Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [164]
One obvious difference between the two was that one was an international figure engaged in a global field, while the other’s main historical interests were insular. At one of our first meetings Fernand Braudel asked me: ‘I understand in England there is much talk about a historian called Namier and his school. Can you tell me something about him?’ Neither he nor any other economic historian would have asked this question about Postan, if only because from 1934 on he had edited the internationally known journal in the field, Economic History Review. Moreover, while nobody outside England except a few specialists cared much that Namier had (it was then thought) revolutionized the approach to the esoteric subject of English eighteenth-century parliamentary history, all economic historians in the effective academic universe recognized Postan’s topics in medieval agrarian history as important, cared about them and were prepared to engage in debate on them across the borders of state and ideology – from Harvard to Tokyo. Unlike research on national politics of the past, economic history in those days had an accepted universe of discourse, even an accepted framework by which to judge the interest of the questions asked, whatever the disagreement about the answers.
In some ways the contrast between Postan and Namier symbolized the major conflict that divided the profession of history, and the major tendency of its development from the 1890s to the 1970s. This was the battle between the conventional assumption that ‘history is past politics’, either within nation-states or in their relations to each other, and a history of the structures and changes of societies and cultures, between history as narrative and history as analysis and synthesis, between those who thought it impossible to generalize about human affairs in the past and those who thought it essential. The battle had begun in Germany in the 1890s, but in my student days the most prominent champions of rebellion, apart from the Marxists, were in France: Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre through their review Annales. Paradoxically Bloch and Postan’s field of medieval history, which one might have expected to appeal to conservatives, actually encouraged original thinking about the past. Even the most conventional historian found it impossible to cut medieval life into neat and separable slices – political, economic, religious or whatever. It almost demanded comparisons and a rethinking of contemporary assumptions and, incidentally, cut across the borders of modern states, nations and cultures. Like ancient history, and perhaps for similar reasons, medieval history is a subject which has attracted some of the best as well as the most stuffy historical minds in my lifetime, though fewer brilliant Marxist scholars than antiquity. On the other hand, it was a field which contained a large number of figures such as my boss at Birkbeck College, the late R. R. Darlington, whose dream in life was to produce an exhaustive edition of a minor twelfth-century chronicler, and who appeared genuinely appalled when I, a young lecturer, suggested that a seminar by a South African social anthropologist then attached to the college might be of interest to students of his special paper on Anglo-Saxon England. What archives had he worked in?
Into this battle between the old and the new history young Marxists like myself at the start of their professional careers as historians, now found themselves precipitated as they joined what was still a small field, measured both in the number of its practitioners and in their output. The enormous expansion of universities old and new, and the stratospheric rise in ‘the literature’, did not get under way until the 1960s. Even in countries like Britain and France, or in fairly broad academic fields such as economic history worldwide, virtually everyone knew of, and could get to know, everyone else. Fortunately the first international congress of historical sciences after