Experiences of Defeat

Abstract This essay explores a neglected aspect of the instrumental use of the past: its application not by “victors” and those in power but rather by those on the losing end of struggles and who have experienced either personal or collective defeat and subjugation, and by extension those sympathetic to such loss, themselves often arguing against historiographical orthodoxies. Taking issue with the cliché that “history is always written by the victors” and also with the view (as expressed for instance in some recent postcolonial writings) that the European practice of history is inevitably complicit in repression, conquest, and marginalization, the essay examines historical writing in the British Isles across fifteen centuries. Beginning in the sixth century and proceeding through medieval, early modern, and modern mutations, the essay argues that the twentieth-century use of history by progressive scholars (including members of Britain’s Communist Party Historians Group) was not a novel revolt against triumphalist history but rather a natural evolution of long-established, if minority, approaches to the past that spring directly from either the experience of defeat or loss, or from an empathetic desire that history’s losers be given their place in the national story.