On "Competitive History"
A few weeks ago I was delivering a lecture on the Mongols, and noted how Chinggis Khan ruled over the "largest land empire in history," a phrase that gets bandied about all over the internet. I asked students to reflect on this: why do we care if an empire is "large" at all? For many, scale represents something about prestige: the larger the area controlled, the more powerful or impressive the empire. Naturally this is partially a reflection of our sources, they speak frequently of rulers who spread the boundaries of their realms. This was a source of pride, protecting and expanding the realm was a sign of a powerful ruler, retreat was a sign of weakness or divine disfavor, etc. Yet we don't need to take this as truth, a place is not solely defined by how capable it is of expanding.
What this reflects, I argue, is called "competitive history", the type of thing you see often on reddit and other social media. Constant comparisons, technicalities over terminology, and impossible-to-square arguments are the hallmarks of this rhetorical and social understanding of history. That is, all this serves to render the historical past into little more than grist for the reddit content mill where people endlessly debate minutia to answer meaningless comparative questions. It does not matter whether the Mongols were the largest land empire in history except as a factoid to put on an infographic. Similarly, this competitive view of history leads to overly hair-splitting debates about government, empire, and politics that take us far from gaining any meaningful understanding from the past. An endless pursuit of typologizing only serves to downplay differences. Premodern empires were not pleasant places to live; brutality was common and slavery was always bad. Even seemingly bureaucratic empires not known for their military prowess such as the Song Dynasty were unpleasant and coercive.[1] By categorizing empires and polities based on how "brutal" they were, we ignore that the experience of those under imperial (or even royal, brutality is not an imperial monopoly) was unpleasant.
Recently I read Donald Sassoon's Revolutions: a New History in which he seems to diminish famines and other violence of revolutions by offering "context" of the scale. The French Terror, he seems to suggest, isn't so bad because "only" a couple thousand were killed. Famines, such as that after the Great Leap Forward, as juxtaposed with the Irish famine, and also contorted with an "excess death" framing that seem to obfuscate the role of state policies in causing these deaths. Whether intentional or not, the outcome is a sense of diminishment. It is an attempt at categorization you see with relative frequency. One thinks of the odious question put forth in Niall Ferguson's work on WW1 that the Germans were more "efficient" at killing and thus wonders why they didn't win the war.[2] It is Freakonomics as historical method, a way of claiming cool detachment from the violence or horrors of the past. "It is just the facts, no need to bring emotion into it" these authors seem to suggest.
So many of these "theories" depend on faulty ideas about people in the past with perfect information, making perfectly optimized choices. It is an inability to reckon with complexity, things in the past happen not because of a confluence of historical factors, but because they were "weak" and should have obviously done X,Y, and Z. Its the "RIP but I'm different" theory of history. As actual historians and experts know, however, there is rarely One Weird Trick to solve a problem. Just poking into the mines of Reddit's r/AskHistory we are greeted by this exact thing: "why didn't Haiti just stop paying their debts?" Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but it suggests further questions: Why didn't they think of that? Are they stupid? Reality, of course, is not so simple.
Much of this comes from a place of curiosity, but it warps people's impressions of the past. The past isn't a fully realized or complex place, but an arena for questions over the "most powerful" empire. As the internet becomes increasingly sloppified, these sorts of hyperbolic and decontextualized topics spread further and further. Clickbait over "the 10 most important events in history" or the title of a video Youtube's algorithm recommended to me: "The Desperate Battle that Saved Europe." These are not serious attempts to reckon with the past, and we don't need to pretend they are.
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- I am referring here to the book I saw recommended by @Beijingpalmer on Bluesky by Elad Alyagon, Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire's Penal-Military Complex (Harvard University Press, 2023).↩︎
- It has been many years since I read this, but it is from The Pity of War where he also argues the British should not have entered the war.↩︎
