Historical awareness 7

is a unique manifestation of the human spirit, with its own culture

and values. For one age to understand another, there must be a

recognition that the passage of time has profoundly altered both

the conditions of life and the mentality of men and women – even

perhaps human nature itself. Historians are not the guardians of

universal values, nor can they deliver ‘the verdict of history’; they

must strive to understand each age in its own terms, to take on

its own values and priorities, instead of imposing ours. All the

resources of scholarship and all the historian’s powers of imagination must be harnessed to the task of bringing the past back

to life – or resurrecting it, to employ a favourite conceit of the

period. But historicism was more than an antiquarian rallying

cry. Its proponents maintained that the culture and institutions of

their own day could only be understood historically. Unless their

growth and development through successive ages were grasped,

their true nature would remain elusive. History, in short, held the

key to understanding the world.

Seeing through the eyes of the past

Historicism was one facet of Romanticism, the dominant movement in European thought and art around 1800. The most

influential Romantic literary figure, Sir Walter Scott, aimed to

draw readers of his historical romances into the authentic atmosphere of the past. Popular interest in the surviving remains of the

past rose to new heights, and it extended to not only the ancient

world but also the hitherto despised Middle Ages. Historicism

represented the academic wing of the Romantic obsession with

the past. The leading figure in the movement was Leopold von

Ranke, a professor at Berlin University from 1824 until 1872 and

author of over sixty volumes. In the preface to his first book, he

wrote:

History has had assigned to it the task of judging the past, of

instructing the present for the benefit of the ages to come. To such

lofty functions this work does not aspire. Its aim is merely to show

how things actually were [wie es eigentlich gewesen].8

By this Ranke meant more than an intention to reconstruct the

passage of events, though this was certainly part of his programme.9

 What was new about the historicists’ approach was

their realization that the atmosphere and mentality of past ages

had to be reconstructed too, if the formal record of events was

8 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

to have any meaning. The main task of the historian became

to find out why people acted as they did by stepping into their

shoes, by seeing the world through their eyes and as far as possible by judging it by their standards. Thomas Carlyle believed

more fervently in historical recreation than any other nineteenthcentury writer; whatever the purpose of historical work, ‘the

first indispensable condition’, he declared, was that ‘we see the

things transacted, picture them wholly, as if they stand before

our eyes’.10 And this obligation extended to all periods in the

past, however alien they might seem to modern observers. Ranke

himself strove to meet the historicist ideal in his treatment of the

wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Others

tackled the Middle Ages in the same spirit.

Ranke’s much-quoted preface is also important as a disclaimer

of relevance. Ranke did not maintain that historical research

served no purpose outside itself; indeed, he was probably the last

major historian to believe that the outcome of studies such as

his own would be to reveal the hand of God in human history.

But he did not look for practical lessons from the past. Indeed

he believed that detachment from present-day concerns was a

condition of understanding the past. His objection to previous

historians was not that they lacked all curiosity or empathy but

that they were diverted from the real task by the desire to preach,

or to give lessons in statecraft, or to shore up the reputation

of a ruling dynasty; in pursuing immediate goals they obscured

the true wisdom to be derived from historical study. In the

next chapter I will consider more fully the question of whether

relevance is necessarily incompatible with historical awareness.

But during the first half of the nineteenth century, when Europe

experienced a high degree of turbulence in the aftermath of the

French Revolution, history was politically contentious, and unless

a special virtue had been made of detachment, it is hard to see

how a scholarly historical practice could have become established.

Though very few people read Ranke today, his name continues to

stand for an Olympian impartiality and a duty to be true to the

past before all else.

The ‘otherness’ of the past

Historical awareness in the sense understood by the historicists

rests on three principles. The first, and most fundamental, is

Thomas Carlyle

(1795–1881)

A popular, though

controversial, Victorian

writer and historian. He

was the author of a long,

colourful account of the

French Revolution.

empathy

The ability to enter into

the feelings of others

(not to be confused

with sympathy, which

denotes actually sharing

them). The term is

often used to describe a

historian’s approach to

the ‘foreignness’ of past

societies. In the 1980s

there was an ultimately

ill-fated attempt to

assess children’s ability to

empathize with people in

the past for examination

purposes.

French Revolution

The tumultuous political

events in late eighteenthcentury France which

overturned the monarchy

and established a republic

based upon the principles

of the Rights of Man.

It involved considerable

violence and chronic

political instability, until

Napoleon staged a military

coup in 1799.

Olympian

Detached and remote, like

the Greek gods on Mount

Olympus.

Historical awareness 9

difference; that is, a recognition of the gulf that separates our

own age from all previous ages. Because nothing in history stands

still, the passage of time has profoundly altered the way we live.

The first responsibility of the historian is to take the measure

of the difference of the past; conversely one of the worst sins is

anachronism – the unthinking assumption that people in the past

behaved and thought as we do. This difference is partly about the

material conditions of life, a point sometimes forcibly made by

the surviving remains of the past such as buildings, implements

and clothing. Less obviously, but even more importantly, the

difference is one of mentality: earlier generations had different

values, priorities, fears and hopes from our own. We may take

the beauties of nature for granted, but medieval men and women

were terrified of forests and mountains and strayed from the

beaten track as little as possible. In late eighteenth-century rural

England, separation and remarriage were sometimes achieved by

means of a public wife-sale; although this was in part a reaction to

the virtual impossibility of legal divorce for the poor, it is hard for

the modern reader not to dwell on the extreme patriarchal values

implied in the humiliation of a wife led to market by her husband

and held by a halter.11 During the same period public hangings

in London regularly drew crowds of 30,000 or more, both rich

and poor, and usually more women than men. Their motivation

varied: it might be to see justice done, to draw lessons from the

deportment of the condemned man or to register indignation at

his death; but all shared a readiness to gaze on an act of coldblooded cruelty from which most people today would recoil in

horror.12 More recent periods may not be so strange, but we still

have to be alert to many evidences of difference. In mid-Victorian

England it was possible for a thoughtful educated person to

describe the teaming poor of East London as a ‘trembling mass of

maggots in a lump of carrion’.13

Historical empathy, which has been much vaunted in classroom practice in recent years, is often taken to mean a recognition

of the common humanity we share with our forebears; but a

more realistic (and also more rigorous) interpretation of empathy

dwells on the effort of imagination needed to penetrate past mentalities, which are irremediably removed from anything in our

experience. As the novelist L.P. Hartley remarked, ‘The past is

a foreign country’.14 Of course, like all foreign lands, the past is

never entirely alien. As well as the shock of revulsion, historians

anachronism

A historical inaccuracy in

which elements from one

historical period (usually

the present) are inserted

into an earlier one, such

as the use of modern

language or attitudes in

historical films and dramas.

carrion

The carcasses of dead

animals on which

scavengers feed.

L.P. Hartley

(1895–1972)

British novelist. His novel

The Go-Between, about

a young boy who carries

messages between a pair

of lovers, is told through

the memory of the boy

grown to adulthood. The

novel’s opening line, ‘The

past is a foreign country;

they do things differently

there’ has been adopted

by historians trying to

put across the dangers

of imposing modern

assumptions on previous

ages.

1 0 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

experience the shock of recognition – as when they come across

unaffected spontaneity in the behaviour of parents towards children in seventeenth-century England, or uncover the consumerist

culture of eighteenth-century London. ‘All history’, it has been

said, ‘is a negotiation between familiarity and strangeness’.15 But

in any scholarly enquiry it is the otherness of the past that tends

to come to the fore because the passage of time has made exotic

what once seemed commonplace.

One of the ways in which we measure our distance from the

past is by periodization. Labelling by century has this effect, as

does the recognition of centenaries. More significant are the labels

devised by historians themselves, since these express a view about

the characteristics of the period concerned. As Ludmilla Jordanova

has observed, ‘marking time is the business of historians’.16 The

most vexed of these labels is ‘modern’. Until the nineteenth

century it was common to refer to all history since the fall of the

Roman Empire as ‘modern’. In universities ‘modern history’ is

still sometimes used in that generic sense (hence the subtitle of this

book). In most current contexts, however, ‘modern’ has a narrower focus. It is identified with industrialization and the coming

of mass society (in consumption, politics and culture) during the

nineteenth century. The intervening epochs between the ancient

and modern worlds are divided up between the medieval and early

modern periods, with the fifteenth century usually treated as the

bridge between the two. These terms are indispensable to historians, but they are paradoxical. In one sense they signal historical

difference (we are not ‘early modern’); but they also impose on the

people of the past labels that had no meaning for them. In other

words, they represent an act of interpretation, devised with the

benefit of hindsight – and patently so when historians argue about

the merits of different versions. It should also be noted that these

labels are Eurocentric, and that they cannot easily be applied to

histories in other parts of the world.17

Putting ‘otherness’ in context

Merely to register such instances of difference across the gulf

of time can give a salutary jolt to our modern assumptions. But

historians aim to go much further than this. Their purpose is

not only to uncover the strangeness of the past but to explain

it, and that means placing it in its historical setting. What may

Historical awareness 1 1

seem bizarre or disturbing to us becomes explicable – though not

necessarily less shocking – when interpreted as a manifestation

of a particular society. To recoil in horror from the grisly details

of witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe is certainly to

acknowledge the gulf that separates that time from ours, but this

is no more than a point of departure. The reason why we understand this phenomenon so much better now than we did thirty

years ago is that historians have positioned it in relation to beliefs

about the human body, the framework of popular religious belief

outside the Church, and the tensions in the position of women.18

Context is thus the second component of historical awareness.

The underlying principle of all historical work is that the subject

of our enquiry must not be wrenched from its setting. Just as we

would not pronounce on the significance of an archaeological

find without first recording carefully its precise location in the

site, so we must place everything we know about the past in its

contemporary context. This is an exacting standard, requiring a

formidable breadth of knowledge. It is often what distinguishes

the professional from the amateur. The enthusiast working on

family history in the local record office can, with a little technical

guidance, substantiate a sequence of births, marriages and deaths,

often extending over many generations; the amateur will come

to grief not over factual omissions but because of an inadequate

grasp of the relevant economic or social settings. To the social

historian, the history of the family is not fundamentally about

lines of descent, or even about plotting average family size down

the ages; it is about placing the family within the shifting contexts

of household production, health, religion, education and state

policy.19 Everything in the historian’s training militates against

presenting the past as a fixed single-track sequence of events;

context must be respected at every point.

The historical continuum

But history is more than a collection of snapshots of the past,

however vivid and richly contextualized. A third fundamental

aspect of historical awareness is the recognition of historical

process – the relationship between events over time which endows

them with more significance than if they were viewed in isolation.

For example, historians continue to be interested in the application of steam power to cotton spinning in the late eighteenth

1 2 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

century, not so much because it is a striking instance of technical

and entrepreneurial ingenuity but because it contributed so much

to what has come to be called the Industrial Revolution. Specific

annexations during the Scramble for Africa attract attention

because they formed part of a large-scale imperialism by the

European powers; and so on. Apart from their intrinsic interest,

what lies behind our concern with these instances of historical

process is the much bigger question of how we got from ‘then’

to ‘now’. This is the ‘big story’ to which so many more restricted

enquiries contribute. There may be a gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’,

but that gulf is actually composed of processes of growth, decay

and change which it is the business of historians to uncover.

Thus the fuller understanding we now have of witchcraft in the

sixteenth and seventeenth centuries begs the question of how this

form of belief came into decline and disrepute, to the point where

in Western society today it is subscribed to by only a very few selfconscious revivalists. Historical processes have sometimes been

marked by abrupt transitions when history, as it were, speeded

up – as in the case of the great revolutions. At the other extreme,

history may almost stand still, its flow only perceptible with the

hindsight of many centuries, as in patterns of land use or kinship

systems in many pre-industrial societies.20

If historical awareness rests on the notion of continuum, this

cuts both ways: just as nothing has remained the same in the

past, so too our world is the product of history. Every aspect of

our culture, behaviour and beliefs is the outcome of processes

over time. This is true not only of venerable institutions such

as the Christian Churches or the British monarchy, which are

visibly the outcome of centuries of evolution; it applies also to the

most familiar aspects of every day, such as marriage or personal

hygiene, which are much less often placed in a historical frame.

No human practice ever stands still; all demand a historical perspective which uncovers the dynamics of change over time. This is

one reason why it is so important that students should study large

swathes of history. At present in British schools and universities

there is so much emphasis on the virtues of documentary study

and narrow specialism that major historical trends tend to disappear from view.

Scramble for Africa

The term given to the

process by which, in

the 1880s and 1890s,

almost the entire African

continent was taken over

by European powers. The

term, which was used at

the time, reflects distaste

at the naked greed with

which the Europeans

jostled with each other

to grab vast areas of land

with no thought at all for

the welfare of the African

peoples who lived there.

kinship systems

Social systems based upon

the extended family.

venerable

Worthy of respect and

reverence, especially by

virtue of age and wisdom.

Historical awareness 1 3

III

Are professional historical awareness and popular

social memory in opposition?

In the sense understood by the historicists, then, historical awareness means respecting the autonomy of the past, and attempting

to reconstruct it in all its strangeness before applying its insights

to the present. The effect of this programme was to drive a bigger

wedge between elite and popular attitudes to the past, which

has persisted until today. Professional historians insist on a

lengthy immersion in the primary sources, a deliberate shedding

of present-day assumptions, and a rare degree of empathy and

imagination. Popular historical knowledge, on the other hand,

tends to a highly selective interest in the remains of the past, is

shot through with present-day assumptions, and is only incidentally concerned to understand the past on its own terms. Three

recurrent features of social memory have particularly significant

distorting effects.

The distorting effects of tradition

The first of these is respect for tradition. In many areas of life –

from the law courts to political associations, from churches to

sports clubs – belief and behaviour are governed by the weight

of precedent: an assumption that what was done in the past is

an authoritative guide to what should be done in the present.

Respect for tradition is sometimes confused with a sense of

history because it involves an affection for the past (or some of it)

and a desire to keep faith with it. But there is very little of the historical about appeals to tradition. Following the path laid down

by the ancestors has a great deal to be said for it in communities

that neither experience change nor expect it; for them present

and past can scarcely be distinguished. That is why respect for

tradition contributed so much to the cohesion of society among

small-scale pre-literate peoples – and why indeed they are sometimes referred to by anthropologists as ‘traditional societies’. But

such conditions no longer exist. In any society with a dynamic of

social or cultural change, as indicated by external trade or social

hierarchy or political institutions, an uncritical respect for tradition is counterproductive. It suppresses the historical changes

that have occurred in the intervening period; indeed it positively

autonomous

State of self-governing

independence.

1 4 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

discourages any attention to those changes and leads to the

continuance of outward forms that are really redundant – or

which we might say have been ‘overtaken by history’. One reason

for the famed stability of parliamentary government in Britain is

that Parliament itself enjoys the prestige of a 700-year-old history

as ‘the mother of parliaments’. This confers considerable legitimacy: one often hears it said that Parliament has stood the test

of time, that it has been the upholder of constitutional liberties,

and so on. But it also results in a reluctance to consider honestly

how Parliament actually functions. The ability of the House of

Commons to restrain the executive has declined sharply since

the Second World War, but so far the immense tradition-based

prestige of Parliament has blunted the demand for fundamental

reform. Such is the authority of tradition that ruling groups have

at various times invented it in order to bolster their prestige.

Almost all the ‘traditional’ ceremonial associated with the royal

family was improvised during the reign of Victoria, yet this

rooting in specific historical circumstances is just what the whole

notion of ‘tradition’ denies.21 In modern societies tradition may

hold a sentimental appeal, but to treat it as a guide to life tends

to lead to unfortunate results.

The State Opening of

Parliament. Much of

the ritual at this annual

ceremony has strong

historical resonance,

but this should not

be confused with a

professional, analytical

sense of history. Such

traditions can, in fact,

conjure up the past to

obscure the political reality

of the present.

(Getty Images/AFP)