Academics, how much work do you read "outside of your direct area" (whatever that means to you)? Like, in answering this question about why Islam grew irregularly in the Indian Ocean (dominant in Malaysia and Indonesia, a minority in Sri Lanka), I don't think I could have been able to think about that question properly without having read broadly about why and how regions convert (my answer drew on research on the Roman Empire, Muslim South Asia, and the Middle East), though perhaps someone could have deduced all those patterns from the Indonesian and Malaysian cases alone. Of course, this broad reading consequently means I'm spread a little more thinly in the secondary literature of my "primary area" than most people are.

More than that, what do you guys think of "comparative history"? I guess I mean a specific type of often-regional history (Bloodlands would fit my understand of comparative history; as would several of the big books looking at the rise of nationalism). I feel like it was a big thing in the 1970's, both in history and in sociology, but has declined since then. Regional histories certainly are popular-the sort of "Atlantic World" stuff, or "Indian Ocean World" seem to focus more on international connections rather than similarities and differences. Other regional work does--a lot of studies of the Middle East, for example the recent Rise and Fall of Arab Dictators for Life to choose just the most recent example that comes to mind, is explicitly comparative, as is a lot of work on Latin America. In other places, though, historians seem to have left comparison to the social scientists.

How do you think about cases that are not your case? Like, I was listening to an episode of the Ottoman History Podcast and this woman kept talking about "my slaves" (meaning, specifically the slaves of the Galata neighborhood, many of whom worked on ships, who appear in the court records available today). She clearly thought, too, about "other people's slaves" within the Ottoman Empire (specifically, one of her arguments appears to be that slavery varied hugely depending on what the slaves were used for). She didn't make any references to slaves outside the Ottoman Empire, nor (at least in the podcast) did she talk about other forms of labor in the Ottoman Empire or beyond (I'm sure she's well read on other forms of labor in the Ottoman Empire).

Just as a fun side note: Arthur Stinchcombe (an eminent sociologist) noted one of the downsides of comparative research:

I am now Emeritus at sociology at Northwestern, mainly involved in historical and comparative work, advising people around here, and sometimes elsewhere, if I can get them to give me copies of their papers or books to comment on. My own comparative research is on why provinces vary so much in their ability to govern and tax their localities while getting along with their empire or federal center, and arguing that the main variables explaining variations in strength and ability to cooperate with the central government are those describing the commercial flow out of the locality. I expect the market for this book will be more or less the same as the efficiency book and another book that essentially no one has read, on comparative slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean during the 18th and 19th centuries. My excuse for the commercial failure of this last book is that no one really wants to know how some kinds slavery were not as bad as some other kinds, and some kinds of emancipations are almost as bad, at least for a while, as slavery was.

How do you deal with minority elites in the historiography?

By this, I mean that there's a tendency, especially in the Early Modern Period or before, to judge the status of minority ethnic or religious communities by the written record left by their most powerful and prominent members.

I am particularly thinking of the way that the phenomnon of "court Jews" in Europe and the Ottoman Empire continues to distort popular (and scholarly!) perceptions and stereotypes regarding the role and position of Jews in the societies of Europe and the Islamic world during the Early Modern period.

More specifically, there's a tendency in the historiography to represent families like the Abarbanels or individuals like Israel Aaron of Berlin as somehow being important indicators of the social and economic roles of Jews in Early Modern times. I'm not so sure that they aren't aberrant outliers that serve to confuse our perceptions of the social and economic life of "the 99%", so to speak.

I no don't work as a professional historian, so I admit I'm a bit of a rank amateur, but this fascinating example of historical research in action, made me take a look at some of the books and articles I've read over the years, and really got me thinking about this problem. I don't have a ton of background knowledge of the subject, but I did take a few classes on it in college, and there has accumulated a voluminous, if not always robust, scholarship since the emergence of "area studies" in the 1970s.

I'm not sure I understand the subject very well, but I feel like there are two problems here:

1. Like everyone throughout history, we have better documentation for the people at the top of the social structure, and this tends to skew our perception of the lived reality of society as a whole. This problem applies to ethnic and religious minorities as much as anyone, especially in the Early Modern era, and earlier, where he have very spotty archival records for "marginalized" linguistic and religious communities that lived in small scattered groups across a wide area, or just generally didn't merit a great deal of attention from the state.

2. There seems to be a phenomenon in Jewish studies literature, whereby poorly-attested folklore and myth gets written in popular books and memoirs, which got cited as somehow being "primary sources" by some hapless graduate student, thereby legitimizing cultural myth as peer-reviewed fact, in a manner strongly reminiscent of this xkcd cartoon.

I very strongly suspect, based on a very cursory overview, that these problems exist in other ethnic studies areas as well, but I confess to being an enthusiastic amateur, rather than a salaried professional.

Is any of these notions already well-established parts of the general historiography of other subjects?

As someone who studied academic history as an undergrad, but went in a different direction for a career, whenever I try to "brush up" on a subject or keep on on modern scholarship, I know just enough to see the flaws and limitations of pop history works, but I don't have quite enough grasp of either methodology or implicit background to properly digest a real academic monograph.

The result is a feeling of wandering through an infinitely vast but dimly lit room, seeing the dark outlines of the furniture against a distant window as I try to not bang my shins on the scattered chair-legs and coffee-tables.

Any thoughts from the experts?

How do historians define and separate a 'rebel' from a 'revolutionary'?