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- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 16 June 2002 02.17 BST
For me, this growing realisation has been a revelation and I see why historians can get so exercised by the impact of postmodernism on historical inquiry - the view that there is no overall historical truth, just particular and varying interpretations. This cannot be right.
I shared the general admiration for the first leg of Schama's ambitious enterprise. As in his great book on the French Revolution, Citizens, Schama uses biographies and fascinating detail to tell a story that sweeps us along. He helps us feel what it was like to be at another time and place. Moreover, his capacity for simplification and focus made those early centuries come alive.
These are great gifts. His history is also suffused with values which I share. In last week's programme on the British Empire - the empire of good intentions - he attacked the free-market fundamentalism which in 1840s Ireland and 1870s India led to famine and death. The British government refused to release stockpiles of food or ban food exports because it believed either act would interfere in market forces.
Tonight, he concludes by eloquently arguing that a concern for social justice and a 'bloody-minded' commitment to liberty are at the core of British values, a direct challenge to Roger Scruton's conservative view of England which holds that the essence of the country lies in the values of an Anglican Tory squire and that all else is a deviation from that happy cultural anchor. Schama is right and Scruton's elegies for a lost England are little more than sentimentality.
None of that is the problem. Rather, it is that Schama's method of telling history does not allow us to establish how events are grounded in economic and social movements and in Britain's links abroad. Nobody, for example, can have read Norman Davies's Europe and the Isles without being forced to concede that Britain cannot be understood independently from Europe. Yet Schama's history is too episodic and personal for that. We see moments of history through the eyes of the governor-general, parliamentarian or literate wife of a district commissioner - and then we move on. The instances are connected not by some underpinning theory or logic, but by Schama's magic; they are made coherent only by his narrative and when that becomes implausible we are left with much less than we should have.
I began to be uneasy about the Schama technique a fortnight ago when he told the story of Victorian Britain through the experience of its women. This was a welcome antidote to male history, with some superb vignettes, but it meant that urbanisation, the impact of science and technology and the rise of an organised, industrial working class were more or less sidelined.
It was the programme on the British Empire that crystallised my concerns. If you take his account literally, then one of the turning points in the decline of British liberalism was our reaction to the Indian Mutiny. According to him, the ridge above Delhi where the British resisted the mutineering sepoys became the central fact in late Victorian political imagination, prompting an ideological reconception of the justification for Empire and the collapse of British liberalism alike.
Up until then, according to Schama, liberalism had been able to declare itself as bringing progress, education and the benefits of free trade to the Empire and eventual self-government once the British job was complete. Afterwards, hopes of liberalism leading towards enlightened self-government were dashed because the natives could not be trusted. Thus, Disraeli reinvented Queen Victoria as Empress of India and thus Gladstone was not able to marshal a majority for Home Rule in Ireland, condemning Ireland and liberalism to their respective fates.
I loved the pictures, relished Schama's elegant commentary but gazed at the television gobsmacked. Are we to believe that the decline of British liberalism was principally because it had been unable to develop a successful progressive story of how Empire would lead seamlessly to self-government? Maybe this is part of the explanation, but it can- not be all. Small facts like the enfranchisement of the working class, the European race to grab Africa, which involved all European states directly in imperialism, the founding of the Labour Party and the character of British capitalism surely all had something to do with liberalism's travails. And didn't both Canada and Australia get dominion status as the liberal progressives in the early part of the nineteenth century had promised, so that, even in its own terms, Schama's account is flawed?
Next week's programme is even more idiosyncratic, juxtaposing the life of Winston Churchill and George Orwell as the key to unlocking what it means to be British. The idea that when Britain was threatened both men subscribed to a deep British commitment to freedom which overrode their different loyalties to Left and Right is neat, but unsurprising. The failure of fascism and communism to develop roots in Britain is more complex than that. Common law, a tradition of political and religious tolerance and the fundamental legitimacy of our political institutions are all part of the account, but not developed. Schama seems almost as surprised as Churchill was by the scale of his landslide defeat in 1945.
Postmodern historians will doubtless argue that I am just pitting my version of history against Schama's - and that both are equally valid. Richard Evans argues in his wonderful book, In Defence of History, that this approach is fundamentally disabling; that not only can historians search for and establish what actually happened and why, but that they must. Schama makes history accessible and fun, but it falls short of the real thing. I agree with his conclusion about what constitutes Britishness. But if true, our history should be able to prove it. The shame is that the chance has not been more fully seized.
