Does history evolve?
‘Many of them can, even in the dark, distinguish between several kinds of money’
I’m a lover of serendipities and coincidences. They make me smile. One of the things I have always loved about finding out more about the world is now many more serendipities and coincidences it throws up because, once you start thinking about something, you start noticing what might previously have been invisible.
This week, a small serendipity: I was about halfway through writing this post, with a pretty clear idea of the point, when I picked up a bit of daily reading on something completely different and found this:
These common features [of South Asian languages] are of course results of a converging evolution.1
Why, you might reasonably ask, did that seem serendipitous? I’d been writing in this post about the ways in which the idea of evolution sits behind quite a lot of historical discussion. I think this is a bit of a problem. My plan was (and is, below) to explore why an evolutionary logic often doesn’t make sense historically, through an article I read some years ago and have thought with ever since.
It was a bonus in this quotation to have such a direct reminder of just how common ideas of evolution are in historical writing!
The idea of evolution, most closely associated with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s book, On the Origin of Species, quite rapidly changed how lots of people thought about the world.
What happens, though, when an idea becomes so mainstream that people start treating it as an everyday logic of ‘how things work’, rather than a specific model for how a particular thing works?
Of course, everyday familiarity with specialist ideas is great. It is much of the point of general, broad-based education: everybody knowing a bit about lots of subjects helps us all to work better together and share a sense of how things fit together, but it comes with risks.
To take just one example, a growing everyday understanding of how germs worked in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a triumph for public health. It also sometimes meant that people with non-transmittable illnesses were isolated or ostracised because people had learned (correctly) that (some) diseases could be passed on by touch or close contact, but lacked a deeper technical understanding of medicine. They didn’t realise that cholera and cancer work in fundamentally different ways.
Evolution and history is, I think, one of those cases. Lots of writing about history treats evolutionary theory as a general rule about how things change, rather than a specific model for how genetic traits are passed on within populations.
The difference is worth thinking about. Evolutionary theory, in very general terms (my own understanding of evolution is also ‘everyday’ or ‘general’ - I’m jot a geneticist!), argues that genes, and the traits that they determine, will be more likely to be passed down and to spread within populations if they give the organism carrying those genes (and therefore expressing those traits) some advantage in the pursuit of a specific aim. That aim is to produce more organisms carrying the genes in question.
In even more ‘everyday’ terminology, this is often described with phrases like ‘survival of the fittest’ or ‘competitive advantage’, in which it is important to remember (but historians often don’t) that ‘fittest’ means ‘best fitted to produce more organisms carrying the genes in question’ and ‘advantage’ means ‘in producing more organisms carrying the genes in question’.
There are quite a few problems applying this theory to history.
First, what the equivalent of the gene? People have, in different studies (and sometimes in the same study!), treated the ‘gene/trait’ that is selected for or against as the individual human being (such and such an individual was more successful because of their unique traits); a particular tool or technology (bronze tools/gunpowder/money spread because they outcompeted other technologies); a specific social practice (such as democracy, or indeed, dictatorship, which have both been argued to offer ‘competitive advantage’ over other systems, including each other); or an entire cultural sphere or political system (e.g. the early farming communities of Bronze Age West Asia or the Roman Empire succeeded in displacing older, less capable societies).
I’m not saying, by the way, that these are things that happened in these ways, just that these are ways in which an evolutionary argument of ‘survival of the fittest’ has been used to make historical arguments. And in them, the ‘gene/trait’ element can be pretty much anything we want it to be, which is not ideal if you are applying a model in which it is a pretty clearly defined specific thing.
Second, what is the ‘aim’ or selection mechanism? Again, in a biological sense, evolutionary theory is pretty clear: the ‘aim’ is for the gene to be passed on and the mechanism is by producing more organisms with that gene. In history, though, what do we mean by ‘more effective’, or ‘more efficient’ or ‘less capable’ or other similar euphemisms, or ‘widespread’ or ‘dominant’? Do we look for something being passed down from one generation to the next, spreading between communities, or being adapted for different circumstances? All of these could be signs of ‘success’.
Third, evolution in the biological sense is an essentially amoral process. A finch with a beak that is better at cracking open nuts on an island full of nuts isn’t a morally superior finch to one that has a differently shaped beak. It is just a finch that is more likely to grow strong and healthy eating lots of nuts and therefore be able to raise more finches who can also grow big and strong eating lots of nuts.
History, by contrast, has always been enmeshed in moral debates and probably always will be. What constitutes a ‘good’ outcome or a ‘good’ society’ is at the heart of some of the most important debates human beings have ever had. Without any single notion of what any given person, group of people or whole society might want, it is very hard to show that things were selected for that outcome. It is also very easy to show that at any given time, there has been no agreement about that ‘good’.
Perhaps most importantly, disagreements about what a good outcome is are historically varies, conscious and affect how people behave. Genes, as far as we know, don’t sit around thinking about whether or not they want to reproduce themselves, or how or with what other genes, or what other things they could do with their lives. They don’t make choices based on those constant and ever-changing thoughts and ideas. People do. All the time.
The reasons why humans may choose to keep doing something or stop doing something, are not just deeply complicated. They are also incredibly difficult to pin down and they are frequently contradictory. Talking about the collective ‘choice’ of a whole society, for example, is actually just a way of talking about a snapshot moment in the dialogue between all of the members of that society: what do they each want, or need or prioritise? Who gets an active say? Who doesn’t? What gets decided actively and consciously and what is chosen by default, inaction or messy compromise?
A mutant gene that controls a trait that brings a significant advantage in terms of the organisms carrying it reproducing more might spread quite quickly. A human invention (such as gunpowder or paper) might not make an impact for centuries because people often like doing things the way they are used to.
An article I read back in 2021 been my favourite reminder of this ever since. It comes from the Journal of the Oriental Numismatic Society and uses records from the archive of the British East India Company to investigate how money was managed in eastern peninsular India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2
I love it for the richness of detail which Hans Herrli has dug out of the sources, but also because blows out of the water two ‘common sense’ ideas that sit underneath a lot of arguments about history and which are often described using the language of ‘evolution’ (even if they do not, for the reasons discussed above, actually fit very well with theories of biological evolution):
Bunk Idea 1: people, and the societies they live in, will tend to become more efficient over time (in the sense of using less time and energy to achieve the same outcome).
Bunk Idea 2: people were less able the further back in time you go to construct complex systems and do complex things.
Allow me, via the good offices of Hans Herrli, himself via the archives of the British East India Company, to demonstrate…
The currency system of what is now eastern peninsular India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was fiendishly complicated. It involved the use of cowrie shells alongside coins. It also involved the use of literally hundreds of different kinds of coins circulating together: coins of different rulers; forgeries of those coins; unofficial/local versions; different standards of the same coin over time as the composition, weight and design changed; coins which were mint-fresh alongside coins so worn they were nearly smooth...
As a result, in Bengal alone, there were around thirty to forty thousand professional money-changers (often called schroffs). Their job was to establish the value of all of these different coins in relation to one another. There were specialists among these money-changers:
I have been assured [writes one functionary of the British East India Company] that many of them can, even in the dark, distinguish between several kinds of money whose size and weight bear no great dissimilarity.
Some men’s job (and they do seem to have been exclusively men) was solely to do this initial sorting. Parties to a large transaction would bring their coins, sometimes numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands, and one specialist would sort them into different types.
Another would then evaluate the coins for things like wear and forgeries but also examine them for small differences in design that might show that a coin of the same type was from one year and another was from the next year, which might affect their market value because of their silver content.
Then another specialist might bring this information together to establish exactly what the whole sum was worth on that day, given the relative value of all of these coins to one another in the market.
Another document describes how the money-changers could circulate the changing prices of different coins against one another across the entire city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). The prices might change from day to day and, at the longest, every couple of days. To the frustration of many British officials, this information could spread around the city, not just to the money changers, but also to other business-people, completely out of the control of the East India Company.
Back to our bunk ideas:
Bunk Idea 1: this system was not (as many of the writers of the documents lament) very efficient, but it continued to operate for several generations. It even resisted strenuous efforts by the increasingly powerful British East India Company to change the way things worked.
Bunk Idea 2: this system depended on individual people, and communities and networks, doing crazily complicated things and producing very technical and resilient outcomes.
Now, there are lots of reasons why this might have been. Here are a few:
there was no easy means of coordinating a complete change of currency for all of peninsular India, and the risk of disrupting a system that worked was greater than the possible benefit of one that worked a bit better. (Wholesale changes to currency systems are notoriously complicated and dangerous even with industrial production capabilities and modern communication technology. Think about the Indian government’s demonetisation of high-value rupee notes in 2016.)
There were incentives for lots of people to keep producing different coins, and not very effective means to stop them or persuade them not to. (Stopping forgers forging is pretty much impossible: the best a really effective currency control system can do is contain the issue, and even then, not well. Persuading rulers across South India to stop minting their own coins would have required somebody to make up the loss of revenue and prestige they would then suffer. Nobody was really in a position to do that.)
The money changers themselves would have been crucial to any kind of mass change of the currency system and had no reason at all to help with that.
Inefficiencies and complications of the currency situation that Herrli uncovers undoubtedly caused lots of people problems in day-to-day business. They also created space to evade, resist and undermine colonial control. How conscious this strategy may have been would be difficult to show, but shouldn’t be discounted, especially as it was hardly in anybody’s interests to record that that was what they were doing…
I could go on, and find other cases from across time and space which reveal other reasons why things did not, apparently, get bigger, better, faster, cheaper over time, but it saves a lot of trouble just to admit up front that how things sort-of work for genes, sometimes, doesn’t really apply to how people work, let alone how societies work.
Zvelebil, Kamil Veith, The Smile of Murugan. On Tamil Literature of South India (Leiden, 1973), p. 10.
Herrli, Hans, ‘Ways and By-Ways of Indian Numismatics: Aspects of Money Circulation in the Bengal and Madras Presidencies’, Journal of the Oriental Numismatic Society, 214.Winter 2013 (2013), 20–25.