Revisiting Barraclough's Contemporary History

July/August 2007 · Historically Speaking 45 Revisiting Barraclough's Contemporary History Bruce Mazlish The British historian Geoffrey Barraclough published his Introduction to ContemporaryHistory in 1 964. He argued that "contemporary ," or "recent" history (his lectures were originally given to an Oxford Recent History Group) was a legitimate , indeed requisite, subject for the historian. This was a major break with more traditionally conceived historical practice, returning us to the Herodotean origins of the discipline. Of evengreater importance was his forceful assertion that contemporaryhistorymarked abreakwith the "modern," requiring the historian of the events of the last 60-70 years to take account of "underlying structural changes" (1).' In a bold act of prediction and analysis Barraclough sketched the outlines of global history avantL· lettre. How prescient was he, in fact, and how well has his analysis held up? In revisitingBarraclough , we cangain renewed insightinto our own "contemporary" history, that is, the "events" that have unfolded in the last halfcentury or so, as well as new ways of thinking about history. Sometime in the 1950s, Barraclough, his reputation secure in the traditional fields of medieval history and German studies in which he had worked, turned toward international history as it trembled on the brinkof becomingworld orglobalhistory. In fact, in 1957 he accepted an appointment as research professor of international history at the University of London,which carriedwith it the directorship of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (succeeding Arnold Toynbee). Like many other historians at the time, he was inspired to transcend his Eurocentric perspective and to reach for a larger vision. His vision is best displayed by his Contemporary History, and strikingly so in its first chapter.' Barraclough offers us a succinct definition when he says that "Contemporary history begins when theproblems which are actual in the world todayfirst take visible shape" (12). With this definition in hand he can then address the question of periodization. Given the difficulty of identifying exacdywhen these problems first appear, and recognizing that they spill over exactboundaries, he floats dates such as 1945, 1939, 1917, or 1898 as his startingpoint. IfI read him correcdy, however, he really takes the period 1890 to 1960 as marking for him the time of contemporary history. What counts is that such history requires us to take on a new perspective andvalues, which then enables us both to perceive what has happened and to realize that everything, so to speak, has fundamentally changed. Barraclough constandy uses the phrases "watershed between two ages," "turning points" (in fact, there are too many of these, which leads to an unsettling of his argument), "sense of livingin a newperiod," and so forth. In this newperiod, for example, he sees a displacement of whatwas formerly central to the periphery and vice-versa. We are living in a new world, which can only be understood in terms of a "world-wide perspective" (2). Certain consequences attach themselves to his call for a newperspective. For example, the notion of archives must be rethought. The Rankean notion of fixed archives, to be found mainly in Europe and detailingdiplomatic maneuvers,is overturnedin aworld where events in an illiterate Africa may have greater importance than what goes on at a conference in Barraclough intuited what is known today as global history, or even new global history. Berlin. The notion of a Europe in decline yields to an emphasis on Europe's role in bringing about aworld inwhichAsia, Africa, and otherparts of theglobe are developing. The traditional procedure of historians working from the past forward and stressing temporal causalityis supplanted by an insistence on starting from the present—as implicitin Barraclough's definition of contemporary history—and working backward . As a secondary consideration, this procedure can allow us to trace a present structure to its roots as far back in the past as appears useful. These underlying structural changes occur according to an "inner logic," where a sort of dialectic is involved. Thus, actions of one kind occurring on one side of the world result in a semi-deterministic fashion in changes on another side. Fortunately, Barraclough is sufficiently aware of contingency and agency to avoid the worst excesses of determinism. We must bear his overall stance in mind as we read...