A Study of History

"Yes. It’s the opposite of The Communist Manifesto in that respect. But, of course, it’s also been criticized for grossly oversimplifying. Toynbee is still not very popular in the historical profession. He was savagely lampooned by another historian I greatly admire, Hugh Trevor-Roper. Trevor-Roper’s criticisms really undermined Toynbee’s reputation for generations, although I think he’s now beginning to be appreciated more. The reasons why I appreciate him are not the conventional reasons. Most people will say, ‘Well, you know, Toynbee’s great virtue was the breadth of his vision, his ability to make comparisons between different parts of the world, his sheer command of data, the innovative way in which he used civilizations as units of study. Also, the resolve with which he pursued his purported agenda of being a historical pragmatist, of basing what he said on the facts rather than on theory (although he wasn’t entirely honest about that. He had plenty of theoretical prejudices that shaped the way he wrote).’ “Books don’t have to be right to be great. Greatness is often the result of very creative and intelligent mistakes” I have a slightly different take on Toynbee from the conventional one. For me, the reason I greatly admire him and love his work is that he realized that you can’t write any history without seeing it in its environmental framework. People don’t usually think of him as a pioneer of environmental history, because he didn’t write a work that was exclusively environmental until the 1970s. Mankind and Mother Earth was his first explicitly environmental book. But in A Study of History , you can see that he always refers to the environmental framework—those conditioning, limiting influences that never determine what happen in the past but do control the limits of what it’s possible for humans to achieve. So, for that reason, Toynbee is a bit of a hero of mine because I think he was right about that. You can’t understand what we do as human beings unless you understand what nature has given us to work with. That’s why in the Oxford Illustrated History of the World it’s divided into five big chronological bands and in each of those bands half to a third of the material is about the way the environment was shaped and reshaped in the period concerned and how that influenced events. That’s a great point, because one of the most controversial debates in the history of the Americas is why relationships between colonizers and their victims—if I can use that word—were so different in areas settled by British people and people under the British crown and those settled by Spanish people and people under the Spanish crown. This sort of debate often degenerates into a lot of moral rubbish about whether Spaniards are inherently better than British or vice versa. I can speak with some authority about this because I’m both—my father was Spanish and my mother was British; I have both nationalities. I can absolutely assure you there is no moral difference: both peoples are equally corrupted by vice and wickedness. But the Spaniards ended up having much more positive relationships with the native populations of their regions because the environment demanded that they use the labour of the indigenous people. Whereas in British-settled parts of the Americas, the native peoples were irrelevant and therefore could be exterminated or expelled. You and I are both very aware of the limitations of the nation state as a useful unit in which to create prosperity and peace and happiness. It’s because they’re not learning history, they’re learning nationalist propaganda. They’re learning the myths that are nourished by the state. When the historical profession was founded in the 19th century and all these university history departments were founded, the purpose was to promote national interests and national unity and to make nations more efficient in competition and war against each other. It wasn’t in order to know the truth. And of course all of those universities in Europe—and to a lesser extent in Britain— were essentially dependent on the state for their funding. Even in the United States, where many of the great universities were private institutions that didn’t depend on state funding, they nevertheless picked up on the importance of the national agenda. In a way, for the United States in the 19th century, self-misrepresentation as a nation state was even more important than it was for states in Europe because the United States was manifestly not a nation in any traditional sense of the word. It was a conglomeration of migrants, natives, former slaves (or until the 1860s actual slaves) and people from all over Europe. In order to try and forge those people into a coherent mass with a common allegiance, historians bought into this job of creating national myths. Thank God we’ve got away from that now, but of course now people are less inclined to take notice of what historians say. No. They’re often terribly superficial and I find it distressing that books that say so little that is worth saying should attract such a big public. For me what’s interesting are the things people don’t know about and haven’t thought of. The charm of the Oxford Illustrated History of the World is that it’s a cooperative work by a lot of excellent historians (I exclude myself from that) who disagree with each other. So when you read it you don’t get the simplified version of history that you get from some of these other commercially successful books, but a real insight into what historical scholarship is like. It’s an arena of debate and of exploration of open-ended questions and unresolved problems. And unresolved problems are the most interesting problems because as soon as you find the solution to a problem, it loses its magic."