Landscapes of Power

"When you write a book that is very visible like mine has been—and I’ve been very grateful and humbled by that—you suddenly get lots of exciting invitations. From the outside, it’s all very exciting and glamorous. The truth is that the nuts and bolts of being an academic—outside the teaching—are hours and hours in libraries and heading to conferences which, annoyingly, quite often take place at the weekends. It’s often a bit scattergun: people are gathered together under a big broad heading of whatever the conference might be about and they’ll give their own two cents about things that may overlap a little bit with what you say and think, or perhaps not at all. Every now and again, you get a conference that’s absolutely in the sweet spot—say on Anna Komnene—but that’s very rare. But all these brilliant men and women are presenting papers at the cutting edge of their field. These papers then get put into conference volumes which are really only of interest to other scholars. No one is going to buy a copy of a series of the proceedings of a conference we’ve held here in Oxford, or it’s very unlikely. But that kind of research is what allows the humanities to keep moving forward. We don’t shout out about that enough. Sometimes people don’t understand what we do in universities. We don’t explain why the humanities are important. We’re about to lose 30% of our funding into subjects like Classics and history—which comes from the EU. The National Endowment for the Humanities in the US is also scheduled for collapse. There’s pressure on the humanities across the world. “The truth is that the nuts and bolts of being an academic—outside the teaching—are hours and hours in libraries and heading to conferences which, annoyingly, quite often take place at the weekends.” We do, sometimes, need to remember that it’s all very well investing in the military and spending lots of money on drones and jetfighters and missiles. But you need to have analysts and people who are able to do the kind of work that historians do—listening in real time to people who are going to be potential threats but also offer opportunities. Those conference volumes—which I’ve contributed to quite a lot of—are slightly thankless. They take years to come out, it’s a very slow process, and publishers don’t sell many copies so they usually get sold for 90-100 quid a go which means even fewer people will read them. It’s a real shame. But there’s a real pleasure in reading conference proceedings because the articles are so detailed and so narrowed down that you see what it is people are choosing to spend their life doing. There’s one about Zoroastrians—an ancient Persian religion—who are dualists and see the world as divided by the two fundamentals of light and darkness or good and evil. We’ve started to find evidence of the dissemination of Zoroastrian ideas in western China about 1,200 to 1,300 years ago. We can pick that up from assessing lots of different Chinese sources—there’ll be whispers in one or two of them—a few cave carvings, a few little bits of evidence that, when pulled together, indicate that there are ideas that are spreading. We know there are these ideas, so it’s understandable that, as people move, they bring words and ideas and beliefs with them. It’s entirely what you’d expect to find. But like a good police investigation, you need to have the forensic evidence to prove it. “Even today, you have people saying that the problems in the Middle East are all to do with Osama bin Laden and the intervention in Iraq. But Western policy in the Middle East has been a disaster for over one hundred years.” Something like that is probably not going to make headline news or result in you being asked to come to the White House to give a talk—but without all that work, we’d fall apart as the humanities. So, it’s great to write visible books that get read and it’s a wonderful thing for all historians that anybody’s book gets read because it means more books get commissioned and published. But, having said that, the nitty-gritty of what we do in the scholarly community is communing with each other to nudge the edges further forward. I’ve had a once in a lifetime opportunity to say, ‘Maybe we should look at history in a different way,’ but that doesn’t come along often. The States is much better at that than we are. There is a plug-in through the think tanks and lobby groups. It’s not necessarily an open door, but it’s much looser on the hinges, and you can get heard. Still, it’s all very well saying that you should listen, but you need to judge by the results. And, it has to be said, that interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria and so on have not gone particularly well. But I remember, a few years ago, talking to a senior minister here in the UK involved with science and technology and engineering. He said, slightly patronisingly, ‘It’s important that we also have the humanities and subjects like yours [i.e. Byzantine history] that have no purpose at all.’ And I said ‘Okay tell me who you listen to who can explain Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and China?’ Now there’s this polarization over Brexit, with Michael Gove saying we’ve had ‘enough of experts.’ What that really means is that we should just shake the dice and gamble on what happens next. It’s true that, as experts, we don’t feel comfortable pushing ourselves to get listened to. By and large we have some degree of humility. We can give you our opinions, but what you do with them is a different story. And it’s much easier to be observing than actually leading policy with incredibly difficult and complicated decisions to make. “‘Okay tell me who you listen to who can explain Russia, Ukraine, the Caucasus, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and China?’” But that doesn’t mean this knowledge is pointless. For example, in my view, what should have happened in 2003, in Iraq, is that the US State Department and the FCO should have gathered every British historian who had worked on the denazification of Germany. That was a clear example of the rebuilding of a state and a clue to how deep you had to go to purge Saddam Hussein’s inner circle. They ripped out the entire Ba’ath Party! Whereas in 1945, they were looking at how much of the Gestapo and the SS you had to get rid of. How many people have to face justice? Who do you leave running the security services and the economy? There’s no win-win. In the 1940s, in Britain, there was real tension between people who felt it was wrong to allow former Nazi Party members to be in high-ranking positions, and the practicalities. i.e. Which is worse? A failed state that may pave the way to anarchy and the Soviet threat? Or is it better to square the circle? You need to use these examples from history. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Even today, you have people saying that the problems in the Middle East are all to do with Osama bin Laden and the intervention in Iraq. But Western policy in the Middle East has been a disaster for over one hundred years! You need to start joining up the dots. All the authors that I’ve mentioned here—from the De Administrando or The Alexiad or Ibn Fadlan or Chekhov—were acutely aware that in the grand run of history there are big transitional moments that need to be understood within a context. In 2017, we’re all waiting for the world to return to normal, and what normal means is that the economy grows, we’re all happy, we all get rich, there aren’t any threats anywhere, and the West gets to lead without all these other annoying people all over the world. I think we passed the tipping point ages ago: the Age of Asia isn’t beginning, it’s begun . These birthing pains that we’re seeing in the Middle East are a sign of a new world when the West looks much less relevant. And, in a way, Brexit , Trump , and this isolationist zeitgeist —a world where we, in the West, think we can be better off on our own—is a very logical response to that. The historian recognises those processes of walls coming up because that disengagement is a way of shutting up the shop. But that’s difficult to see if you only start with the First World War, the Somme, and US hegemony. The bigger challenge I have in the States is explaining that there is a world that the United States needs to study, beyond the geographic US, while also understanding how the US rose. US independence was directly linked to what was happening in central Asia and above all in India. If you can’t see how the butterfly wings work, then you can’t understand science. History is the same."