Meet John Shaw
John Shaw studied history at Ruskin College Oxford and King’s College, Cambridge. He has taught the subject at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, Morley College and elsewhere.
He has researched and written on eighteenth-century Freemasonry; land reform and Scottish politics; and historiography and the theory of history.
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The western historical tradition began with tales of heroes and villains, victors and vanquished. Homer’s epic myths The Iliad and The Odyssey, written during the 8th century BC, tell tales of adventurers and voyagers in the age of gods and heroes. For those more fastidious about what counts as history, The Histories of Herodotus, written three centuries later, begin by recounting the downfall of the vainglorious King Croesus of Lydia whose name is still a byword for wealth and power. History, has a claim to pre-eminence as the narration of the lives and deeds of heroic or vicious individuals.
Ancient and Medieval times
Since then heroic narratives have been central to many traditions of explaining the past. The Greek and Roman tendency to shape the social past around the deeds of great men was augmented by the accounts of the lives of the prophets in the great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In Christian lore, the life of Jesus, narrated from multiple perspectives in the Gospels, gives the ultimate imprimatur to this form of historical account. It helped form medieval hagiography, (telling the stories of the lives of saints) which, although not always linear narratives, tend to end in a culminating moment of conversion.
Age after age has found its own focus for heroic narrative, each expressing the values and mores of their society. For writers Chretien des Troyes in twelfth-century France and Sir Thomas Mallory in fifteenth-century England, medieval chivalry provided the moral purpose as well as the narrative drive for mythological histories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this form of narrative, this way of telling, was alive and well even if the heroes had changed in character. For John Foxe, the lives of the Christian martyrs and particularly the Protestant victims of Catholic persecution provided the cast of characters in narratives that simultaneously vilified Catholicism and provided a heroic basis for the history of Protestantism.
Kings, princes, and engineers
By the eighteenth century, the need to narrate the origins of a structure as complex as the nation-state was already a problem. As modern histories replaced medieval romances, national histories, replete with military heroes, came to replace the story of monarchs and monarchy. Monarchies are powerful institutions, however, and their importance has never been eclipsed in modern historiography.
The power of heroic individualism as a way of narrating history does not end with the noble and the highborn; it has been translated into a modern idiom. Histories of a phenomenon as structurally complex as the industrial revolution began with explanations that prioritised the deeds of a couple of generations of entrepreneurial adventurers.
The inventors’ spinning-jennies, self-acting mules, power looms and steam engines transformed industry; they reshaped the face of the country with their canals, roads, great bridges and finally the railways. The mid-Victorian version of Britain’s rise to greatness through the vision of Arkwright, Watt, Telford, Brunel and a host of others is given full moral, didactic and historical force in The Lives of the Engineers (1861) by Samuel Smiles, the most determined chronicler of heroic individualism of his time.
Narrating history through the medium of the individual is still an important way of explaining the past. Walk into any good bookshop and you will see ample evidence in the publishing explosion in popular science, much of it getting its momentum from highly contextualised biographies of established heroes like Sir Isaac Newton, or the recovery of 'unjustly neglected' figures. Richard Hamblyn’s Invention of Clouds (2002), explaining Luke Howard’s part in the creation of modern meteorology is an excellent example.
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