The Curse of History [Paperback]

In The Curse of History Jeremy Black presents a thoughtful analysis of one of the most controversial issues in public life today: the use of the past to adjudicate present disputes about ethnicity, religion and other indicators of identity. Black criticises the misuse (as he sees it) of history to make judgements about the past from the standpoint of the present which can in turn be used to make judgements on present- day societies, particularly those with an imperial past, a method he calls 'presentism' (page 13). He writes in the preface that 'a sensible desire to learn from the past, and, in doing so, to appreciate the difficulty of learning lessons, is not prominent in the quest for historical justification' (page xi). One common technique used in this misappropriation of the past is the resort to anachronisms, when the past is taken out of context and used for the construction of false analogies. This results in the arbitrary application of present issues and values to past contexts, especially in an interpretive sense.

One of the strengths of the book is Black's fairness in his treatment of viewpoints he does not share. He is cautious both in his criticisms of these as well as his statements in support of his own position. Black insists that scholarly history must address the complexity of understanding multiple interpretive perspectives, the weighing up of conflicting viewpoints, out of which a thesis may be argued that advances knowledge and discussion.

It is when this does not happen that we are burdened by what Black calls the curse of history, by which he means the weight of history. This is the weight of unresolved grievances that skew present day attempts to understand the past. The study of history can be misused to promote a sense of victimhood and grievance. "Past 'wrongs' cannot be righted by generations not responsible for them' (page 210).

It follows that Black is critical of the recourse to apologies for historical wrongs as a way of righting the past, with examples from the Irish famine and the slave trade. He contends that these are usually made for instrumental political purposes that relate more to oversimplified present day views than to realities that were much more complex at the time they occurred: for example the role of African and Arab traders in the slave trade. Inherent in this assumption of having the competence to apologise for the past is a hubris that has a contempt for the past when considered on its own terms. Black is critical of the New Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 and their ahistorical lack of a sense of the world, Blair's 'self-referencing sense of mission' (page 165). Black adds his view to those of other critics that Blair had no sense of history and was deluded in his sense of the world outside his own perception of it, his 'ahistorical failure to engage with society and the world as they are' (page 174). The hubris of the New Labour project was best exemplified by Mandelson's comment that 'we are defining ourselves by the future' (page 163).

Black's own perspective derives from the writings of Edmund Burke. He stresses two particular themes: that of trust between generations and the living relationship between past, present and future in a social community. He also cites Burke's concept of the organic development of the groundswell of national sentiment, and contrasts this organic sense of nationhood with a constructed and artificial one, which he identifies with the European Union's attempt to assert a sense of historical identity by claiming Charlemagne as the putative 'father of Europe'. Linked to this are the arguments about the constitution of the E.U. and whether to include an acknowledgement of the Judaeo- Christian foundation of European civilisation in its preamble.

The book serves as a warning about the consequences of losing a 'sense of the past'. One example of this is the Arab world's presentation of history as an outside imposition that distorts its view of the west (page 100). Another example is the intellectual blind alley that we come up against when prominent historical theorists announce the 'end of history', as Hegel did after the Battle of Jena in 1806 and Francis Fukuyama did after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (page 110). History has a tendency to return with a vengeance (consider Geoffrey Hosking's reference to Freud's phrase 'the return of the repressed' in his studies of post- Soviet Russia). Nationalism, ethnicity and religion have re-emerged into deadly prominence in the former Soviet Union and parts of the Arab and Islamic world. Black reminds us that the study of history developed in European universities during the nineteenth century within the context of the rise of nationalism, as a means of legitimising foundational stories of nationhood and the systems of government then in power (page 30). Black develops a useful contrast between academic and popular history, and between approaches to history that place stress on structural and deterministic factors and those that emphasise the role of chance and contingency. This is an important issue, as some of the most innovative publishing today is of historical works, including what is called 'counterfactual' history.

In general, this is a thoughtful examination of the uses and misuses of history today. Its Burkean perspective sheds fresh light on old arguments, whilst avoiding being prescriptive. I have two reservations. Firstly, the style of the book is rushed, and makes for difficult reading at times. The punctuation and syntax sometimes create inelegant sentences that obscure the book's meaning. One member of a reading group to which I belong thought it may have been dictated rather than written down. It would have benefited from another draft. The other, more serious criticism is the lack of an index. This is a densely argued book that needed one. However, despite these reservations, this is a book to be recommended.