The mid‐meiji ‘history boom’: professionalization of historical scholarship and growing pains of an emerging academic discipline

Abstract

In January 1893 the journal Waseda bungaku diagnosed a ‘historical fever’. The term described an increased preoccupation with history among the educated public, which found expression in books and articles and a number of new history journals. Although this ‘history boom’ was part of a long‐term phenomenon, the early 1890s were remarkable in two ways. First, intellectuals representing different generations, educational backgrounds and disciplines were involved in heated debates about how history should be studied and represented. Second, the commentators reflected on the boom and its aftermath with a striking self‐consciousness even while it was in progress. Over the next months Waseda bungaku and other publications reported regularly on the boom and the debates it generated. By summer 1893 its climax had passed and the same journals spoke of a ‘desolation’ that history was falling into and discussed its reasons.

This article traces the ‘boom’ and following ‘desolation’ as experienced by commentators mainly in Waseda bungaku, Shikai and Kokugakuin zasshi and explains it by placing it in the context of the emerging modern nation state and the formation of the professional academic discipline of history.

Keywords:

• Meiji period
• national identity
• historical scholarship
• historiography
• professionalization
• Germany