History is all about narratives – how to blue the abstract truth

There is an old adage that history is always written by the victors. In a sense it’s true. If you’ve just won, you’re going to want to portray your side as the legitimate party. That’s why Richard III got such a bad rap from the Tudors. But to me the universal point is that history is all about narratives – which tend to be shaped by whoever has power at the time. As those power balances change, so too does the nature of the historical narrative being used by those in power to justify their position.

This works at all levels. Let’s take a personal example. I write entirely on personal effort and merit. My contribution to historical scholarship at global level was recognised a decade ago when I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society at University College, London, on merit of my publications.

I have friends in the academic field here in New Zealand who have supported what I’m doing. But alas, my reward from various other members of the local academy – all employed at my expense as taxpayer – has been a narrative to the effect that because I have published extensively in their territory on my own merits, I must be ignorant of academic techniques, incompetent at every turn, personally worthless, and so stupid you’d think I spent most of my time first wondering which way around to sit on a toilet, then getting it wrong. Curiously, the more I publish on personal merit and effort, the more frenzied and derogatory the commentaries seem to get. Last year alone, one academic historian published the ‘Wright is a personally worthless incompetent’ narrative no fewer than six times – a repetition that smacks not of fair criticism of my work, but intentional malice.

The general issue, of course, is that this narrative presents both as a direct attempt to do me financial and reputational damage, and to gas-light. And that’s the general point. Narratives don’t convey an objective truth. They convey a story that authors wrap in all the terminology of ‘objectivity’, but where they are actually peddling a particular line.

My book on the Treaty of Waitangi was picked up as a core text for a Treaty course being taught at one university – a great endorsement of what I’d written – but at the same time other academics were queuing up to kick me over it (I’d committed the cardinal sin of not sufficiently mentioning the owner of this territory, a historian who’d made her career out of the Treaty’s story from the early-1980s perspective).

This is also true of the way we view history. In New Zealand’s case – as I explored in my book Waitangi: A Living Treaty (Bateman 2019), the ‘history’ taught at schools through much of the twentieth century reflected a narrative founded in Pakeha visions of the late nineteenth century. By this view, Maori had fought with Pakeha, were beaten, became friends, and the country enjoyed the best race-relations in the world thereafter. There was only one problem. It wasn’t true. As was well known at the time, in reality Maori had been sidelined and stripped of their land over a span of decades by the relentlessly growing economic and political power of the intruding society. By the 1890s most Maori were living in ruralised poverty: New Zealand society, in practise, was separatist. But the history narrative of the day focused elsewhere, justifying the colonial position; and at a time when dominant Pakeha society had appropriated surface aspects of Maori life as their own, even Maoritanga could not escape colonial power.

Such late colonial-age narratives are not unique to New Zealand, of course. That thinking has changed since, and for obvious reasons. There is a New Zealand lobby group named after a brand of furniture polish that continues to peddle the discredited late-colonial narrative today. But times have moved on; the view of history from the third decade of the twenty-first century is very different. Is that, itself, a new narrative? Of course. Every vision of history is going to be mediated by current cultural priorities – and so new narratives arrive, discrediting the old.

The fact that history works by narratives does not mean then rejecting new narratives, or imagining that one can escape the frameworks of analysis: but it does mean exploring and understanding the process behind them, including discovering how that understanding can, in turn, be used as a tool to explore the past. That’s what I do in my histories, as far as possible. This, it seems, is received as breaking the ‘fourth wall’ of the field and thus further proof of how wrong and stupid I must be, although history is one of the few fields where self-analysis of the methodology is part of its academic technique (‘historiographical method’). The method is taught post-grad. Curiously, a paper I wrote recently as part of a project was received by a former senior lecturer at the RMC Sandhurst with the comment that, were he still teaching there, he’d use it as an essay question and get his Honours level students to figure out my methodology.

My technique is one I’ve built from my history degrees (plural), from my original science background, from my post-grad studies in philosophy under Prof. Peter Munz (himself a student of both Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein), and my undergrad degree in anthropology initially under Prof. Ann Chowning. My approach is that there is no abstract truth: everything is relative, and understanding emerges from exploring the relationships.

For some reason this has led to some in the the academy pursuing their narrative in which I am portrayed as an incompetent, inept idiot, as I say. What would Rick Sanchez do, I wonder?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2022

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