Fowden’s First Millennium

Abstract

‘Study problems in preference to periods’, Lord Acton averred in 1885. Situated amidst a series of aphorisms, the ironic subversion (intentional or otherwise) may have been lost on an audience listening to a lecture that inaugurated Acton’s tenure as Regius Professor of Modern History.1 Minutes earlier he had defined the subject of his chair by adducing a familiar pantheon of early modern avatars: Columbus, Machiavelli, Erasmus, Luther, and Copernicus. ‘The modern age did not proceed from the mediaeval by normal succession, with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient reign of continuity’.2 It was the breathless celebration of that order, which included history’s role in ‘detecting error and vindicating entrusted truth’, and so in rousing man from the ‘dreaming prehistoric world’, that earned Acton infamy as the ‘highest consciousness’ of Whig history, in whose thought ‘the moral function of history was most greatly magnified’.3 The twentieth century disabused most of us of Acton’s moral certainties, but I cannot be the only historian who, having read a confused thesis prospectus, still directs the wayward Ph.D. student to heed his advice. For reasons that are not unrelated to that century’s political and epistemological convulsions, of course it will no longer do to pronounce ex cathedra, Acton-style. If he was a ‘lumper’ who drew sweeping and so aphorism-generating conclusions, the professionalization of history has made most of us ‘splitters’, determined to define and defend our modest territories of specialist knowledge, wary of perilous excursions outside of our own areas of expertise. In narrating and understanding the past, we typically transmute the time and space of human experience into chronology and geography, concepts that are ultimately reified into markers of professional expertise: one historian does ‘18-century France’, another ‘Tang China’. In an age of globalization and big data, there are naturally some reflexes, most notably a torrent of books and journals with a comparative, interdisciplinary, hemispheric or even global reach, including the rise of ‘Big History’, a mode of universal narration in which Eusebius’ or al-Ṭabarī’s (Biblical) Creation is replaced by the astronomers’ Big Bang. But narrow specialism remains the marrow of disciplinary training in history. If change is coming, it is coming slowly, despite the efforts of a journal such as this. Disciplinary habits are hard to kick. By disrupting Acton’s facile distinction between period and problem—that is, by making problems of both period and place—Fowden swims against this tide of spe-