What is historical agency?

Answer 1

Historical agency is the ability of an entity to impact the development of the events of history. This agency is not inherent in all historical characters, and at the same time is not limited to humans; associations, organisations, ideas, fictional characters and even the tides can identified as agents of history. What is more the focus of the issue is the lack of agency attributed to groups, usually those dominated groups (subalterns). Such issues are often highlighted by post-colonial theorists and historians take on this challenge to reconstruct the agency of these groups who have previously been over looked to better understand the course of history and what made it. Groups are often overlooked in terms of agency due to unacknowledged assumptions in historiography. this includes such notions as racism, class bias, nationalism or anything else that assumes one group was either homogeneous or was a tool used to impact history on the initiative of another, usually elite, group.