David Abernethy
David Abernethy describes himself as “a loner” – at least in terms of writing – and he works on his writing projects with solitary zeal. He refuses to write anything formally until he’s completely developed his argument, so he takes notes – he shows a page from his notebook during our conversation – writing the original material along with commentary of his own, snippets of “thoughts.” His own argument emerges out of those snippets, but it takes time, lots of time, and lots of notebooks. His most recent book, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980, is a magnum opus, a historical, political science analysis of European colonialism around the world from its beginnings. It took Prof. Abernethy 15 years to write the book. But then Yale Press told him the manuscript was too long: “I spent fifteen years marching up that hill and then three years actually marching down the hill because it would not get published; it would not see the light of day were I not to have cut it maybe thirty percent or so. And the painful process of deleting words that took all those years to get on paper was pretty tough.”
David Abernethy would spend the academic year teaching and working on committees, and he loved it. During the summers he would devote himself to his research and writing task, steadily working on his book, summer by summer. Prof. Abernethy’s story of his work style – his dedication, his joy, his calm determination – is inspiring and a little intimidating. How many writers and scholars are there willing to work so long on a project of such grand scope? And after such a long haul, marching up and down that hill, he was stuck on how to finish the book, resolving his problem in what, in the course of these conversations, we’ve found to be a characteristic practice among many writers: he took a shower, during which he was inspired to compose his penultimate paragraph! His book has been hailed as a tremendous achievement in scholarship in his field, and the long haul was well worth the effort. David Abernethy has much to share with us on how he writes, particularly the virtues of patience and sweat. --Hilton Obenzinger
Transcript of How I Write Conversation with David Abernethy
HO: Well, I’d like to welcome everybody to the second of a new tradition at Stanford, “How I Write,” conversations with faculty and other experienced writers on how they write. As I pointed out the first session, why someone writes and what they write, they’re all important and cannot be disentangled from how someone writes, but how—techniques, style, habits, work habits—all of those sorts of questions are the kinds of things that we’re investigating. My name is Hilton Obenzinger. I work with honors students and other advanced writers at Undergraduate Research Programs. And this is part of an ongoing research project. We really don’t know where this research will go, but I guess that’s part of what research is about. Really to find out how the different experienced—more experienced, less experienced—writers do their work, and to see whether or not there are some kinds of insights that can be gathered from this. And that’s why we’re videotaping it, Besides, as I said when Mary Lou was here, it may be useful for America’s Most Wanted. But we’ll have a library of these discussions, hopefully over a period of time, of a lot of different folks, having expressed all kinds of different experiences from different fields. So last month Mary Lou Roberts was our first person in conversation, from History. Today is Professor David Abernethy from Political Science. On March 6, we’ll be speaking with Alex Woloch of the English Department. And Alex is an assistance professor. He’s having his first book published, and it will be very interesting speaking with him as, kind of, emerging experienced writer, rather than kind of experienced over the years. But today we are going to speak with David Abernethy, who’s recently released a book, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980, and has written another book on education and politics in Africa. And [he] teaches in the Political Science department. Last time, the discussion was pretty far-ranging, asking Professor Roberts questions about her work style, et cetera, but also went off into discussing the trials and tribulations of writing grant proposals and experiences and insights about procrastination. So, whatever questions and concerns people have, feel free to raise them in the context of this discussion. So, welcome, Professor Abernethy, and I know you have a number of different things you wanted to show us, and maybe we can just jump into that?
DA: Show and tell. OK. This is the book that it took me fifteen years to write, and about three years to cut. And what I thought I would do is pass around for you a couple of handouts that show a bit of the way in which I worked. Just by way of background, substance and style can’t be disconnected totally. I decided many, many years ago to ask a fairly large and intractable question: namely, why did people from one tiny part of the world—namely, Western Europe—dominate in formal ways, through their empires, so much of the world for practically half a millennium. It didn’t seem probable for that to be the case. So I had a huge question; it seems to me a good question, the answer to which helps to define the modern world. It’s an important question, and it’s one that I never got bored raising. As I did research—my own field is African politics, but obviously European colonialism extends to other parts of the world as well - I came up with something I just called “thoughts.” And they would be spin-offs from what I was reading; I might wake up in the morning and come up with a thought. And I just had a series of these things. I had a file called “thoughts,” and basically came up with over 300 pages of little snippets. You've got page 153 here. What I then did was to arrange them in little snippets and put them in with paper clips—you can see these marvelous paper clip marks here— arranged according to the topic that I was doing. Phase one, European expansion, that’s chapter three in the book, having 300 pages of these little thoughts, totally random, I mean I just typed them in when I thought of them. But then you take those and rearrange and cut them up into tiny sheets of paper—very low-tech, I’m a low-tech kind of guy. Put them in sheets of paper and then put them here arranged by topic. What this did was to free me up to just say often the same thing over and over again. And the best way I could say it—the fourth way I said it—well, that’s something that might in fact go into the text. So a big topic, you just think about these things, write them in any order, but then rearrange them later.
OK, second handout: this shows the process of writing and the process of rejecting a whole bunch of ideas. And I just simply printed up the series of rejects: “could ill-afford to cost lives…”. It doesn’t seem to make any sense, but this is actually, I type something up, I don't like it, I just press return and try again, press return, press return. This is probably 95% of the material that was rejected, but out of it came words that might make sense.
I thought I could convey through these two handouts something of the rather painful process of writing and rewriting.
HO: You mentioned that this last book took you fifteen years, right? This probably encourages some of the people working on dissertations that there’s hope. How did you sustain your interest in this task, your ability to keep focused on the task that you were doing? And, then, was it fifteen years of research and then a certain number…or ten years of research and then write? And obviously there’s a writing process you’re doing right away. But when you, like, sit down and say, “OK, I’m going to write this chapter,” did you do it in sections, and what was the process like?
DA: I’d say roughly the first seven or eight years must have been spent just doing research, primarily asking the question, “How did Europeans expand in various parts of the world?” and then the other side, “How did these empires collapse?” So it was essentially research, but research is writing in the sense that you’re always taking notes. And in note-taking I find if I carry out a dialogue or conversation with the writer, rather than simply passively recording what the writer says, I can present my own voice, and actually use my own reactions to what the writer says, that’s the basis for what I’m going to argue later on. My little device is a parenthesis: I am reading something, I am taking notes on what the writer says, then I put down a parenthesis, which is myself speaking, “This is nuts,” Or “Greatest point I ever heard,” Or “But what about what the author just said three pages ago?” I am directly engaging the author with these reactions. And the parenthesis means I know that I am speaking when I go back to read the notes. And then what I do, is I run through the parenthetical notes, which is my voice, andthat often is the argument. The combination of what I’ve been saying all along becomes what I’m saying, as opposed to the notes that I have taken from somebody else. So the process of those seven or eight years of taking notes continually involved my own reaction, which became a form of my own writing that I used later on. And, then, since I basically worked only in the summers—I am fully involved in teaching and administrative things during the year— it is fifteen summers plus a little bit of sabbatical time. So that’s when you start at some point after maybe eight years trying to write things up, write a first chapter.
Initially this thing was unmanageably large. I kept on writing and ended with about 1100 pages of manuscript. The press, Yale, which eventually put it out, said it’s much too long, you’ve got to cut it down. So I spent fifteen years marching up that hill and then three years actually marching down the hill because it would not get published, it would not see the light of day were I not to have cut it maybe thirty percent or so. And the process of deleting words that took all those years to get on paper was pretty rough on me.
HO: Was it better?
DA: Some of it was a whole lot better. For one thing, I finally made the cuts. I could have asked somebody else to do that, but I am very…I’m a loner, honestly: I do my own work, I don't delegate it out, and I thought, “If this is going to be my work, I'd better do the cuts.” I went through the manuscript about three different times. The biggest was cutting about 125 pages just by going through sentence by sentence. I think I write concisely, but I found out that’s not so, all the a's, and and's, and the's, and 'on the other hand's. I just was merciless cutting this stuff out, and the writing clearly was better; it was more concise, it was fairly dense writing—I mean, every sentence hopefully has something to say—but that’s the only way I could do it in order to say what I wanted to say and also we contained within the space limits the press gave me. So I think the process, painful as it is, was just terrific. The writing is more epigrammatic. When you want to say something, you want to say it in a memorable way. Epigrams are brief and concise, you like them because they are brief. I moved in, I guess, an epigrammatic direction.
HO: Working summer to summer you were still able to keep, kind of, the continuity of what you were doing. Were you thinking about the project, and maybe even doing small amounts of research, during the academic year as well?
DA: I developed a course called “Colonialism and Nationalism in the Third World,” which became the book. So, in that sense, I was developing a course, which was getting my ideas out and getting some reactions from students. I also teach a course on African politics, which certainly looked in some detail at the European colonial experience in Africa and the nationalisms that arose. So I wasn’t doing things in my teaching that were disconnected from this topic. Over time, I taught some seminars that were directly connected as well: I developed an undergraduate seminar called “Decolonization in Asia and Africa, 1948-1980,” which involved a series of case studies of countries—India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Algeria, Zimbabwe, et cetera—and I gained a lot, as we always do, from student papers. The students do all this work. I take notes on student papers all the time. You students don’t realize this, but your input is quite substantial. So in that sense, the work I did in teaching fed back in.
To go back, Hilton, to the earlier point about did I ever…what kept me going? This is a huge, huge question: why are we speaking English thousands of miles away from a little North Sea island? Why does Stanford have Spanish red-tile roofs? We’re surrounded by the dominance of, quote, “the West”, which is really Western Europe. Western Europe is totally insignificant in geographic terms if you look at the map; it’s two percent of the land-space of the world. How come it took over pretty much all of the New World, et cetera, et cetera? So the question was absolutely riveting, and if I could figure out the answer…It took me about ten years, I’d say, to come up with an answer. I had a big question, and I was inevitably floundering, but eventually the particular argument that I focus on, which is the nature of European institutions, began to come into focus. And then it became fun, once you get an idea, to see where it might travel. And it’s this particular idea about triple assault I was focusing on: Europeans hit people with agencies of governance, of economic transformation, and of religious conversion. If I could see how that works, and the ways in which Europeans hit people with these three institutions in different places, that was fun. Did it work in New Zealand? Damn, it does! Does this work out in Paraguay? Yes! So the more you look, and the more you find that your hypothesis is confirmed—or even if it’s qualified—the more exciting that process becomes.
HO: You talked about the influence of students. Have you had the experience of xeroxing a student paper and keeping it? Have you talked with students about, “I like the work that you’ve done and I really want to incorporate the kind of work…” Do students get the message from you, you think, that their own writing is part of this broader community? You know, in your case, you’re able to use their research. How do they respond to that?
DA: I xerox maybe five or six student papers a year. It’s a fairly small number. They know they have done good work because they are getting A’s, sometimes A+ grades. I'm not sure if I ask them for permission to xerox their work, but, nonetheless, I do that. Usually it’s to get the citations that they use, and also maybe to pick up some of their ideas. In one case, a student many years ago, Dennis Galvin, wrote a brilliant senior honors thesis, actually for History; such a good thesis that I then assigned it in my course on foreign aid the next year. In that case I asked him for permission to do that, but that’s an extreme case. And, oh, actually last year Negar Azimi did a thesis with me on controversies over AIDS in South Africa, government policy towards AIDS. Such a good thesis that I, in fact, two weeks ago assigned it for students to read a part of it in a seminar that Richard Roberts is teaching on health in Africa. Again, I asked the student for permission, you can rest assured, and she was delighted to have that happen. So every once in while if it’s a thesis, then that’s a substantial piece of work the student has worked on for the year that can be incorporated into our own teaching.
HO: I want to go back to…there were a number of things that you raised that were interesting and other areas to go to. When you do research, what constituted the research for this book? And I’ll ask you for an example. There’s of course relatively contemporary history secondary sources. Did you go into archives? Did you seek out primary sources? Did you travel to New Zealand? What constituted research in regards to this?
DA: I would say it was primarily secondary sources. This is an effort to try to understand the big picture, and for me secondary sources are fine insofar as they present aspects of the big picture. So, I wasn’t pretending to have done substantial primary work. I did some: at Rhodes House at Oxford I did work on British colonial administrators, fascinating work that Tony Kirk-Greene has collected over the years; I went to the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University – for work on European exploration in the New World – which has some wonderful visual materials. So there were occasional cases where I just kind of plunged in with the primary documentation. Another case where I did that had to do with a case study I did on the Portuguese capture of Malacca in 1511, which is kind of like a micro…it’s as close as you can get to a lab experiment in the social sciences. The three people who might have controlled the world - the Chinese, the Arabs, and the Europeans - were all at the same time in the same place. I was so excited when I found that the three people who might have created global hegemony were actually at the same time in the same place, early sixteenth century in Malacca, which is on the Malayan Peninsula. And so the question, “How come the Portuguese took this place over whereas the Chinese and the Arabs did not?” was a way of testing out an argument as to why European countries came to power. The general argument happened to fit the data quite nicely, thank you. In that case I was getting into some writings by Albuquerque, who was the first Portuguese administrator for the Indian Ocean. So that was fun. But I didn't feel that I needed to because I wasn’t doing the kind of work that historians do; I'm doing comparative macro-social history. It’s comparative; we're trying to figure out what are Europeans doing in different times and places, what are similar features and different features, and for that, I think, all you need is the big picture in order to get an even bigger picture.
HO: So the nature of the field requires that kind of big-picture way of looking at things. I was wondering, I wanted to, kind of, switch gears to other aspects of the writing process for you. First of all, I mean a very basic question, do you enjoy writing? And, if so, what kind of delight or pleasure does it give you? And if not, how do you take care of business?
DA: I don't enjoy starting to write. It’s the usual problems that we have. I get around that by actually sitting in front of a piece of paper and trying to write the first couple of sentences; that’s hard. But once I get through the first couple of sentences, I say automatically, “Let’s go to the computer!” and off we go. So the start is a little difficult, but the process of writing I find pretty enjoyable because I am trying to answer questions. There is a big question out there, it’s a puzzle. It doesn’t make sense, this phenomenon that we all take for granted, Europeans running the show for so many years. It doesn’t make sense; what’s going on? And I think that effort to pursue the answer to a question that is a deep puzzle keeps me in the process of writing along that course. I focus on the substantive attraction of the material itself, that’s what pulls me along. I also take pleasure in a well-turned phrase, and that can come out of rejecting about fifty poorly turned phrases. But if you get it right, then, although its taken extra time, you say, “OK, got that.” And that came, I think, particularly at the end because I had a very good editor at Yale who, after I had done my cutting, proceeded to do some additional cutting. He pointed out some cases where I could still make changes. And at that point I really was so close, I wanted to be even more epigrammatic or more tightly focuses, and I remember saying, “Boy, that sentence really zings. Got it!” And then we’d move onto something else. That’s where it was an almost triumphal pleasure in the crafting.
HO: I wonder also about the process. Now, you kind of already indicated that, in some instances at least, you write by hand and then you shift to the computer. Is that your regular mode? Do you do a lot of initial writing by hand and shift to the computer to get going; do you write directly on the computer; what’s your technological relationship there?
DA: As I say, I start writing or working through the initial writer’s block by taking pen to paper. I also hand write outlines with diagrams: this connects up with this and so forth. A lot of the creative doodling to sort of organize your thoughts is best done, I think, by hand. In part because all I know how to do with a computer is type on it. I am really, I’m technologically very challenged. When I first bought a computer I remember going for an hour lesson to operate it, and the sweat was pouring down my face because I thought if I pressed the wrong button the computer would go poop in front of me or it would blow up or something. So I'm not confident that the computer can do anything other than be a typing mechanism, and I don’t use it really for anything else. But for that purpose I just think it’s fabulous. I mean, you can do these press returns and get it right. You can shift paragraphs around.
HO: Yeah, you do a lot of editing on it, back and forth, moving…
DA: Right, the usual activities that make the computer such an amazing thing. I would never have been able to do this book if the computer weren't there. I think it would really be impossible given the scope of the topic.
HO: You know, we’re going to meander through this because everything sparks off another thing, which then comes to the questions of, once upon a time you were an undergraduate, and what was writing like at that time? I know it’s hard for a lot of younger people to know that actually at one time we really did cut and paste and, you know, have to retype things. That’s on a technological end. But how did you find writing when you were an undergraduate? Or even earlier, how did you come to see yourself as being able to write?
DA: I think the key experience for me…I went to a prep school in the East called The Hill School for three years, and in tenth grade I had an English teacher, Alex Revell—hello, Alex—who would assign us things to read over the weekend, and come Monday morning we had fifty minutes in class with no notes to write an essay. He would set the essay, we'd write it. This was by far my best introduction to writing.
HO: By hand?
DA: By hand. Oh yeah, you had to write it by hand. Your job was to come in there having organized stuff in your head, but then answer the question he posed. I think it was a marvelous experience, a tremendous amount of work, the adrenaline was flowing throughout that process of fifty minutes, but I felt that it improved my writing quite a bit. I did journalism also. I was the editor of the school newspaper, and when you’re editing other people's work that process can improve your own. I think, also, in college writing a senior honors thesis was very, very important. It was not just that I got the experience of writing—it was based on a summer I had in Nigeria being able to do fieldwork there—but it answered the larger question, “Would I want to do this for my life, and would I want to ask big questions and try to write answers to them?” The process wasn't enjoyable one hundred percent, particularly when somebody stole my notes about halfway through the process—not a good experience—but I just found it fundamentally rewarding. And I think that affected my decision to, not just write a senior honors thesis, but maybe write a Ph.D. thesis, or maybe—as we are in teaching—being paid to be an eternal student. I mean, I’m an eternal student; I’m still a student. And somebody is paying me to do this, which is quite amazing. I like that. That early experience of the taking on a senior honors thesis was pretty formative for me.
HO: And as long as we’re going through this, what was the experience of doing a dissertation like? Did it go rather smoothly, did you have kind of zigzags, blocks, you know, kind of a new form, or was it just the senior thesis times four?
DA: The doctoral dissertation was based on about fifteen months of research also in Nigeria. I then revised it extensively, and it became a book. My main memory of that was writing it up back in the East in Boston—I was a graduate student at Harvard—in one of the hottest summers they ever had. And what I did was to take notes on things or on interviews, and then I had a carbon copy—I don’t think we even had xerox at that point yet—and then you take the carbon copy and you cut up into tiny little strips, which might be a quarter of an inch or an eighth of an inch, and then you rearrange those on a sheet of paper. And the problem was that unless you put those down with paper clips, they would all scatter as you try to keep yourself cool with a fan. So I remember sitting there, sweat pouring down my face, [thinking] “Do I turn on the fan, in which case all my unclipped notes go all over the place, or do I keep the fan off, in which case everything is organized but I keep sweating?” You guys in this new, new universe can hardly imagine this, but those are the kinds of issues a writer like me faced at that point. It was really a matter of literally cutting and pasting or cutting and putting down and then trying to make sense out of what you had. If you made a mistake in typing it’s huge, because you had to type it again. I had no secretary. I was a mere graduate student at that point, and so it better be right the first time. The great thing about computing is that you can keep making mistakes, you can press return, you can try again. I think it vastly improves the quality and certainly the speed of writing. So I think you guys have a wonderful life now, but it wasn’t quite so easy then.
HO: You know, you had also mentioned starting to write by hand to overcome a writer’s block. And that’s the block of starting, you know, with something. Do you ever get stuck in the middle of something? And what have you done or what did you do to jump-start?
DA: I'm not sure if I've had writer's block. I've had conceptual block: that is, what is the answer to the question, or how am I going to phrase this? But writing per se hasn't come all that hard to me.
HO: Now I know that in a workshop that I did with Political Science you had a wonderful story about different ways of getting ideas, including the way that you finished this last book. And I wonder if you could just tell people that.
DA: Well, the story I told when Hilton was in the honors seminar I ran for Political Science was that it was very important for me, after having looked at the characteristics and the causes and the consequences of European colonial rule, to add a final chapter on the moral evaluation of colonialism. This is often not done in the social sciences because you just look at this in a kind of bloodless way: what are the causes, what are the consequences, end of story. But I felt, partly because of the way I’m constructed and partly because I think ethical concerns arose while looking at the question, that it was important to conclude with some—not necessarily saying this is good or bad but—some reflection on how one makes the statement that things are good or bad, how you think about your thinking when you’re making ethical judgments. We live in a post- and anti-colonial world, so we kind of assume that colonialism was a terrible thing. But what kind of logic and what kind of evidence and what kinds of standards do you use if you want to make that kind of judgment? In any case, I went through my final chapter on the moral evaluation of colonialism, and literally about a few hours before I was supposed to send that chapter off, I was having a shower—I do a lot of thinking in the shower, but anyway—and it suddenly occurred to me I hadn’t really said what drove the thesis, what drive the book. I was a little bit too distant from what was really going on in me, and I wanted to add a paragraph that was punchier, that expressed my feelings as well as this more analytic side, which steps back several feet from reality in order to comment on reality. Would you like me to read what I wrote after the shower? So I get out of the shower, dry off, and here’s what I wrote in this penultimate paragraph. It has more punch because it’s me speaking directly to what was driving this. You can see even it’s…I want to have balance, but I think it conveys in more emotional terms than elsewhere in the book what I felt. It sort of had to be done.
The imperial project consumed the lives of millions of human beings and blighted the lives of millions more. Its worst aspects—the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, forced labor, sexual exploitation—should not be forgotten or excused. The forests of the Amazon and Congo Basins were killing fields, as were the Banda islands and Tasmania, and lands inhabited by Araucanians, Pequots, and Hereros. A recurring corollary of land acquisition by settlers was that indigenous people deprived of access to land lost inherited ways of life and patterns of thought and belief as well. Alienated lands should be thought of as “dying fields.” Things fell apart for non-Europeans, many things, under the triple assault. But colonialism was not just the sum total of its worst-case scenarios. New crops, medicines, and occupations extended the lifespan and enhanced the welfare of millions of subject peoples. New ideas and beliefs were not only comforting and enlightening, but also empowering.
So I just dashed that thing off and then sent it off to Yale.
HO: Right after the shower.
DA: Right.
HO: But are there other ways, do you often get ideas - well, you said you get ideas in the shower. Last session, we talked about this at length and various ways people have…there’s actually some scientific research done with the emotions of hot water on the back of the head, and it releasing some though process.
DA: I hadn’t thought about it.
HO: And also I had an honors student last year, who always wrote with the sun beaming on the back of his head, and he had a laptop and he would move as the sun moved. Now I asked him—and he won an award, I mean, you know, successfully completed…
DA: You rest your case.
HO: Well, what happens when it is cloudy? Well, obviously those are conditions for him; he knows how to write in other conditions. But are there other ways that you’ve, you know, taking walks and other ways of getting ideas?
DA: Yeah, I take walks, and I just talk to myself and try to figure out whether I convince myself with all this talking. That helps. Sometimes another classic thing that people do is to raise a question before they go to sleep, and then when they wake up in the morning sometimes, not always but sometimes, the answer has been worked out over those hours of sleep. It’s good to have a little piece of paper and pen or pencil near your bed where you wake up, in case something happens at 3:00 in the morning or you can’t get to sleep because this idea is still there. You want to have paper very close at hand so you can jot that down.
HO: At least get it out of your system, right, so you can go back to sleep.
DA: Right.
HO: Now, when you’re actually writing, you know, you’re working at the computer, do you work extended periods of time, do you take regular breaks, can you write at different hours, you know three to five every afternoon, that’s it? What kind of pattern of writing do you have?
DA: I'm a morning person. I fade quite early at night, and I get up at five usually, and that’s when my brain is at its best. So I work hard between five in the morning and about noon. And then at that point my head gets pretty tired. I would take an afternoon nap for about an hour that would refresh a little bit, but I did most of my work in the morning. And I know I am supposed to get up every 15 minutes and stretch, but sometimes I would work for four hours and I’d think, “My gosh, I can’t believe it’s time for lunch!” I was so engaged in this process, which sort of felt good, that I was, you know, fully intellectually involved. But in general by noon I had done my day’s work, and it was time to get on with other things.
HO: Five to noon. That's seven hours!
DA: I can go off quite a long time. I mean, breakfast, OK. But I definitely found that the earlier I started the more I could just cruise.
HO: Obviously with this book, this is an extended project. But perhaps in other types of writing—and I know that you said in prep school you did journalism—how have you dealt with deadlines? Do you feed off of deadlines, do you not stand deadlines, do you choke up or what?
DA: I think there’s a huge difference between my writing…I mean, let’s put it this way, before tenure, you definitely have a deadline, the clock is ticking all the time. And a book came out of that, but I knew it had to come out at a certain time because otherwise I wouldn't be at Stanford very long. After tenure it’s totally different. One reason that I could take so long with this book on empires is nobody’s going to fire me if it takes me umpteen years to complete it. I’m totally driven by my interest and curiosity and where I want to go. In that sense there’s no deadline, and it might have been good for somebody to say, “Look, Abernethy, you've worked at this for ten years, what have you got to show for it?” Nobody said that; probably should have. But the absence of deadlines in that sense created a problem because it just kept on going and going, maybe too long. The deadlines for me are preparing lectures and getting ready for a class at 9:00. I mean, my students, some of whom are here in this room, would not believe how close I come. Sometimes I’m about three minutes away from “I got to go into the room,” and I’m still not quite sure what I’m about to say. The deadlines there are pretty tough. On the other hand, because I lead such a busy life I tend to work such that I know I'll be panicked right before it’s time to lecture. And that panic actually increases the power of the lecture because I’m revved up, precisely because I am not sure that I could do it. So it’s the deadlines for lecturing or speaking that drive me, but the deadlines for writing have tended not to be very salient.
HO: So something of an adrenaline rush. It sounds like you were driven by your topic and you didn’t need the deadline, you didn’t need adrenaline. You know, it could have been useful in some ways, but you were really self-motivated. There is this puzzle, this question that you think you wanted to engage in.
I have a few more questions, and we’ll open it up. One is, after having done this really large project, what sense of satisfaction do you have at the end of it? Have you gotten feedback; have you gotten reviews yet? And, there’s always a question about getting that kind of criticism or support or whatever it might be. And then, you know, are you…have you embarked on a new project? Can you contemplate another project? Maybe not that big!
DA: There are several questions embedded in those remarks, Hilton. I get aesthetic pleasure by actually picking up the book and running through it. It is an ego rush to see my name on the cover. Let’s face it. So there’s that element. And then if there are particular issues that I want to think about, sometimes I’ll go to a particular chapter, I’ll go back on what I wrote, as if I am reading somebody else's work. That’s fun. A criticism I could make of myself is that because it took me so long, and I am a loner, I didn't write articles along the way, which would have enabled other people to read this and then criticize it. So I didn't get sufficient criticism from others as I went along the way. Another consequence is that people thought all these years I wasn’t doing anything. So clearly my image was that I was an unproductive scholar because I wasn’t publishing. So be it. But I think there were real costs intellectually to not having people say, “We like your third point, but the fifth point’s really crazy.” But it was the nature of the subject, and the fact that I needed time to figure out what my argument was before I could write the book, and also the argument was book length, it isn’t article length. So that’s just the way it was. When it comes to criticism by reviews, I've had some quite positive reviews, and some negative reviews; that's always tough on the ego, especially since they are out there in print. It’s particularly tough—I’ve had a couple of reviews where it’s pretty clear to me the person didn't read the book or just read a few things and then they’re commenting on this work of years and why are they just looking at chapter three as far as I can tell? So it seems to me in those criticisms are unfair. But that’s the name of the game. I mean, you don’t know who’s going to review your book; you have no control over it.
Another thing that took so long, particularly on the editing side, was that Yale sent the book out to political scientists and historians. You may not think there’s much difference between those disciplines, but there’s a lot of difference. Put too briefly, historians tend to focus on particulars and are quite nervous about generalizing from the particular event, usually derived from primary sources. They don't like to generalize because each thing is distinct and unique in itself. Political scientists, on the other hand, look at particulars but we continually try to generalize. Social scientists are trying to work toward the circumstances under which, in general, if you had X, you might have Y. Historians didn’t like the types of generalizations I was drawing because they felt I was moving beyond the evidence. On the other hand, political scientists don't like the historians' fascination with detail. And political scientists keep asking, “So what!? So why is that interesting? What is the story an illustration or a case of?” So if I’m writing, if I’m a political scientist and I’m doing a political science approach to history, I am approaching the historians on the one hand and the political scientists on the other. And in the reviews of the manuscript before it was published—before they decided to publish it—the historians were much more critical of me than the political scientists. Political scientists don’t mind comparisons across time and space; that what we comparativists do. But historians of eighteenth-century Spain would say, “What are you doing comparing this to nineteenth century somewhere else? That comparison is invalid; it doesn’t situate each case in and of itself. Any political scientist crazy enough to write about the fifteenth century or the twentieth - what does this guy know?” So you can see all the historians lining up in terms of their particular approach saying, “This is an over-extension of what is valid.” And what I then had to do for myself, but also for the press, is to convince enough people that it was OK to be a political scientist writing about history. And that, in fact, in my view, it’s best when you historicize political science, no reason why our discipline should just talk about current events. But it’s also very important to social-scientize history: that is, you want to identify the general patterns that you find across time and space. My book was an attempt to find those general patterns, and to say these are not just random and made up; there really are certain ways in which settlers…when European settlers come to a place there are certain recurring patterns in what they do, and there are certain recurring responses that indigenous people have to settlers. But this is a problem. If you are trying to write for people in different disciplines, you’ll get the criticism of somebody in the other field that says, “You haven’t quite got it right.” But when I get criticism I say, “That comes with the field. I've chosen to speak to two disciplines. I'm going to get clobbered by one of them, if not both, but I still think this is the way to go.”
HO: I had a review of my last book that was a collage of paragraphs from my book just lifted out. It was a good review. I mean, it was well-written, it said good things about the book, but I read it and I said “My God!” I mean, it was an incredible…you'll also find it—this was a scholarly book—you’ll find it in trade books or literary books sometimes, you write a PR statement about the book and someone just lifts up the PR statement and prints that as the review. So it’s good to write a good PR statement—it might be your review.
Let me ask you one more question before we open it up. You're working with undergraduates and graduate students. What’s been your experience in terms of working with them as writers? I mean, obviously in terms of the field and the methodologies of the field, but also in terms of your perception of the writing, but also how you’ve been able to work with them as writers?
DA: That’s a good question. I haven’t thought about that distinction. I guess one difference is that graduate students in any field are going to be much more attuned to the particular language or jargon of the field. And I'm not criticizing jargon; often it is a shorthand way in which people who are specialists communicate with each other. But clearly, to the extent that political science has jargon that may be difficult to penetrate, graduate students are learning that jargon or teaching that jargon, and they’re doing the shorthand. But I would say their writing is probably less graceful because they are moving into terms that have four syllables rather than, let’s say, one or two. Undergraduates are not there; they are not pre-professionals. They’re still exploring, they’re much more open. So I’d say their approach to writing is less driven by a desire to fit the canons of a discipline. On the other hand, since they tend to be younger, and since they’re closer to the “like, you know” world their writing is just not as crisp, and sometimes it’s more filled with valley-girl and valley-boy talk. “Like, you know, like, I mean?” That’s more of the problem for undergraduates.
HO: OK, dude. Thanks a lot. Now, let's open it up. What kinds of questions [or] concerns do you have?
A: Professor Abernethy, what effect has your extensive reading had on your writing process? Perhaps have you felt that you’ve read too much to be able to write easily? And how [have] other authors affected your phrasing?
DA: I'm not sure. I think that the work I read tended not to be wonderfully written. Certainly political science isn’t a model of great writing. I occasionally read novels, which was fun, but I just don't cite novels because they’re not, in most cases, historically the way to go. I would say I was not elevated by or improved by reading writing that was fine in its quality. Occasionally you’d get a phrase or a way of saying something that was helpful to me. But I tended to treat what I was taking notes on as material, as grist for my mill. There may have been a subtle way in which my style was influenced by it, but I didn’t think about that, and I’m sure I can answer your question very helpfully.
HO: It’s a great idea for a story, though: the man who read too much.
A: On your fifteen-year project, how did you know when you were done?
DA: Well, at some point I realized not only had I read too much, but I had written too much. Yeah, I mean, I came to the end of it. My first task was to classify the phases of European expansion and contraction—that’s sort of a classification scheme, more or less descriptive history. That you get out of the way first. My second task was to take that material and make a causal statement: what are the factors that contribute to Europe’s power? Or, to put it more broadly, why did Europe take over so much of the world, not the Chinese and the Arabs, who are the two other people who had the maritime capacity to do so? That involves comparing with these other groups, but also some counterfactuals: had the Chinese done such and such and such, what might have been an alternative path for the world? So that’s setting up some causal arguments. Then I had to look at the decline of European empires and develop a theory, which is acausal argument, as to why European empires collapsed as and when they did. In the final part I reflected on the consequences of empire: now that it’s over, what kinds of legacies—constitutional, religious, linguistic, et cetera, et cetera—litter the world as a consequence of European dominance? And then, finally, my moral chapter. So when I got through with that, I had done enough work! The book ended when I had talked about characteristics, causes, consequences, and ethical reflection. I couldn't think of anything else, and it was far too long to begin with—or to end with, so to speak. At that point the three-year process of cutting began.
A: Did you have any sense when you started out how long it would take?
DA: No, I didn’t. And in that sense I, quote, “read too much.” I mean, I really thought about the world as the unit here, or as close as we can to the whole world. I didn’t, by the way, want to use—there’s a certain term called world-systems theory, which I thought was quite reductionist, reduces everything down to economic actors. If you’re dealing with big-picture history, you don’t want to act in a reductionist way. For me, the political and the economic and the religious were all very important components of what Europe was exporting, and only until one looked at the interaction between political, economic, and religious institutions could one see what the sources of their power were. So I could have used some categories that people use when they think of the world in my discipline, but I just didn't think that they worked.
A: One question: how did you deal in your writing process with your everyday life? I mean, I suppose that being in such a very precise topic and very fascinating in terms of extracting from everyday issues, and I wanted to know how you could dealwith that, especially for a long time?
DA: Well, I think I led…it must have been an unbalanced life in the sense that I was spending so much time on this process, but it was primarily during the summers, so I wasn't spending an entire year doing this. And in other respects, I'm married, I’m a father, my parents actually came to live with us during this period, and they died there in the home. I think it’s very important to have a number of other commitments, particularly, I would say, if one is a loner. Interestingly, in university activities, I am always doing things with other people. But in terms of my intellectual life, I am very much on my own, which is quite different from the style of writing and research in most of the university, where, at least in the sciences and engineering, it’s almost invariably a collective enterprise. The notion of secreting yourself and going off to the library and just trying to figure something out year after year is not the norm here, I would say. So, being a loner in that respect, I reached out to try to be more sociable both in terms of family life, and I would say also in terms of university activities. I think University committees are actually quite fun. You raise interesting questions and meet a bunch of people you have never met before. So I guess it’s the combination of being a loner in one’s own intellectual life and then being kind of a social butterfly, if you will, in terms of university service. That produces some form of balance.
A: What advice would you have for an undergraduate or even graduate students who would aspire to one day write something of that magnitude? How do you develop the writing skills necessary for it?
DA: Whew, beats me.
A: Is it just practice?
DA: I would say something equivalent to that experience I went through in tenth grade: speaking of deadlines, that would be a case of in fifty minutes you’ve got to finish your essay, you’ve got to turn it in, you’re going to get graded on it. I think putting yourself in those situations where you have a lot of writing to do under pressure would be very, very helpful. And remember the book I’m taking about is a book done after tenure. Life after tenure is totally different from life before tenure. Life before tenure you’ve got these deadlines, these pressures on you all the time. It’s really tough, especially in a place like this where it’s difficult to get tenure. So in that sense I'm privileged to have the time, and I didn’t have to fear being unemployed. But the early skills I would say are the skills of writing quickly under pressure, writing gracefully under pressure.
HO: I may need to add some things just from my own experience because what you’ve pointed out is really important. You really need to be possessed by a burning desire to answer questions. In other words, I think I’m going to write just to write—now, there’s some value to that, but it won't help sustain you to do something. You really need to get pissed off, bugged, entranced, whatever it might be, to keep you going. But, you know, you also build those skills over time, so they tend to come with experience, right? And then the other thing is don't wait for inspiration; you push yourself to make that work happen. There is inspiration, those times when you wrote and you had a click and, ohhh, it felt just right and you love it, and if you’re lucky, you read it again and it really is good.
DA: You still love it.
A: I wanted to know, how long did it take you to form your argument after doing all this research, and if, at all, did you change it often?
DA: Counter to the advice I give students in the honors seminar or in the seminar that you’re taking now, which is to say, you want to have an argument in place which you can always change, but you want to have some claims you’re making instead of just going out there and looking for anything. Counter to that, I think I was driven for several years by the question but not by the answer. It took me several years before I came upon the particular institutional argument which I felt opened things up. In terms of changing the argument, once I got the main idea, everything I looked at seemed to make pretty good sense. I wasn't finding cases where the thing didn't work.
I had problems devising a theory broad enough to account for decolonization when the first set of independence movements – from the 1770’s through the 1820’s - was led by people of European background (“settlers”) and the second set – after 1945 – was led by people not descended from Europeans. At some point I came up with the idea that there are psychologically different processes at work depending on who was pressing for independence. For settlers, the longer they’re away from Europe, the less they think of themselves as citizens of Europe; they think of themselves as, begin to call themselves, “Americans” or, in the case of South Africa, “Afrikaners.” The extent of time lived away from Europe was a factor in their decision, given there are certain specific triggers leading settlers to say, “We’re out of here.” For non-Europeans it’s not time but level of education. Education was an experience which put non-Europeans very close to Europe in terms of their understanding what drove Europe. It made them totally aware of the contradictions of colonialism. Europeans were going on and on about civilization, self-determination, nationalism, democracy, et cetera, and totally contradicting that in their colonial theory and practice. Education was a kind of forced introduction to the craziness of this whole system. It also gave non-Europeans formal qualifications to take over the state, by pushing Europeans out take it on themselves. So my argument…it took me a long time to figure out how decolonization proceeds, because it’s at different paces with different groups; there may be different explanations that are more important for explaining one set of outcomes than another. As you can tell, I’ve been trying to say it much too briefly. But that took me time to work it out. Once I had it, I didn't revise it. But it was kind of a struggle to come to the point to realize that time was the functional equivalent for settler nationalists to education for non-European nationalists.
A: I have two questions. You said earlier that you were a loner, so I wonder whether you ever engaged in certain discussions and debates about your ideas that you turned into this book, whether you defended them with your academic peers. And the second question is just about the Stanford undergraduate curriculum, how that prepares students to write, how it teaches writing, and what the program, how does it allow us to . . .
DA: I did present my ideas in several seminars to colleagues here, and I worked very closely with, in fact, a group of historians and anthropologists in developing a course called “The World outside the West,” from which I learned a great deal. And talking with them over the years was very helpful to me. And I also had some major mentors in my department— Gabriel Almond and Alex George and Paul Sniderman, and Richard Roberts —there were four people, whom I mention in the preface who really were very important. They read the manuscript, they critiqued it, they took it seriously, and were very, very helpful. As for the second question, I think the overriding problem for undergraduate writing in a course is, I mean you know, [snaps] it starts and then it’s over. This is the problem students are facing all the time in seminars that I teach because, quite apart from style, they’ve got to figure out a question, and they’ve got to get their research information starting on week three, and they’ve got to get it done by week eight. That's very, very difficult to do when you are not yet clear what the topic is. I mean, you’re learning through the course what the topic is because of the fact that you needto know what the topic is in order to write the paper. So there is a kind of catch-22 there.
Many of us who teach in the trenches don't really know what is being taught in what’s now called PWR, the initial course of teaching students writing and rhetoric and so forth. I think what’s needed is a closer connection between those introductory writing courses and what we do so we can build on what’s being done with freshmen. I’d like to see how PWR actually affects their writing later on.
A: Is there any way you could sort of recreate this tenth grade experience you had at the college level, if you found that so helpful back then, if you see students who aren’t writing as well as you think they could, they still have that vernacular writing style?
DA: It's possible; I just don't think it’s my task. That is, what I want them to do for me is to write a paper, and that’s not something you do in fifty minutes. I would say in courses in English, maybe, or courses that focus on style and presentation, that kind of intensity would probably be very helpful. It’s just not what I think is my task because my subject isn’t taught best, I think, by writing under that kind of pressure.
HO: Are there any other questions? I still wanted to follow up—because I think you forgot, I mean, I gave you a series of questions—are you working on another project?
DA: No. Nothing quite…well, actually, the thing I want to look at now—and I don’t think it will ever end up in a book like this—but would be, again, a big topic, I like big topics because they pull you along. Instead of doing history—and I didn’t think as a political scientist I’d be pushed off into the fifteenth century as much as I was—I want to do something contemporary, I want to do something policy-oriented. My interest is in non-governmental organizations in the Third World, poor countries, and what role they play in economic development, and what role they play in the political evolution of their country. How that for another too-big topic?! But it is more contemporary, more policy-oriented. And hopefully I’d like to look at cases where NGOs are creatively working with governments to solve problems, other cases where NGOs are battling governments and governments are trying to shut NGOs down, so the extreme cases of where you have uncreative relationships between government and civil society and where you have destructive relationships. And then ask the social science question: under what situations are the creative situations more likely to appear? So that’s what I’d like to. I’ve done some work on this in South Africa. I can see doing work on it in India and a variety of other countries. I doubt if it’ll come up with a book, but it’s a great question to pursue anyway.
HO: Well, given the process you went through last time, you don’t know yet, right? It might come up with some articles at very least, right?
Well, look, I'd like to thank you very much for coming and everyone else for coming! Please stay if you want, have some of the refreshments and talk with Professor Abernethy. And, you know, this is part of a research discussion. It’s OK if some people come intermittentlyand have to go. We have this on tape; we’ll be able to, you know, take a look at this, and maybe five years from we’ll play it again and look at it again…
DA: Actually, let me have the last word. I find it very helpful to be asked how I write because it’s not something I think about. I just do it. You pushed to be explicit and self-conscious and deliberate about what I do year after year. I appreciate very much your asking me to do this and the questions that you and others have posed.
HO: Thank you very much!
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