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Why Most of the History You Read is ‘Wrong’
Including mine…
History is a difficult endeavour. We tend to imagine it as a science offering us immutable facts about the past, but it’s more complicated than that. Part of the problem has to do with how we like to teach and understand history. So, with that in mind, here’s why lot of history you’ve read is ‘wrong’ and why there’s a better way to learn.
Simplification and the death of truth
I grew you with a certain understanding of history that went broadly like this. Much of the world had operated under the feudal system for millenia, then, following the Renaissance and Early Modern, nation-states emerged for the ruins of empires. After the industrial revolution, many of these became capitalist economies, while the occasional state became communist. Fascism would rise and be defeated in the 20th century; globalisation would come to dominate the 21st.
It’s a neat little narrative with an incredibly general perspective, but this is often how history is taught, as a series of developments. This is why it came as a great shock to me as I continued my studies and I found it’s more complex than that. For example, take the curse of the ‘ism’. Capitalism, Communism, Fascism, Feudalism. What are these concepts? If you dig into a concept like Feudalism, you realise that far from being a…
