Historical Empathy and Practising Biographical History

Delving into biographical histories this week brought me back to what I have always found so interesting in history: storytelling.

I am, and have always been, an avid reader of fiction, biography and autobiography. Whether it’s 1950s rural Naples (My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante), the fictional town of Macondo in rural Colombia (One Hundred Years of Solitutde, Gabriel García Márquez) or mid-20^th century Kyoto (Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden), it’s these characters and their settings that reveal to me most vividly, the intricate complexities of history.

I do not mean to oversimplify the method of practising biographical history by comparing it to reading or writing fiction since that is not the purpose of this historiographical approach. However, what I can say is how pleasantly surprised I was to find how similarly gripping I found these stories to be. These individual’s transnational lives – convicts, wives, nobles and the like – made for incredibly interesting, page-turning history.

Nevertheless, I also understand the criticisms of biographical history as anecdotal or obscure. One life, out of the billions that have existed, cannot possibly represent a historical process, a structure, an idea. Furthermore, as voiced by Clare Anderson, the choice of the subject is ultimately that of the biographers, in which some peoples’ lives, but not others, are seen as important or interesting enough to be committed to biography. The presentation of these subjects can often tell you just as much about the biographer as it can about the lives that are being portrayed.

However, criticisms of this form stems from the assumption that individual’s emotions, experiences and ideas have only anecdotal value in describing the great narrative of history; that the purpose of history itself is to describe and understand this great historical narrative rather than individual’s stories. If you take this view when writing biographical history, describing a life as representational of other lives in a country, a religious community, an era for example, you can end up putting people into categories, which can obscure the complexities biographical writing is so good at revealing.

On the other hand, if we look for discord and resistance in anomalous lives, particularly that which looks at colonial subjects, we can arguably lose sight of colonialism’s universal attributes and grander power structures and thus undermine an anti-colonial politics that is responsive to the commonalities of experience among the colonised.

The tensions between the micro and the macro, the particular and the universal, the individual and their contexts, are all inherent to the practise of transnational history. Yet, the biographies in the readings this week struck me, not for their value in confirming or challenging larger issues or narratives, but for their ability to evoke a more empathetic kind of historical understanding, like that gained when reading literature.

Biographies allow historians to be more sensitive to lived experiences of individuals whilst gaining an insight into the complex networks of wider, transnational historical processes, be it inter-colonial constructions of race or contradictions in the social hierarchies of the British imperial world. It is often also written in a way that is often more accessible and engaging to a procrastination-prone individual (like myself). I’ve never tackled a biography before, and have very little idea as to how to even begin to go about it, but perhaps it is the answer I’ve been waiting for, to get back to the root of what I thought history was all about, telling a story.