17. Trafalgar Square 1961: sit-down demonstration against nuclear arms (Daily Herald, 18 September 1961)
18. Trafalgar Square 1961: historian among policemen
19. A married couple: Marlene and EH (Castelgiuliano, 1971)
20. Before the era of computers (1970s)
SOME FRIENDS: 21. (above left) Georg Eisler: Comintern child, painter, wit
22. (above right) Pierre Bourdieu: how to understand (and criticize) societies
23. (below left) Ralph Gleason: ‘Dizzy Gillespie for President!’
24. (below right) Clemens Heller: music-lover and impresario of minds
25. Latin America: with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brasilia, Brazil 1995)
26. Latin America: Hortensia Allende, widow of Salvador Allende (Santiago, Chile 1998)
27. Latin America: lecturing under Orozco murals (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1997)
28. Wales: above Llyn, Arddy, Gwynedd (1980s)
29. Wales: in Gwenddwr, Powys (1990s)
30. Looking back on the Cold War: EH and Markus Wolf in discussion on Dutch television
31. An old historian
The rebel Germans, a postwar generation, were largely formed by their studies in Britain and the USA, and tended to Max Weber rather than Marx, as against the home-grown Marxism of the British Communist Party Historians’ Group. Yet we all recognized each other as allies. Past & Present acknowledged the inspiration of Annales in the first paragraph of its first issue. For Annales Jacques Le Goff (‘a reader from the beginning, an admirer, a friend, almost (if I may say so) a secret lover’ 5) compared Past & Present with his journal, while the chief of the new Germans appears to regard ‘the astonishing effect of the Marxist historians’ generation’ as the main factor behind ‘the global impact of English historiography since the 1960s’.6
At this stage history in the USA (as distinct from the US social sciences) still played a relatively minor international role. In fact, there was little real contact between it and the old world, except in fields of traditional interest to US Europeanists, such as the French Revolution, and in the fields brought with them from Europe by the German exiles after 1933. But Europeanists were a minority, distrusted as cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguers by the great bulk of generally monoglot historians whose subject was the history of the USA, a subject which, as treated by most of them, had very little in common with what historians elsewhere were doing. Only slavery was a subject that aroused international interest, but the younger historians of this subject who were to make a mark abroad were very untypical of the profession in the fifties and sixties. They included several young postwar members of the American Communist Party – Herb Gutman, the brilliant Gene Genovese and the former national secretary of the Young Communist League and subsequent Nobel Prize laureate, the endlessly ingenious Bob Fogel.
Curiously enough, this was true even of so patently global a subject as economic history, which may explain why, when an international association was founded in this field, it was basically run as an Anglo-French condominium of Braudel and Postan. Stateside historical innovations – economic history in terms of businessmen (‘entrepreneurial’ history) in the 1950s, ‘psychohistory’ (that is Freudian interpretations of historical figures) and the much more dramatic ‘cliometrics’ (history as retrospective and often imaginary econometrics) in the 1960s – found it hard to cross the Atlantic. Not until 1975 was the quinquennial World Congress of Historical Sciences held in the USA, presumably on diplomatic grounds, to balance the Moscow session of 1970.
On the whole, in the thirty years following the Second World War the historical traditionalists were fighting a rearguard engagement in a losing battle against the advancing modernists in most western countries where history flourished freely. Perhaps they would have defended themselves more effectively if the garrison of the central stronghold of traditional historical scholarship, Germany, had not been put out of action by its association with National Socialism. (The situation of historians in communist countries was not comparable to the West, but, as it happened, the Marxism to which they were officially and sometimes genuinely committed fitted in with the western modernizers more than with traditionalist, mainly nationalist, history in their own countries.) In 1970 a rather optimistic, not to say triumphalist, meeting was organized by the American journal Daedalus to survey the state of history. Except for the (defensive) spokesmen for political and military history, the gathering was dominated by the modernizers – British, French and, among the under-forties, American.7 By that time a common flag had been found for the far from homogeneous popular front of the innovators: ‘social history’. It fitted in with the political radicalization of the dramatically expanding student population of the 1960s. The term was vague, sometimes misleading, but as I wrote at the time, noting the ‘remarkably flourishing state of the field’: ‘It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it.’8
There was some cause for satisfaction. Not least because, somewhat unexpectedly, the Cold War had not substantially interfered with developments in history. Indeed, it is surprising how little it penetrated the world of historiography, except, obviously, on such matters as the history of Russia and the USSR. Capitalism and the Historians, a volume published in the 1940s under the auspices of Friedrich von Hayek, argued that historians who pointed out the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution on the poor were systematically biased against the benefits of the free enterprise system. This led to a lively polemic which entertained students, the so-called ‘Standard-of-Living Debate’ when the left (i.e. myself, speaking for the communist historians) responded, but it cannot be said that this debate, which has continued at intervals ever since, was subsequently conducted on ideological lines. Explosive subjects such as Russia, especially in the twentieth century, and the history of communism were, of course, ideological battlefields, although the debate was one-sided, since the orthodoxies enforced in the Soviet Empire crippled both their historians and their interpretations. If one was a serious Soviet historian, the best thing was to stick to the history of the ancient East and the Middle Ages, although it was touching to see how the modernists rushed to say (within the constraints of the permissible) what they knew to be true every time the window seemed to be slightly opened – as in 1956 and in the early 1960s. I myself became essentially a nineteenth-century historian, because I soon discovered – actually in the course of an aborted project of the CP Historians’ Group to write a history of the British labour movement – that, given the strong official Party and Soviet views about the twentieth century, one could not write about anything later than 1917 without the likelihood of being denounced as a political heretic. I was ready to write about the century in a political or public capacity, but not as a professional historian. My history finished at Sarajevo in June 1914.
Luckily I abstained from twentieth-century history until it was almost over, but it went against the grain of the historiographical movement, which was away from the remote past and towards the present. Until well past 1945 ‘real’ history finished, at the latest, in 1914 after which the immediate past reverted to chronicle, journalism or contemporary commentary. Indeed, since the archives remained closed in Britain for several decades, it simply could not be written to the standards of traditional historians. In most countries, even the nineteenth century had not yet been fully absorbed by academic history departments, except by the economic historians. The great historiographical debates had not been about it, although political radicalism, not least in the form of a new passion for labour history, now drew attention to an era which had been seriously neglected by historians in a number of countries. Even in Britain, until the 1960s politicians, serious journalists, relatives and essayists wrote the biographies of the great figures of Victorian Britain, not professors. Nevertheless, the gap between past and present narrowed, perhaps because so many professional historians had actually been involved in the
Second World War.
At the same time, academic history in the western sense was still largely confined to the First and Second worlds and Japan. Broadly speaking, outside these regions it did not exist, did not flourish, or continued along traditional lines, except for minorities of Marxists and (as in parts of Latin America) patches of modernist Parisian influence. Moreover, most academic history was overwhelmingly Eurocentric, or – in the term preferred in the USA – concerned with ‘Western Civilization’. The globe entered Cambridge history only as ‘The Expansion of Europe’. With rare exceptions such as Charles Boxer it was not historians but geographers, anthropologists and language specialists, as well naturally as imperial administrators, who occupied themselves with ‘non-western’ affairs. Before the war extra-European history as such interested few historians except (by reason of their anti-imperialism) the Marxists and non-European historians such as the Japanese, who were then also under strong Marxist influence. In Cambridge a succession of historians convened the so-called ‘colonial group’ of the student Communist Party (overwhelmingly South Asians). The Canadian E. H. Norman, later a diplomat and pioneer historian of modern Japan who committed suicide in 1957 under pressure from the US witch-hunters, was followed by my old friend V. G. (Victor) Kiernan, a man of disarming charm and universal, elegant erudition about all continents who also wrote on the poet Horace and translated Urdu poetry, by the Canadian Harry Ferns, whose field was Argentina and who became extremely conservative in later years, and by the brilliant, original and self-destructive Jack Gallagher, who never got up before midday and later occupied the chairs of imperial history in both Oxford and Cambridge. My own interest in extra-European history also derives from my association with that group.
Extra-western history came into its own with the decolonization of the old empires and the simultaneous rise of the USA as a world power. World history as the history of the globe emerged in the 1960s, with the obvious progress of globalization. Historians from the Third World, notably a group of brilliant Indians, spun off from the local schools of Marxist debate, gained worldwide recognition only in the 1990s. The interests of world empire as well as the extraordinary resources available to US universities made the USA the centre of the new post-Eurocentric world history and, incidentally, transformed its history textbooks and journals. How could historical perspectives remain the same? Fidel Castro brought about the systematic development of Latin American studies in Britain in the early 1960s. Indeed we understood at the time that it was influenced by suggestions from President Kennedy’s Washington that it would be convenient to supplement locally distrusted North American experts on this region with the more acceptable Europeans. (If so, the project misfired. Latin American history overwhelmingly attracted young radicals.) However, the histories of Europe, the USA and the rest of the world remained separate from each other – their publics coexisting but barely touching. History remains, alas, primarily a series of niche markets for both writers and readers. In my generation only a handful of historians has tried to integrate them in a comprehensive world history. This was partly because of the almost total failure, largely for institutional and linguistic reasons, of history to emancipate itself from the framework of the nation-state. Looking back, this provincialism was probably the major weakness of the subject in my lifetime.
Nevertheless, around 1970 it seemed reasonable to suppose that the war for the modernization of historiography that had begun in the 1890s had been won. The main railway network along which the trains of historiography would roll had been built. Not that the modernizers, at least outside the French enemies of the ‘history of events’, necessarily proposed a hegemony of economic and social history, or even a relegation of political history, let alone the history of ideas and culture. The modernizers were far from reductionists. Though they believed that history must explain and generalize, they knew it was not like the natural sciences. However, they believed that history had a comprehensive project, whether it was Braudel’s ‘total’ or ‘global history, integrating the contributions of all the sciences of man’, or, if I may quote my own definition, of ‘what history in the broadest sense is about: how and why Homo sapiens got from the palaeolithic to the nuclear era’.9 Yet within a few years the scene had changed utterly. As Braudel himself complained about the Annales he no longer directed in the 1970s, the sense of priorities, the distinction between significance and triviality, which was essential to the old project, had gone. Just so old hands from Past & Present complained about Raphael Samuel’s new History Workshop Journal (the last remote offspring of the old CP Historians’ Group), that it discovered all sorts of corners of the past interesting to enthusiasts, but showed no sign of wanting to ask questions about them. History as the exploration of an objectively recoverable past had not yet been challenged. That only came with the fashion for ‘postmodernism’, a term which was virtually unknown in Britain before the 1980s, and which, fortunately, had made only marginal inroads into the field of serious historical writing by the start of the new century. Nevertheless, sometime in the early seventies the historiographical tide turned. Those who thought they had won most of the battles from the 1930s on, now found it running against them. ‘Structure’ was on the way down, ‘culture’ was on the way up. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the change is to say that the young historians after 1945 found their inspiration in Braudel’s Mediterranean(1949), the young historians after 1968 in the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s brilliant tour de force of ‘thick description’, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight’ (1973).10
There was a shift away from historical models or ‘the large why questions’, a shift from ‘the analytical to the descriptive mode’, 11 from economic and social structure to culture, from recovering fact to recovering feeling, from telescope to microscope – as in the enormously influential little monograph on the world-view of one sixteenth-century eccentric Friulian miller by the young Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.12 Perhaps there was also an element of that curious intellectual distrust for the rationalism of the natural sciences which was to become much more fashionable as the century drew to its end. Not that one can see much of a return from structural to narrative history among academics, or to old-style political history. At any rate, as far as I know historians of younger generations in the past thirty years have so far produced no masterpiece of non-analytic narrative history to be compared to that acknowledged triumph of traditional scholarship in this genre, Steven Runciman’s The Crusades (1951–4). However, the sheer extent to which patently important matters had been concealed or passed in silence in the half-century since 1945 left a vast scope for straight, archive-based filling of gaps, or the ‘history of events’. One has only to think of the hidden continent of Soviet archives which came into public view in the 1990s, the history of the Cold War or the long official silences or public myths about France under German occupation, or about the foundation and early years of Israel.
Although the historiographical moderns who had battled so successfully against the ancients until the late 1960s were an alliance which contained the Marxists, the challenge to their supremacy did not come from the ideological right. If my generations of Marxist historians formed in the years from 1933 to 1956 had no real successors, it was not because the cold warriors gained ground in schools and history faculties – probably the opposite was the case – but because the generations of the post-1960s left mostly wanted something else. But once again, this was not a specific reaction against Marxism. In France the virtual hegemony of Braudelian history and the Annales came to an end after 1968, and the international influence of the journal dropped steeply.
At least some of the change in history echoed the extraordinary cultural revolution of the late 1960s, which had its epicentre in the universities, and more particularly in the arts and humanities. It was not so much an intellectual challenge as a change of mood. In Britain the ‘History Workshop’ movement was the most characteristic expression of the new post-1968 ‘
historical left’. Its object was not so much historical discovery, explanation or even exposition, as inspiration, empathy and democratization. It also reflected the remarkable and unexpected growth of a mass public interest in the past which has given history a surprising prominence in print and on screen. History Workshop meetings, which brought together amateurs and professionals, intellectuals and workers, and vast numbers of the young in jeans, flanked by sleeping-bags and improvised creches, resembled gospel sessions, especially when addressed with the required hwyl by star performers such as the wonderful historian of Wales, Gwyn Alf Williams, a low-slung dark man whose superb management of his stammer served to underline his platform eloquence. It is typical that the first Women’s Liberation Conference in Britain (to which Marlene was taken by the females of our ‘New Left’ friends) grew out of a proposed History Workshop at the end of the 1960s. Sheila Rowbotham’s historical manifesto of feminism which followed was characteristically called Hidden from History. These were people for whom history was not so much a way of interpreting the world, but a means of collective self-discovery, or at best, of winning collective recognition.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 36
