Introduction
The assertion that history is written by the victors captures a deep and enduring truth about the relationship between power and narrative. Throughout the ages, those who have triumphed in wars, revolutions, and political struggles have wielded disproportionate influence over how events are recorded, interpreted, and remembered. This essay argues that historical narratives are indeed profoundly shaped by the interests of the powerful, and that this asymmetry has systematically marginalised the perspectives of the defeated, the colonised, and the oppressed.
Colonial powers systematically constructed historical narratives that justified their domination while erasing or demeaning the histories of colonised peoples.
Explain
European colonial empires did not merely conquer territories; they also seized control of how the past was understood and taught. By casting colonised societies as primitive, stagnant, or barbaric, colonial historiography provided an intellectual justification for imperial rule and positioned Western civilisation as the apex of human progress. This narrative erasure had lasting consequences, as generations of colonised peoples were educated in systems that taught them to view their own histories through the lens of their conquerors.
Example
British colonial historiography in India characterised the pre-colonial period as one of despotism and stagnation, a narrative challenged only decades later by Indian historians such as Romila Thapar, who demonstrated the sophistication of Mughal administration and pre-colonial economic systems. In Singapore, the founding narrative long centred on Sir Stamford Raffles's arrival in 1819 as the moment the island's history began, effectively sidelining over 600 years of prior history as a thriving Malay trading port. It was only with the excavation of artefacts at Fort Canning in the 1980s and subsequent archaeological work that the pre-colonial history of Singapura as part of the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires gained wider public recognition.
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This confirms that history has been written by the victors, as colonial powers deliberately constructed narratives that erased indigenous histories and legitimised their own dominance, a distortion that has taken generations to begin correcting.
Authoritarian regimes routinely rewrite and censor historical records to consolidate their legitimacy and suppress the memory of opposition.
Explain
State control over historical narratives is not confined to the colonial era; contemporary authoritarian governments actively manipulate the historical record to serve their political interests. By controlling school curricula, censoring dissident scholarship, and punishing alternative interpretations, regimes ensure that the version of history available to their citizens is one that validates the ruling order. This deliberate distortion demonstrates that power continues to determine whose version of events achieves dominance.
Example
The Chinese Communist Party has systematically suppressed public memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, removing references from textbooks, censoring internet searches, and detaining activists who attempt to commemorate the event. As of 2023, most young Chinese citizens have little to no knowledge of the protests or the military crackdown. Similarly, in Japan, successive conservative governments have been accused of downplaying wartime atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and the use of comfort women in official school textbooks, provoking diplomatic tensions with China and South Korea and prompting calls for more honest historical reckoning.
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This powerfully illustrates that history continues to be written by those in power, as authoritarian and nationalist governments actively suppress inconvenient truths to maintain a self-serving version of the past.
The destruction of cultural heritage and archives by victorious forces has permanently silenced the historical voices of defeated peoples.
Explain
Beyond narrative manipulation, victors have frequently engaged in the physical destruction of the records, monuments, and cultural artefacts of those they have conquered. This material erasure makes it impossible for future generations to reconstruct the perspectives of the vanquished, ensuring that the victor's narrative faces no documentary challenge. The loss is irreversible: once archives are burned and monuments demolished, the histories they embodied are gone forever.
Example
The Spanish conquest of the Americas resulted in the systematic destruction of Mayan and Aztec codices by Catholic missionaries in the sixteenth century, with Bishop Diego de Landa ordering the burning of thousands of Mayan manuscripts in 1562 on the grounds that they contained 'superstition and lies of the devil.' Only three or four pre-Columbian Mayan codices survive today, leaving vast gaps in our understanding of one of the world's most sophisticated ancient civilisations. In Singapore, the controversial exhumation of graves at Bukit Brown Cemetery from 2013 onwards to make way for an expressway sparked public debate about whose history is preserved and whose is erased, with heritage advocates arguing that the graves of early Chinese immigrants constituted an irreplaceable archive of social history that was being sacrificed to developmental priorities.
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This demonstrates that the victors' control over history extends beyond narrative to the material conditions of historical knowledge itself, as the deliberate or incidental destruction of the defeated's cultural heritage permanently silences their voice in the historical record.
Counter-Argument
Critics argue that the growth of social history, oral history, and digital media has successfully recovered the voices of marginalised peoples, proving that the victors do not monopolise historical narrative. The Subaltern Studies Group and Singapore's National Archives oral history programme, with over 7,000 interviews, demonstrate that alternative histories can and do challenge dominant accounts.
Rebuttal
While these scholarly and archival efforts are valuable, they remain marginal compared to the resources and institutional power that states command over historical production. The Chinese Communist Party's successful suppression of public memory of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, despite the existence of digital media and global scholarship, demonstrates that state power over narrative remains formidable. Counter-narratives exist, but they rarely achieve the reach, funding, or curricular entrenchment needed to displace the versions of history that serve those in power.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the claim that history is written by the victors remains substantially valid, as those who hold power continue to shape dominant narratives in ways that serve their interests and marginalise dissenting accounts. From colonial historiographies to state-controlled textbooks, the imprint of the powerful on the historical record is undeniable. While counter-narratives have always existed, they have historically struggled to achieve the institutional support and public visibility needed to dislodge victor-authored accounts from their privileged position.
Introduction
While the claim that history is written by the victors contains a kernel of truth, it is an oversimplification that underestimates the resilience of alternative narratives and the capacity of modern historiography to recover suppressed voices. The growth of social history, oral history, and postcolonial scholarship has significantly challenged victor-centric accounts, and the digital age has further democratised the production of historical knowledge. This essay contends that while victors have historically enjoyed narrative advantages, the claim that they monopolise historical writing is increasingly untenable.
The growth of social history, oral history, and subaltern studies has successfully recovered the voices of those marginalised by victor-centric narratives.
Explain
From the mid-twentieth century onwards, a revolution in historical methodology has shifted the discipline's focus from the powerful to the powerless. Social historians, oral historians, and scholars of subaltern studies have developed rigorous methods for recovering the experiences and perspectives of ordinary people, women, minorities, and colonised communities. This scholarly movement has produced a vast body of work that directly challenges the claim that history belongs exclusively to the victors.
Example
The Subaltern Studies Group, founded in 1982 by historian Ranajit Guha, systematically recovered the agency and perspectives of peasants, workers, and lower-caste Indians who had been written out of both colonial and nationalist historiographies. Their work demonstrated that the colonised were not passive victims but active agents who resisted, negotiated, and shaped their own histories. In Singapore, the oral history programme of the National Archives, established in 1979, has recorded over 7,000 interviews with ordinary Singaporeans, preserving the lived experiences of communities such as Samsui women, kampong residents, and former political detainees whose stories are absent from official textbooks.
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This demonstrates that history is not exclusively written by the victors, as dedicated scholarly and archival efforts have proven capable of recovering and amplifying the voices of the marginalised, producing a richer and more contested historical record.
Defeated and oppressed communities have consistently maintained their own historical traditions through oral culture, literature, and communal memory, even under severe repression.
Explain
The claim that victors write history assumes that the defeated are passive consumers of the dominant narrative, but this underestimates the resilience and creativity of subjugated peoples in preserving their own accounts of the past. Through oral traditions, folk songs, religious rituals, and clandestine writings, communities have sustained alternative histories that contradict and challenge official accounts. These counter-narratives often re-emerge with transformative force when political conditions change.
Example
During centuries of slavery in the Americas, enslaved Africans preserved their histories, cosmologies, and cultural identities through oral storytelling, music, and spiritual practices such as Vodou and Candomblé, which encoded West African historical and religious knowledge in forms that slaveholders could not easily suppress. Similarly, the Aboriginal Australians maintained over 65,000 years of continuous cultural memory through songlines and oral traditions long before European settlers arrived and imposed their own historical frameworks. These indigenous histories have gained increasing recognition in recent decades, as exemplified by the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a constitutionally enshrined Aboriginal voice in Australian governance.
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This illustrates that the defeated and the dispossessed have never been entirely voiceless, as their resilient traditions of oral and communal memory-keeping have ensured that alternative histories survive, challenging the notion that victors enjoy a monopoly on historical narrative.
The digital age has radically democratised the production and dissemination of historical knowledge, breaking the victors' monopoly on narrative.
Explain
The internet, social media, and digital archiving have fundamentally altered the economics and politics of historical knowledge production. Whereas traditional historiography required institutional support, publishing infrastructure, and academic credentials, digital platforms allow individuals and communities to document, publish, and disseminate their own historical accounts to a global audience at minimal cost. This democratisation has made it vastly more difficult for any single group, however powerful, to control the historical narrative.
Example
The Arab Spring of 2011 was documented in real time by ordinary citizens using smartphones and social media, creating a grassroots historical record that contradicted the official narratives of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. WikiLeaks' publication of classified US diplomatic cables and military documents provided an unprecedented counter-narrative to official accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reaching millions of readers worldwide. In Singapore, independent digital platforms such as the Bukit Brown documentation project and the Singapore Heritage Society's online archives have enabled citizens to research and publicise aspects of the nation's heritage that receive limited attention in official channels, fostering a more pluralistic understanding of the country's past.
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This demonstrates that the digital revolution has significantly eroded the victors' ability to control historical narratives, as the barriers to producing and disseminating alternative accounts have fallen dramatically, making the aphorism increasingly obsolete in the information age.
Counter-Argument
Proponents of the 'victors' thesis' point to the systematic destruction of cultural heritage, such as the Spanish burning of Mayan codices and the Chinese government's censorship of Tiananmen, as evidence that those in power actively and effectively control the historical record. They argue that the material erasure of archives and monuments permanently silences defeated peoples.
Rebuttal
However, this argument underestimates the resilience of subjugated communities in preserving their histories through oral traditions, literature, and communal memory. Aboriginal Australians maintained over 65,000 years of continuous cultural knowledge through songlines despite colonial erasure, and the Arab Spring of 2011 was documented by ordinary citizens using smartphones, creating grassroots historical records that no regime could fully suppress. The digital age has fundamentally democratised historical production, making total narrative control increasingly impossible even for the most powerful states.
Conclusion
Ultimately, while the victors have long enjoyed disproportionate influence over historical narratives, the assertion that they exclusively author history overstates their control and understates the agency of the defeated. The growth of critical historiography, the preservation of oral traditions, and the democratising potential of digital media have all created spaces for suppressed narratives to emerge and challenge dominant accounts. History is not a monologue delivered by the powerful but an ongoing, contested conversation in which multiple voices, including those of the vanquished, increasingly demand and receive a hearing.