The EconomistJuly 20th 2019 Britain 49W
hatever youthink about recent events in Britain, you can-
not deny that they qualify as historic. The country is trying to
make a fundamental change in its relationship with the continent.
The Conservative Party is in danger of splitting asunder and hand-
ing power to a far-left Labour Party. All this is taking place against
the backdrop of a fracturing of the Western alliance and a resur-
gence of authoritarian populism.
Yet even as history’s chariot thunders at a furious pace, the
study of history in British universities is in trouble. The subject
used to hold a central position in national life. A scholarship to
read history at one of the ancient universities was both a rite of
passage for established members of the elite and a ticket into the
elite for clever provincial boys, as Alan Bennett documented so
touchingly in his play “The History Boys”. Prominent historians
such as A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper were public figures
who spoke to the nation about both historical and contemporary
events. The Sunday Timeshad Trevor-Roper on retainer to write
special reports on big news stories and Taylor’s televised lectures
attracted millions of viewers.
This was as it should be. Britain is a small island with a gigantic
history, and history connects it with the wisdom of the ages. But
something has gone badly wrong of late. Even as history itself has
become more dramatic, the study of history has shrivelled. The
number reading it at university has declined by about a tenth in
the past decade. The number studying languages, which often
have a historical component, has fallen by a fifth—hardly an aus-
picious start for “global Britain”. Students have instead been stam-
peding into overtly practical subjects such as medicine, veterinary
sciences and business studies.
At the same time, the historical profession has turned in on it-
self. Historians spend their lives learning more and more about
less and less, producing narrow phds and turning them into
monographs and academic articles, in the hamster-wheel pursuit
of tenure and promotion. The need to fill endless forms to access
government funding adds the nightmare of official bureaucracy to
the nightmare of hyper-specialisation. And historians increasing-
ly devote themselves to subjects other than great matters of state:
the history of the marginal rather than the powerful, the poor rath-er than the rich, everyday life rather than Parliament. These fash-
ions were a valuable corrective to an old-school history that fo-
cused almost exclusively on the deeds of white men, particularly
politicians. But they have gone too far. Indeed, some historians al-
most seem to be engaged in a race to discover the most marginal-
ised subject imaginable. What were once lively new ideas have de-
generated into tired orthodoxies, while vital areas of the past, such
as constitutional and military affairs, are all but ignored.
The people who pay the heaviest price for this are the students
who choose to spend several years of their lives, and many thou-
sands of pounds, studying history. Under the old dispensation,
students at least acquired a general sense of the history of their
own country. Today, they often study a mish-mash of special sub-
jects that don’t have much to hold them together, let alone provide
a sense of broad historical development. The general public is also
short-changed. Senior historians used to think that their job in-
cluded talking to the nation and setting current events in their his-
torical context. For the most part today’s historians remain isolat-
ed in their professional cocoons, spending more time fiddling
with their footnotes than bringing the past to light for a broader
audience. Who outside academia has heard of Lyndal Roper, the
current Regius professor of history at Oxford?
The obvious reason to worry about this is that there is more
than a little truth in the old adage that those who don’t learn from
history are condemned to repeat it. The world seems to be deter-
mined to copy the mistakes of the 1930s and ’40s, with Donald
Trump recycling the isolationist rhetoric of America Firsters and
Jeremy Corbyn embracing a failed socialist ideology. History is a
safeguard against this kind of Utopianism. One of the reasons the
world is in such a mess is that neoliberals became carried away
with their own ideology. They made all sorts of unrealistic prom-
ises, about abolishing the boom-bust cycle or bringing democracy
to the Middle East, that a moment’s reflection on history would
have exploded.
The study of history is also a safeguard against myopia. Moder-
nity shrinks time as well as space; people live in an eternal present
of short-term stimuli and instant gratification. History teaches
them to broaden their horizons and shift their perspectives. On a
more mundane level, history can be a safeguard against outright
idiocy. The Northern Ireland secretary, Karen Bradley, might not
have expressed surprise that Protestants and Catholics in the prov-
ince vote along sectarian lines if she had spent, say, an hour study-
ing the history of the province over which she presides.What’s past is prologue
There are glimmers of hope. Britain still has historians with a ge-
nius for bringing their subject alive, such as Tom Holland, Sir Si-
mon Schama and Dame Mary Beard. History festivals are booming.
The decline in the number of students reading the subject has not
been as precipitous as in America. But these are no more than
glimmers. A striking number of Britain’s bestselling historians ei-
ther don’t have academic jobs (like Mr Holland) or face brickbats
and backbiting from their fellow professionals (as Dame Mary
does). The public’s voracious appetite for military history, so clear-
ly demonstrated during the d-day celebrations, is catered for al-
most entirely by non-academics such as Sir Max Hastings and Sir
Antony Beevor. Historians need to escape from their intellectual
caves and start paying more attention to big subjects such as the
history of politics, power and nation-states. The extraordinary
times that we are living through demand nothing less. 7Bagehot The end of history
The decline of the study of the past bodes ill for the future