At the same time, academic history in the western sense was still largely confined to the First and Second worlds and Japan. Broadly speaking, outside these regions it did not exist, did not flourish, or continued along traditional lines, except for minorities of Marxists and (as in parts of Latin America) patches of modernist Parisian influence. Moreover, most academic history was overwhelmingly Eurocentric, or – in the term preferred in the USA – concerned with ‘Western Civilization’. The globe entered Cambridge history only as ‘The Expansion of Europe’. With rare exceptions such as Charles Boxer it was not historians but geographers, anthropologists and language specialists, as well naturally as imperial administrators, who occupied themselves with ‘non-western’ affairs. Before the war extra-European history as such interested few historians except (by reason of their anti-imperialism) the Marxists and non-European historians such as the Japanese, who were then also under strong Marxist influence. In Cambridge a succession of historians convened the so-called ‘colonial group’ of the student Communist Party (overwhelmingly South Asians). The Canadian E. H. Norman, later a diplomat and pioneer historian of modern Japan who committed suicide in 1957 under pressure from the US witch-hunters, was followed by my old friend V. G. (Victor) Kiernan, a man of disarming charm and universal, elegant erudition about all continents who also wrote on the poet Horace and translated Urdu poetry, by the Canadian Harry Ferns, whose field was Argentina and who became extremely conservative in later years, and by the brilliant, original and self-destructive Jack Gallagher, who never got up before midday and later occupied the chairs of imperial history in both Oxford and Cambridge. My own interest in extra-European history also derives from my association with that group.
Extra-western history came into its own with the decolonization of the old empires and the simultaneous rise of the USA as a world power. World history as the history of the globe emerged in the 1960s, with the obvious progress of globalization. Historians from the Third World, notably a group of brilliant Indians, spun off from the local schools of Marxist debate, gained worldwide recognition only in the 1990s. The interests of world empire as well as the extraordinary resources available to US universities made the USA the centre of the new post-Eurocentric world history and, incidentally, transformed its history textbooks and journals. How could historical perspectives remain the same? Fidel Castro brought about the systematic development of Latin American studies in Britain in the early 1960s. Indeed we understood at the time that it was influenced by suggestions from President Kennedy’s Washington that it would be convenient to supplement locally distrusted North American experts on this region with the more acceptable Europeans. (If so, the project misfired. Latin American history overwhelmingly attracted young radicals.) However, the histories of Europe, the USA and the rest of the world remained separate from each other – their publics coexisting but barely touching. History remains, alas, primarily a series of niche markets for both writers and readers. In my generation only a handful of historians has tried to integrate them in a comprehensive world history. This was partly because of the almost total failure, largely for institutional and linguistic reasons, of history to emancipate itself from the framework of the nation-state. Looking back, this provincialism was probably the major weakness of the subject in my lifetime.
Nevertheless, around 1970 it seemed reasonable to suppose that the war for the modernization of historiography that had begun in the 1890s had been won. The main railway network along which the trains of historiography would roll had been built. Not that the modernizers, at least outside the French enemies of the ‘history of events’, necessarily proposed a hegemony of economic and social history, or even a relegation of political history, let alone the history of ideas and culture. The modernizers were far from reductionists. Though they believed that history must explain and generalize, they knew it was not like the natural sciences. However, they believed that history had a comprehensive project, whether it was Braudel’s ‘total’ or ‘global history, integrating the contributions of all the sciences of man’, or, if I may quote my own definition, of ‘what history in the broadest sense is about: how and why Homo sapiens got from the palaeolithic to the nuclear era’.9 Yet within a few years the scene had changed utterly. As Braudel himself complained about the Annales he no longer directed in the 1970s, the sense of priorities, the distinction between significance and triviality, which was essential to the old project, had gone. Just so old hands from Past & Present complained about Raphael Samuel’s new History Workshop Journal (the last remote offspring of the old CP Historians’ Group), that it discovered all sorts of corners of the past interesting to enthusiasts, but showed no sign of wanting to ask questions about them. History as the exploration of an objectively recoverable past had not yet been challenged. That only came with the fashion for ‘postmodernism’, a term which was virtually unknown in Britain before the 1980s, and which, fortunately, had made only marginal inroads into the field of serious historical writing by the start of the new century. Nevertheless, sometime in the early seventies the historiographical tide turned. Those who thought they had won most of the battles from the 1930s on, now found it running against them. ‘Structure’ was on the way down, ‘culture’ was on the way up. Perhaps the best way of summarizing the change is to say that the young historians after 1945 found their inspiration in Braudel’s Mediterranean(1949), the young historians after 1968 in the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s brilliant tour de force of ‘thick description’, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight’ (1973).10
There was a shift away from historical models or ‘the large why questions’, a shift from ‘the analytical to the descriptive mode’, 11 from economic and social structure to culture, from recovering fact to recovering feeling, from telescope to microscope – as in the enormously influential little monograph on the world-view of one sixteenth-century eccentric Friulian miller by the young Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg.12 Perhaps there was also an element of that curious intellectual distrust for the rationalism of the natural sciences which was to become much more fashionable as the century drew to its end. Not that one can see much of a return from structural to narrative history among academics, or to old-style political history. At any rate, as far as I know historians of younger generations in the past thirty years have so far produced no masterpiece of non-analytic narrative history to be compared to that acknowledged triumph of traditional scholarship in this genre, Steven Runciman’s The Crusades (1951–4). However, the sheer extent to which patently important matters had been concealed or passed in silence in the half-century since 1945 left a vast scope for straight, archive-based filling of gaps, or the ‘history of events’. One has only to think of the hidden continent of Soviet archives which came into public view in the 1990s, the history of the Cold War or the long official silences or public myths about France under German occupation, or about the foundation and early years of Israel.