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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.

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.

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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.

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.

Subscribe to Chris Williams's posts

 

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.

Some of them, like the Battle of Britain, are what I'd call 'over-determined': they have so much going for them that it's no puzzle that they became the official version, especially in this case, when the other explanation involves a rather more shady event. Others - like fact that the main losers of the battle of Trafalgar were the Spanish, not the French, are harder to explain.

Most academics never get a chance to communicate with a broad public, since the government only funds us (essentially) to carry out (often esoteric) research and teach students. This is a shame; it leads the field of popular history largely to amateur historians and writers. Some of these are brilliant geniuses, as good as the very best PhD-holding academics. Others aren't. This is a topic that we come to in one of the podcast discussions that accompany this series.

A few weeks ago I found out that some lovely Americans had actually done some research on how we learn about history. They took a group of teenagers from Seattle and investigated what they knew about the Vietnam War. Although their parents often had very different views about the war, the kids all tended to think the same thing. They'd picked up a story about the war which had some of its elements in it - the apparent futility of the struggle and its dire effects on many of the US soldiers who fought it, and the wave of protest against the war at home. But they had no idea about the fact that, right until the final pullout, a majority of Americans supported the war. There was no room for pro-war demonstrations in their narrative of events.

The whole paper is available here, and it's worth a look:

Common Belief and the Cultural Curriculum (1.31MB)

(If you have problems opening this pdf file, try downloading the free acrobat reader)

Now somebody needs to do the same job for the UK.

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.

Subscribe to Chris Williams's posts