The main news in the academic twittersphere has been an article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph (14 February 2021) that the government’s education secretary plans to appoint a ‘free speech czar’. His (or her) duty will be to sanction universities and student unions that ‘violate’ free speech, for instance by ‘cancelling’ speakers. Simultaneously, the Culture Secretary has summoned heritage organisations and warned them that public funds must not be used for ‘political purposes.’ Heritage (and history) were tasked with celebrating the country’s heritage and with making people proud of being British.
There is little detail. The ‘czar’ may never be appointed. In that sense, while this announcement is worrying, it may be a classic case of government through campaigning rather than action.
But such initiatives also serve other purposes, where the announcement of a policy is at least as important as any concrete steps taken to implement it.
In this case, it is about British identity, and the role of history within it. Johnson’s government was elected on a nationalist platform that vowed to sever political ties with the European mainland – Brexit. Its policies are based on an image of Britain as an island kingdom that successfully stood aloof from shenanigans on ‘the Continent’. That is paired with a celebration of national greatness, much of it centring on an empire that, for about a century and a half, ruled large parts of the globe. Boris Johnson himself envisioned post-Brexit Britain to build an ‘Empire 2.0’.
The past is thus an essential ingredient in framing Brexit as an act of national renewal, as ‘Making England Great Again’. History was meant to reinforce that narrative. Boris Johnson authored a biography of Winston Churchill, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the Commons, a book on the Victorians. Both books were panned by experts, but that, for the moment, is less important than the particular image of the past that they promulgated. British exceptionalism was rooted in a very specific period of time, between the succession of Victoria, and the end of World War II. And it was a celebration of greatness. This was about fashioning heroes that their modern biographers could be seen to emulate.
That approach is as old as the recording of history itself. It roots the concerns and ambitions of the present in an idealised past. Hence Virgil, in the late first century BC, imagined the origins of Rome in the Trojan War and the entirely fictional exploits of Aeneas and his band of fellow-exiles. The desire to find antecedents and venerable predecessors permeated even profound breaks with the past. The writings of the founding fathers of the American Republic are replete with references to Cicero and the history of Rome. Nineteenth-century English chartists invoked an idealised Anglo-Saxon past with which to challenge the ‘Norman yoke’ of present day elites. Nazis debated whether they rebuilt the empire of Charlemagne or whether they were the true heirs of the emperor’s Saxon adversary, Widukind. And so on.
Part of the reason why history could serve this function is because it was assumed to be inherently truthful. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville coined a definition, itself rooted in classical Roman ideas, that still resonates: history is the narration of true events. It was to be distinguished from fables, which narrate things that could not have happened, and ‘plausible narrations’, which recount things that could have happened, but did not. As with most definitions, its neatness does not quite match up to reality, but I will return to that. History is taken to be truthful. Thus, it provides legitimacy and precedent.
On a most elementary level, this kind of works. History is (supposed to be) based on verifiable individuals and often indisputable dates. William the Bastard did defeat Harold at Hastings in October 1066. Colonial representatives did sign a declaration declaring independence in 1776. Churchill did become Prime Minister in 1940.
Now, while dates can be pretty indisputable, their meaning is not. What did the Norman Conquest signify? How did it come about? What was its impact? These are just some of the questions that writers of history began asking a generation after the Conquest. They are still asking them today. Each generation had to define that meaning anew, and the answers given reflected factors as diverse as education, institutional background, location, religious and cultural context, traditions and expectations of patronage, the language of record, and so on. And that's before we get to whether it was a 'good' or a 'bad' thing. Or in Victorian parlance, whether the Normans imposed a yoke on England, or whether they rescued it from self-imposed provincialism.
Consequently, there never was just one interpretation of the past. Where Hungarian historians since the Middle Ages celebrated Attila as national hero, to the rest of western Europe he was a barbarian, the scourge of God, wreaking devastation and terror. Where Boris Johnson celebrated Winston Churchill as great statesmen and vanquisher of Nazism, to historians of modern India, Churchill’s role during the Bengal famine tarnishes that image. His – even by the standards of the early twentieth century – profound racism causes considerable unease to Black and Asian Britons – or, in fact, to anyone who feels uneasy about the idea that race is a meaningful category to describe anything, or that one could be superior to others. Where Jacob Rees-Mogg celebrated Victorian men, others point to the continuing suppression of women, the social iniquities of Victorian Britain, and the persecution of gay men. Or they look to critics of Empire, to suffragists, trade union organisers. And so on.
The role of history as a source of legitimising precedent has always been a political act. Recovering and celebrating a communal past was one way in which newly active groups claimed political legitimacy, or with which political ideals could be propagated. When urban communities started to become political actors in the twelfth century, they created a past for themselves that was rooted in but distinctive from that claimed by elites. The rulers of France and Germany may have claimed to be descendants of exiled Trojans, but the city of Trier had been founded 1,250 years before Rome. Or so it was claimed. ‘When Adam delve and Eve span, where was then the nobleman?’ was a battle cry sounded by peasants in fourteenth century England as well as by their counterparts in sixteenth-century Germany.
Scouting history for models also means rejecting established uses and readings of the past. The story of Adam and Eve invalidated celebrations of noble privilege based on ancestry. Edward Colston may have been a great benefactor to Bristol. But that he had earned his fortune in the slave trade also made him an inappropriate object of public celebration, all the more so in one of the ethnically most diverse cities in Britain. And so on.
Currently, we are witnessing the most recent iteration of this well-established pattern: a dominant interpretation of history is challenged by groups and communities whose forebears had either been left out of that reading, or who experienced those parts most deemed worth celebrating as oppression, enslavement, as individual or collective humiliation.
The ensuing debates are not about history, but about how to use the past for the present. The distinction is important. It separates trying to find out what may plausibly have happened (and why and how) from using an idealised image of the past in order to serve the needs of the present. If we stepped back, we probably could agree that Churchill played a pivotal role during World War II – propped up by American money, of course, assisted by Stalin’s tenacity (and what a can of worms that is!), and with the help of troops both volunteer and conscripted from Australia and India, Singapore, France and Poland as well as Britain. But he was also a racist, a sexist, and a political turncoat of the highest order. Talking about his flaws does not diminish his accomplishments. They make them more remarkable. They also make him a less than ideal national and nationalist figurehead.
The policy touted in the Telegraph is therefore not about protecting British history, but about enshrining a particular version of it. Note that the National Trust is criticised not because it took so long to ask just how many of the nice houses it administers had been built with money earned from slavery, but because it did seek to find out.
University historians are another target. Obviously, they are experts - second only to 'cultural marxists' in the government's gallery of bêtes noire. Worse still, most are not actually that interested in history as a source of comforting national narratives. The founding credo of the discipline is still that formulated by Leopold von Ranke in the 1820s: “To history has been attributed the function to judge the past, to instruct ourselves for the advantage of the future. Such a lofty function the present work does not attempt. It aims merely to show how it actually took place.” Ranke himself did not always live up to that ideal (neither do all historians – but that is a story for another occasion). What matters is that our task is not to ask whether Churchill was a hero or a villain, but to figure out why he may have acted as he did, how his actions fit within broader contemporary parameters, the influences on which he drew, and so on. We might also seek to bring to attention neglected aspects of the past – like the role of income derived from slavery in funding country houses in rural Britain. In our own way, we are still trying to sort history from fable and plausible narration.
We don’t always get it right. Important information gets overlooked. New information comes to light. Previously neglected aspects call into question widely held assumptions. Topics that once had been deemed unworthy of investigation offer surprising new insights. Technologies provide new ways of approaching and analysing evidence. Writing history isn’t static, but a continuing conversation among historians, between them and the past, as well as, of course, between them and their audiences, and with the society of which they form part. That is not some kind of sinister plot, but simply part of what we do. To ban the rewriting of history is to ban trying to find out about it in the first place.
That professional ethos also means that we have little time for sloppiness. Hence the derision with which Johnson’s and Rees-Moog’s forays were greeted. And, in all fairness, their efforts were pretty atrocious. But then so was Gordon Brown’s book on Heroes. That’s not party politics. It’s professionalism. It also means, of course, that the very narrative about British history that the government is currently peddling will find little favour with professionals. It is simplistic. It is undercooked. Most of it is verifiably wrong.
For the government, however, much hinges on that version of British history. Now that Johnson has established himself and his colleagues as defenders of proud Britannia, builders of Empire 2.0, buccaneers in the mould of Raleigh and Drake, any criticism of that image also calls into question the validity of the claims that build on it. The government's response has been not to modify how it presents itself, but to brand any criticism an elitist assault on Britain's proud heritage. Dissenters are enemies to be squashed and silenced. They do not dispute bad history, but 'cancel' right-thinking men and women.
In some ways, the assault on universities is flattering. Seriously: that the myth of the Blitz still circulates widely, fifty years after it has been debunked, or that, despite 150 years of scholarship, Magna Carta can still be invoked in an attempt to flout COVID restrictions, tells you how difficult it can be for academic historians to communicate their findings beyond the classroom. But one also wonders whether government policy is born not from any sincere interest in the past, but from a pathological fear of debate, scrutiny and criticism, whatever their source, and whatever their reach. The same attitude, after all, drives governmental action in relation to to the BBC, the media more generally, the courts, and even business. Dissent must be squashed.
That makes it all the more imperative to resist. Our task is not to provide soothing comfort, but to point out mistakes, and to urge each other to do better. It is to act as critical friends (pace Cicero, to use a reference point the PM might remember). Scouting history for heroes and villains is futile, and a little lazy. It also turns human beings into mere playthings for mendacious moderns. Rather than trying to figure out what they might have thought, felt, hoped for, feared (and so on), and why, people become mere ciphers, to be used and abused as best suits the needs of a washed up newspaper columnist who inexplicably ended up occupying No. 10.
The past is not something to be celebrated or abhorred, but simply part of what we are both collectively and individually. What we do with that inheritance is up to us, but we cannot choose the baggage we carry with us. The better we understand that baggage, however, the easier it will be for us to chart a path forward that others might find worth emulating - notwithstanding all the shortcomings and flaws that we also bring to it. But that is a more sensible and grown-up approach to history than the one the government has proposed. Maybe it's time for Mr Johnson and his colleagues to start leaving childish things behind.
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