The Undivided Past (42 page)

Among the partisans and proponents of divided humanity, there is often an easy presumption of cause and effect between the agitation and articulation of group identities, the resulting pressure exerted on those in power, and the furtherance of human progress: as colonial nationalists battle for freedom from
imperial control, or as women worldwide seek to gain liberties and equality, or as
blacks in the United States campaigned for their
civil rights. But while some collective groupings are built around such virtuous claims, and achieve such admirable outcomes, not all of them are, and not all of them do, as evident in the mobilization of
Aryans against
Jews, or of
white supremacists against blacks, for very different (and very deplorable) ends. There is an additional assumption that such mobilizations invariably achieve their aims, but the processes whereby colonies became independent, or women’s circumstances were improved, or civil rights were won for American blacks, or apartheid was ended in South Africa, were clearly much more complex than that.
⁵
The mobilizations may well have played a part—but only a part. Moreover, some of the most successful leaders of these causes achieved their ends through appeals
across
these divides, rather than on the basis of adversarial identities:
Martin Luther King Jr. promoted the interests of blacks that they might enjoy civil rights with whites, not at their expense;
Betty Friedan sought to involve men as well as women in the pursuit of her
feminist agenda; and in denouncing apartheid,
Nelson Mandela was motivated by a concern not just for blacks, but for humanity as a whole.

Even those who have sometimes advocated sectional interests, particular identities, and group antagonisms have on occasions seen the force, wisdom, and justification of a more generous, all-embracing, and inclusive view. One such individual was
Rudyard Kipling, successively acclaimed and denounced as the racist poet who declared the white man’s burden and advocated the white man’s supremacy. But in a very different mood, he would
urge a broader perspective on
humanity, in which the differences were ultimately dissolved in the similarities:

And one such institution of which the same may be said has been
Christianity, which for much of its
history has been belligerently and intolerantly opposed to alternative religions, as well as to heretical and heterodox versions of itself, but which has also been a powerful force in the twentieth century against such evils as
racism and the mistreatment of women, in the cause of proclaiming a common humanity.
⁷

Yet what
V. S. Naipaul once called “that missing large idea of human association” has received little attention from historians, even in our own time when world history, global history, and transnational history are more advocated and more popular than ever before.
⁸
This is partly because the deeds and attitudes that constitute and exemplify our common humanity tend to be to historians what good news is to journalists: the default mode of human activity, a quotidian reality that rarely merits headlines, being somehow either unworthy or uninteresting.
⁹
And this lack of appeal is evident across the
political as well as the scholarly spectrum. On the left, the preferred model of human behavior and association remains that of collective identities heroically mobilized by charismatic leaders to achieve virtuous ends through struggle and conflict against implacable forces and evil foes. On the right, the vision of common humanity is also occluded, by stressing the primacy of struggle and competition among individuals, an atomistic (and antagonistic) view immortalized by
Margaret Thatcher’s observation that there is no such thing as society. Neither of these perspectives leaves any room for the greater
claims or larger subject of our shared
humanity beyond our differences. Yet the human past needs to be approached, understood, explained, and written not just in terms of competing individuals and the survival of the fittest, or of group
identities latently or actually in conflict with each other, but also in terms of the concerns, activities, and achievements that transcend these divisions.
“History and humanity,” one American scholar notes, “are not in fact enclosed in boxes, whether national, ethnic, local or continental. Good history ought to reflect this truth.”
¹⁰

As the late
J. H. Plumb once remarked, history “is neither pagan nor
Christian, it belongs to no nation or class, it is universal; it is human in the widest sense of the term.”
¹¹
Thus understood, the primary job of the historian is not to assist in constructing the artifice of discrete, self-contained, self-regarding, and mutually exclusive groups. This enterprise has been a priority too long unexamined to the detriment of a more complex, dynamic, and ultimately more compelling understanding based on the multiplicity of identities, by turns individual and collective, separate and shared, that animate all of us in unique and changing ways. A history that dwells only on divided pasts denies us the just inheritance of what we have always shared, namely a capacity to “live together in societies sufficiently harmonious and orderly not to be constantly breaking apart.” Surely, then, it is at least as worthwhile to take as our starting point humanity’s essential (but under-studied) unity as it is to obsess on its lesser (but over-studied) divisions?
¹²

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:

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

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