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- [00:01]
Advertiser 1
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Matt Elton
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Matt Elton
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Lucy Noakes
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Matt Elton
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Lucy Noakes
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Matt Elton
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Lucy Noakes
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- [01:49]
Advertiser 2
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- [02:19]
Matt Elton
Hello, and welcome to our monthly series, History behind the Headlines. I'm Matt Elton. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month, I'll be joined by our two regular panellists.
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Hannah Skoda
I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.
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Rana Mitter
I'm Rana Mitter. I'm St. Lee Chair in US Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history.
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Matt Elton
Hannah and Rana, thank you both so much for being here. As usual, we're going to be doing something a bit different today, which is to devote the episode to some of the challenges facing history in Britain in 2025. There have been a number of headlines in recent months about potential closures to university history departments and the funding challenges faced by such institutions. Back in February, I spoke to Lucy Noakes, who is the president of the Royal Historical Society, which aims to advocate for historians, promote history as a subject and support students and professionals through grants and awards. She had some interesting things to say and we'll be hearing from her in a bit. But first, Hanran Rauna, is this an issue that you've come across in recent months?
- [03:27]
Hannah Skoda
Yes, I certainly do. It's absolutely true that we're at a really interesting moment in the teaching and research of history. I think I should perhaps preface my comments by saying that we are extremely sheltered at Oxford from many of the wider, very practical challenges facing many UK institutions. So I'm aware that many of my colleagues are facing threats of huge cuts. We're all very acutely aware that we're living through this moment. We're also living through a moment, I think, at which the kind of range of what we consider to be our historical interests and sort of proper subjects of historical inquiry are expanding in hugely exciting ways. So it's quite strange, in a way, to be at a moment at which there are all these cuts, which is very dispiriting, but also a moment at which we are kind of broadening out our sense of what history is and what it should be and whose voices from the past we should be listening to. I thought it might be also useful just to remind listeners that history is a relatively recent subject in universities. So the first independent honours degrees in UK universities in history were in 1872 in Oxford and 1873 in Cambridge, and were then very much focused on a particular kind of constitutional history, from which I think we've largely moved away now. But it's a subject the teaching of which has its own quite interesting history.
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Matt Elton
And that's a history we'll get into a bit later. Rana, what are your top line thoughts about the situation at the moment?
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Rana Mitter
Well, one of the ways that I look at what's happening with history in the UK at the moment is in a sort of international context, because, well, I got to teach alongside Hannah at Oxford for many years and know, as she said, what is in some ways a wonderful but obviously in some ways quite sheltered environment for the teaching and study of history. It's not that Ox, like other great universities, couldn't use more support and more funding, but compared to a lot of our colleagues in the history teaching sector, we are still quite protected in that particular more well funded section, relatively well funded section of the history environment. I think that's fair to say, while making it very clear that there is definitely an underfunding of history as a whole. But I also contrast it with what's happening to other places. One is the United States where I work these days, and also with China, where I spend most of my professional interest, so to speak, is focused in terms of looking in part at the history of history in China. So in the United States, I would say that when it comes to what you might call the professional study of history for people who decide to study it in college, or indeed at graduate school level, for those who can make their way through the maze, there's still significant funding and support perhaps of a sort that makes, you know, even the more well funded places in the UK look quite envious in various ways. I'd say that also in some ways, I think anyone who keeps an eye on the headlines has seen that it's become politicized, perhaps even beyond what you see in the uk. You know, sometimes there's a talk about the way in which politics and history interact in Britain, and I suspect we'll talk a little bit more about that. But also more broadly, the United States as a society where actually political divergences and differences have become greater, also mean that often there's more difference in how people perceive their own history and the history of the United States in the world. So, you know, that is something that's quite noticeable when you look at the argument over which statues should stay up or go down, for instance. And China, again, it's a very different sort of environment. An authority, authoritarian state, not a democracy. And therefore one where history is used in some ways much more explicitly as a political tool. And that means you have two strands. One is an environment that anyone from the wider world would recognize, you know, graduate students and people studying quite complex history in universities and in, in schools and high schools and colleges. And on the other hand, a crime that's now known as historical nihilism, passed by the Communist Party a few years ago, in which essentially in certain circumstances, deviating an officially approved version of history is not just frowned upon, but actually an offence. So we haven't got to that stage, I think, anywhere in any of the liberal countries that I deal with. But it is worth noting that some places, notably China, just do history differently.
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Matt Elton
Thank you. Both as your Answers there suggest this is an issue that actually connects to wider issues of history's value in society, of politics and of culture more generally. As I mentioned at the start, I spoke to Lucy in February and we'll now hear some more from her about what her take on the situation is. Lucy, thank you so much for being with us. You have been president of the Royal Historical Society since November. When I spoke to your predecessor, Emma Griffin, back in the summer of 2023, she identified university history funding particularly and access to higher education history in Britain as key areas of work for the rhs. And she also suggested that that work might continue into the tenure of her successor, who's obviously now you has that turned out to be, and how big is that problem now in 2025?
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Advertiser 1
I'm really sorry to say this has only got worse since I became president. At the end of November 2024, we have started working with two departments which are facing significant cuts in terms of the programs that they offer and then potentially to staffing. We have got one or two other departments that have informally got in touch with us for support and to have conversations about this. History programs across the country are under get from restructuring and the cutting down of degree programmes. But history, it's really important to say that history remains very popular among students. 2024, I think over 47,000 students took history A level. And in 2023, which is the last year that we had figures for about 40,000 students were taking undergraduate and master's programmes with history in the title. So they're still really, really popular. And importantly, all the surveys show that students still really enjoy. They find the studying of history at university really, really satisfying. In the summer of 2024, we published our report on the state of history in British universities at the moment called the Value of History. Anybody can see this or download it from our website. What we found there was really concerning. We surveyed our members. What we found was that of 66 departments where people had responded to our survey, 39 of these, so well over half have seen cuts in what they're able to offer since 2020. Some of this we've seen through well publicized cuts to programs and to redundancies. Others are more hidden because issues like staff retire or move on to a different job not being replaced, or departments being merged into far larger departments. Overall, this seems to be worse in what we still term post 92 universities, universities that became universities after 1992, these were often starting with smaller staffing levels, smaller student numbers and sometimes, but not always with a Shorter tradition in teaching history and the humanities more widely, but often doing really great, really innovative work with their students. But it's increasingly impacting post 92 universities. And now in recent weeks, we've seen this kind of, you know, rippling out and starting to affect some of the larger, long established Russell Group institutions where entire history programs are currently under threat.
- [11:05]
Matt Elton
Are there particular sub disciplines or certain sections of history study that you've noticed being more at risk, and are there any other trends that you'd like to identify across this wider picture?
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Advertiser 1
We haven't yet identified any particular kind of sub disciplines or programs being particularly at risk. I mean, over recent decades, I would say it has become harder for people to access some particular programs in history. Medieval studies, for example, over the last, at least the last decade has been cut down in many places, which is a real loss for people. So I'm not seeing yet, we don't have the figures yet to say there are particular areas or particular fields. I think what's becoming clear is that it is often smaller recruiting programmes, and these can vary really widely that are being targeted by university managers who are having to make cuts at the moment for a whole range of reasons. Obviously they're looking at programs that recruit smaller numbers of students, but that doesn't mean those programmes shouldn't exist for some students. It's becoming harder to access programmes in humanities, in history, in languages, for example, overall than it would have been a decade or so ago.
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Matt Elton
For people who might not know what are some of the reasons that universities are giving for these courses being cut and for history provision more generally being cut.
- [12:26]
Advertiser 1
Again, that's going to depend on which universities you ask. So if you go to some of the larger Russell Group institutions, you will find that a lot of the reason why they are struggling is the legacy of the really a kind of hostile environment for overseas students. The changes to whether or not students can bring in families, family, for example, changes just making it a sense that we often see or hear from among overseas students to worry that they're not welcome in this country anymore. So that is making it harder for them to recruit what have become large numbers of students for those institutions which help them to keep going and to make the provision for other students that they want to do. Other universities that have historically had smaller numbers of overseas students are in turn finding their numbers of home undergraduates are dropping because some of the larger Russell Group institutions are making it easier for students to access their programs. So students who might traditionally have gone to either a post 92 or to a pre 92 university, which isn't a large Russell group, are now finding they might have an offer from a large Russell group university. And because I think they're often told at school and at college that now, if you go to university, you need to go to a Russell. Russell group. I think wrongly. I absolutely think wrongly. But if they're made an offer by a Russell group, they will often go there rather than to the smaller university, which leaves smaller universities struggling. And of course, this is all underpinned by the very minimal changes that there have been in the funding model that was introduced by the Conservative Lib Dem coalition government in 2010, which almost overnight shot up fees from around 3,000 to just over 9,000. That's an awfully huge burden for most individual students to have to carry it. But it's also because that income has not gone up, has not kept place with inflation for universities, Universities are having a smaller and smaller funding pot to draw in in order to do the very important range of work that they do.
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Matt Elton
And given that you cited there the 2010 government here in Britain, it sounds like the speed of political change is quite slow. One of my questions to you was going to be, has there been any changes since. Obviously, when I spoke to Emma, there was a Conservative government. We've since then had a change of government. It's now a Labour government. Have you spotted any change since the Labour government has been in power?
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Advertiser 1
Okay, I'd caveat this with, say they haven't had very long and they've got an awful lot on their plates. Okay, so I'll start with two changes that I think are very welcome. The first change is that the door feels less closed to universities and to humanities subjects. Okay. There are opportunities, I think, developing for us to talk to and work with policymakers, and that's. That's very welcome as that develops. Secondly, I say, and I think this is really important, the announcement really early on within the first week of the incoming Labour government last summer, that the culture wars are over. I found that very welcome for history, for historians, because, you know, any historian will know, any history student will know the way that we teach and study history, the way we think about the past is not fixed. Right. The past is always with us. We don't teach history in the same way that our predecessors did, did 100 years ago. So, of course we approach it, we think about it differently, and this is always evolving, always changing. And I think that that process became very unhelpfully politicized as part of the culture wars, it became very difficult to have any kind of critical history and critical thinking, which I think is what we do in large part as historians. And I think that's a kind of a no win situation for historians when you get drawn into those arguments. So we're really grateful to have had statement from government that those days are over. However, in terms of changes, I would say there have not been as many as we would have hoped. There's been absolutely no movement on the structural changes that in my opinion, in the opinion of others, it is becoming more and more apparent that British universities need, if they are to continue and if they're to continue to act as, as, you know, kind of cultural ambassadors, as an almost a soft power for Britain. If they're starved of funds in the way that they have been, it's very difficult to see how that continues.
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Matt Elton
So what more can be done to help this situation?
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Advertiser 1
Well, I mean, I'm not a policy maker in terms of British universities. I honestly think that the current model we have is broken. I think that there needs to be a willingness among politicians, among policymakers and to work with university leaders and university representatives to actually have a really profound rethink. Think about how we fund and how we organise higher education in Britain. This wouldn't be popular with all universities, am I going to say. Anyway, one thing that could be done really quickly is that you could reintroduce what used to be called cap on student numbers for individual institutions. This was withdrawn, I think, around 2017, 2018. Before that point, universities had a cap on the number of students that they could admit to any degree programme in order to kind of manage the supply of students across the country. That was withdrawn. I can see the arguments for withdrawing it. I can also see it would be politically difficult to put that back in place. But something I think needs to be done about how we find places for students. I think if the government were to even start to consider putting the cap in place before they did so, they would have to find the funding from somewhere to help departments where research and teaching programs have been eroded over the past few years to rebuild themselves. So there's a lot of work to be on. It's a really complex situation.
- [18:28]
Lucy Noakes
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- [18:54]
Matt Elton
I wanted to go back to that culture wars idea that you mentioned just then. Do you think that the culture wars of the past 10 years or so have been damaging to the history profession in Britain in a very real way?
- [19:06]
Advertiser 1
I do, I do, in many ways. I mean, I suppose you could say it's given history publicity. You know, some people would argue no publicity is, is bad publicity. I'm not entirely convinced about that. I mean, it's something that we find students are often interested in studying and discussing. In my own field and I work on the experience and memory of the two world wars of the 20th century. I sometimes run an undergraduate final year module where we look at the memory of the Second World War, which leads us on to thinking about how those memories were mobilized during the Brexit debates and during COVID And students really, really like studying that and unpack tracking what went on. But I think in a wider way, I think it's a no win situation for historians because it ignores the way that history works. It means that particular topics become politicized in a way that is not helpful for understanding how history actually works.
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Matt Elton
What one thing would you wish that politicians understood about history and how it works that they don't currently?
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Advertiser 1
That's a really, really good question, Matt. I think that I would like them to understand that history is a process. Okay. It's not something that stands still and that critiquing existing ideas is absolutely at the heart of historical practice. That's how we work. We look at what people have done and we think about how that might be done differently. I would like them to grasp that idea, to understand that it's. It's not something that just stands still. It's a live living profession.
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Matt Elton
So to go on to the people who are doing that work, what challenges do face historians that we've not talked about before?
- [20:51]
Advertiser 1
Oh, there are so many. There's two that I'd like to flag up here. So one is for historians working in universities and also in other sectors. There are many historians, of course, working in galleries, libraries, archives, museums, who are facing cuts. For academic historians, it has become harder and harder for many of us to actually get to archives. Many universities have either cut back in large part or cut back entirely on any internal research funding. So unless you're able to get funding from an external body, which is very competitive and very, very difficult, you know the success rate, and I've assessed some of these, the success rate is well below 10% for most programs. An awful lot of very good projects are not getting Funding because they're simply not the money available. So, you know, some colleagues are not even able to get £20 to go and travel to an archive in a nearby town. And that of course has a real knock on effect on the kinds of history that can be done. So that is a massive emerging problem. The other thing I would say is it's really, really difficult for people who want to become historians. Okay, we all start as master students and then as you go on to be doctoral students and sometimes have postdoctoral positions, which there used to be a clear career structure for people who wanted to be academic historians. With the cuts to history programmes that has almost disappeared, you have a very few, very lucky small number of people are managing to get jobs in universities. Increasingly they're looking elsewhere for jobs, which is good. It's great to have historians everywhere. But that kind of traditional career structure has almost had the rug pulled out from under it. And I think that can be really dispiriting for what we call early career historians who are really great, really talented, committed researchers, but they look at the field and they can't see how they can progress their careers. And I think that's a real loss for both for them as individuals, for the historical profession, but more widely for the kinds of historical research that's being done.
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Matt Elton
And if we were to check back in, in two years time, what would you like to have achieved? What would you like the RHS to have achieved over those two years?
- [23:14]
Advertiser 1
My wish list, I guess, would be topped with history thriving in the UK in many ways. That's got to start with an investment in British universities of a rethinking of the funding structure with an investment and a recognition of the value of history and the humanities more widely. I think if we can have that, if we grasp that this is really popular both with the public, but also with students coming in, then we can start to reinvigorate history more widely across our whole national culture. And that would have such wonderful results, both for people's sense of self, for our sense of ourselves as members of communities, as members of a national community. Even if we understand and share our pasts, I think that enriches all of that would be the top of my wish list. A greater investment in history and a greater recognition of history's value.
- [24:14]
Matt Elton
So that was Lucy Noakes. I wondered, Rana and Hannah, what your thoughts were. Having heard the interview with Lucy, I.
- [24:21]
Rana Mitter
Found myself thinking that there really is a wide and long term story behind the comments that Lucy was making. I think she analyzed with great skill what you might call a crisis in the contem, study and appreciation of history in Britain today. But actually, I think one of the things that's worth stressing, and she did say this, but I think, you know, just to bring it out again, is that societies which don't nurture their own history, debates about history, the preservation of the past, the analysis of it, will very quickly find that actually that wider sense of identity also begins to fade as well. We can sometimes criticize, and I think we should criticize countries which become so obsessively interested in history that they police the interpretation of it. And that's not something that I think any of us would ever want in Britain or indeed in the United States. But it is true on the one hand, in a strange way, that's kind of giving a respect to history, the idea that you do fund it, you do pay for it, because it matters to society, so much so that you actually end up controlling it. And I just wonder if the carelessness that sometimes seems to operate around history, either reducing it simply to a sort of chocolate box version of history around heritage, or making it purely a subject for contention, the idea that it can only be about dispute rather than about trying to create some sort of wider and quite complex set of understandings about how we got to where we are today, that those really important purposes for the study of history get lost.
- [25:51]
Hannah Skoda
Yeah. And I would add to that what I really liked about this interview was the sense that we are facing a huge crisis right now, but at the same time a real sense sense of positive enthusiasm and hope for the practice of history. And I guess I would add to that that I find it the most enormous privilege and honour working with students, both at undergraduate and at graduate level. I learn so much from them. I hope they learn something from me too. And, you know, I have a very strong sense in my working life that students of history have so much to offer the world. And I think what came through in the interview as well is that there are two particularly press reasons for thinking about the importance of history teaching and indeed history research, and the intersections between the two at the moment. One of those is that we live in an era of almost unprecedented myth making, where distinguishing fact from complete fabrication has become more pressing than ever. And so, partly studying history is simply about identifying what is true and what is not true. But it's also about equipping students with the ability to do that for themselves to think really critically about information with which they are presented. And obviously that has always been something very important. But I Think the sheer kind of bombardment of everybody with information posing as a particular kind of truth at the moment makes the importance of these skills even more pressing. But there's also another really important point about history practice, which I thought came across very beautifully in her interview as well, which is that the kind of historical myth making which is going on, I think, very powerfully in certain political circles at the moment, one could think, for example, about the myth making on both sides and the instrumentalisation of history in terms of the war in Ukraine. Certainly when the Russians first invaded, it was made very, very clear that there was a particular view of history which was being promulgated here. So I think. I think the professional practice of history is a way of reminding us just how important it is to acknowledge that history is a contested site and to think about the ways in which we can engage with that kind of contested nature of history intelligently and in nuanced ways, and the ways in which we ourselves can do our historical research in ways that are full of nuance and texture and subtlety, to kind of push back against this sense that certain political actors are adopting very, very strident lines of kind of weaponizing history for particular ends.
- [28:30]
Rana Mitter
I think that's absolutely right. One of the things that I think it's worth noting, and perhaps this is something that would boost the case that Lucy was making in her interview, is quite how much the study of history in Britain is appreciated and respected around the wider world. We sometimes have a bit of a tendency in the UK to sort of underplay the achievements of what we do well. And I think it might come as a surprise to many people to know quite how well respected the study of history and the uses of history, including in public history, are seen overseas. So, I mean, I should say the perspective I'm speaking from is that I've been associated over the years, in some cases currently, with various UK institutions that do their best, I think, very successfully, to try and bring that history to a wider public. So the British Museum would be one good example of that. Another one, actually, is the Imperial War Museum, which has done a great deal to take a subject which is both, you know, horrifying and in some ways has often been studied in quite traditional ways, military history and the study of war, to actually use it to encompass a whole wider range of human experiences and to explain quite why war has been so devastating, and not only, of course, why we need to understand it, but hopefully how we come to avoid it in future as well. I'm very struck by how both of Those institutions have huge international audiences, not just in terms of the physical building things, but more and more in terms of online presence as well. So again, these are great examples, I think, of how the UK can take things that might at first glance sound quite, you know, traditional, inward looking and actually make something genuinely global and very, very wide ranging around them. Certainly when I go to China, again, this might surprise some people, the level of respect for curating, for the ability of the UK to use that kind of public history. Often, you know, quietly spoken. I think I can say to this podcast you, because there's obviously freedoms to work with that history in the UK that you don't get in China. Certain amount of envy, I think as well, in terms of what one could do with that kind of public history. Beyond that, I'm just going to mention also something that might seem a bit niche, but I think it's just a wonderful example of how the UK's institutions can have a big influence and that's PhDs in history. Now, you know, I imagine the vast majority of people, quite rightly can go through life without ever needing to worry about PhDs in subjects that obviously involve. Involve a long period of study of something quite niche. You know, there's often the cliche that you spend sort of three years doing a doctoral thesis on a subject which you and three other people in the world know anything about. But in the case of history, actually what it does is to give you immense depth on something that enables you to find breadth beyond that. And I would say that students who have done doctoral study in the UK's universities, not just in, you know, the, perhaps the most famous ones, but actually all across Scotland, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, all of these have tremendous experience in training students who will then go on to extraordinary influence in their own countries. I don't mean just being academic historians. So there are plenty of those all around the world who are trained in the uk. But actually off the top of my head, I can think of people everywhere from the various last few US administrations, including the current one, but also many other parts of the world in India, China and elsewhere, that kind of in depth historical training, which the UK still does extraordinarily well because of the history of doing it, you might say, the tradition of doing it, the resources that are still available in great libraries, even if they are not supported and funded in the way that some of us would like to see, and the depth of experience, the human side that, you know, takes a very long time to build up and could be destroyed very easily. I Think that's what Lucy was getting at at her interview. UK still has an awful lot of that, along with the broad idea that it's still a wide ranging and quite cosmopolitan environment for the exchange of ideas. And I sometimes worry, particularly working now outside the uk, that, you know, Britain's own wider establishment sometimes doesn't appreciate enough what it's managed to build up in that world of history and how it can support and preserve it. These are things that are very hard to build up but easy to lose.
- [32:41]
Matt Elton
In your experience, Rana, is that something that we are seeing in other countries in the world at the moment, do you think?
- [32:46]
Rana Mitter
Yes, I think it is. I would say that first of all, if you look at some places where history is very well funded but not necessarily very freely practiced, that emphasizes the divergence that I think we should at all costs avoid in the uk. I mean, I will come back to China. It's the place that I know best in terms of professional study. And I should start by saying that there are many, many fantastic historians working in China today. They go to archives, they publish materials, they write books of great interest and complexity about many, many. But I don't think I'm saying anything that would be controversial to say that the study of history in China today has become quite narrow in various areas, particularly ones that touch on high level Chinese politics. It's not so easy now to publish things that are, say, critical of aspects of the history of the Chinese Communist Party, which rules China itself. So that may be an extreme example of what I'm talking about. I think we can also see elsewhere around the world. There's signs of this sometimes in India, parts of Southeast Asia, and some, like Turkey, might be another good example that there seem to be more constraints in terms of the way in which particularly controversial aspects of history can be studied. We're certainly not at that stage yet, either in the United States or in the uk, but the fact that it can happen and that it's a slightly different question from the question of whether it's well funded reminds us, I think, always to be on our guard, to be vigilant.
- [34:13]
Hannah Skoda
And I would pick up on a very practical aspect that Lucy referred to in her interview as well, regarding international students, students that UK institutions for a long time have been really at the forefront of higher education in the sense of attracting vast numbers of international students. And that is certainly becoming more and more problematic at the moment. And I see that as a really tragic development. I think there's been such a strong sense in the past that international Students have contributed the most enormous amount economically, but most of all intellectually to what's going on here. But also just reiterated the point that learning is not an activity which needs to be limited to a particular national context. Right. It's fundamentally a kind of cosmopolitan activity. We're all part of humanity. And, you know, history syllabuses are structured in higher education in a way that doesn't just tell the story of a particular island. They are histories of humanity that students are being encouraged, Encouraged to explore. And that's been hugely, hugely stimulating. And I think something which is very, very important for us to do everything we can, really, to defend. I thought listeners might be amused to hear that in the Middle Ages people were getting anxious about really quite similar issues. I fished out a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury from the University of Oxford in the 1430s. So the university wrote. The university is like Rachel, Old Testament Rachel, mourning her lost children. Children, her beauty is gone for very trouble. Once she was famous in the world. Students flocked to her from almost every nation Then she abounded with men learned in every art and science. Her schools were not dilapidated, nor the halls and inns empty. Now, alas, it is so impoverished by war and scarcity, and so slender is the reward of merit that hardly any do any more care to resort hither. I'm not sure what the lesson is to draw from the fact that they were worrying about international students in the 15th century as. As well, apart from to say that they were articulating really beautifully, I think, this sense that learning is something which doesn't happen within a particular set of borders and that the most productive intellectual exchanges really rise above that.
- [36:27]
Rana Mitter
Anna, could I add off the back of that, if you sort of fast forward, I think, to the way in which, in the modern era, international knowledge has gone across boundaries. It's very, very notable, again, that history is one of those elements that essentially helps people to shape their own ideas in very, very significant ways. I mean, when you think about the way in which the 20th century, Britain and United States as well, have developed the study of history, quite often it's people coming from other countries who often in a way that seems, you know, almost counterintuitive, are coming to those places to study the history of their own societies. In some cases, this is a product, particularly, you know, 50, 70 years ago, of the way in which empire developed. Ironically, many of the nationalist movements of the early 20th century were formed by students who were under colonial rule in Africa or Asia, coming to the Metropole, to London, to Paris, to Berlin, wherever it might be, and actually both studying there, but also using those encounters to actually create a sort of more national identity, identity of their own, which they then transmit back into independence movements over the decades that follow. But also in that era, and also in the more contemporary era, you do find that where there are restrictions and constraints at home, it's sometimes possible to actually go overseas and to be able to write more freely about your own society. Which is a sort of strange irony, but one that you do find frequently in periods when parts of the world find themselves under authoritarian rule. And writing freely about history can often be a very liberating exercise in itself. You know, taking the sources, taking the materials and writing the much more complex, nuanced, and often in some ways quite from the point of view of those who like a sort of simple story. Quite frustrating nature of history, because the point about history is that it's not a morality story. It does have complexities within it. We don't have good guys and bad guys. It's not a melodrama. And in that sense, sense, understanding how human society is complex is one of the most important elements that really good, detailed, in depth study of history can give to that wider question of what it is to be human. One of the reasons why, although various universities divide as to whether history is a social science or a humanities subject, I always think the humanity part of history is a very important part of understanding why it's important.
- [38:56]
Matt Elton
One of the other strands from her conversation with Lucy is the sense that there is sometimes conflict between historians and politicians in a way that's not always that helpful. Was there anything else that you wanted to draw out in that sense?
- [39:08]
Hannah Skoda
I was thinking about this in the context of the Middle Ages. In fact, there's a very interesting debate in the 14th and 15th century as to how far universities and their sort of intellectual world should be entangled with the world of politics. And it's a debate which is strangely resonant.
- [39:24]
Advertiser 1
Resonant.
- [39:25]
Hannah Skoda
In 1430, the University of Oxford wrote a rather desperate letter to the Duke of Bedford about how those involved in politics at a royal level should be listening more to the university. Because they said for military power, unless channelled by wisdom and learning, is easily misdirected, like a ship without a rudder. So I love that idea of the university and higher education as a kind of rudder for the kingdom. But then at the same time, you get other writers in the same period, period, who are basically saying the intellectual pursuits going on in universities are very different and they should stand apart from politics. So there's a quotation from a chronicle called Michel Pintouin, who in A Question of Faith, you don't accept the council of knights. So neither is it fitting for you to immerse yourself in a question of war. Return therefore to your schools and close yourself up. So he's saying, go back to your ivory towers and get on with it and don't try to proffer us advice. So again, I think it's very striking that this sort of sense of the entanglement of academic pursuits and politics is something which people have debated in various ways over the centuries.
- [40:34]
Rana Mitter
So I will quote a politician, if I may, to, you know, cap what Hannah has said in terms of thinking about how politicians in history interact. The quote is from a politician who's no longer with us. It's Oliver Cromwell. And he wants to pointed at opponent and said, I beseech thee in the bowels of Christ to think you may be mistaken. And I always think that's a wonderful phrase because it's a reminder in this wider context, I think, that if you are politically inclined, left, right, center, whatever it might be, this isn't a partisan thing. I think, and think that history points you in a particular conclusion or a kind of neat ending, then I would echo Oliver Cromwell and say, please, I beseech to think that you may be mistaken. It is very important to understand that a complex understanding of the past, of its causes, of the consequences that come from a set of historical events, always creates complexity. And I think that's one of the things, in a weird sense, that we have lost sight of in the present day. Politics today is so much shaped by rapid technological change, social media and so forth, that I think there's a paradox, there's an irony, irony which is that because there is so much noise out there, people have turned, perhaps even more than in the past, to quite simplistic interpretations of what's wrong with society now. We've always had this one way or another. But in some ways, I think that understanding historical causation and consequence is a really important counter argument for those who work in the political sphere. Reading works of history are something, something I think I'd certainly encourage. But also reading works of history that don't leave you with a comfortable ending, which perhaps tell you that things are more difficult, more complex than perhaps you realize. That's something I think we've slightly lost sight of. And history should really be comfort reading. That's not the point of it. The point of it is to give you a variety of Framings and tools, you might even say, to interpret your political moment in the present day.
- [42:38]
Matt Elton
Finally, I ended my interview with Lucy by asking her how, if we were to talk in two years time, she might like to see the situation change. I wanted to ask the same question of you two. What would you hope for if we were to pick up this conversation again in 2027?
- [42:53]
Rana Mitter
I would very much hope that the current crisis in terms of funding and support of the study of history in Britain has been at least partly resolved. One of the great benefits of the way in which the study of history is built up in Britain over the last century or more is that it's one of the most cosmopolitan places in the world to study history. It's why so many people come from around the world to do that. That's partly, you know, product of the history of empire. And there's a reason that India, Africa and parts of Asia are well studied in the uk. But I'd say that's also true of it being a European country. And the fact that, that, you know, so many of the really great historians of, say, modern Italy or Spain or even France in some cases actually are British or British based or have trained here is actually a great compliment to the uk And I think to lose that would be a great shame. Something that for a long time was visible in the British school system was good training in languages or the possibility to study European and other languages. And that helped feed into, I think, a very wide ranging study of history as well. That ability to handle languages outside English has in some ways been quite heavily reduced in recent years. You know, there's a lot of priorities in schools, one understands that. But it is certainly the case that being able to get students who can operate comfortably in other languages is not as easy as it used to be. And that's one of the things that tends to constrain the study of history in some ways, perhaps limiting to Anglophone subjects. So if we can add a supplement for two years time, if we see a move back towards, towards having that broader, linguistically based, more cosmopolitan study of history, that will be a great win. If it's possible.
- [44:43]
Hannah Skoda
I would certainly echo all of that. I completely agree. I think I would particularly like to see more funding for graduate students. But as a much more general point, I think I would like to see a continued and even kind of growing trust in the historical profession and in the historical process, in the process of doing history without attempts to kind of instrumentalize it or to sort of set a particular goal for what history needs to achieve just a trust in the process that what it does is reveal a much richer sense of our humanity.
- [45:16]
Matt Elton
Hannah and Rana, thank you both so much for your time. We'll be back, but for now, thank.