My recent reading has serendipitously included a many empires, both fictional and factual.

“’Empires are not …‘ She trailed off before she said anything truly treasonous. Librarians of Alyssium were trained to be impartial, but how could anyone who studied history not have feelings about it? She’d never understood that. History was full of people, all of whom had lives and dreams that were affected by the dry laws and military actions that filled university textbooks. Emperor Mevorin liked to insist every action taken by the empire was for the good of its people, but far too many of its actions throughout history had been for the good of the empire, which was not—regardless of what the emperor espoused—the same thing. An empire, unchecked, was a selfish beast of insatiable hunger.” [original emphasis]

– Terlu Perna in The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst

It’s not the empire aspect that grabbed me about this quote, however. History is indeed full of people, and I have a homebrew hypothesis why that fact is often forgotten.

We’re living through a phase when science and/or technology are seen as the most important lens(es) to view life through (unlike, say, during Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment). Scientific research seeks to observe phenomena objectively, quantifying them, and removing as many hints of the personal as possible.

There was a time when there was discussion within history and other humanities about emulating that approach (e.g. cliometrics), but in the past 30 to 40 years or so, research focus in the social sciences has been shifting more towards the individual experience.

However, since the rest of society is still wearing pink science love goggles, this shift hasn’t broken through to mainstream discussions yet. Hence, the lay public—including the character in the above quotation—is under the false impression that historians do not regard history as concerning actual people.

Again, this is a personal crackpot theory of mine.

The book’s protagonist, Terlu, does also remind me of my high school teachers in a way. In my senior year, during the prep for our finals, teachers would spend some time in class iterating how important their subject is. It got almost comical one day when class after class literally every single one of them said a variation of “These things are so important” or whatever—each surely aware of the spread of subjects on offer at our school, and of our work load, not to mention the fact that even at high school level some of us students had already started on our paths towards specializing in our future fields.

In a way that was good, though—we clearly had motivated teachers who cared about their fields. Terlu in the quotation above also is clearly very passionate about her interests, to the extent of being blind to a host of other considerations in life, and it shows. She’s also young, and that also shows.

(There is a more curmudgeonly comment I’d like to make as well: “university textbooks” are the kindergarten version of academia. History at university level is a very different beast from the rote learning of names and dates that the lower levels of education pretend constitutes history. If Terlu imagines “university textbooks” or other basic treatises contain the whole of what historical research is, she’s a staggeringly more junior librarian than the novel purports and greener than a St. Patrick’s Day parade. *grumbling in librarian-married-to-a-historian*)

Durst, Sarah Beth. The Enchanted Greenhouse. London: Pan Macmillan, 2025, pp. 105-106.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.