Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

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