There’s a World Out There
If Covid-19 has taught us anything it is that the West – and that includes its historians – must expand its horizons.
Both producers and consumers of history tend to divide roughly into two camps. There are those who seek to find the present in the past, using examples from history to confirm their current prejudices. And there are those who engage with the past on its own terms, however uncomfortable that might prove, trying to understand differing world views, however strange and disconcerting they might seem.
For me, one of the appeals of studying the past is its strangeness, its unfamiliarity, and the challenges that it presents. It is all too easy to see one’s self in the ‘other’ rather than the other itself. This inability to look beyond one’s world view also presents a challenge to our understanding of the present and, indeed, the future.
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