Causation in history

Dr Sakul Kundra
Thursday, March 23, 2017

WHAT actually happened can never be known in its entirety, only partial actual past is revealed in history
by interpretation of written, oral, physical sources and other past sources.

A historian analyses the past based on process of selection of surviving records in the present and finally
gives his authentication.

A historian makes interpretation of surviving facts, organises them in a coherent way to fill up the gaps
with his empathetic understanding and imagination.

According to Marc Bloch, history is to be written "with integrity, with truth, with the utmost penetration into
its hidden causes and thus, with difficulty" whereas EJ Tapp's Some Aspects of Causation in History
claims that "without a concept of causation there can be no history".

These two articles briefly enlighten the concept of causation in history, a historian methodology to assign
causes to events and lastly, the implication of determinism and accident/chance theory in causation.

Causation: Historians craft

If one analyses what were the causes of World War II, the answer will be multiple major causes such as
impact of the Treaty of Versailles, rise of Italian fascism, rise of Hitler and his Nazi party, the Great
Depression, Japanese expansionism, anti-communism, appeasement policy, militarism, nationalism, US
isolationism and so on.

Therefore, it becomes a puzzle for a common person to give priority to which cause over another to term
the "ultimate cause". Thus, a historian tries to find out the basic questions of the five Ws and one H and
attempts to reconstruct the past after analysing all possible and speculative facts.

Thus, an imaginative reconstruction of the past is made with raising new questions and minimising the
existing uncertainties in the light of fresh evidence and drawing fresh interpretations based on them.

Causation plays a vital role in providing a coherent and intelligible explanation of the past.

As the study of history is a study of causes, the historian keeps asking the question "why" until he comes
to a final answer or cause.
Walsh describes a cause as "a necessary condition of some result, picked out from the remaining
conditions either because it is something which might have been produced or prevented at will because it
was in some way unusual or unexpected".

It is believed that history consists of marshalling the events of the past in an orderly sequence of cause
and effect.

James Brien's Causation in History narrates that "causal relationships are essential to establishing
historical explanations and aiding in the understanding of the past. Without it, historians are left with a
collection of unrelated facts". So he stated causation is considered the great central pillar of historical
thinking.

Methodology of causation

What does a historian do when one is confronted by the necessity of assigning cause to an event?

A historian begin by commonly assigning several causes to the same event as one has to deal with
multiplicity of causes.

Thereafter, a list of causes is compiled and endeavour made to reduce them in order, and establish some
kind of hierarchy of causes in relation to each other and to finally decide which cause or category of
causes should be regarded as the final or ultimate cause of all causes.

Historians act as a judge to discover whose actions were the ultimate cause of an event so he analyses
varied causes such as long and short-term causes, underlying, immediate, actual, principal, essential,
general, necessary, actual and ultimate causes.

Different historians have different answers or causes to the same question, event or action.

Historians may disagree over the selection and significance of any cause.

A historian, by the virtue of his urge to understand the past, is compelled to simplify the multiplicity of his
answers, to subordinate one to another and to introduce some order and unity into the chaos of
happenings and the chaos of specific causes.

Thus, the historian is acknowledged with "the cause" one has given to a reason for an event or action.

In order to establish causality between two independent variables, X results in a change in the dependent
variable Y, one has to consider four factors. Firstly, time order meaning the cause must precede effect.
Secondly, co-variation signifying if the independent variable changes and the dependent variable also
changes, the independent variable may be the cause of the dependent variable.

Thirdly, rationale or theoretical justification meaning that there must be a logical and compelling
explanation for why these two variables are related and lastly, non-spuriousness refers that it must be
established that the independent variable X, and only X, was the cause of changes in the dependent
variable Y. Rival explanations must be ruled out.

Indu Banga in her article Historical Causation shows that causal analysis rests on theory in the sense of a
set of logically coherent propositions with suggestive potential.

A conscious use of theory as an analytical tool enables historians to fruitfully employ the insights,
concepts and techniques of the other human sciences, which also suggest new questions and open up
new avenues of research.

Moreover, Banga explained the "problem relating to give cause to any event like over emphasis on a
single cause often gives it the character of an accidental happening and secondly, sometimes the
immediate causes of an event are unduly emphasised, looking over the larger context or the underlying
conditions.

"But really the immediate cause is merely a point in a chain of events, trends, influences and forces at
which the effect begins to become visible.

"Thus, the subject matter of history being the past society in totality, historical causation is a complex
undertaking, obliging the historian to seek not just a cause or a few causes, but causal wave-chains."

Two other underlying concepts that need to be emphasised in regard to causation are determinism and
chance or accident.

* Dr Sakul Kundra is an assistant professor in history, college of humanities and education, FNU. The
views expressed are his own and not of this newspaper or his employer.