ABSTRACT
This reflective article offers an argument for the importance of making international connections for historical research regardless of where one is based. For students in South Africa to gain further knowledge of the world, universities in the field of history need to offer global coverage in subject offerings and research strengths. The National Research Foundation in South Africa offers tremendous help in this regard through research funding calibrated to publication output. The challenge is less that an historian who specializes on history outside South African history faces limitations but rather that those faculty will have challenges recruiting students who are not narrowly focused on South African history to the exclusion of other regions of Africa and the globe. Since the best universities in the world strive for global coverage of topics a winning strategy would be for universities in South Africa to do the same. The SAHJ plays a vital role in solving this dilemma. This article argues that the SAHJ should build on its impressive focus on South African history while casting at the same time a broader net, offering history faculty and students in South Africa the resource of scholarship that emphasizes South Africa's global connections and influence on the world.
I have researched and taught in multiple countries, including the United States, Bangladesh, Australia, and South Africa. I currently hold a joint position at Western Sydney University, Australia, and the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. When I reflect on the challenges of teaching and researching in South Africa, I recognise that working in South Africa as a global historian has definite strengths and weaknesses. South Africa simply does not have the same extensive library collections, or global archives, as most Western European and North American countries. Archives in the United Kingdom and the United States contain sources on every part of the globe. That is not always the case in South Africa or, for that matter, most countries that have a smaller population.Footnote1 This reflective article offers an argument for the importance of making international connections for historical research through libraries and archives regardless of where one is based.
Much of my research has focused on global topics from the nineteenth century to the present.Footnote2 This means, of course, that I need access to large libraries and, above all, a diverse array of archives. So in many ways, while researching in South Africa might not offer resources readily available for my projects, the same must be said of much of the research materials I required while living in the United States and Australia: travel to archives is a must, and it hardly matters that I board a plane in Johannesburg or Chicago to go overseas.
I had only taught for two years in the United States before I became a Fulbright Scholar and flew off to Bangladesh on a split fellowship to teach at Dhaka University and finish the research for the book I was working on, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. After two years teaching in the United States, I felt that I was adequately experienced and already knew how to teach.
But my education in pedagogy had just begun. The election battle between the Bangladesh National Party and the Awami League closed down the streets of Dhaka with hartals (street led strikes) and this largely closed down the university. But not teaching was not an option. I had taken the Fulbright money. I had to write a report for the United States State Department. What would I say if I had not taught anything or anyone? So, I managed to track down part of the history department that still operated and found Sirajul Islam, director of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, which Dhaka University officially governed in a different part of the city. He sprang into action. ‘You can lecture here at the society,’ he said. ‘And if you want students, not just scholars, there are places you can volunteer and teach.’
One of these places turned out to be a Buddhist-run orphanage. They had few books, and certainly no money. Coming in for some volunteer sessions with a small group of teenage boys, I had no resources to count on. Stripped of all the props, I learnt that I could still do one thing: talk about ideas and listen to students talk about ideas. In that classroom I learnt that ideas are not ideally given from one person to another through textbooks, PowerPoint, or Blackboard demonstrations. Ideas are discovered in the nature of the human mind itself, like Socrates teaching mathematics to the slave boy by drawing in the sand. I also learnt a rather primitive form of cognitive modelling. That is, I would create arguments about ideas and give examples of writing arguments on ideas verbally, creating the narrative before them ‘on my feet’.Footnote3 This helped the boys do the same thing, step by step, first verbally and then in written form. In a society where traditional arts and crafts were learnt through apprenticeship, the boys intuitively understood the process because they had seen it in their own societies. I learnt to ask questions that lead them to discovery. History as a topic helps because history is a story, and so I told stories.Footnote4 I compared new concepts to concepts they already understood, in simple language. In this way I discovered a basic teaching tool that has stood the test in every country I have taught regardless of the level of support: debating ideas secures student learning and enthusiasm, regardless of whether the students are in a developed or a developing country.
In South Africa, I have come across another set of unique challenges. It is not entirely unique to this country – the same does hold true in the United States and Australia – but I would say it is particularly accentuated in South Africa. The challenge is that knowledge about the world outside of South Africa is lacking and, further, that the history of South Africa itself in the minds of many students does not go back much further than the liberation struggle. That slavery existed in other societies, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere, often come as a complete surprise. Lurking behind the emphasis on slavery and apartheid is the insidious suggestion that Africans have lacked agency. This, in turn, affects self-esteem and accounts for some (though by no means all) of the lack of confidence that many of my students grapple with.
South Africa, however, provides ample opportunity for some of the most innovative, creative, and inspiring teaching environments in the world. For the last five years, I have taken students from Western Sydney University and the University of Johannesburg to the Kruger National Park where they analyse issues covering the history of conservation and nature management, all issues of vital concern to the contemporary world. Co-taught by Brett Bennett (also on a joint appointment at Western Sydney University and the University of Johannesburg), the first class at the Kruger Park took place in July 2015. We worked with the Nsasani Trust which, in turn, worked in partnership with the Skukuza Science Leadership Initiative that provided select scientists and other specialists who taught into the programme and organised housing. We have so far completed 11 Kruger classes.
An example of how research and teaching are intertwined, this unique initiative started when I became a research associate (an unpaid position) at the University of Johannesburg. Brett Bennett and I began collaborating with leading ecologist Frederick Kruger and his son Lawrence Kruger, who was teaching with the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) at the Kruger National Park. With Lawrence Kruger's help and his connections to the Nsasani Trust, which had just been created, we arranged to begin our own study trips with Western Sydney University. We benefitted from the infrastructure in the park and worked out a unique arrangement to draw on the expertise of park employees for some lecturing and specially designed field trips. We also benefitted from intensive peer review, as staff members observed each other’s teaching and offered often discipline-specific feedback on how to communicate effectively on interdisciplinary topics to enhance student learning. Soon we found ourselves employed at the University of Johannesburg, in a split appointment, and were able to add South African students to the Kruger class.
The first challenge proved to pull together a team of teachers from Western Sydney University, the University of Johannesburg, the University of Cape Town, the Nsasani Trust, the Sans Park and OTS, all of whom had never taught together before. This large and diverse team included scientists who had not taught in higher education before as well as experienced lecturers from all three universities and OTS.
We created a fieldwork protocol that challenged both the park employees and academic staff. This was the first time I had brought together scientists, social workers, and humanists to create a broadly interdisciplinary curriculum that drew on scientific studies and articles that merged with historical scholarship. The new learning objectives required Brett Bennett and me to achieve a deeper understanding of the scientific conceptions that lay behind environmental historical questions. The participating undergraduate students thus found themselves reading and discussing material far afield from their majors.
For most students, the class was their first hands-on learning experience where classroom teaching was combined with intensive field research and individual observation. This was vital for studying, for instance, the effect of elephant populations on tree growth, the problems arising from prolonged droughts, or the historical processes that lay behind broader policy implications. This was also – for most – the first class where they experienced personal and intense relationships with their teachers, owing in part to the fact that we all lived together in close proximity. The close teacher-student relationship enabled the students to provide constant feedback that helped them bridge the interdisciplinary divide between their own majors, the majors of the other students, and the different specialties of the class.Footnote5 While many universities around the world offer excellent travel study trips, this unique experience for South African students, at a world-class heritage site, took place right in their own backyard.
One of the main group projects was the production of a video that investigated one of the major ecological and policy challenges facing the park. Often the classes chose to focus that year’s video on the effects of drought or the impact of tourism on the park. The videos gave students a chance to act as experts themselves, modelling their arguments on the methods they saw staff employ.Footnote6 This project had real-life application: staff from the Kruger National Park often attended and gave further feedback. The students became part of a real-life assessment of policy options for the park. Many of their ideas were enthusiastically received by the staff of the park. Knowing how seriously their work was taken only increased in the students a sense of urgency and passion for their projects. The projects also created enthusiasm amongst the Kruger Park’s staff, who eagerly agreed to sign up for the next class that we would teach.
The class combined students from Western Sydney University and the University of Johannesburg, which meant a mix of African, White, and Asian students. One thing that tied them together socially was the fact that few came from upper-class or professional backgrounds. Almost all of them worked as they attended university. They were also united by their excitement to be in a truly international class, making friends from other countries and continents, and by the thrill of learning in and exploring the Kruger National Park. If we cannot always afford to bring South African students to the world, it is still possible to bring the world to South Africa.Footnote7
Over the arc of my career, I have worked in the fields of environmental history and global history. My early and ongoing research argued that environmental reforms and even much of modern environmentalism arose from an Asian and imperial context. Especially my first book, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism,Footnote8 posited that many of the tenets of the conservation and environmental movements arose in colonial India rather than in America, a position that was at first controversial but is now well established. I showed how forestry reforms in India under British colonial rule spread throughout the British Empire during the second half of the nineteenth century and then to much of the world, including the United States.
An interest in power relations and globalisation led me to complete my second and third major monographs. The second, Lord Palmerston and the Empire of Trade, offered the first analysis of the social, cultural, and political dynamics driving Britain’s mid-nineteenth century formal and informal imperial expansion.Footnote9 I continued exploring the theme of informal empire – a concept that I argue is essential to understanding world history over the past 200 years – as it related to the British and American empires. My third book, Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture, explored how diverse elite groups worked in symbiosis with British and American elites, spreading westernism far beyond the confines of formal empire.Footnote10
My most recent book, The Global History of Organic Farming, explores the origin and spread of organic farming protocols and how the ideas of this movement fed into the broader environmental movement.Footnote11 Forthcoming in 2024 is a book co-authored with Brett Bennett entitled Saving the World the First Time.Footnote12 This book is the first comprehensive investigation of how forestry intersected with ideas of human-induced climate change before global warming.
My scholarship has attempted to interpret and explain the profound global impact of environmental reforms related to forestry, agriculture, and human-induced climate change that transformed the world’s physical, social, and political environments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have specialised in how European and North American interactions with the colonial and developing world (especially India, the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia), created significant environmental problems, such as deforestation, that created the context in which imperial environmental management arose. This research has been at the cutting edge of the historiographical shift away from national history to transnational and global history.
As an environmental, imperial, and world historian, I have found that the country I work in has had a noticeable but not determining impact on my work as a scholar. In the United States it was easy to gain archival material on American history. But I still had to get on a plane, constantly. The crucial factor has not been where I work but where the archives are located that I need for my projects, and of course what funds are available for reaching those archives.Footnote13
In this regard, the University of Johannesburg has been an excellent help because South Africa’s Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) gives money to the university for each article or book I publish, a portion of which the University of Johannesburg makes available to me as a research fund. This has been particularly useful. In Australia, small funding is difficult to get; in fact, it is largely non-existent. What is available are large grants through the Australian Research Council, and I have won two of these. This allows funding at a generous level for about three years. But frankly, I think the model is broken, and the DHET scheme that allows universities in South Africa to pay into academics’ research funds is much better. As a historian, I do not need gargantuan sums: indeed it is a great deal of administrative work trying to figure out how to spend large amounts. But regular payments based on my publications and placed into the research fund, and often modest amounts from my own funds, have allowed me to reach archives around the world for my scholarship. In this sense, being a non-South African historian working in South Africa has proven beneficial for my publication outputs. But the inescapable fact is that a South African academic usually needs to travel.
Another pertinent issue – and I think a matter implied by the question of how non-South African academics fare in South Africa – is the matter of colleagues. In the field of history, most of my colleagues are historians of South Africa, and good ones at that. Most of my postgraduate students are writing South African history and, again, doing a good job of it. But this means that few of my honours or master’s students are doing work that engages global networks or engages in big-picture studies. They can and do frame the South African component in a larger context, and thus my expertise gets well utilised. But clearly to be a South African student writing about global connections or other areas of the globe poses the same challenges as being a non-South African historian in South Africa. It means that it is imperative to go out of the country for fieldwork. Evidence of connections over space and time provide key evidence for transnational or global history. No national history arose in a vacuum or operates with complete independence. Hence understanding national history requires understanding world history.Footnote14
The limitations faced by non-South African historians in South Africa do not need to be this way. For instance, universities that attempt to have first-class departments should not employ staff that all work on the same area but should try to find a balance of world regions and topics to focus on. Solon Buck, an archivist working with the United Nations just after the Second World War, argued that ‘[s]cholarship that feeds upon the archival resources of a single country cannot be otherwise than one-sided and nationalistic. The only antidotes are freedom of access to the originals in whatever country they may happen to be.’Footnote15 There is no reason why South African universities need to focus the majority of their history staff on South Africa, or even Africa. The best universities in the world seek a balance of topics, and this can be a goal for any university in South Africa that wishes to enhance its reputation as a top global institution. It also means making available a wider range of topics for history students to specialise in and would also require the funding for students to travel and reach the relevant archives.
But has the focus on South African history by my colleagues limited my own progress as a teacher and scholar in South Africa? The answer is no, because in any university that has global reach and a broad geographical focus covering most of the world and relevant cultural histories, the same situation would apply: most colleagues work on different areas. Much as we hold an ideal of teamwork, and co-publication, and finding a helpful symbiosis between colleagues, the historian is by nature a lone wolf: usually a particular topic and methodology results in a single authorship. This is a good thing, with exceptions being useful at times.
It is a momentous decision whether or not the South African Historical Journal (SAHJ) should remain focused on South African history or attempt to publish more broadly on topics outside of South African history. I would like to contribute some thoughts on that. I was the founding editor of the journal Britain and the World and ran it for many years. This journal was sponsored by the Britain and the World historical society. It may offer a useful way of thinking about how a journal can be based in a national topic while at the same time casting a wider net. With Britain and the World, we faced a similar dilemma as now faced by the SAHJ. When we started out, the society was called British Scholar, and this was also the name of the journal. We soon discovered, however, that to understand the history of Britain we needed to also understand the world that Britain impacted so heavily and how global developments, in turn, dramatically impacted Britain.Footnote16 Hence the change of name to Britain and the World of both the journal and the society. Within a few years, we ranked 35 amongst all history journals on the Thompson Reuters index. The journal went on to fulfil its focus on British topics, but any part of the world impacted by Britain, whether regarding cultural trends, the empire, or the informal empire, were published. Also published were events and trends in a part of the world that in turn impacted Britain.
This may or may not prove helpful for the SAHJ, but it occurs to me that it might be a useful model: to keep the focus on South African history while at the same time casting a broad net. A journal could investigate the impact of South Africa on the rest of Africa, on the diaspora of white, black, and Indian South Africans overseas, or the cultural and political trends in South Africa that have affected the world, or indeed any global developments that in turn have significantly impacted South Africa. This would include publicising this broader mission to scholars in other parts of the world, who would otherwise not think of submitting to the SAHJ. Operating as a specialist journal is not a disadvantage; indeed, as regards the archives in South Africa, one historian of archival research has stated that ‘there are archives, in turn, that are of international interest precisely because they are so uninternational, or so evocative of a lost and ununified world’.Footnote17 Losing a specialty to gain a wider audience is not desirable. But gaining a wider audience and tapping into international archival networks for new knowledge – wedded to the specialty of South Africa – is an advantage.
All periods of South African history could prove fertile ground for research. Is it even possible to underplay the importance of the development of humans in this part of the world? African empires and trade impacted the great powers of the Middle East and Mediterranean in the ancient and medieval period. Early modern and modern world history certainly offer large opportunities, from the sixteenth century onward. Human migration from ancient times, South Africa as a key lynchpin in Dutch and British empires, the export of gold to the world currency in the late nineteenth century to the present, and world debates about apartheid, the role model of the rainbow nation since 1994, and struggles of the current government with problems that are common to all developing nations – these are but a few examples of history involving South Africa which engages much of the history of the entire globe.
I will point out one challenge that I have noticed in Australia and South Africa – the cultural cringe factor. This comes less from being a developing nation (Australia is developed and still suffers from this) than from a nation that has a smaller population than the major world players. Australia is wealthy, yet Australian humanities or social science journals are often ranked lower by Australians themselves, as can be seen in our Australian Research Council rankings and by the emphasis Australian academics place on international publications as somehow representing the gold standard of academic publishing. South Africa has a similar problem. In the academic imagination, the centre seems so often to lie in the north, and not the south. As one scholar has noted,
Despite well-developed national historiographies, New Zealand, Australian and Canadian history still suffer from a dose of cultural cringe. This emanates from the legacy of imperial feeling that New Zealand, Australia and Canada do not have their ‘own’ histories, and subsequently the ones being written are somehow inferior. Hence, they are variously regarded as ‘easy’, ‘common knowledge’ and ‘boring’.Footnote18
I also think other factors are at play with the cultural cringe factor. The emphasis on national histories is an attempt in a postcolonial world to capture the narratives and experiences that are lost in a top-down perspective. But there can also be overcompensation. First, it is worth noting that journals like the American Historical Review, amongst many others, consider themselves capable of tackling almost any historical theme or cultural and material trend anywhere in the world. When limiting the focus of a journal to South Africa, it is an invitation to be ignored by most academics who are laser-focused on Europe and the Anglo-countries. When a journal has ground-breaking research that engages the larger picture, it is much harder to ignore. Essentially, a journal in South Africa can aspire to make the claim that it is impossible to understand other regions, and certainly the global picture, without taking the published research in its volumes into account. This is done by building on the strength of a geographical focus, and then broadening. The SAHJ is clearly a leader in the history of South Africa, and this should never be jeopardised. It is needed. But casting a broader net does not mean losing your footing on the ground you stand on. This approach worked well with Britain and the World. It may work well with the SAHJ.
To sum up, working as a historian in South Africa provides many unique teaching opportunities. For researching outside of South Africa, one must board a place and go to the archives needed, but this is true, if to a somewhat lesser extent, in any country of the world. Africa continues to grow in importance to the world economy and it is unlikely that research that involves South Africa and Africa can be placed outside the centre of our mental maps. Broadening our teaching focus and finding points of connection with our research to a larger picture may be a practical and fruitful way forward.
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Notes on contributors
Gregory A. Barton
Gregory A. Barton is a historian of British, world, and environmental history. He is Professor of history at Western Sydney University and visiting professor of history at the University of Johannesburg. He is the author of Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism; Lord Palmerston and the Empire of Trade; Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture; and The Global History of Organic Farming.
Notes
1 There has been little research into the challenges of researching in developing countries, and what little there is focuses largely on the sciences. See C. Alemayehu, G. Mitchell, and J. Nikles, ‘Barriers for Conducting Clinical Trials in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review’, International Journal for Equity in Health, 17 (2018), 37.
2 G.A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); G.A. Barton, Lord Palmerston and the Empire of Trade (New York: Longman, 2012); G.A. Barton, Informal Empire and the Rise of One World Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); G.A. Barton, The Global History of Organic Farming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); G.A. Barton and B. Bennett, Saving the World the First Time: How Forests Inspired Efforts to Stop Climate Change, 1770 to the Present (London: Reaction Press, forthcoming).
3 For literature on cognitive modelling, see J.R. Busemeyer and A. Diederich, Cognitive Modelling (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010); J.S. Brown, A. Collins, and P. Duguid, ‘Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning’, Educational Researcher, 18, 1 (1989), 32–42; A. Collins, J.S. Brown, and A. Holum, ‘Cognitive Apprenticeship: Making Things Visible’, American Educator, 15, 3 (1991), 6–46.
4 C. Coulter, C. Michael, and L. Pynor, ‘Storytelling as Pedagogy: An Unexpected Outcome of Narrative Inquiry’, Curriculum Inquiry, 37, 2 (2015), 103–122; K. Moore, ‘Exposing Hidden Relations: Storytelling, Pedagogy, and the Study of Policy’, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 43, 1 (2013), 63–78.
5 For the importance of fieldwork and close teacher-student relationships for learning outcomes, see D.L. Dickerson, K.R. Dawkins, and L. Annetta, ‘Scientific Fieldwork: An Opportunity for Pedagogical-Content Knowledge Development’, Journal of Geoscience Education, 55, 5 (2018), 371–376; G. Hagenauer and S.E. Volet, ‘Teacher-Student Relationship at University: An Important yet Under-Researched Field’, Oxford Review of Education, 40, 3 (2014), 370–388.
6 J. Hong, Z. Pi, and J. Yang, ‘Learning Declarative and Procedural Knowledge via Video Lectures’, Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 55, 1 (2018), 74–81.
7 The Kruger study class came to a halt during the Covid-19 pandemic but has since been restarted. See G.A. Barton, B.M. Bennett, S. Hifazat, B. Tsuwane, and L. Kruger, ‘Sustaining the University of Johannesburg and Western Sydney University Partnership in the Time of Covid: A Qualitative Case Study’, Yesterday and Today, 24 (2020), 1–21.
8 Barton, Empire Forestry.
9 Barton, Lord Palmerston.
10 Barton, Informal Empire.
11 Barton, The Global History.
12 Barton and Bennett, Saving the World.
13 There are many exceptions to this rule. In South Africa, the archives are on the whole well organised. There are, however, many challenges owing to the lack of emphasis on acquiring sources with global connections. See P. Ngulube and V.F. Tafor, ‘The Management of Public Records and Archives in the Member Countries of ESARBICA’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 27, 1 (2006), 57–83.
14 See C.A. Bayly, S. Beckert, M. Connelly, I. Hofmeyr, W. Kozol, and P. Seed, ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111, 5 (2006), 1441–1464.
15 E. Rothschild, ‘The Archives of Universal History’, Journal of World History, 19, 3 (2008), 382.
16 G.A. Barton, ‘Towards a Global History of Britain’, Perspectives on History, 1 October 2012, https://www.historians.org/research-and-publications/perspectives-on-history/october-2012/towards-a-global-history-of-britain.
17 Rothschild, ‘The Archives of Universal History’, 383.
18 K. Pickles, ‘Transnational History and Cultural Cringe: Some Issues for Consideration in New Zealand, Australia and Canada’, History Compass, 9, 9 (2011), 658. For a discussion of what I term imperial synthesis, see G.A. Barton, ‘The Imperial Synthesis’, British Scholar, 1, 2 (2009), 151–154. See also H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
19 L.J. Hume, ‘Another Look at the Cultural Cringe’, Revivalist, (Winter 2003), http://www.the-rathouse.com/Another_look_at_the_Cultural_Cringe.htm.