The hand of history
Is one of Britain’s leading historians right to play down the importance of conflict? No, says MIchael Pye
We’re living in an age of nice, soft history: easy to digest, easy to forget, won’t change your mind or send you out to riot. Call it Blue Plaque history: the attempt to write stories that seem unobjectionable, and take out all the brawls, conflicts and special interests that made it possible to find the material to write the story in the first place.
Now David Cannadine is, his new book tells us, Chair of the Blue Plaques Committee: guardian of the official kind of memory. He is in charge of allowing people to be remembered, but also to be cut down to a slogan on a decorative bit of metal. This is not entirely a surprise.
For Cannadine is a lovely writer, very reader-friendly, with a clear and wide angle view of the past; but he cushions us. He writes a book about the British empire and turns it into an export drive for the British class system; which nicely lets us forget about race and colour and suchlike matters, not to mention profit and greed. When he writes about class it’s not the brute Marxist engine of history, inevitable conflict, it’s just the way we choose at any given time to talk about inequality and social conflict; which is closer to lit crit than any disturbingly lively prophecy of endless struggle.
His ideas can be bright and clarifying, but they’re given importance mostly by conflict with the ideas he’s contradicting; they don’t quite stand on their own. This makes it very odd that what he most of all contradicts is conflict itself. He doesn’t like it. He doesn’t do dialectic, which seems to make him think of Marx and not Plato. He hankers after onevolume histories in the Trevelyan manner – grandfatherly history, which tells the story of Britain with no disagreeable mention of warring groups and interests.
He also loves a total kind of history – the economy, the politics, the culture and as much of society as he can get down on the page; and he acknowledges that he gets this taste from reading the likes of that old Marxist, eric Hobsbawm. The trouble is that an old Marxist thinks he knows why and how the different parts of the picture fit together, even if his notion is entirely wrong, so he has a single subject. Cannadine doesn’t; he tells his stories as they come along. He tells them with a vividness and sometimes a wit sadly missing in history drenched in last century’s theories, but you’re left wondering exactly what he thinks is going on.
This time he’s arguing against one-dimensional history, even against one-dimensional living – allowing yourself to be reduced to just one label, maybe woman, maybe lumpenproletariat, maybe Muslim or Scottish or black or a signed-up member of a bona fide, battle-ready civilisation. He says he wants to show what connects us, our variousness, our “common humanity”; but he doesn’t write that history, which is tough to shape. Instead he writes about how our ideas of conflict change, fight among themselves.
For “common humanity” usually means “what You have in common with Me.” History may look comfortable to a comfortably tenured white man but there have been times – try being a woman in Afghanistan now, or a Jew or a homosexual in 1938 Berlin, or the wrong kind of black in a British colony – where a single label, one part of an identity, mattered so much it could kill you.
Cannadine’s war is against Marxists, even though he admits they’ve pretty much given up fighting back. The fall of Communism becomes his argument against the Marxist notion of class, and its overwhelming importance in history, which is rather odd since he also says the idea was falling apart when the people trooped off willingly to fight the First World War instead of making revolution. How willing they were, and how close Britain came to revolution in 1919, are not questions he wants to raise. Class was still baffling the Labour Party in the early 1990s when they obsessed over why the workers voted “wrong.” One clue: the only person I’ve ever actually heard talk of voting for his class interests was a banker.
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Cannadine is very good on the abuse of history by politicians who don’t know much. He disapproves of anything being inevitable, everything is circumstantial, so it makes no sense to him to talk about the inevitable clash of civilisations, Western against Islamic, say, much less to see it as the new and supercharged engine of history. He disapproves of the last President Bush saying the world is fundamentally divided and we have to choose where we stand.
He flirts with the notion of a post-racial America, citing (as do many white American professors) the number of inter-racial marriages, as though love and lust ever had any trouble crossing racial barriers, and also the election of President Obama. He says genetics have made a nonsense of the notion of race controlling destiny; we are all much too much alike for the argument to make sense. This is clearly true, but it only makes the notion of race more interesting; it has never rested only on faith or fact or the usefulness of not having to pay for human rights for your slaves or subjects. And it has not lost any of its importance, unfortunately: take a close look at the slogans the next time the Republican Right is out protesting against President Obama and you’ll see that race is very much on their minds.
Then there’s the question of women. Professor Cannadine clearly does not much approve of Professor Germaine Greer, which is a question of taste, but he doesn’t have convincing arguments against her old slogan that “before you are of any race, nationality, region, party or family, you are a woman”. The fact feminists don’t always agree on everything does not discredit the idea of paying attention to women’s views of the world. It doesn’t mean that at times – issues of equal pay or equal access to work, for example – a woman could ignore the fact that she was seen as a woman before anything else.
Historians of women, he says, “have found it difficult to agree what this history looks like, whom it is about, how it should be written, and what it shows”. Well, historians of men aren’t doing that much better, which is the whole point of this new book of his, and you’d think he would remember the gigantic omission, or maybe deletion, that historians are trying to correct: a history that often left out half the people who ever lived (except, of course, queens, saints, victims and the occasional Borgia). And what