Why write history?

Why write history? This question has plagued the discipline since it kicked off in earnest some two centuries or so ago. Dispensing with relativism, objectivism, subjectivism, postmodernism, Marxism and all the other isms that get thrown into the debate, I would like to strip it back to its roots and wonder why, no matter what school we buy into, we care at all? For me, I believe it to be the search for an answer to one the big questions of life the universe and everything: Where did we come from?

History connects us all, much more recently than you might think. The mathematics testifies to this and I apologise for getting technical but here goes. We all had 2 parents, who each had 2 parents (4), who each had 2 parents (8), who each had two parents (16) and so on. After going back 37 generations, at an average of 25 years between the birth of each generation, we would have had 137,438,953.472 ancestors only 925 years ago. That’s 30 billion more people than have been estimated to have lived as Homo Sapiens Sapiens in the whole of history. This is of course impossible. The explanation is a great deal of overlap, that we all share common ancestors, not in the primordial past or the Mesolithic distance, but in the last millennium. It means that every single one of us is, statistically at least, related to Richard the Lion Heart, to Guibert de Nogent, to William the Conqueror, to Ben Charlemagne, to Mohammed, to Zoroaster, Socrates, even Christ himself if he was a historical character. Our histories are interconnected more than most people know and our shared dreams, fears, passions and worries are shared for good reason.

Where did we come from? Cosmologically, we came from the big bang, and this excites the physicist. Biologically, we evolved as a result of abiogensis, and this excites the Biologist. Culturally, politically, individually and sociologically we all came from each other’s ancestors. We are all connected by a shared past and shared lineage that has wrapped itself around the tiny blue globe we inhabit, and the understanding of that shared past is what excites the historian. The historian, in essence, asks ‘where did WE come from’. Not where life come from, not where the universe came from, just US. History is a selfish discipline when cast against the vastness of space, but one that, if removed from society tomorrow and replaced with absolute subjectivity or ignorance, would sully our understanding of each other.

Why write history? Because we must!