Do not read this post unless you also read the second instalment of these thoughts here. It clarifies the argument.]
... [W]hile the
discipline has been bogged down in post-empiricist soul-searching, history itself
has been, to a considerable degree, taken over by non-specialists. It is a platitude that ‘the past’ has become
public and that academic historians do not have sole access to or control over
it. Most of the volumes shelved in the
history sections of bookshops are not written by what I consider to be
historians. The history that appears on
television is similarly dominated by non-specialists. Usually styling themselves ‘writer and
historian’, ‘journalist and historian’, ‘broadcaster and historian’ or whatever
… ‘and historian’, they are in most cases, in fact, writers, journalists, broadcasters
or whatever who have written books about history. Having written a book about history does not
make you a historian. This does not mean
that these books and broadcasts represent ‘bad history’ (though frequently they
do), that they do not present factually accurate accounts, that they do not
contain valid and valuable ideas and interpretations or – most importantly of
all – that they do not play a huge part in getting people interested in the
past. The problem for history is in
important regards the opposite. What
they do, they do very well. That leaves
the academic discipline of history in a very difficult position. What exactly do proper, qualified, university
historians have to offer? In the current
political climate the surfeit, ubiquity and (by its own lights) quality of
popular history places the discipline very much under siege.
The implication of the situation
just described is that anyone with basic literacy can write history and call
themselves a historian. When you think
about it, there are not many intellectual disciplines where anything like this
is the case. I cannot, for instance, buy
a chemistry set and a subscription to New
Scientist, come up with some cranky
idea about ‘bad egg gas’, and go on television as ‘Hubert Grumpy, writer and
chemist’. If I didn’t have a degree in
the subject, I could not dig up my back garden and appear on documentaries as
‘Hubert Grumpy, writer and archaeologist’.
At the very least, the word ‘amateur’ would have to be appended. The purveyors of television and ‘bookshop
history’ do not (with notable but fairly rare exceptions) carry out actual
historical research but are still called historians; they are not academically
qualified beyond, on occasion, a first degree and have no university post but
are nevertheless referred to as ‘media dons’.
They work from the published research of academic historians. Sometimes (especially in the case of the
presenters of television history) they don’t even do that; they have
researchers to do it for them.
Parasitically, they make money from other people’s labours. Any university historian who works on any
subject even remotely interesting to the wider public will be able to tell you
how she has been contacted by a TV or radio researcher expecting them to spend
a large amount of time on the phone conveying (free of charge) the results of her
work so that a broadcaster can make money out of it through a television or
radio broadcast and spin-off volume. I
am surely not the only one who, in refusing to do someone else’s job for free,
has been accused of ‘not being interested in communicating’. It is difficult to imagine many other
academic disciplines where this problem is anything like as significant. If we take the most successful purveyors of
popular science, almost all are academically qualified (well beyond first
degree level) in the subject about which they talk.
Now, one might reasonably wonder
what is wrong about any of this. In some
ways there is nothing wrong with it at all.
As I will argue later in this book, no one owns the past or any segment
of it; indeed, the dangers with which this volume is concerned chiefly involve
over-identification with, a claimed ownership of, a particular vision of the
past. But there is something rather
unnerving for the future of the discipline of history about the current
situation. Let us look briefly at how
one gets to be an academic historian.
Especially in the current situation in universities in Great Britain and
beyond, to acquire a university post is (even while acknowledging the nepotism,
favouritism and wilful avoidance of actual merit that pervades the profession
in different ways and to different degrees) to have passed through a series of
tests of quality. To receive funding to
get onto a post-graduate course requires one to be among the best in an
undergraduate cohort, usually with not merely a first class degree but with one
of the best first-class degrees in the year.
When one considers the small fraction of the population to get a good
university degree in a popular and thus competitive subject like history, we
can see that, in intellectual terms, we are already in at most the top
percentile or two of that section of the population which is seriously
interested in history. To move from an
MA to a PhD requires a good performance (usually a distinction) at that level,
and to find employment after a PhD, in a situation where permanent jobs are few
really requires one (however rightly one may be sceptical of the process) to be
at the forefront of a very small percentage of all those who took a history
undergraduate degree. It demands the
successful completion of a thesis which convinces established historians of its
quality and significance and, increasingly, demonstrated success in getting
published (again convincing more established academics of the high standard of
work) and indications of ability as an effective teacher and
administrator. It must be considered a
serious situation for the profession when someone who has never subjected
themselves to any of this qualitative scrutiny, but does have the ability to
write a book and (and this is rarely related to any rigorous assessment of
quality) find a publisher, is accepted as a historian to the same degree as the
person who has passed all those tests.
Increasingly, the circle of ‘writers and historians’ has become
something of a closed circuit. Reviewing
each other’s latest efforts, they hail their friends as ‘the most
interesting/exciting ancient/medieval/modern/military historian writing in Britain
today'. At the same time, they use their
greater access to the media to damn any attempt by actual historians to point
out the short-comings and inaccuracies of their work and to sit in judgement as
reviewers of any work of professional historians (as if they were their peers)
that makes it sufficiently far into the public sphere as to be deemed worthy of
review in the broadsheets or literary supplements. Again, it is difficult to imagine many other
disciplines where a comparable situation arises.
One reason for this, for sure, is
that many, probably most, academic historians [though not me, obviously] do not feel especially
comfortable standing on their academic dignity.
It looks faintly ridiculous to academic historians (though not,
evidently, to specialists from other disciplines dabbling in history), to
append their academic titles to their by-lines, especially in more popular
writings. Most university historians are
well aware that one does not have to have had a historical training to produce
at least certain sorts of good historical work, and most accept the view that
many interpretations and accounts of past events are possible and valid
(leaving aside the point that a great deal of popular bookshop history,
especially around its fringes, concerns interpretations of the past that are
neither possible nor valid). They see
the dangers of any restriction of access to the past to routes that go via the
approved priests and priestesses of the discipline. This is all correct and laudable, but the
current laissez-faire attitude is equally dangerous to the discipline and
indeed to history in general, if not more so, and, in my view, it cannot be
left to continue unmodified.
The current state of affairs may
also owe its rise to the end of Rankean positivist history. This has removed what was surely one of their
most powerful weapons from the arsenal of the professional historian, the claim
that they were better able to tell it like it was than anyone else. More to the point, what the consumer of
popular history has come to expect from such work is indeed, generally, a story
that tells it as it really was. More
complex and sophisticated histories, however accessibly related, are often kept
off the shelves and screens by the gatekeepers of those outlets: the ‘trade’
publishers and marketers, the editors and producers. The latter are, of course, often close
associates of the authors and presenters of popular history.
In one of my own areas of
specialism, the so-called ‘barbarian migrations’, there has never been a TV
documentary on the subject that has not retold the same old story of how the
barbarians conquered the Roman Empire, in spite of attempts (including my own)
to try and pitch an alternative and more accurate version. I once acted as a consultant to an historical
atlas produced by a major publisher of lavishly illustrated books and attempted
to have the spread on the barbarian migrations designed in such a way as not to
perpetuate the old myths through the repetition of the usual swirling arrows
starting in central Europe and ending in Africa or Italy. But my advice was entirely ignored. What was published was yet another map with
spaghetti-like arrows tipped all over it providing the same misleading idea to
another generation of potentially interested readers. Why? I
asked the editor and was told that that was what people wanted from a
historical atlas. Such publishers and TV
editors, with no actual educational experience, apparently know what people can
and cannot grasp. It is an astonishingly
elitist and patronising attitude.
This has a far more insidious
effect upon the historical profession.
The last Labour government of the UK (yes, a Labour government) placed
British universities under the control of the Department of Business, Innovation
and Skills, which is some ways says it all.
Part of that policy was to ensure that all university activity was
‘useful’ and the means of measuring such utility was to judge the ‘impact’ of
research. Leaving aside the more general
questions about such a policy, what it means and how it is to be done is still
somewhat mysterious but for a long time the advice generally bandied about was
to get one’s work used in broadcasting of some sort. In other words, the profession was being
compelled to place itself at the service of the purveyors of popular history
and their agents, editors and directors who set the rules for, and indeed
control access to, the market in which academic historians were now being told
they had to compete. The further implication,
of course, was to restrict the type of history being written. The Royal Historical Society made no serious complaint
against this development. This should
not surprise; a few years later, it made no protest at all at the revelation
that government funding for research, via the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, would be given to work that furthered the Conservative Party’s
nebulous non-idea of The Big Society.
Related to this is perhaps most
revealing indicator of the perilous state of play. Recent debates upon the teaching of history in
schools have largely been played out in the newspapers through the pens, not of
professional historians, but the writers of populist books. The qualified historian has even lost a place
at the table where historical educational policy is made. Advice has been publicly sought from the
writers of pulp history rather than from more respected specialists or the
learned society of the historical profession, which is left – typically enough
– meekly bleating from the side-lines.
What does one do about this? There are, to be sure, steps that could be
taken by the profession. Its learned
society could issue a set of standard fees for advice and consultancy. That none exists currently is absurd. I have recently (how accurately or fairly is
beside the point) been kindly described as ‘our leading authority on early
medieval warfare’. Television
researchers regularly contact me expecting me to give out my time and expertise
free of charge. Yet, the same
researchers would never approach ‘our leading authority’ on business law or
pre-nuptial agreements without expecting to pay through the nose for their
time. That the situation is different
for historians is entirely the profession’s own collective fault but, while
steps could and should be taken to remedy it, that is not part of my argument.
What is part of my argument, in brief, is that what the peddlers
of television and bookshop history typically produce is not what I consider to
be proper history. It will be the
essential plank of my argument in this book that what history is, is not simply
narratives about the past or descriptions of past events. My argument will not just be that true
history contains argument and explanation – hardly a revolutionary position –
but also that it has, ineluctably, within its own methodology, an ethical and
political programme. I will argue that
it is this which the profession must bring out to distance itself from the
populists.