Historians’ choice of research topics is never itself interrogated as an ethical act

Evidence

The prevalent attitude within professional historiography is of course that history is a field of knowledge, and as such, any question posed within its boundaries is as legitimate as the next. In other words, who is to say what is a legitimate or valid historical question and what is not? The entire range of historical space and time is equally open to investigation, without prejudging the legitimacy of membership qua membership. Only the results or answers given to the formally posed question are subjected to evaluation as good, bad, solid, persuasive, flimsy, or otherwise. But as a rule the very questions or choices of historical topics are never themselves interrogated. No one, to my knowledge, has ever cast doubt on a historian’s work insofar as the topics chosen for study are concerned, be they minting practices under the Qing dynasty, the uses and economy of salt in the New Kingdom of Pharaonic Egypt, the structure of Mamluk armies, filth in nineteenth-century Paris, the history of mosquitos in the Malayas, or, for that matter, the conditions of felicity in the speech of a Pennsylvania village idiot. The extent to which this state of affairs is integral to the modern sovereignty of knowledge has never been a topic of investigation, much less a serious one. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 519

Categorization

• QUESTION: Hallaq asserts that no historian has ever been challenged on topic choice — worth testing whether this is literally true or whether it’s an overstatement meant rhetorically; the claim that this silence is ‘integral to the modern sovereignty of knowledge’ is ambitious needs backfill.
• SEED: A provocative essay angle: the ethics of topic selection in scholarship — why some questions are considered self-evidently legitimate and others are not, and what a scholar’s choice of subject itself reveals about complicity.