Historical Agency in a World of Consumers: Simon Schama and the Hamburger of History
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HISTORICAL AGENCY IN A WORLD OF CONSUMERS: SIMON SCHAMA AND THE HAMBURGER OF HISTORY Tim Hitchcock In 1965 Simon Schama, the author of several important books, the star of Britain’s recent renaissance of television history, and the person who, more than anyone else epitomises the successful achievement of the aspirations of a generation of Western historians on both sides of the Atlantic, discovered food.1 He had grown up in a Kosher household and during his first years at University, his mother lovingly dispatched parcels of roast chicken, strudel and fish cakes to his college rooms. His undergraduate tutor, the incredibly rude and acerbic Jack Plumb, elaborately accommodated his dietary requirements, serving him rubbery omelettes, while Plumb himself tucked in to partridge and grouse, and the exotic servings of the high table tradition of Cambridge University. In response, and under the second hand tutelage of movie stars, and through the assiduous study of the works of Julia Child, Jane Grigson and Elizabeth David (the writers who more than any others introduced an English reading audience to the delights of world food), Schama developed a passion and a facility for cooking. He made ratatouille, sole meuniere and gazpacho, to the applause of his Cambridge contemporaries. At first he cooked within the boundaries of Kosher cuisine. But, at the end of the day, tempted beyond endurance by Plumb, encouraged by his ever hungry fellow students, and discouraged by the seemingly humble and parochial offerings of his own family and background, Schama gave in. He turned his back on the lovingly prepared weekly packages of roast chicken, strudel and fish balls sent by his doting mother, he turned his back on a central element of his own upbringing. 1 Besides his recent starring role in the BBC’s History of Britain series, Simon Schama’s major publications include (in reverse chronological order): A History of Britain, vol. 3, The Fate of the Empire, Talk Miramax Books, 2002; Rembrant’s Eyes, Knopf, 2001; A History of Britain, vol. 2, The British Wars, Talk Miramax Books, 2001; A History of Britain, vol. I, The Edge of the World 3500 B.C.–1603 A.D., Talk Miramax Books, 2000; Landscape and Memory, Vintage Books, 1996; Dead Certainties, Vintage Books, 1992; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Vintage Books, 1990; The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Vintage Books, 1997 (first published 1987); Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (Alfred Knopf, 1978); Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813, Vintage Books, 1992 (first published 1977). 82 Xenopoliana, XI, 2003, 1–2 HISTORICAL AGENCY IN A WORLD OF CONSUMERS What is important for us today, is not his abandonment of a millennial old culinary tradition, but the direction of the journey he took from this most European of backgrounds. Guilt ridden, but determined, he did not look for a small French bistro, or a bit of cheese and pate, or even a chicken masala. Instead he walked directly to the nearest Wimpy Bar. For those unfamiliar with the British Wimpy Bar, they are studies in American cultural hegemony. They serve up a pallid British simulacrum of the fattiest and most disgusting of American fast food. The meal that Schama chose to mark his transition from smart Jewish boy to international scholar was a hamburger – something called, in a beautifully ironic twist, a “real McCoy”.2 In a very direct way, Schama's journey and choice, years ago in Cambridge, from a well defined community with a well defined cuisine, to American fast-food, reflects the journey of his generation of historians, of writers like John Brewer, Linda Colley, David Cannadine and Roy Porter. This is a group of historians, whose work has centred on eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, who were trained by J.H. Plumb, and who have crafted a powerful tradition in their own right, that shares a peculiar, if largely unexamined, ideology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the work of this generation of historians, their contributions to history, and the extent to which, underpinning it all, is a model of social change and development of which we need to be explicitly aware. At the same time it is an attempt to reflect on the very peculiar place in which we as historians now find ourselves. To reflect on how we can write history that is relevant, political and engaging, that helps to explain the past and informs the present, without recourse to the ideological constructs associated with Marxism, a construct that no longer has the political and intellectual purchase it possessed for most of the last hundred and fifty years. In other words, this paper is an attempt to critique one major strand of Western history and to suggest other ways of writing the past. In terms of Simon Schama and his hamburger, it is an attempt to suggest that European historians have been seduced by the joys of American intellectual life. They have seen the well appointed libraries of Harvard and Yale, spent time at the Huntington and at Princeton, and in the process have abandoned many aspects of their national historical and intellectual traditions, in favour of an ill-thought out and essentially unfulfilling intellectual perspective. They have eaten fully of the empty intellectual calories of American academic life, and are now purveying that junk food to an European audience. Sir Jack Plumb was the supervisor of all these historians. He was also a very unpleasant man. He has the reputation for having been the rudest man ever to occupy a professorial chair in Cambridge, and to have quite unnecessarily trod on the feelings of other scholars in his headlong dash to advance his own career. He was also an inspirational teacher and intellectually powerful figure in 2 Simon Schama, Michael Caine inspired me to cook (and not a lot of people know that), “The Guardian”, 19 September 2002, “Food”, p. 10-11. Xenopoliana, XI, 2003, 1–2 83 TIM HITCHCOCK the Cambridge history department of the 1950s and 60s. Indeed, his was the closest thing that Cambridge possessed to the personification of a liberal historical tradition. From an undistinguished class background, and with socialist leanings for much of his life (until his volte face and adoption of extreme right wing views in the 1970s), he was the only research student ever trained by the single most important British social historian of inter-war Britain, G.M. Trevelyan, and could arguably lay claim to the liberal middle ground of social historical thought. Plumb recognised earlier than his less gifted colleagues, such as Geoffrey Elton, that social history would replace its constitutional competitors in the hearts of a wider readership, and in the job descriptions scanned by ambitious young historians.3 Through his students, much more than through his own work, Plumb has given focus to the recent historiography of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, and because of British history’s central role as the first industrial society in a Marxist paradigm, created a model that many scholars around the world have followed. The distinctive characteristic of this historiography is its apparently liberal but not ideological nature. It eschews supply-side economic models of either social division or agency, and combines a history of consumption with a Habermasian analysis of the development of political culture and civil society. In other words, this tradition gives authority to the individual in part through studying what they choose to buy (whether the products of the industrial revolution, or Britain’s growing empire), and secondly through what upper and middle class people, said and read. To simply review some of the more important works of this school of history gives a sense of the proclivities these authors share. The best starting point in this literature is the jointly authored Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England, first published in 1983.4 In this volume, J.H. Plumb, John Brewer and Neil McKendrick laid out a stark, and largely new vision of eighteenth-century Britain, of its industrial revolution and political landscape. In a series of essays on John Wilkes and the commer- cialisation of radicalism, on leisure, shaving and fashion, the authors embedded a new idea in to British history, the notion of a “consumer revolution”. They argued that the transformations associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be most readily understood by exploring what people wanted to buy, and why. In many respects this new pre-occupation was a simple reflection of the changing nature of 1970s British society, with its own new emphasis on the joys and cultures of consumption. 3 For a sympathetic account of Plumb’s career by his one time student and collaborator, Neil McKendrick, see Sir Jack Plumb, “The Guardian”, October 22, 2001, p. 20; for a more critical assessment see Jeremy Black, A plumb with an acerbic aftertaste, “The Times Higher”, August 16, 2002, p. 18-19. 4 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and Sir John Harold Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, Indiana University Press, 1982. 84 Xenopoliana, XI, 2003, 1–2 HISTORICAL AGENCY IN A WORLD OF CONSUMERS A few years later Simon Schama brought out his most substantial volume, The Embarrassment of Riches.5 This book provides a history of the Dutch Republic during its seventeenth-century golden age. In it, Schama pits the incredible new wealth of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, against its puritanical religious culture, to provide an explanation of change that places consumption centre stage. In this volume class conflict is replaced by an internal psychological battle between religion and desire, between an essentially medieval notion of physical restraint, and what Schama depicts as an essentially modern desire for luxury and excess.