The Undivided Past

by David Cannadine

  Late in his life, having done with A Study of History, that became Arnold J. Toynbee’s view, as expressed in his words quoted above, and that wider and wiser perspective has been eloquently and appropriately reaffirmed by his biographer, Professor William H. McNeill:

  Humanity entire possesses a commonality which historians may hope to understand just as firmly as they can comprehend what unites any lesser group. Instead of enhancing conflicts, as parochial historiography inevitably does, an intelligible world history might be expected to diminish the lethality of group encounters by cultivating a sense of individual identification with the triumphs and tribulations of humanity as a whole. This, indeed, strikes me as the moral duty of the historical profession in our time.13

  In this McNeill is undoubtedly correct: the history of humankind is at least as much about cooperation as it is about conflict, and about kindness to strangers as about the obsession with otherness and alterity. To write about the past no less than to live in the present, we need to see beyond our differences, our sectional interests, our identity politics, and our parochial concerns to embrace and to celebrate the common humanity that has always bound us together, that still binds us together today, and that will continue to bind us together in the future.14

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although I had been brooding on this subject for a long time, the immediate stimulus to get some preliminary thoughts down on paper was the invitation to give the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures, which I delivered under the auspices of the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge during the Lent Term of 2007. I am grateful to Professor Quentin Skinner and to the board of electors for asking me, to Professor Richard J. Evans for urging me to tackle a large topic that might appeal to undergraduates, and to the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge, for their generous hospitality during my visit. Having already written Trevelyan’s biography, I was delighted to be given this opportunity to pay him another form of homage, and it was a particular pleasure to do so exactly fifty years since the lectures established in his honor had been inaugurated. This book is an expanded and rewritten version of my original texts, incorporating much new material and more fully developed argumentation, and I have deleted my original opening remarks about Trevelyan’s life, work, and family, which seemed appropriate to the local Cambridge setting, but not to a publication that I hope will reach, as Trevelyan’s own writings so often did, a much wider audience.

  In tackling this subject, I have drawn upon a broad range of literature far beyond my limited sphere of knowledge, and I am indebted to many friends who have helped me in areas of the past (and present) that are not my own: Anthony Appiah, Robert Attenborough, Christopher Bayly, David Bell, the late Isaiah Berlin, Glen Bowersock, Judith M. Brown, Peter Brown, Richard Bulliet, Owen Chadwick, John Darwin, John Elliott, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Eric Foner, Roy Foster, Timothy Garton Ash, Anthony Grafton, John Hall, Henry Hardy, the late Eric Hobsbawm, Brooks Hosfield, Michael Howard, Ronald Hyam, Jonathan Israel, the late Tony Judt, Stephen Lamport, Nomi Levy-Carrick, Anthony Low, Neil MacGregor, Kirsten MacKenzie, Alastair MacLachlan, Peter Mandler, Phil Nord, Nel Irvin Painter, the late Simon Price, David Reynolds, Duncan Robinson, Daniel T. Rodgers, Emma Rothschild, Stuart Schwartz, Hamish Scott, Amartya Sen, Christine Stansell, Shirley Tilghman, Sean Wilentz, and Adrian Young. I have also been greatly helped by reading the many books on diverse subjects that have come my way as a judge of the Wolfson History Prize, and by stimulating discussions with my co-judges, Keith Thomas, Averil Cameron, Richard J. Evans, and Julia Smith. Earlier versions of some of these chapters were delivered to gatherings at the Institute of Historical Research in London, to the Council in the Humanities at Princeton University, as the Rushton Lecture at the University of Virginia, to the Australian National University in Canberra, and at the Festival of Ideas in Melbourne.

  I undertook the initial work for the Trevelyan Lectures while I was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Professor of British History at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London, and I completed the reading for this book as Whitney J. Oates Senior Research Scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. I am grateful to many colleagues and friends in both institutions for their help, support, and encouragement, in particular to Miles Taylor, Elaine Walters, Helen McCarthy, Jennifer Wallis, and Martha Vandrei in London, and to Jeremy Adelman, Anthony Grafton, Harold James, William Chester Jordan, Phil Nord, Carol Rigolot, and Gideon Rosen in Princeton. Most of this book was written while I was Fletcher Jones Foundation Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and a Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. I owe a large debt to Roy Ritchie and Susie Karasnoo at the Huntington, and to Peter Goddard at the Institute, for giving me such a warm welcome, and for providing ideal surroundings for sustained thought and uninterrupted writing.

  I am grateful, as ever, to my agents, Gill Coleridge in London and Michael Carlisle in New York, for smoothing the bumpy path from original idea to manuscript to publication, and I am indebted to the help, wisdom, and guidance of my two transatlantic editors and friends, Simon Winder at Penguin and George Andreou at Alfred A. Knopf, with both of whom it has again been a joy and a pleasure to work. I also wish to thank Juhea Kim for having overseen the production of the book with great alertness and efficiency, Roland Ottewell for his meticulous copyediting of the text, and Sara Brooks for her help with the proofs. Linda Colley has, as before, made life worth living and books worth writing, and I once more offer up to her my thanks and love. I dedicate this work to two dear friends, whose lives in medicine and music, and in so much else besides, are a constant reminder, embodiment, and celebration of the humanity that all of us share. And I offer this book in the hope that it may contribute to a greater awareness, appreciation, understanding, and recognition of that broader existence we all have in common, that lies beyond the single identities, the exaggerated differences, and the polarized animosities that too easily and too often loom too large, too distorting, and too damaging in all of our lives.

  David Cannadine Norfolk, England

  July 10, 2012

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. For the formative elements of George W. Bush’s worldview, see M. Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New York, 2002). For three recent examples of this Manichean formulation, see D. Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind (New York, 2005); C. Jennings, Them and Us: The American Invasion of British High Society (London, 2007); W. Hutton, Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality—Why We Need a Fair Society (London, 2010).

  2. Quoted in E. Luce, “A Tragedy of Errors,” Financial Times, January 19, 2009.

  3. T. Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago, 2010), pp. 91, 100–101, 104.

  4. D. Bell, “Class Consciousness and the Fall of the Bourgeois Revolution,” Critical Review 16 (2004): 336–38; P. Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 469–521.

  5. M. Guibernan, The Identity of Nations (Cambridge, 2007), p. 173.

  6. C. Geertz, “What Is a State If It Is Not a Sovereign?: Reflections on Politics in Complicated Places,” Current Anthropology 45 (2004): 584; F. Nussbaum, “The Politics of Difference,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (1990): 375–86; S. Collini, English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture (Oxford, 1999), p. 264; C. Hall, “Introduction: Thinking the Postcolonial, Thinking the Empire,” in C. Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: A Reader (Manchester, 2000), p. 16; K. Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” in K. Wilson, ed., Cultures, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 5. For a recent attempt to write global history employing the concept of “difference” as the organizing principle, see J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 20
10).

  7. L. Colley, “Britishness and Otherness: An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 309–29; W. H. McNeill, “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians,” American Historical Review 91(1986): 5.

  8. M. Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, 2010), pp. 28–29, 35–36; A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York, 2006), pp. xx–xxi. See also A. Ryan, “Cosmopolitans,” New York Review of Books, June 22, 2006, pp. 46–48.

  9. M. Angelou, “Human Family,” in I Shall Not Be Moved (New York, 1990), p. 5.

  10. T. Garton Ash, “Obama’s Beijing Balancing Act Points to the New Challenge for the West,” Guardian, November 18, 2009; Garton Ash, “Obama Must Wish He Were Cameron,” Guardian, July 22, 2010; N. MacGregor, “The Whole World in Our Hands,” Guardian, Review, July 24, 2004; MacGregor, “Britain Is at the Centre of a Conversation with the World,” Guardian, April 19, 2007; MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (London, 2011), pp. xviii, xxv.

  11. Bill Clinton, “World Without Walls,” Guardian, Saturday Review, January 26, 2002; Clinton, “My Vision for Peace,” Observer, September 8, 2002.

  12. Todorov, Fear of Barbarians, p. 197. Raymond Aron once made a similar point when he observed that life “is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable”: quoted in T. Judt, The Burden of Responsibility (Chicago, 1998), p. 182.

  13. For a rare and honorable exception to this generalization, see M. Macmillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York, 2009), esp. pp. 54–90.

  14. J. Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge, 1976), p. ix; M. B. Finocchiaro, “Science, Religion, and the Historiography of the Galileo Affair: On the Undesirability of Oversimplification,” Osiris 16 (2001): 116.

  15. B. Bailyn, “How England Became Modern: A Revolutionary View,” New York Review of Books, November 19, 2009, p. 44; L. Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39 (2006): 617.

  16. K. V. Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), p. 6.

  17. P. Vallely, “Blair’s Glinting Eye Turns to Iran,” Independent on Sunday, January 23, 2011. See also the Angolan freedom fighter Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos (Pepetela), Mayombe (London, 1983), p. 2.

  ONE: RELIGION

  1. Matthew 25:31–46.

  2. P. Brown, The World of Late Antiquity from Marcus Aurelius to Mohammad (London, 1971), pp. 54–55.

  3. A. Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West (Oxford, 2008), pp. 124–27.

  4. R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians (Harmondsworth, 1996), pp. 561–71; H. Katouzian, The Persians: Ancient, Medieval and Modern Iran (London, 2009), pp. 49–58.

  5. M. E. Marty, When Faiths Collide (Oxford, 2005), p. 159; W. Lippman, A Preface to Morals (New York, 1929), p. 76; Matthew 12:30.

  6. Matthew 25:35.

  7. Marty, When Faiths Collide, p. 134.

  8. J. Wolffe, introduction to J. Wolffe, ed., Religion in History: Conflict, Conversion and Coexistence (Manchester, 2004), pp. 5–6.

  9. H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (London, 1965).

  10. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 71–74; G. Clark, Christianity and Roman Society (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 9–10.

  11. G. A. Bonnard, ed., Edward Gibbon: Memoirs of My Life (London, 1966 ed.), p. 147; Pocock, First Decline and Fall, p. 497.

  12. J. W. Swain, Edward Gibbon the Historian (London, 1966), pp. 62–70; P. Brown, “Gibbon’s Views on Culture and Society in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries,” in G. W. Bowersock, J. Clive, and S. R. Graubard, eds., Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 43–45.

  13. R. Porter, Gibbon (London, 1988), pp. 1, 112–15.

  14. D. P. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman Empire (Urbana, Ill., 1971), p. 106.

  15. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 105–6; J. W. Burrow, Gibbon (Oxford, 1985), pp. 52–55.

  16. Porter, Gibbon, p. 119.

  17. Burrow, Gibbon, p. 53.

  18. P. B. Craddock, Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian, 1772–1794 (Baltimore, 1989), pp. 60–63.

  19. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 121–23.

  20. L. Gossman, The Empire Unpossess’d: An Essay on Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 33, 47; Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman Empire, p. 106; Burrow, Gibbon, p. 51.

  21. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 125–29.

  22. Ibid., p. 117.

  23. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman Empire, pp. 106, 112; Porter, Gibbon, p. 115; Burrow, Gibbon, p. 63.

  24. Swain, Gibbon the Historian, p. 66; Craddock, Gibbon, Luminous Historian, p. 63.

  25. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 283; Porter, Gibbon, p. 116; Bonnard, Edward Gibbon, p. 136; Burrow, Gibbon, p. 66.

  26. Burrow, Gibbon, p. 53.

  27. Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, p. 35; J. Huskinson, “Pagan and Christian in the Third to Fifth Centuries,” in Wolffe, Religion in History, p. 15.

  28. R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 21–22; Burrow, Gibbon, p. 56.

  29. Jordan, Gibbon and His Roman Empire, p. 107.

  30. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 124–28.

  31. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 592; Brown, World of Late Antiquity, p. 104.

  32. B. Caseau, “Sacred Landscapes,” in G. W. Bowersock, P. Brown, and O. Grabar, eds., Interpreting Late Antiquity: Essays on the Postclassical World (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), pp. 34–35; C. Kelley, “Empire Building,” in ibid., pp. 184–85; M. Beard, J. North, and S. Price, Religions of Rome, vol. 1, A History (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 364–75; Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 609–62; Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, p. 14.

  33. A. Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395–600 (London, 1993), pp. 7–8; M. Vessey, “The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Re-Making of ‘Late Antiquity’: From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983),” Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998): 377–411.

  34. P. Brown, “Christianization and Religious Conflict,” in A. Cameron and P. Garnsey, eds., The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 13, The Late Empire, A.D. 337–425 (Cambridge, 1998), p. 641.

  35. Wolffe, introduction to Religion in History, pp. 6–8; Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, p. 388.

  36. Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, pp. 38–53; G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 2, 18, 41–43.

  37. Huskinson, “Pagan and Christian,” pp. 21–22.

  38. K. Shelton, The Esquiline Treasure (London, 1988), pp. 72–75.

  39. B. Caseau, “Sacred Landscapes,” pp. 29–30.

  40. J. Sandwell, “Christian Self-Definition in the Fourth Century AD: John Chrysostom on Christianity, Imperial Rule and the City,” in J. Sandwell and J. Huskinson, eds., Culture and Society in Later Roman Antioch (Oxford, 2003), pp. 35–58.

  41. Huskinson, “Pagan and Christian,” pp. 29–31.

  42. Brown, “Christianization and Religious Conflict, pp. 632–35; Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, pp. 586, 607–8; Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, p. 28; Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, p. 10.

  43. Huskinson, “Pagan and Christian,” p. 35.

  44. Introduction to Bowersock, Brown, and Grabar, Interpreting Late Antiquity, p. xi.

  45. Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, pp. 11, 14.

  46. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, pp. 70–72; Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, p. 110.

  47. Clark, Christianity and Roman Society, p. 1; Cameron, Mediterranean World, p. 144. See also R. Bartlett, “Reflections on Paganism and Christianity in Medieval Europe,” Proceedings of the British Academy 101 (1998): 55–76.

&nbs
p; 48. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 85, 132.

  49. ibid., pp. 4, 85, 104–7, 144–45; Burrow, Gibbon, pp. 49–51; D. J. Geanakopolos, “Edward Gibbon and Byzantine Ecclesiastical History,” Church History 35 (1966): 170–85; S. Runciman, “Gibbon and Byzantium,” in Bowersock, Clive, and Graubard, Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pp. 53–60.

  50. Porter, Gibbon, pp. 130–31; Burrow, Gibbon, pp. 77–78.

  51. A. Cameron, “Thinking with Byzantium,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th. ser., 21 (2011): 54.

  52. R. W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (New York, 2004), pp. 1–45.

  53. Brown, World of Late Antiquity, p. 194; R. Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent: The Dramatic Story of the Earliest Encounters Between Christians and Muslims (London, 2004), pp. 11–15, 42–44.

  54. R. Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521–1580 (London, 2008); B. Rogerson, The Last Crusaders: The Hundred-Year Battle for the Centre of the World (London, 2009).

  55. N. Housley, Fighting for the Cross: Crusading to the Holy Land (London, 2009), pp. 208–37; B. J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), pp. 300–12.