Kenneth Pomeranz thinks big. His 2000 book, The Great Divergence, reopened the discussion around a large question: Why did Europe industrialize first? Now, as the newly installed president of the American Historical Association, Mr. Pomeranz will confront major challenges facing the future of his profession. The University of Chicago historian, a China scholar, discussed his goals in an interview at the association’s annual conference here. What follows is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
Q. What’s the general state of the history profession right now?
A. Intellectually, the state is as healthy as it’s ever been. I can sit in a library at a third-tier university now and digitally access more sources in more languages and search them faster than I could have done in the library at Harvard or Yale 20 years ago. That’s an astonishing thing. And we’ve learned a tremendous amount over the last few decades about how to intelligently read incomplete records. We sometimes think of history as not making progress, because it doesn’t come to definitive answers about lots of things. But it does make progress. We are better equipped to tell richer stories about more things with more accuracy.
Professionally, we are in a somewhat scary moment. Some of that is coming from outside. It’s the crisis of funding for public education. It’s the crisis of academic publishing, which is mostly driven by the cost of science journals, which are busting library budgets. But some if it is also [internal]. How have we gotten so much better at this? Partly through an enhanced division of labor. And enhanced division of labor means high degrees of specialization. And high degrees of specialization don’t always go with then being able to turn around and communicate well to a nonspecialist, “Hey, this is what we’ve learned and this is why it’s actually really cool. This is why it matters to you.” Our space in the public sphere has been diminished to the benefit of fields like economics.
Q. You’re now president of an organization that represents 14,000 members, including historians at colleges, museums, and libraries. What will be your priorities?
A. We and a lot of other professional organizations have a window coming up in which we need to reinvent ourselves. If we reinvent ourselves successfully, we can thrive, and we can really matter for quite some time to come. If we don’t, we could be in really serious trouble. To put it really crudely, a very large percentage of our revenue comes from membership and from attendance at this annual meeting. Many people will join simply to be good citizens. But I’m not convinced that in a world of all sorts of competing pressures, enough people will join for that reason alone to keep the organization going. In the past they joined to get The American Historical Review. Now, if you’re at any institution with a JSTOR subscription, you have access to the AHR. Even for departments that want to interview job candidates, there are more and more jobs where people are saying maybe we should just do Skype interviews.
Q. So what’s one direction you might take in trying to reinvent the AHA?
A. A lot of what we’ve been thinking about is, What could we do for people through our Web site? Imagine a Facebook-like thing in which, if you assign Fred Wakeman’s article on the term “Chinese trader,” you could find out who else in the country assigns this article. And then you could have essentially a users group. What happens when I assign it? What parts of it do students not get? Or questions that people might want to ask who are maybe in less-desirable employment situations. Let’s say you’re the only untenured person in a small department, and there’s a question you’d really like to ask about proper personnel procedures, or about whether it’s good or bad for your likelihood of tenure to take on a certain possibility. You might well want to be able to—behind some sort of gate of confidentiality—consult other historians at other places.
Q. What about your intellectual goals?
A. I’ve been pretty strongly associated with a revival that’s been going on in the last 10 or 15 years of comparative history, of attempts to think on a somewhat larger scale than historians typically like to do. Transnational and transregional comparison is a really very, very important tool for understanding both the past and the present. I’d like to encourage more of that.
It’s important for people to think about the large stories we can tell. Because nature abhors a vacuum. If we’re too shy to tell those large stories—if we say everything is so complex, I don’t ever want to generalize—other people, ranging from certain kinds of political scientists and economists and so on to evening-news pundits, will rush in and fill the gap, as they have. It’s unfortunate that historians have become over the last few decades a smaller and smaller part of the public conversation. Robert Reich, the economist who was labor secretary under Clinton, once said that in eight years in Washington, he very often heard people say, “Look, you gotta understand the economics of this.” Or, “You gotta understand the politics behind this.” He never in his eight years heard anybody say, “You gotta understand the history of this.” I think we need to try and claim a little bit bigger piece of the space in the public square. One of the ways to do that is to be a little bit more daring about telling larger-scale stories.
