Qfix (United States)

Michael Oakeshott, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1933 Michael Oakeshott, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1983, reprinted 1985, 359 pp., ISBN 0-521-31179-9, 220 pp., £44.00 (paperback), ISBN 86597...

In this article I consider two related questions: what history is for and what my history is/was for. The answer to the first question, as given mainly by historians, seems to be just about everything, and as given, mainly by philosophers of history (the ones, at least, that I consulted), seems to be the attainment of some kind of practical purpose or objective, forward looking in its perspective. Though, a number of philosophers of history, in particular, Oakeshott and Melon, do suggest an alternative view of history, seen as some kind of abstract and ideal historical understanding of the past, possibly ‘for its own sake’. The answer to the second question seems to be a somewhat confusing mixture of practical purpose – mainly the passing of exams and qualification – and a somewhat adulterated version of a ‘for its own sake’ sort of history – adulterated not by my purposes and objectives but by those of various publishers and editors. In the end, though, the main use and purpose of my history – what my history is/was for – seems to have been the satisfaction of a desire to write, the gratification of a literary impulse.

This article surveys the historiography of thuggee, the system of mass murder supposedly discovered by the British in India in the nineteenth century. In particular, it asks how far the thuggee archive, created by William Sleeman, the British official mainly concerned, can be considered reliable, and how far it should be seen as an orientalist construct. At the same time the article looks briefly at the way thuggee appears from time to time in western literature and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a significant image representing oriental (Indian) backwardness and barbarity.

Edward Said’s short piece on T.E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia”—in Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient—has provoked some debate, though less than one might expect. This article takes a further look at Said’s argument. It suggests that in calling for a “new dialectic” in his discussion of Lawrence and the Arab Revolt—so recognizing the need of the contemporary orientalist not only to understand the Orient but also to participate in the process of change—and in introducing the concept of narrative as an alternative to the concept of vision, Said partly undermines his own position regarding orientalism. The article also looks further at Lowell Thomas’s contribution to the creation of the Lawrence myth, and at contrasting interpretations of the principal film version, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962).