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History is other people

Auction Of Gandhi's Personal Effects | Getty Images News

In a broadside aimed at Western civilisation, M. K. Gandhi once likened the Mother of Parliaments to a prostitute and dismissed hospitals as ‘institutions for propagating sin’. According to Gandhi, Parliament’s only function was to gratify the whims of the Prime Minister, and hospitals, by treating substance abusers and alcoholics, simply encouraged others to behave irresponsibly. 

The Mahatma got away with such provocative statements because the tone of his critique was unfailingly reasoned and polite. Even if you thought him barmy, it seemed ungrateful to say so.  Mostly he targeted systems and institutions rather than those responsible for them. For his British adversaries he often evinced a genuine regard. In Hind Swaraj, a Q and A on Indian self-rule from which these nuggets of negativity are extracted, only one specifically British trait is singled out.  Bizarrely it is the Britisher’s – or rather, the Englishman’s – proprietary attitude to history. 

“The English have a habit of writing history” [says Gandhi]; “they pretend to study the manners and customs of all peoples. God has given us a limited mental capacity but they usurp the function of the Godhead and indulge in novel experiments. They write about their own researches in the most laudatory terms and hypnotise us into believing them. We, in our ignorance, then fall at their feet.”

But whoa up there. I mean, hang on. That’s a bit close to the bone. Writing other peoples’ history is what I’ve been doing most of my writing life. It’s a passion, an indulgence and nearly a living. It’s not a habit, and exploring Asian history is no more presumptuous than writing about Picts and Scots.  ‘The past is a foreign country’ says the narrator in L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. ‘They do things differently there’ — just as they do on the other side of the world. Like Hell, history is always other people. We trespass when we cross the centuries just as we do when we cross the continents. Or as Gandhi would have it, we ‘usurp the function of the Godhead’, whether grappling with the Middle Kingdom or the Middle Ages.  

I doubt, then, if my rendering of China’s history would be any more credible, let alone hypnotic, if I were Chinese; it might help sales in China but it would be no guarantee of impartiality. A Bengali postgraduate once challenged some particularly fatuous generalisation in my history of India. Red-faced and stalling frantically, I suggested she try writing a history of Scotland. It couldn’t fail, I told her; Scottish readers would be flattered, they would value her detachment and, if howlers like mine went largely undetected, imagine what she could get away with.  

So writing history should not be left exclusively to those whose antecedents played a part in it. I’m not even sure it should be left to historians. The giants at whose feet Gandhi supposed his countrymen falling in adulation were men like Gibbon, Carlyle, Macaulay and James Mill. Mill had published a massive history of India without ever feeling the need to go there; and Macaulay, without learning a single Oriental language, had famously dismissed the whole corpus of Indian and Arabic literature as less valuable than ‘a single shelf of a good European library’. No wonder Gandhi was disgusted. 

But note that none of these nineteenth-century luminaries would pass for historians today. Gibbon, Carlyle and Macaulay didn’t teach, they didn’t specialise, they didn’t pride themselves on using unpublished sources, and they didn’t let conflicting evidence come in the way of a cherished conviction or a fine turn of phrase. They were first and foremost writers, men of letters and of public affairs. I suppose we’d now call them ‘public intellectuals’. 

Gandhi had got me thinking. Who is best qualified to write history? And why is so much of the best history written by non-historians? Last century’s giants might find today’s senior common rooms just as uncongenial as Macaulay and co. Churchill’s confident prose would be shot down in flames. Hugh Trevor-Roper would face a peer-review firing squad for authenticating those spurious Hitler diaries. And R. H. Tawney, my model and the one history-writing Englishman Gandhi might have endorsed, would be best remembered for having been left for dead on the battlefield. 

As a sergeant in the 22nd Manchester regiment, on 1 July 1916 the 35-year old Richard Henry Tawney had been one of the first ‘over the top’ in the battle of the Somme. He was promptly hit in the chest and abdomen by machine-gun fire, then half-buried by an exploding shell. More dead than alive, he lay unattended in no-man’s land for a day and a half before being retrieved and invalided home. He played no further part in the war. But Tawney’s experience of serving in the ranks – he had refused a commission on principle – and his near-miraculous survival are supposed to have been influential in moulding his career.  

As a committed socialist and a staunch Christian he espoused social reform, promoted adult education and provided the young Labour Party with a sound basis of political theory. He also became an historian — and, construing history as morality, an historian with a mission. To arm the working man with an intellectual understanding of his disadvantaged condition, he lectured to mining communities and factory workers in the industrial towns of the Midlands and the North. On the shop floor he learned while he taught; and these insights into inequality and injustice informed his two great historical studies. One dealt with the commercialisation of agriculture and land ownership as a result of the enclosures. The other blamed the acquisitive and individualistic ethos of capitalism on the Reformation and the displacement of Christian values. It also sold an astonishing 150,000 copies. Economic data, where available, lent support to his hypotheses. He was one of the first editors of the Economic History Review and from 1931 held a professorship at the London School of Economics.  

But this is all a little misleading. Lawrence Goldman, Tawney’s biographer, proposes that the turning point in his career may not in fact have come on the Somme but on the Isis. At Balliol he had read Classics in the near-certainty of getting a first. It didn’t materialise; he got an unexciting second. His father fulminated, his college sympathised; if Tawney himself was devastated, it was mainly on their account. Having myself got an even more dismal degree, I know how he felt: the expectations of others prove harder to handle than one’s own. Instead of Oxford, classics and a comfortable life educating the elite, Tawney chose history, socialism and enlightening the working classes. Years later he took revenge on Oxford when, as an examiner, he doled out firsts with mischievous abandon. 

But then Tawney was as ill-suited to twentieth-century academia as Macaulay or Gibbon. According to Goldman, ‘he never had any sort of training in English history’, and the evidence to support his theories often proved embarrassingly elusive. Other historians might – in his own words – ‘make a darkness and call it research’; he preferred interrogating the past ‘in the light of general ideas’. He focussed on societies rather than individuals and trends rather than events.

Whether Gandhi ever read Tawney I don’t know. He should have. Tawney’s genial tone, his saintly reputation and his concern for the under-privileged would have resonated with the Mahatma. So would the discovery that Tawney’s father had taught Sanskrit in Calcutta and Tawney himself had been born there. In later life, swathed in tweed, with a kindly smile, a drooping moustache and a pipe that once ignited spontaneously in the middle of a lecture, Tawney looked every crumpled inch the eccentric English academic. Yet his interests were far from parochial and, though he never re-embarked for India, he did tackle China. 

From the floor at the LSE he once protested against the archive-led nature of historical research. ‘What the historian needs is not more documents but stronger boots,’ he announced. The boots would have been handy when he left for Shanghai in 1930. He had been commissioned to report on agricultural reform in China’s more famine-prone provinces. Perhaps someone thought Republican China’s agrarian problems mirrored those of Tudor England; perhaps Tawney thought a remote arena should be no more challenging than a remote era. He was away for a year, travelling and interviewing, and he came back with a book. 

Entitled Land and Labour in China it scarcely sets the pulse racing. Dependent on interpreters and translators, Tawney often appears ill-informed or out of his depth. Getting things spectacularly wrong proves to be an occupational hazard. He likes the people and admires their industry but sees ‘no chance of anything much being made of China for a few hundred years’. He thinks the Japanese invasion of Manchuria will stop there – it didn’t – and Communism will never catch on – it did. He admits he may be wrong but perseveres regardless. The result reveals more about China than any contemporary study and is recognised as what Goldman calls ‘a minor classic’. 

Like Gibbon and Macaulay, Tawney is read today, if at all, as much for his writing as his history. It’s not to everyone’s taste. Capacious sentences are braced with metaphor and studded with punctuation in an effort to contain their dependent clauses. They may require more than one reading. And the majesty of the prose, by lending a gloss of conviction to the content, might make today’s historians deeply suspicious. But what Tawney – and all great history writers – manages is to make his work memorable. 

Cars, roads, electricity, artificial fertilisers — in 1930s’ China, he finds few of what he calls ‘these pert amenities’. On the contrary, loom, lathe and kiln have scarcely been altered throughout ascertainable history; likewise the institutions of family, marriage and property, and the relationships of landlord and tenant, master and apprentice, debtor and creditor. ‘What elsewhere is forgotten, is in China remembered’, he writes, ‘and what elsewhere is a memory, is in China a fact’.  The labour required to build the Great Wall is still resented. The humiliation heaped on China by the Western powers will never be forgiven.  

As someone who once boated up the Mekong by way of research into the origins of French colonial rule in Indo-China, I find his booted approach to China rather encouraging. Tawney listens and observes, struggles to comprehend and speculates with caution. Not unlike Gandhi himself, he respects honest toil and identifies with the underdog. Seldom does he speak of his documentational researches and never in laudatory terms. He recognises that all history is the history of other peoples, he trusts to his ‘general ideas’ more than to the archivists’ catalogues, he accepts that he may get things wrong, and he takes immense care with the writing. Like Macaulay and co he’s more history writer than historian. And to my mind, all the more readable for it. 


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