Brits Abroad

In 1984 Geoffrey Elton gave an inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History in Cambridge entitled 'The History of England'. In the face of what he called 'the present predilection for social and intellectual history [which] operates against narrative', Elton argued in favour of the primacy of English history. The focus on English government and politics provided for him a 'continuous thread' exploring 'the manner in which this society managed to civilize power and to order itself through constant changes'.¹

Twenty-five years later Richard Evans delivered his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor on the contribution of British historians to the history of continental Europe. In this book, an expanded version of that lecture, Evans argues that the interest of British historians in Europe is long established and can be explained by the perennial entanglement of Britain with the Continent. He begins his story in the eighteenth century when Edward Gibbon, disenchanted at Oxford by 'the monks of Magdalen, steeped in port and prejudice' (p. 60), spent four years in Lausanne, becoming familiar with French, Latin and Greek and the European Enlightenment. Later a journey to Rome on the Grand Tour triggered the project that became the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). The French Revolution shaped the concerns of historians such as Charles Kingsley and Thomas Carlyle, whose terrifying account of the Paris crowd storming the Bastille inspired Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. Lord Acton, who became Regius Professor at Cambridge in 1895, was a 'European through and through': born in Naples, educated in Paris, married to a Bavarian. Mandel Creighton, also married to a German, translated Ranke and wrote a history of the Papacy while G. M. Trevelyan, enthused by the Italian Risorgimento, wrote biographies of Garibaldi and Daniele Manin. The First World War had a huge impact on British historians, several of whom were involved in the British delegation to the Paris peace conference. These included Howard Temperley, author with George Gooch of British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, Sir Charles Webster, who explored parallels with the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna, and the Russianists B. H. Sumner and E. H. Carr. John Wheeler-Bennett, an expert on the German army and biographer of Hindenburg, was almost killed in Hitler's Night of Long Knives. The Habsburg Monarchy fascinated R. W. Seton-Watson before its demise and A. J. P. Taylor after its collapse. Taylor went to Vienna in the late 1920s and Evans notes that 'when he spoke German it was with a strong Viennese accent' (p. 124). The Second World War drilled a new generation of historians who had seen active service: Bill Deakin in Yugoslavia, Monty Woodhouse in Greece, Michael Howard in Italy. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the biographer of Archbishop Laud, was recruited to the intelligence service and following a mission to Berlin wrote The Last Days of Hitler. Even Richard Cobb found his way back to France as a liaison officer and stayed on to research Les Armées révolutionnaires.

The direction of travel, however, says Evans, was not just from Britain to Europe. Lewis Namier fled antisemitic persecution in Poland before the First World War. Eric Hobsbawm, orphaned in Vienna, witnessed the rise of Nazism in Berlin before coming to London in 1933. Between the wars a number of German-Jewish historians fleeing Hitler's Germany found their way into British universities, sometimes anglicizing their names. Gottfried Ehrenburg became Geoffrey Elton, Siegfried Pollack, Sidney Pollard; Ernst Peter Henoch, Peter Hennock; and Hans Gubrauer, John Grenville. Franz Carsten slipped more easily into Francis Carsten. Some like Elton became experts on and defenders of British history, but even Elton wrote about Reformation Europe. After the war historians from different backgrounds came to Britain. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, whose supervisor Fritz Fischer blamed Germany for the outbreak of the First World War, found it impossible to secure an academic job in Germany and came to Oxford in the 1960s to...