History is a key battleground in our increasingly bitter contemporary culture wars. In the polarised debates over who we are, the cry of ‘you can’t rewrite history’ regularly goes up. And is regularly met with the counterclaim that history needs to be rewritten.
Virtually the only thing both sides can agree on is that the past matters. But why, and in what ways? And is there a route out of our current impasse? These are some of the questions tackled in this episode, in which George Miller talks to Robert Gildea, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, about his new book, What is History For?
Along the way, Robert also reflects on his own career as a historian and what it has taught him about the role of history in our present political reality.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
What Is History For? is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £8.99.
Robert Gildea is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at the University of Oxford, and a specialist on French and European history in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2003 he won the Wolfson Prize for History. Follow him on Twitter: @RobertGildea.
SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
1:51 – Robert’s attempts to convince his father that he was cut out for a career as a historian
6:18 – What drew you to history?
13:37 – What do historians actually do?
18:38 – What is the trajectory that historians normally follow?
22:40 – Why is history more complicated than a settled body of knowledge?
30:55 – Why history matters, and is still significant in the world today
42:17 – Is it possible to have a truly successful reckoning with the past?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
George Miller: Hello and welcome to the Transforming Society podcast from Bristol University Press. My name is George Miller and I’m the editor of a new series from BUP that launched last spring. Over the next few years, What Is It For? will explore the purpose of a range of institutions, beliefs, ideologies and other key things that make up the contemporary world. From war to philanthropy, nuclear weapons to free speech, conspiracy theories to immigration policy. The aim is not to come up with easy answers, but to stimulate constructive debate. These are questions that are worth asking in order to think about what made the present the way it is, and also how the future could be better.
What Is History For? has just joined a series, along with the Olympics and prisons. It’s by Robert Gildea, who is Professor Emeritus of Modern History at Oxford University. He sums himself up on his Twitter bio as “angry about inequality, injustice and colonialism. Still European.” Robert’s main focus has indeed been modern French history. He won the Wolfson Prize for his study of France under German occupation. But in recent years, he’s widened his lens to look at the colonial past and its influence on contemporary politics in empires of the mind. And he also recently published a history of the miners’ strike in 1980s Britain.
In Robert’s book for our series, What Is History For? and in this conversation, he talks about the enduring power of history to shape our present reality, about how historical myths get deployed in political discourse and collective memory, about history’s role in the culture wars, and the vital importance of rewriting history.
But we also get personal insights, such as the time he was recommended to write a history of knitting, and where we began when we met in Oxford recently, the adolescent Robert’s attempts to convince his father that he was cut out for a career as a historian rather than a civil servant.
Robert Gildea: Yes, I think I was about 15, 16. I had thought about other careers. At some point I wanted to be an architect or I wanted to be a surgeon, but then I suppose I became very interested in history. Yeah, my father was a civil servant in the Board of Trade, or DTI as it became, and sometimes the cabinet office. And he said, if you go to the civil service, he said, you will have your hands on the levers of power. You’ll be able to advise ministers and get things done. And it’s true that at the time he was involved in a lot of trade negotiations and Britain’s entry into Europe. And I didn’t want to do that because I think I was quite… I had a problem with authority, as indeed he did. And he didn’t get promoted as much as he might have done. But I came to think that history was a way of influencing events, not events, but shaping opinions that I thought if you wrote books and if you taught students, you could have an impact on the world. So we had that argument and I think he was quite sceptical when I became an academic.
The only time when I really got approval from him was when I became Professor of Modern History in 2006 and that job was associated with his old college, Worcester College. And then at that point he kind of gave me the benefit of the doubt. But the sad news was that by the time the EU referendum came around in 2016, his marbles were slightly going and I took him down to the polling station and then I later had to inform him that his whole life’s work had gone up in smoke. All those trade negotiations, all that entry into Europe was no longer. And I said to him, “I’m afraid, Dad, this is the bad news. We’re leaving Europe.” And he looked at me and he said, “Hmm, isn’t that rather a silly idea?”
George Miller: And I guess in your career you’ve pursued that… you’ve given an answer to that question in some of your work, haven’t you?
Robert Gildea: Well, the other side of that is that because he was a very strong European, in fact he wrote, apparently he wrote an essay for the civil service exam on why national sovereignty was finished. This is probably in 1947, ’48. And he believed that power either had to go move up towards something more confederal or federal or down towards something more regional. That nation states after the First World War had not, after the Second World War, First World War and Second World War, had not really done themselves much credit and therefore we need to look at that. And because he was a great European, he was very keen that his children should learn a foreign language. And so at the age of 14, I think I was packed off to a French family, which at that point was living in Versailles. And I can remember my first mistake in French, I got off the train and I was picked up by my pen friend and we were coming into Versailles and I said to him, “Où est le palais?” And you know the French people have this way of thinking, they can’t think cyber, they can’t think, “What is this person trying to say?” And they said, “What Palais? There’s no Palais here.” And after a bit I realised you had to say, “Où est le château?” because it’s the Château de Versailles. And a Palais to them is a Palais de Justice. It’s a law court. But that was my first humiliation of not knowing the difference between Palais and Château.
George Miller: In French they are quite intolerant, aren’t they? You have to be quite close to the target, otherwise they will feign complete incomprehension and not meet you halfway.
But Robert, you mentioned your father saying if you were in the civil service you could have your hands on the levers of power and you thinking that historians could perhaps have influence. But was that what appealed to you back then or were you enthralled by other aspects of history when you were really young? Was it narrative or colour or big ideas as much as thinking about influence and teaching?
Robert Gildea: I think it was an alternative world. I mean interestingly I wasn’t interested in ancient myths and I didn’t understand myths because they weren’t true. And I didn’t know how to grapple with myths, although I have spent my whole life, a lot of the stuff in the book is about historical myths and what role they play in public discourse and how historians have to deal with them. But interestingly I think I was probably about eight or nine and I was given a book token for five shillings. And at that point a ladybug book cost two and sixpence. So I remember going to WH Smith in Streatham, which was our nearest WH Smith, and buying the Ladybird Book of Alfred the Great and the Ladybird Book of William the Conqueror. And being absolutely enthralled, less by the text actually, but by the illustrations, by this very curious guy called L. Dugard Peach. I haven’t really followed him up but the illustrations were in full colour and really evocative of a period and characters. And I suppose I became entranced.
I mean interestingly I never got on with the Middle Ages. I remember trying to do the Middle Ages at university and not getting on with the structure of feudalism or saints or the venerable Bede until much later on one of my young colleagues who was a Scottish historian said “I haven’t got on with the Middle Ages”. He said “Oh the Middle Ages” he said “it was just about men in leather jackets killing each other”. And I thought why didn’t Peter Brown tell me that? Why didn’t the wonderful historians, men in leather jackets, killing each other?
But I was very fascinated when I was about 14, 15 I was obsessed by the English Civil War. I did a lot of work on the English Civil War and I remember reading a book about it. The name of the author slips me. But he has an early example of oral history. It’s on the Battle of Marston Moor and they’re trying to clear the peasants off the battlefield. And he’s explaining to the soldiers, explaining to the peasants that there’s going to be a battle between the king and parliament and the peasant says “What? Have those two fallen out then?” So yeah full of amazing stories.
And of course by the time I got to A level I went to a school where you did two A levels early and then you were supposed to do the Oxford examination and then if you were still there you could do French. The third A level was French so I did the two A levels, history and English. But I think I probably spent 70 or 80% of the time doing the history and I did a bit of English. The French I left behind and then I did the Oxford exam, got into Oxford and they said “Well you need to stay on for another two terms to do the French.” I thought “I’m not doing that.”
And in that gap year was a kind of gap six months from now I went to Paris and did a course at the Sorbonne, a course in French language and civilization and I thought “I’m not going to do any history courses because I know I’m going to do history for when I get to university.” So I did courses in French literature, French politics, French geography and they had some amazing lecturers and I learned a huge amount about French literature which I hadn’t done. I mean I was at school I hadn’t even heard of Baudelaire, I hadn’t even heard of Rimbaud. So that kind of dimension, the cultural dimension really opened up for me there.
George Miller: And was that where the seed was sown for a career which would in large part focus on French history?
Robert Gildea: Well there were two seminars in French history that I attended even as an undergraduate. There was Richard Cobb’s seminar which was about the French Revolution and Theodore Zeldin’s seminar which was more about the 19th century. I remember going to one of Theodore Zeldin’s seminars and there was Rod Kedward speaking and he was talking about anger in the French resistance and I thought, “How can you, how is that a historical subject, anger?” But you know, Theodore Zeldin went on to write two volumes on 19th, 20th French history which was translated to French as history of French passions which in fact was quite good.
So I think I felt that, you know, whereas with German history the seminars I went to it was always about how did we get into this mess, i.e., the Third Reich, and they weren’t even talking about the Holocaust, it was just Nazism, how do we get into this mess and how did we get out of it? And I felt that German history was on these railway lines whereas French history was, you could do anything. In fact, Theodore Zeldin once said to me, he said, “I think you should do your thesis on knitting. What you should do is to go into the Bibliothèque nationale and read all the 19th century manuals on knitting and try and read the subtext.” And I thought, is this guy taking the mickey? I mean, I didn’t know whether he was a genius or whether he was actually trying to frustrate my career but anyway I didn’t, I went to work on education.
I did a thesis on education in Brittany in the 19th century. As a way of testing, we’re onto the subject of myths, there was this story which I think I quote of an education minister of Napoleon III who in the 1860s said, “I can look at my watch and tell you what every French child is studying at precisely this moment.” There was this myth, there’s always been a myth of French centralisation and that applied also to education. So I thought, and then of course in the late 19th century there were the anti-clerical reforms where they basically, they took the religious education out of state schools and they took the teaching orders out of state schools. And I thought, well I wonder how far that kind of worked, did that actually work? Could that be done in a very Catholic conservative part of France like Brittany?
So I suppose that was my first encounter with myth, how can a story of centralisation, which is kind of part of the myth of the French Republic, does it actually work when you get down to the nitty gritty of the archives and local history?
George Miller: You were doing that I guess in a spirit of challenge because you were sceptical about the received myth. So I’m really curious about what historians actually do when it comes, you know you framed a fairly tight question about education in Brittany and it’s part of a bigger question about this myth of French centralisation and control. Tell me a little bit about how you then actually go and test that, what does it actually entail, the work of a historian before you start to write it up, what are you looking for, how are you looking for it, how are you beginning to form some kind of picture that will actually result in a thesis or a book?
Robert Gildea: Well, I have to say that in those days there was virtually no graduate training and you didn’t have to do a masters. So you went straight from the BA to your doctoral work and I think I did about a term and a bit of reading around my doctoral subject and they just said go to the archives, so you went to the archives.
And I basically read all the kind of reports of school inspectors and I also looked at all the data of the fluctuation of state schools and other schools and the growth of schools and what happened when you brought in compulsory education, compulsory elementary education in the 1830s.
But I suppose one of the things I did, although I was only working in one department, even in one department there were areas that were more right-wing than others. And I’ve been interested in various historians who said well you can trace a lot of divisions in French history back to the revolution. In fact, some people argue that you could trace the same divisions back to the wars of religion. I had a map of the department with each commune, so it’s divided by about 300 communes and I was drawing distribution maps, drawing distribution maps of where the state schools were and where the religious schools were, but then you’d map that onto which areas the primary schools teachers were recruited from.
I went into the teacher training college and looked at their registers and I worked out where people were recruited from. And then I went to the seminary and worked out where the priests were recruited from and they were from different parts of the department. One was more progressive, one was more reactionary. And then you trace that back to the French Revolution and there was a very important division in the French Revolution around the reform of the Catholic Church when they brought in something called the Civil Constitution of the Clergy which was to reform the church and the clergy had to make an oath to it, take an oath to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and in a place like Brittany they refused.
So you get a map of the places where they signed up for the reform and then you could see these maps building up a picture, a picture that was entrenching sort of political and religious attitudes over a period of 100 years and then you think well okay so if these divisions are so entrenched, I mean I did have a rather rigid view of French history which was inspired by the sort of annales school of history but what I suppose my thinking was if you’re interested in these divisions that go back a long way right to the French Revolution then the idea that a reform can just come in and then somebody can change the face of French education by passing a bill and then looking at his watch, I mean it’s not going to happen.
George Miller: So it’s a kind of demonstration that things are more complicated than the myth which I guess is one of the big takeaway points of the book—that people, for various reasons, whether it’s because they hold power or they’re contesting power, have certain narratives that they often adhere to, but the historian comes along and, if they’re a good historian, what they’re saying is, actually, it’s more complicated than that.
Robert Gildea: Yes, and the annales school, which was, you know, very influential, and I kind of discovered this as an undergraduate—I mean, it basically said that everything is determined by demography, economic structures, and patterns, and then only then do you get to politics, religion, culture, what they used to call mentalities. So you know, you really have to drill deep before you get to what’s really shaping the world. And I kind of liked that. I mean, that sort of disappeared much later on, that kind of rather mechanistic way of looking at how things work, but for some reason, at that time, I thought that was quite an interesting way of looking at the world.
George Miller: And having been through that training, which, as you describe it, was sort of learning by experimenting—you know, as you say, you weren’t told ‘these are the research methods’; you were working it out as you went along—that then gives you a set of skills which you can take as a professional historian and apply to bigger questions. Is that the trajectory that historians normally follow?
Robert Gildea: Yes, although historians do change over time. I mean, in a sense, what I was working on in one way was historical memory, how people in the present are influenced by memories of the French Revolution or what happened, or whatever. But I think I was doing it in a rather mechanistic way, and then later, about 10-20 years later, I wrote this book called The Past in French History, which was about historical memory and the way in which different memories have shaped French politics.
I remember showing a first draft to a senior historian, Colin Lucas, and he wrote it back to me and said, “Well, what you don’t understand, Robert, is that memory is a construct. It’s not just a thing that is inherited from the past.” And I have this thing from Marx about, you know, the weight of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living, and that was my kind of go-to place for memory. And he said, “No, no, memories are construct, we construct memories, scientists construct memories,” and that was like scales falling from my eyes, and then I realised that you had to deal with the history that was much more about agency and imagination and much less about these determining demographic or economic or social factors.
So I kind of became much more interested in this historical agency, and that was a time when there was an important article called “The Return of Narrative,” because for a long time narrative history went out of fashion, but then narrative was okay, so you could talk about narrative and agency and the way individuals thought. And at a later stage, I got into oral history, which is dealing with memory but dealing with memory through interviewing individual people about their memory, and obviously those people fit into certain contexts. So I think I’m much more interested in individuals and agency and the way things are constructed from on a day-to-day basis.
George Miller: But when you leave the more sort of analytical, data-dependent kind of view of history, then obviously, as you say, the role of imagination and interpretation come into play in a much bigger way.
Robert Gildea: As I say, when I was doing my research and in the first part of my career, I had, as I say, the annales school, the Marxist school, was very influential, and therefore, I kind of felt that people were very much more determined than they couldn’t really change the world they were living in; they were kind of stuck in these envelopes or these almost like walking through a bog. But then I kind of subscribed to a school of history where individual agency is much more important, and people can fashion their own lives and think about things they want to think about. I do quite dislike it when people say, “Well everyone has their own opinions, everyone has their own opinion, and everyone could do what they want to do,” but it’s not, no, because I’m still enough of a social historian to think that actually, you can do your own thing, but there are constraints, you know, there are social constraints, ideological constraints, things in society do actually constrain what people can do. But within those constraints, they are much looser and much more fluid than I probably would have thought 50 years ago.
George Miller: So that’s one thing you frequently hear people say. Another thing if you listen to the news or read the newspapers you hear people frequently say is “You can’t rewrite history,” and that I’m sure in the university is a debate that’s long been settled, but in the popular discourse, and your book really is about how history gets out into the world and influences thinking and attitudes and politicians and power, and this idea that history is a settled thing and that contestation is illegitimate and party pre is, I think, quite a prevalent one. I know it’s perhaps partly whipped up by certain sectors of the media, but if you were to stop people in the street, a certain number of them would think that history was a settled body of knowledge about, it was sort of fact-based and the interpretations were derived from that. Can you explain to someone who perhaps believes that, why it’s a lot more complicated?
Robert Gildea: Well, about 30 years ago, I had a very bright student who was quite angry about these different historical perspectives and why are 70 historians writing about the civil war, the French revolution, with these different historical perspectives? He said, “Why can’t you put all the facts that people agree on in a box, and that’s what’s given, and then people can write very short books and articles just sort of around the edges of that if they disagree with this or that, the interpretation of these facts?” And I just—I mean, I have to say, I was a bit gobsmacked by that, because I suppose the thing is, as your perspective changes, it’s a bit like a kaleidoscope. If you look at something from one angle, you see something, and if you look at it from another angle, it looks different.
And not only that—so if you’re a conqueror, and you’re writing the history of the Norman Conquest, you write one story, and if you’re an Anglo-Saxon who’s been defeated, you know, provided you’ve still got something to write on or stories to tell, you’re going to write a completely different story. And ditto with the British Empire. If you’re a soldier or missionary of the British Empire, you’re going to tell one story, and if you’re an inhabitant of West Africa or India, and you’re being clobbered by the British Army, then you’re probably, if you have the ability, you’ll write a different story. Women will write different stories from men, and so on and so forth. And not only these different perspectives, but here, you’ve also got history as moving. I mean, so you know, we now have the Gaza war, and obviously since the Gaza war, people are going to be looking at the history of the Middle East in a different way or, and maybe reassessing the Holocaust in a different way. With every major event, perspectives change.
And I think when people say you can’t rewrite history, what I think, the way I sort of interpret that is, “Please don’t rewrite the history that we’ve already written.” So imagine, you know, Winston Churchill, who famously said, “History will be kind to me because I shall write it.” And you know, not only did he write the history of the Second World War, but he wrote a history of the English-speaking peoples, which plays to a very sort of British-centric, Commonwealth-centric view of the world. And you know, if you’re a person of immigrant origin, or someone living in, you know, someone who they’ve recently done a programme on the Bengal famine, which was, you know, which was inflicted by the British effectively during the Second World War, nowhere in Churchill’s memoirs, Churchill’s Second World War book volumes, there’s no mention of the Bengal famine. So once you start to think about the Bengal famine, then you have to think about the British Empire in a rather different way. It wasn’t about bringing religion and civilization and prosperity to the whole world. I mean, though there were, this came at a cost.
So there’s a kind of post-colonial school of history, you know, which not only wants to rewrite the history of the British Empire from a different perspective, but also thinks, well, why are we celebrating people like Cecil Rhodes, and why does Cecil Rhodes still have a statue in Oxford? And there have been, you know, in the last 20 years, two campaigns to bring down the statue of Cecil Rhodes; neither has succeeded because they are up against the people who say, well, you can’t change history. I mean, Cecil Rhodes did what he did, and you can’t change that, and there’s a monument to him, and we’re not going to bring it down. But what, you know, the what becomes clear is that Cecil Rhodes and his statues stand for a particular view of history, and other people don’t agree with it.
George Miller: You talked about influence right back at the beginning, and historians, through teaching or writing, potentially having some influence. Clearly, it’s a complicated question, but how do you get beyond that kind of opposition, that kind of resistance, and actually, you know, lead somewhere which is, if I can put it this way, more enlightened or less oppositional, less confrontational?
Robert Gildea: Well, I suppose it’s sort of chipping away, and I suppose the other thing you notice with history is it kind of moves in waves, you know, there are topics and there are ways of doing things which move with like a tide. I mean, I remember when I first studied the British Empire as an undergraduate, the question was, you know, explain why there was this burst of imperialism in the late 19th century, what used to be called the new imperialism. You know, one of the books you read was called *Africa and the Victorians*, and it explained that, you know, one of the triggers for the expansion of Empire in the late 19th century were troubles in South Africa and troubles in Egypt, and you know, the British came in to sort out the troubles, and they ended up expanding the Empire, and it never occurred to me that, you know, the people who were resisting the British in Egypt or the people who were resisting the British in South Africa had a story of their own to tell. But you know, with time, people say, well, we need to listen to the history of colonised peoples; we have to listen to, we have to do black history; we have to do the history of indigenous peoples in Australia or Canada. So then there’s a kind of movement where gradually momentum builds up, and you know, people are studying what became called, you know, becomes called post-colonial history, and then the people who are writing old-fashioned, white, British colonial history, you know, feel a bit embattled, but they fight back. And that’s where you get the culture wars.
You know, the culture wars, to my mind, is basically the people who want to rewrite history to write, you know, women’s history or queer history or black history or indigenous history or even working-class history. I mean, they are, they find themselves up against the people who want to write, you know, white, male, middle-class, or elite history. And when these people who are in the top positions and have their hands on the levers of power are damned if they’re going to let go, so this, I think, is what the culture war is about: it’s about whose interpretation of history comes out on top, and that’s why I say that history is a battlefield. It’s about whose view of history, whose interpretation, whose book or series of books on history comes to be accepted as the quote “dominant narrative.”
George Miller: And what’s clear from all of this is that history matters to people; it’s not just some recondite academic debate. You mentioned the Gaza war, you write in the book about Putin’s view of Ukraine—history is very much part of the whole way in which these very present issues are framed, debated, justified, legitimized. There’s a lot at stake, isn’t there? And I guess that’s why the book, that’s why you wanted to write the book and why it matters. I mean, history really does matter, it’s not just a sort of pious view of an academic. It’s really significant in the world today, in all sorts of contexts.
Robert Gildea: Yes, and I think one of the things I try to do in the book is to show how history is used and misused because it is so much part of the common currency. You cited Putin, and in fact, I think one of the first things in the book is that before the invasion of Ukraine, Putin makes a long speech in which he explains that Ukraine has always been part of Russia. And if you go back a thousand years, in fact, Russia started in Ukraine, in Kiev. But he wants to demonstrate that the Russians and the Ukrainians are part of the same history, have the same ethnicity, they have the same culture, they have the same religion. But the point is, although that’s half true, it’s also true that in Ukraine, they broke away, tried to break away from Russia during the Russian Revolution, and then after, in the 1990s, it became a separate country with its own identity, and therefore then started to rewrite its own history and prioritize its own language.
So when people are taking positions, you know, they frequently have to kind of rewrite history in order to justify their position. When people take power, they have to either say, well, they are continuing the Roman Empire, or they are continuing the French Revolution. They very often go back to some previous source of legitimacy to justify what they’re doing. And I suppose what I’m trying to do in the book is to show there’s a tension between how politicians or people in the public sphere use history and how historians use history, because historians are tied to evidence and tied to telling history, you know, in inverted commas, “as it really was.” But of course, it’s not as easy as that, because you find that some historians are what you might call court historians, or official historians, or close to power historians, and they’ll write a history that’s pleasing to those in power. Other historians are kind of bolshie, you know, Marxists or post-colonial, or they write women’s history or queer history, and they’re clearly up for a fight, if you like.
So, the battles over history take place not only in the public sphere, where no historians are involved, but they also take place within history itself. So these battles go on at different levels, but as you say, they are extremely important and influential. It’s almost the air we breathe. I mean, I may be prejudiced as a historian, but I find it difficult to think about the current political world without immediately thinking about how we got here, where we may go next, and so on.
George Miller: Yeah, well, I mean, that, as you know, is the whole premise of this series—to try to understand where we are and where we might be heading, with reference to the past. Because it seems to me it would be impossible to explain the nature of various contemporary debates without at least some understanding of and reference to the past. We are, there is a perpetual relationship with it. You listen to any politician or any educator, and there is going to be some kind of invocation of the past in some context; it’s going to be used to legitimate, explain, or contextualize some present reality.
Robert Gildea: Well, there’s a famous quotation from Orwell’s *1984* which I think I cite a couple of times, and it’s quite difficult to get right, but I think it goes: “He who controls the past controls the future; and he who controls the present controls the past.” And I think that’s very powerful because it shows that if you’re in power, or if you’re in the university, or if you’ve got a university professorship, or you’ve got a column in the newspaper, or you’re a minister of culture, or minister of education, or just even prime minister, you can submit a certain interpretation of the past which conditions the way people think, and that then you can kind of build a vision of the future.
I mean, if you take Brexit, for example, one idea of Brexit was, you know, Boris Johnson’s sunlit uplands: why can’t we go back to a kind of merry England, you know, wonderful England, where it was for hundreds of years, but also, why can’t we go back to global Britain, why can’t we go back to the British Empire? So in a sense, Brexit was sold as a return to some sort of British past which a lot of people bought into.
I remember from my last book, *The Miner’s Strike*, interviewing a woman in County Durham, a miner’s wife, and it transpired that she’d voted leave, and she’d almost voted Conservative, but just before she voted, she thought, what would my dead father have said if I voted Conservative? And she said, my dead father would not have coped, so I voted Labour, as always. But she said, oh, she wanted to go back to how Britain used to be, and I said, well, what do you mean when you wanted to go back? She said, I want to go back to the 1950s, and she’d explained how this is the 90s when she grew up, and how she enjoyed this mining village, and everyone knew each other, and so it’s kind of based on this. And I, and I was very, I like this woman, but this idea that your political decision could be made on the basis of going back to the 1950s, which is not possible, I found that very moving and also slightly disturbing.
Because it would be a particular view of the 1950s that, as you were describing before, is shaped by all the intervening decades and shaped by the media, you know, what people have absorbed from newspapers, and so it’s not really a literal going back, but it’s, I guess, it’s harking back to a time when things seemed simpler. Well, because life is very painful, you know, contemporary life is very painful, and people have anxieties, and somehow, you know, in the past, you kind of fantasize that people didn’t have those anxieties; they kind of lived on a day-to-day basis. But of course, if you go back to the past, I mean, one of my first memories when I was about 10 years old is the Cuban Missile Crisis. So, people talk about the swinging 60s, and they weren’t the 60s great, well, there was also the Cuban Missile Crisis, and everyone thought they were going to blow up, and my mother had tinned food in the cupboards, and jam jars of water under the stairs, and that’s how you’re going to deal with the nuclear crisis.
George Miller: So you can see why the way history is taught in schools is such a concern to politicians because that is kind of the bedrock on which, in later life, people will view history. What they’ve absorbed in primary and secondary school is kind of shaping the view they take of the British Empire, for example. So, it’s understandably a battleground.
Robert Gildea: But even when I was a student in the 1970s, history in Oxford was conditioned by what? I didn’t know the term at the time, but it’s the so-called Whig view of history. And that is, you had to do the whole of British history from the Anglo-Saxons to the present. And the basic narrative was the growth of the English parliament, the growth of the English parliament, and the growth of the British Isles. And that was the kind of thread that held everything together and made it possible for you to get up through a thousand years of history. And I remember at the time, I belonged to another group called Radical Historians that met in a subterranean room in Balliol, and they were kind of young, basically undergraduates of a Marxist disposition. And we were saying, well, we want more social and economic history. That’s the first thing. We hadn’t even got around to thinking about post-colonial history or gender history. I mean, all those things came in later.
But the powers that be want to publish this idea of what’s been known as ‘our island history’. The British history from the beginning is the story of this British people going back to the Anglo-Saxons who converted to Protestantism and converted to parliamentary government and then went out and conquered the world and brought in priests and civilization and Christianity. And it’s actually quite difficult to shift. And it’s a kind of reflex that many people have.
For example, the historian Andrew Roberts wrote a final volume to Churchill’s history of the English-speaking peoples; he wrote a fifth because that book only went up to 1900. So Andrew Roberts produced the 20th century volume and it basically continues the history of the English-speaking peoples. So it is powerful.
And also, there are rows about what music can we have for the last night of the proms? Can we have Rule Britannia or is Rule Britannia, does it say, there’ll be an opposition to Rule Britannia because it says Britain’s never, never shall be slaves. Does that mean other people can be slaves but Britain can’t be slaves? So there have been orchestras and conductors who have said, well, you know, we’d like not to have the words or we’d like not to have Rule Britannia. But I mean, it was only a few years ago when Boris Johnson said, you know, we have to stop being so wimpish and negative about our glorious past, that of course we’re not going to get rid of Rule Britannia. So, you know, we’re back in the culture wars. We’re back in this very powerful force around imposing a certain view of British history that some people are contesting. But as I say, it’s a battlefield. No one knows. I think it’s shifting, but it’s not shifting very much.
George Miller: The Germans have a long compound word called ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’, which means something like truth and reconciliation, coming to terms with the past, reckoning with your past, dealing with your past. And I think they were long held up as, you know, exemplars of this because they’d had such a dreadful 20th-century history that there really had to be some kind of reckoning with the past.
My question is, you know, we see the rise of the far right in Germany today. Do you think it is possible to have a successful, a truly successful reckoning with the past? And if so, do you think Germany suggests lessons for a Britain which is clearly, you know, didn’t have a Nazi past, but is clearly struggling to work out what to do about its colonial past?
Robert Gildea: Well, I think it’s one of the things I say in the book is that, you know, one of the big challenges of history is to work through your past, which means thinking critically about it, and not just staying with easy myths and legends. And as you say, the Germans, because of what happened with Nazism and the Holocaust, have, in a sense, moved quite decisively on this and opened up records and, you know, opened museums to the Holocaust. In a sense, it’s interesting in Germany that the Palestinian viewpoint is clamped down on very severely. And in a sense, you could say that they’ve thought through their past so much and their guilt about the Holocaust so much that they now say, well, you can’t criticize Israel because of the Holocaust and you can’t be pro-Palestinian. So it can lead to new rigidities.
But I think the French also have, you know, also thought about their own colonial record. And if you look at other countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, they all have started to engage in thinking about the colonial record. In fact, my last doctoral student is doing a thesis on this kind of thinking about empire that went into kind of overdrive around the turn of the millennium, around the year 2000, and why should this be?
But I think just as some people are thinking about the colonial past and seeing and criticizing empire as responsible for expropriation and exploitation and extermination, and this is something that we should, you know, feel bad about and maybe compensate people who have been enslaved or, and so on. At the same time, there is this kickback and people who say, for example, the National Trust is getting too ‘woke’ about talking about the way in which so much wealth in Britain, the wealth of country houses in the 17th, 18th, 19th century was built on the wealth derived from the slave plantations. So I think working through the past is a challenge for every day, but it’s going to be a permanent challenge because there will always be pushback, there will always be disagreement, there will always be different points of view. But the one thing that’s clear is that you can rewrite history and you must rewrite history and above all, you must think through history again and again and again to try and get the right answers.
George Miller: That was Robert Gildea, whose book What is History for? is available now. There are more details about it and the other titles in the series on the Bristol University Press website at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk. That’s it from me for now. So thanks for listening and goodbye. (upbeat music)
What Is History For? is available on the Bristol University Press website. Order here for £8.99.
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