Conceptualising Historical Crimes

“Historical concepts” are terms used to describe practices by the contemporaries of these practices. Scholars can defend the use of historical concepts with the argument that many practices deemed inadmissible today (such as slavery, human sacrifice, heritage destruction, racism, censorship, etc.) were accepted as rather normal and sometimes even as morally and legally right in some periods of the past. Arguably, then, it would be unfaithful to the sources, misleading and even anachronistic to use the present, accusatory labels to describe them. This would mean, for example, that one should not call the crimes committed during the Crusades crimes against humanity (even if a present observer would have good reason to qualify some of these crimes as such), for such a concept was nonexistent at the time. A radical variant of the latter is the view that not only recent labels should be avoided but even any moral judgments of past crimes.