International history

Patrick Finney
The study of political and diplomatic relations between nation states was central to the discipline
of history as it was professionalised and institutionalised in the 19th century.(1) As the discipline
expanded and diversified, the study of statecraft became the preserve of a discrete sub-field
known as diplomatic history. After the Second World War, diplomatic historians gradually
developed a more expansive view of their subject matter. Although formal relations between
states remained central, more systematic attention began to be paid not only to diplomacy, but
also to economics, strategy, the domestic sources of foreign policy, ideology and propaganda,
and intelligence.

Thus in the 1960s and 1970s diplomatic history mutated into a specialism predominantly
denoted as international history. This expansive evolution has continued with each successive
generation and at the cutting edge of the sub-discipline today scholars are plying cultural modes
of analysis and emphasising non-state actors and transnational processes in ways which in turn
call into question the adequacy of the descriptor international. Mingling traditional and innovative
approaches, this is a vibrant area of historical inquiry, albeit with a dynamism that engenders a
lack of consensus over what should constitute its core concerns.

The classical diplomatic history of the later 19th and early 20th centuries was hallmarked by
assiduous attention to the archival record and an interpretive focus on the foreign policies of the
great powers, the making and breaking of treaties, and the deliberations and actions of foreign
office clerks, diplomats and statesmen. At a time when developments in philosophy and politics
combined to make the rise of the modern European nation-state seem the central drama of the
age, it was natural that statecraft and war should occupy centre stage in historical writing.

Such inquiry was also facilitated by the growing inclination of governments to publish edited
collections of diplomatic correspondence to justify their foreign policies to a broader (and newly
enfranchised) public. Diplomatic history thus appeared to possess potent explanatory force, its
popularity fuelled by a belief that by revealing 'the secret stratagems of monarchs and
statesmen' it could uncover 'the pattern of the past which explained the present'.(2)

Following the cataclysm of the First World War, the relevance of diplomatic history only
intensified as the questions it tackled were demonstrably 'of fundamental importance both to the
recent history and to the future of mankind'.(3) An idealist and internationalist conviction that
discovering the roots of past conflicts would contribute to the cause of peace was integral to the
sub-discipline: this motivated the endowment of the Stevenson Chair in International History at
the London School of Economics, first filled by Charles Kingsley Webster in 1932. (This concern
was shared by the nascent discipline of international relations, long one of international history's
most significant others: Webster had previously been Woodrow Wilson Professor of International
Politics at Aberystwyth.)

That said, most diplomatic historians disdained present-centred concerns, professing scrupulous
objectivity and hard-line empiricism. This did not, however, prevent ideological entanglement
and much diplomatic history was saturated with pernicious patriotic sentiment. Explaining the
origins of the First World War became a matter of enormous contemporary political significance
through the interconnection of the issue of 'war guilt' with German demands for the revision of
the Treaty of Versailles. The controversy was played out through the official publication of
archival material and the propagation of conflicting, often stridently nationalist, interpretations.
If these contingencies secured a place of unprecedented privilege in political and intellectual
discourse for diplomatic history, circumstances after the Second World War induced a malaise.
The rise of social and economic history and the Annales paradigm, the growing influence
of Marxism in the academy and the burgeoning of fertile social science approaches in a
revitalised international relations conspired to endow diplomatic history with a reputation as 'the
most arid and sterile of all the sub-histories'.(4) Its fixation on events, elites (almost exclusively
male) and formal power, together with its predilection for careful narrative reconstruction, came
to be regarded as both ideologically dubious and intellectually restricted. The growing complexity
of contemporary international relations also cast doubt on the explanatory power of politics
narrowly defined.

Practitioners responded by creating a much more expansive international history, attentive to

profound structural forces, the formulation as well as execution of policy, a wider range of actors
and a host of new thematic concerns. The gradual opening of British (and other) state archives
pertaining to the pre-1914 and pre-1939 periods in the 1960s provided a further catalyst for this
development, as it made available a wealth of new materials that scholars eagerly devoured in
constructing new histories of the origins of the First and Second World Wars.

By the 1970s, international history was clearly established as a mature intellectual practice,
acquiring the appropriate paraphernalia of dedicated journals, conferences, specialist degree
schemes and professional associations. Its terrain became more complex and contested, as new
approaches proliferated without entirely displacing more traditional practices and the volume of
publications perceptibly increased. Naturally there were tensions between competing approaches
and internal debate about the proper balance to be struck between different analytical factors.
So, for example, Paul Kennedy's masterly The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was castigated
by some critics for its economic determinism.(5) Equally, new sub-specialisms such as
propaganda history – deploying modish visual source materials – initially struggled to win
legitimacy within the field.

Moreover, despite its innovative diversity international history continued to be regarded by many
other historians with 'condescension and antipathy' as a reactionary field remote from the
discipline's cutting edge.(6) So paradoxically even as the 'new international history' was
proclaimed, the reflective literature was hallmarked by self-flagellatory introspection and
ruminations on decline. One critic famously declared international history to be 'marking time',
too stubbornly attached to conventional modes of explanation and narrow Rankean exegesis and
lagging behind theoretical advances elsewhere in the discipline.(7) With some justice many
international historians believed such critiques slighted their sophisticated achievements. (8)