In the midst of multiple geopolitical crises and armed conflicts, and after a global pandemic, a common trend has emerged across different fields of study, from the hard sciences to the social sciences and the humanities: the so-called “turn to history.”Footnote ¹ The turn to history in international law refers to a significant methodological shift that has occurred over the past two decades as international legal scholars have increasingly incorporated historical methods and perspectives into their work.Footnote ² International lawyers have investigated the historical origins, development, and contexts of international legal doctrines and institutions. Rather than treating international law as a timeless and ethereal system of rules, scholars are examining how it concretely emerged from specific historical, political, and cultural contexts.

Far from being celebratory, this soul-searching historical engagement has questioned standard accounts regarding international law as a progressive evolution toward justice. Instead, such histories have explored the lights and shadows of the field, thus revealing its complex and multilayered developments.Footnote ³ This historical engagement has important implications for contemporary international law. Understanding the historical contingency of legal doctrines can reveal hidden assumptions, expose continuities with problematic pasts, and open up space for reimagining the future of international law. It thus connects to broader critical approaches in international law.Footnote ⁴

Unsurprisingly, then, even experts in international cultural heritage law and heritage studies are gradually using history as a useful lens for investigating their field.Footnote ⁵ Within heritage studies, the connection between history and heritage appears to be a natural one. After all, if heritage studies scholars regard heritage as a process initiated in the past, then historians who study the past can contribute to this field of research by “offering insightful understandings of that past.”Footnote ⁶ International legal historians have also used heritage as a source for writing history. More fundamentally, as a field, heritage studies are “at the junction of several different disciplines,” including mainly archaeology and architecture but also anthropology, museology, musicology, and increasingly, history.Footnote ⁷

The “turn to history” represents a shift in how heritage professionals and lawyers approach cultural heritage, moving away from treating heritage as static objects or sites toward understanding heritage as historically contingent, socially constructed, and embedded in historical processes.Footnote ⁸ In heritage studies and international cultural heritage law, this has meant greater attention to how heritage narratives are created and whose voices are privileged or marginalized. The historical turn has shed light on the colonial legacies embedded in heritage practices and institutions.Footnote ⁹ As Hicks points out, “these histories are closer than [one] may think. They’re not even histories … This is about the here and now.”Footnote ¹⁰

Against this background, this short book review examines and critically assesses an interesting monograph that can contribute to the turn to history in international cultural heritage law and heritage studies. An archaeologist and historian with working experience on both sides of the Atlantic, now based in Athens, Greece, Maud Webster contributes valuable insights not only to those interested in archaeology, art history, and history more generally but also to experts in the history of heritage protection and “readers interested in looking across and beyond the traditional borders of the humanities” (p. 1).

“Why do we need history to begin with?” Webster asks at the beginning of her monograph (p. xiii). To understand the “existential need for history” and its fundamental role in human life (p. 3), the book is divided into three parts. Chapter 1 explores the fundamental concepts of time and history. Chapter 2 examines the sociopolitical needs for history as materially expressed in cultural artifacts, buildings, monuments, and sites. Chapter 3 explores written and visual records “created to situate selves and events in time” (p. 3). The book illuminates “one intriguing aspect of what it means to be human” and how people try to make sense of history, adopting an interdisciplinary approach mainly based on history, archaeology, and psychology (p. 5). This is very appropriate as historians construct narratives based on records. These can be oral, woven into narratives or songs, or tangible memorials like objects, sites, and written texts (pp. 8–10).

Chapter 1 conceptualizes history as “therapy” (p. 7): “it is usually when something is lost … or turns into something else that the mind seeks to comprehend what happened … it is when beliefs or other towers crumble, love or other fortunes run out or a world view falls away to another … that narrative tends to follow the breach” (p. 8). Webster relies on Paul Ricoeur’s insights into history as therapy.Footnote ¹¹ Since history is continually permeated by violence, collective memory is imbued with symbolic wounds that demand healing.Footnote ¹² For the French philosopher, history can constitute a form of collective group therapy for the common good. Like the successful elaboration of personal grief (Durcharbeitung) can heal psychological wounds, the critical elaboration of the past can heal historical wounds. Like a doctor, the historian works to heal the wounds of the past and “liberate the present, making it livable with all its baggage” (p. 11). As in psychotherapy, elaboration is seen as the process of working through interpretations of life experience toward the success of therapy; similarly, in making history, historians should consider various perspectives and understand the “emotional investments” at play.Footnote ¹³ Ricoeur’s life experience informed his approach: “orphaned in the First World War, he spent the second in a prison camp” (p. 11).

The need for history feels therapeutic due to its transcendence. History and heritage (as a historical marker) reflect “a complex yearning: that of freezing something or someone that has passed” (p. 13). They are linked to mortality and transcendence. They can signify a refusal to let a person or a moment go and relate to the fear of loss (pp. 13–14). The memory of people and events can provide “existential orientation” (p. 16). However, the need for history does not merely relate to the attraction to the traces left by others but also by “an urge to leave our own mark behind” (p. 16). Knowing that we are mortal makes us want to matter beyond our lifespans. History and heritage thus offer a form of immortality, enabling us to become part of something larger than ourselves. By “situating ourselves within the constituted continuity that history offers, we can carve out a place in that bigger picture and try to make peace with our own historicity” (p. 18). This is why destroying historical records and the cultural heritage of people can constitute a kind of cultural genocide.Footnote ¹⁴

Chapter 2 discusses how history and heritage constitute a meaningful context for the present. History turns the chaos of the present into something comprehensible. Without it, there would be disorientation and an inability to understand why things are the way they are. In parallel, protecting cultural heritage is key to safeguarding one’s identity and need to belong, and it can constitute a source in the practice of history. The chapter also links history and heritage to the formation of collective and individual identity and roots by discussing several archaeological case studies and conceptualizing monuments as historical “narratives written in stone” (p. 43).

Chapter 3 develops Ricoeur’s idea of history as therapy by linking historical research to soul searching. For Webster, “Insofar as history consists of … elaborated memories and accounts of the past, it bears ample analogs with some forms of psychotherapy” (p. 63). Like revisiting one’s memories can alter one’s sense of self, writing histories of a field can not only map its past histories but also influence its future. History can assuage “the anxiety of orientation, the need to fit oneself into the perceived flow of things” by ordering time and “weaving ourselves … into a bigger picture” (p. 89); “it can be comforting to … trace the steps of others before us—whether we want to follow them or not” (p. 86).

Coming to a critical assessment of the book, due to its concision, the reader is left with more questions than answers. Nonetheless, this monograph constitutes an important piece of a broader mosaic, an impressionistic introduction to further excavations, investigations, and treatises in the field. Due to their salience, some concepts would have required more in-depth investigation. For example, several international lawyers have used psychology to investigate their field,Footnote ¹⁵ and this subject has much to offer to heritage studies, too.Footnote ¹⁶ It would have been appropriate to explain the promises and pitfalls of this innovative approach to the field.

That said, the book’s short length should not lead potential readers to minimize the strength and depth of its ideas. On the contrary, Webster successfully goes to the heart of the matter, addressing why history and heritage are so important to us. While no book can be exhaustive, Webster succeeds in exploring strategies to make sense of the past and offers a thought-provoking and engaging analysis. Combining archaeology, history, and psychology, she links cultural heritage protection to eternal themes such as life and death, violence and survival, healing and human flourishing. Her work attests to the recent turn to history in international cultural heritage law and heritage studies.