In the 1990s, I had begun to work on a history of modern historiography, and signed a contract with a publisher. As I proceeded, I became increasingly unsure of the project. Much had been written on the topic. In 1999 a very good small book, Modern Historiography by Michael Bentley, appeared, which accomplished what I had intended. I began to feel that my original plan with its orientation on Europe and North America was too limited and that an inter-cultural history of historiography from a global perspective was needed.
Such a history did not exist, at least not in Western languages. The various histories of historiography that had been written in the twentieth century concentrated on academic history, neglecting the fact that even after the professionalization of historical studies in the nineteenth century, a good deal of history was written by non-professional historians who often reached a wider public.
While I did not agree with Hayden White that history was merely a form of imaginative literature, I saw a great deal of overlap, particularly in the nineteenth century, between the great works of historical scholarship, such as those by Ranke and Michelet, and literature; as a matter of fact their historical works were read by a broad public. I began to move from viewing history as an autonomous professional discipline to seeing it as part of a historical culture in which other expressions of historical consciousness played a role.
Thus I was less interested in the great historians and in the great works of history that had been the concern of virtually all histories of historiography, including my own, although they were representative of the culture and time and provided keys for understanding them. Works in the 1980s that studied collective memories, like the French series, Lieux de Mémoire (Places of Memory) pointed in this direction. I thus saw the need to analyze the discourse that was dominant in a given epoch and society. I set myself two important limits. One was that I would focus on historical writing after all, realizing that such writing is an expression of a broader culture, but also believing that it is better to approach the culture through its parts than to drown in a fathomless sea.
Second, I decided to begin my study in the late eighteenth century, as I would have done if I had followed my earlier more conventional plan, but for a different reason. In this earlier plan, I started as Bentley did with the late eighteenth century as the starting point of professional scholarship. However, I chose this starting point because until then there was little contact of historical traditions and practices beyond cultural boundaries, such as, for example Western, East Asian, South Asian, Islamic, and Sub-Saharan historiographies. Contact had begun much earlier in other areas, such as the economic penetration of the non-Western world.
Before 1750 or 1800 the history of historiography is basically a record of separate traditions that have little contact with each other. After 1800 this changes. There is a steady influence of the West on non-Western historiographies. This is not a mere process of Westernization, as everywhere indigenous cultures respond differently. The beginning point of the study I conceived, therefore had to be the situation at the threshold of Western influences. Although there are marked differences there are also parallel developments and processes of modernization of historical studies in East Asia, India and in the Muslim world.
After 1800, modernization takes on a predominantly Western face, but there are different forms of modernization in the West and in each of the non-Western cultures. There is thus no uniform process of modernization but there are multiple modernities. What I envisaged was not a well integrated, encyclopedic work but rather an extended essay, perhaps three hundred pages long, which presents less of a survey than a series of questions about how one can in fact write such histories.
I was able to convince my longtime friend Qingjia Edward Wang to join me as co-author. Wang had written an important book, Inventing China through History (2001) on Chinese historical writing in the twentieth century, which dealt with the role of traditions of Chinese scholarship in the modernization of historiography in China. We complement each other well. Wang who received his MA in Shanghai and his doctorate in the United States, teaches in the United States. He has maintained close contacts with his alma mater in Shanghai and with institutions in Taiwan, reads Japanese well, has written on the transmission of Western historical thought to China via Japan, and is well acquainted with Western discussions.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 195f