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1 Doing history in public?
Historians in the age of impact
Pedro Ramos Pinto and Bertrand Taithe
Impact: n 'ımpakt
1 The action of one object coming forcibly into contact with another
2 A marked effect or influence
OED
What makes the real historian is not only the sensitivity to the great issues of the past; one also needs to love, like a pleasant intellectual gymnastic, the bricolage of research.
Marc Bloch, âPour un lecteur curieux de mĂ©thodeâ, 22 September 19391
Why are we writing this book?
The last twenty years have seen an unprecedented democratization of history. While there may be questions about which past we now choose to evoke, the publicâs interest in the past is not novel, nor was the writing and researching of historical subjects ever the exclusive domain of the professional academic. But the dynamics of this growing public engagement with history are clearly a departure from the past. History has become a pervasive cultural commodity, widely and eagerly consumed in the form of heritage, education and entertainment, even explicitly as an aid to the construction of new forms of identity.
This process has, in many ways, reinvigorated the discipline of history by prompting professional historians to think about their audiences, and to seek ways of interacting with publics and historians outside the academy. This imperative was not always present: Fernand Braudelâs sense that history had to engage with the contemporary world was framed in 1959 in a very different context from the current debate on the impact of history when he wrote:
History has to show its virtues, its contemporary usefulness, a little out of a place. I say History because civilisation is more or less History. It is also very nearly, âglobal societyâ.2
Then the concern was to anchor historical methods among the social sciences and to present History (with a capital H) as the fundamental interpretative discipline which might explain the present. The Annales school of history and its successor âNew Historyâ were syncretic and brought to bear geographic and economic archival knowledge to articulate an authoritative voice.3 Though the issue remained implicit throughout most of the historical debates of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s; historians expected that voice to be heard, its lessons to be heeded, their students to rule through the administrations of nation states. This certainty has all but vanished today. Historians are now immersed in very different societies and their relevance is questioned.
From this condition stems a pervasive sense of unease among historyâs traditional producers and keepers. The era of the dominance of the official archive as the repository of history, with the academic historian as its interpreter, or the high priest of what Michelet dubbed âresurrectionismâ, is over.4 The myth of the historian as oracle has been challenged by the multiplication of producers, publics, and repositories of historical memory and interpretation. As Toby Butler argues in his essay (Chapter 3 in this book), history is now largely the product of digital archives â digitized or digital native material â lending themselves to the cacophonic interpretations of a wide range of voices. In Samuelâs words in his major contribution to the debates on the nature of history, Theatres of Memory (1994):
History is not the prerogative of the historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, an historianâs invention, it is rather a social form of knowledge; the work in any given instance, of a thousand different hands.5
The age of demotic and democratic history which Raphael Samuel announced so vigorously in the 1980s and early 1990s is now tangible â though it is less a culture of the material past, the one that Samuel focused on when he considered mock Tudor houses, than one of the virtual past in which conspiracy theories rub shoulders with antiquarian concerns and meticulously documented genealogies.6 This exponential production outside of academic circles and far from its own debates on the value of history or postmodern theory is offering the most extraordinary Copernican challenge a profession could face.
At the same time as the production of history has broken the banks of academia, universities themselves are undergoing an epochal process of transformation which adds to the pressure for historians to redefine their position. In particular, the relationship between academic historians and the state has been profoundly altered, as Peter Mandler shows well in his contribution (Chapter 12) to this book. Universities are increasingly pushed to adopt an industrial and neoliberal model of knowledge production and distribution,7 a transformation most apparent in the emerging emphasis on the âimpactâ of research as a measure of quality, and the benchmark and justification for universitiesâ claim for public funding, direct or indirect.
The economic idea of impact has come to dominate the economic concerns of British and European funding bodies as well as worldwide academic debates.8 Through impact narratives â the âcase studiesâ of public engagement upon which university departments are assessed â historians have been asked to attempt to tell (if not measure quantitatively) just how relevant history might be to the world. The metaphorical use of impact, an image which evoked the ballistic image of a bullet hitting a target and the idea of concentrated and traceable influence, carries a great amount of baggage. In its more benign version, it sees science as incremental revelation that chips away at the frontiers of knowledge, punctuated by big bangs of discovery that mark epistemological shifts in our understanding of the physical world. In its practice, however, it seeks to identify the individual contribution rather than Samuelâs thousand hands, and in doing so reverts to myths about the process of scientific discovery and the role of great men of yesteryear.9
Other than in a very limited sense, history is ill-suited to this regime of knowledge production. Historical âdiscoveriesâ lie more in the realm of curiosity than that of epistemological break, from the kingâs remains found under the parking lot to the occasional forgotten manuscript. As such, history finds itself relegated from the podium of groundbreaking knowledge to the plodding ranks of âusefulâ knowledge, or that section of the academy now being restructured as the R&D department of footloose, innovative and âflexibleâ industries. The assumption that research was intrinsically good and a common good has given way to the idea of learning and enquiry as a form of private investment which has to fit the logic of the market; the economic and social worlds are no longer synonymous with history as Braudel might have imagined, but with its âcustomersâ, expecting a useful product. Historyâs impact, as with engineering or marketing science, is expected to come through a âpartnershipâ with industry aimed at creating a successful commodity: the well-visited heritage space, the popular TV series with book tie-in or the serious, yet best-selling historical novel. The question of who is in the driving seat in this âpartnershipâ, and what consequences that has for the nature of the product itself, are left unasked.
Either way, the narrowing of the definition of what the production of history is for necessarily entails a loss of academic freedom for the professional historian. At one level this reflects the fact that historians are and were indeed a caste who relied on notions of academic freedom and a university rentier economy facilitated by a consensus on the intrinsic value of knowledge and of the university as an institution for the reproduction of elites imbued with a certain idea of public service â the enlightened and benevolent despotism of the civil servant.10 The base utilitarian notion that all knowledge should be productive, a Dickensian parody taken seriously, has challenged this self-evidence at a time when universities come to define themselves as enterprises of knowledge production rather than sanctuaries for sacred and universal values.
The comfortably bourgeois mode of self-referential history writing that the traditional university supported had already come under attack from the mid-twentieth century by radical historians, Marxists and Feminists and the History Workshop movement, who shared a desire to make history more inclusive, less male and eurocentric.11 Their challenge continues and when it is combined with the more methodological and theoretical critiques of postmodern theorists like Hayden White, it amounts to a serious but also productive unease.12 Yet it is not these critiques that are fundamentally affecting the academic environment of history production, but rather the transformation of the university into a producer of private goods: the social reproduction of elites which Bourdieu lambasted in the 1960s is no longer the preserve of disciplines such as history but of business studies.13
But if there is no golden past of historical production to cling to, there are clearly significant challenges ahead that stand in the way of the creation of a truly democratic, honest and â dare we say it? â relevant model of production of historical knowledge. In order to reflect on this, we draw on the metaphor of production. This does not aim to reduce history to the status of commodity, although as de Groot argues persuasively in his contribution (Chapter 2) to this volume, the commodification of history has greatly expanded its public, for better and for worse. But it does allow us to break down History with a capital H into a series of processes that seem to us critical to reflect on: who produces historical knowledge; where and how it is produced; how is it circulated and consumed. In this way we want to think aloud about what history is meant to achieve as a discipline, how it engages more explicitly with practitioners, with the politics of nationalism and inequality, with the sciences, journalism and the media.
We have gathered in this volume a range of young and more established historians, practitioners and people who have straddled several careers while always referring back to history. The authors were asked to write for a wider audience â a wider audience even than the one we envisage for this introduction. They were asked to present their craft, in the artisanal sense that all historians are indeed workers of a range of materials in their effort to shape a representation of the world that is relevant to their contemporaries. We have asked our authors to be free and not shy away from controversies if these might enrich the debate raging today on the value of historical knowledge. Not every possible theme will be exhausted by such a book. Concerns such as gender and sexuality run throughout the book and are not the object of a single article. The chronological concerns, longue durĂ©e and event histories are not the focus of this book, and neither do we give precedence to the many subtle subcategories of social, cultural, economic, world, area studies. The controversies around the nature of facts and truth which so divided the historical profession are well documented elsewhere and now belong to the toolbox of all well-trained historians (whether they like it or not).14 These debates we leave in the background.
In this introduction we deemed it useful, however, to engage with some key themes which might help raise the concerns and hopes that led us to bring together this collection of articles. Our first heading will be to consider the issues arising from the commodification of history; then to consider how history production has changed and is changing today; ending with a reflection on the role of the historian in the era of impact.
History as a commodity
Debates on the nature of history have moved along since the 1980s and 1990s. In that period History Workshop historian Raphael Samuel engaged publicly on the nature of British identity and its relation to history.15 In particular historians were engaging forcefully with issues relating to the national curriculum, the multiplication of producers and the rampant commercialization of history. The historical turn in television series and identity politics which is evoked in this book (Chapter 2) by Jerome de Groot was in full swing. In the UK Samuel reviewed the rise of demotic forms in the consumption of history. Far from perceiving this as a threat, Samuel highlighted the rich encounter between consumers and micro-producers of history while denigrating the sanitization of the past associated with the rise of so-called âVictorian valuesâ. In France and on the continent meanwhile, the phenomenal sales of lieux de mĂ©moires, which was copied in different guises in Italy or Germany, brought about the complex re-evaluation of how the wider public related to memory and landscapes onto which history had been inscribed.16 This enabled a political review of the mythologies of the republican tradition which aimed squarely at addressing the populist politics on the far right and their use of old historical language and memorial sites. The bicentenary of 1789 in France, the subsequent anniversaries of Nelson, the First World War or other events ensured that history never ceased to be a successful market.17
National Trust and English Heritage, and the wider heritage industry worldwide, have made considerable stock and profit from the sales of popular books, as well as living shows mixing professional and amateur re-enactors, heirs of the experimental archaeology of the 1970s and of a desire to engage with the materiality of history. The televisual liberalization of the 1990s and 2000s facilitated the commissioning of new documentaries and the endless diffusion of...
