Volume: 36 Issue: 1 | January 1986 | Page 46-50 | Words: 3142 | Author: Taylor, A.J.P.
What is European History?
European history is whatever the historian wants it to be. It is a summary of the events and ideas political, religious, military, pacific, serious, romantic, prosaic, near at hand, far away, tragic, comic, significant, meaningless, anything else you would like it to be. There is only one limiting factor. It must take place in or derive from the area we call Europe. But as I am not sure what exactly that area is meant to be, I am prefty vell in a haze about the rest!
A.J.P. Taylor
Marc Ferro
Obviously if this question had been asked fifty years ago it would have had only one meaning. European history, identical with the history of Europe, was that of its peoples and their cultures and limited, or not, to the lands that they occupied. It would naturally have included the societies from which those present civilisations sprang, namely the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, the Egyptians or whoever.
Seen from this narrow viewpoint, the question is nevertheless more complex than it at first appears. For instance, the inclusion of the Turks in European history depended solely on whether, at a given time, they had direct links with Europe. The Turks themselves however, would see things differently, for if, on the one hand, it were the history of the land over which they ruled that was being considered, the Greeks and the Hittites would of necessity be included (incorporating and fixing the Turkish nation firmly in the territories occupied only a few centuries ago), but the Armenians would be excluded. If, on the other hand, the history referred to was that of the Turkish people themselves, then the whole of Central Asia would be considered, both past and present, for all that the Pan-Turkish myth has survived in the collective imagination.
This example, chosen deliberately from the fringes of Europe, taken an a lied to the whole of Europe, applied describes a type of history practised fifty ....
