Response to Baldwin

Response to Baldwin RICHARD J. EVANS My book Cosmopolitan Islanders derives from the Inaugural Lecture I delivered in 2008 as Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge. The brief of such a lecture is a tricky one – you have to say something about yourself, something about your field, and something about the discipline of History, and you have to appeal both to colleagues and to the wider world. In addition, in both Oxford and Cambridge, the only two universities with Regius Chairs of History, there have been many famous Inaugurals, by historians as varied as J. B. Bury, Hugh Trevor-Roper and, most famous of all, Lord Acton. In some universities, where professors are all-powerful, the Inaugural has served as a means of laying down the law about how the subject should be taught and researched. But in recent times this has been rare, and it has never really been true in Oxford or Cambridge; the one time that an Oxford Regius, the seventeenth-century specialist Sir Charles Firth, tried this, he ran into a huge amount of trouble and was more or less ostracised in the Faculty for the rest of his career. So what I tried to do in Cosmopolitan Islanders was to point to an interesting and barely noticed fact: namely, that while many British historians write about the history of European countries, are translated into the languages of those countries, sell very well there, and have a notable impact on the national historiography, the same is not true in reverse, except in very rare cases. On the face of it, it seems rather odd that historians should work on countries other than their own. So I decided to investigate where this strange habit had come from in the British case, and whether it was long- established or recent. In order to do this, I traced the history of British historians’ preoccupation with the European Continent since the eighteenth century. It quickly became apparent that this had been very much a minority pursuit, engaged in for very parochial British reasons, until after the end of the Second World War. At this point, the combined influences of historians in Britain who had been exiled from the Continent in the 1930s, and British historians who had become interested in Continental history through their engagement with Italy, France, Germany or some other European country during the war, impacted on a new generation – my own Wolfson College, Cambridge, CB39BB; [email protected] Contemporary European History, 20, 3 (2011), pp. 367–376 C Cambridge University Press 2011 doi:10.1017/S0960777311000361 368 Contemporary European History – who came to maturity just as the British university system was undergoing a huge expansion in the 1960s and early 1970s and offering a large number of jobs to aspiring young historians. Thus British historians’ interest in the history of Europe, learning the language, living and researching in the country of interest, and engaging with its national historiography, is of relatively recent origin. The second central element in my investigation was an email questionnaire I sent to all the British historians I could think of who worked mainly or exclusively on the history of the European Continent. I received seventy or so sometimes very lengthy and detailed communications from these colleagues in response to my questions: why did they choose the Continent and not Britain, how did they learn the necessary language or languages (given the fact that command of a foreign language is now unusual among Britons), how was their work regarded in the country they researched on, and how did they see the future of British research into Continental European history? The answers they gave mentioned a variety of reasons for their engagement, but also pointed to the very positive reception their work had received from native historians, even in the case of the French, though this was only a very recent development in their case. At the same time, their own work presented a mixture of engagement and distance, and it was precisely the latter, along with the British literary tradition of writing history, so different from the social-science models predominant on the Continent, that made their work, when it was translated, so influential in France, Spain, Germany and other European countries. Hence the title of the lecture and the book: Cosmopolitan Islanders, signifying the fact that while British historians were in some senses cosmopolitan, their cosmopolitanism was very much from the perspective across the English Channel and the North Sea. The fact that ‘British’ and ‘European’ history are taught as entirely separate subjects in schools and universities in the UK is a significant pointer to this fact. These two arguments, based on the questionnaire and on the biographies and works of British historians writing on France, Germany and other European countries since the eighteenth century, formed both the bulk of the book and the core of its argument. In order to round them out, I engaged in a small-scale exercise in historical statistics to try and see if there was a quantitative dimension to my principal arguments. This was only meant, as I pointed out, to be illustrative, and the figures themselves were very ‘rough and ready’; there are many uncertainties and the sample is very small. The argument of the book in no way depends on this statistical exercise. Nor was the book intended to be definitive – rather, as an essay based on a lecture, its purpose was to arouse debate. By and large, it has signally failed to do this: it received only a handful of reviews, and it has not sold more than a couple of thousand copies. So Peter Baldwin’s lengthy and detailed consideration of the book is very welcome. Unfortunately, however, though it presents a range of interesting new points, Baldwin’s essay directs its critique against arguments I did not put forward, and seriously distorts the nature and thrust of what the book was trying to say. Baldwin reverses the balance and thrust of my evidence when he treats the brief statistical survey in the opening chapter, a survey which occupies fewer than nine pages out of a total of 234 in the book, as the core of the argument. In introducing the Response to Baldwin 369 figures, I say explicitly that they are ‘unsystematic’ and intended to ‘buttress’ the impressions conveyed by historians of the varying interests of their colleagues in different countries. The book is not ‘padded’ (as Baldwin put it, rather rudely I thought) with ‘excerpts from colleagues’ emails’ and ‘summaries of modern British historiography’; the emails, responses to my questionnaire and the only way of getting at the views and experiences of British historians, are the most important part of the book, while the earlier chapters present not an account of modern British historiography (there is none in the book) but an investigation into how and why a small number of British historians became interested in Continental history in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how they approached and understood it: again, this is central to the book’s main arguments as I have summarised them above. The book does not stand or fall by the statistics; they are its least important aspect. What of the statistics themselves? I can only agree with Baldwin when he says that counting is tricky and that my figures do not prove my case – but then, they were never meant to. Providing really robust figures would need a huge research exercise involving a team of researchers and months of work and at the end there would most probably still be many imponderables. However, a few points might be made in defence of my figures. Looking at history faculties alone can be (and has been) questioned: many historians on the Continent work in language faculties or medical or legal schools. But the same is true in the UK: I worked for thirteen years in a modern languages department, along with a dozen or so other historians of France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Scandinavia. And it is extremely unlikely that medical and legal schools on the Continent are full of historians working on other countries. There are research institutes in the UK too, as well as freelance historians not attached to universities who nonetheless produce very good work. Institutions such as the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and, over the years, various research centres funded by the Wellcome Trust, contain a good number of historians of medicine. And as for including historians who are either research assistants or postgraduates, it is unlikely that the distribution of their interests differs markedly from that of permanently employed faculty members. So most probably these factors cancel each other out. And in any case, it seems to me perfectly legitimate to concentrate on mainstream university teaching and research departments when doing the counting. Other points could be made. For example, it is true that all American medievalists have to be cosmopolitans. But there are very few of them. History in American is overwhelmingly of the early modern and modern eras. Readers should look at my statistics themselves and reach their own conclusions. Baldwin’s own statistics are too vague and ill-defined to be worth paying much attention to: most of his points rest on assertions for which he presents no detailed evidence. He does not distinguish between the foreign countries historians work on, though there is a crucial distinction to be made, for example, between interest in countries formerly part of the British or French empire, and countries that were not (the difference accounts for the relatively low interest in foreign countries shown 370 Contemporary European History by historians of those nations which, like Germany, never had much of an overseas empire).

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