Reclaiming History

Once again, shots have been fired in the UK’s culture wars. This time, via the website History Reclaimed, introduced by one of its editors, David Abulafia, in an op-ed for the Telegraph. The site aims act as a corrective to “campaigns to rewrite the histories of Western democracies so as to undermine their solidarity as communities, their sense of achievement, even their basic legitimacy”. Examples of such nefarious schemes include the claim that Canada and Australia are founded on genocide or that “Slavery—despite being almost universal until the early 19th century—is cast as the original sin of Britain and the United States, supposedly shaping their societies and creating their prosperity.” History Reclaimed will “challenge distortions of history and to provide context, explanation and balance in a debate in which condemnation is too often preferred to understanding.” To that end, the website team assembled, “an independent group of scholars with a wide range of opinions on many subjects, but with the shared conviction that history requires careful interpretation of complex evidence, and should not be a vehicle for facile propaganda.”

Now, most historians would agree that history should not be used for facile propaganda. Certainly, its writing should be based on the careful interpretation of complex evidence. They might, of course, be hesitant about listing the history of slavery or that of indigenous communities and their treatment by colonial settlers as the sole examples of distorted history. On the other hand, those are among the most fervently debated topics in the contemporary Anglosphere, often resulting in some very bad history indeed. One can only welcome the measured contribution of expert historians. Regrettably, that is not what one will find on History Reclaimed.

I

The site lists over forty members, headed by two seasoned Cambridge historians: Robert Tombs, now retired, a highly-regarded expert on nineteenth-century France, and David Abulafia, a historian of the late medieval western Mediterranean. Its advisory board includes other luminaries, such as Timothy Blanning, another erstwhile Cambridge don and expert on eighteenth-century Germany, and John Marenbom, a Cambridge medievalist who has done exceptional work on high medieval philosophy. There is a strong Fenlands element, with a sprinkling of Oxonians (including Nigel Biggaar), Canadians, and Brits working at US thinktanks .

Surprisingly, however, given the priority granted to debates about colonialism and slavery, the overwhelming majority have no expertise regarding either of those topics. Colonial history and slavery are not the only blind spots. An even more glaring one is the study of history itself. All in all, fewer than half of the people listed as contributors identify themselves as historians. For example, Elizabeth Weiss is a physical anthropologist, with expertise “in post-cranial studies using CT scans, X-rays, and metrics on past populations to reconstruct lifestyles and better understand bone biology.” Doug Stokes describes himself as a middle manager (head of research and development) at Exeter University. His academic background is in political studies, aka “US foreign policy, international security and debates on grand strategy.” Cornelia van der Poll teaches Ancient Greek at St Benet’s Hall in Oxford. And so on.

The relative absence of expertise matters. One wouldn’t want a dentist – however accomplished they might be in their chosen profession – to perform brain surgery. Similarly, when it comes to studying the human past, being a specialist in a region’s history brings with it a knowledge of the idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of the evidence. It’s a way of avoiding rookie mistakes. Expertise also requires familiarity with past and current scholarship. That’s, after all, where changing meanings, cultural legacies and evidential idiosyncrasies are discussed and explored. It is where new approaches are tried out, and where different questions about the past are asked and the answers given evaluated. Such wider expertise is essential if, as History Reclaimed purports to do, one sets out “to challenge distortions of history and to provide context, explanation and balance.” Without it, all one can offer is half-baked punditry.

II

The lack of expertise will set alarm bells ringing. A feeling of impending doom will follow on realising that History Reclaimed’s claim to “independence” is spurious at best. The enterprise is, in fact, highly partisan. Bella d’Abrera, for example, who describes herself as “currently at the forefront of the ‘Culture Wars’ in Australia”, is Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Programme at the Institute for Public Affairs, an Australian think tank opposing lockdown and other public health measures – or what its press releases describe as the ‘Zero covid delusion’. She also spearheads a campaign rejecting the possibility that colonising indigenous people might be described as colonialism. Any such notion, she has argued, must be inspired by “Critical Race Theory”, the teaching of which ought to be banned from the Commonwealth’s schools. Dr d’Abrera also has strong views as to what the study of history entails. In 2018, she lamented that “Students in Australia are not being given a "positive formation." Instead, they are being taught a narrow, one-dimensional view of the world seen through the prism of class, gender and race, (…).” In Dr d’Abrera’s eyes, it seems, History is not about exploring how past societies might have functioned or how people in the past might have experienced the world around them. Instead, it is simply a tool with which to reinforce a specific version of communal identity. It’s a quest for heroes, but for heroes of the right kind and with the right cultural pedigree.

Her 2018 intervention had come about because of a dispute over the Ramsay Centre - a bequest by Paul Ramsay, dedicated to promoting “western civilisation”. As the Ramsay Foundation also demanded a say in the appointment of academic staff, their teaching and research, a sequence of universities refused to accept its terms (a regrettably partisan selection of reactions has been archived here). Eventually, the Ramsay Centre was established as a funding body for undergraduates and postgraduates at three Australian universities. Its director, Simon Haines, is another member of History Reclaimed. Most recently, he joined Dr d’Abrera in complaining that a proposed national curriculum for Australian schools paid too much attention to Aboriginal visions of the communal past, at the expense of a European legacy “and the story of our own nation, with its historical and constitutional roots in British history.”

Contrary to what the term suggests, it would appear that studying western civilisation is not about gaining an understanding of the society from which the literature, art and culture of the wider European world since Antiquity had emerged, but a matter of propagating a particular vision of the European - and hence white colonial - past. Studying ‘the west’ ought to celebrate achievements like the abolition of slavery, the idea of human rights, and so on. By contrast, exploring how such concepts had come about, how their application related to, came into conflict with and was often limited by factors such as class, gender and race, is deemed to be an attack on these same values. Taken to its logical extreme, such thinking results in any discussion of the civil rights movement in the US - which inevitably involves talking about racism, Jim Crow, segregation, etc. - being dismissed as an attack on the very principle of civil rights. And that actually happened.

D'Abrera and Haines may have been especially outspoken on these issues, but they are by no means outliers. Doug Stokes serves as an advisory council member of the Free Speech Union, founded by Nigel Biggar and headed by Toby Young. Its ‘manifesto’ for the 2021 elections took particular umbrage at the concept of hate crimes and hate speech, while Stokes joined fellow-reclaimer Biggar in lamenting the ‘woke war on the west’, which, it seems, manifested itself by studying slavery and western colonial empires. Ruth Dudley Edwards, another member of the team, opined that “The Woke movement, which claims to be about social justice, is quite simply racist and totalitarian.” Her chief evidence was to assert that George Floyd’s murder wasn’t racist. And so on. Life is too short to go through all the 40+ names listed on the Reclaimed website. In any case, a clear enough pattern has emerged: many reclaimers are concerned less with exploring the past than with propagating a very peculiar version of British (i.e. not even European, let alone ‘western’) history.

III

To see how far this intellectual background shapes the site’s content, let’s have a look at the articles featured on the Reclaimed ‘frontpage’ of 31 August:

The headline piece on critical race theory, by Joanna Williams, originally appeared in Spiked magazine. Williams is “director of the Freedom, Democracy and Victimhood Project at the think tank, Civitas”. Civitas first rose to prominence by proposing a way of teaching English history that was specifically aimed at contrasting an English love of freedom with the purported authoritarianism of Muslims. In the early 2010s, Civitas teamed up with the Telegraph to reprint Helen Marshall’s Our Island Story, a Victorian classic of unabashed high imperialist fervour, including views on gender and race that have aged even less well than its account of essentially English history. What about Williams' article? ‘Critical Race Theory’, she expounds, is a tool of oppression. “The academics, experts and workplace trainers that comprise the burgeoning diversity industry make a good living and find an important sense of purpose in revealing our unconscious bias, hearing penance and holding out the promise of absolution. They are morally invested in the existence of racism and cannot afford for it to ever disappear.” The last sentence is worth savouring: racism is a social construct fashioned by a self-serving elite of academics. Racism would not exist if middle class experts ceased to profit from postulating its existence. The oppressed, in this scenario, are white working class men (definitely not women): “Back in the days of empire, upper-class British boys were trained up for a life in the colonies, they had a role to fulfil managing and civilising the natives. Over a century on, the natives are now at home rather than abroad, and white rather than black or brown, but the civilising mission remains the same. It is now white working-class men who are made to atone for their privilege in a never ending process of repentance.” So much about acting as a corrective to distortions of the past.

D'Abrera, in an article originally published in the Australian Spectator, offers such considered insights as “Historians are generally more interested in conveying to students the idea that the past is something to be abhorred, requiring endless apologies. Many have adopted the post-modernist approach, refusing to recognise a fixed, total, or absolute truth about the past.” Needless to say, d’Abrera serves up no evidence to support her claims. But, otherwise, where to start? That it can be difficult to establish a total fixed or absolute truth about the past had been proposed by as radical a postmodernist as Leopold von Ranke (the nineteenth-century godfather of modern historians). It’s also rather a common sense approach to take. After all, the record of the past is inherently fragmentary, and we are at the mercy of our sources, the cultural environment from which they emerged, etc., etc., pp. (hence all this stuff about expertise). That also isn’t a terribly new insight. Among many others, Thucydides, Sima Qian and Ibn Khaldun already grappled with the issue and its implications. See here and here.

As for the suggestion that historians are generally treating the past as something to be abhorred: that will come as much of a surprise to my peers as it would, one hopes, to the historians among d’Abrera’s. Speaking from a personal perspective, I enjoy the comforts of modernity far too much to want to live in the thirteenth century. But it’s a fascinating period – which is, after all why I study it. Lots of great things are happening in architecture, art, literature, science, theology, philosophy, with a good dose of political intrigue, some fascinating characters, and so much more. Equally, though, I would fail in my responsibilities as a historian if I did not also point out the less appetising aspects of the period: the persecution of Jewish communities, the religious oppression, endemic violence, the precarity of most people’s lives, and so on. That’s not me being 'woke’. It's simply me trying to gain (and to offer) as comprehensive an understanding as possible of how people in the past might have experienced their lives. It is this respect for the essential humanity of the people we write about that separates historians from hacks.

Other articles pursue lines similar to d’Arbera’s and Williams’. There’s Jeff Flynn-Paul's hatchet job for the Spectator, claiming that there was no colonial violence in the European settlement of North America. Doug Stokes denies that racism exists at UK universities, and describes ‘decolonising the curriculum’ as largely a managerialist ploy. He seems to have been unaware of the Royal Historical Society’s report on race, ethnicity and diversity. But then he isn’t a historian. That those of his peers who actually are also fail to mention it, comes as more of a surprise – especially, as they seem quite happy to parade their credentials as - to quote from Paul Moon’s website, “fellow[s] of the Royal Historical Society in University College, London.”

IV

All in all, the site seems to be concerned less with reclaiming, than with ignoring and distorting history. One thus wonders whether Reclaimed isn’t really just another tool for waging a culture war. There certainly seems to be considerable overlap with populist authoritarian talking points. See, for instance, the rejection of recent scholarship on colonialism and slavery. Indeed, the language used by Reclaimed and its contributors echoes that of Oliver Dowden, the UK culture secretary, when he vowed to “defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”. Dowdens’s outburst had been triggered when the National Trust published an interim report on the relationship between Britain’s colonial past and the slave trade on the one hand, and several of the landed estates in its portfolio on the other. See also here and here. Likewise, the rhetoric of History Reclaimed resembles that of Donald Trump’s ill-fated 1776 Commission, which declared that “a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in our founding principles is the path to a renewed American unity and a confident American future.”

The alarmism about “Critical Race Theory” in Abulafia’s piece for the Telegraph, and the prominence granted to the concept on the Reclaimed website appear to have been conceived in the same febrile milieu. CRT has become the bogeyman of choice for conservative politicians. It even displaced such once popular villains as ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘postmodernism’. The UK government declared that “the application of critical race theory to municipal public services threatens to undermine integration and community cohesion, by exaggerating differences within local communities; instead, councils should be seeking to build and strengthen a shared local and national identity across class, colour and creed.” In Australia, Pauline Hanson spearheaded efforts to ban CRT from the national curriculum. ““It is from critical race theory we get terms like ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white privilege‘ which radical leftists love to throw around so much. (…) It is because of Critical Race Theory [that – BW] Australian children have been forced to stand during assemblies and [be] publicly humiliated for being ‘white’ oppressors. Unless we take a stand, the values that make Australia the great nation will continue to die the death of 1,000 cuts. Critical Race Theory has no place in the curriculum of our nation, our children deserve an education, not an indoctrination.”” In the US, banning the teaching of CRT at schools has become a something of a competitive conservative sport. Why? As the governor of Oklahoma put it: “Now more than ever, we need policies that bring us together, not rip us apart.” Or, to follow the line peddled by History Reclaimed, acknowledging the effects of colonialism and slavery undermines the cohesion and legitimacy of western democracies.

V

Clearly, then, History Reclaimed does not “challenge distortions of history and provide context, explanation and balance in a debate in which condemnation is too often preferred to understanding.” Nor does it heed its own precept that “history requires careful interpretation of complex evidence, and should not be a vehicle for facile propaganda.”

Such dissembling is bad enough. More pernicious still is the willingness of the historians involved to allow their professional credentials to be exploited in so blatantly partisan a fashion. Sometimes, our professional expertise and our political convictions can form fruitful partnerships. But that requires that we act from a position of expertise. That is what makes us expert witnesses. By contrast, allowing our professional status to compensate for a lack of expertise turns us into partisan hacks at best.

I fear that too many members of History Reclaimed may have failed to heed that distinction. What makes this troubling is not that we are arguing from opposite sides of the political divide. After all, even minds as sharp as Abulafia’s and or Tombs’ will occasionally be wrong. It makes them human. And well-reasoned disagreement is the lifeblood of our profession. No, what makes their involvement so disconcerting is that they have allowed their considerable reputation to be deployed to lend a veneer of respectability to outpourings that in every respect fall short of the exalted professional standards that Abulafia, Tombs & Co. have otherwise come to embody. By bartering away their credentials so cheaply, they put not only their own credibility at risk, but also that of the profession that had helped them obtain these credentials in the first place. Far from reclaiming history from partisan propagandists, they seem to have joined them. They certainly have made it more difficult for the rest of us to combat distortions and facile propaganda.