After a very helpful and beneficial unconference at the weekend, my project proposal is starting to take shape.
It now seems appropriate to start preparing for the short essay.
Initially, I was planning on doing a historiographical essay outlining the different approaches which I am planning of incorporating into my project. However, I now think it’s more appropriate to write a methodological essay on comparative history in order to avoid self-plagiarising when it comes to my actual project.
Furthermore, having written historiographical essays last year in HI2001 I think it would also be beneficial to pay some attention to the methodology behind writing transnational and global history. Hence, writing about methodology is a chance to expand my skills and understanding of practicing history.
After this weekend, I’ve decided that my project will be a comparative study and feel that it would be beneficial to do the short essay on comparative history.
After (very) briefly looking over the Bloch and Haupt and Kocka chapters, it has become apparent that I believe that I’ve made the right choice to have chosen a comparative approach. As I’m planning on comparing two different subaltern groups and their cultures, the comparative method certainly seems the most appropriate to use. As Haupt and Kocka write ‘Historical peculiarities only become clearly visible when one refers to comparable examples, which are sufficiently similar in some respects, but differ in others’ (p.4). This is a good place to start when trying to establish to what extent there was a ‘Welsh subaltern’, as by comparing it to the well-known example of the Indian subaltern, the answer will (hopefully) become clearer.