In Defence of the Distant Past JONATHAN HEALEY St Catherine’s College, Oxford In my line of work, I end up reading a lot of UCAS forms. For those not familiar with the application process for British universities in, say, the last couple of decades, the UCAS form is something like a curriculum vitae for prospective students. It is where they detail their GCSE and AS-Level results, their predicted grades for the summer ahead, and it is where their headteacher weaves a golden narrative of their academic and personal achievements at school. But the real heart and soul of the UCAS form is not the dry statistics of results and predictions, or even the head’s glowing reference. No, the real heart is found in the student’s own ‘personal statement’. Here they detail why they want to study History; how they were inspired as children by visits to stately homes and castles; and how they have more recently been stimulated by the reading of some weighty historical tome – usually the provocative noodlings of a telly don: a Niall Ferguson, perhaps, or a David Starkey. One of the most common problems that prospective students write about is the question of ‘why’. Why do we study History? What is the discipline for? What can it hope to achieve? And usually their answer is fairly straightforward: we study History because it teaches us lessons, ripe for application to today’s world. Indeed, History, they say, teaches us about how we got to where we are today. They normally mean politically: it is the story of the development of today’s political institutions; but they sometimes also include great social and economic developments: the rise of industrial capitalism and the affluence of the west, the emancipation of women, the gradual (but incomplete) conquest of racism. Their tone is usually optimistic: they are bullish about what humanity has ‘achieved’ (notwithstanding, of course, the unprecedented horrors of the twentieth century). The dominant approach even smacks a little (perhaps a lot) of nineteenth-century Whiggism: the intelligent sixth-former of today seems to see History in broadly progressive terms. Things are getting better; humanity is improving itself. Such questions make for classic interview fodder. In Oxford, unusually amongst British universities, we actually get the chance to challenge our applicants on the statements they make on their UCAS forms. And it is questions of ‘why’ that have, in my time as an interviewer, provided some of the most interesting exchanges. My line of attack is normally this. ‘Here in Oxford’, I might say, ‘we take a chronologically wide view of History; we dig deep into the distant past, in fact, you are obliged to study at least one medieval period and one early modern period 1 (broadly from about 1400 to 1750). How can we justify that?’ Sometimes I permit myself a little diatribe. The medieval world is so different to ours, and the events we study took place in an incomprehensibly distant age. The medieval mindset, economy, society, political organization (and so on) was so distinct from our own. How on earth can we draw lessons that are useful for today’s policy-makers from this? And the same can be said for the early-modern age, the period I research myself. Things were – simply – completely different back then. The distant past is not just a foreign country, it is a different world. At this point, many students will return to their original Whiggish tack. Okay, so medieval history is difficult to link to modern developments, but it provides the background to early-modern history, and that provides the background to the eighteenth-century, which provides the background to the nineteenth. So they espouse a sort of domino-theory approach to historical development, where medieval history appears as the hunt for the original motive hand, knocking over the first block, setting the game in motion. And to a point this is true, of course: even if we take a The World Turned Upside Down (1643) – much of what we narrow view of what history is for, and find in the distant past is so strange to our modern eyes take it to be the pursuit of the origins that it is difficult to learn contemporary lessons from it. So why should we bother studying the distant past? of the present-day, then in order to understand those origins, we need to understand the origins of those origins, and so on. But the problem with this is that if we simply consider the distant past as a precursor to the modern past, which in turn is the building blocks of today’s world, then by necessity we will end up committing one of the cardinal sins of the historical profession: we will end up writing ‘present-centred history’ – the study of the past from the point of view of present-day concerns and issues. Briefly, this can be distorting from two perspectives. Firstly it encourages historians to devote disproportionate attention to topics deemed of present-day relevance, to the detriment of those which were of greatest importance to people at the time. To take an example, there might be a powerful argument, given today’s concerns, to reconstruct the history of racial thought and racism in the distant past, and of course such a topic is important and interesting. But the majority of early-modern people, certainly in England, almost certainly spent more time worrying about witches and astrology than they did the finer points of race, so if we want to understand the past, as opposed to the past history of today’s hot issues, then we should ideally be devoting much more attention to the history of astrology than to the history of racism. Of course, there is an argument that, especially given the historical profession’s continued appetite for public funding, we should be focusing on present- 2 day issues. But there is an easy counter to this, for present-centred history is inherently distorted and is thus ‘bad’ history. Even if we do want to seek the historical background to issues of present-day concern then we want to do it properly; and doing it properly means considering it in the proper context. Secondly, and similarly, present-centred history has the tendency of picking out the elements of the past with which we are more familiar, rather than understanding past societies on their own terms. Sir Isaac Newton is a good example: great mathematician and father of modern physics as he was, he spent a considerable chunk of his time on Biblical hermeneutics. To see Newton as a harbinger of modern science is perhaps defensible, but if we just see that side of Newton then we cannot properly understand him. If we just seek out those elements of the past that we are most familiar with, then we misunderstand our subject. We have come dangerously close to the contentious issue of ‘impact’. The ‘impact agenda’ was launched – controversially – at the research councils and universities by the last government, to a storm of protest from the arts and humanities world. Broadly speaking, it demands that research should create cultural and social ripples beyond the world of academia: it should have short-term economic and social benefits. Academics should no longer be content with talking amongst themselves, but they should engage with the wider community, including (perhaps most controversially) policy-makers. The impact agenda was, unsurprisingly, particularly controversial amongst those working in the humanities (rather than, say, the social sciences). Amongst historians, it was medievalists and early-modernists who felt most threatened. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: it is much easier to construct a case for the policy-relevance of post-war economic history than, say, a study of medieval hermits, or marriage patterns amongst the early-modern Catholic gentry. Where those working on the distant past did score ‘impact’ it was often – essentially – as a branch of the entertainment industry rather than for any particular academic reasons. Take the project, here in Oxford, which is looking at coroners’ inquests in Tudor England. The work is telling us very important things about everyday life and work in a society very different to our own; indeed it promises to produce some of the most fascinating and vivid English social history for quite some years; its main ‘impact’, however, came when Martin Clunes read out a series of coroner’s reports on Have I Got New For You because, frankly, some of the accidental deaths were pretty funny (in, when you think about it, a pretty tragic kind of way). So what, then, is the case for studying the distant past? Is it just that some people find it interesting and slightly exotic? This is an important question, because if that were true, and distant history is merely a relatively obscure branch of the literary industry, like books on the occult or birdwatching, then there is little case for the public funding of research. It would, it could legitimately be argued, be unfair for taxpayers’ money to be used to pay for the unusual hobby of a minority, except 3 in those cases where the research had a direct relevance to publicly-available artefacts such as castles, historic houses or museum-pieces. The first thing to say to this argument is that even if we do reduce the role of the distant past to these museums and buildings, our proper understanding of these is dependent on an army of historians who are fostering understanding of the wider culture in which such artefacts were created. The same can be said for popular history books. Okay, certain books are marketable, and in some cases books either on history or about history (think Wolf Hall) can be immensely profitable; but none of these publishing sensations would have been possible without the largely unprofitable work of academics worldwide. The marketable side of history cannot be understood without reference to its more obscure cousins. Take a history book on the French Revolution, for example. It would be hard to understand the French Revolution without knowing something of the economic hardships that accompanied it: one of the reasons it was so violent was that Parisians, for most of the period from about 1788 to 1795, were terribly, painfully hungry. One of the reasons we know this is because economic Allegorical contemporary print depicting the French Revolution and the Sans Culottes – although many books on the Revolution itself are historians have quantified very marketable, these depend on a mountain of scholarship that bread prices throughout the would never make a profit. period. When Simon Schama wrote Citizens, his bestseller on the Revolution, he depended in part on the work of these economic historians. But it would be a brave publisher who tried to mass-market a book on French food-prices in the late eighteenth century. Such work depends on public funding, either directly, or by creating a demand for such obscure works by paying for university libraries, to whom publishers can sell the less page-turning works of scholarship. But there is a much wider argument in favour of the study of the distant past, and I would argue that it has two sides to it. I want to use two metaphors, one for each. Firstly, I would argue that the distant past can work as a mirror to our own world. It is only through looking at societies radically different to our own that we can really understand ourselves. Secondly, the distant past can be a laboratory in which we test the character of humanity. What historians do, and why they are so important, is they study the nature of humankind. They look at the past actions of our species and see how we act in certain situations. Since the basic biology of the 4 human body had changed little over the millennia of recorded history, there is plenty to be learned from looking to the distant past. Let’s consider each of these in turn. Rudyard Kipling, in a poem entitled The English Flag, published in 1891, asked rhetorically ‘what should they know of England who only England know?’ His point was that in order to understand England, you needed knowledge of other places. You needed to know what made England different in order properly to know it. It’s an apt metaphor for the history of our own world. We tirelessly study modern history, hoping to explain ‘where we came from’ and ‘where we are going’, but we rarely stop to think about what makes modern history modern? What is modernity? In fact, we cannot understand what it means to be modern without studying human social organization in its non-modern forms. We need non-modern comparisons as a mirror, and given that we cannot see into the future, this means looking to the distant past. More especially, this allows us to expose certain human traits that we might be tempted to see as ‘natural’ as in fact historically determined, not as innate elements of our being but more as moments in historical time. Take our present assumption that a growing economy is normal. It was recently announced, to much concern, that the UK economy had suffered a second successive quarter of negative growth. This is today seen as aberrant, something which the Coalition should be ashamed of. But the assumption of a continuously growing economy, rather than being ‘natural’, is actually, when set in historical context, an unusual facet of modernity. Self-sustaining growth itself appeared at a particular moment in historical time; in England – probably – this happened in the eighteenth century (or maybe the late seventeenth). It is not a ‘natural’ aspect of human life, though it has been a crucial element of modernity. We don’t, of course, know how long it will last. Even the idea of growth has a history: a recent article by the English historian Paul Slack, for example, has argued that the idea of ‘improvement’ in economics was essentially an intellectual creation of seventeenth-century Britain. Another example, perhaps an equally pertinent one, is the idea that certain forms of behaviour are ‘natural’. Acquisitiveness, for example, is sometimes seen as a natural human trait. People naturally want to improve their material conditions of life, so will – if they are allowed to make money from their efforts – work hard and long hours. This ‘profit motive’ is frequently considered an essential characteristic of humanity. But to historians this issue is not remotely settled. To a much older generation, for example, the profit motive was often seen as appearing in the early-modern period on the back of the Reformation: at its core was the so-called ‘Protestant work-ethic’. Such ideas are less than fashionable these days, but the question of whether the profit motive has historical origins is still a live one. The Dutch historian Jan De Vries, for example, has argued powerfully that from around the late seventeenth century, particularly in England and the Dutch Republic, ordinary middling-sort families, desirous to increase their material comfort, gradually chose to devote more 5 of their time to producing for exchange rather than home consumption. In other words, they worked harder, for longer, and increasingly for wages so they could buy the latest consumer goods: clocks, new textiles (often from Asia), tea, coffee, china, books, paintings and so on. It is, arguably, to this ‘industrious revolution’ (as De Vries calls it) that we can trace the emergence of the modern profit motive. It is thus an aspect of modernity, but not a necessary natural trait of humanity: we know this by studying its origins in the distant past. This may seem a little present-centred, and to an extent it is. But there is a difference between delving into the past looking for antecedents for present-day concerns, and what I am proposing, which is studying distant societies in detail, and then using them to flag up comparisons with modernity. But the distant past can also be a laboratory in which we put humanity’s soul to the test. By this I am not claiming that historians can ever achieve the fullness of a rigorous scientific methodology; our laboratories are by their nature incapable of performing controlled experiments. We cannot run multiple tests, isolating factors as we go on. Worse, we are forced to work with malfunctioning equipment: sources are missing, and some of them are written by their subjects who have An English East Indiaman rounds the Cape of Good Hope, painting by Thomas Whitcombe (1763-1824) – axes to grind. But it is all we have, and if studying the distant past can help us understand whether we are to get to grips with whom and the profit motive is a natural human trait, or whether it is what we are as a species, then we have to merely characteristic of a particular historical epoch. take on this faulty laboratory and work it for as much as we can. We need to ask ourselves why humans have acted in the ways they have done in the various circumstances they have lived through. Why, for example, did Europeans, in the medieval period, devote so much of their productive energy to maintaining monasteries and nunneries? Why did wealthy men believe that charging at each other on horses and trying to knock each other off with poles conferred status? Why did male textile workers weave while women span? Why did peasants (usually) accept a social order which kept them near the bottom of the pile? Why did some societies believe in witches while other believed in fairies, and others still believed in both? Why, in the Renaissance, did so many highly educated men develop such complex beliefs about demons, and how did states and people allow these ideas to become converted into large-scale executions of ‘witches’ during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? What caused the relatively sudden end to the prosecutions while witch-beliefs remained strong? Why did Europeans in the eighteenth century develop ‘scientific’ forms of racism where these had not existed before? Why, when anti-Semitism has been such a constant scourge of European history, did the Holocaust not happen earlier? What caused medieval peasants to 6 decide that their economic fortunes were best protected by their gathering themselves together to manage their agriculture communally? Why, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, did they change their minds again and privatize the landscape? Why did attitudes towards the poor go through such drastic alterations through history? How on earth did a pauper in the England of Queen Elizabeth I hope to survive? These are all questions from pre-modern European history which, sure, are fascinating in their own right, but they also cut to the heart of who we are as humans. The distant past, as much as the present and more recent history, can give us the key to this self-knowledge of what are species is capable of doing, for good or ill. There are, of course, plenty of other strong reasons for maintaining our collective interest in the distant past. Perhaps I am just a naive academic, but I strongly believe that knowledge in itself is good, and worth pursuing just for the sake of it. We should not shy away from trying to understand things which have little contemporary relevance, which are not policy- focused or easily marketable. The finer details of the paleobiology, or of distant galaxies are worth knowing because they are there, not because we might make money out of them. An understanding of the distant past is also, in educational terms, a valuable basis for skills- Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire – studying why medieval people spent so much of their scarce resources on religion helps us training. Despite resistance from understand who we are as humans. some quarters, and despite the regular press stories about schoolchildren who think Nelson is a character in The Simpsons (which, in fairness, he is), one of the most wonderful developments in school history teaching in the last couple of generations has been the triumph of skills-based History. Sure, children leave school knowing fewer dates, but the practice of History helps them develop skills of considerably greater utility, like the critical analysis of sources, empathy across cultural boundaries, the evaluation of masses of (usually) contradictory evidence. I’d rather have a generation of critical thinkers than one that can list by heart all the kings and queens of England since Alfred. And the distant past gives a perfect opportunity for exercising that skills-based learning. For British history, for example, there are plenty of sources, is plenty of scope for debate, plenty of interesting stuff going on, and (perhaps most importantly) there is enough chronological distance between then and now for children to at least have the chance of displaying objectivity. In fact, I would argue (and I realise that few schools or exam boards are likely to listen) that if the aim is a properly skills-based curriculum, then we should look first and foremost to the distant past. I would add, as an aside, 7 that in my opinion the study of the distant past is actually pretty helpful as a way of fostering tolerance of human diversity. People who can empathize over chronological distance, engaging with societies very different to ours but on their own terms, should also become better at empathizing across spatial and cultural boundaries in the present-day. Of course, all my arguments could be steamrollered in the face of a single- minded desire to shred funding to the arts. Fortunately no such drive has yet been seriously put forward, but if the enemies are not yet at the gates, then there have certainly been some ominous reports from the frontier. To those who are still not convinced, I’ll offer one more point in defence of the study of the distant past. Quite simply, the funding of historians has to be one of the most efficient areas of public spending around. The total annual budget of the Arts and Humanities Research Council is about £102 million, and only a small portion of that goes to medieval and early-modern history. This compares to an estimated £1 billion lost to the treasury each year through benefit fraud, and an HM Revenue and Customs estimate that tax avoidance (much of it by the very rich and by fabulously wealthy corporations) in the UK runs to ‘several billion pounds’. Historians tend to be enthusiasts: they work not just because they have their boss breathing down their neck, but because they love their subject and are passionate about pushing the boundaries of knowledge. The treasury gets plenty of bang for its funding buck. In short, the study of the distant past is a tiny drain on our public purse, and it is one that is incredibly efficient at producing results. Okay, some of our medievalist and early-modernists are not great communicators, preferring to disseminate their thoughts purely within the confines of the academic world, but there are many who are. If, say, the present government were to double the funding given to the study of the distant past it would barely dent the budget, and it would drastically increase both our knowledge and our understanding. The work would be carried out by dedicated professionals, some of the finest brains in Britain today, and it would produce results that would reverberate down the ages. We would produce more knowledge that was interesting, challenging, and which helped us understand both what it means to be ‘modern’, and who we are as humans. And that is exactly why we should study the distant past. 8