods of history are appropriate to the study of the internationalisation of firms; (2) that choices and alternatives at given points of time are central to this process; (3) that the role of sequencing and time are central; and (4) that the comparative method is an aid to comprehension of the process of internationalisation.

This paper now examines research methods widely used in history Footnote 3 that have the capability to improve international business research. These are: (1) source criticism (here it is argued that international business researchers are insufficiently aware of deficiencies in “texts”); (2) the analysis of sequences, including time series analyses and process theorising; (3) comparative methods (not exclusive to historical research); and (4) counterfactual analyses (which are currently less utilised than in previous periods of international business theorising). This followed by a proposed research agenda based on the two key methods of examining change over time and utilising comparative analysis.

2.1 Source Criticism

The use of sources is as prevalent in international business as in history but they are often accepted uncritically. Gottschalk ( 1950 ), noting that few source documents are completely reliable, suggests that, ‘for each particular of a document the process of establishing credibility should be separately undertaken regardless of the general credibility of the author’. Given that reliability cannot be assumed, source criticism, as Kipping et al. ( 2014 ) argue, is fundamental to any historical research.

The trustworthiness of an author may establish a basic level of credibility for each statement, but each element must be separately evaluated. This requires questioning the provenance of the text and its internal reliability (Kipping et al. 2014 )—including, importantly, attention to language translation issues if relevant. This leads to the important checks brought about by triangulating the evidence. Triangulation requires the use of at least two independent sources (Kipping et al. 2014 ). This principle is utilised in international business journals by the requirement that both elements of a dyadic relationship are needed to cross check each other. Examples include licensor and licensee, both partners in a joint venture, parent and subsidiary in a multinational enterprise. The question of how far these are independent sources also needs careful investigation. Documents or statements addressed to different individuals and institutions may serve a variety of purposes. Those addressed to powerful individuals, groups or institutions may be intended for gain by the sender. Interviews may be designed to impress the interlocutor. The purpose of the document needs to be explicated. Documents may be designed for prestige, tax minimisation, satisfaction of guarantees (by government, sponsors or creditors) or to cover deficiencies in performance. The historian’s craft is, in part at least, to expose fraud and error (Bloch 1954 ).

Source criticism includes evaluating what is not present in archives, not just what is. Jones ( 1998 ) points out that the company archives many analysts require often do not survive—those that involve statutory obligations often do, but those involving high-level decision making, such as Board papers, often do not. He points out that ‘issues of capabilities, innovation and culture will necessitate looking at what happens “lower down” within a firm’s structure’ (Jones 1998 , p. 19). Further,

The study of intangibles such as the knowledge possessed within a firm, flows of information, and the corporate culture—and how all these things changes over time can involve a very wide range of historical record far removed from documents on strategies… Oral history—of staff employed at all levels—is of special use in examining issues of culture, information flows and systems (Jones 1998 , p. 19).

These issues—intangible assets, strategy, culture and decision making in the face of imperfect information—are crucial in international business strategy research.

In addition to criticisms based on material that exists in ‘the archive’, we need to recognise that the archive is the result of a selection process and therefore that excluded material may be important. Footnote 4 The selection process may be biased towards particular nations, regions, races, classes, genders, creeds, political groupings or belief systems. This is a key theme of ‘subaltern studies’ growing out of South Asia, and particularly India, in imperial times (Ludden 2001 ). The clear implication of these studies is that the colonial era archive was compiled by the colonial (British) administrators and this presents a largely pro-Imperial bias. However, it is also true that among the dispossessed voices, some were privileged (e.g., the Congress Party spokespeople) and others selected out. The lineage of subaltern studies leads us through Gramsci ( 1973 ) to postmodern views of the text: Derrida ( 1994 ), Foucault ( 1965 ), Barthes ( 2005 ). As well as not ‘hearing’ particular groups, the archive records may not cover particular questions or issues Footnote 5 (see also Belich 2009 Footnote 6 ; Decker 2013 ; Moss 1997 ).

2.2 Analysing Sequences, Time Series and Processes

There are a number of important techniques in historical research which are useful to international business scholars in examining process, sequence, rhythm and speed—all of which are important in internationalisation. As Mahoney points out ( 2004 , p. 88), ‘Causation is fundamentally a matter of sequence’. This is a problem addressed in economics as ‘Granger causality’ ( 1988 ). The critical question is not data access, but careful theorising. Sequence and duration arguments attempt to pick up sensitivity to time and place.

Process analysis holds out the possibility of integrating the time dimension into the internationalisation of firms. Process research, which is contrasted to ‘variance paradigms’, pays particular attention to the sequencing of events that take place within cases (Welch and Paavilainen-Mantymaki 2014 ). Events, not variables, are the crucial writ of analysis and capturing multiple time points builds narrative, event studies and panel data analyses. In combination with variance approaches, process analysis has the potential to explain the effects of context (place) and time in internationalisation. The critical task is the identification of the linking mechanisms that connect cause and effect. This requires connecting qualitative data evaluation with experimental reasoning. It is also a useful check on spurious statistical relationships (Granger and Newbold 1974 ). Easterlin ( 2013 ) argues that cross-sectional relationships are often taken to indicate causation when they may merely reflect historical experience, i.e., similar leader–follower patterns for variables that are causally unrelated. This is particularly the case when similar geographic patterns of diffusion are captured by the data—as may well be the case when studying the internationalisation of firms. This may reflect the fact that one set of (national) firms get an early start whilst others play catch-up.

We must, however, beware of ‘ingrained assumptions about historical periodization where mere temporal succession is insufficiently distinguished from historical explanation’ (Gregory 2012 , p. 9). This provides a connection to ‘path dependence’ and sensitivity to initial conditions. Careful examination of relevant data allows analysts to identify reactive sequences ‘whereby an initial outcome triggers a chain of temporally ordered and causally connected events that lead to a final outcome of interest’ (Mahoney 2004 , p. 91).

Page ( 2006 ), however, shows that path dependence describes a set of models, not a single model. Forms of history dependence can be divided between those where outcomes are history dependent and those in which the equilibria depend on history. Path dependence requires ‘a build-up of behavioural routines, social connections, or cognitive structures around an institution’ (p. 89). Page shows that there is a variety of types of path dependence, each of which can be precisely defined, and that it is insufficient to cite ‘increasing returns’ as evidence of path-dependent processes. The consequences for process research on internationalisation are profound and require researchers to be as precise as possible, when asserting path dependence, to evidence its roots and specify their impact on future trajectories. Jackson and Kollman ( 2010 ) build on Page’s definitions and suggest ‘If social scientists use notions of path dependence, they should have clearly articulated definitions and criteria for what constitutes a path dependent process’ (p. 258): ‘Any such formulation must be able to explain how the effects of initial and early outcomes are maintained over long periods of time and continue to be observed in current outcomes’ (p. 280). This is far stronger than a simple statement that ‘history matters’. Path-dependent sequences raise important theoretical issues and thereby contribute to a further and deeper round of understanding; as with quantitative analysis we need to be constantly attentive to sources of bias (Nickell 1981 ).

Understanding sequences entails additional complexities. Brown ( 2012 , p. xxii) points out that choosing the periodicity (start and end points of data collection and investigation) can risk coming to foregone conclusions and ‘a deceptive teleology’:

Two aspects of history are particularly important for historians: propulsion and periodization. The first concerns the forces that promote change. The second involves mental architecture: the chronological framework within which we set out history. Since all periodization presumes a theory of change, these are linked theoretical properties (Green 1993 , p. 17).

Propulsion and periodization—change and classification—are ultimately constructs and need to be placed both within a theoretical framework and a given context of time and place. This is a challenge to international business research which is often insufficiently theoretical and contextualised.

International business studies need to be sensitive to the period of study. Laidler ( 2012 , p. 5) advises,

The past may be the only source of data against which economic hypotheses can be tested or calibrated, but data never speak entirely for themselves. They need to be interpreted through a theory. When the only theory deemed suitable for this purpose embodies itself as part of its own structure, even on an ‘as if’ basis, then that structure is inevitably projected onto the past, and other perspectives on the historical record are obscured.

This suggests that a fundamental problem is that international business research is often inadequately theorised. Theories which stand up to testing in many historical periods are more robust than those that do not. Jones and Khanna ( 2006 , p. 455) see history as an important source of time series data: ‘historical variation is at least as good as contemporary cross-sectional variation in illuminating conceptual issues’. Although it should be noted that many historians are sensitive to the limits of generalisation across historical periods. Burgelman ( 2011 ) sees longitudinal qualitative research being situated between history as ‘particular generalization’ (Gaddis 2002 ) and reductionism; that is, ‘general particularization’.

Longitudinal research and good process research draw on both history’s narrative methods and statistical and mathematical models. Such longitudinal studies clearly need rigorous methods from both history and statistics. A relevant example is Kogut and Parkinson ( 1998 ), who examine the adoption of the multidivisional structure, testing Chandler’s ( 1962 ) core thesis over a long time period, ‘analysing history from the start’. Despite the difficulties of compiling archival data for a large sample of firms, the authors are able to test an innovative methodology on diffusion histories of the ‘M-form’ from the period beginning in 1950. They use a hazard model (of adopting the M-form) with imitation and firm covariates that predict adoption rates. The sample (62 firms) is large enough to be split into ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ adopters of this organisational innovation and a comparison of the difference between the two samples enables the authors to confirm Chandler’s historical account and to point to some qualifications concerning flows of information between firms which meant that proximate firms were more likely to adopt the M-form structure. Imitation effects by firms located in the same industry and firms with links to M-form adopters also seemed significant.

The Kogut and Parkinson ( 1998 ) study is a successful example of ‘History Meets Business Studies’ (p. 257) and also of the application of techniques of organisational demography. This approach has also been successfully applied to the birth and death of subsidiaries and foreign market entry strategies (Kogut 2009 ). Historical studies have established an important precedent of ‘the importance of sampling on founders rather than survivors and of the effects of age on mortality’ (Kogut 2009 , p. 721). Shaver ( 1998 ) pointed out that many previous studies had not accounted for endogeneity and were subject to self-selection bias but that such effects could be corrected for using a methodology that factors in the full history of entries, taking account of strategy choice based on firm attributes and industry conditions. Strategy choice is endogenous and self selected based on these conditions and modelling has to account for this. Concepts such as the ‘liability of newness’ (Stinchcombe 1965 ) and the (in International Business) celebrated ‘liability of foreignness’ (Zaheer 1995 after Hymer 1976 ) examine diffusion over time. There are, however, as Kogut ( 2009 ) points out, several unresolved challenges in the organisational demography literature. First, self-selection bias is still unresolved in that successful firms are more likely to venture abroad. Second, because of unobserved variables (such as the quality of the firm) heterogeneity remains in any sample of firms and any heterogeneous population can be shown to suffer ‘liability of newness’. Controls for heterogeneity, of course, are a palliative (e.g., size of firm) but it is difficult to control all such variation. A careful specification of the growth process of firms (despite Penrose ( 1959 ) and her heirs) still eludes us.

In concluding this section, it should be mentioned that cliometrics, or the measurement of history (also called the New Economic History) is not uncontroversial (Diebolt 2012 ). ‘Hypothetico-deductive models’ (utilising the counterfactual position) using ‘propositions contrary to the facts has not escaped criticism’ (Diebolt 2012 , p. 4), and they contrast with the inductive position of the German historical school (Grimmer-Solem 2003 ). The economistic tradition of ‘opportunity cost’ whereby the true costs of any action is the best alternative foregone, provides a firm philosophical link between economics and the counterfactual as discussed below.

2.3 Comparative Methods

The comparative method is of great importance throughout the social sciences. There are three classic comparators in social science research: across space, across time, and against a carefully specified counterfactual state of the world (Buckley et al. 1992 ). International business research has traditionally focused on just one of these—across space. Historical research specialises particularly in comparisons across time, but also has lessons in spatial comparison and in counterfactual analysis.

Research that depends on ex post statistical adjustment (such as cross-country regressions) has recently come under fire; there has been a commensurate shift of focus towards design-based research—in which control over confounding variables comes primarily from research design, rather than model-based statistical adjustment (Dunning 2012 , p. xvii).

The design of a randomised controlled experiment has three characteristics (Freedman et al. 2007 , pp. 4–8):

The response of the experimental subjects assigned to receive a treatment is compared to the response of subjects assigned to a control group. This allows comparisons of outcomes across the two groups.

The assignment of subjects to treatment and control groups is done at random—a coin toss, for example. This establishes ex ante symmetry between the groups and obviates the existence of confounding variables.

The manipulation of the treatment or intervention is under the control of the experimental research. This establishes further evidence for a causal relationship between the treatment and the outcomes (Dunning 2012 , p. 15).

Crucially most extant research utilises ‘as if random’ assignment of interventions rather than ‘natural’. Its success depends upon the plausibility of ‘as if random’, the credibility of models and the relevance of intervention. ‘Qualitative evidence plays a central role in the analysis of natural experiments’ (Dunning 2012 , p. 228). This is because an investigation of the causal process is critical (Collier et al. 2010 ) in avoiding ‘selecting on the dependent’ variable by analysing only those cases where causal-process observations appear to have played a productive inferential role. Indeed, Dunning ( 2012 , p. 229) suggests that a future research agenda should focus on developing a framework that distinguishes and predicts when and what kinds of causal-process observations provide the most useful leverage for causal inference in natural experiments. Results however may be very particular and parochial because of the limited availability of natural experiment possibilities (Yin 2014 ). Experimental results, therefore, come at a price.

The price for success is a focus that is too narrow and too local to tell us ‘what works’ in development, to design policy, or to advance scientific knowledge about development processes (Deaton 2009 , p. 426).

Comparison across places by geographic area or space is frequent in international business research (across nations, cultures, regions, areas, cities). The multinational enterprise is an excellent laboratory or natural experiment because it holds constant the single institution of the firm but varies the location of study. The division, and the later unification, of Germany allowed Kogut and Zander ( 2000 ) the opportunity to conduct a natural experiment by comparing the two sections of the Zeiss Company under socialism and capitalism. The experimental design measured the dependent variable (outcome)—the technological output of the two firms proxied by patents—under ‘treatments’ offered by the different economic contexts of the two different economic systems. This unusual design substituted for a random sample by eliminating the effects of extraneous factors and isolating the effects of the treatment variable on the ‘same’ firm. Comparative management experiments can be done by comparing company A’s subsidiary in Vietnam with its subsidiary in Virginia. This is the stock-in-trade of many international business experiments and was utilised by Hofstede ( 1991 , 1997 , 2001 ), whose work on culture held the host company (IBM) culture constant whilst varying the purported national cultural responses of the firm’s employees.

Comparisons across time, holding place constant, are the essence of ‘history’. They give rise to notions of ‘growth’, ‘progress’, ‘design’, ‘loss’. Chandler ( 1984 ) describes his method as the comparison of detailed case studies to generate ‘non historically specific generalizations’. Research in business history has challenged the Chandler thesis that managerial capitalism is universally becoming the norm (Whittington 2007 ; Rowlinson et al. 2007 ). Hannah ( 2007 ) illustrates the use of comparative historical data to challenge the received wisdom. As noted elsewhere in this piece, such comparisons are fraught with danger unless carefully conducted. Meanings of documents, words, artefacts and statements vary according to different point of time usage and must be carefully analysed as best practice historical research dictates. As Ragin says ( 1987 , p. 27),

many features of social life confound attempts to unravel causal complexity when experimental methods cannot be used… First, rarely does an outcome of interest to social scientists have a single cause… Second, causes rarely operate in isolation. Usually, it is the combined effect of various conditions their intersection in time and space, that produces a certain outcome… Third, a specific cause may have opposite effects depending on context.

These three factors—multiple, interacting causes, differential by context—are the very essence of international business research. Because of the difficulty of designing natural experiments International business research has emphasised statistical control in its methods. Ragin ( 1987 ) points out that statistical control is very different from experimental control. Footnote 7 Statistical control does not equate to experimental control: ‘the dependent variable is not examined under all possible combinations of values of the independent variables, as is possible in experimental investigations’ (Ragin 1987 , p. 61). Ragin presents a Boolean approach to qualitative comparison (after George Boole ( 2003 ) [1854] and also known as the algebra of logic or algebra of sets). Kogut ( 2009 ) shows the relevance of this approach to international business research (see also Saka-Helmhout 2011 ). A recent development of the use of Boolean algebra in international business is the application of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis in the assessment of different models of capitalism (Judge et al. 2014 ).

Qualitative comparisons are of the essence in (historical) international business research. As Kogut ( 2009 ) shows, a proposition based on a three-cause explanation in order to avoid simplifying assumptions at the outset requires a truth table of 2 3 or eight combinations as in Fig.  1 . Thus, to achieve experimental control, the investigation needs eight cases with the characteristics shown in the table in order to determine which combination of causes (A, B, C) determines the outcome (1). (See Ragin 1987 , particularly Chapters 7 and 8.) Thus historical comparative data can focus our attention on cases as wholes and to explore the combinatorial complexities of causation (Ragin 1987 , p. 171). Footnote 8 It is also suggestive of the answer to the perennial question of how many cases are needed to satisfy a proposition. For instance, it might be suggested that the rise of Japan was due to (1) lifetime work contracts, (2) company unions and (3) the Keiretsu system. In order to prove or disprove the argument, the bottom line where all three proposed casual factors are present must be contrasted with situations where none of them are present (the top line) where only one of the proposed causes is present and where combinations of two causes are present. This enables the analyst to identify necessary and sufficient conditions. In a three cause theoretical proposal, a total of eight cases are needed.

Truth table for a three cause proposition

As Mahoney ( 2004 , p. 82) says, ‘comparative-historical methodology offers tools well adapted to the analysis of necessary and sufficient causes’. This need not rely on deterministic logic because necessary and sufficient causes can be expressed in a probabilistic framework. This also aligns with expressing variables in a continuous rather than in a dichotomous fashion. These techniques are helpful, as Saka-Helmhout ( 2011 ) points out, in analysing cross-case analyses of bundles of conditions, in particular in the identification of patterns of regularities and differences. The methodological stream (and theoretical underpinnings) of comparative historical research therefore lead to the more systematic pinpointing of necessary and sufficient causes in international business case research. For applications to management research, see Oz ( 2004 ).

2.4 Counterfactual Analysis

The third classic comparator is the ‘alternative position’. The counterfactual question—‘what if?’—is a particular type of thought experiment designed to elucidate causality. It is widely (if sometimes unwittingly) used in economics where ‘opportunity cost’ (the real cost of resources) is defined as the cost of the next best alternative foregone. The ‘alternative position’ and its specification have long been a particular problem in international business research—classically in the analysis of foreign direct investment (FDI). What would have happened in the absence of a particular foreign investment? (Reddaway et al. 1968 ; Steuer 1973 ; Cairncross 1953 ; Buckley et al. 1992 , p. 36). Jones and Khanna ( 2006 , p. 464) say that a ‘comparative approach also gets at the spirit of specifying counterfactuals’.

Historians have long had to face this issue. Several variously sophisticated attempts have been made to try to answer the question of what would (might) have happened had some of the crucial turning points of history turned out differently (Beatty 2011 ; Ferguson 1997 ; Cowley 1999 ; Lebow 2014 ). Lebow ( 2012 ) points out that counterfactuals are frequently used in physical and biological sciences to develop and evaluate sophisticated, non-linear models. The counterfactual has to be well defined and this requires a thorough analysis and presentation of the context of the alternative position. Such thought experiments are perhaps history’s closest comparator to a laboratory experiment (Gaddis 2002 , p. 100)—although see the section on natural experiments in the social sciences above. The counterfactual counteracts the static nature of much historical analysis by focusing upon dynamics and processes.

Durand and Vaara ( 2009 , p. 1245) have examined the role of counterfactuals in explicating causality in the field of business strategy. They argue that:

Counterfactual history can add to our understanding of the context-specific construction of resource-based competitive advantage and path dependence, and causal modelling can help to reconceptualize the relationships between resources and performance.

The role of counterfactual reasoning in organisation studies was also explored in two issues of Management & Organizational History [volume 3(1) 2008 and volume 4(2) 2007]. MacKay ( 2007 ) pointed out that counterfactuals can guard against path dependencies in both structure of organisations and perception. Counterfactuals illustrate that the world could be other than it is and help the analyst to evaluate different possibilities including decisions and their outcomes. Thus socio-economic and technical path dependencies can introduce rigidities and cognitive or psychological path dependencies can impair organisational learning. Toms and Beck ( 2007 ) criticise received counterfactuals (on the Lancashire cotton industry) as suffering from the problems of teleology and hindsight that occur when the counterfactual is contaminated by ex post knowledge of the outcome (Maielli and Booth 2008 ). Footnote 9 Toms and Beck ( 2007 , p. 315) attempt to construct a history ‘from the perspective of decision making entrepreneurs as embedded historical actors’. This is surely the model for internationalisation researchers, when examining past decisions and their outcome.

The key, as Leunig ( 2010 ) points out, is to be explicit in specifying the counterfactual position as this provides more evidence than a simple judgement on the impact of (say) a critical innovation. Fogel ( 1964 ) in finding that agricultural land opened up by the railroads might otherwise have been undeveloped, examined the possibility of an alternative network of canals. Footnote 10 This was done not by simple perusal of a map but by examining detailed typographical maps, as a canal builder would do. A limitation of counterfactual analysis is the ability to go on to use comparative analysis because the carefully constructed counterfactual is often locationally or temporally specific. For instance, although in Fogel’s counterfactual, canals could have done most of the work of railroads, he assumed away the vagaries of the weather—in the Northeast of the US at least, canals would have been frozen for at least 4 months of the year. Footnote 11 An excellent example of a carefully constructed counterfactual is Casson’s construction of the (optimal) counterfactual railway network (complete with timetable) for the UK taking account of network performance, the physical geography of the UK, Victorian urbanisation and traffic, engineering constraints, regulation, institutional and political constraints (Casson 2009 ).

The counterfactual has an important place in the development of international business theory as analyses of the impact of FDI on host and source countries have been cast in the terms of the ‘alternative position’—what would have happened in the absence of FDI. Foreshadowing the current debate an offshoring and outsourcing, earlier literature on the impact of FDI following Hufbauer and Adler ( 1968 ) identified three polar ‘alternative positions’ (Buckley and Artisien 1987 , pp. 73, 78–79, 80).

The classical assumption assumes that FDI produces a net addition to capital formation in the host country but a similar decline in capital formation in the source country. This is equivalent to the assumption that FDI substitutes for exports. The reverse classical assumption assumes that the FDI substitutes for investment in the host country but leaves investment in the source country unchanged. This is equivalent to ‘defensive investment’ where the source country firm cannot penetrate the target market via exports and would lose the market to host country firms in the absence of FDI. The anti-classical assumption is that FDI does not substitute for capital investment in the source country, neither does it reduce investment by host country firms. Consequently FDI increases world capital formation (in contrast to the other two assumptions where world capital formation is unchanged).

Anticlassical conditions are most likely when host country firms are incapable of undertaking the projects fulfilled by FDI. Each of these assumptions is static and rigid—not allowing for a growth of demand, perhaps from the ‘presence effect’. An organic model, postulating that FDI substitutes for exports in the short run, but in the long run substitutes for rival investment is more likely. Hood and Young ( 1979 ) pointed out that the relationship between FDI and exports needs to be fully specified in any such examination of effects of FDI.

This debate needs to be updated as it predated studies of MNEs’ foreign market servicing strategies and motives other than market-seeking. A parallel move away from economic counterfactuals towards specifying alternative decision making scenarios for decision-making entrepreneurs would be a step forward here (Toms and Beck 2007 ). A further important question here concerns the identity of the decision maker and whether ownership (foreign versus domestic) matters. As concern with the employment impact of FDI at home and abroad grows, counterfactual analysis is useful in specifying the myriad impacts (employment among them) of modern MNEs.

The ‘historical alternatives approach’ (Zeitlin 2007 ) is a specifically business history variant of counterfactual analysis. The historical alternatives approach is promoted by Zeitlin ( 2007 ) as ‘against teleology and determinism’. The approach suggests that plasticity of technology has been underrated, leading to technological determinism of a particularly narrow type. Strategic action in the face of uncertainty, mutability and hedging strategies gives a far wider range of outcomes than conventionally allowed for and ‘the market’ is dogmatically and narrowly the result of historical construction. Size of firms, strategic action, industry imperatives and rationality are too glibly taken as determining factors and the result is an excessively pre-determined view of business choices. While it is certainly the case that many analyses based on historical reasoning are unduly constrained in terms of other potential outcomes, alternative futures have to be specified extremely carefully and constraints that are to be lifted on outcomes must be spelled out and the degree to which they are assumed to be not binding requires extensive and meticulous research.

In internationalisation research, alternative positions are important concepts in the development of the process. The decisions that key managers make can be evaluated by presenting them with alternative scenarios, as Buckley et al. ( 2007 ) did. This is usually, for practical and cost reasons, a point-of-time rather than a continuous exercise even though, in principle, these choices could be presented to managers frequently throughout the internationalisation process. There are examples of where a single investment is considered as a ‘Go/No go’ decision and others where several alternative investments are simultaneously considered (Buckley et al. 1978 ). In many cases firms will themselves investigate alternative scenarios even if this is done informally rather than through ‘scenario planning’.

3 Discussion

Table  1 shows the areas where the four key methods identified above have been successfully applied in international business.

The application of the above principles of method suggests that a new international business history is called for that relies on the two key principles of examining change over time and using the comparative method. If we accept that the study of history is about change over time, then international business history needs to take a long-run view of change and of the role of multinational firms in large scale social and economic development. This presents a major challenge in view of the material in archives. Company archives cover the world from the point of view of the (single) company. In international business this represents only one actor in a complex drama. The roles of host and source countries are perforce omitted. It behoves the writers of international company histories to take a wider perspective than just the company’s viewpoint. In approaching the comparative method, the spatial comparison encompasses the international dimension but changes over time require a longer run view than most company histories allow for. Comparing the role of a company in the eighteenth century with the nineteenth is not often possible from a single company’s archives (and it can be argued, were this to be so, we would be dealing with an outlier). In short, the writing of international business history needs to be more imaginative, not only in method but also in its engagement with wider theory and technique.

It is equally the case that international business theory and methods can enrich historical research. Footnote 12 In addition to the Chitu et al. ( 2013 ) examination of ‘history effects’ in international finance and trade, international business can be focused on global history in the way that Bell and Dale ( 2011 ) analysed the economic and financial dimensions of the medieval pilgrimage business (using contract and network theory and the analysis of saints’ shrines as business franchise, under an umbrella brand of the Universal Catholic Church).

3.1 Historical Research Approaches and the Internationalisation Process

The question of how firm internationalisation evolves over time is best answered by the careful use of historical research methods duly adapted for the context of international business research (Jones and Zeitlin 2007 ) . The temporal dimension of the internationalisation process needs to be centre-stage and critical decision points and turning points need to be mapped on a timeline and against feasible alternatives. As extant international business research has shown (Buckley et al. 2007 ), managers are only partly guided by rational processes and context and contingency play roles in determining the final decisions. If we know when these critical decisions are made, then it becomes much easier to understand the factors that were in play in the decision makers’ minds. It is frequently remarked that key ‘events’ (a coup, the launch of a rival’s product, a competitive market entry) were the triggers for investment (or non-investment) decisions and a timeline of events—a mapping of process—can be a key to understanding. The temporal sequencing of ‘events’ in the internationalisation process is clearly vital to comprehension of the firm’s strategy and decisions. As well as time, at a given place, we need to add place at a given time for all these events. Thus a double comparative across time and space is necessary for a rounded understanding of outcomes.

Process research also needs to comprehend simultaneous processes as there is not just one sequence of events in internationalisation; rather, there are multiple. Selection of processes to track has to be theoretically driven. Process research cannot stand apart from the theory, it is has to be fully engaged with the appropriate theories and to feed back into them (Paavilainen-Mantymaki and Welch 2013 ). This is fully in accord with Pettigrew’s ( 1997 ) approach to processual analysis. Moreover, as Pettigrew ( 1997 , p. 340) says, ‘The time quality of a processual analysis thereby lies in linking processes to outcomes’. Linking internationalisation processes to outcomes (performance) is a missing element in our understanding—the results of the managerial decisions form an essential element of a feedback loop to further internationalisation.

The four generic methods applied in historical research outlined here—source criticism, time series analysis, the use of comparative methods and counterfactual analysis—are all vital in constructing a proper process analysis of the internationalisation of the firm (or of a firm’s internationalisation). It is fundamental that a critical appraisal of all sources be undertaken, be they company statements, archives, documents or interviews. Wherever possible these should be triangulated against other sources. Nothing should be taken on trust and, if it has to be, this should be clearly stated. Wherever possible, a timeline of relevant events should be made in order to sequence the decision processes and outcomes. The construction of multiple timelines—of different managers, sub-units of the firm and other key actors (such as competitors, agents, customers, suppliers, governmental bodies, support agencies) should be compared and contrasted. The coincidence in time of actions by interested parties is prima facie evidence of joint causality. These techniques can be extended by the use of comparisons not only in time but in space. The geographical mapping of actions and outcomes gives richness to the process analysis. The transmission and impact of decisions from one geographical point (e.g., headquarters) to another (a subsidiary, a potential takeover victim), the time-lags involved and the reaction time of the recipient are all vital in understanding internationalisation. Counterfactual analysis, too, can be a useful tool. Firms often approach internationalisation decisions with a number of contingencies. If they cannot acquire foreign firm X, should they turn to Y, or to a greenfield venture instead? These alternatives are useful to know and it may be possible to construct feasible alternative internationalisation paths.

In summary, historical research methods and approaches provide a research design for internationalisation process studies that enhance the depth of understanding by incorporating concrete timelines, alternatives and decision processes.

3.2 A New Concept of Internationalisation

The new concept of internationalisation that emerges from a consideration of the light shed by historical research on managerial processes is that internationalisation is the outcome of a set of decisions, dependent on context and previous decisions, considering alternative locations, entry and development methods in a choice set of time and space. In these sequential decisions, knowledge of past decisions and their outcomes plays a part in the next round of decisions. Hence companies can create ‘vicious circles’ or ‘virtuous circles’ in their internationalisation processes. In this sense, a knowledge of history of the company making the decision and of similar companies making comparable decisions can be valuable for the manager. History matters to decision-makers as well as analysts. The question of when to take history into account and when to ignore it and ‘take a chance’ is the essence of managerial judgement (and of ‘real options theory’—see Kogut and Kulatilaka 2001 ; Buckley et al. 2002 ). Those who make regular correct calls will develop a ‘track record’ and be valued accordingly. Thus both the weight of history and the judgement of successful individuals will build path dependence into the internationalisation process.

The research approach formulated in this article encompasses the Uppsala approach to internationalisation (Johanson and Vahlne 1977 , 2009 ) as a special case. The Uppsala approach has no explicit role for time. It explains market entry as a sequence which is determined by psychic proximity to the source country in a loose path dependent fashion. A more careful specification of the relationship between market entry and psychic distance and an explicit acknowledgement of the role of time would allow a fully historical analysis of market entry sequencing in the Uppsala tradition.

4 Conclusion: The Response to the Challenge of Historical Research

The last sentences of Butterfield’s ( 1965 , p. 132) The Whig Interpretation of History encompasses the challenge of historical research methods: ‘In other words, the truth of history is no simple matter, all packed and parcelled ready for handling in the market-place. And the understanding of the past is not so easy as it is sometimes made to appear’. Historical research methods can help international business researchers to be more questioning, analytical and critical and to think laterally in terms of alternative states of the world, different choices and outcomes. There is a justifiable argument that international business research is insufficiently critical of ‘texts’ in all their forms—company statements, official statistics, interviews with managers among them—and historical research has a number of techniques for improving the penetration of meaning behind texts, as this piece has shown.

In using research methods derived from history we must always factor in ‘Contingency, choice and agency’ (Clark 2012 , p. 362). We should also remember that history interacts with geography—context is crucial. To quote the historian Peter Brown’s work on wealth in the early Christian period, ‘A true history of Latin Christianity requires an unremitting sense of place’ (Brown 2012 , p. xxii). A good example relevant to international business is the combined use of historical, geographical and sectoral data by Becuwe, Blancheton and Charles ( 2012 ) in analysing the decline of French trade power in the ‘first globalization’ of 1850–1913. A sense of place involves understanding both the global macro context and the particular location.

There is an awkward disjunction between traditional historical research and hypothetico-deductive modelling. This is paralleled by the lack of integration between quantitative and qualitative methods in international business research, arising from their philosophical bases in positivism and subjectivism. The careful integration of historical research methods into international business provides us with one channel of progress towards a more complete understanding of the phenomena of international business.

In the particular case of the analysis of the internationalisation of the firm, historical approaches place managerial judgement central to the process. Such judgement, however, is constrained by context. This context is both temporal and spatial. ‘When’ and ‘where’ matter in both an individual decision and the analysis of decisions. The use of the plural here implies sequencing and therefore a focus on process. The choice set faced by the manager is constrained by what has gone before—by history. This does not determine the next decision in the sequence but it influences it. The new concept of internationalisation is that sequence, not events, are at the heart of the international growth of the firm, that spatial issues (including psychic distance to a potential host country) must be accounted for, and that past decisions constrain outcomes.

On the importance of methodology (in international business as elsewhere) we can end with a quote from Kogut ( 2009 , p. 711): ‘It is one of the best-kept secrets of research that a methodological contribution is the most powerful engine for the replication and diffusion of an idea’.

It is suggested by Cannadine ( 2013 , p. 9) that academic histories are often responsible for emphasising divergences rather than similarities: ‘Most academics are trained to look for divergences and disparities rather than for similarities and affinities, but this relentless urge to draw distinctions often results in important connections and resemblances being overlooked’. The contrast between history and social science has been an issue for over a century (see Simiand 1903 ).

See also the debate on the ‘historic turn’ in organisation studies (Clark and Rowlinson 2004 ).

Stephanie Decker ( 2013 , p. 6) identified four features that ‘clearly distinguish historical from non-historical research designs’. These are: reconstruction from primary sources (empirical rigour), thick contextualisation in time and space (empirical at times, theoretical rigour), periodization (theoretical rigour when combined with strong historiography) and historical narrative (accessibility, empirical and theoretical rigours).

For an excellent review of the use (and extension) of archive material see Wilkins and Hill ( 2011 ) ‘Bibliographical Essay’ pp. 445–458.

See also Schwarzkopf ( 2012 ).

Belich notes, of trying to identify ‘emigrants’ and their opinions: ‘This problem of the silent majority is, of course, endemic in the social history of ideas. The standard solution, not one to be despised in the absence of alternatives, is to pile up available examples of opinions in the vague hope that these are typical. Once possible refinement is the analysis of the conceptual language of substantial groups of lesser writers who are trying to persuade their still-larger target audience to do something’ (Belich 2009 , p. 148 f.).

‘In most statistical analyses, the effect of a control variable is its average effect on the dependent variable, across all cases, not of the effects of other variables. The subtraction of effects central to statistical control is a purely mechanical operation predicted on simplifying assumptions. It is assumed in multiple regression, for example, that a variable’s effect is the same in each case—that a one-unit change in an independent variable has the same effect on the dependent variable regardless of context, that is, regardless variable’s effect by simple subtraction. The result is a dependent variable whose values have been “corrected” for the effects of one or more independent variables’ (Ragin 1987 , p. 59).

For a full discussion of varieties of comparative history, see Skocpol and Somers ( 1980 ).

See Evans ( 2014 ) for a critical appraisal of counterfactuals.

As a referee points out, Fogel was not posing the ‘what if’ question but rather ‘by how much less would the US economy have grown if there had been no railways’.

I owe this point to Geoff Jones (personal communication 09.07.2013).

Kobrak and Schneider ( 2011 ) make a call for a renewal of historical research methods in business history, ‘reviving some basic historiographical notions’ (p. 401).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for comments on earlier versions from Chris Clark (Cambridge), Simon Ball (Leeds), Andrew Thompson (Exeter), Niall Ferguson (Harvard), Jeremy Black (Exeter), Mark Casson (Reading), Janet Casson (Oxford), Catherine Casson (Birmingham), Jonathan Steinberg (Pennsylvania), Catherine Welch (Sydney), Adrian Bell (Reading), Peter Miskell (Reading), Stephanie Decker (Aston), Geoffrey Jones (Harvard), Mira Wilkins (Florida International University), an anonymous reviewer for the AIBUK 2013 Conference at Aston University, participants at AIBUK Aston 2013, three anonymous reviewers for AIB 2013 and participants at the AIB Conference, Istanbul, July 2013, two anonymous referees and particularly to the editors of this Focused Issue.

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Buckley, P.J. Historical Research Approaches to the Analysis of Internationalisation. Manag Int Rev 56 , 879–900 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11575-016-0300-0

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The Purpose of the Crusades: a Historical Analysis

This essay about the Crusades explores the multifaceted purposes behind these medieval military campaigns. It examines the religious fervor, political ambitions, and economic interests that drove Europeans to take up the cross, highlighting the complex interplay of faith, power, and commerce. The essay also reflects on the darker aspects of the Crusades, acknowledging the violence and suffering they caused, while underscoring their lasting impact on history and human nature.

How it works

In the grand tapestry of human history, few chapters command as much intrigue and controversy as the Crusades. These medieval military campaigns, shrouded in religious zeal and political ambition, continue to captivate scholars and laypersons alike. Yet, amidst the clash of swords and the fervor of holy fervor, lies a deeper inquiry into the purpose of these tumultuous events – a purpose as multifaceted as the era from which they emerged.

The Crusades, often portrayed as a singular quest for religious redemption, are a mosaic of motivations that defy easy categorization.

Yes, religious fervor undeniably stirred the hearts of many who took up the cross, driven by the promise of spiritual salvation and the sanctity of reclaiming Jerusalem from Muslim rule. The impassioned sermons of Pope Urban II, rallying knights and peasants alike to the cause, echo through the corridors of history, emblematic of the fervent faith that propelled the Crusades forward.

Yet, to view the Crusades solely through a religious lens would be a disservice to the intricate web of political intrigue and economic ambition that underpinned these endeavors. The Byzantine Empire, beset by the encroaching Seljuk Turks, sought aid from the West, presenting European powers with an opportunity to expand their influence into the fertile lands of the Near East. The establishment of the Crusader States following the First Crusade speaks to the geopolitical aspirations that drove Western powers to intervene in distant lands.

Economic factors, too, played a pivotal role in the Crusades. The allure of trade routes to the East, long monopolized by Islamic powers, tantalized the burgeoning commercial interests of Italian city-states such as Venice and Genoa. The Crusades provided a convenient pretext for these maritime powers to assert their dominance in the Mediterranean, forging alliances and carving out lucrative trade concessions in the wake of military conquests.

Moreover, the Crusades served as a pressure valve for the simmering tensions and feudal rivalries that characterized medieval Europe. Knights and nobles, accustomed to waging war amongst themselves, found a new sense of purpose in the call to arms against a common enemy. The Crusades offered an opportunity for martial glory and territorial expansion, drawing ambitious men from across Europe to the banner of the cross.

Yet, for all their lofty aspirations, the Crusades were not without their dark shadows. The brutal sack of Jerusalem during the First Crusade stands as a stark reminder of the atrocities committed in the name of religious fervor. The clash of civilizations between Christian and Muslim forces left a legacy of bloodshed and suffering that lingers in the collective memory to this day.

In the annals of history, the purpose of the Crusades remains a subject of debate and interpretation. They were a product of their time – a time of faith and fanaticism, ambition and aggression. To understand the Crusades is to grapple with the complexities of human nature itself – the capacity for both noble idealism and ruthless violence.

As we look back on this tumultuous chapter in history, we are reminded that the true purpose of the Crusades defies easy categorization. They were a reflection of the hopes and fears, the aspirations and contradictions, of an age long past. In seeking to understand the Crusades, we are confronted not only with the distant echoes of the past but with the enduring complexities of the human experience.

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An ancient manuscript up for sale gives a glimpse into the history of early Christianity

A n important piece of early Christian history, the Crosby-Schøyen Codex, is up for auction at Christie’s in London. This codex is a mid-fourth century book from Egypt containing a combination of biblical and other early Christian texts.

The Crosby-Schøyen Codex was discovered alongside more than 20 other codices near Dishna, Egypt, in 1952. These manuscripts are collectively known as “the Dishna Papers” or “the Bodmer Papyri,” after the Swiss collector Martin Bodmer.

Though often overshadowed by other 20th century discoveries, this trove of ancient manuscripts represents one of the most significant finds for understanding the history of early Christianity. As an expert on early Christian reading practices , I consider the Dishna Papers an invaluable witness to the formation of the Christian Bible. This ancient library shows how, before the consolidation of the Bible, early Christians read canonical and non-canonical scriptures – as well as pagan classics – side by side.

An overshadowed discovery

The middle decades of the 20th century were exciting years for scholars of early Christianity.

In 1945, a collection of 13 ancient codices was discovered near Nag Hammadi, Egypt. These contained dozens of otherwise unknown works, mostly associated with minority and marginalized forms of early Christianity. With titles like “The Gospel of Thomas” and “The Secret Revelation of John,” this cache of non-canonical scriptures captured the public’s imagination and inspired a bestseller .

The very next year, Bedouin shepherds discovered ancient Hebrew scrolls hidden in a cave at Qumran on the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea.

The “ Dead Sea Scrolls ” found in this and a dozen subsequently discovered caves constituted a massive library of Jewish texts, including biblical works and hitherto unknown texts with remarkable parallels to the writings of the New Testament. This find was celebrated in news stories , documentaries and other publications as among the greatest discoveries of the 20th century.

At the very same time, the Dishna Papers were discovered, smuggled out of Egypt and sold to European collectors with considerably less fanfare. No headline hailed the discovery of the Dishna Papers. Instead, pieces of this collection were sold to the highest bidders, scattering the ancient library across the globe .

The Dishna Papers

Though less exotic than Nag Hammadi or Qumran, the contents of the Crosby-Schøyen Codex and the 20-some additional codices discovered near Dishna have proved every bit as important for our understanding of early Christianity.

Two manuscripts of the canonical gospels, Luke and John, belonging to this ancient library predate almost every other surviving copy of these gospels. Scholars used these new manuscripts to revise the text of the New Testament .

For instance, the vast majority of manuscripts of the Gospel of John describe Jesus as “the only-begotten Son” (1:18). But the early manuscripts discovered at Dishna read “the only-begotten God.” Here and elsewhere, English translations of the Bible were changed to reflect the contents of the Dishna Papers.

But the library discovered near Dishna did not consist entirely of texts that ended up in the Christian Bible. Scriptures that were not included in the Christian canon, like Paul’s “ Third Letter to the Corinthians ” and “ The Shepherd of Hermas ,” were also found among the Dishna Papers.

One codex from Dishna contains the “ Acts of Paul ,” an extra-Biblical account of Paul’s travels and martyrdom. Another contains the “ Infancy Gospel of James ,” a non-canonical story about the life of Mary, Jesus’ mother. The discoveries at Dishna provide evidence that these writings, though unfamiliar to modern readers of the Bible, spent centuries on the periphery of Christian scripture.

The Dishna Papers included a few additional literary texts. One codex in this mostly Christian library contains several comedies by the Hellenistic playwright Menander. Another codex binds together a chapter of Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War” with a Greek version of the biblical Book of Daniel.

Evidently, the owner of this Christian library had no aversion to the arts and sciences of pre-Christian Hellenism. In this library, pagan classics and Christian scripture stood side by side.

But whose library was this?

The Crosby-Schøyen Codex, which is now up for sale, actually supplies several important clues to the origin of the Dishna Papers with which it was found.

Thanks to recent radiocarbon dating of this codex and the contents of a closely related manuscript , the Crosby-Schøyen Codex can be dated with some measure of confidence to the middle of the fourth century – roughly 325 to 350 C.E.

The Crosby-Schøyen Codex itself contains five texts in Sahidic Coptic, a dialect of the ancient Egyptian language. Three texts are Biblical: Jonah, Second Maccabees 5:27-7:41, and 1 Peter. The rest of the codex contains part of a well-known Easter homily and a brief otherwise unknown exhortation.

These texts, argue scholars Albert Pietersma and Susan Comstock, may have been collected into a single codex for use as an Easter lectionary . A lectionary is a collection of readings used in Christian worship services. Such lectionaries were used in Pachomian monasteries, like the one located only a few miles west of Dishna.

This monastery was established in the mid-330s by Pachomius, the reputed founder of communal monasticism . His Pachomian Rule , by which the monks would have ordered their communal life, makes frequent reference to the public and private use of books. Pachomius’ monasteries even taught illiterate monks to read.

It seems likely that this eclectic library of canonical and non-canonical scriptures, early Christian writings and pagan classics belonged to these book-loving monks in central Egypt. One of the Pachomian rules allowed monks to borrow books from the monastic library for up to one week.

Today, for a few million dollars , one such book can be yours forever. On June 11, 2024, the Crosby-Schøyen Codex will go to the highest bidder.

This article is republished from The Conversation , >, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.

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Ian N. Mills does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Stakeholder Analysis: Miami-Dade Police Department Essay

Stakeholder analysis is crucial for effective service delivery by law enforcement officers. Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) plays the crucial role of maintaining law and order during various public events and gatherings. The upcoming Democratic-Republican National Convention poses a major task for MDPD to ensure that all the Americans who attend the gathering are safe and that none of their rights are violated. Elected officials, political leaders, the media and press, event organizers, and advocacy groups are some of MDPD’s stakeholders. The stakeholders interested in the convention will make various claims that MDPD must meet for effective service delivery.

Organization Description

Miami-Dade is one of the most highly populated counties in the U.S., needing security for smooth social and economic activities. MDPD is a county police department that services Miami-Dade which has an estimated population of about 2.7 million residents (Zare et al., 2022). The organization is governmental and has its headquarters in Doral, Florida. As a governmental agency, MDPD has a mission of serving and protecting its community with courage and integrity (MDPD, 2023). Therefore, the agency partners with various stakeholders to realize its mission in the Miami-Dade community.

Key Stakeholders Identification

Internal stakeholders include those who work with MDPD, and the services are of importance to the Democratic-Republican National Convention. Some of the internal stakeholders include U.S. secret service, MDPD sworn officers, MDPD Police Benevolent Association, and criminal justice organizations. Meanwhile, the external stakeholders involve those who operate outside the agency. Business owners, elected officials, politicians, Miami-Dade residents, and human rights organizations, among others, are external stakeholders. The stakeholders are influencers since they persuade MDPD to take various actions during the convention. Given the wide range of stakeholders, they will be categorized into four: local government, the federal government, the public, and businesses as show on figure 1.0.

Stakeholders’ Interests and Concerns Identification

The identified stakeholders have various interests that can be addressed by MDPD. As a political convention, the stakeholders have interests that are similar to MDPD. The federal and local government stakeholders are interested in the safety of the Miami-Dade residents during the convention. The business community and the public are interested in impartial treatment by police officers and their security. Therefore, the stakeholders’ interest that is the most important to MDPD is the enforcement of law and order. Meanwhile, political interests such as who should be the next president or senator are not important to the agency.

Claims that Stakeholders are Likely to Make

The stakeholders involved in the convention are likely to make various claims to MDPD. The public may claim that MDPD is less responsive to their safety needs. Politicians may claim that the agency is not accountable for its actions against its supporters. The business community may accuse the agency of failing to respond to crimes and other emergencies. The claims by the various stakeholders are legitimate given the high population of the area and the increased number of attendees. Failure to consider the claims made by the stakeholders may lead to a loss of public trust in MDPD. Considering them would enhance positive police-public relationships and support from various stakeholders. However, the consideration can be associated with increased operational costs which are unexpected.

Most Important Stakeholders

The public and business persons of Miami-Dade are the most important stakeholders of MDPD. The agency has an explicit constitutional and statutory obligation to maintain law and order in Miami-Dade (Stolzenberg et al., 2019). Another reason why they are the most important stakeholder is that they are the closest community to the agency. The majority of the elected officials are not important because they have private security officers who ensure that they are safe. Moreover, the federal government, through agencies such as the secret service, ensures its officials’ safety (Jennings & Perez, 2020). Therefore, MDPD will protect the residents and businesses that have no other form of security.

SWOT Analysis

MDPD enjoys various strengths that can be maximized during the convention. The agency has highly trained professionals who deliver services legally and acceptably. The investigative department has sufficient human resources to attend to all claims presented before them. Additionally, MDPD modernized a surveillance system that can help detect abnormalities and criminal activities during the convention. Furthermore, the agency has adopted the community-oriented policing approach which strengthens its relationship with the Miami-Dade residents (Dias & Hilgers, 2020). Taking advantage of the mentioned strengths will allow MDPD to counter any problem faced during the upcoming Democratic-Republican National Convention.

Although the agency presents various strengths, some manifested weaknesses may encumber effective service delivery. The agency has lost the trust of a section of the residents who have suffered from police brutality. The residents may reject some of the directives given by the agency. Moreover, some MDPD officers have been involved in cases of racism, making it difficult for the stakeholders to cooperate with them (Dias & Hilgers, 2020). Furthermore, high rates of crimes within Miami-Dade present the agency as incompetent in meeting its constitutional obligation to enforce law and order. Effective strategies must be adopted to counter the weaknesses and regain public trust during the convention.

Opportunities

The Democratic-Republican National Convention presents various opportunities for MDPD. Firstly, the convention can help the agency expand its community outreach programs by involving various stakeholders. MDPD officers can be encouraged to focus on building their relationship with the public during the event. Secondly, there is an opportunity to increase funding and resources. The agency can exploit the opportunity by presenting its problems to the elected officials and politicians attending the event (Ozga, 2019). Lastly, MDPD has a chance to regain public trust by effectively executing its role of enforcing safety during the convention.

Some threats can be detrimental to MDPD’s planning and law and order enforcement activities. Budget cuts and limited resources due to tough measures against the economic conditions can deter effective service delivery. Additionally, the possibility of an increased crime rate in some Miami-Dade areas threatens MDPD’s reputation. An increase in the crime rate associated with limited police resources can result in anarchy. Furthermore, the threat of public scrutiny and mistrust in law enforcement can hinder the agency’s activities. The agency should adopt effective risk management approaches to encumber the threats.

Organizational Strategy

MDPD utilizes the community-oriented policing approach which best addresses the weaknesses and threats. Through this approach, the agency can bring together all the stakeholders and resources in preparation for the events. Involving the stakeholders will help in minimizing the weaknesses of public mistrust and high crime rates since everyone will feel involved in the agency’s decision-making (Dias & Hilgers, 2020). Exploiting the opportunities of expanded outreach programs and possible funding and increased resources can help overcome the threats. While the increased funding will counter the threat of limited resources and budget cuts, collaborating with the public will help avoid the high crime rate in some areas.

Organizational Policy

The upcoming Democratic-Republican National Convention offers MDPD a chance to cooperate and work with all stakeholders. The collaboration will likely work to the benefit of the agency and Miami-Dade residents who are interested in the convention. Therefore, the agency’s fundamental policy should be to gain a competitive advantage. MDPD will regain public trust and an excellent reputation if all the stakeholders are safe. The outcome gives the agency a competitive edge over other police departments, attracting more funds and resources.

Specific Action Recommendation

Various specific actions will help MDPD deliver effective services to its stakeholders. The agency can mobilize needed resources such as surveillance systems that will ensure the public and businesses are protected. Moreover, MDPD can negotiate an agreement with event planners to report those who disobey the law, causing mayhem during the convention. Furthermore, police officers can be encouraged to avoid the use of excessive force when enforcing law and order. Resource mobilization, stakeholder involvement, and adherence to the law are crucial for safety maintenance.

MDPD is one of the county police departments which serves Miami-Dade residents. The agency has a statutory and constitutional obligation to protect the community from any external and internal threats. The upcoming Democratic-Republican National Convention is an opportunity for the agency to maximize its strengths and opportunities to overcome weaknesses and threats. MDPD must enhance its community-oriented approach by mobilizing resources, engaging stakeholders, and acting in a manner that is not forceful to the public.

Dias, F.A., & Hilgers, T. (2020). Community oriented policing theory and practice: Global policy diffusion or local appropriation? Policing and Society , 1–9. Web.

Jennings, W. G., & Perez, N. M. (2020). The immediate impact of COVID-19 on law enforcement in the United States . American Journal of Criminal Justice , 45 , 690–701. Web.

MDPD. (2023). Miami-Dade Police Department: About us . Web.

Ozga, J. (2019). The politics of accountability . Journal of Educational Change , 21 (1), 19–35. Web.

Stolzenberg, L., D’alessio, S. J., & Flexon, J. L. (2019). Eyes on the street: Police use of body-worn cameras in Miami-Dade County . Weston Publishing, LLC.

Zare, H., Meyerson, N. S., Delgado, P., Spencer, M., Gaskin, D. J., & Thorpe, R. J. (2022). Association between neighborhood and racial composition of victims on fatal police shooting and police violence: An integrated review (2000–2022) . Social Sciences , 11 (4), 153. Web.

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26 Why and How History Matters

Charles Tilly † was Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

• Published: 05 September 2013
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This article examines the importance of history in political analysis. It suggests that explanatory political science can hardly get anywhere without relying on careful historical analysis and describes social movements in history. It discusses the historical importance of the processes of state transformation and the conception of social movements as political innovations. It concludes that every significant political phenomenon lives in history and requires historically grounded analysis for its explanation.

Do you suppose that historians labor dumbly in deep trenches, digging up facts so that political scientists can order and explain them? Do you imagine that political scientists, those skilled intellectual surgeons, slice through the fat of history to get at the sinews of rational choice or political economy? Do you claim that political scientists can avoid peering into the mists of history by clear-eyed examination of the contemporary world that lies within their view? On the contrary: this chapter gives reasons for thinking that explanatory political science can hardly get anywhere without relying on careful historical analysis.

Let us begin, appropriately, with a historical experience. Early in 1969, Stanford political scientist Gabriel Almond proposed that the (US) Social Science Research Council use Ford Foundation funds to support a study of state formation in Western Europe. Thus began an adventure. For fifteen years before then, the SSRC’s Committee on Comparative Politics had been looking at what it called “political development in the new states.” By then, committee members Almond, Leonard Binder, Philip Converse, Samuel Huntington, Joseph LaPalombara, Lucian Pye, Sidney Verba, Robert Ward, Myron Weiner, and Aristide Zolberg had converged on the idea that new states faced a standard and roughly sequential series of crises, challenges, and problems. Resolution of those problems, they argued, permitted states to move on to the next stage en route to a fully effective political regime. In a phrase that reflected their project’s normative and policy aspirations, they often called the whole process state- and nation-building. The SSRC committee labeled its crises PIPILD: Penetration, Integration, Participation, Identity, Legitimacy, and Distribution.

Committee members theorized that ( a ) all new states confronted the six crises in approximately this order, ( b ) the more these crises concentrated in time, the greater the social stress and therefore the higher the likelihood of conflict, breakdown, and disintegration, ( c ) in general, new states faced far greater bunching of the crises than had their Western counterparts, hence became more prone to breakdown than Western states had been. The violence, victimization, and venality of new states’ public politics stemmed from cumulation of crises. Presumably superior political science knowledge would not only explain those ill effects but also help national or international authorities steer fragile new states through unavoidable crises.

The SSRC scheme rested on one strong historical premise and two weak ones. On the strong side, the theorists assumed that Western states had, on the whole, created effective national institutions gradually, in a slow process of trial, error, compromise, and consolidation. More hesitantly, these analysts assumed both that political development everywhere followed roughly the same course and that the course’s end point would yield states resembling those currently prevailing in the Western world.

Since theorists of political development actually drew regularly on Western historical analogies (see, e.g., Almond and Powell 1966 ), SSRC committee members naturally wondered whether a closer look at Western history would confirm their scheme. It could do so by showing that the same crises appeared recognizably in the historical record, that they occurred more discretely and over longer periods in older states, that later-developing states experienced greater accumulations of crises, and that bunched crises did, indeed, generate stress, conflict, breakdown, and disintegration. In my guise as a European historian, they therefore asked me to recruit a group of fellow European historians who had the necessary knowledge, imagination, and synthetic verve to do the job. (As we will see later, they were also sponsoring a rival team of European historians, no doubt to check the reliability of my team’s conclusions.)

Our assignment: to meet, deliberate, do the necessary research, report our results, criticize each other’s accounts, and write a collective book. A remarkable set of talented scholars accepted the challenge: Gabriel Ardant, David Bayley, Rudolf Braun, Samuel Finer, Wolfram Fischer, Peter Lundgreen, and Stein Rokkan. We spent the summer of 1970 together at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford, California), frequently calling in critics such as Gabriel Almond, Val Lorwin, and G. William Skinner. We presented draft chapters to each other and a few sympathetic critics in Bellagio, Italy, during a strenuous week the following year. After multiple exchanges and painstaking editing, we finally published our book in 1975.

Before we began the enterprise, I had produced several essays dissenting from the sorts of breakdown theories that formed the midsection of the committee’s scheme (e.g. Tilly 1969 ). Some committee members may therefore have hoped to convert me to the committee’s views. Or perhaps secret skeptics within the committee wanted to raise their colleagues’ doubts about the committee’s political development scheme. 1 In either case, they got more than they bargained for. Looked at closely, the relevant Western European history revealed repeated crises, constant struggle, numerous collapses, far more states that disappeared than survived, and a process of state transformation driven largely by extraction, control, and coalition formation as parts or byproducts of rulers’ efforts not to build states but to make war and survive.

In an abortive effort to counter the intentionality and teleology of such terms as “state-building” and “political development,” my co-authors and I self-consciously substituted what we thought to be the more neutral term “state formation.” The term itself caught on surprisingly fast. Unfortunately, it also soon took on teleological tones in the literature on political change. 2 Contrary to our intentions, students of state formation in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia began taking the European experience as a model, and asking why their regions had failed to form proper states. 3 Nevertheless, many readers saw the book as a serious challenge to existing ideas about political development ( Skocpol 1985 ).

What is more, our historical reflections raised the distinct possibility that the processes of state formation were far more contingent, transitory, and reversible than analysts of political development then supposed. Hoping to write the final sentence of the final volume in the SSRC’s series of books on political development, I therefore ended my concluding essay with these words:

But remember the definition of a state as an organization, controlling the principal means of coercion within a given territory, which is differentiated from other organizations operating in the same territory, autonomous, centralized, and formally coordinated. If there is something to the trends we have described, they threaten almost every single one of these defining features of the state: the monopoly of coercion, the exclusiveness of control within the territory, the autonomy, the centralization, the formal coordination; even the differentiation from other organizations begins to fall away in such compacts as the European Common Market. One last perhaps, then: perhaps, as is so often the case, we only begin to understand this momentous historical process—the formation of national states—when it begins to lose its universal significance. Perhaps, unknowing, we are writing obituaries for the state. ( Tilly 1975 , 638)

I lost, alas, my rhetorical bet: a parallel SSRC group of historians working on direct applications of the crisis scheme to the United Kingdom, Belgium, Scandinavia, the United States, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Russia, and Poland under Raymond Grew’s leadership took even longer to publish their volume than we did. Editor Grew closed his presentation of the book’s findings with words more cautious than my own:

Models of political development should not tempt us to explain too much, nor be allowed to stimulate too many ingenious answers before the questions are clear. Today’s heuristic device must not become tomorrow’s assumption. One of the strengths of these essays is that they do not attempt to create a closed system; another is their recognition of many paths to political survival—and of many higher goals. A next step should be the careful formulation of historical (and therefore not just developmental) problems, followed by the comparison of realities rather than abstractions. The Committee’s broad categories of political development, like photographs of the earth taken from space, remind us that familiar terrain is part of a larger system, and urge us to compare diverse features that from a distance appear similar. They do not obviate the need for a closer look. ( Grew 1978 , 37)

In short, according to Grew, the crisis-and-sequence scheme may raise some interesting historical questions, but it certainly does not answer them.

Differences between the Tilly and Grew conclusions mark an important choice for historical analysts of political processes. 4 On one side (Grew), we can stress the obdurate particularity of historical experiences, hoping at most to arrive at rough, useful empirical generalizations through close analysis of specific cases. On the other (Tilly), we can use history to build more adequate explanations of politics past and present. Unsurprisingly, this chapter recommends the theoretically more ambitious second course, while heartily agreeing with Grew that it requires expert historical knowledge. Not only do all political processes occur in history and therefore call for knowledge of their historical contexts, but also where and when political processes occur influence how they occur. History thus becomes an essential element of sound explanations for political processes.

1 Why History Matters

Several different paths lead to that conclusion. Here are the main ones:

At least for large-scale political processes, explanations always make implicit or explicit assumptions concerning historical origins of the phenomenon and time-place scope conditions for the claimed explanation. Those assumptions remain open to historical verification and falsification. Example: students of international relations commonly assume that some time between the treaty of Augsburg (1555) and the treaties of Westphalia (1648), Europeans supplanted a web of overlapping jurisdictions with a system of clearly bounded sovereign states that then provided the context for war and diplomacy up to the present.

In the case of long-term processes, some or all features of the process occur outside the observations of any connected cohort of human analysts, and therefore require historical reconstruction. Example: displacement of personal armies, feudal levies, militias, and mercenary bands by centrally controlled national standing armies took several centuries to occur.

Most or all political processes incorporate locally available cultural materials such as language, social categories, and widely shared beliefs; they therefore vary as a function of historically determined local cultural accumulations. Example: economically, linguistically, ethnically, racially, and religiously segmented regions create significantly different configurations of state-citizen relations.

Processes occurring in adjacent places such as neighboring countries influence local political processes, hence historically variable adjacencies alter the operation of those processes. Example: the Swiss Confederation survived as a loosely connected but distinct political entity after 1500 in part precisely because much larger but competing Austrian, Savoyard, French, and German states formed around its perimeter.

Path dependency prevails in political processes, such that events occurring at one stage in a sequence constrain the range of events that is possible at later stages. Example: for all its service of privilege, the entrenchment of the assembly that became England’s Parliament by the barons’ rebellion of 1215 set limits on arbitrary royal power in England from that point forward.

Once a process (e.g. a revolution) has occurred and acquired a name, both the name and one or more representations of the process become available as signals, models, threats, and/or aspirations for later actors. Example: the creation of an elected national assembly in the France of 1789 to 1792 provided a model for subsequent political programs in France and elsewhere.

In all these ways, history matters. In the case of state transformation, there is no way to create comprehensive, plausible, and verifiable explanations without taking history seriously into account.

Apparently political scientists have learned that lesson since the 1960s. Now and then an economist, sociologist, geographer, or anthropologist does come up with a transhistorical model of state transformation. 5 Rare, however, is the political scientist that follows their lead (exceptions include Midlarsky 1999 , Taagepera 1997 ). To be sure, the historicists could be wrong and the unhistorical modelers right. I hope, however, to persuade you that historical context matters inescapably, at least for all but the most fleeting and localized political processes.

Whether the importance of history seems obvious or implausible, however, depends subtly on competing conceptions of explanation. As a first cut, let us distinguish:

Proposal of covering laws for complex structures and processes.

The special case of covering law accounts featuring the capacity of predictors within mathematical models to exhaust the variance in a “dependent variable” across some set of differing but comparable cases.

Specification of necessary and sufficient conditions for concrete instances of the same complex structures and processes.

Location of structures and processes within larger systems they supposedly serve or express.

Identification of individual or group dispositions just before the point of action as causes of that action.

Reduction of complex episodes, or certain features of those episodes, to their component mechanisms and processes.

In an earlier day, political scientists also explained political processes by means of “7. Stage models in which placement within an invariant sequence accounted for the episode at hand.” That understanding of explanation vanished with the passing of political development.

History can , of course, figure in any of these explanatory conceptions. In a covering law account, for example, one can incorporate history as a scope condition (e.g. prior to the Chinese invention of gunpowder, war conformed to generalization X) or as an abstract variable (e.g. time elapsed or distance covered since the beginning of an episode 6 ). Nevertheless, covering-law, necessary-sufficient condition, and system accounts generally resist history as they deny the influence of particular times and places. Propensity accounts respond to history ambivalently, since in the version represented by rational choice they depend on transhistorical rules of decision-making, while in the versions represented by cultural and phenomenological reductionism they treat history as infinitely particular.

Mechanism-process accounts, in contrast, positively welcome history, because their explanatory program couples a search for mechanisms of very general scope with arguments that initial conditions, sequences, and combinations of mechanisms concatenate into processes having explicable but variable overall outcomes. Mechanism-process accounts reject covering-law regularities for large structures such as international systems and for vast sequences such as democratization. Instead, they lend themselves to “local theory” in which the explanatory mechanisms and processes operate quite broadly, but combine locally as a function of initial conditions and adjacent processes to produce distinctive trajectories and outcomes. 7

2 History and Processes of State Transformation

Across a wide range of state transformation, for example, a robust process recurrently shapes state-citizen relations: the extraction-resistance-settlement cycle. In that process:

Some authority tries to extract resources (e.g. military manpower) to support its own activities from populations living under its jurisdiction.

Those resources (e.g. young men’s labor) are already committed to competing activities that matter to the subordinate population’s survival.

Local people resist agents of the authority (e.g. press gangs) who arrive to seize the demanded resources.

Struggle ensues.

A settlement ends the struggle.

Clearly the overall outcome of the process varies from citizens’ full compliance to fierce rejection of the authorities’ demands (Levi 1988 ; 1997 ). Clearly that outcome depends not only on the process’s internal dynamic but also on historically determined initial conditions (e.g. previous relations between local and national authorities) and on adjacent processes (e.g. intervention of competing authorities or threatened neighboring populations). But in all cases the settlement casts a significant shadow toward the next encounter between citizens and authorities. The settlement mechanism alters relations between citizens and authorities, locking those relations into place for a time.

Over several centuries of European state transformation, authorities commonly won the battle for conscripts, taxes, food, and means of transportation. Yet the settlement of the local struggle implicitly or explicitly sealed a bargain concerning the terms under which the next round of extraction could begin ( Tilly 1992 , chs. 3 – 4 ). Individual mechanisms of extraction, resistance, struggle, and settlement compound into a process that occurs widely, with variable but historically significant outcomes. From beginning to end, the process belongs to history.

Consider a second robust process of state transformation: subordination of armed forces to civilian control. Over most of human history, substantial groups of armed men—almost exclusively men!—have bent to no authority outside of their own number. Wielders of coercion have run governments across the world. Yet recurrently, from Mesopotamian city-states to contemporary Africa, priests, merchants, aristocrats, bureaucrats, and even elected officials who did not themselves specialize in deployment of armed force have somehow managed to exert effective control over military specialists. 8

That process has taken two closely related forms. In the first, the course of military conquest itself brought conquerors to state power. Then administration of conquered territories involved rulers so heavily in extraction, control, and mediation within those territories that they began simultaneously to create civilian staffs, to gather resources for military activity by means of those staffs, and thus to make the military dependent for their own livelihoods on the effectiveness of those staffs. In the process, tax-granting legislatures and budget-making bureaucrats gained the upper hand.

In the second variant, a group of priests or merchants drew riches from their priestly or mercantile activity, staffed the higher levels of their governments with priests, merchants, or other civilians, and hired military specialists to carry out war and policing. In both versions of the subordination process, the crucial mechanisms inhibited direct military control over the supply of resources required for the reproduction of military organization.

As in the case of extraction–resistance–settlement processes, the actual outcomes depended not only on internal dynamics but also on initial conditions and adjacent processes. In Latin America, for example, military specialists who had participated extensively in domestic political control recurrently overthrew civilian rule ( Centeno 2002 ). Military men retained more leverage where they had direct access to sustaining resources, notably when they actually served as hired guns for landed elites and when they could sell or tax lootable resources such as diamonds and drugs. Again, a similar process occurs across a wide range of historical experience, but its exact consequences depend intimately on historical context.

3 Social Movements as Political Innovations

State transformation may seem too easy a case for my argument. After all, since the fading of political development models most political scientists have conducted contemporary studies of state changes against the backdrop of explicit references to historical experience. The same does not hold for the study of social movements. By and large, students of contemporary social movements fail to recognize that they are analyzing an evolving set of historically derived political practices. Either they assume that social movements have always existed in some form or they treat social movements as contemporary political forms without inquiring into their historical transformations.

Nevertheless, sophisticated treatments of social movements generally assume a broad historical connection between democratization and social movement expansion. 9 One of the more important open questions in social movement studies, indeed, concerns the causal connections between social movement activity and democratization—surely two-way, but what and how ( Ibarra 2003 ; Tilly 2004 , ch. 6 )?

Social movements illustrate all the major arguments for taking the history of political processes seriously:

Existing explanations of social movements always make implicit or explicit assumptions concerning historical origins of the phenomenon and time–place scope conditions for the claimed explanation.

Some features of social movements occurred outside the direct observations of any connected cohort of human analysts, and therefore require historical reconstruction.

Social movements incorporate locally available cultural materials such as language, social categories, and widely shared beliefs; they therefore vary as a function of historically determined local cultural accumulations.

Social movements occurring in adjacent places such as neighboring countries influence local social movements, hence historically variable adjacencies alter the kinds of social movements that appear in any particular place.

Path dependency prevails in social movements as in other political processes, such that events occurring at one stage in a sequence constrain the range of events that is possible at later stages.

Once social movements had occurred and acquired names, both the name and competing representations of social movements became available as signals, models, threats, and/or aspirations for later actors.

None of these observations condemns students of social movements to historical particularism. Regularities in social movement activity depend on and incorporate historical context, which means that effective explanations of social movement activity must systematically take historical context into account. Like anti-tax rebellions, religious risings, elections, publicity campaigns, special interest lobbying, and political propaganda, social movements consist of standard means by which interested or aggrieved citizens make collective claims on other people, including political authorities. Like all these other forms of politics, the social movement emerges only in some kinds of political settings, waxes and wanes in response to its political surroundings, undergoes significant change over the course of its history, and yet where it prevails offers a clear set of opportunities for interested or aggrieved citizens.

Consider just two historically conditioned aspects of social movements: their repertoires of claim-making performances and their signaling systems. History shapes the availability of means for making collective claims, from the humble petition received by a Chinese emperor to the pronunciamiento of a nineteenth-century Spanish military faction. Those means always involve interactive performances of some sort, preferably following established scripts sufficiently to be recognizable but not so slavishly as to become pure ritual. They therefore draw heavily on historically accumulated and shared understandings with regard to meanings, claims, legitimate claimants, and proper objects of claims.

In any given historical period, available claim-making performances group linking various pairs of claimants, and objects of claims clump into restricted repertoires: arrays of known alternative performances. In Great Britain of the 1750s, for example, the contentious repertoire widely available to ordinary people included:

attacks on coercive authorities : liberation of prisoners; resistance to police intervention in gatherings and entertainments; resistance to press gangs; fights between hunters and gamekeepers; battles between smugglers and royal officers; forcible opposition to evictions; military mutinies

attacks on popularly-designated offenses and offenders : Rough Music; ridicule and/or destruction of symbols, effigies, and/or property of public figures and moral offenders; verbal and physical attacks on malefactors seen in public places; pulling down and/or sacking of dangerous or offensive houses, including workhouses and brothels; smashing of shops and bars whose proprietors are accused of unfair dealing or of violating public morality; collective seizures of food, often coupled with sacking the merchant’s premises and/or public sale of the food below current market price; blockage or diversion of food shipments; destruction of tollgates; collective invasions of enclosed land, often including destruction offences or hedges

celebrations and other popularly-initiated gatherings : collective cheering, jeering, or stoning of public figures or their conveyances; popularly-initiated public celebrations of major events (e.g. John Wilkes’ elections of the 1760s), with cheering, drinking, display of partisan symbols, fireworks, etc., sometimes with forced participation of reluctant persons; forced illuminations, including attacks on windows of householders who fail to illuminate; faction fights (e.g. Irish vs. English, rival groups of military)

workers’ sanctions over members of their trades : turnouts by workers in multiple shops of a local trade; workers’ marches to public authorities in trade disputes; donkeying, or otherwise humiliating, workers who violated collective agreements; destroying goods (e.g. silk in looms and/or the looms themselves) of workers or masters who violate collective agreements

claim-making within authorized public assemblies (e.g. Lord Mayor’s Day): taking of positions by means of cheers, jeers, attacks, and displays of symbols; attacks on supporters of electoral candidates; parading and chairing of candidates; taking sides at public executions; attacks or professions of support for pilloried prisoners; salutation or deprecation of public figures (e.g. royalty) at theater; collective response to lines and characters in plays or other entertainments; breaking up of theaters at unsatisfactory performances.

Not all British claim-makers, to be sure, had access to all these performances; some of the performances linked workers to masters, others market regulars to local merchants, and so on. In any case, the repertoire available to ordinary Britons during the 1750s did not include electoral campaigns, formal public meetings, street marches, demonstrations, petition drives, or the formation of special-interest associations, all of which became quite common ways of pressing claims during the nineteenth century. As these newer performances became common, the older ones disappeared.

That is where the social movement repertoire comes in. Originating in Great Britain and North America during the later eighteenth century, a distinctive array of claim-making performances formed that marked off social movements from other varieties of politics, underwent a series of mutations from the eighteenth century to the present, and spread widely through the world during the nineteenth and (especially) twentieth centuries. Social movements constituted sustained claims on well-identified objects by self-declared interested or aggrieved parties through performances dramatizing not only their support for or opposition to a program, person, or group, but also their worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. (Social movement participants always claim to represent some wider public, and sometimes claim to speak for non-participants such as fetuses, slaves, or trees.) The array of performances constituting social movement repertoires has shifted historically, but from the earliest days it included formation of named special-interest associations and coalitions, holding of public meetings, statements in and to the press, pamphleteering, and petitioning.

Social movement repertoires amply illustrate the importance of history. Although the British–American eighteenth century repertoire brought new elements together, each element had some sort of available precedent. British governments repressed popular, private, non-religious associations that took public stands as threats to the rights of Parliament. Yet they had accepted or even promoted religious congregations, authorized parish assemblies, grudgingly allowed workers’ mutual-aid societies that refrained from striking and other public claim-making. Authorities had also long tolerated clubs of aristocrats and wealthy city-dwellers. (The term “club” itself derives from the practice of clubbing together for shared expenses, and thus taking on a resemblance to a knotted stick.) More rarely and indirectly, social movement repertoires also drew on authorized parades of artisans’ corporations, militias, and fraternal orders. Adaptations of such parades figured extensively in Irish conflicts from the eighteenth century to the present. 10

Eighteenth-century innovations broadened those practices in two different directions, converting authorized religious and local assemblies into bases for campaigns and creating popular special-purpose associations devoted to public claim-making rather than (or in addition to) private enjoyment, improvement, and mutual aid. The broadening occurred through struggle, but also through patronage by sympathetic or dissident members of the elite. More generally, the internal histories of particular forms of claim-making, changing relations between potential claimants and objects of claims, innovations by political entrepreneurs, and overall transformations of the political context combined to produce cumulative alterations of social movement repertoires ( Tilly 1993 ).

The formation of the social movement repertoire included substantial losses as well as considerable gains. Many of the avenging, redressing, and humiliating actions that had worked intermittently to impose popular justice before 1800—seizures of high-priced food, attacks on press gangs, donkey-riding of workers who violated local customs, and others—became illegal. Authorities whose predecessors had mostly looked the other way so long as participants localized their actions and refrained from attacking elite persons or property, began to treat all such actions as “riots,” and to prosecute their perpetrators. Establishment of crowd-control police as substitutes for constables, militias, and regular troops in containment of demonstrations and marches temporarily increased the frequency of violent confrontations between police and demonstrators. Over the long run, however, it narrowed the range of actions open to street protestors, promoted prior negotiation between social movement activists and police, encouraged organizers themselves to exclude unruly elements from their supporters, and channeled claim-making toward non-violent interaction. Path dependence prevailed, as early innovations in the social movement repertoire greatly constrained later possibilities.

Social movement signaling systems similarly illustrate the importance of history. From the start, social movements centered on campaigns in support of or in opposition to publicly articulated programs by means of associations, meetings, demonstrations, petitions, electoral participation, strikes, and related means of coordinated action. Unlike many of its predecessors, the social movement form provided opportunities to offer sustained challenges directed at powerful figures and institutions without necessarily attacking them physically. It said, in effect, “We are here, we support this cause, there are lots of us, we know how to act together, and we could cause trouble if we wanted to.”

As compared with the many forms of direct action that ordinary people had employed earlier, social movement performances almost never achieved in a single iteration what they asked for: passage of legislation, removal of an official, punishment of a villain, distribution of benefits, and so on. Only cumulatively, and usually only in part, did some movements realize their claims. But individual performances such as meetings and marches did not simply signal that a certain number of people had certain complaints or demands. They signaled that those people had created internal connections, that they had backing, that they commanded pooled resources, and that they therefore had the capacity to act collectively, even disruptively, elsewhere and in the future.

More exactly, from early on social movement performances broadcast WUNC: worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment. How they broadcast those attributes varied historically, but in early stages the signaling had something like this character:

Worthiness: sober demeanor, neat clothing, presence of dignitaries

Unity: matching badges, armbands, or costumes, marching in ranks, singing and chanting

Numbers: headcounts, signatures on petitions, messages from constituents

Commitment: mutual defense, resistance to repression, ostentatious sacrifice, subscription and benefaction

If any of these elements—worthiness, unity, numbers, or commitment—visibly fell to a low level, the social movement lost impact. This signaling system helps explain two centuries of dispute between authorities and participants over whether pleasure-seekers or vandals had joined a performance, how many of the people present happened to be on the premises for other purposes or out of idle curiosity, how many people actually took part in the performance, and whether the police used undue brutality. Social movement performances challenge authorities and other political actors to accept or reject both a set of claims and the existence of a distinctive collective political actor. But the relevant signaling systems change and vary historically.

4 Social Movements in History

With these lessons in mind, let us look more closely at the early development of social movement claim-making. We can usefully begin a history of social movements as distinctive forms of political action in the 1760s, when after the Seven Years War (1756–1763) critics of royal policy in England and its North American colonies began assembling, marching, and associating to protest heightened taxation and arbitrary rule ( Tilly 1977 ). Braving or evading repression, they reshaped existing practices such as middle-class clubs, petition marches, parish assemblies, and celebratory banquets into new instruments of political criticism. Although social movement activity waxed and waned with state toleration and repression, from the later eighteenth century the social movement model spread through Western Europe and North America, becoming a major vehicle of popular claim-making.

In the British Isles, for example, by the 1820s popular leaders were organizing effective social movements against the slave trade, for the political rights of Catholics, and for freedom of association among workers. In the United States, anti-slavery was becoming a major social movement not much later. American workers’ movements proliferated during the first half of the nineteenth century. By the 1850s social movements were starting to displace older forms of popular politics through much of Western Europe and North America.

Throughout the world since 1850, social movements have generally flourished where and when contested elections became central to politics. Contested elections promote social movements in several different ways:

First, they provide a model of public support for rival programs, as embodied in competing candidates; once governments have authorized public discussion of major issues during electoral campaigns, it becomes harder to silence that discussion outside of electoral campaigns.

Second, they legalize and protect assemblies of citizens for campaigning and voting. Citizens allowed to gather in support of candidates and parties easily take up other issues that concern them.

Third, elections magnify the importance of numbers; with contested elections, any group receiving disciplined support from large numbers of followers becomes a possible ally or enemy at the polls.

Finally, some expansion of rights to speak, communicate, and assemble publicly almost inevitably accompanies the establishment of contested elections. Even people who lack the vote can disrupt elections, march in support of popular candidates, and use rights of assembly, communication, and speech.

Once social movements existed, nevertheless, they became available for politics well outside the electoral arena. Take temperance: opposition to the sale and public consumption of alcohol. In Britain and America, organized temperance enthusiasts sometimes swayed elections. American anti-alcohol activists formed a Prohibition Party in 1869. But temperance advocates also engaged in direct moral intervention by organizing religious campaigns, holding public meetings, circulating pledges of abstinence, and getting educators to teach the evils of alcohol. In both Great Britain and the United States, the Salvation Army (founded in London, 1865) carried on street crusades against alcohol and for the rescue of alcoholics without engaging directly in electoral politics. American agitator Carrie Nation got herself arrested thirty times during the 1890s and 1900s as she physically attacked bars in states that had passed, but not enforced, bans on the sale of alcohol. Social movements expanded with electoral politics, but soon operated quite outside the realm of parties and elections.

Anti-slavery action in the United States and Britain (that is, England, Wales, Scotland) illustrates the social movement’s rise. 11 Mobilization against slavery and increasing salience of national elections—with slavery itself an electoral issue—reinforced each other in the two countries. The timing of anti-slavery mobilization is surprising. Both the abolition of the slave trade and the later emancipation of slaves occurred when slave-based production was still expanding across much of North and South America. The Atlantic slave trade fed captive labor mainly into production of sugar, coffee, and cotton for European consumption. North and South American slave labor provided 70 percent of the cotton processed by British mills in 1787 and 90 percent in 1838. Although slave production of sugar, coffee, and cotton continued to expand past the mid-nineteenth century, transatlantic traffic in slaves reached its peak between 1781 and 1790, held steady for a few decades, then declined rapidly after 1840.

Outlawing of slavery itself proceeded fitfully for a century, from Haiti’s spectacular slave rebellion (1790 onward) to Brazil’s reluctant emancipation (1888). Argentina, for example, outlawed both slavery and the slave trade in its constitution of 1853. Between the 1840s and 1888, then, the Atlantic slave trade was disappearing and slavery itself was ending country by country. Yet slave-based production of cotton and other commodities continued to increase until the 1860s. How was that possible? Increases in slave-based commodity production depended partly on rising labor productivity and partly on population growth within the remaining slave population. Slavery did not disappear because it had lost its profitability. Movements against the slave trade, then against slavery itself, overturned economically viable systems.

How did that happen? Although heroic activists sometimes campaigned publicly against slavery in major regions of slave-based production, crucial campaigns first took place mostly where slaves were rare but beneficiaries of their production were prominent. For the most part, anti-slavery support arose in populations that benefited no more than indirectly from slave production. The English version of the story begins in 1787. English Quakers, Methodists, and other anti-establishment Protestants joined with more secular advocates of working-class freedoms to oppose all forms of coerced labor. A Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, organized in 1787, coordinated a vast national campaign, an early social movement.

During the next two decades, British activists rounded out the social movement repertoire with two crucial additions: the lobby and the demonstration. Lobbying began literally as talking to Members of Parliament in the lobby of the Parliament building on their way to or from sessions. Later the word generalized to mean any direct intervention with legislators to influence their votes. British activists also created the two forms of the demonstration we still know today: the disciplined march through streets and the organized assembly in a symbolically significant public space, both accompanied by coordinated displays of support for a shared program. Of course all the forms of social movement activism had precedents, including public meetings, formal presentations of petitions, and the committees of correspondence that played so important a part in American resistance to royal demands during the 1760s and 1770s. But between the 1780s and the 1820s British activists created a new synthesis. From then to the present, social movements regularly combined associations, meetings, demonstrations, petitions, electoral participation, lobbying, strikes, and related means of coordinated action.

Within Great Britain, Parliament began responding to popular pressure almost immediately, with partial regulation of the slave trade in 1788. By 1806, abolition of the slave trade had become a major issue in parliamentary elections. In 1807, Parliament declared illegal the shipping of slaves to Britain’s colonies, effective at the start of the following year. From that point on, British activists demanded that their government act against other slave-trading countries. Great Britain then pressed for withdrawal of other European powers from the slave trade. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the major European powers except for Spain and Portugal agreed to abolition of the trade. Under economic and diplomatic pressure from Britain, Spain and Portugal reluctantly withdrew from officially sanctioned slave trading step by step between 1815 and 1867. From 1867 onward, only outlaws shipped slaves across the Atlantic.

Soon after 1815, British activists were moving successfully to restrict the powers of slave owners in British colonies, and finally—in 1834—to end slavery itself. Although French revolutionaries outlawed both the slave trade and slavery throughout France and its colonies in 1794, Napoleon’s regime restored them ten years later. France did not again abolish slavery and the slave trade until the Revolution of 1848. With Brazil’s abolition of slavery in 1888, legal slavery finally disappeared from Europe and the Americas. Backed aggressively by state power, British social movement pressure had brought about a momentous change.

As of the later nineteenth century, social movements had become widely available in Western countries as bases of popular claim-making. They served repeatedly in drives for suffrage, workers’ rights, restrictions on discrimination, temperance, and political reform. 12 During the twentieth century, they proliferated, attached themselves more firmly to the mass media, and gained followings in a wider variety of class, ethnic, religious, and political categories. More frequently than before, social movements also supported conservative or reactionary programs—either on their own or (more often) in reaction to left movements. Italian and German fascists, after all, employed anti-leftist social movement strategies on their ways to power ( Anheier, Neidhardt, and Vortkamp 1998 ). As a result of incessant negotiation and confrontation, relations between social movement activists and authorities, especially police, changed significantly. 13

Regularities in social movements, then, depended heavily on their historical contexts. Eighteenth-century social movement pioneers adapted and combined forms of political interaction that were already available in their contexts: the special-purpose association, the petition drive, the parish meeting, and so on. They thereby created new varieties of politics. Forms of social movement activity mutated in part as a consequence of changes in their political environments and in part as a result of innovations within the form itself on the part of activists, authorities, and objects of claims ( Tilly and Wood 2003 ). Early innovations stuck and constrained later innovations not only because widespread familiarity with such routines as demonstrating facilitated organizing the next round of claim-making, but also because each innovation altered relations among authorities, police, troops, activists, their targets, their rivals, their opponents, and the public at large. When movement repertoires diffused, they always changed as a function of differences and connections between the old setting and the new ( Chabot and Duyvendak 2002 ). Social movement politics has a history.

5 Concluding Reflections

So does the rest of politics. We could pursue the same sort of argument across a great many other historically grounded political phenomena: democratization and de-democratization, revolution, electoral systems, clientelism, terror, ethnic mobilization, interstate war, civic participation, and more. The conclusion would come out the same: every significant political phenomenon lives in history, and requires historically grounded analysis for its explanation. Political scientists ignore historical context at their peril.

So should political science quietly dissolve into history? Must professional political scientists turn in their badges for those of professional historians? No, at least not entirely. I would, it is true, welcome company in the thinly populated no man’s land at the frontiers of history and political science. But history as a discipline has its own peculiarities. Historians do not merely take serious account of time and place. They revel in time and place, defining problems in terms of specific times and places, even when doing world history. One ordinarily becomes a professional historian by mastering the sources, languages, institutions, culture, and historiography of some particular time and place, then using that knowledge to solve some problem posed by the time and place. The problems may in some sense be universal: how people coped with disaster, what caused brutal wars, under what conditions diverse populations managed to live together. The proposed solutions may also partake of universality: one step in the evolution of humanity, persistent traits of human nature, the tragedy of vain belief. But the questions pursued belong to the time and place, and adhere to the conversation among students of the time and place.

Although we might make exceptions for area specialists and students of domestic politics, on the whole political scientists’ analytic conversations do not concern times and places so much as certain processes, institutions, and kinds of events. Let me therefore rephrase my sermon. As the analysis of state transformations and social movements illustrates, political scientists should continue to work at explaining processes, institutions, and kinds of events. To do so more effectively, however, they should take history seriously, but in their own distinctive way.

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See, e.g., Biggs 1999 ; Braddick 2000 ; Corrigan and Sayer 1985 .

For critiques, see Barkey and Parikh 1991 ; Centeno 2002 .

Here and hereafter, “historical” means locating the phenomenon meaningfully in time and place relative to other times and places, “political” means involving at least one coercion-wielding organization as participant or influential third party, and “process” means a connected stream of causes and effects; see Pierson 2004 , Tilly 2001 a .

E.g. Batchelder and Freudenberger 1983 ; Bourdieu 1994 ; Clark and Dear 1984 ; Earle 1997 ; Friedmann 1977 ; Gledhill, Bender, and Larson 1988 ; Li 2002 .

See Roehner and Syme 2002 .

McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 2001 ; Tilly 2001 b .

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Bryan 2000 ; Farrell 2000 ; Jarman 1997 ; Kinealy 2003 ; Mac Suibhne 2000 .

d’Anjou 1996 ; Drescher 1986 ; 1994 ; Eltis 1993 ; Grimsted 1998 ; Klein 1999 , ch. 8 .

Buechler 1990 ; Calhoun 1995 ; Gamson 1990 ; McCammon and Campbell 2002 ; McCammon et al. 2001 ; Tarrow 1998 .

Fillieule 1997 ; della Porta 1995 ; della Porta and Reiter 1998 .

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