The 2003 Cambridge History Festival

30Historically Speaking · January 2004 ket processes to flourish: specifically, legal rules that define and enforce private property and contract rights, permit freely floating prices, and facilitate the creation oflimited liability corporations. These liberal institutions, whatever their illiberal embellishments , were making possible highly articulate divisions of labor at the national level. And the relative absence of trade barriers allowed unprecedented integration of economic life on a planetary scale. The liberal international order and the rapid expansion of global trade ultimately proved unsustainable. In the years between World WarI and World War?, warfare, economic cataclysms, and the rise oftotalitarian ideologies combined to destroy the world economy. Although there was a partial reconstitution ofthe international trading system afterWorldWar?, much oftheworld's population lived under regimes that explicitly repudiated the idea ofan international market economy. Only in the past couple of decades, with the collapse of anti-market regimes in the communist and developing worlds, has a trulyglobal marketorder begun to make a reappearance. What went wrong in that earlier era of globalization was the problem I addressed in my article. Greenfeld cannot evaluate my explanation because she is unable even to recognize the problem. The 2003 Cambridge History Festival Derek Wilson "W' ' bile our historians are practising all the arts ofcontroversy, they miserably neglect the art ofnarration, the art ofinteresting the affections and presentingpictures to the imagination ."1 So wrote Lord Macaulay in 1828. David Starkeybeatthe same drumin a recent article for the London Times-, "professionalisation means a cult of the obscure, the esoteric and the illiterate . . . what should be the mostpublic ofsubjects has become one ofthe most hermetically sealed." These two statements are not cairns built in a flat landscape between which lie a level century and a half ofunchanging perceptions. They are more like familiarmarkers on a cross-countrycircuit that tell us we have been here before. There have always been academic specialists , scholars who, according to one colourful définition, "crawl along the frontiers ofknowledge with a magnifying glass." Theymay, and frequendy do, turn the historian 's craft into an arcane mystery, and career structures encourage this trend, for advancementis often a matter ofacademic politics— supporting the hypothesis of Professor X; undermining the assertions of Doctor Y. Popularhistory, on the other hand, ebbs and flows. At some times it becomes fashionable to be fascinated by the past, orwhat is generally thought to be "the past." At others the common perception is thathistoryis dryand irrelevant. It is when popular taste is in that first phase, when Joe Public cannot get enough of "old stories," that the contrast between the academic and the popularcomes into sharpest focus. This is the phase of the cycle currendy being experienced in Britain. It is often said, with a fair degree oftruth, thatthe 1960s was the decade in which we turned our back on our past; and itis not surprising thatit should have been so. Formanypeople "history" was a process thathad led to two devastatingwars, economic depression, austerity, the loss of empire, and Britain's descentinto the ranks of second-class powers. They wanted to look forward, not back, and the future was bright with the promise ofscientific and technological advance, full employment, and a rising standard ofliving. For many "history" meant either a classroom diet of regnal dates, batdes , andActs ofParliament ora patriotic catalogue ofheroes and great deeds fromAgincourt to Trafalgar. Neither seemed to have anyrelevance to the late 20th-centuryworld. Ageneration on, the historymarket looks very different. In 2002 the number of students opting for first degree courses in history increased by 14%. Publishers' lists are bulgingwith newtides in popularhistoryand biography. Academics are falling over themselves to sell program ideas toTVproducers andwe have a channel completelydevoted to history. The heritage industryis boomingas never before, whole families heading offfor reenactmentweekends orimaginativelypresented museum exhibitions. Adult education courses in history and related subject areas are in demand, and record numbers ofamateur historians are making use ofarchives to research their own families or local communities . Historical fiction, a genre considered to be on its deathbed twenty years ago, has made a remarkable recovery and its devotees nowhave their own society, operative on both sides of the Adantic. We are back, in many ways to where we were in...