Comparative History: Developing Relations between the Method of ‘Writing’ and Construction of the Historical Narrative

• Main Author: Souradip Bhattacharyya
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Sarat Centenary College 2021-07-01
• Series: PostScriptum: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Literary Studies
• Subjects: keywords writing; narrative; method; history; social relations
• Online Access: https://postscriptum.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/pS6.iiSouradip.pdf

One of the primary concerns of studying historiography is to assess the quality and technique of history writing. We must also pay attention to the structure embedded in history writing, useful in making a historian/critic aware of the politics of representation. Twentieth century debates on the technique, structure, and theme of history writing have recorded the emergence of "oriented" history, by which I mean, history writing has been transformed and rearranged along multiple sub-disciplines and genres. The objective of this paper is to analyze historical writing to show that history can at the same time be a correlation between the conjoncture and the event. Rather than being watertight compartments or superior to the cultural space of the individual, social life and socioeconomic relationships are realized through various cultural practices and modes of cultural production. In fact, as I shall study in this paper, socioeconomic relations and cultural practice are co-constitutive. In this sense, my intention is to remodel/restructure the compartmental structure of analysis—as history post Annales has done—to propose a more mutual interaction between the two. I propose to do that through a comparative analysis of two texts, Smuggling as Subversion (1998) by Amar Farooqui and Smuggler Nation (2013) by Peter Andreas. The focus of comparison shall be the way each historian studies the socioeconomic significance of smuggling in each context, and the role smuggling played in redefining/reproducing the social relations between the colonizers and the colony. It is imperative for such comparative study to understand that the historical method of analysis and thematic content of history depends on authorial intentions and the historical context in which it is put.