Ireland: Contested Ideas of Nationalism and History

Preface: On Being a Historian in Four Countries

Preface On Being a Historian in Four Countries In  I had the good fortune to win a state scholarship worth £ a year. It also covered university fees. Without the state scholarship I might have gone to Liverpool University; with it I was able to apply for admission to Cambridge University. Cambridge, like Oxford, was a collegiate university and in becoming an undergraduate I also had to choose a college . Quite by chance I became a member of Peterhouse, mainly because my history teacher Frank Grace had been a research student there in the s. Peterhouse was also well known as the college of Herbert Butterfield , a former grammar schoolboy, whose book The Whig Interpretation of History () challenged the assumptions of the orthodox nationalist interpretation of English history. I had come across it at my own grammar school. Peterhouse had earned a reputation as a college in which history had been taken seriously since the days of Adolphus Ward, master of the College from  to . One of the editors of the Cambridge Modern History, Harold Temperley, a leading diplomatic historian, had been a fellow . It was thus not surprising that it should be my choice of college. History teaching at Cambridge revolved around lectures organized on a university basis and tutorials centered on the college. We attended most lectures out of a sense of duty but there are some which I still recall with pleasure, in particular those by Michael Oakeshott on political thought and by Michael Postan on economic history. Helen Cam’s course of lectures on medieval constitutional history was also an impressive performance . She was a great admirer of Stubbs but she also introduced us to the works of Maitland and we were made very much aware that there was a good deal of debate about such issues as the Magna Carta and the role of parliament. We also read Stubbs’s Charters as well as parts of his History. Oakeshott’s lectures were intellectually exciting but it was in Postan’s lectures that we were made aware of what today we would call history 1 from the “bottom up,” contrasting with the “top down” approach of most other lecturers. In his lectures on medieval economic history Postan emphasized the importance of such factors as population growth, price movements , and labor supply. It was in his lectures that I first heard Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society mentioned and George Homan’s Villagers of the Thirteenth Century, both of which I came to appreciate only after I had left Cambridge. Postan’s approach derived from his European background, his training as an economist, and his work as a graduate student at the London School of Economics where history was studied in the context of social science. Here he had been a junior colleague of R. H. Tawney and of Eileen Power (who became his wife). Curiously enough the London School of Economics was billeted at Peterhouse during the war but there was little contact between the two institutions. I did, however, hear a talk given by Tawney at Peterhouse after he had been made an honorary fellow of the College. I also recall lectures given by J. H. Parry, later a professor at Harvard as part of a course on the Expansion of Europe. Parry was fascinated by such details as the “lateen” rig used by Muslim traders in the Indian Empire and the “fore and aft” rig of European vessels. He was also, more importantly, the author of The Spanish Theory of Empire and it was through this that I was introduced to the ideas of Las Casas, Victoria, and Sepulveda and the assumptions which lay behind Castilian imperialism. In contrast, other lectures on European history by Butterfield, Sir George Clark, the Regius Professor, and others seemed more commonplace. (It was said of Clark that he reduced the Scientific Revolution to the influence of a watchmaker in Leyden.) Needless to say it was assumed that English history was in no sense “European.” England had taken its own “sonderweg.” It was possible to attend lectures in other disciplines and I took advantage of the opportunity to hear F. R. Leavis lecturing on poetry and on the novel. What I remember about the poetry lectures was his handing out sheets on which poems were printed without being attributed to an author . He then invited our comments about which we thought superior in terms of originality or use of language. This was my first contact with Cambridge “Practical Criticism” and it...