More years ago than it is decent to recall, when I first started teaching undergraduates, I would sometimes ask them why they thought we should study history. Unfairly sprung upon them, perhaps, some would take refuge in the axiom that ‘we can learn lessons from history’. Pressed harder, they might come up with such insights as ‘history teaches us that dictators should never be appeased’ or ‘the lesson of history is that democratic regimes ought not to negotiate with terrorists’. The first, I imagine, was a peculiarly British legacy from the Second World War: in particular the morally awkward status of the Chamberlain government’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler. The second may have been a consequence of the ‘troubles’ in Ulster that were, at the time, frequent headline news.

Both statements were thoroughly understandable, but just as thoroughly wrong. In the case of the former, it was easy enough to point out that if the British state had more effectively ‘appeased’ the dictatorships of Stalin and Mussolini then World War Two would likely have been averted. And if nothing else, the late success of the Northern Ireland peace process seems to have mortally undermined the latter. (Though I’m not suggesting that governments should in consequence be assiduously soothing the fits of all tyrants or laying on tea and biscuits for the most deranged terrorist.) Those two old saws are less repeated these days, thankfully. Still, my suspicion has lingered that, for many people, history’s utility lies in the great social and moral prescriptions it can allegedly offer its students.

I decided to test this hypothesis with a small experiment, which you may like to try yourselves. I googled the phrase ‘the lesson of history’, to see what the world’s favourite search engine would come up with. And I must admit that amongst the almost 65,000 results were several that appeared quite sensible, or at least arguable. Nevertheless, history was also conjured up to defend a whole variety of dubious proclamations. The panoramic seemed in vogue:
"The inevitable lesson of history is that, when you change just one thing, you end up changing everything."

As did the audacious:
"The lesson of history is that there is no economic force on this globe that is stronger than free people and their desire to create a better life."

And even the potentially hazardous got a good look in:
"The lesson of history is that when doctors start telling patients what they should and should not eat, patients would be well advised to ignore them."

However, what struck me was the continuing popularity of the type of prescriptive assertion sprung from the same seed as truisms about resisting dictators or defying terrorists. For instance, what did history have to say about one of the most debated contemporary issues - the conflict in Iraq? It seemed from my results pretty clear that history required America’s troops to stay in:
"The lesson of history is that walking away will cost more, whether in Iraq or elsewhere."

Or get out:
"The lesson of history and the solution [to problems in Iraq] is pretty simple: The US has to withdraw."

And history’s prevarication on contentious topics did not end there. The capricious sprite incessantly served up contradictory advice. It taught us that free trade was the best solution to world poverty, although it was only ever beneficial for rich people; that dictatorships were always ephemeral, but likely to be long-lived without foreign intervention to remove them; and that America’s military strength was a mighty deterrent to and cause of war. In short, history was evoked to support all manner of idiosyncratic, hectoring, or unshaded opinions. (I’m not denying that some of these opinions might contain a little truth, but what they’re not is ‘lessons of history’.) 

What does this tell us about the discipline, though? Does it simply lend weight to the idea (also fashionably repeated in my Google search results) that history provides us with no lessons at all? That - beyond the subject being rich, complex, and interesting in its own right - there is no reason to study it? Has history no social function? As it happens, history does provide ‘lessons’ for those who care to study it, although they are hardly ever of the rigid prescriptive kind that I’ve been talking about above. What some of them are will be the subject of the next part of this blog.

Taking it further:

Related courses from the Open University:

Total war & social change   - explore the relationship between war and the transformation of society that took place during the first half of the twentieth century. You’ll examine questions about possible relationships between total war and social, cultural and geopolitical change, and includes topics such as: European governments; societies and armies in 1914; the nature of warfare and differences in the conduct of those wars; social developments in Western democracies; the holocaust; the division of Europe after World War II; women and war; film and propaganda; and war, literature and the arts.

Exploring history: medieval to modern 1400-1900 - the problems and methodologies of history are well covered in this OU course, which gives students a very broad introduction to the study of history. It highlights three big historical themes - changing beliefs, producers and consumers, and state formation - and looks at how they altered from the medieval period through to the nineteenth century. Amongst the topics covered are slavery and the slave trade, the European Reformations, Imperialism, the French Revolution, and the Wars of the Roses.

About the author

Dr Stuart Mitchell has spent fifteen years teaching history in higher education - the last thirteen of which have been with the Open University, amongst other institutions. Currently, he’s a tutor on Exploring History: Medieval to Modern (A200) and Total War and Social Change (AA312). He also serves as the university’s academic consultant on the BBC television programme, Timewatch. His first book, The Brief and Turbulent Life of Modernising Conservatism, was published in 2006.

Blogging about

The Things We Forgot To Remember

Some events resonate, and are celebrated down the ages. Others, equally significant, are forgotten. Michael Portillo investigates The Things We Forgot To Remember.

This week’s programme on the Battle of Trafalgar returns to a theme that we’ve explored several times on TTWFTR. ‘What actually happened’ doesn’t get remembered when it doesn’t fit into a nice simple story.

It also shows up a large number of inconvenient truths. Here are some:

1) ‘Spain was defeated in 1588. Then it just declined.’
We’ve already had a go at this one in series one, when we pointed out that ‘the’ Spanish armada of 1588 was followed up by three more, each equally large. But the Spanish Empire did not go away: as the Darien episode demonstrated, the Spanish dominated the Caribbean in the eighteenth century, in the face of hostility from many states and people who would have dearly loved to get control of the silver of the Americas. But by 1820, the Spanish state was impotent in the caribbean

2) ‘The Battle of Trafalgar stopped Napoleon’s invasion.’
The true story is rather more subtle, though if anything more impressive. Brilliant work by Nelson and his fellow-admirals in the Trafalgar campaign had meant that the French and Spanish fleets failed to out-thing their British enemies. There was no chance that they could bring enough ships together to gain the kind of victory that Napoleon needed. He had to have control of the Channel for at lest a week to get his army over - when it was obvious that this wasn’t going to happen, he order the great camp at Boulogne to be dismantled, and marched off to defeat the Austrians again. Before Trafalgar was fought.

3) ‘That was the end of French naval power’
1805 didn’t spell the end of French naval power. In the nineteenth century, the French were able to build up a colonial empire in Algeria and in south-east Asia. Furthermore, they were periodically able to worry the Royal Navy. You can see the signs of this worry from orbit:

Portland Harbour and the breakwater at Alderney were constructed specifically to give the RN bases from which to fight the French. In addition, forts like Fort Nelson were built around the naval bases of Plymouth and Portsmouth in order to defend against a surprise landing.

Britannia may have ruled the waves, but it did not do so effortlessly, Trafalgar or no Trafalgar.

But because so much of our shared view of what’s important in History has been defined as the conflict between Britain and France, we’ve tended to shoehorn our views about history into this easy to understand two-way struggle, at the cost of a broader understanding of what went on.

That’s all for now - I hope you’ve found the series and the podcasts interesting. I have a number of ideas up my sleeve for any potential series 4: the Jarrow March and the battle of Thermopaylae need to be knocked off their perches, for starters. I’m off to persuade Radio 4 to commission a fourth series, and the OU to fund it. I hope you’ve enjoyed series enough to wish me luck.

About the author

Chris Williams is a lecturer in the History Department of the Open University. He researches on British policing, and chairs the course team for the OU course Total War and Social Change: Europe 1914-1955.

Blogging about

The Things We Forgot To Remember

Some events resonate, and are celebrated down the ages. Others, equally significant, are forgotten. Michael Portillo investigates The Things We Forgot To Remember.

Ever since I learned of the 1943/4 Bengal Famine, I have always wanted to do more to bring it to the attention of the general public.

One of the motivations of The Things We Forgot To Remember is as an answer to the question "Why study history?" There are a lot of answers to this, but one important reason is that people are already talking about history, and sometimes, they have got it seriously wrong. One example of this is the widespread ignorance of the Bengal famine.

For me, the 'killer facts' about the Bengal famine are straightforward. In 1941, when the Battle of the Atlantic was at its height, Winston Churchill and the War Cabinet considered the question of relative priority to give to imports of food, raw materials, and munitions. They reached a clear conclusion: food came first. In 1943, when famine threatened millions in India, the War Cabinet responded to the urgent calls for help by Amery and Wavell. They discussed whether or not to divert shipping and food to try and lower prices and hence avert mass deaths. They took an equally clear decision: the demands of the war (in this case, moving onto the offensive in the Balkans) came first.

It seems pretty clear that the British Empire gave a higher priority to the lives of its British subjects (who, of course, had a say in voting for the government) than it did to its Indian ones – who had no such hold over their rulers.

Right now, it appears increasingly fashionable to sing the praises of the British Empire. Gordon Brown has even gone so far as to argue that the British should "stop apologising" for it. At the same time, he played an enthusiastic part in celebrating the British Empire's abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Any such moral accounting has to set such achievements (and others, such as the suppression of sati) against the sacrifice of Imperial subjects to power games.

I'm having to grapple with these questions in concrete terms right now, because I'm involved in the production of a new OU history course, on the topic of 'Empire'. We're trying to present and summarise the main features of empires over the last five hundred or so years, so in any case it's not an easy task. We have to leave a lot out, so the debates about what to put in are often rather fierce. One question that often return to is the relative prominence to give to issues like the Bengal famine, compared to factors such as modernisation.

Any apologist for empire has to deal with the racism, the oppression, the violence, and the frankly amazing (for me) sadism that it involved – as well as the initial wars of conquest. Empire may have looked pretty towards the end, but its formation was anything but.

Perhaps the most important reason for British people to remember the Bengal Famine, though, is that people in South Asia remember it. We can't understand how they might see the Empire - and the idea that it was a Good Thing, until we've got some idea of its appalling downside.

About the author

Chris Williams is a lecturer in the History Department of the Open University. He researches on British policing, and chairs the course team for the OU course Total War and Social Change: Europe 1914-1955.

Kicking off the year of reading for 2008, Stephanie Forward introduces a light-hearted romp:

We’re seeing in the New Year on the Forum with a scintillating literary romp. Super-sleuth Thursday Next is a woman with a mission, and we are joining the valiant LiteraTec as she strives to protect hapless fictional characters from the villainous Acheron Hades.

Our heroine needs to cross the Prose Portal if she is to protect and preserve one of the most popular figures in nineteenth-century literature: Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

As we face the thrills and spills of the chase we will have to gird ourselves to endure a barrage of ingenious allusions, a surfeit of apostrophes and ampersands, and some seriously excruciating word-play.

Why was the Anglo-Welsh border closed in 1965?

May Pickwick the pet dodo plock-plock once too often?

Can Mr Quaverley regain his rightful place in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’?

Will Thursday succeed in rescuing her Aunt Polly from the amorous William Wordsworth?

Might she identify the playwright who REALLY penned Shakespeare’s dramas?

Could there possibly be a resolution to the one hundred and thirty-one years of conflict in the Crimea?

Shall Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester attain the dénouement they truly deserve?

And – more importantly – is it too late for Thursday to find lasting love with Landen Parke-Laine?

All these questions and more – oh dear yes, many, many more – will be addressed as we venture into the surreal world created by Jasper Fforde in The Eyre Affair. So let’s leap into Thursday’s colourful Speedster! All roads lead to Swindon (and Haworth…..).

Discuss the book in the forum.