In my generation what Marc Bloch called ‘the trade of the historian’ was not taught in any systematic way in Britain. We picked it up as best we could. Very much depended on whom we encountered as undergraduate students. In my days at Cambridge there was only one teacher whose lectures, though given at nine o’clock in the morning, I attended regularly, in common with most of the bright young radical history students of that time.1 The astonishing M. M. (‘Mounia’) Postan, recently arrived in Cambridge from the London School of Economics, was a red-haired man who looked like a lively ape or Neanderthal survivor, which did not stand in the way of his impressive appeal to women, and he lectured in a heavy Russian accent on economic history. Economic history was the only branch of the subject then on the Cambridge programme which was relevant to the interests of Marxists, but the Postan lectures, with their air of intellectual revivalism, attracted even some such as the young Arthur M. Schlesinger who made no bones about his ‘lack of skill (and interest) in economic history’, not to mention his lack of interest in Marxism. Every one of those lectures – intellectual-rhetorical dramas in which a historical thesis was first expounded, then utterly dismantled and finally replaced by Postan’s own version – was a holiday from interwar British insularity, of which the Cambridge history faculty provided a particularly self-satisfied example. What other don would have told us in 1936 to read the recent French Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, not yet famous even in its own country, to invite the great Marc Bloch to lecture in Cambridge, presenting him to us, justifiably, as the greatest living medievalist? (Alas, I can remember nothing of his lecture except the image of a small pudgy man.) Though passionately anti-communist, Postan was the only man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest of the great central and East Europeans, and took their work sufficiently seriously to expound and criticize it. He knew nevertheless that he attracted the young Marxists, and, though denouncing their belief in Russian bolshevism, welcomed them as allies in the fight against historical conservatism. 2 During the Cold War, when I depended on his references as my doctoral supervisor, he also helped to keep me out of jobs by pointing out to anyone concerned that I was a communist. I cannot exactly say that he was my teacher, or indeed anyone’s teacher – he formed no school and had no disciples – but he was my bridge to the wider world of history. And he was certainly the most surprising figure to be found in a senior history chair in Britain, or probably anywhere, between the wars – impressive, charming and absurd.
For Mounia Postan, somewhat improbably for a historian, was a lifelong fantasist and romancer. Without corroboration you could not believe a word of what he said. If he did not know the answer to a question – about the middle ages or the love-affairs of his students – he invented one. Since he was also very obviously an outsider in interwar Britain, whose highest ambition was to be an insider, the scope for fantasy was vast. Moreover, he lied with an utterly disarming shamelessness or chutzpah. Many years later when he was due to retire from his Cambridge chair but did not want to, he told the university that he was one year younger than his documented age, claiming that his birth record in what had then been Russia and was now Romania, no longer existed. As usual, he did not convince. As usual, people shook their heads, smiled, and said: ‘That’s Mounia!’
In some ways the greatest of his fantasies was the construction of a new identity in Britain, where he arrived from Soviet Russia via Romania in 1921. His early history was very much what one might have expected of a middle-class Jewish youth from the south-western borders of Tsarist Russia. He had studied at Odessa University until the Revolution, which he welcomed, joining a radical Marxist-Zionist group, divided only between those who wanted to go to Palestine to build a socialist society immediately, and those who wanted to organize the world revolution first. Mounia belonged to the second tendency. When Soviet power, distrustful of Zionism, was firmly institutionalized in the Ukraine after the civil war, he found himself imprisoned, he claimed for a few months, and then released. (During the Second World War this made him unacceptable to the Soviet authorities as a representative of the British Ministry of Economic Warfare.) He then came to England where, beginning as a part-time student, he made his career in the London School of Economics as a medieval agrarian historian. He did not so much conceal his background as allow the world to choose between an assortment of stories of varied continental adventure, mostly implying non-Jewishness, although no Jew who met him, and even in interwar England few non-Jews, could have been deceived for a moment. And yet, he succeeded by sheer brilliance, absurd charm, immigrant determination and not least the help of his teacher and first wife, the medieval economic historian Eileen Power (1889–1940), in climbing the peaks of his new environment, ending his life as Sir Michael Postan, married to Lady Cynthia Keppel, sister of the Earl of Albemarle. In this he was more successful than the other implausible and intellectually brilliant historiographic import from Eastern Europe, the very consciously Jewish L. B. (Sir Lewis) Namier, who got his knighthood but failed to get a chair in his cherished Oxford.
One obvious difference between the two was that one was an international figure engaged in a global field, while the other’s main historical interests were insular. At one of our first meetings Fernand Braudel asked me: ‘I understand in England there is much talk about a historian called Namier and his school. Can you tell me something about him?’ Neither he nor any other economic historian would have asked this question about Postan, if only because from 1934 on he had edited the internationally known journal in the field, Economic History Review. Moreover, while nobody outside England except a few specialists cared much that Namier had (it was then thought) revolutionized the approach to the esoteric subject of English eighteenth-century parliamentary history, all economic historians in the effective academic universe recognized Postan’s topics in medieval agrarian history as important, cared about them and were prepared to engage in debate on them across the borders of state and ideology – from Harvard to Tokyo. Unlike research on national politics of the past, economic history in those days had an accepted universe of discourse, even an accepted framework by which to judge the interest of the questions asked, whatever the disagreement about the answers.
In some ways the contrast between Postan and Namier symbolized the major conflict that divided the profession of history, and the major tendency of its development from the 1890s to the 1970s. This was the battle between the conventional assumption that ‘history is past politics’, either within nation-states or in their relations to each other, and a history of the structures and changes of societies and cultures, between history as narrative and history as analysis and synthesis, between those who thought it impossible to generalize about human affairs in the past and those who thought it essential. The battle had begun in Germany in the 1890s, but in my student days the most prominent champions of rebellion, apart from the Marxists, were in France: Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre through their review Annales. Paradoxically Bloch and Postan’s field of medieval history, which one might have expected to appeal to conservatives, actually encouraged original thinking about the past. Even the most conventional historian found it impossible to cut medieval life into neat and separable slices – political, economic, religious or whatever. It almost demanded comparisons and a rethinking of contemporary assumptions and, incidentally, cut across the borders of modern states, nations and cultures. Like ancient history, and perhaps for similar reasons, medieval history is a subject which has attracted some of the best as well as the most stuffy historical minds in my lifetime, though fewer brilliant Marxist scholars than antiquity. On the other hand, it was a field which contained a large number of figures such as my boss at Birkbeck College, the late R. R. Darlington, whose dream in life was to produce an exhaustive edition of a minor twelfth-century chronicler, and who appeared genuinely appalled when I, a young lecturer, suggested that a seminar by a South African social anthropologist then attached to the college might be of interest to students of his special paper on Anglo-Saxon England. What archives had he worked in?