It’s almost never possible to cover all history relevant to a particular moment in time at once, whether in writing or in the classroom. There’s just too much going on around a country, let alone the globe, to be able to do anything but split topics into their own sections of information. Yet taken too far, this unavoidable compartmentalization can lead to necessary information being completely excised and alienated from its causes or effects. Nowhere have I noticed this more than in my own professional specialization, the study of imperialism and the modern European overseas empires. Even though conquest, expansion, and economic influence outside of Europe formed a huge proportion of foreign policy from the sixteenth century to the twentieth (and in many ways right up to the present), too many courses treat empire as something to be safely cordoned off and alienated from the history of these countries at home in ways it simply never was in real life.
I was reminded of how oddly empire gets taught these days when I was preparing for an AP World History tutoring session. I love doing AP World, and I was very much looking forward to hitting my student’s textbook’s chapter on high imperialism, the Scramble for Africa, and the pre-First World War height of the European empires. As I began to read, however, I was shocked, not by how little or how inaccurate the material was (though there were more than a few mistakes), but by how much material had been purposely left out of earlier chapters to be included now in this one. We had left the 1600s behind months ago, and yet the chapter began by rewinding to the founding of the English East India Company to discuss the British presence in India. The Industrial Revolution had been two chapters previous, yet only now did we discuss the role of colonies in providing raw materials and captive markets for European manufactures. At best, these organizational decisions resulted in redundancy, like talking about Japan’s efforts to modernize in the chapter immediately beforehand and then devoting another entire section in this one to Japanese imperialism up through the Russo-Japanese War. At worst, I fear that alienating so much imperial history from the history of its corresponding European cores leaves students with a crippled understanding of the whole picture—and one that may even be harder to remember as a result.
It’s hard to say where such organizational curriculum decisions might come from. Modern misconception that, rather than the default mode of statebuilding across human history, imperialism was an aberration of a few discrete periods? Perhaps, but this particular textbook was actually quite good about highlighting how imperialism has run throughout the history it covers (which starts with the ancient world, so I should hope it did!). On other occasions, it might be a symptom of the nature of specialized degrees and jealous favoritism; I’ll always remember how Kevin told me that the syllabus of his 20th Century European History masters program at Columbia contained not a single work of imperial history.
More important than origins, in my mind, is how I might recommend fixing all this. The solution for higher level courses like Kevin’s, of course, is fairly easy: add a couple of books on empire into the mix! Revising a textbook, however, is a bit more complicated. All the information is there, in large part; it just needs to be moved around. Ironically, given my attachment to this subject matter, I think I would actually prefer there never be a single chapter devoted solely to imperialism at all (with the possible exception of the Age of Exploration that kicks all the modern European ones off). Instead, every chapter should have a section on colonialism or integrate it into other sections when relevant, whether describing geopolitical, economic, or socio-cultural developments. Plymouth Rock should go hand in hand with English Dissenters and the Civil War; high imperialism should complement the Industrial and Second Scientific Revolutions; in short, knit everything back together as close as we can.
This all may be more than a bit of navel gazing on my part, to be fair. But I do think there needs to be a larger discussion here about how we teach history in the twenty-first century. More and more, I have encountered well-meaning attempts to get away from the old dates-and-great-men approach to teaching history in secondary classrooms that go too far in their correction, opting to teach thematically and putting on blinders to any other information that doesn’t fit, regardless of relevance. I worry that in an effort to make history more palatable, it is slowly (and sometimes not so slowly) being dismembered in a way that renders it less comprehensible and unrecognizable as such. It’s always a balancing act, but for now, it seems a constructive equilibrium often remains beyond our reach.