My series on the Disruptive Dependency Theory continues. I've cut and pasted content from my Teaching Note on the Disruptive Dependency Theory into this blog post. As a result, there are some minor indentation and formatting errors.
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Being biased is one thing. Another important thing is responding successfully to criticisms of bias. Over the course of the past few decades. it has become less easy to avoid criticism of bias because one’s scholarship these days is out in the open. Also, another problem is that by making one’s writing open to reading by any members of the public, one is also opening oneself up to criticism by non-English speakers. The problem inherently is that it is not possible for a historian to understand all of the languages in the following, admittedly incomplete, list of languages, spoken by the subjects of the British Empire: Urdu, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Zulu, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Fulfulde, Ibibio, Kanuri, and Tiv. And, these days, it is very easy to spot a historian who does not know a particular language. The basis of this argument against the work of Niall Ferguson and other BritishEmpire-o-philes can be stated quite simply as follows: “If you don’t know many of the languages that were spoken by the colonized, how then do you know what they felt about the experience of colonization, if you cannot really understand their work directly and since a lot of the work is so openly critical of the Empire?” Another argument is as follows: “Have you looked at a sufficiently large number of models to understand the effects of the British Empire on the colonized before you arrived at your conclusions?” Looking at things through models is key, since they permit us to abstract away some of the irrelevant economic data while preserving the relevant data.
Why this ChatGPT exercise?
This short exercise of examining simply a set of words from a number of languages was undertaken for a reason. This reason is that this exercise amply illustrates some of the problems with writing history. Take ChatGPT’s explanation of the word “kintsugi”. Now, I know based on my prior knowledge that kintsugi does refer to “the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum”. I am also aware that the method is similar to the technique called “maki-e”. But beyond that, I don’t have much knowledge. For instance, I don’t know if it is true that “it is often used metaphorically to describe the process of repairing and improving one's financial situation after experiencing a setback or hardship”. And if this insertion by ChatGPT is, in fact, factually accurate, I don’t know how often such an expression is used to mean the first thing, that is, actual broken pottery – as compared to the second thing. viz., the metaphorical concept of repairing one’s life. I also don’t know if this phrase is only used within certain communities and, if so, which ones. Such problems of interpreting specific texts occur all the time in history. If it is so hard to even understand individual words in the right context, it would follow that it would end up being even harder to interpret entire manuscripts and, further to that, all the written records of a particular historical period.
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The following is the burden of the historian: to try and go back to the time period in question and try to reconstruct that area as best as one can in one’s own mind by taking into account the various languages spoken, by taking into account the various belief systems prevalent at the time, by taking into account which communities existed at a particular time & how they lived and communicated, and so on. One can then proceed with writing about that era, but this should be done only after a sufficiently thorough study of that period of time is undertaken. I personally find it hard to believe that Niall Ferguson has been able to mentally transport himself to so many of the different worlds occupied by the British Empire and inhabit all those minds, while also being able to refute all the counter-arguments thrown at him by his detractors also engaging in the same exercise of going back to mentally inhabit those worlds and those pre-deceased minds.
