Summary
Historian whose four Age volumes — The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975), The Age of Empire (1987) and Age of Extremes — are called one of the summits of post-war historical writing in “Contra Mundum”, the thirty-ninth essay in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, which then charges his overview method with treating non-European politics as derivative and with conveying little of historical experience from within (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.441-449).
Details
- Born in Alexandria, where his parents — one from Vienna, the other from Britain, both originally from Eastern Europe — met and married; the city was prosperous, cosmopolitan and recently occupied by Britain, and “also, of course, contained the Arabs” (PDF p.441).
- He writes “for all who wish to understand the world and who believe history is important for this purpose”, and approaches the present in “the twilight zone between history and memory” (quoted PDF p.441-442).
- In Age of Extremes he is a “participant observer” of his own lifetime, the “Short 20th Century”, admitting ignorance and “casual and patchy” knowledge; historians’ “business is to remember what others forget” (quoted PDF p.442-443).
- The book’s three blocks are “The Age of Catastrophes”, “The Golden Age” and “The Landslide”: “the history of the twenty years after 1973,” he says, “is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis” (quoted PDF p.445).
- Said’s charges: “the dynamics of the great part of the world’s history in the Short 20th Century are derived, not original”, the élites of non-bourgeois societies imitating “the model pioneered in the West” (quoted PDF p.446); little awareness of the debate over authority and representation in non-Western studies; “Arabian” anti-imperialist nationalism characterized in Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990, as given at PDF p.446) as “the natural high spirits of martial tribes”; and an ill-equipped, surprisingly banal account of Muslims and of “politicised religion”, despite his pioneering work with Terence Ranger on invented tradition (PDF p.446-447).
- Earlier in the same book, his claim that Palestinian nationalism was “created” by “the common experience of Zionism settlement and conquest” (as printed) is given as a predisposition locating nationalism’s germ in Europe (PDF p.398), and the Introduction quotes his Age of Empire on the nineteenth century’s “simple global economy” (PDF p.18-19).