History: Scope | Quomodo Scimus : IBTOK

areas of knowledge - history

Scope of History

History is not the past

A novelist tells historians how it is.

THE PROVOCATION

Hilary Mantel opened her 2017 BBC Reith Lectures with a definition worth reflecting on:

Hilary Mantel quote on what history is and is not

She continued: "It's what's left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it - a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more 'the past' than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey."

Mantel is a historical novelist, not a historian - and that outside position sharpens the point. The claim separates two things that are easy to conflate: the past, which happened and is gone, and history, the reconstruction of what survives. What historians work with is a fragment of a fragment.

Understanding what kind of knowledge emerges from those conditions is the scope question for History as an Area of Knowledge. A failure to understand what distinguishes history from the past is what makes historical knowledge so problematic for TOK students

Big idea 1 - The facts do not speak for themselves

E.H. Carr's What is History? - first published in 1961 and still the most widely used introduction to history as a discipline - opens with a deceptively simple example. At Stalybridge Wakes in 1850, a gingerbread vendor was kicked to death by an angry mob. Stalybridge is a town in Greater Manchester. The Wakes was the annual fair - a tradition in mill towns across the north of England where factories closed for a week and workers gathered for festivities. The violent death is a documented fact - witnessed, recorded. But is it a historical fact?

Carr's answer: not automatically. A fact becomes a historical fact only when a historian decides it is worth including, and that decision depends on what argument the historian is trying to make. The gingerbread vendor's death spent a century in obscurity before being cited in an Oxford lecture. Whether it enters the historical record depends entirely on whether other historians take it up. "Its present status," Carr writes, "is that it has been proposed for membership of the select club of historical facts."

The past is full of gingerbread vendors. Only some of them become history. Carr's image for this is the fish and the fishmonger's slab. Facts are not laid out waiting to be inspected. "They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch."

The historian's choices carry a perspective. They are shaped by the questions the historian brings, which are shaped by the present in which the historian lives.

The French historian Marc Bloch, writing his Historian's Craft in occupied France in 1942 and arrested by the Gestapo before he could finish it, put the same insight differently. History, he wrote, is "the science of men in time." Not the science of the past as fixed record, but of human beings as living, in a certain time and space. The historian "does not think of the human in the abstract. His thoughts breathe freely the air of the climate of time."

Bloch tells a story about arriving in Stockholm with his colleague Henri Pirenne. Pirenne immediately said: "What shall we go to see first? It seems that there is a new city hall here. Let's start there." When Bloch looked surprised, Pirenne added: "If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life." Attentiveness to the present is not a distortion of historical judgment. For Bloch, it is a condition of it.

Portrait of Marc Bloch with text on what history is and is not.

Big idea 2 - History is not just about events.

Carr and Bloch establish that selection is unavoidable - the historian chooses what to look at. But there is a prior question: at what scale? Watch my short film below. It links the Big Ideas 2 and 3.

History is plural

History should be understood as plural: histories, not one single history. Any event can be viewed from many legitimate perspectives, like different observers looking down from a hot-air balloon. Historians may choose different aspects of the past to study, but in practice they often focus on similar themes. This raises questions of power: dominant histories, especially national histories taught in schools or universities, are not natural or inevitable. They are created, defended, and shaped by institutions.

The balloon in the film makes the point visually. The same view yields different knowledge depending on the altitude. History works the same way. Changing the scale of analysis does not just change the detail - it changes what becomes visible at all.

You already know this from your history lessons, even if they haven't named it. Take the Industrial Revolution. At the level of events, you have specific inventions - Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's spinning frame - and specific decisions by identifiable people. Zoom out one level and you see the PESC (Political, Economic, Social and Cultural) factors behind those events: the availability of coal and iron, enclosure of common land, capital accumulation, population growth, the particular geography of Britain as an island with navigable rivers. Zoom out further still and you reach questions that individual decisions did not cause and cannot explain: centuries of agricultural improvement, the slow stabilisation of a climate, the geological accident of coal seams close to the surface and close to the port of Cardiff in the video above.

Each level of zoom produces a different kind of explanation - and a different answer to the question of what caused the Industrial Revolution. This is the tension historians call structure and agency. Agency explanations focus on what individuals decided and did. Structural explanations focus on the conditions that made certain outcomes possible, likely, or nearly inevitable regardless of who was in charge. Most historical explanation moves between these levels without always naming them.

The French historian Fernand Braudel built an entire historiography on the argument that historians had been systematically looking at the wrong level. His The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, published in 1949, studies not just Philip's reign but the geography, trade routes, climate and settlement patterns of the Mediterranean world across centuries. The events historians usually privilege - battles, treaties, the decisions of rulers - were for Braudel the least explanatory layer of causation.

He called this surface layer l'histoire événementielle: "a surface disturbance, the waves stirred up by the powerful movement of tides. A history of short, sharp, nervous vibrations." His image for its limitations: "I remember a night near Bahia, when I was enveloped in a firework display of phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails."

Beneath the events lay economic and social cycles lasting decades. Beneath those, the near-immovable realities of geography, climate and demography - what Braudel called the longue durée, the long duration. Philip II did not cause the Mediterranean world. He was produced by it. The scope question is not which scale is correct. Each reveals something the others cannot. The choice of scale is a choice about what kind of explanation history is supposed to produce.

Big idea 3 - History is always for someone

Carr and Bloch show that selection is unavoidable with both facts and scale. The British philosopher of history Keith Jenkins argues that the choices historians make are not merely intellectual: "History is never for itself; it is always for someone." Jenkins's claim in Rethinking History (1991) is that what gets written and taught as history reflects the interests of those with the power to produce it. "Particular social formations want their historians to deliver particular things," he writes. "The predominantly delivered positions will be in the interests of those stronger ruling blocs within social formations." The versions of the past held by the less powerful - women, the working class, social and ethnic minorities - have historically been defined as illegitimate and excluded from the official record.

Behind this argument sits a concept students will recognise from core lesson 4: Gramsci's hegemony - the idea that dominant groups maintain power not through force alone but through control of culture, education and knowledge, including which histories get told and which get silenced. Jenkins is applying that logic specifically to the historical discipline. The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce gave this a precise formulation in 1917. "Every true history is contemporary history," he argued. Historians are always driven by present concerns: "Only an interest in the life of the present can move one to investigate past fact. This past fact does not answer to a past interest, but to a present interest."

A single example shows what this means in practice. In 1946, the highly respected, Oxford University historian A.L. Rowse published The Use of History, a mainstream introduction to the subject. On what history should be taught in schools, he wrote:

"I think the royal road to appealing to the interest of the schoolboy...is the biographical: lives of great men, especially men of action, like the great English seamen or soldiers and adventurers and their exciting stories...Schoolboys respond immediately to the appeal of patriotism, to the spirit of self-devotion in such lives as Wolfe, Sir John Moore, Nelson, Livingstone, General Gordon, Scott of the Antarctic, Lawrence of Arabia."

Rowse was not an eccentric. He was a mainstream historian writing a mainstream introduction. His 1946 history is Croce's point made visible: the present interest - patriotic, imperial, male - is the whole argument, not an incidental colouring of it. What Rowse had to say about the education of girls was particularly instructive, this was the Gramscian 'common sense' of its day and explains why feminist history was not yet a thing:

"I deeply doubt whether physics and chemistry have any educational value, save for a few exceptions, in girls' schools at all. I should have thought that in these their place might be more profitably taken, for obvious reasons, by biology, hygiene and natural history — sciences of life rather than of matter." A.L. Rowse, The Use of History, p. 169.

The Perspective page takes the question further: if history is always shaped by someone, who has that someone typically been? When "for someone" becomes the whole point, the past stops functioning as history at all. Lowenthal calls the result heritage. In The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, he argues that heritage and history make different kinds of claim: history tests what it says against evidence and acknowledges that its account will be revised; heritage selects and adjusts the past to confirm a group's sense of itself in the present. A national curriculum or a restored battlefield tells you something about the group that made it, not necessarily about the past it appears to document. The diagram below maps the branches of history as a discipline and marks where the discipline ends and possession begins.

Each big idea on this page feeds the next. The historian's choice of what to select is shaped by the questions they bring. The choice of scale determines what those questions can reach. Those questions and scales are not chosen in a vacuum - they reflect the world the historian inhabits and the purposes history is expected to serve.

The scope of History compared

A knowledge built from traces

The three big ideas on this page - selection, scale, and power - describe a form of knowledge built from incomplete evidence, shaped by the questions of the present, and never fully separable from the interests of those who produce it. Placing History alongside the other Areas of Knowledge sharpens what is distinctive about it.

The most immediate comparison is with Natural Sciences. Both disciplines make claims about the real world and both depend on evidence. A scientist can observe phenomena directly, design experiments, and repeat them under controlled conditions. The historian works from traces of events that happened once and cannot be repeated or recreated. The Battle of Hastings cannot be run again with a different variable. This is the defining condition of the discipline, not a weakness unique to it. Natural Science produces knowledge by isolating causes; History produces knowledge by reconstructing contexts.

The comparison with Mathematics runs deeper. Mathematical truths appear to be knower-independent: the Pythagorean theorem was true before Pythagoras, holds regardless of who proves it, and carries no trace of the mathematician's nationality, era, or political situation. Historical knowledge is knower-dependent by definition. Carr, Bloch, Jenkins and Croce all argue, from different angles, that who is doing the knowing shapes what gets known. This is not a failure of rigour in History - it is a consequence of History's subject matter: human beings making meaning in time, which Mathematics does not share.

Human Science shares History’s difficulty, but not its distance. Human Science’s Scope page argues that the knower and the known are made of the same material: a psychologist studying belief is themselves a believer in a way no historian is a sixteenth-century peasant. History studies people who can no longer answer back. Human Science mostly studies people who still can.

The Arts sit at the furthest end of this same question. History interprets evidence about events that actually happened; Scope of the Arts describes something closer to the reverse, work that does not have to answer to any prior event at all. A historian’s reconstruction can be wrong about what happened. A painting cannot be wrong about an event it was never claiming to record.

Next: Perspectives in History

Think further: questions and resources

Mantel describes history as "the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past." Does this make historical knowledge fundamentally different from scientific knowledge, or do all disciplines organise ignorance in some form?
Carr argues that the gingerbread vendor's death only becomes a historical fact when a historian decides it matters. Who should have the authority to make that decision?
Bloch's colleague Pirenne insisted that being a historian means loving life, not old things. Does engagement with the present sharpen or distort historical judgment?
Braudel argues that the Industrial Revolution cannot be explained by individual decisions alone - geography, climate and centuries of agricultural change created the conditions. Does this make human agency in history an illusion?
Croce claims that "every true history is contemporary history." If Rowse's 1927 history reveals his imperial present more than it reveals the past, what would genuinely reliable historical knowledge look like?
Jenkins argues history is always for someone. Mathematicians make the same claim about their discipline - that mathematical knowledge is for everyone, independent of the knower. Which position is more defensible?

Films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — IB TOK History 1 (2019)

Richard Jones-Nerzic

This is the first of series of films from your favourite history teacher made from a history teaching perspective. A film based on my book chapter from 2012. History is not the past itself, but a present-day interpretation of evidence from the past. It is both a process and a product: historians research, select, analyse and write. Unlike casual storytelling, history depends on trained methods. It sits between the arts and social sciences, using both empathy and evidence. Finally, history is plural. Different historians ask different questions, and the histories we study often reflect power, institutions and national priorities.

🎬 WATCH — Death of Stalin (2017)

Armando Iannucci,

A political satire set in the hours and days following Stalin's death in 1953. What makes it useful for this page is the speed at which history is rewritten: within hours of the death, factions are already constructing competing accounts of what happened and why, each version shaped by who benefits from it. The film is Jenkins's argument made visible - history is never for itself, always for someone - and Croce's point compressed into real time: the most contemporary history of all is the history being written before the body is cold. My students can watch the film here.