IT IS OFTEN SAID—way too often—that “History belongs to the Victor”. There is of course a lot of truth in the dictum. But it faults for being glib, and for being a discussion stopper.

What I find more fruitful to consider is that “History belongs to the writer of History”. This also means that History is lost for those who do not write, be that as a matter of culture, propensity, or in disregard of useable meaning in passing experiences and events.

Different civilisations have tended to treat the passing of time differently. And largely, History has involved the whim and will, and the fate and folly of the powerful. At a superficial level, History has been about the powerful, but given the stature of representing the collective. Without stories about the powerful, there has been little History to access.

Events and experiences lost in time are of course a trillion times more than those which get recorded. How the recording happens, how truthful is the recorder… these are of course vital elements to consider.

And then there is also to be deliberated upon wherein the very recording of change and the workings of power amount to criticism of the powerful given the ideology that rulers are the stabiliser of the body politic. Within such a stability—and feudalistic philosophies would often hold to that belief—society repeats itself from day to day in an unchanging cosmos assured by the legitimately powerful. No news is good news. All is well if there is nothing to report.

Even in China, a civilisation known for its fervent recording of emperors and their governance, the Ruler having Heaven’s Mandate—tianming—brought peace and harmony to all under heaven. Chaos reigns when that Mandate is missing.

But that was but an aspiration, a theory, something to seek. And so, the records of each dynasty would document for later dynasties what pitfalls to avoid when reigning, and what rituals bring good cosmic favour. Governance by a literate class—by pedantic mandarins—probably worked against the ability of emperors to keep mistakes and misfortunes under wraps.

Going further, one can imagine other traditions of dynasticism, where the ruling class would understand that keeping disharmonies and unrest unrecorded would suggest to all and sundry—and to future generations—that good governance had prevailed. Perhaps this tendency—towards non-history, towards a history, towards an undocumenting regime, as it were—was a much more common practice than we would assume.

History For Whom?

There is also the question of the reader. Who is History often written for? As purported lessons for rulers and imperial servants of the future, as in a mandarinate? As propaganda providing rationales, excusing faults and megaphoning virtues and achievements? As a didactic move in a struggle between narratives made in order to overshadow and outshine unfavourable narratives being told by other scribes?

Focusing on the last query above, we would have to realise that the adage that History is told by the Victor holds more truth if we also accept the fact that those considered victors can change over time. The narrative can evolve. This would also be more common, one would assume, the larger the literate class in the relevant society. New agendas, new political needs, new interpretations, new sources… all these come into play over time, altering stories to suit new needs.

What the original victor may have accomplished when writing his story, and deciding what should be “historical facts”—knowledge relevant to his story—is often to limit for good the sources available for later re-interpretations.

Simply put, History belongs to the historian, the narrator, the storyteller. If you don’t take the trouble to narrate your story, you have no History. The historian, the narrator, the storyteller, even if they do not ever emerge victors in the dialectical development of History, are at least in the running. They stake a claim by putting pen to paper. They propose twists and turns to the story, as it were.

As stated by the highly respected historian Edward Hallett Carr when delivering the George Macauley Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University in 1961:

“The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.” —What is History? (Vintage Books, 1961:11).

Now, in 2025, having gone through much globalisation, and having been faced with the inevitability of relativism in understanding mankind and cultures, we— Modern Man—should find this reminder much easier to accept: That history is necessarily an interpretation limited by necessarily incomplete and therefore potentially misleading sources, written to forward some contemporary aim, and as a continuation of a dialectic with other interpretations, and perpetually tentative in its truth contents.

For all its flaws as a discipline, History remains to modern humans—caught as we are in faster and faster changes in our lives—a phenomenon that attracts most of us. It entertains us, it challenges whatever we have taken for granted so far, and it offers layers of meaning where the default experience of life is often a state of chaos and a flow of disjointed experiences, and a threat of ignorance and irrelevance.

Put another way, History is our problematic pursuit of self-understanding and self-acceptance.