A LIFE IN HISTORY

This is the text of the inaugural lecture in the ‘Rewriting the

Past’ conference, held in July 2002 in conjunction with the
Institute of Historical Research in London to celebrate Past and

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Present’s fiftieth anniversary. Eric Hobsbawm is one of the
founder members of the journal, and was assistant editor for its
very first issue in February 1952; he has seen Past and Present
through all fifty years, and is now vice-president of the Past and
Present Society.

Although life has lengthened substantially in the past half-

century, any person of eighty-five is still a statistical rarity. My
age-group represents less than 1 per cent of the world population.
By virtue of age he or she is also a historical source. I suppose
that is why I have been asked to reflect on the changes in histori-
ography in the seventy years since I first encountered the subject
in the Berlin of 1932, and the fifty-five years since I began to
practise it as a university teacher and writer. This is what I
understand by the otherwise rather vacuous title of the lecture
proposed to me.
My first contacts with a professional historian as a schoolboy
were unpromising. He was a small, round man who dashed round
the classroom of a Berlin Gymnasium pointing a ruler as he asked
pupils for the dates of the German emperors. I learned them by
heart but have naturally forgotten all of them since. The joke
was that this exercise must have bored our teacher as much as
us, for, as I now know, he was by far the most distinguished
scholar in the school, author of a monograph on the mystery cults
of Eleusis and Samothrace, a recognized classical archaeologist
and papyrus expert and a contributor to Pauly–Wissowa. Like
us he was a victim of ‘1066 and All That’, the curse of interwar
secondary school teaching. It almost turned me off history for
good. Fortunately I discovered the Communist Manifesto in the
school library. A little later, in England, I was lucky enough to
have a schoolmaster who thought I was good at the subject and
told me to read Lord Acton for the Cambridge scholarship. This
4 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 177
helped me to get a scholarship, but confirmed my scepticism
about conventional Oxbridge history. Nevertheless, I decided to
read history at Cambridge, partly because nothing else was avail-
able (except for economics the social sciences were non-existent
there), and partly because it was obvious that there was a lot
more to history as taught at universities than what grammar
school history had prepared me for. With a few exceptions, of
which G. M. Trevelyan was the most eminent, established histor-

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ians between the wars did not write for schools, let alone for the
broad public. On the contrary, they distrusted those who did.
Actually — at least in Cambridge — most of them, having lost
the self-confidence of the Victorians, wrote rather sparingly, even
when preparing the monographs which were the foundation of a
scholar’s reputation. How could one live up to the ideal of a
history both unchangeably true, based on a totally exhaustive
study of archive sources, definitive, and immune to the criticisms
of equally erudite, and often equally costive, colleagues? Necks
stuck out were there to be chopped off. One of the major advances
since the war, at least in the UK, is the remarkable reduction of
this gap between school history and university history, and even
more, between academic history and history written by academics
for the general public.
Nevertheless, with few exceptions the Cambridge history fac-
ulty was a discouraging spectacle: self-satisfied, insular, culturally
provincial, deeply prejudiced against theories, explanations and
ideas, and even against too much professionalism — suspicious
of anything that came too close to the present. Let me remind
you that, with the exception of the economic historians, and the
radicals and socialists with their interest in the working classes —
but they were largely outside academia — almost all university
historians kept away even from the Victorian period and its
politicians until well after the second war, leaving the biographies
of its statesmen to relatives and journalists, and general assess-
ments to gentlemanly amateurs like G. M. Young. Only diplo-
matic history was a sufficiently important nineteenth- and even
twentieth-century field to attract bona fide academic historians of
standing.
For most of the hundreds who read history, this did not much
matter. They did not expect to become historians, although, as
future members of the British Establishment, they were expected
to benefit from memories of a peculiarly esoteric subject:
 A LIFE IN HISTORY 5
Constitutional History. Most dons regarded their main duty as
getting the young through the Tripos with a decent second-class
degree. But for the relatively few who wanted to become dons
themselves it did matter, because in my day what Marc Bloch
called ‘the trade of the historian’ was not taught in Britain, either
before or — except for some technicalities — after graduation.
The only guidance I ever got on how to use libraries, even
elementary reference libraries, came not from any university

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teacher, but from Communist Party comrades who mobilized
students for vacation help in the Labour Research Department
in London. Unlike undergraduate supervision, which was taken
seriously, the direction of postgraduate theses was a pitiful joke.
In short, we picked up the trade as best we could. Very much
depended on who we encountered as undergraduates: mostly
other bright undergraduates and, if we were lucky, a good super-
visor. Fortunately for the young radical history students there
was one teacher at Cambridge whose lectures, though given at
9 a.m., one had to attend regularly.
Mounia Postan, recently arrived in Cambridge from the LSE,
was a red-haired man who looked like a Neanderthal survivor
and lectured in a heavy Russian accent on economic history. This
was in any case the only branch of history on the Cambridge
syllabus relevant to young Marxists, but the Postan lectures, with
their air of intellectual revivalism, attracted anyone with a lively
mind. Every one of them, intellectual-rhetorical dramas in which
a historical thesis was first expounded, then utterly dismantled
and finally replaced by the Postan version, was a holiday from
British insularity. Who else would have told us to read the
Annales, not yet famous even in their own country, and presented
Marc Bloch to us, correctly, as the greatest living medievalist?
(Alas, I can remember nothing of his lecture except a small pudgy
man.) Passionately anti-communist as he was, he was the only
man in Cambridge who knew Marx, Weber, Sombart and the rest
of the great Russians and central Europeans, and took their work
seriously. He knew very well that he attracted the young Marxists,
and, while denouncing their belief in Russian Bolshevism, wel-
comed them as allies in the fight against historical conservatism.
During the Cold War, when I depended on his references, he
also helped to keep me out of jobs. He was not exactly my or
anyone’s teacher — he formed no school and had few disciples —
but he was our bridge to the wider world of history. And he was
6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 177
certainly the most surprising figure to be found in a senior history
chair in Britain between the wars. Like the other pre-Hitler
immigrants who left their mark on British history — Vinogradov
and Namier — he came from eastern rather than central Europe.
Like them he ended with a knighthood, but unlike Namier, he
was a world figure in a subject dealing with problems regarded
as important and relevant in Harvard, Moscow and Tokyo as
well as England. On the other hand at one of our first meetings

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Fernand Braudel asked me: ‘I understand there is much talk in
England about a historian called Namier. Can you tell me anything
about him?’
In some ways the contrast between Postan’s and Namier’s
subjects symbolized the major conflict that divided the histori-
ography, and the major tendency of its development from the
1890s to the 1970s. This was the battle between history as narra-
tive and history as analysis and synthesis, between those who
thought it impossible or impermissible to generalize about human
affairs in the past and those who thought it essential, between
‘objectivism’ and ‘the subjective-psychological way of seeing
things’ (to quote the young Otto Hintze),1 between those who
rejected any contamination of history by the social or any other
sciences, or evolutionary models, and those who were open to
them. The battle had opened in Germany in the late 1890s but
in my student days the most prominent champions of historical
modernization, apart from the Marxists, were the Annales group
in France. Essentially, for both of these the way forward was
through economic and social history, although this was not at all
the primary interest of Febvre, and certainly not of the young
British Marxists. Many, perhaps most of them, came into history
with markedly literary/cultural interests. But economic and social
history was the foothold the modernists had on the forbidding
rock face of institutionalized conventional history.
Into this battle between the old and the new history young
Marxists like myself, at the start of their professional careers just
before and after World War Two, now found themselves plunging
enthusiastically. They joined what was still a small field, measured
both in the number of its practitioners and in their output. The
enormous expansion of universities, old and new, and the strato-
spheric rise of ‘the literature’, did not get under way until the
1 Otto Hintze, ‘Über individualistische und kollektivistische Geschichtsauffassung’,
Historische Zeitschrift, lxxviii (1897).
 A LIFE IN HISTORY 7
1960s. Even in countries like Britain and France, or in very broad
academic fields such as economic history worldwide, virtually
everyone knew of, or could get to know, everyone else.
Fortunately, the first international congress of historical sciences
after the Second World War was held in Paris in 1950. Before
the war the historical establishment had ruled supreme — for by
driving the best of their social sciences into emigration fascism if
anything reinforced it. However, the war had so disrupted the

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old structures that, for a brief moment, the rebels had actually
taken charge. The congress, organized by an Annales man, Charles
Morazé, was planned on heterodox lines, essentially by the
French, with some input by the Italians, and some from the Low
Countries and Scandinavia, plus some very uncharacteristic
Anglo-Saxons: Postan himself, the Australian historical statisti-
cian Colin Clark, and a Marxist ancient historian from Liverpool.
The Germans were, of course, virtually absent, even though it
was not known at the time quite how much their eminent histor-
ians had been involved in the Nazi system. The historians of the
USA attended the congress in droves — when have Americans
not been keen on visiting Paris? — but they had plainly not been
much consulted about the planning. Apart from one report on
ancient history, and a last-minute Texan disquisition on world
history as frontier history, they were kept outside the main
planned sections. The Soviet Union and all its dependencies were
absent, with the one exception of Poland. They all turned up in
full force in 1955 after Stalin’s death, at the next international
congress in Rome. Times were tense in those months immediately
after the outbreak of the Korean War when the (French)
President of the International Committee said gloomily that ‘the
congress will provide future historians of historiography with an
important record of the mentality of historians after the crisis of
the second world war . . . while they wait for the third’.
If you want to pinpoint the birthplace of post-war histori-
ography, I suggest it was in a section on ‘Social History’ at this
congress — the first time the field made an institutional appear-
ance. To my surprise I had found myself nominated as the official
chairman of the so-called ‘Contemporary’ session. I suppose
Postan must have proposed me, since nobody else could have
heard of me. Here an odd collection of anomalies and marginals
came together, who were soon to make their mark: Vicens Vives,
a lone voice from Franco’s Barcelona looking for intellectual
8 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 177
contacts, who was later to inspire the modernization of Spanish
history, the Marxist Poles who came from the East with the same
purpose, the brilliant French researchers with uncompleted theses
like Pierre Vilar and Jean Meuvret, who were soon to be integ-
rated into Braudel’s new rival to the Sorbonne, the future École
des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. There were the historians
of socialism and labour, the Marxists and their critics. There was
Paul Leuillot, secretary of the Annales who spoke for Marc Bloch,

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Braudel and myself, about to become co-founder of Past and
Present. In short, the face of the historiography of the 1950s and
1960s was becoming visible.
Let me draw your attention to two crucial points. First, and
somewhat unexpectedly, the Cold War did not interfere with
developments in history, though it did affect the careers of histor-
ians in varying degrees. In retrospect it is surprising how little
it penetrated western historiography, except, of course, on
such matters as the history of twentieth-century Russia and
Communism, as well as debates about the Cold War itself. It did,
however, keep the politically heterodox largely outside that major
innovation of the post-1945 era, scholarly research on actual
contemporary history, on the basis of primary sources which now
became available in the West and its empires, at least selectively.
The remarkable official British History of the Second World War
of the late 1940s, especially the Civil series, entrusted primarily
to academic historians, is an early landmark in the modernization
of historiography. I think the impact on history of the extraordin-
ary degree to which academics were mobilized in Britain and the
USA for wartime duties, has been much underestimated.
But second, and equally surprising, the various platoons of
historical modernizers, in spite of patent ideological, political and
national differences, knew themselves to be on the same side,
and fighting the same adversaries. The inspiration of the French
was in no way Marxist, except for the historiography of the
French Revolution, which being identified with the Sorbonne,
was seen, if anything, as part of the enemy forces. (Braudel once
told me regretfully that the trouble with French history in his
lifetime was that its two major figures, himself and Ernest
Labrousse, were ‘brothers who could not get on’.) The post-war
‘historical social science’ generation of West German modernizers
under Wehler and Kocka, initially formed by the German pro-
fessors who had stayed in Germany — often, as it turned out,
 A LIFE IN HISTORY 9
uncomfortably identified with the Third Reich — tended to Max
Weber rather than Marx. In the 1960s they acquired a journal
and an institutional base in two or three new universities. In
Britain, on the other hand, the Marxists were uniquely prominent
and the journal Past and Present, which emerged from the discus-
sions of the CP Historians’ Group, was to become in effect the
modernizers’ chief medium. Yet we all recognized each other as

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allies. P & P acknowledged the inspiration of the Annales in the
first paragraph of its first issue. The Annalist Jacques Le Goff,
who described himself as ‘a reader from the beginning, an
admirer, a friend, almost (if I may say so) a secret lover’, saw
the two journals as allies, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler appears to
consider ‘the astonishing effect of the marxist historians’ genera-
tion’ as the main factor behind ‘the global impact of English
historiography since the 1960s’. The success of P & P itself
proves the point: founded fifty years ago at the very worst
moment of the Cold War by people known for their CP member-
ship, and systematically blackballed for some years — not least
by the Institute of Historical Research — it made its way because
it attracted readers, authors and eventually editorial board
members from patently non-Communist and anti-Communist
historians.
This raises the interesting question why, in post-1945 Britain
of all places, the Marxists were so much more central to the
historical modernizers’ project than elsewhere in western Europe.
I wish I could answer it. I can only make three passing sugges-
tions. First, that history, being a subject of general rather than
specialist university study, was a more obvious option for intellec-
tuals than in other countries: my Cambridge intake in 1936 con-
tained fifty history scholars and exhibitioners, as many as in the
natural sciences, though still much less than the seventy-five of
classics. Second, that history as an intellectual discipline filled
some of the gap left by the absence of the philosophy classes
which were so characteristic of continental Gymnasia or lycées,
and by the virtual absence from British intellectual life (outside
the LSE) of the sciences of society. Had I completed my secondary
education anywhere on the Continent, I very much doubt whether
I would have become a professional historian. Finally, credit
should be given to the British CP, a body which both encouraged
academic activities such as those of its Historians’ Group as
10 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 177
politically beneficial, and did not interfere with them so long as
they caused no political trouble; which we did not, until 1956.
At this stage history in the USA (as distinct from the US social
sciences) still played a relatively minor international role. In fact,
there was little real contact between it and the Old World, except
in fields of traditional interest to US Europeanists, such as the
French Revolution, and in the fields brought with them from
Europe by the German exiles after 1933. But Europeanists were

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a minority, distrusted as cosmopolitan Ivy Leaguers by the great
bulk of generally monoglot historians whose subject was the
history of the USA, a subject which, as treated by most of them,
had very little in common with what historians elsewhere were
doing. Only slavery was a subject that aroused international inter-
est, but the younger historians of this subject who were to make
a mark abroad were very untypical of the profession in the fifties
and sixties, since they included several young post-war members
of the American Communist Party — Herb Gutman, the brilliant
Gene Genovese and the endlessly ingenious Bob Fogel, now a
Nobel laureate.
Curiously enough this was true even of so patently global a
subject as economic history, which may explain why, when an
international association was founded in this field around 1960 it
was basically run as an Anglo-French condominium of Braudel
and Postan. Stateside historical innovations, though known, found
it difficult to cross the Atlantic. This was true in the 1950s
of economic history in terms of businessmen (‘entrepreneurial’
history), and in the 1960s of the much more formidable clio-
metrics — history as retrospective and often imaginary econo-
metrics — and certainly of the mainly Freudian ‘psycho-history’.
Not until 1975 was the quinquennial Congress of Historical
Sciences held in the USA, presumably for diplomatic reasons to
balance the Moscow session of 1970.
On the whole, in the thirty years after 1945 the historical
traditionalists were fighting a rearguard action against the advan-
cing modernists in most western countries where history flour-
ished freely. In 1970 a rather optimistic, not to say triumphalist,
meeting was organized by the American journal Daedalus to
survey the state of history. Except for the (defensive) spokesmen
for political and military history, the gathering was dominated
by the modernizers, British, French and American. By that time
a common flag had been found for their far from homogeneous
 A LIFE IN HISTORY 11
forces: ‘social history’. It fitted in with the political radicalization
of the dramatically expanding student population of the 1960s.
The term was vague, sometimes misleading, but, as I wrote at
the time, noting the ‘remarkably flourishing state of the field’:
‘It is a good moment to be a social historian. Even those of us
who never set out to call ourselves by this name will not want to
disclaim it’.
However, in one respect the situation in the early 1970s had

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advanced very little. Academic history in the western sense was
still largely confined to the First and Second Worlds and Japan.
Broadly speaking, outside these regions it did not flourish, or
continued along traditional lines, except for minorities of Marxists
and (as in parts of Latin America) patches of modernist Parisian
influence. Moreover, most academic history was overwhelmingly
Eurocentric or, in the terms preferred in the USA, concerned
with ‘Western Civilization’. With rare exceptions it was not his-
torians but geographers, anthropologists and linguists, as well as,
naturally, imperial administrators, who occupied themselves with
non-western affairs. Before the war extra-European history as
such interested few historians except the Marxists (by reason of
their anti-imperialism) and, of course, the Japanese who, as it
happened, were then also strongly under Marxist influence. In
Cambridge the direction of the so-called ‘colonial students’ group’
of the CP in the thirties was in the hands of a succession of
historians whose subsequent contribution to the subject is not
negligible: the Japanologist E. H. Norman, the universally erudite
Victor Kiernan, and the brilliant, deeply original and self-
destructive Jack Gallagher.
Extra-European history began to come into its own with the
decolonization of the old empires and the simultaneous rise of
the USA as a world power, reinforced by the sheer scale of the
North American university enterprise. World history as the his-
tory of the globe emerged in the 1960s with the obvious progress
of globalization. Historians from the Third World, notably a
group of brilliant if controversial Indians, spun off from local
Marxist debates, only began to win worldwide recognition in the
1990s. The interests of world empire, as well as the extraordinary
resources of US universities, made the USA the centre of the new
post-Eurocentric history and, incidentally, transformed its history
textbooks and journals. However, the histories of Europe, the
USA and the rest of the world remained and still remain separate,
12 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 177
their publics coexisting but barely touching. Not for want of
trying. In spite of half a century’s systematic efforts, I doubt
whether Past and Present has published any article which histor-
ians of the USA would consider indispensable. We have probably
published a handful of genuinely seminal papers on some of the
other continents, but essentially — even today — the contents of
the journal remain geographically skewed. History still continues
to be, alas, primarily a series of niche markets for both writers

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and readers. In my generation only a handful of historians have
tried to integrate them into a comprehensive world history. This
has been mainly due to the failure, primarily for institutional and
linguistic reasons, of history to emancipate itself from the frame-
work of the nation-state. Looking back, this has been probably
the major weakness of the subject in my lifetime.
Nevertheless, around 1970 it seemed reasonable to suppose
that the war for the modernization of historiography that had
begun in the 1890s had been won. The main railway network,
along which the trains of historiography would roll, had been
built. Not that the modernizers, at least outside the French enem-
ies of the ‘history of events’, necessarily proposed a hegemony
of economic and social history, or even a relegation of political
history, let alone the history of ideas and culture. The modern-
izers were not reductionists. Though they believed that history
must explain and generalize, they knew it was not like the natural
sciences. However, they believed that history had a comprehens-
ive project, whether it was Braudel’s ‘total’ or ‘global history,
integrating the contributions of all the sciences of man’, or — if
I may quote my own definition of ‘what history in the broadest
sense is about: how and why Homo sapiens got from the palaeo-
lithic to the nuclear era’. Yet within a few years the scene had
changed utterly. As Braudel himself complained about the Annales
he no longer directed in the 1970s, the sense of priorities, the
distinction between significance and triviality, which was essential
to the old project, had gone. Just so old hands from Past and
Present complained about Raphael Samuel and his History
Workshop Journal (the last remote offspring of the old CP
Historians’ Group), that they discovered all sorts of corners of
the past interesting to enthusiasts, but showed no signs of wanting
to ask questions about them. History as the exploration of an
objectively recoverable past had not yet been challenged. This
only came with the fashion for ‘postmodernism’, a term which
 A LIFE IN HISTORY 13
was virtually unknown in Britain before the 1980s, and which,
fortunately, has made only marginal inroads into the field of
serious historical writing. Nevertheless, sometime in the early
seventies the historiographical tide turned. Those who thought
they had won most of the battles from the 1930s on, now found
it running against them. ‘Structure’ was on the way down, ‘cul-
ture’ was on the way up. Perhaps the best way of summarizing
the change is to say that young historians after 1945 might be

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inspired by Braudel’s Mediterranean (1949), the young historians
after 1968 by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s brilliant tour
de force of ‘thick description’, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese
Cock-Fight’ (1973).2
There was, in Lawrence Stone’s words, a shift away from
historical models or ‘the large why questions’, from economic
and social structure to culture, from recovering fact to recovering
feeling, from telescope to microscope, as in Carlo Ginzburg’s
enormously influential monograph on his eccentric Friulian
miller. I am also struck by a certain flight from the actual past as
in the flourishing and fertile field of memory studies which has
shot up since about 1980. Here we are concerned not with what
was, but with what people think, feel, remember or usually
misremember about it. In some ways this can be seen as a develop-
ment of themes we pioneered — Pierre Nora, the inspirer of the
monumental Les Lieux de mémoire claimed that it was ‘an echo of
the Invention of Tradition’. But we explored these things in an
utterly different intellectual context. Certainly there is nothing
in common between our way of writing history, and the more or
less sophisticated reductions of history to mere forms of literary
composition. Perhaps there was an element here of that curious
distrust for rational analysis and science which has become more
fashionable as the century drew to its end. Not that anybody
seriously attempted a return to the history before the victories of
the Braudelian-Marxist-Weberian modernizers. Geoffrey Elton’s
attempt to restore a sort of traditional orthodoxy failed, even in
Cambridge.
Has the new turn produced better history than our generation?
It has certainly multiplied the journals beyond measure. I refrain
from judgement. Since the old are biased, why trust us? It is
quite possible that my judgement that the French historical school
2 Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cock-Fight’, in his The
Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).
14 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 177
is no longer what it was in the 1960s is due to mere age and the
ignorance it brings of what is really happening in the world. I
leave it to you.
Nevertheless, since the early 1970s — a watershed in other
aspects of history also — the tone of historiographical discourse
has changed. The reaction has not come primarily from the
ideological or political right. Nor is it a specific rejection of
Marxism, for it also led to the end of the plainly non-Marxian

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Braudelian hegemony in France, and the steep drop in the inter-
national influence of the Annales. Anyway, by the standards of
the 1930s Marxism has not declined. Its questions continue to
haunt those who want to understand the past and the present.
If anything, I see the change in historiography as coming from
the 1968 generation, from an academic left that emerged in the
cultural revolution of the sixties, and thus with a different orienta-
tion from my generation. If there is an intellectual challenge, it
is rooted in a change of mood, of which the British ‘History
Workshop’ is a characteristic expression. Its original object was
not so much historical discovery, explanation or even exposition,
as inspiration, empathy and democratization. It also reflected the
remarkable growth of a mass public interest in the past which
has given history a surprising and welcome prominence in print,
on screen and in public exhibition. ‘History Workshop’ meetings,
which brought together amateurs and professionals, intellectuals
and workers, and vast numbers of the young in jeans, flanked by
sleeping bags and improvised crèches, resembled radical gospel
sessions, especially when addressed with the required hwyl by
star performers like Edward Thompson or the wonderful histor-
ian of Wales, Gwyn Alf Williams. It is typical that the first
Women’s Liberation Conference in Britain grew out of a proposed
History Workshop, inspired at the end of the 1960s by Sheila
Rowbotham, the pioneer author of a book characteristically called
Hidden from History. These were people for whom history was
not so much a way of interpreting or even changing the world,
but a means of collective self-discovery, a way of winning collect-
ive recognition. With some of them I have a lot of sympathy.
Nevertheless, the risk inherent in this search for identity and
roots is that it leads to in-group history — history fully accessible
only to those who share the historical and life-experience of its
subject, or even the physical configuration of the humans to
whom it appeals. It undermines the universality of the universe
 A LIFE IN HISTORY 15
of discourse that is the essence of history as a scholarly and
intellectual discipline. It also undermines what both the ancients
and the moderns had in common, namely the belief that histor-
ians’ investigations, by means of generally accepted rules of logic
and evidence, distinguish between fact and fiction, between what
can be established and what cannot, what is the case and what
we would like to be so. But this has become increasingly danger-
ous. Political pressures on history — by old and new states and

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regimes, identity groups, and forces long concealed under the
frozen ice-cap of the Cold War — are greater than ever before
in my lifetime, and modern media society has given the past
unprecedented prominence and marketing potential. More his-
tory than ever is today being revised or invented by people who
do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose.
The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent
than ever, not least in politics. We are needed.
At the same time we are rediscovering what we can and should
do. While the daily affairs of humanity are today conducted by
the criteria of problem-solving technology, to which history is
almost irrelevant, history has become more central to our under-
standing of the world than ever before. Curiously, while arts
faculties argue about the objective existence of the past, historical
change has become a central component of the natural sciences,
from cosmogony to a revived evolutionary Darwinism. And this
has been transforming history itself, though most historians show
little awareness of it: through molecular and evolutionary biology,
palaeontology and archaeology. History is being reinserted into
the framework of global evolution. We are now aware how extra-
ordinarily young Homo sapiens is as a species. If the DNA calcula-
tions are right, we left Africa 100,000 years ago. The whole of
what can be described as ‘history’ since the invention of agricul-
ture and cities consists of hardly more than 10,000 years or, say,
400 generations, a blink in the eye of geological time. Given the
dramatic acceleration of the pace of humanity’s control over
nature during this period, especially in the last ten or twenty
generations, the development of humanity so far can be seen to
be something like an explosion of our species, a sort of bio-social
supernova, into an unknown future. Let us hope it is not a
catastrophic one. Within this brief moment of time the Darwinism
of the origin of species, sociobiology and similar reductive models
give way to the historians. This is our realm. And, for the first
16 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 177
time, we have an adequate framework to study it as genuinely
global history, and to study it by our methods — betwixt and
between the humanities and the natural and mathematical sci-
ences, belonging to neither, essential to both. Since I think the
central question of history is how we got from the palaeolithic to
the Internet era, I welcome this. If historiography in the twenty-
first century wants a main agenda, here it is. I wish I were young
enough to take part in it.

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E. J. Hobsbawm