What happens when “nothing happens”? Rethinking continuity as a dynamic process

 

Claire Holliss was kind enough to offer her thoughts and critique on an earlier draft of this and the subsequent post, which were significantly improved by her generous and insightful comments.

A decade ago, I was given the recommendation to read Willard Sunderland’s newly published book, The Baron’s Cloak. I should have set aside the time to read it then. Better late than never, though. A decade later, I’ve finally gotten round to doing so.

Subtitled A History of the Russian Empire in War and Revolution, the book is a masterclass in microhistory, telling through the life and experiences of one man the story of the Russian empire as it lurched into the Russo-Japanese War, 1905 Revolution, First World War, Revolution of 1917, and Civil War. That man is Baron Roman Feodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg.

Baron Ungern-Sternberg, shortly before his execution in September 1921. Credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The story is a remarkable one, told in a remarkable way. If you’ve ever read a book on the Russian revolution and Civil War, you’ve almost certainly never read one like this. In terms of its narrative style and exposition of complex ideas, it’s probably the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. If you’re interested in Russian and early Soviet history, you should certainly read it.

But that’s not why I’m writing about it now.

What has interested me most about this book right now is what it reveals about the nature of historical continuity.

In this post, I’ll first address what I think continuity means and make a case for it being approached as a distinct disciplinary concept in and of itself. I’ll then map out five different ways of conceiving of historical continuity. My thinking here has been considerably sharpened by reading Sunderland’s book but also leans heavily on a number of pedagogical articles and chapters, which I’ll reference as I go.

In a subsequent post, I’ll return to The Baron’s Cloak to explore what this brilliant book reveals about the nature of historical continuity.

The two posts are closely connected, but both can be read separately. Hopefully, you’ll find both have an interesting story to tell.

Approaching Continuity as a Dynamic Process

What do we mean by “continuity”?

This deceptively complex question might lead us into the trap of a single, very simple answer: continuity is what change is not.

Viewed like this, continuity represents a simple unchangedness over time. It might be expressed as one end of a spectrum in which change occupies the opposite end. (If it seems here like I’m building a straw man, I should point out at this point that I’m writing in large part from personal experience: this is, unfortunately, exactly how I’ve approach the question of continuity in my teaching in the past.)

An unhelpful dichotomy: Change and continuity as opposite ends of a spectrum

There is an instinctive conceptual neatness to this approach, which is at least partly supported by recent pedagogical literature. Consider the following statements in published book chapters and articles on continuity and change:

Counsell (2011): “[change has] her conceptual opposite – ‘continuity’”   Seixas and Morton   (2013): “[change is] an alteration; possible evolutionary erosion or sudden collapse, gradual building, or revolutionary upheaval” whereas “[continuity is] staying the same; an uninterrupted succession [my emphasis – AD] or flow”   Stanford (2025): “things that did happen (change) and things that didn’t happen (continuity)”

Although it makes sense on one level to think of continuity simply as a lack of change, this approach quickly runs us into problems. In fact, as I’ll go on to explore, the three short quotes above actually obscure some very interesting things the authors themselves have to say about the nature of continuity. But they also seem to be indicative of a wider issue. Whereas the disciplinary concept of historical change has been quite thoroughly explored and developed in recent years, the nature of continuity remains relatively under-theorised and is often relegated to having an essentially negative character. That is, it is seen as marking a relatively straightforward absence or lack of change, rather than the presence of something active.

Over a decade ago, Rachel Foster (2013) suggested that despite “an increasing need to move students beyond a simplistic conception of continuity as ‘nothing happens’, it is less clear what kinds of conceptual understanding we should be seeking to develop.” How far have we really come since then?

Here, I’ll suggest that we should move away from seeing continuity for its primarily negative character and begin to view it as a dynamic process with moving forces and trajectories of its own.

I’ll propose that we give continuity its own conceptual space in which to operate, acknowledging its clear link to historical change but recognising also its complex relationship with other disciplinary concepts, including similarity, difference, causation, consequence, and interpretation. In one sense, then, I’m aiming to echo what Murray, Burney, and Stacey-Chapman (2013) argued, that there are significant pedagogical “possibilities for the oft-forgotten ‘c’ in the twin second-order concept of ‘change and continuity’” and that focusing on continuity can “encourage pupils to keep searching for patterns and new questions across temporal dimensions”. (In fact, I think that designing teaching around questions of continuity can just encourage pupils to do this, but also encourage the same of us, as teachers!)

I’ll also try to tackle what seems to me to be a major problem with approaching continuity as a negative, that is, as simply marking the absence of change or even “what didn’t happen”. This is the problem of agency.

Seeing continuity as something not taking place invites us to attribute to it not just a negative character, but also a passive one, by contrast the dynamic agentic processes of change. In this view, continuity might seem to be a result of people from the past not actively engaging the world around them. The reality is that continuity is often both highly complex and the result of considerable effort on the part of many people. When things “stay the same”, they often do so because different groups and individuals work extremely hard to ensure they do.

Thinking Towards Dynamic Continuity

Like change, continuity can and should be seen as a dynamic process with its own moving forces and trajectories.

To be able to do so, however, we first need to establish what continuity actually “looks like” in practice. This implies, as Foster (2013) argued, being able to describe in detail and with precision what happens across time.

Firstly, we should bear in mind that continuity does not occur in a vacuum, separately from other conceptual processes. A number of writers (Foster, 2008; Foster, 2013; Seixas and Morton, 2013; Teaching History editors, 2020) emphasise that continuity operates alongside change in a fluctuating and complex relationship. This means not only that certain things do not change while others do, but also that changes themselves impact on the character and type of continuity. As Frances Blow (2011) has argued, we therefore need to “clarify connections between concepts of change, continuity and development [emphasis in original]”. Further to this, continuity can also be closely intertwined with the disciplinary concepts of similarity, difference, causation, consequence, and interpretation.

A useful starting point here is to consider what types of continuity might occur in history. Many history teachers, following well-established pedagogical research, are now familiar with dealing with change through analysis of its rate, extent, and nature, and with expressing this analysis through an accompanying disciplinary lexicon. Following this principle, I think we should be doing the same with continuity. In much the same way as change, it is possible to examine continuity through its rate, extent, and nature, as well as establishing its trajectory, all of which can be expressed through their own complex language.

This might seem all counterintuitive, especially if we view continuity as simply something not changing or happening. After all, how can we talk about how fast or in what way something doesn't occur?

But if we liberate ourselves from prescriptive definitions, we can free ourselves up to think more creatively and inquisitively about continuity.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve begun to provide students with and instruct them in the use of vocabulary that can help approach continuity as a process. An example of that vocabulary, provided to KS5 (A-Level) students, is below (I should stress that this is not really anything particularly new; Foster’s 2013 article, focused primarily on vocabulary for change, also includes words which serve to describe continuity).

Here, though, I’d like to dig a bit more into the idea of continuity as a process to see what further directions we can take it in, starting off with different ways we can conceive of continuity. What actually does continuity involve?

Here are five ways we might see continuity taking place as a dynamic process:

1. Continuity as sustained repetition of existing patterns (i.e. something happening over and over again with apparently little change);
2. Continuity as reaction or resistance to change (i.e. changes being limited or halted by countervailing forces working to stop them);
3. Continuity as restoration or reversion (i.e. previously existing forms being re-established in the long term after a short-lived period of change);
4. Continuity as novel trends (i.e. new patterns being established by an intense period of change which then set off longer-lasting historical trends of their own);
5. Continuity as legacy (i.e. over the very long term, events and processes from the distant past leading to certain recent historical or present-day consequences or outcomes).

Continuity as a “Path” through Time

When thinking about what these kinds of continuity actually “look like”, I’ve found the visual metaphor of a path helpful.

In this instance, a “path” is the established pattern taken by events and processes up to a particular point in the past. The more closely events and processes continue to follow a particular path, the greater the degree of continuity over time. The more they deviate from that path, the greater the change.

While this might appear at first glance to confirm the assumption of continuity and change as polar opposites, in fact I think this metaphor can actually allow us to demonstrate the complex interactions between continuity and other disciplinary concepts. Before I get to that, though, a couple of caveats:

A) As conceived here, this metaphorical “path” is represented by a basically straight line, which might suggest continuity to be a linear pattern or trend of events and processes. However, the apparent linear straightness of the “path” is actually an illusion. Just as a physical path weaves its way through significant points in the landscape and its line on a map is really only an approximation of the exact route it follows, so a temporal “path” is just a representation of the generalised trajectory of multiple moments in time which broadly but inexactly join together to form a particular trend.

 “Paths” through time: a useful metaphor for continuity? Credit: the author, 2025

B) Exactly where and when a particular “path” can be discerned in history is probably a matter of historical interpretation. Historians always have to decide which parts of the past are salient and worthy of mention. This means that some historians are likely to see trends and continuities existing because they are interested in certain aspects of the past, whereas other historians, focused on other aspects of the same periods of history, may not because they are looking at the past from a different angle.

However inexact the metaphor might be, drawing out a “path” of historical patterns or trends has helped me to consider the five examples of historical continuity I’ve proposed above.

Here, I’ll present each one through a diagram to represent this visual metaphor. With each diagram, I’ll try to explain a little further and give a concrete example from the past to illustrate.

Perhaps the most straightforward conceptualisation of continuity over time is one of events and processes proceeding much as they had done before. In this view, they continue more or less to follow an established “path” or pattern. Seixas and Morton (2013) indicate the relatively unchanging nature of cultural identity as one example of a pattern of behaviour and ideas continuing over the long term. In concrete terms, we might say that the belief of a people in their own nationhood (e.g. the “English” since the late Medieval period) underpinned by their own language and customs, might be an example of sustained repetition. It’s important to note, however, that all repeated practices in fact evolve and shift over time, so sustained repetition over time is not simply exactly the same continuing without any change. However much romantic nationalists may want to claim otherwise, there is no such thing as an unchanging national spirit or essence of a people.

Just as continuity is never likely to be absolute in the sense of seeing no change whatsoever, it is also not always linear in the sense of following broadly predictable patterns or trends. Sometimes, continuities develop out of an immediate context of sudden and rapid change. One way this might happen is when groups and individuals act in reaction or resistance to limit the extent of a change they perceive to be threatening. In this case, their actions can ensure that any deviation from the established path is less than would otherwise have been the case. Continuity here might mean comparatively less change during a period of flux or upheaval, rather than no change at all. An example of such a form of continuity might be the continued secretive practice of religion in militantly atheistic Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe, ensuring at least in part the continuity of religious practice through small acts of resistance to official atheism.

Sometimes, whether something counts as a change or a continuity depends on the historical timescale chosen for an inquiry. As Seixas and Morton (2013) contend, “Periodisation [emphasis in original] helps us organize our thinking about continuity and change” and is a “process of interpretation”. In certain shorter periods of history, seemingly great and dramatic changes can be detected. However, if we zoom out and look at the longer term, we might find that, after a period of change and upheaval, a previous “path” or pattern is restored or reverted back to. Think of, for example, the restoration of the monarchy in England (1660) after what ultimately proved to be a short-lived experiment in republicanism following the execution of Charles I. What this example shows is that lines of continuity can actually be broken, only to be re-established later (something which appears to run counter to Seixas and Morton’s [2013] own definition of continuity, given above). In this case, continuity appears to be at least as much related to the disciplinary concept of historical interpretation as it is to that of change.

Intriguingly, this approach to continuity might also be considered in the context of the lived experience of people at the time. To do so, as Counsell (2011) has suggested, “We would need to reflect on how… [people in the past] positioned themselves temporally and historically” in order to establish “how people’s own past and future appeared to them”. We might ask, therefore, how far someone living, say, in England in 1660 would see the restoration of the monarchy as a “continuity” rather than just another instance in a line of momentous and turbulent changes. In fact, whether someone in the past views a moment as marking continuity or change is likely to reflect their own position in and perceptions of the society in which they lived. Some people might view something in their own time as marking continuity; others might disagree with them. In this sense, then, we might find ourselves dealing not just with historical interpretations of the past, but also contemporary interpretations of it, by people who lived it themselves.

As Blow (2011) notes, “change and continuity interact, to make patterns of development” and “Trends occur when there is a continuity of the rate and direction of ‘change’” (emphasis in original). In this case, a sudden change which breaks an established historical path can set events and processes along a new path, one which represents a novel trend. An example of this could be what many Russian and Soviet historians, following Peter Holquist, call Russia’s “continuum of crisis”, a period of continual armed conflict spanning at least 1914 to 1921, which encompassed the First World War, Russian Revolution, and Russian Civil War(s). It’s important here to note that novel trends such as this mark a continuity not simply because similar events happen in a distinct period of time, but also because those events are causally and consequentially linked to one another (thus, in the case of Russia’s “continuum of crisis”, the First World War led directly to the February Revolution, the political system of which collapsed during the October Revolution, which in turn triggered the Russian Civil War). A series of otherwise random similarities across time does not, I don’t think, really constitute a trend.

Over the very long term, with history zoomed out to its furthest extents, we might be able to consider continuity as a legacy of the distant past, in which the present or recent past witnesses the completion of a trajectory established by a much earlier event or process. This view of continuity might deliberately overlook many of the finer details of events and processes unfolding between a distant moment of change and its eventual culmination in the more recent past or present day. It assumes, however, that there is a discernible path running between those two moments. It also assumes, as with novel trends, a causal and consequential relationship marking numerous distinct moments along that path, whether or not those moments are explicitly examined. An example might be present-day racism in America and western Europe as a legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery.

Concluding Thoughts

Is the metaphor of a “path” really a useful one? Does it reveal more than it obscures? And do these five examples of what continuity might look like really work?

Some types of continuity, as I’ve described them in these five examples, merge at points into others, in which case you might feel I’ve invented some categories which shouldn’t actually exist. There may well be many other clear examples of types of continuity that I’ve not thought of here, in which case you may find this list to be incomplete.

In any case, I hope this post gives some pointers as to the directions in which we could take the concept of continuity. As always, I’d be very happy for any thoughts on what I’ve written here!

In the next post, I’ll return to Willard Sunderland’s remarkable and brilliant book, The Baron’s Cloak, to show how its narrative can help illustrate different types of continuity.

Further Reading

Frances Blow, “‘Everything flows and nothing stays’: how students make sense of the historical concepts of change, continuity and development”, Teaching History 145 (December 2011), pp. 47-55

Christine Counsell, “What do we want students to do with historical change and continuity” in Ian Davies (ed.), Debates in Teaching History, Routledge (2011), pp. 109-123

Rachel Foster, “Speed cameras, dead ends, drivers and diversions: Year 9 use a ‘road map’ to problematise change and continuity”, Teaching History 131 (June 2008), pp. 4-8

Rachel Foster, “The more things change, the more they stay the same: developing students’ thinking about change and continuity”, Teaching History 151 (June 2013), pp. 8-17

Helen Murray, Rachel Burney and Andrew Stacey-Chapman, “Where’s the other ‘c’?: Year 9 examine continuity in the treatment of mental health through time”, Teaching History 151 (June 2013), pp. 45-54

Matt Stanford, “Change and Continuity” in Dan Keates, Matt Stanford and Corinne Goulée (eds.), A Practical Guide to Teaching History in the Secondary School, Routledge (2025), pp. 43-56

Peter Seixas and Tom Morton, The Big Six: Historical Thinking Concepts, Nelson Education (2013)

Willard Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak: A History of the Russian Empire in War, Cornell University Press (2014)

Teaching History editors, “What’s the wisdom on change and continuity”, Teaching History 179 (June 2020), pp. 50-53