The uses o f his t ory 3 3

II

The uses of history – an inventory of alternatives

Historical difference lies at the heart of the discipline’s claim to

be socially relevant. As a memory-bank of what is unfamiliar or

alien, history constitutes our most important cultural resource.

It offers a means – imperfect but indispensable – of entering into

the kind of experience that is simply not possible in our own

lives. Our sense of the heights to which human beings can attain,

and the depths to which they may sink, the resourcefulness they

may show in a crisis, the sensitivity they can show in responding

to each other’s needs – all these are nourished by knowing what

has been thought and done in the very different contexts of the

past. Art historians have long been familiar with the idea that

the creative achievements of the past are an inventory of assets

whose value may be realized by later generations – witness the

way that Western art has repeatedly reinvented and rejected the

classical tradition of Greece and Rome. But creative energy can

be drawn from the past in many other fields. History reminds

us that there is usually more than one way of interpreting a

predicament or responding to a situation, and that the choices

open to us are often more varied than we might have supposed.

Theodore Zeldin has written a magpie’s feast of a book, called An

Intimate History of Humanity (1994), ranging over such subjects

as loneliness, cooking, conversation and travel. His aim is not to

lay bare a pattern, still less to predict or prescribe, but to open

our eyes to the range of options that past experience places at

our disposal. Most historians probably have serious misgivings

about a fragmented exposition such as Zeldin’s, which lacks any

topographical or chronological coherence. But his rationale is not

unusual. Natalie Zemon Davis – a leading cultural historian of

early modern Europe – has said, ‘I let [the past] speak and I show

that things don’t have to be the way they are now . . . I want to

show that it could be different, that it was different, and that there

are alternatives’.4

 As the process of historical change unfolds, old

arguments or programmes may once more become relevant. This

has been a persistent theme in the work of the foremost historian

of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill:

Since capitalism, the Protestant ethic, Newtonian physics, so long

taken for granted by our civilization, are now at last coming under

classical tradition

‘Classical’ refers to the

ancient world of Greece

and Rome. Their ideas

and philosophy were

often revived by later

ages, notably during the

fifteenth and sixteenthcentury Renaissance and

again in the eighteenth

century.

Protestant ethic

Also known as the

Protestant work ethic.

First analysed in detail

by Max Weber in The

Protestant Ethic and the

Spirit of Capitalism (1905),

this held that Protestant

theology, with its stress

upon an individual

relationship with God (as

opposed to the Catholic

stress on the collective

community of the Church),

was uniquely well suited

to the development of an

independent, self-reliant

approach to work.

Newtonian physics

The understanding of the

operation of the natural

world developed by Sir

Isaac Newton (1642–

1727). Newton’s theories

were unchallenged until

the writings of Albert

Einstein (1879–1955).

3 4 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

general and widespread criticism, it is worth going back to consider

seriously and afresh the arguments of those who opposed them before

they had won universal acceptance.5

The point is not to find a precedent but to be alert to possibilities.

History is an inventory of alternatives, all the richer if research is

not conducted with half an eye to our immediate situation in the

present.

Lessons from the familiar

Of course not all the past is exotic. In practice our reaction to a

particular moment in the past is likely to be a mixture of estrangement and familiarity. Alongside features that have changed out of

all recognition, we may encounter patterns of thinking or behaviour that are immediately accessible to us. The juxtaposition of

these two is an important aspect of historical perspective, and

it is often the point at which the more thoughtful professional

scholar engages most directly with the claims of social relevance.

Peter Laslett’s path-breaking work on the history of the English

family offers a striking instance. Since the 1960s – beginning with

The World We Have Lost (1965) – he has written a succession

of books about the nature of early modern English society. He

emphasizes two general conclusions. First, the residential extended

family, which we fondly believe existed in the pre-modern world,

is a figment of our nostalgic imagination: our forebears lived in

nuclear households seldom spanning more than two generations.

Second, the care of the elderly was not notably more familybased than it is today, but the scale of the problem was vastly

different – indeed old age was not regarded as a problem at all

because few people survived for very long after their productive

life was over. Our view of the nuclear family is changed when we

recognize that it was not a response to industrialization but was

rooted in much earlier English practice. On the other hand, policy

towards the old will get nowhere if it is guided by past models:

‘Our situation remains irreducibly novel’, writes Laslett; ‘it calls

for invention rather than imitation’.6

 He does not trace the evolution of family forms over time – the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries are missed out entirely. His point is rather that the first

step to understanding is comparison across time, which throws

into relief what is transient and what is enduring about our

present circumstances.

The uses o f his t ory 3 5

The ability to distinguish between the enduring and the transient is vital to any realistic programme of social action in the

present. Consider, for example, another aspect of the history of

old people – state provision in the form of a pension. Historical

perspective is usually limited to the establishment of the Welfare

State after the Second World War, with perhaps a backward

glance to the introduction of old age pensions by Lloyd George

in 1908. But these antecedents do not explain why the level

of the pension has consistently been fixed at below subsistence level. Here, as Pat Thane explains, the relevant past is the

nineteenth-century Poor Law administration, accountable to local

rate-payers, and concerned to allocate the barest minimum to

every category of claimant.7

 History here is not being quarried

for ‘meaning’ to validate particular values but is treated as an

instrument for maximizing our control over our present situation. To be free is not to enjoy total freedom of action – that is a

Utopian dream – but to know how far one’s action and thought

are conditioned by the heritage of the past. This may sound like

a prescription for conservatism. But what it offers is a realistic

foundation for radical initiatives. We need to know when we are

pushing against an open door and when we are beating our heads

against a brick wall. Grasping what one historian has called ‘the

distinction between what is necessary and what is the product

merely of our own contingent arrangements’ offers important

practical dividends.8

Facing up to pain: history as therapy

The concept of historical difference has one other rather surprising application – as a means of grappling with aspects of the

very recent past that we might prefer to forget. It is a measure

of the almost incredible extremes of human behaviour over the

past century that a real effort of the imagination is now needed

to understand what happened under the Third Reich or in the

Soviet Union under Stalin (more recent instances include Idi

Amin’s Uganda and Pol Pot’s Cambodia). In cases such as these

the gulf between present and past is, as it were, compressed into

a single life-span. Those who lived through these experiences of

mass death, incarceration and forced removal suffer from a collective trauma. The line of least resistance may be to leave the past

alone, and in the Soviet Union ‘forgetting’ was the official line for

Idi Amin (1925–2003)

General Amin seized power

in Uganda in 1971 in a

military coup. He proved

a brutal dictator and

massacred large numbers

of his own people. He

expelled Uganda’s entire

Asian population and

was finally overthrown

by a military invasion by

neighbouring Tanzania in

1979.

Pol Pot (1925–1998)

Communist leader of

Cambodia 1975–9. He

instituted a reign of terror

in which the entire urban

population was forced

into the countryside and

some two million people

were massacred. He was

overthrown by an invasion

from neighbouring

Vietnam.

3 6 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

most of the period between the death of Stalin and the collapse

of communism. Individuals did not forget, but there was no way

in which their pain could be shared or publicly marked. A nation

that cannot face up to its past will be gravely handicapped in the

future. This understanding was central to the policy of glasnost

(‘openness’) proclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s.

He realized how crippling the psychological burden of the past

was as long as it remained buried. After some initial hesitation,

he opened up the archives to historians and allowed the Soviet

people to acknowledge publicly the terrible sufferings of the Stalin

era. Whatever else happens in Russia in the future, that collective

owning of the past cannot be undone. James Joll saw this kind of

painful engagement with the recent past in therapeutic terms:

Just as the psycho-analyst helps us to face the world by showing us

how to face the truth about our own motives and our own personal

past, so the contemporary historian helps us to face the present and

the future by enabling us to understand the forces, however shocking,

which have made our world and our society what it is.9

Historical difference provides an indispensable perspective on the

present, whether as an inventory of experience, as evidence of the

transience of our own time, or as a reminder of the deeply alien

elements in our recent past.

III

Understanding behaviour in its context

The practical applications of historical context are much less

likely to make the headlines, but they are no less important. As

explained in Chapter 1, the discipline of context springs from

the historian’s conviction that a sense of the whole must always

inform our understanding of the parts. Even when historians

write about specialized topics in economic or intellectual history,

they should respect this principle, and they open themselves to

major criticism if they fail to do so. The same principle informs

the practice of social anthropology, where fieldwork is concerned

as much with the entire social structure or cultural system as with

particular rituals or beliefs. The problem both history and anthropology face is how to interpret behaviour that may be founded

on quite different premises from our own. It would, for example,

be a great mistake to suppose that commercial transactions in

social anthropology

Academic discipline that

analyses small-scale

societies by the techniques

of participant observation.

Mikhail Gorbachev

(1931–)

Soviet leader 1985–91.

Gorbachev instituted

the policy of glasnost

(openness) in discussing

the failures of the

Soviet system, and

of fundamental

reconstruction

(perestroika) of Soviet

society. This precipitated

the collapse of the Soviet

Union, and Gorbachev

resigned in the aftermath

of an attempted coup in

1991.

The uses o f his t ory 3 7

thirteenth-century England – or twentieth-century Polynesia –

were guided solely by what we define as economic rationality;

looking at these societies as wholes will give us a grasp of how

trade and exchange were informed by religion, social morality

and social hierarchy (to specify only the most likely dimensions).

The reason why this mode of thinking has contemporary application is not, of course, that our own society is alien or ‘different’.

Rather, the problem today is the baffling complexity of society,

which leads us to place exaggerated faith in specialist expertise,

without proper regard to the wider picture. E.J. Hobsbawm

deplores how modern policy-making and planning are in thrall to

‘a model of scientism and technical manipulation’.10 This is more

than prejudice born of a demarcation dispute between arts and

sciences (Hobsbawm himself has always been respectful of science

and technology). The argument here is that the technical approach

to social and political problems compartmentalizes human experience into boxes marked ‘economics’, ‘social policy’ and so on,

each with its own technical lore, whereas what is really required

is an openness to the way in which human experience constantly

breaks out of these categories.

The lateral links between different aspects of society are much

easier to discern with the benefit of hindsight. In our own time it

is clearly harder to spot the connections, given our lack of detachment and our lack of hindsight. But at the very least a historical

training should encourage a less blinkered approach to current

problems. The Gulf War in 1991 illustrates this point – if in a

regrettably negative way. The history of Western imperialism has

been the subject of some highly sophisticated analysis over the

past forty years. Historians do not see the process of European

expansion merely as an expression of maritime flair and technical

superiority. They link it to economic structures, patterns of consumption and international relations – and increasingly to codes

of masculinity and constructions of racial difference as well. All

too little of this kind of contextualization was applied by the

media to the escalation of conflict in the Gulf. For most commentators it was hardly seen outside the frame of international

law and the politics of oil. Historians can claim with some justice

to be specialists in lateral thinking, and this has underpinned

their traditional claim to train graduates for management and the

civil service, where the ability to think beyond the boundaries of

particular technical perspectives is at a premium. A similar case

Gulf War

In 1990 President Saddam

Hussain of Iraq invaded

and annexed the small

oil-rich kingdom of

Kuwait. The invasion

was condemned by the

United Nations, and the

Iraqis were forced out of

Kuwait the following year

by a counter-invasion

by a broad international

coalition led by the United

States.

3 8 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

can be made in relation to the education of the participating

citizen, who inevitably approaches most public issues as a nonspecialist.11

Does history repeat itself?

Context is also the principle that historians invoke against the

common, but mistaken, belief that history repeats itself. Human

beings strive to learn from their mistakes and successes in their

collective life just as they do in everyday individual experience.

Historical biography is said to feature prominently in the leisure

reading of British politicians. Indeed a few of them have written distinguished works of this kind – Winston Churchill and Roy Jenkins,

for example.12 That politicians have a lively interest in the historical

context in which posterity will judge their own standing is only

part of the explanation. The real reason for their study of history

is that politicians expect to find a guide to their conduct – in the

form not of moral example but of practical lessons in public affairs.

This approach to history has a long pedigree. It was particularly

pronounced during the Renaissance, when the record of classical

antiquity was treated as a storehouse of moral example and practical lessons in statecraft. Machiavelli’s prescriptions for his native

Florence and his famous political maxims in The Prince (1513)

were both based on Roman precedent. He was justly rebuked by his

younger contemporary, the historian Francesco Guicciardini:

How wrong it is to cite the Romans at every turn. For any

comparison to be valid, it would be necessary to have a city with

conditions like theirs, and then to govern it according to their

example. In the case of a city with different qualities, the comparison

is as much out of order as it would be to expect a jackass to race like

a horse.13

Guicciardini put his finger on the principal objection to the citing

of precedent, that it usually shows scant regard for historical

context. For the precedent to be valid, the same conditions would

have to prevail, but the result of the passage of time is that what

looks like an old problem or a familiar opportunity requires a different analysis because the attendant circumstances have changed.

The gulf that separates us from all previous ages renders the citing

of precedents from the distant past a fruitless enterprise.

Only in the case of the recent past have historians seriously

attempted to draw on historical analogies, on the grounds that

Winston Churchill

(1874–1965)

As well as his multivolume histories of the

two World Wars, Churchill

also wrote a detailed

biography of his famous

ancestor, John Churchill,

Duke of Marlborough.

Roy Jenkins

(1920–2003)

Served as Home Secretary

and Chancellor of the

Exchequer under the

Labour Prime Ministers

Wilson and Callaghan, as

President of the European

Commission, and was

one of the founders of

the short-lived Social

Democratic Party (SDP).

He also found time to

write critically acclaimed

biographies of Gladstone

and Churchill.

Machiavelli (1469–1527)

Niccolò Machiavelli,

Florentine statesman

and philosopher. When

Florence overthrew the

ruling Medici dynasty and

declared itself a republic

in 1493 Machiavelli served

the new regime, but he

was arrested and tortured

when the Medici returned.

Machiavelli is best known

for his book of advice for

rulers, The Prince, which

suggests that the most

successful rulers should

know how to deceive and

dissemble. It earned him a

quite unjust reputation as

a promoter of unprincipled

tyranny.

The uses o f his t ory 3 9

much of the context may remain essentially the same over a short

period and that the changes which have occurred are comparatively well documented. During the later stages of the Cold War

there was something of a vogue for ‘applied’ history of this kind.14

But even here the task is a daunting one. Consider the case of the

arms race. The decade before the Second World War is commonly

regarded as an object lesson in the dangers of military weakness

and of appeasing an aggressive power. But one could equally cite

the precedent of the First World War, one of whose causes was

the relentless escalation in armaments from the 1890s onwards.

Which precedent is valid? The answer must be: neither as it

stands. Even within the time-span of a hundred years, history does

not repeat itself. No one historical situation has been, or ever can

be, repeated in every particular. If an event or tendency recurs, as

the arms race has done, it is as a result of a unique combination

of circumstances, and the strategies we adopt must have regard

primarily to those circumstances.15 The key historicist notion of

the ‘otherness’ of the past is not suspended merely because we

stand at only two or three generations’ distance from our object

of study. As Hobsbawm has reminded us, the atmosphere of the

1930s (through which he lived) was utterly different from today’s,

which makes any comparison between the original Nazis and their

imitators today pretty pointless.16 At the same time, the drawing

of historical analogies, often half consciously, is a habitual and

unavoidable part of human reasoning to which people in public

life are especially prone. It is not necessarily futile, provided we

do not look for a perfect fit between past and present, or treat

precedent as grounds for closing critical debate about the options

available now.

The truth that history never repeats itself also limits the confidence with which historians can predict. However probable it may

seem that a recurrence of this or that factor will result in a familiar

outcome, the constant process of historical change means that the

future will always be partly shaped by additional factors that we

cannot predict and whose bearing on the problem in hand no one

could have suspected. Moreover, when people do perceive their

situation as ‘history repeating itself’, their actions will be affected

by their knowledge of what happened the first time. As E.H.

Carr pointed out, historical precedent gives us some insight into

what kind of conditions make for a revolution, but whether and

when the revolution breaks out in a specific instance will depend

4 0 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

on ‘the occurrence of unique events, which cannot themselves be

predicted’.17 The dismal record of well-informed intelligent people

who have made false predictions, or have failed to predict what

with hindsight seems obvious, does however suggest one lesson

of history: that control of the future is an illusion, and that living

with uncertainty is part of the human condition.

IV

The way ahead: history and sequential prediction

Process – the third principle of historicism – is equally productive

of insights into the present day. Identifying a process does not

mean that we agree with it, or believe that it made for a better

world. But it may help to explain our world. Situating ourselves

in a trajectory that is still unfolding gives us some purchase on

the future and allows a measure of forward planning. In fact

this mode of historical thinking is deeply rooted in our political

culture. As voters and citizens, almost instinctively, we interpret

the world around us in terms of historical process. Much of the

South Africa’s Truth

and Reconciliation

Commission provided a

forum where those who

had committed crimes in

the name of apartheid

could admit openly what

they had done and receive

forgiveness from their

victims. This process of

facing up to a painful

recent past proved helpful

in allowing South Africans

to work together to face

the future.

(Topfoto/Image Works)

The uses o f his t ory 4 1

time our assumptions are not grounded in historical reality; they

may amount to little more than wishful thinking projected backwards. But if conclusions about historical process are based on

careful research, they can yield modest but useful predictions.

We might call these sequential predictions, in order to distinguish

them from the discredited repetitive or recurrent variety. These

prevailing beliefs about historical process need to be brought into

the light of day, tested against the historical record, and if necessary replaced by a more accurate perspective.

One prediction based on historical process which has stood the

test of time concerns the political destiny of South Africa. During

the 1960s, when most colonies in tropical Africa were securing

their political independence, it was widely assumed that majority

rule would shortly come about in South Africa too. Despite the

weight of white oppression, mass nationalism was visibly the

outcome of a process that dated back to the foundation of the

African National Congress in 1912, and that had been marked

by a growing sophistication in both political discourse and techniques of mass mobilization. Moreover, the South African case

could be seen as part of a worldwide phenomenon of anti-colonial

nationalism which had been building up since the late nineteenth

century. In that sense history might be said to be ‘on the side’ of

African nationalism in South Africa. What could not be predicted

was the form of the succeeding political order, and the manner in

which it would be achieved, whether by revolution from below

or by devolution from above: those were matters of detail which

only the future could divulge. But the direction in which the historical process was unfolding in South Africa seemed clear. The

time-scale turned out to be more extended than had been supposed – thus demonstrating the crab-like way in which a historical

process may unfold – but the general prediction was accurate

enough.18

Sometimes identifying the valid and appropriate historical

process is complicated by the presence of more than one possible trajectory. Take the current debate about the ‘breakdown’

of the family. Processual thinking is certainly very evident in the

way the media handle this issue. The relevant process is generally

seen to be the decline of personal morality, aided and abetted by

misguided legislation, beginning with the Matrimonial Causes

Act of 1857, which set in train the liberalization of divorce.19

Historians, on the other hand, bring into play a much more

African National

Congress

The black South African

political party, founded in

1912, which led resistance

to apartheid.

Matrimonial Causes Act

This act of 1857 enabled

couples to seek divorce

through the newly

created divorce courts.

Previously, it had only

been obtainable through

a specially passed Act of

Parliament.

4 2 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

fundamental and long-term process, namely the changing role

of the home in production. Some 250 years ago most work was

done in or adjacent to the home. In selecting a mate, prospective

spouses were influenced as much by the home-making and breadwinning skills of their partners as by their personal attractions;

the ending of a marriage through separation or desertion meant

the end of a productive unit, and for this reason most marriages

endured until death. The Industrial Revolution changed all this:

the growth of the factory (and other large firms) meant that most

production no longer took place in a domestic setting, and control

over domestic dependants ceased to be economically central. Now

that personal fulfilment is by far the most compelling rationale

of marriage, there is far less reason for people to stay in family

relationships that no longer bring them happiness. The decline

of the productive household, rather than a collapse of individual

morality, would seem to be the critical historical process involved

here; and given that the separation of work from home shows

little sign of being reversed, it is a reasonable prediction that our

society will continue to experience a comparatively high rate of

marital breakdown.20

Questioning assumptions

But the most important role of processual thinking is in offering

an alternative to the assumptions of permanence and timelessness that underpin so many social identities. As we saw in the

last chapter, nations tend to imagine themselves as unchanged

by the vicissitudes of time. The fallacy of essentialism does not

hold up well against historical research. ‘British’, for example,

was in the eighteenth century a newly minted category to take

account of the recent Union of Scotland and England, and it was

built on the exclusion of Roman Catholics and the French. At

the beginning of the twenty-first century, the cultural meaning of

Britishness is probably less certain than it has ever been, while the

British state seems set for disintegration as Scotland edges closer

to independence.21 In the same way, any notion of what it means

to be German has to come to terms not only with the multitude of

states under which most Germans lived until the mid-nineteenth

century but also with the political calculations that led to the

exclusion of many German-speaking lands (notably Austria) from

the German Empire in 1871. A historical perspective requires us

Union of Scotland and

England

The Act of Union between

England and Scotland was

passed by both countries’

Parliaments in 1707.

Although there were

economic advantages to

both sides, the English

wanted it primarily to

prevent the Catholic

pretender, Prince James

Edward Stuart, becoming

king of Scotland. The act

only passed through the

Scottish Parliament with

the help of wholesale

bribery.

The uses o f his t ory 4 3

to abandon the idea that nations are organic; it is nearer the truth

to regard them, in the words of an influential text, as ‘imagined

communities’.22

The term ‘race’ raises similar problems. In its modern form,

‘race’ was originally developed as a category that justified the

growing ascendancy of the West over other peoples. It treated as

fixed and biologically determined what is socially constructed,

and it has been most strongly developed as a means of reinforcing

political and economic control over subordinate groups (as in

colonial Africa and Nazi Germany). The way in which an earlier

generation of historians wrote about Western global expansion

strongly implied that the ‘native’ peoples at the receiving end

were inferior both in their indigenous culture and in their capacity

to assimilate Western techniques; and these negative stereotypes

served in turn to sustain a flattering self-image of the British – or

French or German – ‘race’. More recently, minorities with a strong

ethnic identity have constructed what might be called a ‘reverse

discourse’; they too embrace the concept of ‘race’, because the

term brings biological descent and culture together in a powerful

amalgam that maximizes group cohesion and emphasizes distance

from other groups. Among blacks in America and Britain there is

today rising support for Afrocentrism – the belief in an absolute

sense of ethnic difference and in the transmission of an authentic

cultural tradition from Africa to blacks of the modern diaspora.

A stress on common ancestry and a downplaying of outside influences lead to a kind of ‘cultural insiderism’. The appropriate

response is to point out that no nation has ever been ethnically

homogeneous and to stress the formative experience of slavery

and other forms of culture contact between black and white in

Europe and the New World. The purpose of historical work is not

to undermine black identity but to anchor it in a real past instead

of a mythical construction. The outcome is likely to bear a rather

closer relation to the circumstances in which black and white

people live today. The formation of racial and national identities

is never a once-and-for-all event, but a continuous and contingent

process.23

Challenging notions of ‘natural’

What is true of the nation applies still more to the ‘natural’.

When unwelcome changes in our social arrangements are afoot,

diaspora

The dispersal of a people

over a wide area.

homogeneous

All of the same sort.

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

we often express our attachment to what is being replaced by

asserting that it has always been there – that what is changing is

not one particular phase with a limited time-span but something

traditional, or fundamental, or ‘natural’. This is especially true of

gender. The ‘traditional’ role of women looks less and less tenable

when we read about the entrepreneurial widow of seventeenthcentury England, or the groundswell of women’s organizations

that worked for the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century,

well ahead of the agitation for women’s suffrage.24 The new

history of men and masculinity is equally unsettling of received

truths. Traditional fatherhood is often thought to have combined

an emotionally hands-off approach with a distinctly hands-on

approach to family discipline. That is usually what is meant by

‘Victorian’ fatherhood. But in so far as the Victorians kept their

distance from their children and meted out harsh punishments

to them, this was a reaction against the past, rather than the

climax of a long tradition. The celebrated political journalist

William Cobbett recalled that his time as a young father was

spent ‘between the pen and the baby’; he remembered how he had

fed and put his babies to sleep ‘hundreds of times, though there

were servants to whom the task might have been transferred’.25

Cobbett was writing in 1830, just when the tide was beginning to

turn against the close paternal involvement with young children

that had been so common when he was a young man thirty years

before. It makes a difference now to know that a fully engaged

fatherhood today is not some Utopian fantasy but a pattern that

has existed within English culture in the comparatively recent

past. In fact codes of fatherhood have been in continuous flux

throughout the past 200 years, and probably earlier.26 One of the

most salutary influences on the practice of history in recent years

has been the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault.

His cardinal principle was that no aspect of human culture is

God-given or lies outside history, and in his historical work he

plotted some of the major shifts that have occurred in the human

experience of sexuality, sickness and insanity. In selecting major

themes of this kind in pursuit of what he called ‘an archaeology

of the present’, Foucault achieved an influence that extended far

beyond academia.27

entrepreneurial widow

We now know that many

widows in seventeenth

and eighteenth-century

England ran their own

businesses, and that it

was by no means unusual

for women to assume

positions of influence

that historians had long

assumed were reserved

for men.

abolition of slavery

The campaign for the

abolition first of the

transatlantic slave trade,

then of slavery itself, and

later of the internal African

slave trade, constituted

one of the most important

and influential lobbying

movements of the

nineteenth century.

Church groups and women

played a prominent role in

the process on both sides

of the Atlantic.

The uses o f his t ory 4 5

V

History for its own sake?

Granted, then, that history has a varied and significant practical

relevance, the question remains whether this should influence

the way in which historians set about their work. Prior to the

Rankean revolution, this question could hardly have arisen.

Historians believed what their audience assumed, that a historical

education offered a training for citizens and statesmen alike.

They took it for granted that history furnished the basis for a

rational analysis of politics; indeed, many of the best historians,

from Guicciardini in the sixteenth century to Macaulay in the

nineteenth, were active in public life. All this was changed by the

professionalization of history. By the late nineteenth century the

subject featured prominently in the university curriculum all over

Europe, controlled by a new breed of historians whose careers

were largely confined to academic life. Their subject’s traditional

claim to offer practical guidance seemed irrelevant – almost an

embarrassment. They adhered strictly to the central tenet of historicism, that history should be studied for its own sake, without

paying much attention to the practical benefits that could accrue

from this approach. This attitude has been very influential with

the historical profession in Britain. A generation of conservative

historians was inspired by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott,

who deplored what he called the ‘practical attitude to the past;’

he regarded it as ‘the chief undefeated enemy of “history”’.28 G.R.

Elton was an outspoken champion of the prevailing orthodoxy:

Teachers of history must set their faces against the necessarily

ignorant demands of ‘society’ ... for immediate applicability. They

need to recall that the ‘usefulness’ of historical studies lies hardly at

all in the knowledge they purvey and in the understanding of specific

present problems from their prehistory; it lies much more in the fact

that they produce standards of judgement and powers of reasoning

which they alone develop, which arise from their very essence, and

which are unusually clear-headed, balanced and compassionate.29

Apart from providing an intellectual training, the study of history

is represented as a personal pursuit which at most enables the

individual to achieve some self-awareness by stepping outside his

or her immediate experience; in the austere formulation of V.H.

Galbraith, ‘the study of history is a personal matter, in which

Macaulay (1800–59)

Thomas Babington

Macaulay, British historian,

poet and administrator.

As well as writing a bestselling History of England,

Macaulay served on the

Council of the GovernorGeneral of India, as MP

for Edinburgh, and as

Secretary at War in the

government of Lord

Melbourne.

4 6 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

the activity is generally more valuable than the result’.30 Neither

of these justifications is peculiar to history: training the mind is

part of all academic disciplines worth the name, while the claim

to enlarge the individual’s experience can be argued with equal, if

not greater, conviction by teachers of literature.

It should be noted that there was a political context to this

fastidious recoil from ‘relevance’. Both Elton and Galbraith had in

mind the excesses of propaganda to which relevant history had led

under the regimes of Hitler and Stalin (Elton was a refugee from

Nazi Germany): Nazi and Soviet historians were state employees,

expected to repeat crude party dogma about the past. In Europe

totalitarian excesses on that scale are a thing of the past, but

in many countries historical scholarship is still vulnerable to

political pressure, especially of a nationalist kind. Against that

background, scholarly detachment can seem virtuous. As Peter

Mandler has suggested, ‘historians shy away from considering

the uses of their discipline for fear of stirring up dying chauvinist

embers’.31

One positive result of ‘history for its own sake’ is a wholehearted commitment to the re-creation or resurrection of the past

in every material and mental dimension. There are historians

for whom a fascination with the past as it was really lived and

experienced overrides all other considerations. A notable case was

Richard Cobb, a leading historian of the French Revolution:

The historian should, above all, be endlessly inquisitive and prying,

constantly attempting to force the privacy of others, and to cross

the frontiers of class, nationality, generation, period, and sex. His

principal aim is to make the dead live. And, like the American

‘mortician’, he may allow himself a few artifices of the trade: a touch

of rouge here, a pencil-stroke there, a little cotton wool in the cheeks,

to make the operation more convincing.32 [emphasis added]

Cobb’s marvellously evocative studies of the seamy side of life in

revolutionary France, notably Death in Paris (1978), certainly vindicate his approach. Probably all historians can trace their vocation

back to a curiosity about the past for its own sake, often aroused in

childhood by the visible relics of the past around them. And there

will always, one hopes, be historians like Cobb with special gifts

in the re-creation of the past. But it is quite wrong to suppose that

historians in general should be content with this. For most of them

it is the essential preliminary to explaining the past. Their purpose

Death in Paris

Richard Cobb (1917–96)

was a colourful British

authority on the history

of France. Death in

Paris gives a glimpse

of the social history of

nineteenth-century Paris

through a collection of

police records relating to

dead bodies fished out of

the Seine.

The uses o f his t ory 4 7

is to identify trends, to analyse causes and consequences – in short

to interpret history as a process and not just as a series of brightly

coloured lantern-slides. Thus historians of the English Revolution

approach their work with a view to discovering not only what

happened in the Civil War or what it felt like to be a soldier in the

New Model Army but also why the war occurred and what changes

it brought about in the nature of English politics and society. Or

to take a more distant example: the events of the Anglo-Zulu War

of 1879, which saw the dissolution of the Zulu kingdom and the

destruction of an entire British regiment, were tragic enough; but

a whole other dimension of irony and pathos is revealed when

we consider the betrayals, the mutual misunderstandings and

the culture conflict that set the two sides on a collision course.33

This represents the other side of historicism. Without it, history’s

practical explanatory functions could not be fulfilled at all. (The

distinction between re-creation and explanation is further explored

in Chapter 6.)

The rejection of relevance

However, it is perfectly possible for historical explanation to be

pursued without reference to the claims of social relevance, and

this, rather than the strictly ‘resurrectionist’ position, represents

the mainstream academic view. For explanation, too, can be

sought ‘for its own sake’. Topics such as the origins of the First

World War or the social welfare provision of the Victorians can

be tackled in an entirely self-contained way without any recognition that they might have a bearing on the choices available to

us today. Academic syllabuses are sometimes drawn up on the

assumption that history consists of a number of core themes and

episodes of permanent significance which, because they have

generated extensive research and debate, offer the best material

for training the intellect. New areas of study such as the history

of Africa or the history of the family are dismissed as passing

fancies peripheral to ‘real history’. Commenting on the gradual

retreat from big, contentious topics in university teaching, David

Cannadine writes:

The belief that history provides an education, that it helps

us understand ourselves in time, or even that it explains

something of how the present world came into being, has all

but vanished.34

New Model Army

The highly trained

professional army created

by Parliament during the

English Civil Wars (1642–

9). It is usually credited

with having turned the

tide of the war against

King Charles I.

Anglo-Zulu War

Also known as the Zulu

War (1879). It began with

a completely unprovoked

British military invasion of

Zululand in South Africa,

after which an entire

British army column was

wiped out by the Zulu at

Isandhlwana. In the end,

superior technology and

firepower enabled the

British to defeat the Zulu.