Dan Snow's History Hit - Time's Monster with Priya Satia

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Priya Satia joined me on the podcast to discuss the dramatic consequences of writing history today as much as in the past. Against the backdrop of enduring global inequalities and debates about reparations and the legacy of empire, Satia offers us a hugely important and urgent moral voice.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about history today, the history of how history was used in European imperial project, particularly the British Empire. I'm talking to Professor Priya Satya, a professor of history at Stanford University. She's a prize-winning historian, prize-winning author, and you're going to see why, because she's a bit of a legend. She's written an astonishing book called Times Monster. And as I was reading it, I was operating at the very extremity of my mental capacity. For many of you, this will be right in the middle of the ballpark. But for me, I was on the very edge. I was clinging to the edge of it. If you are interested in the issues raised in this podcast, for example, the British Empire's treatment of opposition in Kenya, India and elsewhere, We've got lots of programmes, lots of programmes on History Hit TV. We have Operation

Legacy, for example, on History Hit TV, how the British sought to cover up some of their colonial era atrocities in Kenya. We've got all sorts of other shows available on History Hit TV. This week is Trafalgar Week. So all week we're looking at that hugely important battle in the genesis of the British Empire, a battle that confirmed Britain's dominance at sea over the French and Spanish. And it would be the last full-scale fleet battle the British fought against an opposing kind of global hegemonic power until the First World War. A hugely important battle. To mark that battle we're making History Hit TV available at a super, super cheap rate. If you use the code Trafalgar, Trafalgar, it gets you a month for free,

and then your first three months, just one pound, euro, or dollar. So we've got a whole season of Trafalgar and Nelson-related content up there, and lots more going up besides. In the meantime, everybody, enjoy Priya Satya. Priya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. This book blew my mind. Can I ask you, I know you say it's not a history of history, but I found your discussion of the journey we've all been on since Thucydides and Herodotus on this kind of history journey. Can you tell me a little bit how you see the idea of history developing just briefly in the last 3,000 years? I'm sorry for that big question, but it's so good. I can't let you go without it.

And your first chapter was so good. No, I mean, so we've always been telling stories about our past, right? Every civilization does it, and every civilization has always done it. But the way we do it, the purpose of doing it shifts over time. So if you look at Herodotus, it's a history, and he's considered the father of history, but there's fable mixed in there. Sometimes God intervenes directly in the world. Thucydides is different. Well, he's sort of taken as the father of modern history, I guess you could say, in the sense that he's trying to tell a story without God intervening in the world, where human events just build on each other. But those two words didn't necessarily shape how history was written, you know, since then, right? Those words

are lost, they're rediscovered, they're translated, they have different influences in different parts of the world. But what happens is in the Enlightenment, these philosophers in Europe are trying to think of a way to understand history where it has meaning and purpose. Because if history, if human events don't have meaning and purpose, then you're just stuck looking at the horrible human condition, right? And the horrible things that humans always do. And you have to just hope that in the afterlife, there will be some meaning. So they're trying to think, okay, we behave horribly, we are human. But perhaps we can imagine this in earthly time, having some kind of meaning or purpose, right? And that's the way we can understand how a good God allows evil to exist in the world, why there is even evil, right? And so what they decide is that,

God does not intervene directly in the world, but he exercises a kind of providential care so that we know that we shouldn't panic. we shouldn't even object when we see something that seems evil occurring, because it may be that in the long run, it has a very productive effect. And so this new way of thinking about history in the 18th century, the argument I make in the book is that it changes sort of everyday ethical thought for first people in Europe who are coming up with these ideas, but then it's sort of exported all over the world. Even more than that, you suggest that because of their standpoint, their context, this providential guiding hand from God seemed to be delivering the world into the hands of said Europeans and thinkers.

These thinkers were becoming politicians that are in right in many cases, or certainly influencing politicians. And so history is a way of justifying the present arrangements. Yeah, so in the 18th century, Britain, for instance, is almost always at war. And some of these thinkers are looking at this and saying, you know, war doesn't seem to be a very good thing. A lot of people die, it's destructive, but maybe it's a necessary evil, right? Maybe in the end, this is going to do something for the better, not, you know, for Britain, but later on, then they start adding on this idea that for the world as well, right? And in fact, Britain wins all but one of those wars, and British power expands steadily. And then these people at the turn of the 19th century are looking back and thinking, yeah,

we were right. This has worked out well for the nation. And this is a providential project, the expansion of British power. And from that point, all kinds of decisions relating to the spread of British power, even when it meant destruction on the ground or even the destruction of entire peoples at times, right? All of that can be justified by the idea that we're fulfilling a historic destiny, historic destiny, that in the end, it will be vindicated in time. We can't judge it right now. We have to suppress our ordinary kind of moral compunctions about what we're doing. We confess them in our diaries. We write letters to our mothers in which we express this discomfort, but we do it nonetheless because history is asking us to do it. It's very fatalistic, actually.

Macaulay, Hume, this idea of Whiggish history, which we still sometimes talk about in the UK, and indeed with contemporary thinkers, I don't know whether it's Steven Pinker or Fukuyama, the big debates, like if everything was just slowly getting the ultimate dialectic, you know, if everything slowly was just getting better, is that the seeds of that modern impulse that we see there? Yeah, the idea that history must be about progress. This is the birth of that idea. And even Marxists have it in their own version, right? So there's liberalism and Marxism, the Whig interpretation and the Marxist interpretation. And we know that

they're on opposite sides in the Cold War, but the fundamental belief, you know, that history is going to be a story of progress is common to both. And what happens is in, especially as you get into the 20th century, there are historians like Herbert Butterfield is the British historian who actually, I think, dubs it the Whig interpretation of history. And he says, actually, this is totally wrong. I mean, the job of historians is not to look back and judge things in the past and histories. The purpose of human life is not something that's going to come to fruition far, far in the future. It's about the here and now. And all the way through the modern period. But as you mentioned, you know, people like Fukuyama, I mean, these are these remain really powerfully influential ideas in our kind of popular conceptions of history. Even if within the academy, I think there's there are more critical views. people that you talk about, whether it's Quaker gunsmiths or people on the crumbling frontiers of empire, that link between their understanding of history and their actions and their ability to justify things that they knew to be unethical at the time. That is a central argument of a book

I find so fascinating. Yeah, I mean, the whole imperial project is so, so many people just feel guilty all the time. It's a jurist and a historian who goes to India right after this massive Indian rebellion in 1857. And it takes a year for the British to crush it. And they crush it very, very violently and brutally, blowing thousands of people off cannons. I mean, there's some really horrendous stories. And then Henry Maine goes there determined to fix things. Obviously, something has gone wrong. But when he gets there, he decides that, look, it's too late. We've already destroyed too much. We can't restore Indian civilization and culture and administrative arrangements to what they were.

So we kind of have to live with our mistakes. And we have to recognize that British power by its very nature is destructive in a really, really constructive way. I mean, he, I don't have the quote at my fingertips, but he basically spells that out as, you know, as much as I would have liked to make things right, I can't. And in service to hit of history, we have to all just be phlegmatic you know the sorry that British kind of thing about the stiff upper lip you know and and put up with this feeling kind of stoically and and do what history requires this kind of change is going to come to India we brought it maybe too quickly ourselves but India was going to change anyway. And so now we have a responsibility

to finish the job as destructive as it might feel and as much as it makes our consciences weary. And so it's amazing how often it is someone like a historian who is in that position of administrative power making those calls. So I think history was really practically helpful in enabling empires, whether it's Macaulay, you mentioned, or Maine, or later, you know, even Winston Churchill. Well, Seeley, you mentioned his great quote about the sort of school of statesmanship. So I'm understanding now, as I'm reading about the Times Monster, which is the title of your book, it is predictably clever, because the Times Monster, which is the title of your book. It is predictably clever because The Times Monster doesn't refer to the monstrous form of the British Empire, but The Times Monster

means that the British Empire was created by an awareness of the passing of what they thought was history. I'm not calling the empire the monster or the British a monster. I'm sad to think, I hope no one takes that meaning. It's history. History is time's monster. It's meant playfully. And it's like this idea of history that had such good intentions behind it, that to make our peace with earthly life. So we're not always, you know, looking to the afterlife for meaning. That's a pretty nice thought.

But by thinking that way, we created this monster that licensed us to behave in ways that we knew we weren't, that we knew were not right by kind of ordinary ethics. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And gives us these amazing ideas that we still are still in modern parlance state like to be on the right side of history and as obama says like bending the arc of history does not always run

whatever i mean lovely rhetoric but kind of in crazy really anyone can say like you know here um trump supporters say they're on the right side of history and and critics of trump say they are on the right side of history and the point is like no one ever thinks they are on the right side of history and the point is like no one ever thinks they're on the wrong side of history right so you can't really sit around waiting for history to judge and i think it's more important to listen to what historians today are saying about to explain how we got here and then use your ordinary, more transcendent, non-time-based, or Columbus Day was yesterday, and the Trump White House released an extraordinary statement that's kind of, in many ways, quite fascist, really, in its conception of Columbus Day and history and revising history. And you point out in your book,

and I was reading it yesterday, that actually, and I was very struck by that contrast, because you point out that until about 1945, historians were very much on the side of the establishment. And historians in the US and UK, for example, were people that bolstered a narrative of imperialism and progress and white man's burden, so to use an expression from the time. And now the opposite seems to be the case. Now the academy are regarded as enemies by people like Trump, and I think here in the UK by some on the populist right as well. Yeah, absolutely. And that's some, I mean, there's a history to that too. There was a kind of reckoning or a kind of realization, especially after World War II, within the academy that history obviously doesn't look like it's about progress, you know, coming out of the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. And in that moment, a lot of people were understandably skeptical that history was really about progress.

And they revised their understanding of, you know, what we're doing when we're doing history. Why? Why are we writing history? Are we trying to justify moral wrongs in the past? Are we trying to predict the future? Are we actually just trying to recover what's lost and understand ways of being that we can access through historical sources that belong to the past and sort of commune with them and recognize our own humanity in that and the humanity of people in the past? Like that's a kind of basic human need and function, right? So historians in the academy also, I mean, there was a kind of realization even before World War II

among some British historians also that, you know, history has been really complicit in enabling empire and they start rewriting the empire in way, rewriting the history of colonialism in more critical ways. And there's just more and more awareness of the power of governments and how they can control narratives and how they have been doing that by co-opting history all along. And so you see historians within the academy increasingly taking the position of critic of government or truth

teller against the government always you know informing the public about where they're being lied to by states that are democratic in name but don't always want democratic control of what they're doing right they have their own agendas. And so these ideas become popular, especially among the left and, you know, increasingly in the academy. But in popular culture, I think the idea that history is progress, it's about great men and great deeds, still remains really, really influential. It is difficult, that idea of progress, because particularly if I was an Enlightenment historian or writer and a thinker,

and I'd seen the extraordinary transformation that had gone on in and around me with unlocking the elemental forces of nature and the Industrial Revolution, you could be forgiven for thinking that we were progressing from one place to another. It just turns out that as the 20th century showed, it wasn't necessarily the utopian sort of peaceful uplands that we once thought.

Yeah, I think in the Industrial Revolution, you know, it's the same time it lines up with the Enlightenment too, it lines up with criticism of the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement, for instance. And people are looking at radical change happening. And some people are saying, it looks bad. Some things are being changed very dramatically, but it's going to work out for the best in the end. And other people are saying, no, no, no, nothing can justify this utter destruction of people's lives and livelihoods, right? So these two kind of modes of thinking about history sort of emerge at the same time. And you see critiques as well from the perspective of colonial subjects as well, which is another

thing that's covered in the book. But I think besides World War II and the way that ended, I think right now today, the climate change, which you can trace back to the Industrial Revolution, is really what's kind of forcing people to again, really question, okay, maybe now time has proved that that expectation that emerged in the time of the Industrial Revolution, that this is all going to lead to a really good place. Maybe that was wrong, because we've gotten to a really scary place. Climate looms, I think, rightly very large in this book because it is a gigantically inconvenient fact for those who still talk about, you know, idea of progress and marching towards the sunlit uplands. the voices of historians have been sidelined, ignored by politicians, that historians haven't had as much say as you would? Well, you're biased because you're a historian, but haven't had as much

say as you and I and the people listening to this podcast would like? So I think people who are nostalgic for a time when historians were cozy with power, like to make the claim that historians on the left, historians in the academy have abdicated responsibility and are not informing public debate the way they once did and the way they should. And I think that is a false claim. I think historians' work can be specialized just like economists' work can be specialized. But just as economists continue to contribute to public debate, historians do too. It's just that we're often taking a more critical position of what the state is doing. So some of the examples I give in the book is that, you know, we had the Iraq War in 2003, in which thousands of American historians wrote a petition through the American Historical

Association saying, let's not do this. This is not a good idea. You know, there's no abdication of responsibility. It's just that the government and US government didn't like that opinion and didn't listen to that opinion. And the same thing with, you know, things like, you know, gun control, anything that, you know, immigration, whatever raises a kind of historical question, you'll always find historians speaking about it. The question is whether they're heated or not. What's the job of historian today? What's your job? To teach, to explain how we got here,

to participate in conversations about the past, wherever they happen, in public debate, in conversations about how to address the past going forward. So memorialization, reparations, restitution, apologies, that whole set of conversations, but also to continue what we're doing when we talk about questions of gun control, immigration. So all that stuff, I mean, continue doing that work that we are already doing. But I don't think that we should be waiting for historians to, in the future, to figure out what we're doing now. I think people should read more history. And I think, you know, historians are not abdicating any responsibility, but there are

areas where we could, I hate to use this phrase, but sort of lean in more, you know, and recognize that there are historians who are telling us what the past was like, but popular culture is so full of so many other forms of storytelling about the past, whether it's Netflix shows or pageants and commemorative events, everyone's own personal memories or passed down traditions. I mean, there's this just vast pool of culture that's grounded in stories about the past. And I really do think these new conversations we're having about memorializations and reparations are just one way where we're forcing a reckoning with the past in a big kind of popular culture way. I really think that's a productive direction.

Well, thank you. Thank you so much. And your book in the UK is called Times Monster, History, Conscience and Britain's Empire. Remind us what it's called in the US. Times Monster, How History Makes History. Oh, it's such an interesting book. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's such a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask.

I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that.

It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.