Embracing Complexity - A Conversation with David Cannadine

Howard BUrton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2020
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771700337
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: History

This book is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and eminent historian David Cannadine, Princeton University. This thoughtful conversation includes an examination of different aspects of the societal role of both history and historians while rejecting the simplifying distortions of the historical record that we are regularly presented with. David also provides behind-the-scenes insights into several of his bestselling books, including The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences.This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, Imposing Order, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Finding One's Historical Feet - Merging subjective and objectiveII. The Art of Biography - Trevelyan, Mellon, George V and moreIII. The Undivided Past - The origins of a deliberately provocative ventureIV. Transcending Parochialism - The value of historyV. Categorical Examinations - The utility of boxesVI. Historical Broadening - Changing practicesVII. What to Do, Part I - Advising presidents and educating PrincetoniansVIII. What to Do, Part II - Harnessing technologyIdeas Roadshow Conversations Series This book is part of an expanding series of 100+ Ideas Roadshow conversations, each one presenting a wealth of candid insights from a leading expert in a focused yet informal informal setting to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn't otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks. For other books in this series visit our website: https://ideasroadshow.com/.

The Conversation

I. Finding One’s Historical Feet

Merging subjective and objective

HB: Let’s start at the beginning—that is to say, your beginning: how you became motivated and interested in history and becoming a historian. Was this something that had formed for you from a very early age? Were you passionate about history when you were a small child? How did it begin for you?

DC: It is a very good question; and, of course, it’s one that I’ve asked myself a lot. As I get older, I increasingly wonder how I ever got to be doing what I’ve been lucky enough to do—that’s to say, to persuade people for the best part of 40 years to pay me money to read and write books, which is an astonishingly privileged form of existence, really, for which I’m hugely grateful.

But to answer your question as best as I can: I was born in 1950 on the Western side of Birmingham. My mother’s family came from what in those days used to be called the “Black Country”, which was an area West of Birmingham devoted to industrial production. The Birmingham and the “Black Country” that I grew up in the 1950s was still, as I can now see and perhaps even understood at the time, in many ways recognizably a kind of 19th-century Victorian world. The changes in the southeast of England in the 1920s and 1930s, the Hoover factories and the arterial roads, had rather passed it by. I think I was always conscious of growing up in a world where there were a lot of things that were old, even though the 19th century wasn’t old in the sense that Salisbury Cathedral would be thought to be old.

I was also struck by the fact that there seemed to be this rather close relationship between the countryside and the town. I lived on the western edge of Birmingham where these two things connected. In particular, heading from where I lived into Birmingham, there was this very beautiful suburb where rich people (as it seemed to me at the time) lived, called Edgbaston. The land there was owned by an aristocratic family, who then leased out the plots for houses to be built (most of them had been built in the 19th century) on which middle-class and working-class people lived.

I was intrigued by that connection and I wrote about that in the school magazine when I was only twelve or thirteen. So, I had this curious sense of the 19th century being very close to where I was living and growing up. It was the world, in some ways, that I inhabited. I also had this quite complicated sense that the relations between different social groupings might turn out to be at least as much collaborative as, perhaps, adversarial. Now I’m probably overdoing that in retrospect, overdetermining it all.

HB: Well, you are an academic, after all.

DC: Yes, I am an academic; we’re probably not very good on motivation, least of all on our own. But those were certainly some of the influences on me as a boy growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. In so far as there’s a kind of central area of interest that is still my main preoccupation—though I’ve written more broadly on lots of other things—I suppose, to some degree, it is 19th and 20th century Britain.

That’s really how it started. My father bought me lots of volumes of the Pelican History of England, as it then was, and I thought those were rather wonderful. I read those very avidly. I did read a lot; I was a very bookish child, I suppose. Somehow history became a subject for me of enormous fascination, and I was lucky enough to be growing up when a whole range of writers—Eric Hobsbawm, Asa Briggs, J. H. Plumb, Alan Bullock, A. J. P. Taylor, Owen Chadwick—were all producing books of major historical significance which also reached a broad reading public, of whom I was increasingly one. It was a rather marvellous time to be growing up, because ever year—or, indeed, every other month—there was a book by one of them coming out which was just hugely interesting to read. Asa Briggs, in particular, was a major early influence because he wrote this wonderful history of Birmingham, and ever after that’s always been a book that I wish I’d had the chance to write when he had, which was when he was very young.

So, in general, I suppose it’s a kind of mixture of things. I went to read history at university, because by then it was pretty clear that’s what I wanted to do. I always remember going to what was then called “Careers Service” in my third and final year at Cambridge to get some advice.

I told them that I’d thought about the civil service, but I didn’t really think that was for me. I’d thought about applying for scholarships to America and I thought that was a very good idea, helping me to become a research student and then a professional historian.

And the man said to me, “David, I’ve been thinking about you, and I don’t think the civil service is really quite your scene. I think perhaps you ought to consider applying for scholarships to America and then maybe you’d like to become a professional historian.” And I replied, “Thank you so much for that advice. I’d never thought of any of that.”

HB: You mentioned this sense of history having passed one by, or at least a sense of modernity having passed one by to some extent, when you were growing up in Birmingham. But did you also have a sense that you were in a place that was imbued with the spirit of the Industrial Revolution? That you were close to the spirit of James Watt, an awareness of having been at a place that was at the heart of leading the world centuries earlier?

DC: It was certainly true that the physical creation of the world of Boulton and Watt and their contemporaries was still very much in evidence in the world in which I grew up. My mother’s family, the “Black Country” side of the family, lived close to a whole network of canals and railway tracks which were still very much functioning in the late 1950s and early 1960s when I was growing up. The central area of Birmingham still looked exactly as it did in a very famous print that was done at Birmingham in the middle of the 1880s. It was this area called Chamberlain Square—named after Joseph Chamberlain—and in the middle was a memorial fountain that had been put up to him in the early 1880s.

There was the town hall opposite, designed by Joseph Hansom (as in Hansom cabs), put up in the 1830s. There was the great civic library, in which, later on, I worked as an undergraduate. There was the counselor house and art gallery, and there was Mason College, which formed the core of what later became Birmingham University. The streets were still cobbled and there were still some tramlines. The trams didn’t run by then, but the tramlines were still there.

One certainly had a sense of living in a sort of Victorian world, not least because from the mid 1960s onwards, large parts of it were demolished in a deliberate attempt to move Birmingham into the future. The phrase “The new Birmingham” was the fashion back then: the beautiful 19th century library was demolished and so was Mason College. There was a considerable uproar about that: the conservationist got very exercised by it.

There was, then, this sense as I was growing up of an awareness of an old world in which I grew up, which had obviously once been a hugely vigorous world, but by now no longer was, not least because the zeitgeist of the 1960s was, We have to get rid of all this Victorian stuff and start again. I was lucky enough just to catch the tail end of this Victorian existence and then to live through the era of the 1960s, when the prevailing mode was, This all has to go: we have to start again, and surely we can do better—which I’m not sure, in the end, we have.

But that certainly gave me a strong sense that there is the world of now and the future, and it somehow isn’t the same as the world of then, in which, fortunately enough, I’d actually grown up.

HB: In terms of your principal areas of professional historical research, you’ve written prolifically about the British aristocracy, Victorian England, the monarchy. You’ve written a great deal about British history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing a rather straight line between what you’ve just said and some of the works that you’ve later produced, one might think that this general topic or theme was always something that was in your subconscious, that you were constantly thinking and ruminating over these things. But did it ever become a conscious and deliberate choice for you?

I say this thinking about a conversation that I had with John Elliott, when he mentioned two things: his sudden discovery of Spain from an undergraduate trip that he had taken, but also this sense that British history was very crowded, and there was an understanding that it would be very difficult to break through. Did you feel that as well? Did you also have a sense that British history was “crowded” and would therefore be particularly challenging professionally? Or did you simply move, unhesitatingly, into the subject area that interested you the most?

DC: Well, I probably didn’t know as much about it when I started as I ought to have done, and had I known more I might have acted di...

Table of contents

• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• The Conversation
• Continuing the Conversation