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The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements

By George M. Fredrickson

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 George M. Fredrickson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520209966
The Status of Comparative History (1980)

Surveying recent comparative work by American historians is not an easy task; for there is no firm agreement on what comparative history is or how it should be done.1

Some discussions of the nature of comparative history that present varying definitions and approaches are Fritz Redlich, "Toward a Comparative Historiography: Background and Problems," Kyklos 11 (1958), 362-389; William H. Sewell, "Mare Bloch and the Logic of Comparative History," History and Theory 6 (1967), 208-218; Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., A Behavioral Approach to Historical Analysis (New York, 1969), 250-269; C. Vann Woodward, "The Comparability of American History," in The Comparative Approach to American History, ed. Woodward (New York, 1968), 3-17; Carl Degler, "Comparative History: An Essay Review," Journal of Southern History 34 (1968), 425-430; and Maurice Mandelbaum, "Some Forms and Uses of Comparative History," unpublished paper delivered at the Convention of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, 1978.

All history that aims at explanation or interpretation involves some type of explicit or implicit comparison, but to isolate "comparative history" as a special trend within the profession requires a reasonably precise and restrictive definition. One can, first of all, distinguish comparative history from history that uses the "comparative method" in a relatively brief or casual fashion, more as a heuristic device than as a sustained method or approach. The limited use of a generalized "comparative perspective" or exotic analogy as a way of shedding additional light on some phenomenon in a single nation or society is not comparative history in the full sense.2

This approach is employed in many of the essays in Woodward, ed., Comparative Approach.

Neither is the type of study—so important in the "new social history"—that closely examines a particular community or social action in terms of conceptual schemes or categories that are applicable to the study of similar entities in other contexts.3

A large proportion of the articles in the excellent journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (1958-) are actually of this nature.

If "microcosmic" studies with comparative implications are ruled out, so are "macrocosmic" works that attempt to describe international developments of some kind without a prime concern for analyzing and comparing the variable responses of particular societies.4

Much work in comparative sociology can thus be excluded. A search for uniformities that can be described only on a very abstract plane clearly inhibits a detailed comparison involving the kinds of variables that historians normally stress.

What remains is a relatively small but significant body of scholarship that has as its main objective the systematic comparison of some process or institution in two or more societies that are not usually conjoined within one of the traditional geographical areas of historical

specialization.5

Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), constitutes a major methodological contribution to comparative historical analysis. But the fact that its comparisons are limited to closely related Western European societies places it outside the scope of this essay.

It is only in work of this sort that comparison per se is consistently at the core of the enterprise. In other types of history sometimes described as comparative, the main concern is placing some local phenomenon in a broader geographical context, revealing the general trends prevailing in a given region or throughout the world, tracing some idea or influence across national or cultural boundaries, or describing a particular case in terms that may lend themselves to comparison.

The object of comparative history in the strict sense is clearly a dual one: it can be valuable as a way of illuminating the special features or particularities of the individual societies being examined—each may look different in light of the other or others—and also useful in enlarging our theoretical understanding of the kinds of institutions or processes being compared, thereby making a contribution to the development of social-scientific theories and generalizations. But the practitioners of comparative history may differ on the priority that they assign to these two aims. Those in the humanistic "historicist" tradition will normally give preference to the former, while those who consider history as nothing more than contemporary social science applied to the past will tend to favor the latter.6

For a defense of the "historicist" approach to comparative history, see Redlich, "Toward a Comparative Historiography." A historian who defends the social-scientific mode is Lee Benson. See especially Benson's proposal for a comparative approach to the causes of the American Civil War based on "typologies, analytic models, theories of internal war" in Toward the Scientific Study of History: Selected Essays (Philadelphia, 1972), 309-326.

To some extent, although not consistently, this difference of priorities follows disciplinary lines. It is impossible to discuss comparative history without recognizing the contribution of historically oriented sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and economists. But their work tends to differ from that of those who are squarely in the historical profession by its greater concern for generating and testing theories or models that are either of potentially universal application or at least readily transferable to a number of social situations other than those being directly examined.

Unfortunately, the body of work that qualifies as comparative history in the strict sense is characterized both by its relative sparseness and by its fragmentation. Comparative history does not really exist yet as an established field within history or even as a well-defined method of studying history. Unlike "the new social history" or even psychohistory, it does not possess a self-conscious community of inquirers who are aware of each other's work and build on it or react critically to it. Most of those who do comparative history do not define themselves as comparative historians in any general or inclusive sense. Those interested in the comparison of one kind of institution or process often seem unaware of the cross-cultural work being done on other kinds of phenomena. Scholars working on particular topics in

the comparative history of certain traditionally juxtaposed areas, such as the United States and Latin America, often make no reference to relevant work being done on other parts of the world.

Because of the sparseness and fragmentation of comparative studies, it is difficult to describe general trends over such a relatively short period as a decade. To gain a coherent view, it is necessary to consider works published in the 1960s as well as the 1970s and view them in relation to special lines or traditions of comparative inquiry. To grasp one important tendency, it is useful to go back to 1966, a year that saw the publication of two unusually ambitious studies in comparative history—C.E. Black's...