Historical Method, Source Criticism and Historiography
This domain tests whether you can explain how historical knowledge is produced, not merely recall what happened. Questions ask you to classify sources, test reliability, compare interpretations and recognise how historians' questions shape their accounts.
Core rules
- A primary source is produced in or near the period studied; a secondary source interprets later. Neither label guarantees truth.
- External criticism tests authenticity: date, author, provenance, language, physical form. Internal criticism tests meaning and credibility: purpose, audience, bias, consistency.
- Corroboration compares independent sources. Agreement strengthens a claim; disagreement is evidence of perspective, not automatically error.
- Historiography is the study of changing historical interpretations. Ranke emphasised archival evidence; Annales historians widened attention to society and long-term structures; Marxist, subaltern and postcolonial approaches ask about power and silenced voices.
Worked example
A question asks whether the 1815 Kandyan Convention transferred sovereignty. A British official's dispatch calls it a cession; a Kandyan chief's later testimony says the chiefs preserved customary law and religion. Reasoning: identify each source's provenance and purpose, note that the convention text is a negotiated translation, then corroborate with temple records and later administrative practice. The defensible answer is that sovereignty was contested in practice, not simply transferred by one document.
Traps
- Treating a source as the event it describes.
- Assuming written sources are always more reliable than oral testimony.
- Ignoring translation, genre and audience.
- Using one source as proof while calling it 'biased' only when it disagrees with you.
- Presentism: judging past actors by present assumptions.
Strong answers distinguish evidence from interpretation and state the limits of the evidence explicitly.