Scrambling The Filing Cabinet

Imagine history has been filed like this:

Belgium.
Britain.
France.
The Netherlands.
Germany.
The United States.

Schooling often teaches us by opening one drawer at a time.

We learn about Belgian colonialism, then close that drawer.

We learn about British imperialism, then close that one.

We learn about French colonialism, and so on.

There is a usefulness to this level of specification or specificity. It allows us to identify particular governments, institutions, people, events and decisions. Without it, everything risks becoming a vague soup called Europe. But specificity does not require us to accept the selection and arrangement of the filing system exactly as it stands. Knowing which drawer something was filed under does not mean it belongs only in that drawer.

Scrambling the filing cabinet

Once we begin opening several drawers at the same time, other relationships become visible. Monarchies married into one another. Churches crossed borders. Universities exchanged ideas. Scientists borrowed and developed one another's theories. Merchants financed ventures elsewhere. Families moved between royal courts. Armies formed alliances. Colonial administrations observed and learned from one another. Ideas about civilisation, race, Christianity, property and progress travelled across Europe and far beyond it.

So What did Belgium do? remains a useful question. But it need not be the final one. We can also ask:

What were European kin doing together?

What were they learning from one another? What did interconnected ruling classes, institutions and kin networks build, normalise, inherit and transmit across national borders? That is the filing cabinet scrambled. Belgium does not disappear. Neither do Britain, France or the Netherlands. The drawers still help us locate particular decisions and forms of power. What becomes harder to sustain is the idea that the drawers contain entirely separate histories. Sometimes the nation is simply the wrong scale of analysis.

When monarchs are cousins, capital moves across borders, churches operate internationally, ideas circulate and colonial powers collaborate as well as compete, looking only inside one national drawer can prevent us from seeing the wider arrangement that made particular actions possible.

And this is where another question begins to interest me.

What happens when children whose cultures are relationally centred enter this filing system?

For many people of African descent, a national border does not necessarily mark the end of relationship. Our histories may be different. Our languages may be different. Our countries may be different. Yet we may encounter people elsewhere in the diaspora and recognise something familiar. Not sameness. Connection. That sense of relationship has sometimes had to survive extraordinary fragmentation.

People were dispersed across colonies, nations, languages and continents. Connections were interrupted, renamed and obscured. And yet people continued to recognise, seek out and cultivate relationship. We were scattered, but we are still related. This creates an interesting contrast with the way European history is commonly organised in school. Europe contains centuries of intermarriage, migration, religion, scholarship, commerce, warfare, intellectual exchange and shared political projects. Yet much of that history reaches children through the national drawer first. Belgian. French. British. Dutch. German. The drawer can become easier to see than the web. And that is where a certain asymmetry begins to interest me:

African diaspora consciousness may foreground connection despite historical fragmentation.

European national consciousness may foreground separation despite historical interconnection.

I am not suggesting that every African-descended person understands themselves this way, or that Europeans do not experience wider kinship. I am reaching towards something quieter.

Habit of consciousness

What do we become accustomed to noticing? What relationships become obvious to us? Which ones need to be explained? What disappears into the background because the way information has been arranged teaches us not to look there? This becomes particularly interesting in the classroom. A child may be presented with an event as part of Belgian history, while noticing connections to Britain, France, Congo, the Church, commerce, scientific thought or a much larger European project.

Another child may hear several national histories being taught separately and instinctively ask how the people inside those stories were related. The child is not necessarily disputing the facts. They may simply be changing the scale at which the facts are being viewed. And in my experience, those questions do not always sit comfortably inside the structure through which history is being taught, particularly when the person making the connection is regarded as standing outside the nationality at the centre of the lesson. What does the filing cabinet itself teach? It does more than organise information.

It can organise our consciousness of relationship.

When we ask:

What did our interconnected European societies build, inherit and transmit? We are not merely adding more facts. We are changing the unit of perception. Which nation did this? helps us locate an action. What relationships and shared systems made this possible? helps us see the field in which it happened. Both can matter. But they cultivate different habits of attention. One begins with the drawer. The other notices the web.

And perhaps what intrigues me most is what happens when people formed by different habits of consciousness meet one another in the same classroom. One may have learned to recognise distinction first. Another may notice relationship first. Neither observation needs to erase the other. But what becomes possible when we are allowed to scramble the filing cabinet, follow the connections, and see what else the arrangement of history has taught us to overlook?

How we learn to see relationship in history can eventually shape how readily we recognise relationship in one another.