Howard Burton - For the Love of History: A Conversation With Margaret MacMillan

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Ideas Roadshow conversations present a wealth of candid insights from some of the worlds leading experts, generated through a focused yet informal setting. They are explicitly designed to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldnt otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks.

Over 100 Ideas Roadshow conversations have been held since our debut in 2012, covering a wide array of topics across the arts and sciences.

See www.ideas-on-film.com/ideasroadshow for a full listing.

Copyright 2021 Open Agenda Publishing. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-77170-146-4

Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

All Ideas Roadshow Conversations use Canadian spelling.

Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I. The Historical Enterprise

II. Historical Value

III. Pride and Prejudice

IV. Professional Insights

V. Living Historically

Continuing the Conversation

A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Margaret MacMillan in Toronto, Canada, on July 24, 2012.

Margaret MacMillan is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto and emeritus Professor of International History and the former Warden of St Antonys College at the University of Oxford.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Introduction

Perpetual Revisionism

In his famous essay, Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell distinguishes between nationalism and patriotism, defining the latter as devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people, and stressing its associated defensive nature in direct contradistinction to nationalism, which he views as inherently aggressive and inseparable from the desire to power.

Nationalism, Orwell maintains, consists of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

Award-winning historian and bestselling author Margaret MacMillan has thought long and hard about patriotism, nationalism and the difference between the two, naturally essential themes of her lifelong work on 19th and 20th century history as reflected in such books as Women of the Raj, Nixon in China, The Uses and Abuses of History, The War That ended Peace and War: How Conflict Shaped Us.

For Margaret, theres a clear distinction between a sense of pride that is based on a genuine sense of national historical understanding and a decidedly airbrushed perspective that might well, if were not careful, creep into our self-satisfied images of ourselves.

Theres nothing wrong with knowing your own national storyand that is a complicated story in itself, as we wont all agree on what the story is, but the general outlines well agree onand being rightly proud of some of the things weve achieved.

But I think when it becomes dangerous is when we start saying things like, We are the most wonderful people and everyone else is awful and weve always been good. Thats when it can be dangerous. We need to understand that we have made mistakes too.

We tell ourselves these stories. When I grew up in Canada, the prevailing view was, Were such a nice people, we never do anything awful to anyone else.

Well, it turned out that we werent so nice and kind to the aboriginal peoples, for example. And we werent so nice and kind to some of the immigrants who came here.

We dont have to go to the opposite extreme and engage in what the Australians call black-hat history, saying that were all evil and wrong, but I think we need to be aware that we havent always done the right thing; and we need to examine that, because we should hope that we will try to do a little bit better in the future.

The notion of harnessing the lessons of the pastcarefully examining the historical record in order to increase the likelihood that we will make wiser decisions nowis, of course, a dominant historiographical theme from Thucydides to the present day, but is no less important for all of that. As is the fact that whatever lessons we believe have been learned themselves need to be continually reexamined.

Take Margarets most renowned work, the award-winning Paris 1919, an in-depth narrative history of the six months immediately after World War I that went a considerable distance towards significantly deepening, if not actually transforming, many prevailing views of the motivations, orientations and future impact of the actions of the worlds three leading statesmen during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference.

But that was hardly Margarets intention when she began the work. She simply wanted to indulge her curiosity, determined to take a fresh look at things, trying hard to imagine what it must have been like being in such an enormous position of responsibility during such a pivotal time.

I didnt expect to do a revisionist thing on the Paris Peace Conference. What drew me to the Paris Peace Conference was simply that it was this very interesting event at the end of the First World War where lots of issues seemed to have come up which affected lots of people and the world in which we live. So I was interested in telling the story of that.

But the more I looked at it, the more I began saying to myselfwhich I think you have to do as a historianThese people have been judged quite harshly for what they did then; what would I have done differently or what could they have done differently?

And it occurred to me that they had certain things they had to deal with. Germany had been defeated, but was still very powerful. They didnt want to invade it, they didnt want to lose any more livesafter four years of war you can certainly understand why. They had armed forces which were diminishing daily because people were going homethey were demobilizingand there was very little public will to continue paying for armed forces. So their capacity to influence events was, I believe, much less than people had assumed.

So to say that the top people who met in Paris were responsible for everything that subsequently went wrong seems to me to overestimate their power to affect the ends. Which led me to a rather depressing conclusion that perhaps the objective conditions for making a lasting peace were simply not there in 1919.

Nationalism, as everyone is all too well aware, has a distinct, and particularly unsavoury, tendency to lead to scapegoating: singling out specific people or groups of people who are collectively deemed to be responsible for all of our ills. But nationalism isnt the only route to scapegoatingan uncritical and unimaginative reliance upon standard historical interpretations runs the risk of doing so as well.

In order to extract meaningful lessons of the past, in other words, we simply have to keep thinking about it.

The Conversation

I. The Historical Enterprise

Investigating the subtleties

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