This week’s edition of The Times Higher Education Supplement (29 April – 5 May 2010) has some reflections by Richard Overy, Professor of History at Exeter University, on the threats posed to the discipline of history by the growth of the heritage industry on the one hand and by demands from government for relevance, utility and impact on the other. Popular, indeed populist, history has mass appeal in the shape of television programmes hosted by recognisable personalities, in heritage trails, historical re-enactments and so on. Academic history by way of contrast is arcane, theoretically driven and often without drama: its appeal to politicians preoccupied by concepts of added value is limited and uncertain.
What is Overy’s prescription for saving academic history from extinction from these threats? He does not believe that history or historians have much to offer as guides to public policy. He does contend that the subject needs an intellectually free environment in which the frontiers of knowledge can be pushed back and long-term research can be undertaken. But he also expresses the hope that specialised institutes, some privately funded, may be established in which historical research may be conducted and protected. Businesses and, perhaps, local authorities might just conceivably be willing to support such ventures. Even so, academic history will remain a critical activity dedicated to investigating the past and throwing light on abuses and discrimination to the discomfort of rulers. History may not meet the criteria of those enamoured of the agenda of “impact” but it is and must remain the most humane of subjects, the reflective element of the collective mind.
This is an interesting but rather disappointing piece of analysis. It is unlikely that “the heritage industry” with its historic houses, museums and re-enactment societies poses much of a threat to academic history. Most people who visit such places or participate in the events they sponsor understand perfectly well the gulf that separates them from the past. They offer entertainment rather than historical enlightenment.
The danger from politics is more serious and far-reaching. Politicians naturally enough wish to take important decisions which will be remembered at whatever level they may be operating. They want to promote visions of the past that support their own preconceptions and preferences. Hence, the excision from the history taught in our schools of courses that illustrate the past of the peoples of these islands in the longer term. It is virtually impossible to find any serious consideration of Britain’s imperial record at school level. Hence, too, the attempt to construct radical genealogies linking the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to the Levellers and Diggers of the 1640s and the Chartists of the mid-nineteenth century. These were important and interesting but they are only a tiny piece of flotsam on the broader river of English and British history. Similarly, the events of the First and Second World Wars and the Holocaust suffered by the Jews under Nazi rule are of very great significance in recent history but they should not obscure the other struggles – for example, with Spain and France on the continent and across the Atlantic from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries – in which Britain has been engaged: the far larger scale of atrocities committed by the Soviet Union against its own people and the countries it subjugated after 1945 must not be forgotten.
It is not realistic to expect businesses and local authorities to support historical research. They have to answer to shareholders and to council tax payers. The deplorable record of local authorities in cutting funding for the Victoria County History in the last two to three decades should be remembered. The government will go on providing funding for history as long as there are students who want to study it in universities. But this is going to be cut whichever party wins the General Election next week. If students stop wanting to study the subject, then it will already be dead.
But I do not think this will happen. Too many people inside and outside universities have a serious interest in the past for the discipline of academic history to die. They will go on conducting their research and writing their books and articles. These will be published in one way or another. Overy’s pessimism and his prescriptions are unnecessary. The past has a vigorous present and an excellent future.
