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By Root 1572 0

were a minority, distrusted as cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguers by the great bulk of generally monoglot historians whose subject was the history of the USA, a subject which, as treated by most of them, had very little in common with what historians elsewhere were doing. Only slavery was a subject that aroused international interest, but the younger historians of this subject who were to make a mark abroad were very untypical of the profession in the fifties and sixties. They included several young postwar members of the American Communist Party – Herb Gutman, the brilliant Gene Genovese and the former national secretary of the Young Communist League and subsequent Nobel Prize laureate, the endlessly ingenious Bob Fogel.

Curiously enough, this was true even of so patently global a subject as economic history, which may explain why, when an international association was founded in this field, it was basically run as an Anglo-French condominium of Braudel and Postan. Stateside historical innovations – economic history in terms of businessmen (‘entrepreneurial’ history) in the 1950s, ‘psychohistory’ (that is Freudian interpretations of historical figures) and the much more dramatic ‘cliometrics’ (history as retrospective and often imaginary econometrics) in the 1960s – found it hard to cross the Atlantic. Not until 1975 was the quinquennial World Congress of Historical Sciences held in the USA, presumably on diplomatic grounds, to balance the Moscow session of 1970.

On the whole, in the thirty years following the Second World War the historical traditionalists were fighting a rearguard engagement in a losing battle against the advancing modernists in most western countries where history flourished freely. Perhaps they would have defended themselves more effectively if the garrison of the central stronghold of traditional historical scholarship, Germany, had not been put out of action by its association with National Socialism. (The situation of historians in communist countries was not comparable to the West, but, as it happened, the Marxism to which they were officially and sometimes genuinely committed fitted in with the western modernizers more than with traditionalist, mainly nationalist, history in their own countries.) In 1970 a rather optimistic, not to say triumphalist, meeting was organized by the American journal Daedalus to survey the state of history. Except for the (defensive) spokesmen for political and military history, the gathering was dominated by the modernizers – British, French and, among the under-forties, American.7 By that time a common flag had been found for the far from homogeneous popular front of the innovators: ‘social history’. It fitted in with the political radicalization of the dramatically expanding student population of the 1960s. The term was vague, sometimes misleading, but as I wrote at the time, noting the ‘remarkably flourishing state of the field’: ‘It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to disclaim it.’8

There was some cause for satisfaction. Not least because, somewhat unexpectedly, the Cold War had not substantially interfered with developments in history. Indeed, it is surprising how little it penetrated the world of historiography, except, obviously, on such matters as the history of Russia and the USSR. Capitalism and the Historians, a volume published in the 1940s under the auspices of Friedrich von Hayek, argued that historians who pointed out the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution on the poor were systematically biased against the benefits of the free enterprise system. This led to a lively polemic which entertained students, the so-called ‘Standard-of-Living Debate’ when the left (i.e. myself, speaking for the communist historians) responded, but it cannot be said that this debate, which has continued at intervals ever since, was subsequently conducted on ideological lines. Explosive subjects such as Russia, especially in the twentieth century, and the history of communism were, of