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In another installment of our ongoing series taking a closer look at historiographical milestones and important developments in the academic field of history, today we'll take a look at one of the most prominent historians of the 20th Century and one of his most interesting texts: Eric Hobsbawm and his essay on the invention of tradition.

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) was a British Marxist historian specialized in what is known as the "dual revolution", meaning the political French Revolution and the British industrial revolution and their effects on what he called "the long 19th Century", meaning the time frame from 1789 to 1914, which he discussed in his three books The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 with The Age of Extremes dealing with the 20th century. Hobsbawm is also known for his work on social banditry and his importance in founding the Journal Past & Present, which to this day is one of the most prestigious English-language history journals.

In 1983 he and his colleague Terrence Ranger, a prominent historian of Africa focusing on the history of Zimbabwe, edited and published a short anthology called The Invention of Tradition. In it, Hobsbawm wrote the title-giving essay which deals with one of the defining features of modernity: The invention of tradition.

Invented tradition, writes Hobsbawm,

is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past.

What does Hobsbawm mean with this? In the same volume British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper provides a perfect example: Scottish Highland Tradition. Detailing how today whenever Scotsmen gather to celebrate their national identity, they do so by wearing kilts woven in a tartan whose color and patterns indicate their "clans" and play seemingly ancient Scottish music on their bagpipes. However, as Trevor-Roper makes clear:

the whole concept of a distinct Highland culture and tradition [including kilts woven in specific tartans and bagpipes] is a retrospective invention.

What seems ancient first emerged in the 17th Century and was refined, re-branded, and updated in the 19th Century. When George IV as the first Hanoverian monarch planned his visit to Edinburgh, commercial and national interests entered into an alliance to invent several key traditions of Scotland. Colonel David Stewart of Grath, a military man studying the Highland regiments of the British Army had first publicized the idea of Scottish clans being differentiated by tartans of their kilts; a fact which had virtually no historical basis. When the king announced his visit, Sir Walter Scott, the novelist, was in charge of celebrations and wanted to put on a show including the Highlanders and their kilts.

But what tartan should they wear? The idea of differentiated clan tartans, which had no been publicized by Stewart, seems to have originated with the resourceful manufacturers who, for thirty-five years, had had no clients except the Highland regiments but who now (...) saw the prospect of a far larger market.

And so, kilts with differentiated clan tartans came into existence to be treated as if they were an ancient and reaching far back in history Scottish tradition.

These invented traditions, according to Hobsbawm are in essence a reaction to social change.

[T]he peculiarity of "invented" tradition is that the continuity with it is largely factious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations (...) It is the contrast between the constant change and innovation of the modern wolrd and the attempt to structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that the makes the "invention of tradition" so interesting for the historians of the past two centuries. (...) [What they do] is to give any desired change (or resistance to innovation) the sanction of precedent, social continuity and natural law as expressed in history.

Established by repetition, which gives the illusion of historicity, invented traditions not only serve a social purpose but also a distinctly political one: Specifically, a national purpose. The rise of nationalism, so intrinsically linked with modernity and the 19th Century, was an intellectual project that eschewed its own novelty in favor of legitimacy through history.

Friedrich Engels summed up this sentiment in an article entitled Democratic Pan-Slavism in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of February 1849, when he writes

Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which come under foreign domination the moment they have achieved the first, crudest level of civilisation ... have no capacity for survival and will never be able to attain any kind of independence. And that has been the fate of the Austrian Slavs.

This rather pervasive mind-set sums up the above mentioned defining feature of nationalism: The need for historicity, the need for an ancient and far-reaching tradition to refer to and to legitimize various national aspirations. This is where invented traditions come in rather handy. Used by what Roger Brubaker calls "national entrepreneurs", invented traditions form a backbone of any national and nationalist narrative, which by its very nature, seeks to portray the new national community as the continuation of an ancient already established community and their values and views.

Hobsbawm:

It is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and groups – not at least in nationalism – were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating an ancient past beyond effective historic continuity, either by semi-fiction (Boadicea, Vercingetroix, Arminius the Cheruscan) or by forgery (Ossian, the Czech medieval manuscripts). It is also clear that entirely new symbols and devices came into existence as part of national movements and states, such as the national anthem (of which the British in 1740 seems to be the earliest), the national flag (still largely a variation on the French revolutionary tricolor, evolved 1790-94), or the personification of "the nation" in symbol or image.

In short, the invention of tradition is both factor in establishing as well as expression of the follwoing:

Modern nations and all their impedimenta generally claim to be the opposite of novel, namely rooted in the remotest antiquity, and the opposite of constructed, namely human communities so "natural" as to require no definition other than self-assertion.

The importance of Hobsbawm's essay and the accompanying anthology is manifold: Not only is it a call to question various traditions we are familiar with and which often project an image of antiquity and long history on a historical level but it also provides us with a method of better understanding their importance in the myths we tend to create of out own national community as well as the idea of a national community reaching far back into times immemorial itself.

The essential unessentialist nature of the nation and its community is important not only from a historian's standpoint in researching and understanding prevailing views of who and what we are but also in terms of teaching us that our understanding of the communities we are born into or become part of voluntarily is not set in an eternal historic stone: The nation, who it is and what it represents, is not an eternal community outside of and persisting through history but much like anything else subject to change and the historical process, which means that it may take different forms over time and that we can influence what form it takes on and how we define it.

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