In Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot introduces what he calls “the unthinkable”—a world-historical occurrence that is not recognized or acknowledged as such because those witnessing it do not have (or refuse to entertain) the conceptual framework to make sense of it. In the passage from Trouillot I quoted in an earlier essay, he argues that the Haitian Revolution as the act of enslaved Black men and women making a bid for full freedom and political self-determination was “unthinkable” to even the most radical factions in revolutionary France because they could not envision a Black people as having the capacity for full political agency. It was unthinkable as a political revolution; it could only register as a slave revolt.
One argument of Trouillot’s book is that the Haitian Revolution had remained “unthinkable” in most contemporary historiography, at least up to the time of his writing in 1995.
In my own reading this week I found a similarly “unthinkable” phenomenon. And I didn’t have to look very hard for it; the introduction to the book I was reading overtly disallowed this phenomenon’s importance.
I was reading the first volume of the New Cambridge Modern History, with an introduction written by Denys Hay. Here’s what he wrote:
As for the geographical discoveries of the Renaissance, there is now less confidence that they were in any genuine sense a product of the new thought of the period. A fresh interest in the text of Ptolemy may have been influential—but less so, we may suppose, than the writings of Marco Polo. The motives behind Portuguese exploration (ch. XV, I) were, to say the least, mixed; scientific cartography, a disinterested wish for geographical knowledge were certainly there, but were equally certainly subordinated to a programme determined by politics, religion and (increasingly) commercial advantage. Nor was the discovery of America important at the time. It is, in fact, argued elsewhere in this volume (ch. XVI) that the impact of the New World on Europe as a whole was not marked until the last decade of the sixteenth century.
This paragraph identifies a couple of unthinkable things. First, it argues that the maritime expansionism of Portugal and Spain was not motivated “in any genuine sense” by “the new thought” of the Renaissance. Instead, it was “determined by politics, religion, and (increasingly) commercial advantage”—as if politics, religion, and commerce had no bearing on the Renaissance. Second, it asserts that the discovery of America was not “important at the time.” Not important to what? To the “new thought of the period,” presumably.
From Cabeza de Vaca to Quentin Skinner, I am figuring out what is unthinkable
Even accounting for the fact that this is a very dated bit of historical writing, it makes some very suspect assertions, all in the service of separating ideas from material circumstances or conditions. If “the new thought” isn’t expressed through some act or event, that act or event can be set aside as not really part of the Renaissance, but merely something that coincidentally happened at about the same time.
Interestingly, Hay is willing to make some concessions for Portugal; there was some scientific curiosity at work. But if he begrudgingly concedes that Portugal at least participated in the Renaissance, he slams the door on Spain, draining its most singular political, commercial, religious, and scientific endeavor of all significance for the thought of the period.
This historiographic equivalent of the Black Legend immediately raised a red flag for me. Indeed, I would suggest that if you ever come across a historian saying that some thing or other has no significance whatsoever to the question at hand, take a good look at that thing the historian thinks necessary to mention even while arguing that it is not worth mentioning at all.
Rather, my working assumption is that the European collision with “the New World” mattered at the time, and it matters still in accounting for the history of the idea of “Western Civilization.”
My working approach as a historian of thought and culture, or an intellectual historian, or a cultural historian of ideas—take your pick of labels that apply to what we all are doing here—is not materialist. I am not a Marxist, crude or otherwise, and I reject the notion that ideas are necessarily any less real or powerful than, say, economic conditions. So I am an idealist in that sense of acknowledging that ideas can prompt actions.
But when it comes to thinking about where ideas come from, I am a realist. They emerge from the lived experience of people. They are historical facts, bounded and conditioned by the circumstances in which someone puts them into words, and the circumstances in which other people take them up. They don’t exist independent of embodied life; they are creatures of it.
Trouillot is helpful in this as well. Here is what he has to say about facts in history:
The play of power in the production of alternative narratives begins with the joint creation of facts and sources for at least two reasons. First, facts are never meaningless: indeed, they become facts only because they matter in some sense, however minimal. Second, facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences. Some occurrences are noted from the start; others are not. Some leave physical markers; others do not. What happened leaves traces, some of which are quite concrete—buildings, dead bodies, censuses, monuments, diaries, political boundaries—that limit the range and significance of any historical narrative. This is one of many reasons why not any fiction can pass for history: the materiality of the socio-historical process (historicity 1) sets the stage for future historical narratives (historicity 2).
The materiality of this first moment is so obvious that some of us take it for granted. It does not imply that facts are meaningless objects waiting to be discovered under some timeless seal but rather, more modestly, that history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings.
As historians of ideas, we would do well to remember that we are dealing with the work of living brains, of human lives—and that’s what our own work is as well.
But Trouillot offers a needed caution, lest the materiality of the past overwhelm us entirely:
The bigger the material mass, the more easily it entraps us: mass graves and pyramids bring history closer while they make us feel small. A castle, a fort, a battlefield, a church, all these things bigger than we that we infuse with the reality of past lives, seem to speak of an immensity of which we know little expect that we are part of it. Too solid to be unmarked, too conspicuous to be candid, they embody the ambiguities of history. They give us the power to touch it, but not that to hold it firmly in our hands—hence the mystery of their battered walls. We suspect that their concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences. We imagine the lives under the mortar, but how do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?
How indeed.
“Too solid to be unmarked, too conspicuous to be candid,” these monumental traces “embody the ambiguities of history.” In this light, the New Cambridge Modern History’s assertion of the insignificance of the New World reeks of desperation or delusion. What are we invited pointedly not to think when we encounter a claim like that?
That’s the puzzle I’m working on these days. I’m reading the first published reports of “New World” discoveries in their original languages where I can. From Columbus to Cortés to Cabeza de Vaca, from Cartier to Champlain, from de las Casas to el Inca Garcilaso, from Cabot to Hakluyt. And I’m reading works about the period and the phenomenon of conquest in the Atlantic World. This is all so that I can understand and explain the origins of the idea of “Western Civilization.” The very idea of a “civilization” was not accessible—it was, perhaps, unthinkable—to Columbus and Cortés and Garcilaso de la Vega. That’s important to establish. In trying to explain what they had stumbled upon, European conquerors and the peoples they sought to subjugate alike groped for language that matched the moment. That matters to the broader story of “the new thought” of the Renaissance, if only to demonstrate its limitations and refusals.
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Even with the entire essay above it, I am struggling to understand the sentence “The very idea of a “civilization” was not accessible—it was, perhaps, unthinkable—to Columbus and Cortés and Garcilaso de la Vega.” Is this sentence leaning on a distinction between ‘a civilization’ and ‘civilization’ — which Columbus was part of and people of the ‘new world’ weren’t?
No, it’s not leaning on any distinction; the whole concept of “civilization” itself post-dates Columbus’s voyages, the writings of Inca Garcilaso, Hakluyt, etc. The terms “empire” and “republic” were well known, the notion of “urbanity” was coming to the fore with the city-states of Italy, but the idea of a “civilization” hadn’t really been invented yet. No one spoke of “Persian civilization” or “Greek civilization” before the Renaissance, never mind “Western Civilization,” since the whole conception of “the West” is a post-Renaissance idea.
The idea of “civilization” has a history, and my contention is that this history start in the collision between the Old World and the New World.
Thanks. That helps. It does make me want to go look more carefully at how the little bit of Roman history I’ve just read refers to Rome as opposed to barbarians. As a novice, thinking about history carefully is challenging. (I just finished a Wikipedia dive into the Black Legend — Wikipedia can be frustrating but I got the point and realized I’ve encountered the Spanish Black Legend in some reading.)
Confucius divided the “Chinese” world (admittedly, a plurality of regions throughout “its” history) into the cultured and less-cultured. I’ll quote from Roel Sterckx’s excellent “Ways of Heaven: An Introduction to Chinese Thought” (New York: Basic Books, 2019): “Those in the employ of rulers at the courts of the central states or the imperial capital saw the world outside as a graded zone of waning degrees of civilization. Confucius notes how the ‘Yi and Di barbarian tribes with their rulers are not as viable as the various Chinese states without them’ (“Analects,” 3.5). Better to be a headless Chinese than a barbarian with a brain, in other words. . . . The tribes and nomadic people surrounding the Chinese heartland were sometimes compared to animals. . . . The implication is that those who refuse to be transformed by the civilizing influence of Chinese power are bound to fall off the map” (46).
Frankly, I think this idea of in/out, family/stranger is common throughout history. To take another example: If one thinks of one’s artistic (in the broader sense of “techne”) work as “good,” does that immediately bring forth a “superior” mindset regarding others’ works (through comparision/contrast)? I don’t see how any civilization can appear without humans first assuming that what they’re doing is “civilizing” either their own life or society’s in general.
Mark, the idea of civilization as it has developed in the west isn’t just a new name for some old ways of thinking. It signals a new way of thinking about human life and human societies. I would be interested to know the meaning of the Chinese terms for the idea that the author you quoted is paraphrasing. We know from bare etymology that the idea of “civilization” derives in some part from the Latin “civis” for city. What are the words for the Confucian concepts of “cultured” and “less cultured,” and do they derive from a word for “city” or “city-dweller” or something like that, or does Chinese thought order humankind along different lines than that?
I can tell it is going to be hard rowing against the current for me to historicize a concept that historians themselves use as if it were a natural category. But “civilization” as a concept has a history like everything else, and it doesn’t start with the Greeks or the Romans, or they would have said so. The antonym of “barbarian” wasn’t “civilized”; the antonym was “Greek.” That’s a profoundly provincial way of ordering the world. The idea of “civilizations,” in the plural, is apparently not provincial, because the concept assumes some abstract level of parity between different peoples. To speak of “civilizations” in the plural can de-center any particular society as being the standard against which all others are measured. Can’t really do that with “Greeks and barbarians,” or “Christians and Infidels.”
But the work that “civilization” can do isn’t always the same as the work that it actually does. There’s a history to this too—to “civilization” as a cover for actions that degrade rather than refine human life.
Anyway, this is what I’m working on, and at this point I feel like four or five people in our field will think, “Oh yeah, that makes sense” while everyone else is just going to look at me like I’ve sprouted another head.
Oh well.
David, thanks for your engagement here. Our comments section has come roaring back to life!
Your initial comment prompted me to get a little more polemical about the New Cambridge Modern History, because it goes to greater lengths than just this one passage in the intro to elide the significance of the New World. So I wrote a quick squib over at Medium. Here is a non-paywalled link: Anything but ‘Civilization’
(yes, this means I am discussing USIH posts in places other than USIH, but discourse gonna discourse)
This is in reply to your previous post (I wasn’t able to find a “reply” link.
“I would be interested to know the meaning of the Chinese terms for the idea that the author you quoted is paraphrasing.”
He says in the back of the book: “For translations of primary source texts . . . I have drawn on or adapted existing scholarly translations that have stood the test of time. Otherwise, translations are my own” (435). It’s probably due to the synthesizing nature of the book that he doesn’t elaborate on this point. However, he seems to know his stuff (Professor of Chinese History at Cambridge, UK). I’d assume this is a standard translation (he doesn’t seem to tackle any linguistic debates), but I concur that it’s an important point nevertheless.
Yes, the stadial concept found in Scottish thinkers does seem novel. When one adds evolution and Spencer’s thinking (along with anthropology), the ingredients scream new. However, I can’t help but wonder if some of these ideas analyzed are treated as abstractions from something more fundamental (as I was saying, the basic desire to have one’s way in the world—essentially, what Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Marion Cotillard’s characters are doing in the limbo world (Inception). From this perspective, the drive for “civilization” is an adaptation of an inherent phenomenon of every human (and I do mean every; I recall Augustine’s description of a “jealous infant” gazing at his/her sibling while the latter are being fed). In this case, James’s felicitous phrase rings true, albeit with more flesh than wineskin as the carrier.
“I can tell it is going to be hard rowing against the current for me to historicize a concept that historians themselves use as if it were a natural category. But ‘civilization’ as a concept has a history like everything else, and it doesn’t start with the Greeks or the Romans, or they would have said so. The antonym of “barbarian” wasn’t ‘civilized’; the antonym was ‘Greek.'”
Yes, I am using it as if it were derived from a natural person (a person with drives, desires, hopes, dreams, etc.). Of course, there are varieties of drives/hopes, but not to the extent that it delivers a coup de grace to any attempt to pin them down (otherwise, why pursue the scholarly life?). I agree that the oppositional stances change (maybe in a Hegelian fashion) throughout history. I guess that’s the historical side of the equation; I tend to always connect the contingencies with the constants (can one even do history without these yin/yang correlatives?).
On this day in 1537, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca finally reached safe harbor in Lisbon, after countless shipwrecks, disasters, armed conflicts, years of enslavement, and a journey of thousands of miles. The Naufragios are a page-turner and are a very rich resource for all kinds of inquiries. I wrote a piece about the book here: On This Day in 1537, Cabeza de Vaca Made it Home
I haven’t read Trouillot’s book, but the quoted passages here are interesting. I think he’s right that historical facts, almost by definition, aren’t meaningless, a point E.H. Carr made a long time ago in What is History?. Some events get chosen to be historical facts and others don’t, and occasionally a non-fact, so to speak, will get promoted to the status of historical fact, or rather a candidate for that status, when a historian decides to include it in a narrative in support of some interpretation or argument — Carr’s example is that the mob killing of a “vendor of gingerbread” over “some petty dispute” at a fair or festival (Stalybridge Wakes) in 1850 became a candidate for historical fact when G. Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures at Oxford, published as The Making of Victorian England.
I am less clear about exactly what Trouillot means when he says that a fort or a church or a battlefield is “too conspicuous to be candid.” I suppose he could mean that a battlefield, for example, only communicates meaning to those who know what it is — a two-year-old being pushed around the battlefield of Antietam, for instance, will simply view it as a landscape without any particular significance, since (most) two-year-olds don’t know anything about the Civil War and can’t read explanatory plaques and signage. This seems, however, to trivialize the matter, and Trouillot suggests that buildings and battlefields conceal secrets so inaccessible that “no revelation may fully dissipate their silences.” So, for example, we will never know the details of all the individual agonies that attended every death at Antietam, since tens of thousands of soldiers were killed and no matter how many eyewitness accounts exist, they can’t possibly get at the reality of all of them (or, perhaps, any of them). On the other hand, do we need to know this? Isn’t part of the function of “the historical imagination” to infer things that aren’t readily accessible or explicitly stated, to fill in some of the silences so to speak, or make an attempt to?