1) The historiography of early medieval Britain and Ireland is methodologically and/or epistemologically distinctive. Anglo-Saxonists and Celticists have to think through problems of archival interpretation in creative ways, have to think about the status of oral narrative in new ways, have to grapple with debates about nomothetic and ideographic knowledge in a unique way, have distinctive issues with the validity of comparative or universal history, have to struggle with the ??constructedness?? of their field of knowledge in special ways.

Africa was the last major world region to undergo modern colonialism and experienced it over the shortest period of time. It also had less in the way of larger-scale political centralization than most other areas that went through 19th century colonization did. (Herbst, I think, badly misreads the character of colonialism by taking all of his examples from the early- and proto- periods — he is the anti-Crawford Young — but his argument about the organization of territory is very important.) This lead to a colonial experience that was more intensive in some areas and more scattershot over all.

This is partly your #2, but also gets to the rapid institutional and social changes that Africans experienced/took part in. I don’t want to give in to modernization theory hand-waving, but I feel strongly that there is Something there in the argument that Africa went through economic and demographic changes in about 50 years that Europe went through in 200 or more, with real consequences for #3. (I think in particular of something like Jane Guyer’s “Representation without Taxation” essay, in terms of how post-colonial nations take on the form of modern states, but without the supporting institutions.)

The whole Honors system has had a bit of an underlying problem ever since there stopped being solidly fixed canons in various specializations which one could reliably assume any external expert would know or rely upon.

I think your questions also get to the role of a Swat honors seminar more broadly. I wouldn’t say that your seminar is an outlier in terms of the ratio of specific historical knowledge to theoretical debate. Other profs might tackle classic works in the field more methodically, while you tended toward newer, and in some cases quirkier, monographs, but in all cases the basic goal feels the same: to engage students in exciting historiographical debates in the field. In retrospect, I think perhaps this came slightly at the expense of robust historical knowledge, but this is a criticism that would apply to my other seminars as well. It’s also a criticism coming from a graduate student in history, so I can’t speak for the majority of students who have no direct academic engagement with the subject after their BA – but I might presume that they would take even more from a creative, debate-driven approach that comes slightly at the expense of specialist knowledge.