This post is about John Tosh’s The Pursuit of History, specifically Chapters 9-11. Within these chapters, he tackles three key themes in modern historiography: the cultural turn, the rise of gender and postcolonial history, and the use of memory and the spoken word. These themes particularly stood out to me as they can all apply to my own areas of historical interest. Therefore, for this post, I have reworked the notes I took whilst reading the book, explaining the key concepts and also reflecting on how these can apply and connect to my own interests.
Cultural evidence and the cultural turn
Tosh outlines a decisive shift in historical scholarship, away from a narrow concern with institutions or “high” politics and instead, towards meaning, symbolism, and representation. Drawing on anthropology, literary theory, and psychology, historians have come to treat culture not as the preserve of elites but as a ‘system of shared meanings’ (Peter Burke) binding societies together. Tosh argues that anthropology has encouraged historians to explore past ‘mentalities’ in an attempt to understand how people perceived ideas like time, death and authority. Therefore, this ‘cultural turn’ has destabilised typical categories of history, like class, race and nation, by seeing them as ‘discourse’ rather than stable realities.
Tosh rightly praises this cultural turn for bringing overlooked voices to the forefront, while his scepticism toward postmodernist extremes is also justified, in my opinion. Patrick Joyce’s claim that representation should be the main field of history is provocative and risks sidelining the importance of the material conditions and structures through which people actually lived. I believe these are especially vital when studying histories of violence, oppression or resistance (such as Partition or colonialism) so still need to be understood.
This widened focus has thus reshaped which cultural sources are used. Popular artefacts like devotional images, cartoons, propaganda, mass media are no longer dismissed, as they reveal ordinary people’s worldviews. The reminder that populist art can reveal more about a society than its canonical works is valuable. Visual culture, film, and photography have also become subjects in their own right as they are now, rightly, viewed as constructions rather than neutral mirrors of reality. For instance, New Deal photography or wartime cinema are constructed narratives, driven by the politics and ideology of the time.
Language has also begun to be analysed within its own historical context, influenced by literary theory. Discourse analysis (a method for examining language within its social context), for example, reframes texts and the language used in them as active in shaping identities. Tosh uses the example of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities to emphasise this turn toward analysing language more deeply. Anderson links the rise of nationalism to print capitalism, suggesting that nations are imagined into existence through shared linguistic cultures. This insight ties directly to how Partition was imagined and narrated and framed through newspapers, radio broadcasts and other literature. Partition was not simply reported but scripted, for instance, through the predictive maps that were published in newspapers across the region. Febvre’s warning against ‘psychological anachronism’ (assuming that past minds worked exactly like ours) is useful here as it highlights the care required when working with oral testimonies and populist sources, as one’s analysis is inevitably filtered through current frameworks of understanding.
Gender and postcolonial history
Tosh highlights how only half a century ago, women and the “Third World” hovered at the margins of mainstream historiography. However, today, gender and postcolonial history are central, united by their determination to recover silenced voices and explore the frameworks that allowed for their absence.
Women’s history began as a project of feminist consciousness-raising, but now recognises the diversity of experience. The critique that ‘by claiming to explain everything, [patriarchy] explains nothing’ warns against essentialist categories that overlook historical variation. When looking at Partition, for instance, this means resisting the temptation to frame all women as victims of a single form of violence. Instead, it is important to take into account how class, religion, and location shape vastly different experiences and as Tosh notes, the historian’s job is to explain that variation.
Postcolonial history emerged from decolonisation, critiquing the Eurocentric nature of historical discourse and rejecting the idea that colonialism is purely a product of the past. Neocolonialism and persistent cultural distortions are definitely still present today. Edward Said’s Orientalism was the pioneering text that famously recast imperial knowledge as a ‘science of imperialism’, manufacturing both colonial authority and an internalised legacy of subordination. Tosh’s use of the example of Ranajit Guha’s Subaltern Studies school in 1980s India highlights this. Rejecting elite nationalist narratives, these scholars sought to recover the agency of peasants and labourers within anti-colonial movements. Their method of ‘reading against the grain’ of colonial archives, using intercepted dsicours to partially restore subaltern voices, interested me. This is because it directly maps onto my EPQ approach of using declassified intelligence files to understand women’s wartime roles, even if these files and archives still reflect the biases and priorities of the agencies that produced them. Therefore, the warning that ‘no amount of reading against the grain can take us into the world of the subaltern’ is a important as it reminds us that silences are structural, so it is necessary to acknowledge these gaps.
This chapter reminded me once again of the critque of Joyce’s view, as postcolonial and gender histories evidently show that material structures (e.g. economic exploitation and armed suppression) cannot be ignored when studying oppression and its context.
Memory and the spoken word
This chapter explores an area of historiography that I find particularly interesting: the crossover of collective memory and oral history. Tosh defines collective memory as the socially shared understadnings of the past, shaped by present concerns, used for national identiy and often ‘mamanged’ through commemoration. Oral history is then defined as personal memories gathered through interviews, which can privide vivid access to lived experience but is shaped by hindsight, audeince expectations and the historian’s own framing.
His main argument about collective memory is that it is not static, as it reflects the changing values and political needs of the time. His example of Britain’s contrasting popular memories of WWI (the bad war) and WWII (the good war) stood out to me as it reminded me of Britain’s changing presention of the importance of women’s wartime roles in intelligence, depending on the historical context. Pierre Nora argues that as historical scholarship displaces lived remembrance, modern societies must ‘artificially promote’ memory through monuments, ceremonies, and commemorations. This idea that history displaces memory because modern societies are ‘condemned to forget’ highlights the tension in postcolonial historiography between official archives and living memory. The notion of artificial promotion of memory emphasises how public commemoration is politically selective which could enrich an analysis of why certain events (e.g. D-Day) dominate British WWII memory while others (e.g. colonial contributions, Bengal famine) are marginalised.
Oral history, which developed in the 1960s and 1970s, aimed both to reconstruct lived experience and to democratise historical practice. Projects like the People’s Autobiography of Hackney treated history as something communities could author for themselves. However oral testimony is not neutral so cannot be solely relied upon and always needs to be corroborated with archival or local sources. Tosh warns that collective oral history can ‘reinforce the superficial way’ people understand change, which is a powerful reminder that empowermering communities and accurate historical analysis don’t automatically coincide. Tosh’s idea that oral history can reinforce accepted narratives as much as it challenges them, also struck me as it shows that forgetting is as politicial as remembering. The politics of forgetting resonate strongly with intelligence history as classified archives create deliberate absences, shaping what later testimony can recall.
telling tales 