ABSTRACT
This introduction explains the key premises of the book. Rather than provide summaries of the individual chapters, the co-editors explore the concept of “loss” in historiography more broadly. Topics addressed include the framing of historical arguments as a dyad of contraries, asking whether a “winners and losers” binary is in fact useful. Ancient logic and rhetoric are brought to bear on that question, as is the paradigm-shift model of changing scientific knowledge promulgated by Thomas Kuhn. The introduction posits, further, that loss can be a forceful position from which histories, in many different forms, may be made and that, as with counterfactual history, a “possible worlds” approach to considering history from loss can be fruitful and can remove some of the constraints on the past that history-makers impose on it, by virtue of narrating the past in a particular way, thereby, to quote Martin Davies, “imprisoning” us in history. Finally, the introduction cautions against the assignment of virtue automatically to losing sides, bearing in mind the ways in which loss in the past has also been used in subsequent times to justify revenge, hatred, and oppression.
