"The Archives Talk" – Paolo Sartori's Contribution to the History of Central Asia

Abstract

In the first place, he knows his evidence. He knows the range of it, how it came into existence, what people or institutions produced it, what it can tell and what can never be got from it.' G. R. Elton The Practice of History (1967) Positivism in historical writing has been under attack for many decades now -at least since the publication of Hayden White's Metahistory in 1973, and the broader 'linguistic turn' which it helped to usher in. 1 Even before this, Geoffrey Elton considered history as profession and craft to be threatened by 'relativists', who favoured 'the opinion that it is all simply in the historian's mind and becomes whatever he likes to make of it'. 2 He was referring above all to E.H. Carr's What is History? (1961), whose questioning of the notion of historical truth was mild compared to what followed in the succeeding decades: Elton saw postmodernism as a 'devilish temptation', nothing less than a moral failing. 3 His fears were only partly justified.While there were times (particularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s) when postmodern, relativist approaches to the study of the past looked as if they might carry all before them, positivism, empiricism and historical truth found many staunch and distinguished defenders. 4 What Marc Bloch called the historian's craft has not only survived but thrived in the face of the postmodernist challenge, whose positive effects included a much greater sensitivity to structures and hierarchies of power in the analysis of sources, and the emergence of microhistory. 5 Paolo Sartori may not thank me for placing him in the Eltonian tradition of deep archival research and meticulous documentary analysis, but this virtual ancestry was suggested partly by an (uncomplimentary) reference to his approach as 'positivism' in a review of his recent book, Visions of Justice, 6 and partly by the title of one of his nowcompleted research projects: 'The Archives Talk: Writing the Social History of Colonial Central Asia', on which Sartori worked with Jürgen Paul and Thomas Welsford, was funded by the 1