Why History Matters

"Since the Second World War, the idea of learning lessons from history – which historians sometimes call ‘applied history’ – has been gradually expanding, although it’s hardly mainstream. There’s a famous book called The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant, which was published in the 1960s. There’s also Harvard professors Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, who wrote a book called Thinking in Time , about how politicians and statespeople have made decisions in the past and what we can learn from that today. There’s also an academic Journal of Applied of History . Often, this learning from history idea has been mostly in the field of international relations, diplomacy, and war. How do we prevent wars, or create international cooperation? What John Tosh has done in his book, Why History Matters , is to take that idea of learning from history much further. One of his key points in the book is, ‘Why don’t we learn from the history of public policy when we’re thinking about (say) education reform?’ Or ‘Let’s understand how our health systems have developed in the past: what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, and apply those lessons to today.’ The second really important thing that John Tosh does is emphasize learning from history in terms of the genealogy of our current crises. When we’re looking at something like the war in Iraq or Afghanistan , we should be trying to figure out: ‘What’s the deep story of how we got here?’ That means going back to the history of Western colonialism in the Middle East , because if we don’t understand those earlier episodes, then we’re going to make very poor decisions today. You could do this genealogical tracing for many different realms. For example, why are we obsessed with consumer culture, particularly in the Western world? Why do we have a ‘I shop, therefore I am’ philosophy? That goes back to the history of public relations industry in the 1920s, and the rise of the department store in the 19th century. All of these things have histories, which I write about in my new book. The third thing Tosh writes about is making analogies from history, and how we need to be very careful about doing that. That’s why I like his book, because it’s not just about cherry picking any example from the past. Not every war is another Vietnam, not every dictator is another Hitler and not every financial crisis is like the Great Depression of the 1930s. Let’s not just look for similarities but be well aware of the differences. I learned a lot from Tosh when thinking about my book. For example, I’ve got a chapter on artificial intelligence, which at first glance might seem the kind of thing that you could never really learn about from history, because it’s so modern, so technological, so 21st or even 22nd century. But reading Why History Matters made me think, ‘What is the appropriate analogy here in history, given that we haven’t had anything exactly like AI in the past? Have we ever created large-scale systems which could potentially get out of control, which is one of the potential risks of AI?’ And I reasoned that, yes, we have. We invented the instruments of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century: the first stock exchanges, the first public limited companies, marine insurance. It was a human-created system that very quickly got out of control, with the advent of multiple financial crashes. So, in my book, I draw analogies there. John Tosh’s work has really helped me think about that, and to try and be critical and careful about the way I do it. Yes, but she’s generally talking about it at the level of leadership: the Stalins , the Maos . What I’m trying to say is, ‘No, wait, let’s try and empower social movements, community organizations, people who are trying to reinvent what our economies look like.’ I haven’t written this book for elite political leaders to have in their back pockets. It’s really for all the other changemakers, the educators and activists in every field. I like her skepticism, though. Absolutely right. And that’s what Margaret MacMillan says too. The way I think about is like this: First, let’s recognize that in any subject area – whether it’s history, economics, politics – researchers and writers are cherry picking all the time. We are not getting objective economics from economists. They are choosing what to measure, how to measure it, over what time periods, in which countries, etc. Historians and history are no different from anyone else. Everybody is having to make choices. Then one has to decide, ‘How do I cherry pick systematically?’ The first thing I tried to do is be as open as possible about how I’ve chosen the cases I look at. So I started with ten challenges facing society in the 21st century, which I sourced from the academic literature on civilizational collapse and existential risk. Hence you get things like climate change and threats to democracy and AI. Then I asked myself, ‘Okay, so which episodes in history help inform those issues?’ That cuts out a lot of the past. Also, ‘Which of these episodes are about not just warnings, but possibilities for inspirational change, change for the common good?’ Another layer was, ‘Which of these are about change from below as much as possible, not just change from above?’ By then the number of cherries I could pick were quite radically reduced. I also focused on a particular time period, which is the last 1000 years. My brain could not stretch further than that, but also if you start going back before the year 1000, the quality of the historical evidence, particularly for the ‘from below’ history, starts disappearing. It’s not nearly what one might hope it would be, particularly if you want to have a wide geographical range. So I would call what I’ve done a kind of systematic cherry picking with an honesty and transparency to it. Yes, as someone trained as a political scientist, I partly wrote this book because I didn’t find enough historians writing books about what we could learn for today from all the research they’ve been doing. Occasionally, you do find historians who have explicitly written books about the lessons of history. For example, Tim Snyder wrote a brilliant book called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century . It’s about the warnings of history, especially in relation to interwar fascism and authoritarianism. He’s an expert in that field, and I wish more historians took their learning and tried to apply it to the present. I do understand why it doesn’t happen. You don’t really get a lot of academic points for taking what you’ve studied about medieval Germany and applying it to the present. But when I speak to historians – and I spoke to a lot of them when researching this book – very often they do think that their special subjects have a relevance for today. Experts on witchcraft in 16th century Germany, for example, will frequently look at the persecution of immigrant outsiders today or the role of fake news today and draw parallels. It’s just they don’t tend to write about it in their books, though occasionally they do. What I’ve tried to do is be an ambassador for all these amazing researchers across a range of fields. Obviously, I don’t have expertise in all of these areas. I have certain kinds of expertise, for example, in Latin American colonial history, or the history of consumerism, which I’ve studied a lot over the last 20 or 30 years. But the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus in southern Spain from the 9th to the 14th centuries—I’ve had to learn about that. And about the history of financial capitalism in the Netherlands in the early 17th century. Simon Schama wrote a very nice book on that, The Embarrassment of Riches . There’s some fascinating stuff in that book, although it has become a bit dated."