In Our Time - Heritage

Episode Date: July 18, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role history and heritage have played in the formation of the British national identity. Historians have often maintained a guarded relationship with the so-called ¨heritage industry¨, believing that it presents a distorted version of national life: a Merrie England that is politically acceptable and economically rewarding. History, in contrast, is held to reveal the truth about the past - objectively and scientifically. Our understanding of history changed since the 19th century and, as historians interpret our time and our society, so will our ideas of heritage and history.With David Cannadine, Director of the University of London's Institute of Historical Research; Miri Rubin, Professor of European History at Queen Mary, University of London; Peter Mandler, Fellow in History, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, welcome to the last programme in our current series. This week on In Our Time, we will be discussing the role of history and heritage in the formation of the British national identity.

Some professional historians have maintained a guarded relationship with the heritage industry, believing that it presents a distrust. a distorted version of national life, a merry England that is politically acceptable, good for tourists, but somehow suspect. History, in contrast, has been deemed to seek the warty truth about the past, objectively and even scientifically.

How has our understanding of history changed since the 19th century? What is the role of heritage in national life? And how will historians interpret our time and our society? What will our heritage be? With me to discuss history and heritage at David Cennedine,

director of the University of London's Institute of Historical Research, and editor of a new book, What is History Now? David Canadine is also commissioner with the organisation English Heritage. Mirrooen is Professor of European History at Queen Mary, University of London, and Peter Mandler is fellow in history at Gonville and Keyes College, Cambridge, and also the author of a new book, History and National Life. Peter Mandler, can you give me a definition of what you see is the difference between history and heritage?

Well, history is relatively easy to define. It's the study of the past. although professional historians sometimes like to narrow down that definition to confine it to the kind of study of the past that they write about. Heritage is trickier, partly because it's neologism. It's a relatively recent coinage. One doesn't really find the phrase in its modern sense until 1920s, 1930s, and it doesn't really come into common usage until the 1960s or 70s. And it then entered as a very charged concept. I mean, I think what it boils down to is those parts of history which people feel that they have inherited from the past

and which they have some responsibility to pass down to their descendants in the future. And although those portions of history which people feel are inherited can be abstract and things like Shakespeare or liberty, in modern usage, it tends to mean something more than more, tangible buildings and objects and landscapes which can be inherited, preserved, and passed down. And you think that in that tangible area, there's a strict value system attached to this? Well, it's a process of selection. Because heritage is a subset of history, I mean, all history is a selection from the past. We can't know the to hell in the past.

But heritage is a strictor's selection. And because it often involves dispositions of public money, dispositions of property, it's always highly politicized, highly charged. You skipped over, as it were, the 19th century and the early 20th century, and we hid it on the head in the 60s. Did it take that long to get going? Was it not around in any way before then? Heritage is an idea.

Yes, although usually not under that name. I mean, I think the 19th century was a century saturated. with history and with it saw tremendous leaps forward in the sophistication of the way that the history was practiced and in the breadth of the audience for history.

And amongst the very, very many forms that historical consciousness took in the 19th century, one did begin to see, I think, a sense of heritage consciousness, though people didn't use that word. Because as early as the 1830s people were beginning to visit places, weren't I? Yes. The public was allowed into places. Yes, and I think that

the tower, for instance. Yes, exactly. And certain groups, especially, I think, more liberal or radical groups, more democratic groups, began to develop a notion that there was a sort of body of property and historical goods, which was the property of the people in common, that it was their national heritage, which they ought to have, in some way, have possession of, even though much of it was owned by private owners. And that in some way, they ought to be able to pass it down to the next generation, as you say, like the Tower of London or Windsor Castle. I mean, Royal Property was an obvious candidate. David Kandine, you've said, I'm quoting, the cult of national heritage is frequently blinded by nostalgia and distorted by snobbery.

Can you develop that? Yes, I can. That was, I think, an article I wrote in the mid-1980s to do with an exhibition of country house art and architecture in America. And the case that I was trying to make there was that on many occasions, they're not at all exclusively, the cult of what is ostensibly the national heritage, that's to say everybody,

passed, turns out to be a much narrower thing in practice, often defined as one should not be surprised to discover by the descendants of a ruling elite of an earlier era. And the artifacts which have survived from a time when the ruling elite was more powerful in an aristocratic mode than it is now have been presented as being everybody's heritage objects, even though the fact is that on most occasions these country houses were in fact the possessions of a very tiny and privileged delete. And so the point that I was trying to get at there, which in a sense corroborates the point that Peter Manlou has just been making, is that notions of heritage are indeed politically inflected, redefined generation by generation. And in, I think, the 60s, and perhaps

up until the 80s, perhaps less so now, one of the notions of the national heritage that we were all invited to believe was ours in some sort of collective sense was the heritage of great country houses, which were and still are, the residue of a tiny governing elite. And that's in a sense an aristocratic heritage inflated or extended to become the heritage of everybody. And there is a kind of slight of hand about that. And that was really the

point to which I was drawing attention. Do you think therefore that that aspect of heritage, still sticking to heritage rather than study of history, that aspect of heritage did send out particular messages to, let's stick with the people in this country, that's who we're broadcasting to, about what our history was, but

it was presented through heritage? I think to some degree it did. I ought to say, I'm not against preserving country houses. They are architecturally rather beautiful and often have fine works of art, and the parks are very lovely. I'm not against that. But what I think we need a bit of, as it were, perspective on and a lack of sentiment on is to recognise

that that's only part of what might be thought of as the heritage of the people as a whole for the majority of people who go and visit these country houses. Their forebears didn't live that sort of life. And so I'm anxious that we should be clear that what is part of the national heritage isn't all of the national heritage. is a case, for example, that the countryside actually belongs to the people as a whole. This, of course, is an argument going back to radical polemics in the 19th century, and that we ought to think about that as being authentically the heritage of the nation as a whole

in a way that country houses never have been and, in fact, still aren't, even though many of them are now held by something which is called the National Trust. In fact, I think the idea of the countryside as being our heritage first and foremost has grown more powerful. the idea was formalised up in the Lake District at the end of the 19th century by the buying of Frius Craig was the first one, wasn't it? And we went from there. And that's now informed our society and our way of looking at our past very powerfully, hasn't it?

I think that's right. Clearly there has always been a radical tradition about the countryside, as well as a conservative one. The conservative one is landowner's own land, it's their property, they look after it, they take a long-term view, keep everybody else out. But there's always been an alternative. view, which is that the land belongs to everybody. God gave land to the people, a good liberal doctrine in the period before the First World War, that everybody in some sense ought to have

access to the land as a whole, that the land carries a set of values to do with freedom and liberty, not to do with aristocracy and oligarchy and ownership. And there's a classic instance of a contested notion of countryside. And of course it reaches back in our history to where history becomes a sort of mythology to the commons of England, being the common lands which were taken away from people by enclosures and the common people were referred to in medieval as the commons all the time. Mary Rubin, does the heritage industry, we're sticking with the heritage industry at the moment, stress continuity with the past in your view or difference from the past?

How do you see it in that way? I think when it works, in sites where it really works, it obviously has to be both. Because on the one hand, continuing this notion of entitlement, the issue of entitlement has to do with continuity. There are people living in these aisles and they're implicated in its history and therefore for a modest payment they can enter and visit a beautiful abbey that's preserved and so on and it's absolutely they're right and it's made accessible and I think particularly the inclusion and the interest in getting children into these places is very very important particularly in the sites of English heritage I think so there is this notion there is a continuity

there is a relevance about this that why that's why we're here that's why we choose these sites in the early 21st century and yet and yet to make it and the hook that brings people in that amazes and in a way tantalises them is also the difference in the past, all the weird and wonderful things all the way in which wasn't it strange in the past, particularly, you know, sites of medieval and early modern interest, you know, weren't their lives tough and so on? So there's always this level of a very deep set sense of continuity and relevance, and yet this business of nonetheless the sort of entertain, almost pedagogic value,

of reflecting on change and on difference. Do you think therefore that the heritage industry is, He's going about getting at the truth in a different way from the academic study of history. It's really striking how when there is a really good engaging intellectual content together with a brilliant setting and accessible sites that you can actually touch and visit and so on, it works terrifically well. And on the whole, I think, again, that things have actually improved in the last few decades in terms of access and in terms of particularly attention to younger people. And information.

and information, absolutely, and the accessibility of information and the illustration and games that are related and all sorts of other aspects that some people will call commercialization. But it's about access and about choice as well, people being able to afford these things. And the more who can do so, the better. I recently visited a site, which was quite a rare occasion, which is a medieval castle still in private hands and inhabited by a family. We paid and went in. And it was so striking how different was the atmosphere there. It was all about the hallowed, past. exactly this issue of aristocratic stewardship and privilege and so on.

It was very restricted in terms of where one could visit, what one could touch, and there was sort of this ancient retainer telling us tales of the great family that still lived there. It's a totally different atmosphere from this type of accessible, democratic. It is your right to be here within bounds that pervades most of the heritage industry sites, as it were. Peter, you're going to... I was just going to say that. I think that in the 1980s, I think historians were just beginning to come to grips with heritage industry. And because of the particular political temper of the times, there was a bit of a

crisis, there was a bit of a panic on our part, on the historian's part, as well as, I think, perhaps, on the heritage industry's part. And heritage was portrayed in very monolithic way, both by the people who were projecting it and those people who were criticizing it. I do think that there's been a degree of relaxation on both sides in the intervening 10 or 15 years. Among other things, we can see that what is on offer in the heritage industry is tremendously diverse. It's not just castles or country houses. It's also steam railways. Or Beamish, the museum. It's archaeological sites. It's industrial sites. It's open

countryside. It's more land. I think that... David Canada. One can see heritage and history moving closer together. It's also the case if one thinks of the way history itself has evolved and expanded over the last 20 or 30 years that many historians are now much more concerned with the environment, the built environment, the natural environment than they were 40 or 50 years

ago. So that there is to some degree, I think, a convergence here of interests in a way that earlier on wasn't the There's also a reclamation going on. When you go to Beamish, you see shops that were built between the walls, which are there where you pay in old pens, and little cottages with 1910, 1920, cottages that I remember. The extraordinary thing about them is like D.H. Lawrence's cottage here in Eastwood,

is that they look wonderful. They look like bits of old churches, age and strangeness, and I think that is it, has given them an extraordinary allure, isn't it? You look and you go and you think, God, this is a marvellous thing, whereas it was just a work-aday thing, even when I was a kid. Yeah, I think there is the danger there which, going back with this bit of nostalgia, although it's absolutely

authentic at one level, there are all these things that cannot be contained, that aren't expressed in material objects and remains, you know, people's feelings, people's fears, people's fears of disease and death and so on, that in a way it's very hard for us to capture. And that's why sometimes the very good written or indeed

enacted performances that you can get in these sites do convey more of the smells and the fears and, you know, the sort of nasty aspects of life that the material can't quite capture. Okay. Let's try to talk about history and identity in terms of written history. Peter Manila, in your book, History in National Life, you argue that, this is obviously before the 20th century, the depiction of the past was crucial in creating a national identity. We had a nation, we had a history, we had a nation because we had a history. Walter Scott painted a picture of his England and Scotland, which became known as Good Old England and Scotland and Mary England and so forth. McCauley had another view and so on and so forth.

What kind of audience, let's start with Scott, let's just run through two or three of these great figures. What society was Sir Walter Scott portraying and why was it so appealing to so many people in the 19th century? I think first of all one has to say that this is not an exclusion. exclusively English or British experience. I mean, all European nations, and indeed non-European nations in many cases, went through the same process at the same time. It's a period when nations are forming themselves, not in the sense of boundaries and single rulers, but of peoples.

And these are peoples who are newly literate and with a little bit of disposable income and more mobility. And they are, they need materials in order to interpret who they are as a people, what bonds them together and history provides an obvious starting point. Not the only one. There are plenty of others literature and politics, but history was everywhere, a crucial bonding element for a nation. And I think what Walter Scott's particular genius was, I mean, first of all, he presented lots of pasts. There are medieval pasts, there are early modern pasts, there are 18th century pasts in Scots, Urfra, so there's something for everyone. The bit that has interested me most

was the bit that was pitched at the English, because we usually think of Scott as a father of Scotland, but Scott was also a father of England, and that he wrote a series of novels, mostly set in the 16th century, which were aimed at an English audience and recounted events in Tudor English history. And that was a period which was particularly attractive

to this large, growing, newly literate, newly prosperous, sort of upper working class, lower middle audience that was entering the reading public at the time because it portrayed an England that looked a little bit like them, or plausibly was their origins. It was Protestant. It was comfortable, domestic, commercial, enterprising. Heroic?

And heroic, yes. And this may also have made people accept a United Nation, which was not democratic, in that it had leaders, and the leaders who led them on quests. David, Eric Hobsbone wrote that myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity. But, Cali, would you like to talk to that, but also bring in Macaulay, if you can, because move on from Walter Scott to Macaulay's view of our history?

Well, I think Peter is absolutely right about the general notion that the rise of history, as we understand it now, is associated, not just in this country, but elsewhere with the rise of the nation state. It's also, of course, right to point out that the sort of history he's describing is, in a way, history very unlike that that we're used to now. Most of history now has some connection with what we call universities, whereas almost everybody that Peter has cited had no university jobs, not least because history and universities didn't exist.

So it's a different world from our own time because it's a popular world of history. It's not an academic sense of history, as we'd understand it now, and it's also, of course, the case that these people didn't have the vote. So, in fact, it's a very different set of configurations about history, nation, people, audience, academics than we are inhabiting now. And getting from there to hear is quite a complicated story

that I'm sure we're going to get into. Eric Hobsman, of course, quoted in his book on nationalism Renan, the French historian, who said that being a nation means getting your history wrong. And that quote has had a lot of life to it of late. And I suppose the point that's being put in there is that nations, one aspect of being a nation is composing a narrative about how a nation came into being, which is bound to be selective. It's bound to have good guys and bad guys.

It's bound to have heroic moments, which might not look like that if you're on the other side. Clearly Trafalgar and Waterloo were part of the history of the British nation and play out one way. play out rather differently across the channel, and I suppose that's what Eric Hobbes-Borm thought renan meant. And certainly, I think one of the ways we need to think about the way history was written in the 19th century, not just in England or Britain, but elsewhere, and indeed for part of the 20th century, was that it was indeed in the service of a notion of national identity, which meant that the history that was being written was, in some sense, is partial, one-sided, and not the same as across the channel. I don't, as it were, have a problem with that. I think

these people were well-meant and relatively high-minded, to some degree, History is always going to be the product of its own particular time and place, and 19th century history was the product of the milieu that Peter's just described. And McCauley was sort of cheering on and driving a society that he knew was powerful. He knew was imperial, but he wanted it to have great moral values and distinction. Macaulay was a complicated man. I mean, it's often said that it's all just about progress, getting better things moving forward, and of course he wrote in the sort of prose that embodied that view of life.

But it was a more complicated history than he's often given. credit for. He was more sympathetic to the losers than he's often thought. He's much more sympathetic to Scotland and to Ireland than he's often thought. I mean, McCauley, although easily characterised and perhaps caricatured as a wig and a progressive and a populariser, was in fact an immensely sophisticated man and, in fact, he was a more sophisticated historian than he's sometimes given credit for. Mary, would you like to comment, then I want to ask you another question. Yes, I think that exactly following from the quote that you gave from Hobbesen is, of course,

that all making of history is also learning to forget certain things. And the visions of particularly these later Victorians or J.R. Green is also to give a history that can bring together a nation that does have some very serious cleavages. For example, you know, the sort of Anglican England and the Protestant and the sort of Puritan and a nonconformist England, after all, which also correlates with certain types of ethnic diversities in it. So there is a story and people can be mobilized behind. So in that sense, also it's not just remembering very well what's important is it is putting as secondary and perhaps forgetting some of the cleavages. on the way. And I suppose the challenge is, and what I feel is sort of absent now really, is that we're not sure what it is out there that we can all share in terms of a new narrative. But could you say that in the 20th century there was an increasing interest in personal history, the history of individuals are sort of revealing through their individuality and their individualisms are national identity? Yes, I think that's absolutely right about the second half of the 20th century in particular.

You have great movements that rocked, particularly the Western world, but also with post-colonial movements and decolonizations, people finding themselves and their ethnicities, of course the whole movement of women's rights and other types of rights and liberations, so that people turn to make what the detractors were called sectional histories, and others might say it's actually bringing to the four voices

that would never been heard before. And very often it begins with a quest, it begins with a sort of personal commitment. I mean, we've mentioned Eric Hobspom, of course, his own political quest and political life story is utterly linked with, the history that he wrote. But that is not a problem, it seems to me.

We all get to history through some sort of hook, through something that animates and makes us passionate about us. And if people enter through that and find ways, you know, to articulate that and to fit it into a larger story, that's absolutely fine. And if it means it also brings people who aren't historians into the quest for their family or their locality, everything ultimately, be it, you know, Christianity or any isn't that we can think of,

is always something that. that people can somehow find through which they can find a link their own experiences with a larger, bigger story. So in a way, finding that, reaching history and historical understanding through something that's maybe personal is not a problem. People have always done it. The quest for the individual to become the universal? It's sometimes a universal story.

I mean, like, for example, looking at... Doesn't everybody think they live a universal as well as an individual story? I think the other way we ought to think about this, of course, is that the 19th century was not only the cult of national history, it was the cult of national heroes and biography. as such was a hugely thriving genre, and the presumption was that Gladstone, Disraeli and Coe were all exemplary figures leading heroic lives, and if you read their multi-volume tombstone biographies,

you would learn about these great men, how they had made the nation great, and how they exemplified qualities that everybody else should emulate. And that, of course, world survives even beyond Litton Strait's eminent Victorians in the interwar years. But if we think about how biographies of individuals are now written, it's not like that at all. We no longer see them as exemplary, admirable, virtuous figures. see them as tortured, often unadmirable Freudian figures

who we probably wouldn't want to emulate at all. And in that sense, the notion of the study of individuals has changed very much across the 19th and 20th centuries. And we don't now have exemplary biographies of great figures in the way that the Victorians were very good at and seemed to need and felt they produced. I was thinking more of the study of individuals who were not the Gladyscent Israel, it's much, much lower down the power scale.

I mean, every man. But again, I don't think that necessarily people interested in every man now because they think of every man as a universal figure. I think they're interested in the particularity of every man. And actually that is a very historical way of looking at them. If you look at some very influential late 20th century works, even of academic history like Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, it's a story about A. Miller in early modern Italy. And he's not, I mean, in certain ways he resembles the modern reader, but in many ways he's very strange and alien person indeed. And I think it's, I think

One thing that people are looking for now in history is the sense of particularity rather than universality, which is, again, a very much difference between the 19th and the early 21st centuries. And yet that particularity is always, I think, in the service of, isn't it amazing, that we can relate with a guy so far away that we can connect. It's both. The issue of continuity, which has a sort of universalizing aspect to it. But we're no longer as in awe of general systems of explanation to do with the economy and society, which in an earlier era meant that we had this sense of broader, deeper forces driving the historical process forward,

which individuals could be in some sense situated and understood. A large part of that seems to have been thrown out now, so we're left, as it were, with the individuals, and that's, I think, part of the appeal of them. Does what you say relate to, H. Carr, when he wrote What is History in 1961, New Britain, an answer to that, what is history now, as we were 40 years on,

but what you said about the great forces, what was he saying? What were he saying to historians and about history, as recently as 1961? Well, it does relate to Carr, I think Carr took the view and of course puts it very eloquently and for its time persuasively in what is history, that the things that move the historical process forward, a metaphor itself of some difficulty and complexity, I think, were largely long-term economic and social forces.

And those were the things which drove the historical process forward. And that if that was the case, as Carr wanted to insist, then the scope for individual freedom of action, free choice, the scope for the individual to affect the historical process, was in fact very limited. And Carr set out an agenda where he felt that that was the way to explain the historical process. He thought that history was more about change than continuity, and he thought that the job of the historian was to explain change,

that causal mechanisms were the things that historians had to unravel. And as far as he was concerned, the major causal mechanisms were the economy and society, and in that the role of the individuals was very limited. And that, of course, in fact, is a very similar view of history, to that which Fanon Brodell was putting forward across the Atlantic at the same time. What's your reaction to that in terms of history now, Peter Moon, today? Well, I've been studied now.

David's collection of essays is partly an answer just in its very structure. It's a dozen different essays about different aspects of history because there really is no single discipline any longer. There are a multitude of fragmented sub-disciplines and that does reflect, as David was suggesting, a sort of disenchantment with the big structures

and the big story. I think it also reflects to some extent the diversification of the audience of history. I mean, people have many – well, first of all, we have an audience now. When Carr was writing, he was writing four academics and their students. And for instance, in a publishing environment where virtually the only history books being published in read were textbooks. Today we have an audience of millions. And as a proportion of all the books published, history represents a higher proportion that it has done since the Victorian times. So we have this huge audience, a very diverse audience.

They want lots of different things from history. We don't give them any one thing any longer, nor should we. Mary Rubin, do you think that the present in the last few decades could be characterized as decades where cultural history began to come to the forefront? And if so, can you describe what that is in your view? Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And I wouldn't like people to think that cultural history means the history of sort of high culture, as to a culture, works of art, things that end up in museums and so on.

It's rather a turn towards the making of meaning. That is to say, how people live their lives. Everybody had a culture. Culture is the way in which people understand the world around them. It's a set of assumptions that they inherit, from religion, from family, from community and so on. And that when we take that on board and we try to investigate it, that is really the way in which people experience, even the really great big concepts like monarchy, like nationalism and so on,

it's always has, in some way, it is made culturally available to them in their own lives. So the cultural history tries to attend to how people make meaning and participate and communicate meaning, and also how meaning is sort of penetrates through various sort of social, social meelures. So it's both about, you know, the construction of ideas, I don't know, about monarchy or the church,

but also how people perceive them, engage with them, and use them. Would you say that feminist historians have taken a particular interest in cultural history? And if that's so, why do you think that's so? It's so because I wouldn't use the word feminist historians, but those interested in women and gender in general have attended very, very closely to culture because they believe, a lot of them believe, that a lot of what we take to be female or male in terms of roles and expectations, the way we behave, the way we use language, is actually something that's not sort of inscribed in our genes,

but it has to do with a cultural heritage. So that, you know, a medieval lady at court is something that is a product of a particular cultural, milieu which will be different from a female peasant in that same society and that, you know, we have to attend carefully to how those worlds are constructed. So inasmuch as gender roles are a very strong prime and central example about how culture operates, obviously historians of women and gender got very, very interested and indeed led the investigations of culture, yes. Do you want to answer that? Someone asks you another question, please do you. What lies behind a lot of this is the growing interest in over the course of the 20th century,

particularly in this country where it was rather backward to begin with, in humans. psychology. That one of the reasons why history and biography were separate genres in the 19th century is that historians didn't think it was quite decent to be exploring the inner lives of their subjects, except on the sort of 1066 and all that level, good king, bad king. Over the course of the 20th century, historians have extended their reach to the inner worlds of people and women's history has been, and gender history has just been just one aspect of that, I think. The other change here, which, as it were, adds to the case that Miriam Peter are both making,

is that when Carr wrote the disciplines that most influenced history were economics and sociology, and that gets you to the CAR model and the causation model, the disciplines that have most influenced history I would have thought over the last 20 years are indeed psychology and anthropology. And that, I think, explains partly the shift from economic and social to cultural history and the broader shift from a concern with causes and explanation to the concern with meaning and understanding, which is largely, I think, what cultural history hopes to do.

It tries to explain how earlier societies understood themselves. and it tries to get us into that, and that's a very different notion of what history ought to be doing from that which Carr set out in the 1960s. Can I... Do you want to say... I don't want to ask Peter...

I don't know. I don't know. A crucial term here is, of course, the issue of experience. And how do you get it at the experience of people in the past? I mean, how do you get it at all? Because there are those who never wrote and never left traces. But even those who wrote consciously, you know, is that the proper portrayal of their motivations and their experiences and so on. So it also meant historians engaging with literature

in a wholly new way, with art in a whole new way. And it has been said, psychology, psychoanalysis, literary studies, and anthropology have been really helpful there. Peter Manley, you argue that people are increasingly less interested in issues of national identity. I think that might surprise a lot of others, isn't it? It rather surprises me.

So the obvious question is how do you account for the intense interest in national history that we find in what we started to talk about at the beginning of this programme, the National Heritage, and from Durham Cathedral to Beamish, just long the road, so and so forth. Well, first of all, I think when I said that people were less interested in national indemnity, I was comparing us with the Victorians, for whom I think national identity was almost everything. And then we went through an intervening period of doubt about whether

history was irrelevant to national identity. I still think, I would say that today, that national identity doesn't have nearly the prominence in people's historical imagination, as some commentators suggest. First of all, well, one reason why the heritage industry is so popular is that it's the It offers things near to hand, places to take your kids on a rainy day. I mean, it's the environment in which we live, and it's England or Britain is the place where we live our lives. And therefore, British history is both near at hand and also easy to understand. But if you look at the things that interest people when they're exploring, as they are increasingly, it's Aztecs, it's Alexander, it's archaeology. I think only about a third of the titles in history published today are published in British history,

and not necessarily the most popular title. Simon Shama is, of course, now famous because the BBC has made himself as the historian of Britain, but Simon Shama got his academic reputation and also his popular reputation as an historian of 17th century Holland. And I think that, as I say, if we look at the range of histories that people are interested in in the marketplace,

we see that Britain doesn't have a particularly high profile. And if we ask people also, what their identity is. I'm moving to a slightly different level now. I mean, when opinion polls just discuss people's identity with them, they do say that national identity plays a relatively small part in their lives in comparison to other things that excite them, their families, their communities, their values, their faiths,

their travels, their readings. And nation does not have, I think, the same prominence in people's inner lives that it did in the 19th century. Well, that's a very stout defense of your opinion, and I extra. Come in room in it about this a little bit. Mary, I'll go to Mary first. Well, yes, I mean, it seems to me if we think of the young people now in their 20s and 30s

and how they're sort of when they become the great expensive book buyers, as it were, as they get older. Because on the whole, it's sort of older people who buy these sort of historical tombs. These are people who've travelled massively. I mean, we know young people today travel. There's parts of the world that definitely weren't part of every, you know, young adult's life when I was growing up, like Asia, America and so on, are absolutely there on the agenda. I mean, in terms of our students' course choices, American history, is a thundering success. So I think that will follow through.

And alas, Nazis. Well, I mean, in any case, it is definitely not around the British experience. And we are, of course, dealing with a generation that is becoming now three generations away from that great moment of national pride, which is the Second World War, and everything that represented in which empowered so much in this country in terms of, well, everything from the welfare state to other aspects of culture. It's also very important to notice that the fact that there are so many more people doing history now and so many more varied sorts of history inevitably takes us away from the world that Peter Mandler described,

where both popular history in the 19th century and academic history in the first part of the 20th century was mainly built around the notion of the nation state. But cultural history, women's history, social history, economic history are not primarily about the nation state in the way that political history by definition is. And I think the diversification of history, the enriching of what historians actually think in the past is worth writing about, has of itself resulted in a sense of history as not being entirely or primarily about the nation state at all. I think it's fair to say that national identity is going through something of a crisis, but that doesn't mean it's becoming more important. The crisis may mean in the long run that it becomes less important. And therefore there's a lot to talk about on the political level.

You know, the England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland question or the Europe question or the American. question. And it's not clear what England and Britain mean, but that doesn't mean that we have to sharpen our understandings of those things. It might mean we will dull and blur them. The other thing which has to be factored into any discussion of national identity is the other buzzword now, which is globalization. And there's clearly an interconnection here. I think one cannot discuss national identity without globalization. And there's obviously some interconnection here. There's a wholly separate discourse going on at a moment which says that Globalisation is everything and the nation state is finished.

And somewhere in that, this issue of national identity occupies a rather small and unclear slot. And I think one cannot discuss any of this national identity stuff without some reference to this other dialogue about globalization, which it's obviously connected to. And multiculturalism, of course, particularly for Britain. Just like Geoffrey of Monmouth thought in the 12th century and constructed a history for people who were Normans, Celts, and Celtics and Celtics and so on. And it was myth, and it was also history, and it was very available, and it was grounded in sites and places people could actually find out about in the same way. The challenge will be, or maybe it's unachievable, but we will have to see it's not being done yet to find something that all the peoples of Britain can relate to today. And we're historians, so we know about Jeffrey Monthe, but we're not prognosticators. And it is very hard to say how all this will be resolved.

Well, that's what I'm going to ask you, actually. I can't see what we're doing. The privilege of broadcasting. There will be a feeling, I would have thought, and quite legitimate, because of Simon Sharmus History of Britain and books like Anthony Pover-Stalingrad, that the idea of national, sorry, the idea of narrative history and the drive with great people doing these things is alive and kicking, and that is the way that it's going still.

Can you tell us, if you think that's right? And if not, where is the academy now, as it were? The academy is kind of everywhere. I don't think, I mean, your account of, as it were, Simon Sharma and friends doing splendid, magnificent, best-selling narrative history is, of course, right. That's always been true back to McCauley. But it comes back to this point that we really can't lose sight of. There are just so many more practising historians, both within universities and outside. And inevitably, it means that the subjects they write about, the modes of exposition they use, the approaches they adopt, are going to be much more varied than ever before.

So there's lots of narrative history going on, arguably better than it's ever been before. there's lots of other sorts of history going on as well and it's going to be like that and some are good and some are bad in each different mode and I'm not willing to offer any prediction as to what the next fashion will be it's a very varied enterprise, it's so varied we can't know where it'll go but I think variety is to be welcomed.

You could cite easily two other genres which are if not quite as popular as Stalingrad in the same league. There's the collage little bits and pieces of the kind that Norman Davis offers and then there's the slice of life Stella Tilliard's aristocrats an intense inward exploration of a couple people's lives.

It's not the big, the grand narrative, like Simon Shama, it's just as popular. Can I ask you, do you think, Mary Ruman, given the rise of what we could call family history, where families are recording each other with their camcorders and tape recorders, where the history of the street in which you live has become very important, where you can't go to a village with a shop without a properly, and often very good history of that village in that shop,

which has been written by somebody loving, based in the last 20 or 30 years. It's really everywhere. It's very local. It's very family. So what... I know you're terribly worried about prophesying or predicting anything.

But how do you think this will affect the way this period we're living through now is later regarded? I think you're probably talking also about simply the profusion of histories out there in materials that any historian doing, I don't know, the family in late 20th century Britain would have to attend to.

Well, I think... People think their videos and their emails. If they do. Well, I'm not too worried about the profusion of materials because hand in hand with the growth of the amount out there, we have the most extraordinary means of storing them because the same technology can produce and can store. I was thinking about this profusion after 9-11,

how, if I was in charge of the history project in New York, if I was a historian or a curator, what do you keep, what do you dispense of, where do you begin to select? So the process of selection will always be there. The historian who will write about late 20th century Britain and the one who will have the most poignant insight will probably be the one who will be able to make to create a causal as well as a narrative link

between that little village shop in Cumbria and say government policy on the family, economic trends, who will be able to not use one type of material which is usually what local historians do but to bring them together in a meaningful set of interactions because of course the shop in Cumbria might be very local but it's deeply affected by taxation,

by all sorts of other things that are happening, and indeed global trade. So the real insight of a person who has the privilege, like the three of us, to be historians all the time, will be to attend and to bring together a blend that's meaningful and to trace the ways in which the big and the small interact. Well, here are two predictions. One is that there is no guarantee

that the number of people writing history and reading history, and I think both are unprecedented at the moment, will continue. it will and I hope it will grow. But we need to be clear that the number of people writing history and reading history now is unprecedented, it seems to me, in the whole history of this country and many others. I hope that will continue. Well, the reason at the moment is because we do live in a world, however, in unsatisfactory, where we have a state-supported intellectual class. There are 3,000 people teaching history in universities in this country at the moment.

There is no precedent for that. It's only been true for the last 20 years. There is no guarantee, but it will continue. If it does continue, the number will go up and things will, from our point of you get better, if, as I fear it might, it goes down, then 20 years from now people will look back on this as a halcyon time and golden age when there was more history than ever before or since. The other thing I think we need to bear in mind is that just as we now look back on Carr in the 1960s and think it was all terribly timebound and maybe these lumbering causal mechanisms of economic and social change don't seem the way we would do history. So I think in 20 or 30 years time people will look back and say cultural history, yes, it was

good, yes, it was interesting, but there were all these problems with it. It couldn't explain change. It celebrated. figures rather than giving the broad picture. It was often indifferent to the material circumstances of life. How much wiser we are our forebears will say than those people blundering around in the early 2000s, just as we are on occasions inclined to think that about Carr. Peter. One other thing, that if the world gets a lot more exciting if we have cataclysms and world wars,

interest in history will decline. There's some evidence that during the period of the two world wars, people had too much history in their lives. They didn't want to read anymore. Let's hope, for all of our sakes, that the world doesn't get exciting in that dangerous way, and the history prosperes. Well, I think you made a fair shot at it today. So thank you all very much.

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