Book Review

Methods/Theory

"There will always be scholarly concern over what might have been 'left out' of official edited collections of documents," Forrest L. Griever described the deep-rooted mistrust of government publications. Sacha Zala's study focuses on this crucial issue: what has been the impact of governmental influence and censorship on historiography? He asks three questions: why do governments sometimes suppress the publication of records? Are official publications useful for scholars and researchers? And why do governments give official historians and not public servants the task of preparing official volumes of contemporary documents?

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Since 1624, official publications in England have been called blue books or white books. By publishing selected documents, successive English governments tried to legitimize foreign policy decisions. After World War I, such official publications of files and records became a weapon in international affairs. In the 1920s, the German government attempted to counter the war guilt thesis by editing Die Große Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914. The official papers of the July crisis in 1914 had an enormous impact on public opinion and caused a revolution in contemporary history (as Mario Toscano maintained). Their publication produced a more critical view of the war and led to the development of a revisionist historiography in the United States. In response, the governments in Washington and London were forced to authorize the publication of their own diplomatic papers.

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