South African Historical Journal

ISSN: 0258-2473 (Print) 1726-1686 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rshj20

The Experience of War and the Making of a

Historian: E.P. Thompson on Military Power, the
Colonial Revolution and Nuclear Weapons

Jonathan Hyslop

To cite this article: Jonathan Hyslop (2016) The Experience of War and the Making of a Historian:
E.P. Thompson on Military Power, the Colonial Revolution and Nuclear Weapons, South African
Historical Journal, 68:3, 267-285, DOI: 10.1080/02582473.2016.1237081

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2016.1237081

Published online: 06 Dec 2016.

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 South African Historical Journal, 2016
Vol. 68, No. 3, 267–285, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2016.1237081

Keynote Address
The Experience of War and the Making of a Historian: E.P. Thompson on
Military Power, the Colonial Revolution and Nuclear Weapons
JONATHAN HYSLOP*

Colgate University and University of Pretoria

Abstract
Despite the enormous attention that E.P. Thompson has received as both a social
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historian and anti-nuclear activist, relatively little has been written about the
central role of war in his life and thought. The article argues that Thompson
was crucially shaped by his experiences in the Second World War. It also
argues that he was significantly concerned throughout his life with issues of
the anti-colonial revolt. The paper contends that Thompson’s understanding
of military power has close affinities to that put forward by sociologist
Michael Mann. It traces the neglected key role of Thompson’s analysis of
military power in his masterwork, The Making of the English Working Class.
The paper goes on to show how Thompson’s thinking about war led him to a
critique of the ‘Third Worldism’ of the early 1960s’ New Left movement and
to a sceptical view of Fanonian ideas. Thompson’s analysis of the
‘exterminism’ of the Cold War nuclear confrontation is defended as a
significant contribution to the study of military power and as a concept of
enduring political relevance.

Key words: E.P. Thompson; Michael Mann; exterminism; New Left; Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament

Despite the onset of a new prosperity, London in the winter of 1956 to 1957 was still a city
under the shadow of war. The capital was pockmarked with bombsites. Less visibly but
more urgently, those who took an interest in world politics were aware that the USA and
the USSR, both now equipped with hydrogen bombs and long range missiles, had for the
first time in history, taken into human hands the capacity to end life on earth. This made
any local conflict into an apocalyptic threat. Early November 1956 saw the bloody sup-
pression by the Soviet Army of the Hungarian attempt to create a democratic socialist
government. There was a palpable sense that Britain’s Empire was sputtering toward a
miserable and bloody end. On 29 October, the Eden government launched the ill-fated

*Email: jhyslop@colgate.edu

ISSN: Print 0258-2473/Online 1726-1686

© 2016 Southern African Historical Society
http://www.tandfonline.com
 268 JONATHAN HYSLOP

British-French-Israeli attempt to seize the Suez Canal, a last throw of territorial colonialism.
In Kenya thousands of Mau Mau insurrectionaries sat in brutal prison camps. And in the
broader background, the revolutionary war was raging in Algeria.
Over at the Royal Court Theatre, angry young man John Osborne had the anti-hero of his
sensational play, Look Back in Anger, declare that ‘It’s pretty dreary living in the American
age, unless of course you’re an American’.
In the afternoons and evenings of this grim season, Doris Lessing’s flat at 58 Warwick
Road, in Kensington, was the venue for some remarkable gatherings. Lessing, who had
come to the imperial metropolis as an aspirant writer from Southern Rhodesia in 1949,
was already carving out a position for herself in London’s literary world. She was also cam-
paigning against the British policy of creating a Central African Federation, and was busy on
a book about her recent trip there. Lessing was frequently meeting, over meals at Warwick
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Road, with African nationalist leaders living in London: Harry Nkumbula and Maina
Chona from Northern Rhodesia; Orton Chirwa from Nyasaland; Babu Mohammed from
Zanzibar; and later Joshua Nkomo from Southern Rhodesia. They did not then know of
course that British West, East and Central Africa would soon, relatively peacefully, attain
independence, while southern Africa would face decades of violent conflict.
There was another series of meetings at the Warwick Road flat, of a group of political dis-
senters from the Communist Party of Great Britain. Lessing had been a party member for a
long time. She and some of her comrades were enraged at the party leaders’ inability to face
up to the Soviet acknowledgment of Stalin’s crimes, and at the leadership’s support for the
USSR’s actions in Hungary. The political differences were to prove irreconcilable, and like
thousands of others, Lessing and her friends would leave the party.1
The most striking figure amongst those who convened at Warwick Road was a 33-year-
old adult education lecturer and Second World War veteran from Yorkshire, Edward
Thompson. These meetings were to have some significant consequences. The dissidents
were to set up a magazine, the New Reasoner, which, although short-lived, would play an
important role in creating the anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist political moment known as
New Left.2 The New Left would play a part in the massive British Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament campaign of the late 1950s and 1960s,3 and would be the vehicle for the dis-
semination of the new wave of Marxist ideas embodied in New Reasoner’s successor journal,
New Left Review. And the New Left would stimulate the significant radical social and

1. D. Lessing, Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949–1962 (New York: Harper-Collins,
1997).
2. All editions of New Reasoner are available at http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/nr/index_
frame.htm, accessed 4 November 2015.
3. The CND was founded in 1958. Its initiators included a strong component of radical Christians (notably
John Collins, Michael Scott and Donald Soper – all of whom were also significant figures in the slightly
later formation of the UK Anti-Apartheid Movement). It drew in some significant intellectuals (philosopher
Bertrand Russell, historian A.J.P. Taylor, writer J.B. Priestley, editor Kinglsey Martin). CND achieved con-
siderable support amongst left Labour Party members disillusioned by Aneurin Bevan’s abandonment of his
previous support for unilateral nuclear disarmament. While the New Left did not start the CND, they
became influential amongst the movement’s disproportionately young, educated and middle class activist
base: see H. Nehring, Politics of Security: British and German Protest Movements and the Early Cold War,
1945–1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 63–126.
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 269

political movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.4 One of the most important cultural
products of this moment was to be the book that Edward Thompson would write between
1959 and 1963: The Making of the English Working Class.5
Thompson did not, of course, invent social history – it had a long and complex inter-
national trajectory stretching back into the nineteenth century. But the publication of the
Making transformed and re-energised social history as a historic practice. The book has
been the subject of more than half a century’s academic debate. Considering how much it
has been criticised, it is perhaps surprising that historians are still discussing it, but they
are. I read Thompson as an undergraduate, saw him speak in his period as a leader of the
anti-nuclear campaign, taught his work at Wits University in the 1990s, and always
admired him. But my interest in him was reawakened when, in 2013, I attended a conference
on the occasion of the half centenary of The Making. At that event, scholars from Turkey
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and Japan, India and Argentina, testified to how The Making had affected their national his-
toriographies, albeit in nationally distinct ways. The book had clearly had a unique, almost
conversional, personal impact. An eminent German historian attested to how, sometime in
the mid 1970s, he and his fellow graduate students encountered it in a reading group and
decided that this was how they wanted to write history.
At one level The Making’s appeal is reasonably easy to explain – even though it is not in
reality a very accessible book, unless one has read quite a lot of English history and literature.
Thompson offered a clear alternative to the stagnant intellectual orthodoxies of the Cold War –
Parsonian sociology and crudely deterministic Soviet Marxism. There were of course other
critics of those positions, but few who possessed Thompson’s rhetorical and polemical verve,
and none who harnessed such a critique to a rich new way of doing history. Most important
of all, he revivified the use of the category of class in historical analysis. Class in Thompson
was neither an immovable functional reality nor a dialectical machine generating appropriate
ideologies and politics. Through his emphasis on class as experience, Thompson proposed a
way of breaking the dilemma between structure and agency which tends to plague historical
and sociological writing. He emphasised the activity of the working people in developing
their own understanding of the world: they were, in his famous phrase ‘present at their own
making’. But he also placed culture at the centre. His English working class, and by implication
workers elsewhere in the world, did not make themselves from nothing, but from the cultural
resources available to them – folk traditions and rituals, pamphlets and scripture. Thompson
explicitly denounced the tendency of the left to imagine the working class, as they ‘should’
be, with a ‘correct’ consciousness, rather than seeing them in all their historical complexity.
This approach spoke especially strongly to the concerns of historians of Africa in the
1960s and 1970s. For example Terence Ranger would write in his 1975 book on the Beni
dancers of East Africa that

Just as Edward Thompson describes how the English workers taught themselves to survive and cohere
by making use of improbable and even constricting ideas, so in Beni, we can see these young men, for
good or ill making ‘really their own’, certain themes and structures of the colonialists, and using them
towards survival and coherence.6

4. M. Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995).
5. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 2013[1963]).
6. T.O. Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 76.
 270 JONATHAN HYSLOP

Here we see the preoccupations of the new historians of Africa in that time; a move away
from presenting Africans as passive victims of colonialism to an emphasis on their role as
active historical agents; an insistence on taking the culture of the people of the past seriously;
culture as changing and dynamic rather than static. In all these respects, the ideas of the
Thompsonian project resonated with the new Africanist scholarship.
Thompson’s work has thus been an important – if later highly criticised – reference point
for historians of Africa. But what I want to suggest here, is that there is an aspect of his con-
tribution that not only African historical writing but almost all the current literature about
Thompson neglects, and this is his thinking about military power and war. It is, I will argue,
an element of his legacy which might still be explored by scholars in a way which could
enrich our work.
Scholarship about Thompson and The Making has chiefly dealt with three issues. His
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seminal interventions in debates on class and culture have been revisited with varying
degrees of approval or disapprobation.7 A considerable body of writing, informed by post-
colonial theory, has discussed Thompson in relation to imperialism and colonialism, treating
the great man reasonably charitably in most cases, but generally tending to suggest that he
was insufficiently alive to these questions.8 And some work has addressed the historiography
of The Making, both examining its writing and the subsequent uses to which it has been put.9
But what the literature has largely missed is the extent to which Thompson’s personality
and intellect was shaped by war, by military conflict, and the extent to which his work takes
war as a central theme. War was crucial as – to use the archetypal Thompsonian word –
‘experience’ in the making of E.P. Thompson and in what he made. (And in war I include
not just the World Wars and anti-colonial wars, but also the so-called Cold War, which
was, for much of the world, an extremely vicious hot war.) That is why I have framed the
moment of the writing of The Making as a moment defined by military violence. Though
Thompson’s role as an anti-nuclear political activist is well known, I want to suggest that
he was also a profound thinker of war not only in that capacity, but as a historian and
social theorist. And I will suggest that this includes his greatest and best known work,
The Making, which contains an unread text about military power. This is an aspect of his
work which historians of Africa could usefully ponder.
War and preparation for war is a central human activity. Its fascination as myth and as
history lies in the paradox of the application of immense creativity to immensely destructive
purposes. Yet there is a strong tendency for historians and sociologists to treat military
organisation as always reflecting something else, rather than as a structure of power with
its own dynamics. Mainstream scholarship underwrites the conventional wisdom that in a
democratic society the military is the legitimate expression of the need of the social collec-
tivity to defend itself; Marxists see the army as simply defending the ruling class; revolution-
ary nationalists see armed insurgency as expressing the energies of the oppressed people. But
none of these lines of thinking captures the way that generals have interests just as capitalists

7. For example, J. Rule and R. Malcomson, eds, Protest and Survival, Essays for E.P. Thompson (London:
Merlin, 1993).
8. Notably, in the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty: see D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 2000).
9. R. Fieldhouse and R. Taylor, eds, E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2013).
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 271

do; that the arms industry is unlike other forms of production; that military organisations
become self-perpetuating bureaucracies; that the cultural investments of militarism have
real effects. Sociologists have until recently devoted surprisingly little attention to war,
despite its centrality to human life. Social and labour historians justly defined themselves
against the ‘kings and battles’ view of history, but as a consequence tended to lose sight
of the fact that battles really can be important. Military historian have of recent decades
made immense progress in moving away from the ‘drums and trumpets’ approach, but
have not perhaps been rewarded with the degree of integration into the historical mainstream
that their efforts deserve.10 Even the new transnational history seems rather disinclined to
explore the topic of warfare,11 though one could say that war is the most globalising force
that exists. Thompson, I want to suggest, is a key thinker in moving us forward on these
questions.
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Secondarily, as my opening suggests, I think we need to consider the moment of global

military confrontation which produced The Making in relation to the anti-colonial revolu-
tion. Anti-colonialism was to a much greater extent than generally acknowledged a key
theme in Thompson’s life and work. Thompson was not the crustily Anglocentric historian
for which he has been taken, partly as a result of his own self-presentation. His reluctance to
pronounce publicly on the history of other countries was the result of a certain scholarly
modesty and not of a lack of interest, or knowledge. However, precisely because of the
depth of his thinking on militarism, he had some cogent things to say about the intersection
of military power and anti-colonialism.
I also want to suggest, perhaps provocatively, that there are certain affinities between
Thompson’s ideas on military power and the work of the sociologist Michael Mann.12
Mann designates military power as one of the four fundamental forms of social power, inter-
acting with, but not reducible to, ideological, economic and political power. These forms of
power articulate with each other, shape the possibilities for each other’s use, but are radically
differently configured in specific historical moments, and none is ultimately determinative of
another. The forms of power are not, in Mann’s view, ‘systems’ in any simple sense. Rather
they are networks of actors. These networks do not conform to national boundaries, and
they do not comprise closed ‘societies’. I find Mann’s work suggestive for a number of
reasons. First, in that it recognises military power as a partially autonomous form of
power. Second, because it permits us to see that the military options which are open to
power holders are a factor in shaping their decisions. Third, because viewing military organ-
isations as networks enables us to recognise that they are not machines, but are fragmented
along lines of institutional and other interests. They are not stable but subject to challenge
and disintegration from the actions of their own members. And finally, Mann recognises
how the networks of military power go beyond national boundaries, especially where

10. J. Black, Rethinking Military History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004); S. Morillo and M.J. Paskovic, What is
Military History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012).
11. A point made by D.A. Bell, ‘This is What Happens when Historians Overuse the Idea of the Network’, New
Republic, 26 October 2013.
12. M. Mann, States, War and Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) is the best starting point for Mann’s work;
Mann’s magnum opus is M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986–2012). See also J.A. Hall and R. Schroeder, eds, An Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of
Michael Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
 272 JONATHAN HYSLOP

imperial states are concerned – as a moment’s thought about South Africa’s historic relation
to metropolitan military establishments will make clear. This kind of approach parallels the
way Thompson’s thought about military power evolved.
Many years ago I began to think about whether South African scholars adequately
analysed military power. Partly this emerged out of my own experience in Johannesburg
in the late 1980s during the state of emergency. As I tried to understand what was going
on, I concluded that the actions of the South African Defence Force could not (or at least
could not solely) be understood in terms either of the defence of capitalist interests, nor of
racial ideology, nor even the coherent functioning of the state. Rather, as the SADF
became dominant in the polity, and increasingly violent, it seemed to me that the military
were developing their own social logic of action. At the time I was teaching Weber, and I
was struck by the scattered suggestive comments in his work that portray military organ-
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isation as undergoing a long historic process of rationalisation.13 Weber implies that mili-
tary actors develop their own distinct interests and rationalities. But as Weber warns,
modernist rationality is only a goal-rationality not a value-rationality. We become increas-
ingly effective at accomplishing our ends but increasingly unable to ask ourselves ques-
tions about those ends.14
Later, it began to occur to me that the brand of history I practised had some blind spots as
a result of the aversion to giving sufficient centrality to military conflict. For example, social
historians were so keen not to capitulate to the ideological claims of Afrikaner nationalism
that we tended to downplay the devastating effects of 1899 to 1902 on all elements of South
African society. Conversely, scholars who were able to pay real attention to the military
dynamics of that conflict in a way that integrated it with social history – here I think of
the work of Jeremy Krikler15 and Bill Nasson16 – gave us a richer and more complex under-
standing of their subject.
In the remainder of the article, I will consider the impact of war on E.P. Thompson’s life,
work outward from there to consider the treatment of war in his most important book, and
then, at a more general level, deal with Thompson’s wider thought about military power, and
why it is significant for us.
Thompson was in crucial ways a product of both the world wars and of the colonial and
anti-colonial experience. Doris Lessing in later life made the point that the radicalisation of
her generation went back to the First World War, even though they had been born after it.
Her relationship to her father who had lost a leg in the conflict, and emigrated to farm in
Southern Rhodesia in the aftermath of this trauma, fundamentally shaped her life.17 The
delayed impact of the Great War was also certainly crucial for Thompson. His father, a
lower-middle-class Methodist missionary teacher in India, served as a military Chaplain

13. See M. Weber, From Max Weber, ed. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (London: Routledge, 1991), esp. 159–266.
14. For a brilliant discussion of this issue see D. Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and
Weber (London: Routledge, 1990).
15. J. Krikler, Revolution from Above, Rebellion from Below: The Agrarian Transvaal at the Turn of the Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
16. B. Nasson, Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War in the Cape 1899–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
17. Lessing, Walking in the Shade.
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 273

in Mesopotamia and was decorated for bravery.18 But Edward John Thompson’s faith in the
British Empire was shaken, not strengthened, by his experiences. ‘If I live thro[ugh] this
War’, the Reverend Thompson wrote at the time,

I stand, finally and without question on the side of the Rebels. What is needed is an entire Reconstruc-
tion of society […] the war has shown with sheets of flame that the whole system of things is wrong,
built on blood and injustice … 19

After 1918 Thompson senior was increasingly pulled between a residual admiration for the
Empire and a growing empathy for the Indian nationalists. He thus fell into the classical
liberal trap of pleasing neither side, but nevertheless became friends with some of the
leading Indian political and intellectual figures, notably Rabindranath Tagore. He became
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a notable writer on Indian topics, much of his work sharply critical of the British record
in the subcontinent, and especially of its military violence. The family eventually returned
to England, and Edward John took up a position as lecturer in Indian languages at
Oxford University.
Edward Palmer Thompson was born shortly thereafter. His childhood was closely bound
up with his parents’ continuing Indian links. As a boy, he was coached on his cricket tech-
nique in the family garden by Jawaharlal Nehru.20 Thus the Great War was a tipping
point in giving the Thompson family a far different political orientation than was typical
of their peers.
If the First World War formed the deep background to E.P. Thompson’s life, the Second
was fundamental to the formation of his personality. Edward’s adored elder brother,
Frank, was the golden child of the family. A prodigious scholar, he mastered the classical
languages and became fluent in multiple modern ones. Edward was the laggard by com-
parison. Frank went on to Oxford. Like many young intellectuals appalled by the world
of Fascism and the Great Depression, there, he joined the Communist Party. (It appears
that he was recruited to the Party by his then girlfriend, the later novelist and philosopher
Iris Murdoch.) After the Second World War broke out, Frank joined the army. Following
combat in the Middle East and Italy, he became part of the Special Operations Executive
(SOE), the branch of the British military responsible for supporting the resistance in occu-
pied Europe. He was parachuted into Yugoslavia, where SOE was aiding Tito’s partisans
in their fight against the Germans. Frank’s mission, however, was to work with a group of
Bulgarian insurgents based in Serbia. The intention was that they would enter their own
country to fight the forces of the pro-Nazi government that was in power there. Frank
revelled in being at the side of these fellow-Communists in the battle. A raid was launched
across the Bulgarian border. Whether through mishap, or as his brother came to believe,
through political betrayal, Frank was captured by the Bulgarian Fascists. Brutalised and

18. On Edward John Thompson, see M. Lago, India’s Prisoner: A Biography of Edward John Thompson (Colum-
bia: University of Missouri Press, 2007).
19. Quoted in E.P. Thompson, Alien Homage: Edward Thompson and Rabindranath Tagore (Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 72.
20. C. Winslow, ed., E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 15.
 274 JONATHAN HYSLOP

dragged before a firing squad, Frank died a hero’s death.21 The loss of his elder brother
was devastating to Edward; moreover he now had an almost superhuman model of intel-
lectual achievement and political sacrifice to live up to. This was also incidentally, the
background to E.P. Thompson’s long friendship with Basil Davidson, an SOE veteran
of Yugoslavia and Italy, whose hugely influential work in popularising African history,
and supporting guerrilla movements in Portuguese Africa, he saw as carrying forward
Frank’s spirit.22
Edward went to Cambridge, where he too joined the Communists. He entered the army
and served in North Africa and Italy as a lieutenant, commanding a troop of tanks. At the
age of 20, E.P. Thompson fought at the bloody Battle of Monte Cassino. He was uncharac-
teristically reticent about his wartime experiences, but they were clearly traumatic, and
informed the intensity of his later suspicion of militarists and commitment to nuclear disar-
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mament. An essay he wrote in later life gives a glimpse of this connection. Just before a
nuclear disarmament conference in Perugia, Thompson recalled an incident during the
war, when the allies were advancing on that city. Ordered to advance, he had – correctly
in terms of operational procedure – waved his Sergeant’s tank ahead of his own. The
vehicle was hit by a shell. The Sergeant and his gunner escaped, but three other crew were
still in the vehicle. Thompson ran up, under fire, jumped onto the tank and looked into
the hatch, but got no response. Later, he returned and saw blackened remains within.
Though Thompson had acted properly in formal military terms, he harboured a sense of
guilt over the incident – had his tank gone first, he would probably have been dead. He
recalled the agony of writing to his men’s relatives and their pathetic gratitude for whatever
comfort he could give them.23 Yet at the same time, for Thompson, as for many others in the
left, the war, for all its horrors was a great moment of social solidarity and of unity by people
of goodwill across the world. The breadth of the wartime alliance of liberals, nationalists and
socialists in the name of common humanistic values against a common fascist enemy was a
model for his future political endeavours. He came to see his wartime comrades as animated
by the same spirit as later anti-nuclear campaigners:

My fellow soldiers who were burned in that tank were not ardent politicians. But they were democrats
and anti-Fascists. They knew what they fought for, and it was not for the division of Europe, nor was it
for the domination of our continent by two arrogant superpowers.24

Though Thompson was to remain a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB) for a decade after the war, this politics did not sit easily with the militarist mould
of Stalinism. Already in 1945, this tension was prefigured in an account Thompson wrote
of a dispute which he had, on the very last day of the war, at the border of Yugoslavia,
with a group of partisans over the custody of a wounded Croatian soldier. Thompson

21. E.P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944 (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1997).
22. D. Thompson, ‘Acknowledgments’, in E.P. Thompson, Beyond the Frontier, 2–3.
23. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Liberation of Perugia’, in E.P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers (London: Merlin, 1985),
183–185.
24. Ibid., 200.
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 275

regarded the man as a prisoner who should be treated humanely. The partisans saw the man
as a Fascist, took him away and shot him.25
After returning to Cambridge to complete his studies, Thompson met historian Dorothy
Towers. In 1947 they undertook a pilgrimage to Yugoslavia to work on a railway building
project, and the next year they married.26 Thompson regarded the railway work as his
way of taking forward Frank’s faith in the birth of a new egalitarian and internationalist
spirit in Europe.
From the end of the 1940s through into the 1960s, the Thompsons lived in Yorkshire,
where Edward took up a position as a Workers Education Association lecturer. They
remained very active in the party and sought to live out their politics, residing in a
working-class area of Halifax. Thompson’s major intellectual project became a biography
of the artist, designer and pioneer British socialist William Morris. His work on the book
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though, began to reveal the emerging tensions between Thompson’s idiosyncratic vision
and the rigid and mechanical thought then dominant in the Communist Party.27 Thompson
was drawn to Morris’s critique of industrialism, his deep fascination with English folk tra-
ditions and craft skills, his belief in moral agency and his utopianism, all of which were
hard to fit into received ‘dialectical and historical materialism’. The book, published in
1955, did not make Thompson famous outside the relatively small circles interested in
Morris, although it already revealed his great gifts as a researcher and writer. Thompson’s
attempt to reconcile the aspects of Morris that he found most attractive with conventional
party forms of Marxism to some extent distorted an otherwise remarkable book.28
In order to understand the writing of Making, we need to appreciate not just a broad pol-
itical context, but a very local one. In the New Reasoner years, Thompson was working most
closely with a small group of activists in Yorkshire who were the mainstays of the publi-
cation. These included Dorothy and Joseph Greenald, labour stalwarts and former adult stu-
dents of Thompson, who became the dedicatees of The Making, but also three academics, all
of them war veterans. This core group comprised the labour historian, John Saville, from
Hull and the sociologists Peter Worsley, also from Hull, and John Rex, from Leeds. The
striking thing about all three men was that war had given them an engagement with the colo-
nial world which they would not otherwise have had. Saville had studied at LSE in the 1930s,
where he became a Communist. His early political activities had included smuggling

25. E.P. Thompson, ‘Drava Bridge’, in Thompson, The Heavy Dancers, 231–238.
26. The literature on E.P. Thompson includes B.D. Palmer, E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions (London:
Verso, 1994) which remains an excellent biographical overview; Rule and Malcomson, Protest and Survival;
S. Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory: E.P. Thompson, the New Left and Postwar British Politics (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2011); Fieldhouse and Taylor, Thompson and English Radicalism; C. Winslow,
‘Introduction’, in Winslow, E.P. Thompson.
27. An important exception to this intellectual stagnation was the Communist Party Historians’ Group which
included such immensely creative scholars as Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and V.G.
Kiernan. Thompson was certainly linked to this group, although it is not entirely clear how active he was
in it, and it does appear than Dorothy Thompson (later to become an important social historian specialising
in the subject of the Chartist movement) was in fact was more engaged with it than was her husband: see
Palmer, E.P. Thompson, 55.
28. Two decades later, Thompson revised the text in the light of his later intellectual development: see E.P.
Thompson, ‘Postscript: 1976’, in E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Oakland:
PM Press, 2011[1955]), 799–816.
 276 JONATHAN HYSLOP

messages into Nazi Germany under cover of working as a tourist courier. During the war
Saville had been a non-commissioned officer in the Anti-Aircraft Artillery during the
Blitz. He was then ordered to India, where he was in close contact with the Indian Commu-
nist leadership.29 Worsley, another Cambridge Communist, had served as an officer in the
King’s African Rifles in East Africa and India during the war, learned fluent KiSwahili,
and worked on the disastrous post-war groundnuts development scheme in Tanganyika.30
John Rex, a South African from a white working class Port Elizabeth background, had
been in the Royal Navy in the war. Like many servicemen he seems to have been radicalised
by his wartime experiences. He studied with Monica Wilson at Rhodes, where he took part in
the debates of a generation of politicised ex-servicemen. He had worked as a teacher in
Southern Rhodesia, from where he was deported for his political views.31
Like the New Left as a whole, this group was given cohesion and focus by the rise of the
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Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which demanded an end to the Macmillan
Conservative government and Labour opposition leadership’s support for Britain’s mainten-
ance of a nuclear arsenal, and also, increasingly, rejected the military alliance with the
United States. Thompson and his comrades all engaged in CND’s regional activities.32 An
account in New Reasoner by Worsley, of a CND march across northern England, in
which he, the whole Thompson family including children, Saville, Rex and the Greenalds
participated, is touching in its enthusiasm and naiveté.33 For this group of activists, CND
provided a form of political engagement through which they could respond to the domestic
complacency and pro-American nuclearism of the political establishment in a way that both
drew on their reflections on their experiences in the World War, and enabled them to continue
their longstanding internationalist political commitments.34
New Reasoner strongly and sympathetically took up the cause of anti-colonial national-
ism. The magazine carried articles by the likes of Tom Mboya of Kenya and M.W.K.
Chiume of Nyasaland. It also developed its own fierce critique of how, for the first decade
after the war, Communist and Trotskyist purists had largely dismissed the politics of colonial
nationalism and discounted the value of non-violent nationalist movements. Saville, Worsley
and Rex all wrote on this theme. Worsley’s determination to take the colonial revolution
seriously was later manifested in his 1964 book, The Third World, which both popularised
that term in English and made a strong case – perhaps even too strong a case – for the impor-
tance of the non-aligned political forces of the post-colonial world.35 John Rex was to

29. J. Saville, Memoirs From the Left (London: Merlin, 2003).

30. P. Worsley, An Academic Skating on Thin Ice (New York: Berghahn, 2008).
31. B. Mullan, Sociologists on Sociology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), 9–37.
32. Through the first two years of the existence of CND, 1958 and 1959, the Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB) remained outside it on the grounds that the campaign cut across Soviet ‘peace’ initiatives. The Com-
munists thus deepened the ideological breach with the New Left, and allowed the New Left to gain influence
amongst the young people mobilised on the nuclear issue: see Nehring, Politics of Security, esp. 159–164.
33. P. Worsley, ‘Coast to Coast’, New Reasoner, 6 (1958), 127–130.
34. According to Nehring, Politics of Security, 290, in Britain and West Germany in this period activists devel-
oped a politics in which they responded to their governments international stances ‘in reading memories of
the Second World War into the reality of the cold war; in demanding specific forms of engagement related to
these memories; and in connecting their campaigns beyond the level of nation states as “decision and identity
spaces” … ’.
35. P. Worsley, The Third World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1964).
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 277

establish himself as a foremost – though often highly criticised – scholar of race and immi-
gration. During the New Reasoner period, he was very active in opposition to the British
government’s Central African Federation, and penned a number of articles on the topic.
Together Worsley and Rex represented the British New Left at a solidarity conference in
Accra, convened by Kwame Nkrumah. Worsley was somewhat shocked by the Osageyfo’s
arrogant treatment of his subordinates, but deeply impressed by the speech of the Algerian
delegate – Frantz Fanon.36
All of this helps to explain why Thompson declared, right at the start of The Making that

the greater part of the world is still undergoing problems of industrialization, and of the formation of
democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolu-
tion. Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia and Africa, yet be won.37
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It also suggests why the analogy between Industrial Revolution England and contemporary
South Africa occurred to him: Thompson told his readers that

In the decades after 1795 there was a profound alienation between classes in Britain, and working
people were thrust into a state of apartheid whose effects – the niceties of social and educational dis-
crimination – can be felt to this day.38

The Making is, at a deep level, about military power and war, in a way which seems to be
strangely invisible to its readers. Although it is of course primarily about political radicalism
and – in the broad sense – labour history, in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
century, in the book the long history of warfare for global domination between the British
and French states is not just background, but becomes a crucially important focus of
Thompson’s periodisations and historical explanations. Military conjunctures are treated
as central to England’s internal politics. The birth of the radical political associations to
which Thompson devotes so much attention, are traced to the time of the American War
of Independence. The Pitt government’s decision to go to war in 1793 was aimed, in his
interpretation, not only at promoting British great power interests and suppressing
France’s revolutionary government, but also at repressing internal dissent.39 British radical-
ism draws on internal sources, but it is precipitated out by events abroad. The French Revo-
lutionaries’ victory at Valmy in November 1792, Thompson notes, saw a mass
demonstration in solidarity on the streets of Sheffield.40 In Thompson’s account, the war
is a turning point in British history. In the few years up to 1792, there had been a notable
trend toward liberalisation in many aspects of internal policy. The outbreak of war launched
a time of reaction that was not fully reversed until the Reform Act of 1832. Military power is
then, treated by Thompson as a quasi-autonomous historical factor.
War, for Thompson, creates new forms of national military organisation, with broader
implications for political power. The militia, a form of organisation which was intended

36. Worsley, An Academic Skating, 133.

37. Thompson, The Making, 12.
38. Ibid., 179.
39. Ibid., 100.
40. Ibid., 97.
 278 JONATHAN HYSLOP

to prepare to resist French invasion, became a vehicle through which middle class volunteers
armed themselves against popular insurgency. These volunteers are the hit men of the Indus-
trial Revolution, mobilising against mass protest. This new military structure facilitates new
forms of social alliance between the ‘The sons of the squire, the attorney, and the manufac-
turer’, as they come together in the face of the popular threat.41
Methodologically, it is striking that when Thompson enters into discussion of the limit-
ations of conventional economic historians, he identifies their failure to address this
context of counter-revolutionary war as their signal defect. The war was, in a sense, the
major vehicle of social exclusion. Working people ‘were forced into political and social
apartheid during the Wars (which, incidentally, they also had to fight)’.42 In Thompson’s
view the war is not only used by the new upper classes to intensify exploitative relationships,
but also to destroy the influence of the traditionalistic humane gentry, many of whom still
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accepted a notion of the Commons.43

Throughout the book, Thompson portrays the British army and navy not as closed
systems of power, but rather as tenuous global networks constantly threatened with internal
fragmentation by their men’s political discontent. By late 1792, the authorities and the upper
classes were being shaken by the extent of soldiers’ and sailors’ protests. Attempts – some
fairly successful – by radicals to win the support of soldiers and sailors are a constant
theme in the book. This can have enormous transnational consequences. For Thompson
the high point of this fragmentation within the military was the mutiny of the Navy at Spit-
head and the Nore in 1797. He wrote that:

For the British fleet – the most important instrument of European expansion, and the only shield
between revolutionary France and her greatest rival – to proclaim that ‘the Age of Reason ha(s) at
length revolved’ was to threaten the whole structure of world power.44

One of the odder features of contemporary critiques of Thompson is the idea that he had a
western model of liberal capitalism and an irresistibly rising working class and that his fol-
lowers teleologically imposed this on societies which did not have a liberal bourgeoisie or a
modern secularised labour force. What in fact Thompson makes clear is that he sees the
whole social structure of Industrial Revolution England as absolutely resting on a vast appli-
cation of military force to suppress labour, and that labour’s culture had very specific, pre-
modern roots. Emphasising the illiberal character of the capitalism of the time, he writes,
for example, of how more troops were deployed against the Luddites in Yorkshire and Lan-
cashire than there were British troops fighting the Napoleonic armies in Iberia. What he does
suggest though, is that there was also a constant countervailing movement in the face of this
coercion. There were massive acts of dominant class violence, but there was a popular
response to it that helped to establish the right of assembly, drawing on ideological roots
that had little to do with political modernism. However, there does seem to me to be no
doubt that Thompson was right to see a strengthening pattern of common law rights by

41. Ibid., 480.

42. Ibid., 201.
43. Ibid., 226.
44. Ibid., 168. See D. Featherstone, ‘Counter-insurgency, Subalternity and Spatial Relations: Interrogating the
Court-Martial Narratives of the Nore Mutiny 1797’, South African Historical Journal, 61, 4 (2009) 766–787.
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 279

the mid-nineteenth century. Consequently he was also right, in my view, to insist that the rule
of law is not a bourgeois ideology, but both a human good and a popular achievement.45
There are certain points at which Thompson’s own military and political experience seems
clearly and directly to filter his portrayal of events. In his view, the shift during the war years
of the internal organisation of Britain’s opponent had major consequences. Whereas it was
possible for British radicals to feel identification with the French Revolutionaries of the
1790s, this sympathy was destroyed by the evolution of Napoleon’s dictatorial and eventually
imperial state. By the time of Buonaparte’s coronation in 1802, there was a clear shift to a
radicalism that did not look abroad, was national and for some could be reconciled with
support for the war. By the first decade of the nineteenth century the representative voice
of dissent is no longer the revolutionary Tom Paine but the angry, patriotic former sergeant
William Cobbett, with his fierce condemnations of the military and civilian corruption of
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what he called ‘the thing’, and his nostalgia for pre-capitalist England. It seems inescapable
that Thompson’s understanding of this shift arose from his experience of disillusionment
with the USSR, which he so admired for its resistance to Hitler, as he became aware of
the nature of Stalin’s rule.
Although the pursuit of the left by the British establishment in the 1950s was milder than
that of the American left by McCarthyism, it was a reality, and this must have sensitised
Thompson to some suggestive historical parallels. In his account, the Napoleonic wars
feed the appeal of the submissive doctrines of Methodism, part of a ‘psychic process of
counter-revolution’.46 Radicals are assaulted by ‘Church and King’ mobs. Thompson also
saw the similarities with his own time between the ways in which patriotic pressures might
force intellectuals to abandon social radicalism. Wordsworth, who turned away from his
early enthusiasm for the French Revolution, was a case in point, for Thompson prefiguring
the born-again conservatives of the 1950s.
Soldiers and sailors are everywhere amongst Thompson’s radicals, going right back to the
Putney debates of the English Revolution. It is striking that throughout the book Thompson
shows how clandestine political movements, including the machine-smashing Luddites,
adopted militarised forms of organisation, including ranks and drilling. Even the higher
echelons of the forces were affected by political dissent. Colonel Despard, leader of the des-
perate revolutionary conspiracy of 1802, was able to get no less a military figure than Lord
Nelson to testify to his distinguished war record, although this did not prevent him being
hanged.47
Thompson also demonstrates the importance of popular traditions of hostility to military
power. Opposition to the idea of a standing army was a central plank of popular politics, and
recruiters were targets of protest.
How did these themes of his major work play out in the subsequent development of his
thought?
Thompson’s ideas about militarism took a complicated new direction at around the time
of the publication of The Making. The successor publication of New Reasoner was New Left
Review, which was by then being edited by Perry Anderson. It had developed an enthusiasm

45. E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).
46. Thompson, The Making, 403.
47. Ibid., 506.
 280 JONATHAN HYSLOP

for the position that had become known as Third Worldism, which combined dependency
theory economics with support for the guerrilla insurgencies. The influence of the dramas
of Algeria and Cuba was plain. The position also tended to make the assumption that the
working class in the West had become hopelessly corrupted by consumerism and welfarism.
On the other hand, it to some extent played down social inequalities within African and
Asian societies, emphasising instead the common oppression of all classes by imperialism.
By April 1963, Thompson was at loggerheads with Anderson, and on his way out of the
New Left Review circle. He penned an essay criticising the prevailing view. To some extent
it is a sample of that strange leftist literary genre, the internal document, rambling and
over-polemical. But it also makes some extraordinarily trenchant points.
Thompson questioned the coherence of the notion of the Third World in a way that is
perhaps relevant to the currently popular notion of the Global South. ‘In what sense’ he
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writes,

rhetorical or exact – are we to accept the notion of a ‘third world’? What is the line of demarcation?
Does Ireland belong? Outer Mongolia? Sicily? […] If capitalism is retreating to its North Atlantic
heartlands, what are we to make of the vigorous indigenous capitalisms in South America and Asia?48

Thompson fully understood the significance of international cultural and institutional differ-
ences. What he could not accept was that there was some mysterious variation between the
ways in which capitalism and capitalists operated in different global zones. Therefore he also
was concerned that nationalist ideologies would, all too easily, serve to disguise the interests
of local capitalists. Thompson was entirely sympathetic to the need to take what would today
be called Southern Theory seriously:

It is one thing to respond with deep sympathy to the writings of Fanon, Toure, Senghor or Che
Guevara. More: we have a clear duty to publish these views, and to measure our preoccupations
against their force.49

But he also warned against slipping from intellectually respecting anti-colonial thought into
uncritically accepting nationalist ideologies.

[T]he rhetoric of every social and national revolution nourished and protracted beyond its due
context, can become a source of mystification and chauvinism […] The clothes of revolution only
too easily become the habit of pious scoundrels. The rhetoric is used to evoke a national consensus
and to distract attention from intractable problems.50

This was heartfelt, stemming from Thompson’s experience of Stalinism. And it was also a
statement of a concern that such rhetoric helped to support the creation of new inequalities:
‘I see’, he wrote amidst the euphoria of decolonisation, ‘no a priori reasons why a really nasty
indigenous bourgeoisie or military elite, with feudal associations, might not consolidate itself

48. E.P. Thompson, ‘Where Are We Now?’, in Winslow, E.P. Thompson, 221.
49. Ibid., 222.
50. Ibid. Though offering much of value, Hamilton, The Crisis of Theory, seems to me to replicate, in a contem-
porary context, some of the tendency criticised by Thompson, for the metropolitan left to be over-credulous
toward such ‘radical’ nationalist claims.
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 281

in certain African and Asian countries’.51 At the time, many would have said that he was
wrong, but who, honestly, could now?
Thompson consequently also questioned the idea that there could be no political com-
monalities across the globe. Insofar as Third Worldism saw the whole of society in the metro-
polis as lined up against the unified oppressed of the periphery, it wiped out the complex
history of solidarities across national boundaries and especially the long history of inter-
national unity on the left. ‘The history of British-Indian relations’, he wrote, ‘has not been
a simple series of Amritsars’,52 referring to the British massacre of Indian protestors in
1919. He traced the history of British radical hostility to the empire all the way back to
the period of The Making: ‘So far from our Left having no internationalist traditions, I
would say that next to ‘Spain’, and anti-fascism itself, there was no issue which so seized
the imagination and claimed the attention of British socialists as India.’53 The cumulative
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effect of these decades of political action, Thompson suggested, was that by 1945 it would
have been politically impossible for Britain to wage a war to prevent the independence of
India. He saw this tradition of the British left as having been weakened by the Cold War.
But ‘a new anti-imperialist impulse can be felt, from the time of Suez, with the CND, the
new left, and the campaign against apartheid’.54 His point was not that the record of the
British left was unsullied, but rather that political allegiances could transcend national
boundaries. It is possible for people in different historical positions to find common ground.
This led to a critique of the militarism which Thompson saw in the then-current enthu-
siasm for guerrillaism, embodied in the work of Fanon, and the support offered to those
ideas by Jean-Paul Sartre.55 Of course it is true that critics of Fanon have perhaps unfairly
focused on his theory of the liberating power of revolutionary violence for the colonised.
Fanon’s rhetorically brilliant work covers a much broader spectrum, across the range of
psychological analysis and cultural critique of the colonial situation, and far-seeing dissec-
tion of the emerging problems of the post-colonial state. Yet Fanon’s theory of violence is
inescapably central to the claims he makes. Thompson stated his deep admiration for
those who had taken up arms against fascism and colonialism. But he also, correctly,
noted that many anti-colonial movements had won out without resorting to force. And he
expressed a deep fear, based on his experience of war and Stalinism, for the consequences
of the militaristic form that such movements might take. ‘For the lesson of the 20th
century’ he wrote,

is not only that humanism is discovered in revolutionary struggle; anti-humanism is discovered there
too. Out of the logic of revolutionary struggle there arises that discipline, that embattled ideology,
those quasi-revolutionary forms, which endanger the humanism of the revolution itself. All this is
(or ought to be) too familiar to bear repetition. To accept the necessity for Algerians or Angolans
of this revolutionary dedication is one thing: to glorify it is another: to fail to state what is known
of its dangers and putative consequences is another again.56

51. Thompson, ‘Where Are We Now?’, 225.

52. Ibid., 228.
53. Ibid., 229.
54. Ibid., 231.
55. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre) (London: Penguin, 2001).
56. Thompson, ‘Where Are We Now?’, 241.
 282 JONATHAN HYSLOP

This view was, incidentally, shared by Thompson’s friend Basil Davidson, whose on-the-
ground experience in support of guerrillas in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique and
Eritrea never led him to accept Fanon’s views on armed struggle.57 And though Thompson
would have eschewed psychologism, it is worth noting that the findings of military psychol-
ogy, contra Fanon, confirm that trauma and not psychic liberation is what awaits comba-
tants who survive war.58 For the South African case, a brilliant counterfactual essay by
Saul Dubow asks whether it was not possible for the African National Congress to take a
route other than armed struggle in 1960 to 1961.59 Whatever view one takes of that question,
there can, be little doubt that the countries of southern Africa which went through the guer-
rilla experience have paid a high price for it in terms of the militarisation of their political
cultures.
Though in the paper Thompson frequently signals his allegiance to Marx, what he was in
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a sense stumbling onto was a Weberian, or Mann-ian understanding of the semi-auton-

omous importance of military power. This insight was, years later, to be formulated in his
theorisation of the social dynamics of the Cold War nuclear confrontation as ‘extermin-
ism’.60 This great and neglected contribution to social thought took him well beyond the tra-
dition out of which he came. Thompson rejected the idea that the Cold War had to be driven
by rational intentions or goals. What, he asked, if it was in fact driven by ‘two antagonistic
collocations’ of ‘fragmented forces (political and military formations, ideological impera-
tives, weapons technologies)’?61 The Cold War, he thought was the ‘central human fracture’
… ‘the fulcrum upon which power turns in the world’, engendering ‘armies, diplomacies and
ideologies’, imposing ‘client relationships on lesser powers and export(ing) arms and militar-
ism to the periphery’.62 He saw the US and USSR operating in a broadly symmetrical way in
this context. Both were ‘producing war’ and ‘exporting militarist systems, infrastructures
and technologies’ of power. The profit motive had been, in the west, a factor in setting
this system in train, but only one: bureaucracies could have interests as well as capitalists.
Whether imperialism had initiated the confrontation was no longer important, because
both sides were now fully engaged in a thoroughly irrational system of preparation for
self-destruction. Exterminism, he wrote, ‘designates those characteristics of a society –
expressed, in differing degrees, within its economy, its polity and its ideology – which
thrust it in a direction whose outcome must be the extermination of multitudes’.63
Although Thompson’s use of terminology is considerably less rigorous than Mann’s, the
implicit theoretical basis seems strikingly similar. Military power has its own dynamics. It
interacts with other forms of power but is not necessarily driven by them. Military-related
organisations are internally fragmented. The decisions of political actors are shaped by

57. S. Howe, ‘The Interpreter: Basil Davidson as Public Intellectual’, Race and Class, 36, 2 (1994), 28.
58. D. Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay,
2009).
59. S. Dubow, ‘Were There Political Alternatives in the Wake of the Sharpeville-Langa Violence in South Africa,
1960?’, Journal of African History, 56, 1 (2015), 119–142.
60. E.P. Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism, The Last Stage of Civilization’, http://newleftreview.org/I/121/
edward-thompson-notes-on-exterminism-the-last-stage-of-civilization, accessed 4 November 2015.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 283

the military-strategic options open to them. Power operates through networks which spread
across state boundaries.
But where Thompson goes a step further than other thinkers of military power is in his
emphasis on how military actors are entangled not just with their allies, but with their
opponents. Exterminism is a concept more appropriate to our understanding of the global
nature of contemporary military power than the more standard ‘militarisation’ and ‘militar-
ism’. Militarisation usually implies a consideration of the size and resources of a military
establishment and the broader effects this has on society. Militarism usually implies a con-
sideration of the kind of ideological effect that military interests have on politics and
culture. Both tend to be considered in a national framework and treated as measurable.64
These narrow frameworks often produce analyses which profoundly underestimate how
war as a practice structures our present world. By contrast, the notion of exterminism recog-
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nises that military power is not a static set of arrangements within a single nation state or
military alliance of states, but an entangled global constellation which locks apparent antag-
onists into an shared global order of self-destruction. In a famous debate with the then
American Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, in 1984, Thompson defined the Cold
War: ‘It is an irrational condition. It consists in itself. The superpowers feel threatened
because they are threats to each other. It is an acquired inertia and a self-reproducing
system.’65 In an age in which we are still – though we often forget it – dealing with the poten-
tially catastrophic danger of nuclear apocalypse, and the other hideous legacy of the Cold
War – the hundreds of millions of small arms circulating in the world – this analysis is
one that deserves far more attention than it has had. And it also eerily brings to mind the
other form of exterminism which the great powers are practicing, namely the violent extrac-
tion of raw materials and its consequences in environmental destruction.

Conclusion

If ‘experience’ is the most vital Thompsonian term of historical analysis, it is appropriate to

reflect on the experience of E.P. Thompson. Like the subjects of his historical work, he built
his picture of the world and his responses to its vicissitudes out of the cultural and intellectual
resources available to him. These came largely from his immersion in English literature and
historical writing. But they were also profoundly about what he drew from his encounters
with war and with internationalism. His brother’s self-sacrificing death in the Second
World War shaped his political aspirations. The trauma of his own military service generated
his own resistance to war, but at the same time, the inspiration provided by people from all
over the world coming together to fight against Nazism, continued to animate his politics
throughout his life. Living through the greatest war in history caused Thompson to reflect
profoundly on military power. His parent’s involvement with Indian nationalism and the
comradeship of a group of scholar-activists with experience in Africa and Asia gave him a
deep engagement with the colonial revolution. These many levels of experience came
together in both Thompson’s historical work and his political actions.

64. See the discussion of militarisation and militarism in M. Shaw, Post-Military Society: Militarism, Demilitar-
ization and War at the End of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).
65. E.P. Thompson, ‘Questions to Caspar Weinberger’, in Thompson, The Heavy Dancers, 56.
 284 JONATHAN HYSLOP

In the contemporary world where reaction and corrupt leadership dominates, where
mindless nationalism seems always to trump any conception of common interest, and
where the politics of individual perception always seems able to claim the high moral
ground against an understanding of the structures of power, it is tempting to conclude
that a Thompsonian faith in the practice of history as a part of a project of human solidarity
and rational analysis is doomed. But Thompson’s later life is a reminder that the most unli-
kely of people, in the most hostile of circumstances, sometimes do make a difference.
Thompson’s denunciations of the nuclearism of the two great powers, and his calls for an
international campaign against it by no means went in vain. From 1980 to 1984, Thompson
emerged not only as the most visible leader of the CND in Britain, but also as the key figure
in European Nuclear Disarmament (END), which sought to unite people ‘from Poland to
Portugal’ against the possibility that the powers would fight a nuclear war on their territory.
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Martin Shaw argues convincingly that ‘social movements in both West and East played
crucial roles in the 1980s dissolution of the Cold War world order’.66 Although apparently
defeated by 1983 over the immediate issue of the deployment of Cruise Missiles in the two
key countries involved, Britain and Germany, these movements mobilised hundreds of thou-
sands in mass demonstrations in western Europe and elsewhere, and small but symbolically
highly important groups of protestors in Eastern Europe, demonstrating both the extent of
popular hostility to the nuclear policies of the two power blocks and the extent of mass
support for rapprochement and de-escalation. They thus placed governments, both west
and east under considerable pressure.67 This was arguably a material factor in the stepping
back of the major powers from the brink in the mid-1980s, in the unravelling of east Euro-
pean authoritarian states, and in the partial remission of the Thatcher-Reagan version of
conservatism in the 1990s. Thompson was at the heart of this important historical
moment, exhausting himself in punishing years of anti-nuclear campaigning in the early
1980s, and perhaps bringing about his own too-early death.68
Himself a product of war, Thompson became a brilliant contributor not only to the
struggle to prevent it, but also to our understanding of it as a central social phenomenon.
His attempts to understand the problem of militarism stretched all the way from the experi-
ence of the young man in the tank at Perugia to the work of the world famous historian and
activist of the 1980s. Strangely, this central, military, dimension of his thought has been
rather neglected in the historical literature. But it speaks both to the major questions of his-
torical explanation and to the great existential questions of our time. Whether or not we
agree with his historical method and his political convictions, Thompson’s attempt to
place war at the centre of human experience, to subject its origins and effects as social

66. M. Shaw, Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 148.
67. Ibid., 149–150
68. In the light of persistent attempts to paint the UK anti-nuclear movement as a tool of the Soviet Union – see
for example, Douglas Murray, “CND Cannot rewrite its own history”, Spectator, 29 April 2013 http://blogs.
spectator.co.uk/2013/04/cnd-cannot-rewrite-its-own-history/, accessed 14 May 2016 – it is worth noting
exactly how hostile the Soviet leadership was towards Thompson. As Thompson recounted, the publicly
stated Soviet view was that he was trying to ‘bury the peace movement’ (Thompson, ‘The Liberation of
Perugia’, 195–198). The USSR wanted a peace movement which was uncritical of their political order and
avoided a fundamental critique of military power. Thompson did not oblige.
 THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND THE MAKING OF A HISTORIAN 285

practice to rigorous analysis, and to act boldly and ethically, remains impressive. Thompson
once wrote of leaving the Communist Party, ‘I commenced to reason in my thirty third year,
and despite my best efforts, have never been able to shake the habit off’.69 Surely, it is a habit
worth emulating.

Acknowledgements

I would like thank the Southern African Historical Society for its invitation to give an earlier
version of the article as the Keynote Address at their 2015 conference; Sandra Swart for her
many kindnesses in arranging that event and for her subsequent encouragement to publish
the piece; the anonymous readers of the paper for their exceptionally perspicacious com-
ments; Evan Smith, Cal Winslow and Susan Pennybacker for helpful responses to my ques-
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tions; and Nancy Ries for her constant support, help and encouragement.

69. E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, ‘2008[1978]), 1.