… history has become a multicultural domain, where different groupings struggle for intellectual supremacy on the battleground of ideas, courses and university history syllabuses. It is surely not out of place in this situation to plead for a little intellectual tolerance, and to warn any one particular orientation against the arrogant assumption that its own methods and procedures are necessarily better than those of its rivals.

- Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History

When Richard J. Evans published In Defence of History in 1997, he was responding to what he saw as a growing intellectual crisis within the discipline. History was not under attack from declining student numbers or a lack of public interest. On the contrary, history remained popular. Historical books sold well, university courses attracted students, and the public continued to consume narratives about the past with enthusiasm. However, Evans believed that history needed defending because of a more fundamental challenge of a growing skepticism about whether historical knowledge itself was possible.

The late twentieth century witnessed the rise of postmodernist critiques that questioned the historian’s ability to recover the past. Influenced by literary theory and philosophers of language, many scholars argued that historical narratives were simply textual constructions, no more capable of representing reality than novels or works of fiction (Read also History: Science or fiction?). The past, they suggested, could never be known directly with historians merely imposed meanings upon fragments of evidence. Some theorists went so far as to claim that documents possessed no fixed meaning and were endlessly open to reinterpretation. If all interpretations were equally valid, then historical truth became impossible to establish.

Evans regarded such hyper-relativism as a serious threat to the discipline. While he acknowledged that historians are shaped by their own contexts and assumptions, he rejected the notion that historical knowledge is therefore impossible. His book attempted to chart a middle path between naïve empiricism and radical relativism. He rejected the older belief, associated with historians such as Geoffrey Elton and (our favourite) Leopold von Ranke (Read also Rethinking historical objectivity: Rankean principles v/s Rajasthan’s bardic traditions), that historians could simply allow the sources to ‘speak for themselves’. Historical interpretation, Evans argued, is always an active process in which historians interrogate evidence through questions shaped by the present.

At the same time, he rejected the postmodern claim that the past is nothing more than a textual invention. Sources place limits on interpretation. Historians may disagree, but not every interpretation is equally plausible. Through rigorous research, critical scrutiny of evidence, and continuous debate, historians can arrive at conclusions that are provisional yet reliable. As Evans argued, objective history is not the elimination of subjectivity but the production of a ‘true, fair, and adequate account’ constrained by evidence and disciplined by professional standards.

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One of the most important aspects of Evans’s Defence was his insistence that theory matters. Historians could no longer simply retreat into archives and leave questions of epistemology to philosophers. Every historian, whether consciously or not, makes assumptions about truth, evidence, causation, and interpretation. Becoming more theoretically self-conscious was therefore not a threat to historical practice but a necessary part of it.

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Critics accused Evans of defending an outdated concept of objectivity, yet this criticism often misrepresented his argument. He rejected both Elton’s narrow empiricism and E. H. Carr’s more teleological understanding of causation (Read also Re-reading ‘What is History’ after a history PhD). He welcomed developments such as social history, women’s history, etc., which had transformed the discipline since the mid-twentieth century. His defence was not of a single school of history but of a broad and inclusive discipline united by a commitment to evidence-based inquiry.

Perhaps Evans’s most compelling argument remains his warning about the political consequences of extreme relativism. If every interpretation is equally valid, then historians lose the ability to challenge falsehoods. Holocaust denial, racist historical narratives, and political propaganda become impossible to refute on intellectual grounds. The abandonment of standards of evidence does not necessarily empower progressive voices, but can equally empower reactionary and extremist ones. In this sense, the defence of historical truth is also a defence of democratic public discourse.

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Nearly three decades later, the intellectual landscape has changed, but the need to defend history has not disappeared. If anything, the challenge has become more urgent.

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Today, historians face a different kind of relativism. The threat no longer comes primarily from academic debates about language and textuality. Instead, it emerges from a digital environment saturated with misinformation, algorithmically curated content, and politically motivated distortions of the past. Historical claims circulate widely on social media without regard for evidence or context. Viral posts, short-form videos, and AI-generated content can often reach larger audiences than years of careful scholarly research. In such a world, Evans’s insistence that not all interpretations are equally valid remains profoundly relevant. The question is no longer merely whether historians can know the past, but is whether societies still value evidence-based knowledge about the past.

As a historian, I find another aspect of Evans’s argument particularly significant, that is, his defence of historical research as a craft. The painstaking work of reading documents, reconstructing contexts, comparing sources, and evaluating evidence may appear old-fashioned in an age of instant information, yet it remains the foundation of historical knowledge. Archives do not yield answers automatically. Sources must be interrogated critically, translated across contexts, interpreted with care, and read against the conventions, silences, and power relations that shaped their creation and preservation. Historical understanding emerges through a dialogue between the historian and the evidence, not through the simple accumulation of information.

At the same time, the twenty-first century presents challenges that Evans could only partially anticipate. Historians today must defend not only the possibility of historical knowledge but also the value of historical expertise. Public history, digital archives, community memory projects, and heritage initiatives have expanded participation in the production of historical narratives. This democratisation has enriched the discipline by bringing previously marginalised voices into historical conversation. It has, however, also raised important questions about authority and responsibility. The challenge is not to defend professional historians against the public, but to demonstrate why historical methods remain indispensable in an era when everyone can publish interpretations of the past.

History therefore requires defence today for reasons both old and new. Evans defended history against the claim that objective knowledge was impossible. We must defend it against the claim that expertise is unnecessary. He argued against theories that dissolved the past into language. We confront technologies that can manufacture convincing historical falsehoods at unprecedented scale. He worried about the erosion of standards of evidence. We face a world in which evidence itself is increasingly contested.

Notwithstanding, the fundamental principle remains the same. History is neither a collection of unquestionable facts nor an exercise in limitless imagination. It is a disciplined attempt to understand the past through evidence, interpretation, critical debate, and rigorous engagement with sources. Its conclusions are never final, but neither are they arbitrary. In defending that principle, Evans was defending more than a scholarly discipline. He was defending the possibility that truth about the past, however imperfectly attained, remains worth pursuing. That is a defence that historians in the twenty-first century must continue.