Eating One’s Own:

Examining Civil War

A conversation with David Armitage
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ISBN: 978-1-77170-199-0 (ePDF)

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Edited with an introduction by Howard Burton.

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 Contents

A Note on the Text

Introduction

The Conversation

I. Historical Origins
II. The Semantic Archaeologist
III. In Search of a Definition
IV. Bellum Civile
V. What Is To Be Done?
VI. Historical Relevance
VII. Oceans of Possibilities

Continuing the Conversation

 A Note on the Text

The contents of this book are based upon a filmed conversation

between Howard Burton and David Armitage in Boston,
Massachusetts, on August 29, 2015.

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at

Harvard University.

Howard Burton is the creator and host of Ideas Roadshow

and was Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for
Theoretical Physics.
 Introduction
Imagining the Possibilities

There are few disciplines that have a greater mismatch between the
professional outlook and high-school stereotype than history.

While for many the very word “history” conjures up dry as dust
images of memorizing long lists of “dates” and “facts”, most historians
will tell you that their day job is all about interpretation: constructing
meaningful narratives that—while necessarily a far cry from some
canonical ultimate “explanation” of past events—nonetheless
enable the sensitive and thoughtful reader to attain a deeper level of
understanding.

One of my favourite tricks of the historical trade is the counterfactual

“what if” argument: What if Caesar never crossed the Rubicon? What
if the Americans hadn’t won the Revolutionary War? What if Newton
hadn’t been paying attention to falling apples?

By speculating on what didn’t happen, goes the thinking, some

progress can be made on trying to get a better handle on what
actually did: Was a certain historical event to a certain extent
inevitable, or was it merely one of several possible, plausible outcomes?

A counterfactual is hardly like a scientific hypothesis—you can’t run

to a laboratory somewhere and test it—but it’s typically a highly
valuable tool in the historian’s intellectual arsenal to try to rigorously
distinguish between the necessary and the contingent—or even,
sometimes, the downright serendipitous. Most, therefore, are happy
to embrace it. But few do so with quite the fervour of David Armitage.
For David, the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard
University and a prolific author of a wide range of works of political
and intellectual history, counterfactual approaches represent nothing
less than the very definition of what it means to engage in the
historical enterprise.

“I always argue that all history is counterfactual history, but most of

the time we don’t acknowledge that. As we’re trying to make sense of
historical evidence, we’re always forming plausible and implausible
explanations, or scenarios, or narratives, around that material, and
abandoning those that are implausible in favour of those that seem
plausible as an explanation for all the available evidence.

“That’s counterfactual thinking—we’re imagining ways in which

the evidence could fit together in such a way that it has explanatory
power or that it coheres as a narrative.”

Another prime way that such counterfactual thinking relates to the

words we use to describe our everyday behaviour. While most of us
unthinkingly go about our business invoking whatever terms seem
appropriate to the task at hand, the astute historian often examines
the background of those terms to see what lies beneath, asking
questions like, Why that word, exactly? What would happen if we used
another? Is it a coincidence that this is the expression we use today for
that particular idea or concept rather than something else?

“I’m interested in the way in which language is functional: how it

can be used, especially in political terms. Those of us who are in
that tradition are interested in etymologies, not in the sense that
etymology is destiny—that the original meaning of a term will
therefore, ever after, inflect the way in which a term is used or what
its implications can be—but as a way of recognizing the mobile
and contextual nature of words and expressions—that the history
of the different uses of a term is always, to some extent, embedded
 or sedimented into its uses ever after, whether consciously or
unconsciously.”

Given his focus on language, it’s perhaps not surprising that David
has developed his own expression to describe his historical approach
geared towards analyzing the significance of these accumulated layers
of meaning: a history in ideas.

“The method of ‘a history in ideas’ to recover that sedimentation of

meanings is basically Nietzschean. I remember my early encounter
with Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals was one of those Ah-
ha! moments for me, because I’d been groping towards something
like that without realizing how well someone else had previously
expressed it—in this particular case someone writing in the 1880s.

“One of the most pointed utterances in that particular text is where

Nietzsche says, “Only an idea which has no history can be defined”,
that the most complex ideas are those for which no single definition
is possible.

“And the exercise of ‘a history in ideas’ is to uncover the various

genealogical layers that history has sedimented into the meaning of
the term and to look at the ways in which, often conflict had driven
meaning.”

Well, you might be forgiven for thinking to yourself, this is all very
well and good, but isn’t it all a little too... abstract and academic? After
all, what does all this stuff about counterfactuals and etymology and
Nietzsche have to do with “the real world”?

Quite a lot, as it happens.

Take David’s book, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. You probably

won’t be surprised to learn by now that David carefully charts the
development of the phrase “civil war”, tracing it back to the late
Roman Republic before duly following its progression through the
Roman Empire and early-European societies right through to the
travails of an 18th-century legal scholar struggling to provide a
suitable definition for his superiors in the Union Army in 1863.

But you might be surprised to know that a major impetus for the book
was David’s struggle to make sense of what, exactly, was happening in
Iraq in late 2006 and early 2007. After having come to the regrettable
conclusion that his current project had reached a dead end, he
decided to take an afternoon off and go through some papers that
were available at the Huntington Library, where he was working.

“I was aware that Francis Lieber had been the lead author on
what’s usually taken to be the first modern codification of the laws of
war, and I discovered that the vast majority of his papers were held
at the Huntington, so I thought, Well, this might be an interesting
afternoon’s work, just to see what was there.

“Going through his correspondence, I discovered very quickly that,

as he was putting together drafts of what came to be called “the
Lieber Code” for the Union Army in 1863, he sent a version of the
code to his boss in Washington D.C., Henry Halleck.

“Halleck wrote back and said, ‘This is fabulous. It’s exactly what
we’re looking for: we need this codification for the Union Army.
But there’s a slight problem. We’re fighting a civil war here, and
you didn’t mention that anywhere in the text. Could you just
maybe add a paragraph or two defining civil war, just at the end?
It would be really helpful.’

“Lieber saw the force of that. He then wrote back to his boss in
some intellectual anguish, saying, ‘You know, it’s really much more
difficult than I had imagined. I’ve searched the literature and
there is no legal definition of civil war anywhere that I can come
up with. So I’m going to have to create one for myself, or for us,
or for the Union Army, or for lawyers in general. This is rather a
 tough task,’—or, as he put it in one of his letters, ‘Ticklish business,
that’.

“Lieber’s difficulties with pinning down the concept of civil war, the
meaning of the term “civil war”, became extremely resonant for me
because this was late 2006–early 2007 and I was watching television
and reading The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times when
people were debating what language should be used to describe
the horrifying, sickening levels of violence that were taking place
in Iraq. There was a very polemical debate taking place not only in
the media, but ultimately in the US Congress in particular, about
whether or not what was happening in Iraq was a civil war.

“This was a clear parallel to these questions being asked in 1863:

What is this conflict? What should we call it and how we should
define it?

“And I thought—as someone interested in the slipperiness of

political language, but also the way in which that slipperiness on the
page translates into real-world consequences for tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions of people—
maybe this was a good topic to pursue.”

And so it proved to be. Because while a rigorous, all-inclusive

definition of what a civil war precisely is and isn’t is never going
to happen—and we should justifiably be sceptical of anyone who
claims to have such a thing—it’s overwhelmingly clear that a careful
appreciation of both what has happened in the past and what hasn’t
but might have will significantly assist us the next time we need to
decide how to act in an international crisis.

Which might well be tomorrow.

The Conversation
 I. Historical Origins
In search of multiple perspectives

HB: I’d like to get a sense of your historical motivations and the
origins of your intellectual development. Were you passionate about
history as a young boy? How did that begin for you?

DA: My earliest historical memories probably go back to my early

teens. I remember, some of the very first books that I ever bought
myself were works of history—one on Alexander von Humboldt
and his travels in South America and another one by the great
Renaissance cultural and intellectual historian Frances Yates, The Art
of Memory—both of which seem to me enormously intriguing topics,
but ones which I can’t quite understand why I would have been so
interested in at the age of 14 or 15.
But now—looking back—both may have pointed towards
some of the directions that my own interests would go academically,
at school, at university, and then subsequently in my career as a
historian.
But my career as a historian was belated. In fact, I studied
English literature as an undergraduate and began a PhD on
Shakespeare for a couple of years until I learned the error of my ways
and reverted back to history.

HB: What happened? Was there a singular event that took place? How
did you learn the error of your ways?

DA: Well, I was counter-suggestible as a schoolboy. As you know, in

the British system, one gets tracked ever more tightly through one’s
secondary education to the likelihood of doing a single subject at
university.
And at my school, the two tracks that seemed most obvious for
my interests were either English literature or history; and history was
always going to be the most likely of those subjects, as it was the one
that I enjoyed most and had the greatest success at as a schoolboy.
But at the last possible moment, like a show jumper’s horse
balking at the final fence, I decided that, so excellent was the
teaching that I had at school—and it genuinely was; I had learned
just about everything I thought I wanted to learn at that point about
the historical periods that I was likely to study—it would be more
profitable to open up my vistas on the past by studying literature, in
addition to what I’d already learned as a historian at school level.
So I went to Cambridge to study English, and did much better
on my exams than I—or perhaps anyone else—expected; and then
for lack of imagination, but also because of the opportunity that was
available, I went straight on to do a PhD.
I had done my equivalent, in the Cambridge system, of a senior
thesis on Shakespeare, so I wanted to develop some of the ideas and
the research that I had done as an undergraduate into a PhD thesis.
But I found, after about 18 months, that although it was
wonderful to be in Shakespeare’s company, I couldn’t really imagine
a large part of my life spent with other Shakespeare scholars—not
that, individually, they weren’t very interesting—but I found it too
limiting to have only one canon of one author to work on, when really
I wanted to range much more broadly.
Even at that point I knew that I had an exceedingly low boredom
threshold and that I was likely to be changing topics and questions
and interests quite often; and to be confined within one, single body
of material—however rich, deep and profound that might be, as is the
case of the Shakespearean canon—was not likely to be where I’d be
most happy.
So I went to talk to a friend who was also a careers adviser and
told her that I wanted to abandon my academic career—to give up my
PhD and get out of this confining profession that I’d been channelled
into—and do something imaginative like take the civil service exams.
And she rightly told me, “Don’t be so foolish. You’re having a
frequent kind of crisis that is common to graduate students. Why not
apply for a fellowship to go somewhere else for a year or two as part of
your doctoral research to refresh yourself? Meet some new people, learn
some new techniques, get into some new conversations.”
Very luckily, I got a two-year fellowship to study in the United
States and ended up in Princeton, in large part because Princeton
had—and still has—an extremely good group of early-modern
historians.
So I think I knew at that point that I wanted to retool as a
historian, or rather, go back to my roots as a historian. And that is
certainly what happened in those two years.
So when I came back to Cambridge at the end of those two
years, I moved back to history and was doing a history PhD with
Quentin Skinner, doing my final writing-up under his supervision.
And the rest, as they say, is history.

HB: Tell me more about this fellowship that enabled you to go to

Princeton. Was it geared to people who were contemplating changing
fields? Was it a covert mechanism to turn people away from English
literature and into historical scholarship? What was that all about?

DA: Well, it was a fellowship from The Commonwealth Fund of New

York—a wonderful organization—called a Harkness Fellowship,
which was founded in the 1920s. It was called, subsequently,
the “Rhodes in reverse”—as the Rhodes Scholarship sent young
Americans to Britain to learn about Britain and the British Empire
and create an anglophone elite, so the Harkness Fellowship was
founded in the other direction to bring talented, non-Americans,
mostly students or young professionals from Britain, to study for two
years in the US.
 It was the most marvellous fellowship: it gave you two years of
academic study anywhere you wanted, and they forced you to travel
in the summer between your two academic years. So you were given
quite a generous stipend to rent a car or pay for train tickets—any
mode of transportation you chose—to see as much of the United
States as possible.
Two years or so after I was awarded the fellowship, The
Commonwealth Fund decided that this was a luxury that was
incompatible with its broader goals, so they closed the fellowship
program down in that form.
So the kind of freedom that you rightly perceived in this—to
follow one’s own path, and so forth—became much narrower
afterwards.
But it completely changed the course in my life and I’m eternally
grateful for that—not only for the freedom it gave me to migrate
intellectually, but it immediately convinced me that I would be much
happier in the longer term working and living in the United States
than I would be back in Britain—so it opened up that possibility.
As soon as I possibly could, I came back to the US and I’ve
been here ever since—for 25 years—but that was very much thanks
to The Commonwealth Fund, this fellowship, and the consequent
opportunity to be in Princeton where I met an enormous range
of very close friends, but also some very significant intellectual
influences as well: historians and other scholars who were in or
around or coming through Princeton at that point. Those were very
important years for me.

HB: You mentioned eventually moving on and working with Quentin

Skinner. It strikes me as likely more than a coincidence that you,
a budding Shakespearean scholar—at least until you became
diverted—became connected with somebody who has long been
deeply interested in rhetoric from that particular time period.
Of course, Quentin has enormously wide interests, but his
most recent work, Forensic Shakespeare, as you of course know, is all
about the intellectual tradition that paved the way for a particular
type of dramatically-oriented rhetorical explosion that occurred in
Shakespearean England.
I imagine that you had a lot to talk about. Did that play any role?
Did you have lots of conversations with him about that sort of thing
even back then?

DA: Well, certainly what drew me to him was his work; and one of the
key insights of Quentin’s methodological work, as indeed in much of
his own scholarship, is the necessity to put ideas in context—indeed,
that became the title of the scholarly series that he founded at
Cambridge University Press, Ideas in Context.
I realized when I read his work that he was expressing—
infinitely more elegantly and infinitely more subtly—answers to
questions that I had been asking for about ten years by that point:
How are we to put ideas and other cultural forms into the past in such a
way that they become comprehensible in past terms, but then can also
be rendered comprehensible in the present?
I had been intrigued by versions of that question as a literary
scholar: How could we understand the language of Shakespeare—or
his contemporaries, or near contemporaries—in such a way that we
could recover that in historical terms?
This was not necessarily a question that literary scholars
were asking at that point, in the 1980s. And part of the reason why
I wanted to move out of literature and into history, was because
the historians—especially intellectual historians like Quentin, his
students, and contemporaries—were asking the questions that I
wanted to ask about complex linguistic phenomena.
Whether it was a Shakespeare play, an epic poem by John Milton,
a work of political thought by Thomas Hobbes or John Locke—or, in
parallel, performances of 16th-, 17th- or 18th-century music.
When I was an undergraduate and graduate student, many
of my closest friends and contemporaries were musicians, music
scholars, and singers; and many were involved in the early-music
movement and authentic-performance movement at that time.
And they were grappling with questions that were remarkably
similar to the kinds of questions that intellectual historians were
grappling with, but often in a very different language.
We can’t hear with 16th-century ears, but we can approximate
to 16th-century performance practices in singing, or 18th-century
performance practices on the violin; and how does one bridge that
gap to recover some kind of authenticity, to understand how the
original creators—or in the case of music, performers—understood
what they were doing?
I realized, having read my way into that literature, and having
talked to friends who tried to reconstruct music in that way, that
these were exactly the same questions that intellectual historians
were asking, as well as art historians—I read a lot of art history at
that point, such as E.H. Gombrich, Michael Baxandall and others who
were trying to do a similar historical recovery exercise in art history.
I think the confluence of those interests in historical
performance in music, the recovery of alien understandings of art and
its meanings, and then the kinds of pointed questions that historians
like Quentin Skinner were asking, helped me to grope towards
answers to the sorts of questions that were driving me, that I was
not finding, at that point at least, among literary scholars—though
certainly things began to change very rapidly after that.
The kind of work that Quentin and others have done more
recently on Shakespeare is a sign of 20 or 25 years of new scholarship
which has brought those similar kinds of questions into literary work.

HB: Right. But his motivations, presumably, were similar and

longstanding, I would imagine.

DA: Yes, exactly.

HB: It’s interesting hearing you say this because from my—albeit
quite removed and inexpert—sense of your work, I have always
regarded you more as a politically-oriented thinker.
If one looks at The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, for
example, or The Declaration of Independence, or your recent work on
civil wars (Civil Wars: A History in Ideas), there seems to be a focus on
looking at history from a rather more socio-political perspective.
The answer I was expecting—clearly I didn’t do my homework
well enough—was a sense of being particularly oriented to get a
greater sense of political conflict and human dynamics on a societal
level, but it seems that really wasn’t a primary motivation for you
after all—it looks to be much more related to a more general sense of
developing a broader type of perspective.
Do you regard yourself now as a more politically-oriented
intellectual historian, or would that be pigeonholing you too much
and you would rebel against such a categorization?

DA: No, I think that’s very fair. And it does mark a very fundamental
change that took place during the years that I was in Princeton—or,
to look at it from another perspective—during the years when I was
outside Britain.
Those years in Princeton, I discovered that I was “British”, rather
than “English”, for instance—it was interesting to be called “British”,
or “a Brit,” by Americans and to begin to reflect on what the difference
was between being “English” and “British”.
This was in the late 1980s, with the initial stirrings of questions
about nationalism, which burst out especially after 1989 in Central
and Eastern Europe, questions about the European Union, and so on.
“Globalization” was not a word that anyone used at that point,
but I was beginning to intuit vast shifts in outlook which were
somehow easier to spot once I was outside my domestic environment
where I’d been brought up.
From across the Atlantic I could look at things from a rather
different perspective and think about the nature of a very different
political system in the US, its relationship to its historical roots, and
so forth.
I began to think much more about the Atlantic perspective,
which became very important for much of my subsequent work.

HB: Well, even more broadly than an Atlantic perspective: a global

perspective.

DA: Precisely.

HB: For me, as I was reading your book on the Declaration of

Independence or your book on civil wars, I kept thinking, Here’s this
person who’s clearly grappling with these issues from a wide variety
of different angles: What is really the difference between a nation and
a state, let alone a nation-state? How, exactly, do people collectively
identify with one particular political framework versus another?—and
more significantly, How does this change over time? and Why does this
change over time? and How is it used, abused, and all the rest by those
on the ground at the time?
At the beginning of Civil Wars: A History in Ideas, you talk about
the origins of your involvement in that research question—the details
of which I’d like to get to in a moment—but you make some pithy
comment about how you had written a book, namely, The Declaration
of Independence: A Global History, as “state-making”, and so you
thought that maybe it would be interesting to do something that was
oriented toward “state-breaking”.
And it seems to me that what you’re really saying by this is that
you’re exploring this ambiguity of what a revolution is, and how the
ideas or words that people might ascribe to something very much
depends on their particular perspective—one man’s “secessionist” is
another man’s “freedom fighter”, and so forth.
To me, this motivation to be deliberately examining different
perspectives about the same event comes out again and again in
your work, the need to take distinctly parallel approaches towards
addressing the same issue. Is that a fair way to look at it?

DA: Absolutely, yes. I think this was a discovery of a driving concern

that came, as it were, after I’d left Shakespeare and moved on to other
more political topics. Looking back, I tend to feel that I’ve only ever
had one idea and I keep coming back to that.

HB: Well, it was a good idea.

DA: It’s been reasonably productive. I’ve ridden it quite hard for many
years now; and it’s not always obvious that everybody has even one
idea to work with, so I suppose I’m lucky that I got that one.
And that idea has circulated around the question of the state—
where it emerged from, what it was related to, why it’s proved so
resilient, how it proliferated around the globe, and so forth.
So my first book, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire,
concerned the process of state formation in Britain: that is, the
binding together of three kingdoms—England, Scotland and
Ireland—into what ultimately becomes, by the 19th century, the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. I was wondering about
the origins of that in relation to the process of empire building in the
Atlantic world.
The usual story that was told was that first you had states and
then you had empires: an English or a British state was created, a
French state was created, much later, for instance, a German state
or an Italian state was created; and the next thing you did, once you
became a state, was to create an empire—send people out, conquer
territory to corner resources, or whatever it may be.
I wanted to complicate that story in my first book by saying,
“Well, in fact, maybe it was the other way around. Maybe state
formation was the result of empire, not something that emerged in a
linear fashion, with the state coming first and empire coming later”.
 And then, having taken that story of the formation of the
British Empire up to the middle of the 18th century and having quite
deliberately refused, in that first book, to say anything about that
American Revolution—that was a vortex into which I did not want
to be drawn—it seemed logical then, not least because I’d spent the
earliest part of my career as a teacher in the United States, to pay
back some of the debt to the US by thinking about American History
through an Atlantic, and indeed partly a British, and then ultimately a
global lens, in the Declaration of Independence book.
As you mentioned, that book takes an international and then a
global view of the American Declaration of Independence in order to
try to understand how that document was marked by its international
context in 1776.
There is the question of what its authors “thought they were
doing”—to take one of Quentin Skinner’s famous phrases—by issuing
a Declaration of Independence at that point; and then, by tracing
the long-range impact of the Declaration through its own reception
history—not just how the Declaration itself was read and imitated
elsewhere, but also how it created a genre of other Declarations of
Independence.
More than a hundred such “Declarations of Independence”
have been issued since 1776, which allows us to trace the spread of
“independence” as a defining feature of statehood around the globe
since the 18th century right up to the present—to the likes of Kosovo
and South Sudan—to see a long-range process unfolding.
That also intersected with a more recent book, Foundations
of Modern International Thought, which was centred around the
question, How did we all come to believe that we live in a world of
states?
We have this rather odd linguistic problem: we have a club for
states called the “United Nations”, which is actually made up of states,
not nations.
HB: As you said, it should have been the “United States”, but that
name was already taken.

DA: That’s right. Someone had already taken that.

In fact, one could follow that idea through a little bit further and
say that the United States is, in fact, in some sense an agglomeration
of different nations—if by that we mean self-identifying peoples
brought together under the umbrella of one federal political
organization. So perhaps we should swap the two names.

HB: I don’t think that would work very well with the Republican
Party. Well, probably not the Democrats either, come to think of it, but
certainly not the Republicans.

DA: No, that’s right.

At any rate, these all seemed to me to be logical questions.
And as you said, having talked about the process of state-making
in the Declaration of Independence book, it was natural to look at
the opposite end of the spectrum as well into the notion of “state-
breaking”, and civil war in particular.
As it happens, researching the Declaration of Independence
book also took me into a lot of related literature concerning civil war.
For instance, in the era of what we call “the American
Revolution”, contemporaries in 1775 talked about “the American Civil
War”, they talked about “a civil war taking place on both sides of the
Atlantic”—obviously not a war of arms in Britain itself, but one which
violently divided people.
And certainly, on the American side of the Atlantic, it did create
local civil wars, as well as something that could be thought of as “a
British Civil War” that succeeded the civil wars of the 17th century, as
contemporaries understood it.
 And I wondered why people thought in those terms, where that
idea of civil war came from, what implications it would have for them,
and how that relates to our current concepts of civil war.
In fact, the book on civil war began when I was still thinking
about some of the issues that had been raised by the Declaration of
Independence book when I was doing research at the Huntington
Library in Southern California.
This was in late 2006 and early 2007, at the height of the
violence in the Iraq War, when there was a very pointed, highly
political, and polemical debate—especially in the US, but also in other
parts of the world—about what to call the violence in Iraq. Was it an
insurgency? Was it a rebellion? Was it terrorism? Or was it a civil war?
And I began to appreciate that perhaps the questions that I
had been grappling with for over a decade at that point had some
contemporary, political relevance, rather than—as we sometimes
prejudicially say—“merely historical” significance.
So I wanted to bring a long-range historical story about the
meanings of civil war up to the present, in some ways culminating
this strand of interest in different forms of human community, the
political language used to describe them, and the ways in which that
political language can become very polemical and often conflictual in
and of itself.
 Questions for Discussion:

1. Under what circumstances does it makes sense to divide “history”

into various subfields, such as “political history”, “cultural history”,
“global history” and so on? Are there times when such distinctions
might, in fact, be counterproductive?

2. To what extent is it important, generally speaking, for historians

to be aware of current events? (This is a common theme that occurs
throughout many Ideas Roadshow conversations—those with a
particular interest in this issue are referred to, for example, Chapters
3 and 10 of The Passionate Historian with John Elliott, Chapters
6-8 of Embracing Complexity with David Cannadine and Chapter
10 of Byzantium: Beyond the Cliché with Maria Mavroudi.)
 II. The Semantic Archaeologist
Analyzing sedimented meaning

HB: Another constant focus throughout your work seems to be on the

specifics of language, examining not only rhetoric but how words are
used and change their meaning.
The Declaration of Independence is something that is now
regarded as a sacrosanct document by nearly everyone in the
US—and other countries besides, as you say—but, at the time, it
served a rather different functional purpose and wasn’t recognized
immediately in the same way that it is recognized today.
So a focus on etymology is another, it seems to me, very salient
feature of your work. In the civil war book, you talk about the fact
that, by our contemporary understanding, the Greeks didn’t really
have a word for civil war—the closest they had was the word “stasis”,
which has many other, different, implications—and that it was
really the Romans who invented the idea of civil war, by specifically
invoking a phrase with a somewhat oxymoronic tension to it, which
has considerably dissipated in contemporary translations.
This focus on etymology reminded me of when I spoke with
Darrin McMahon (Deconstructing Genius) and he described how the
etymology of “genius” had all sorts of causal implications in terms of
the way people interpreted and perceived what genius actually was.
And when I talked to John Dunn (Democracy: Clarifying the
Muddle), he described why he devoted a significant fraction of his
book on the history of democracy to its etymology: how meanings
associated with the word have changed and how different people
have interpreted, and sometimes deliberately misinterpreted, the
word itself.
Quentin Skinner, meanwhile, described to me how his rigorous
etymological-historical investigations of the notion of “freedom”
culminated in his deeply insightful “neo-Roman” interpretation of
“freedom” as a declaration of status rather than as a predicate of
actions (Quest for Freedom).
So as I was reading your work I found myself wondering,
Is it possible to be an intellectual historian and not pay attention
to etymology? Do you know of any non-etymologically-oriented
intellectual historians? Or is that, in itself, oxymoronic?

DA: There are a great many intellectual historians who are much less
interested in etymology because they’re, perhaps, less invested in the
overlap between words and concepts.
This is a point of interesting debate among intellectual
historians: what is it that we study? Some intellectual historians study
intellectuals, either individual intellectuals or groups of intellectuals.

HB: Oh, I didn’t realize that—so what some people mean by

“intellectual historian” is to be a historian of “intellectuals”?

DA: Yes, that’s a perfectly legitimate topic and a very important

one. It shades into social history as well as intellectual history. It’s
focused just as much on the interpersonal relations, the educational
backgrounds, the various kinds of interactions among individuals, as
it is on their intellectual products, in terms of their structured texts or
arguments, for instance.
But I think, for those of us who are, in various ways, attached to
the contextualist method—what’s been called, sometimes misleading,
“the Cambridge school”—we’re very interested in language and how
language functions; the way in which it structures thought, and how
it can be used instrumentally: to persuade, to decry, to undermine, to
promote, and many other things.
We’re interested in the way in which language is functional—as
well as merely semantic, as a carrier of meaning—how it can be used,
especially in political terms.
 Those of us who are in that tradition are interested in
etymologies, not in the sense that etymology is destiny—that the
original meaning of a term will therefore, ever after, inflect the way in
which a term is used or what its implications can be.

HB: This is your notion of history in ideas rather than a history of

ideas.

DA: Exactly.

HB: You are emphasizing the contextual nature of these notions, that
no Platonic form exists for these particular words.

DA: Yes. It’s mobile, it’s contextual, it’s what one might call
sedimentary. That is, the history of the different uses of a term is
always, to some extent, embedded or sedimented into its uses ever
after, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Sometimes it’s quite conscious, especially in the context of
quite tight and smoothly or frequently-transmitted traditions, like
the classical tradition of Roman and Greek classics, which formed the
bedrock of education in large parts of the West, deep into the 20th
century.
Indeed, I was probably part of the very last generation for which
that was still fundamental. I went to a grammar school in the north of
England that had been founded in the 15th century, and although the
teaching of Greek had just about gone by the time I’d arrived there—
so I didn’t learn ancient Greek at school—Latin was still fundamental.
I studied Latin all the way through to my final year: I was reading a
canon of Latin works of poetry and prose which St. Augustine would
have recognized, for instance.
So within traditions like that, the memory of earlier usages
and allusions to the meanings of words—as well as the meanings
of events, individual characters, and rhetorical tropes—was deeply
embedded.
And the method of “a history in ideas” to recover that
sedimentation of meanings is basically Nietzschean. I remember my
early encounter with Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals was one
of those Ah-ha! moments for me, because I’d been groping towards
something like that without realizing how well someone else had
previously expressed it—in this particular case someone writing in
the 1880s.
One of the most pointed utterances in that particular text is
where Nietzsche says, “Only an idea which has no history can be
defined”, that the most complex ideas are those for which no single
definition is possible.
And certainly when I was putting together the materials for
the book on civil war—I think I even quote that in the book—that
fundamentally expresses the way in which I understand how ideas
of civil war have accumulated and sedimented over time in such a
way that all efforts to reduce that term to a single definition falsify
the complexity of its history, but also do violence to the way in which
violence is understood and should be understood.
So the exercise of “a history in ideas” is to uncover the various
genealogical layers that history has sedimented into the meaning of
the term and to look at the ways in which, often—again, this is a very
Nietzschean way of thinking about it—conflict had driven meaning.
Conflict, contestation and appropriation of key terms—whether
it’s “civil war”, “democracy”, “genius”, “art”, or other similarly powerful
terms—is not only what has made them objects of recurrent study,
but also makes them ideal vehicles for historical reconstruction—
almost archaeological reconstruction—to add a Foucauldian
metaphor to the Nietzschean genealogical metaphor.

HB: I’d like to move to a more detailed examination of the concepts

involved in your civil war book, but before I do, I’d just like to make
one small comment. There seems to be something very curious
about you, David, because you went to a grammar school and studied
a Latin-based curriculum shortly before that was overhauled, you
won this wonderfully broad-minded fellowship right before it was
discontinued, at least in that form. Are you doing something curious
to the academic world so that they break the mold after you’ve been
through?

DA: Well, you’ve spotted a pattern that I’ve reflected on myself—the

“Typhoid Mary of Western intellectual life”: anything I do will collapse
immediately after I’ve done it. It also relates to a very disturbing
personal pattern: I was teaching at Columbia, in New York, on the day
of 9/11; I was in London on the day of 7/7, so I always tell people,
“Don’t come to a city with me, because something terrible is going to
happen.”
For a while there I did begin to wonder why so many
institutions withered and died after I had successfully taken part in
them, and why all these terrible acts were also happening somewhere
around where I was at that time.

HB: Well, it’s a subject for future historians, no doubt.

DA: Indeed. It’s also a sign that one should never overestimate one’s
own historical significance.
 Questions for Discussion:

1. Should “intellectual history” be regarded as an academic discipline,

or rather a methodological approach to understanding certain ideas?

2. Are there ideas which have “no history”? To what extent is that, in
fact, possible?
 III. In Search of a Definition
Francis Lieber’s “ticklish business”

HB: You mentioned being at the Huntington Library researching the

works of Francis Lieber on the codification of the rules of engagement
during war, which he was then asked to extend to incorporate the
notion of civil war—which, in turn stimulated you to write Civil Wars:
A History in Ideas.
But what you don’t actually mention is what you were planning
on doing with that Francis Lieber business in the first place. This was
after the Declaration of Independence book, presumably. So what
were you planning to do, and are you still thinking about doing that?

DA: I actually wasn’t planning to do anything with that. I went to

the Huntington Library with a completely different project in mind,
and I relatively rapidly discovered that they didn’t exactly have the
materials I had hoped that they would.
It was fantastic to be in Southern California for nine months,
but after about six weeks or so, I realized that the vein had run dry
on the material I had taken with me, so I needed to plunge into the
Huntington’s other remarkable collections to see what else they might
have.
This was, as I mentioned earlier, during the Iraq War. It was a
time when issues of the laws of war were becoming extremely salient
across the globe because of what was going on in Iraq.
I was aware, extremely vaguely at that point, that Francis
Lieber—a Prussian born lawyer, who was a veteran of the battle
of Waterloo and who had later migrated to the United States—had
been the lead author on what’s usually taken to be the first modern
codification of the laws of war. That was as much as I knew at that
point.
But I discovered that all of his papers—at least, the vast
majority of his papers—were held at the Huntington, so I thought,
Well, this might be an interesting afternoon’s work, just to see what was
there.

HB: So you were just poking around, looking for something

interesting?

DA: Yes. It’s another example of the way in which well-directed

academic philanthropy can open up the essential freedom that leads
to productive serendipity, which I think is the most crucial gift that
one can get in academic life.
I had some time, access to a vast range of extraordinarily
interesting, potentially fertile materials, so I thought I would look
at Francis Lieber just out of interest—not because I thought it was
necessarily going to lead to anything.
Going through his correspondence, I discovered very quickly
that, as he was putting together drafts of what came to be called “the
Lieber Code” for the Union Army in 1863—“General Order No. 100”
was the official title of it—he sent a version of the code to his boss
in Washington D.C., Henry Halleck, who, like Lieber himself, was a
lawyer—in fact, an international lawyer in Halleck’s case.
Halleck wrote back and said, “This is fabulous. It’s exactly what
we’re looking for: we need this codification for the Union Army. But
there’s a slight problem. We’re fighting a civil war here, and you
didn’t mention that anywhere in the text. Could you just maybe add a
paragraph or two defining civil war, just at the end? It would be really
helpful.”
Lieber saw the force of that. He then wrote back to his boss in
some intellectual anguish, saying, “You know, it’s really much more
difficult than I had imagined. I’ve searched the literature and there is
no legal definition of civil war anywhere that I can come up with. So I’m
going to have to create one for myself, or for us, or for the Union Army,
or for lawyers in general. This is rather a tough task,”—or, as he put it
in one of his letters, “Ticklish business, that”.
So he had to put together the first legal definition of “civil war”
in 1863. It was a very bizarre definition. It was largely tailored to the
current circumstances of what was, not even generally at that point,
being called “the American Civil War”. But it became fundamental in
legalizing a concept which, until that point, had been historical or
literary, but had not been formalized within any expert discipline or
language.
This became the first moment where a group of professionals—
in this case one lawyer, but later others as well—had to explicitly
ask themselves, “Okay, what is a civil war, exactly? What makes that
different from other kinds of warfare or other kinds of organized
violence?”
And Lieber’s difficulties with pinning down the concept of civil
war, the meaning of the term “civil war”, became extremely resonant
for me because, as I mentioned earlier, this was late 2006–early 2007
and I was watching television and reading The Los Angeles Times
and The New York Times when people were debating what language
should be used to describe the horrifying, sickening levels of violence
that were taking place in Iraq. There was a very polemical debate
taking place not only in the media, but ultimately in the US Congress
in particular, about whether or not what was happening in Iraq was a
civil war.
This was a clear parallel to these questions being asked in 1863:
What is this conflict? What should we call it and how should we define
it?
And I thought—as someone interested in the slipperiness of
political language, but also the way in which that slipperiness on the
page translates into real-world consequences for tens of thousands,
hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions of people—
maybe this was a good topic to pursue.
 I was looking around for the subject for my next book; and, as so
often happens, it was by sheer coincidence—though no coincidences
are sheer coincidences: one is always prepared for the possibility
that something will emerge from the concatenation of unrelated
materials—that I thought, Here is a book that I need to write which
would deal with 2006 in Iraq, 1863 in the US, 1776—the American
Revolution as a civil war—the civil wars of the 17th century, where
some of my early research on British history had been concentrated,
and then going on all the way back to the Roman historians of civil
war, whom I had studied as a schoolboy a couple decades earlier in my
grammar school.

HB: A great big meaty theme for the longue durée.

DA: Indeed. I was approaching middle age and I thought, This is a

moment when I should be thinking about a big topic. And this was
the biggest topic I could think of: a history of ideas of civil war from
Ancient Rome to the present.
Writing that book over the last decade has almost killed me, but
I hope it will be worthwhile, because I think it’s a topic where one
can show the importance of a historical, genealogical, archaeological
approach, and the importance of intellectual history to understanding
contemporary dilemmas; but also a topic where one can make a claim
for the importance of history in relation to public discourse.
It also allows one to make a claim to both historians and the
broader public about the necessity of treating some fundamental
topics from a long-range—or as historians say, a longue durée—
perspective: not concentrating on simply a few months or a few years,
but actually, in some cases, excavating back through hundreds or
even thousands of years in order to understand the dilemmas of the
present.

HB: Two remarks.

 First, if memory serves, you wrote how when you started
thinking about this as a possible topic, you thought, Well, surely
somebody’s thought of this before and has written a long-ranging,
sweeping view of what a civil war is, what it means, how it’s been used
and abused from many different perspectives and, more generally, how
it has evolved over time.
And you were quite surprised to discover that, in fact, that was
not the case.

DA: Yes, absolutely. It seemed so obvious and so important. How

could nobody have done this before? Later, after having spent nearly
ten years working on the book, I realized exactly why no one had done
this: because it’s extraordinarily difficult for one human being—let
alone even, perhaps, a team of human beings—to cover such a large
and complex span of material. But nonetheless it was, for me, very
important to do this.
One’s always glad to find a gap in the market—there are fewer
and fewer such opportunities these days. But it’s also important for
me to try to methodologically innovate somehow with every book I
write—whether it’s by expanding in space, bringing together fields
which haven’t been in dialogue with each other, or, in the case of this
book, by expanding the usual boundaries of intellectual history in
time.
I wanted to set myself a methodological challenge, as well as
answer a particular pointed and—at least to me, and I hope to others
as well—important question.

HB: My second remark is that it’s probably worth pointing out that,
the last time I checked anyway, the Huntington Library is actually still
standing, so it seems to have avoided the Armitage Curse.

DA: It is—which is extraordinary, especially in Southern California,

considering the risk posed by fires, tsunamis, and earthquakes.
 Questions for Discussion:

1. To what extent is a “codification of the laws of war” a justification

for war?

2. Does this chapter give you a deeper insight into the everyday
research world of the professional historian? To what extent does a
historian’s perspective of “a gap in the market” correspond to most
people’s sense of that concept?

3. What do you think David means, exactly, when he talks about his
desire to “methodologically innovate” with every book he writes?
 IV. Bellum Civile
The Roman reference point

HB: I’d like to talk a little bit about the Romans—you devote a
considerable amount of time and attention to the fact that the ancient
Romans invented the concept of civil war.
In keeping with what you were saying earlier regarding the
value of etymology and the sedimentation of meaning, my sense is
that this idea not only played a very strong role in how the Romans
saw themselves, but also in the views of their many descendants
of the Roman world. So that seems the appropriate place to start
one’s investigations of this idea. And one question I have about all of
this is a somewhat whimsical counterfactual one: how do you think
our notion of civil war would be different had ancient Rome never
existed?

DA: Well, the first recorded use of the term for “civil war”—“bellum
civile”—is in the 60s BCE when Cicero uses it in one of his speeches,
but he employed it in such an offhand way that it is very clear that it
was already in Roman speech and the Latin language at the point.
We don’t know who invented it. It must have, almost certainly,
been a man—a Roman citizen—probably someone with some basic
knowledge of Roman law and Roman conceptions of citizenship and
belonging, for the literal meaning of the term bellum civile, is “a war
among or between citizens.”
Why was that such a pointed and poignant term? Well, the broad
Roman conception of war was a conflict that was just and that was
fought against an external enemy—or, in Latin, a “hostis”—someone
who is hostile, someone who was, to use much later language, an
“other”, from the outside.
 A war against fellow citizens—a bellum civile or civil war—was
almost deliberately paradoxical and even oxymoronic in the sense
that it cannot be just because it was not fought against someone who
was other, distant, outside, or hostile, in the classic sense—nor can
it be just in the sense of responding to an injury from an external
enemy.
So the original term was very unstable and explosive in that
sense, because the Romans, for the most part, named their wars for
the enemy that they were fighting, rather than for the place where the
war took place.
So, war against Hannibal was called the “Hannibalic War”; wars
against the Poeni, also known as the Carthaginians, were the “Punic
Wars”, the war against the North African ruler Jugurtha was the
“Jugurthine War”.
Meanwhile a bellum civile meant a war against fellow citizens,
which was the very definition of incivility—insofar as to be civilized,
to be city-dwelling, to live in a civitas, a commonwealth, a city, as a
metaphorical, metaphysical, and a physical place, was to be protected
precisely from the kinds of savage, barbaric, or animal-like violence,
which occurred outside that civilized arena.
So the incursion of that violence into the community itself was
the greatest horror that could be imagined. This deep association
with the fundamental conceptions of politics, of community, of
belonging, of security, of freedom among the Romans gave the idea of
civil war a charge which meant it was used very sparingly for the first
century or so that we have records of its usage.

HB: As you said, it’s also very paradoxical because, rather than
civilization being protected by the forces of righteousness and justice,
as it were, you have a situation where civilization is actually tearing
itself apart. Hence, it’s etymologically the opposite of what one might
expect for other wars.
DA: Yes, it’s almost the idea that Rome was eating itself, that civility
was feeding off itself, especially after almost a century of wars that
were called and thought of as civil wars within Rome itself.
This seemed—not just to Roman historians, but Roman orators,
poets, and lawyers—to have become a recurrent pattern that was
related, in some accounts, to what seemed to be fundamental,
moral deficiencies built into the fabric of Roman civilization itself,
deficiencies that would continue to tear at the very fabric of the
Roman commonwealth itself.
That apprehension—repeated endlessly and often terrifyingly
by Roman writers—became one of the greatest Roman legacies to
later Romanoid societies—those who thought of themselves, in some
sense, as heirs of Roman politics or culture.
This fear continued deep into the 18th and early 19th century
of repeating patterns of self-consuming, self-destructive, violent
behaviour which rose above the level of “mere seditions” or
“tumults”—as the Romans would have said—to open warfare, which
was defined as being undertaken by well-organized armies, headed
by generals, attacking each other under the formal codes of warfare
itself.
This was something that was bigger than mere riots,
demonstrations, tumults, even rebellions. That became one of the
dividing lines, but also one of the points of contention: something may
be civil, in the sense of taking place within or among the members of
a recognizable community, but did it rise to the level of war? And if
it rose to the level of war, how might that be understood? How might
it be regulated? Could it even be ameliorated at some point? These
remain recurrent questions into the present.
When I initially began my research, I thought that the Roman
heritage would peter out in the 16th, 17th, or perhaps the 18th
century. But it endured for much longer than I had imagined.
If today, for instance, one goes to Arlington Cemetery, and you
head further away from the crowds, past the parts of the cemetery
commemorating contemporary wars or 20th-century wars, and
you head to the far western edge, you’ll find the Monument to the
Confederate Dead, set up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, just on
the eve of the First World War.
Inscribed on that monument is a quotation from the Roman
poet Lucan about the Roman civil wars. That seems to me to sum up
extremely nicely the enduring power—not even just into the 19th
century, but even into the early 20th century—of a highly moralized
Roman conception of civil wars still inflecting the way in which what
we would think of as modern civil wars were being seen.
And even in the debate on the Iraq War, quite a few of the
commentators on the typology of war, when judging whether or not
the violence in Iraq rose to the level of war, would use the Roman
example and say, “It doesn’t look like Roman civil war, so it can’t be a
civil war.”
So those Roman conceptions endure even into the 21st century.
 Questions for Discussion:

1. How does the Republican Roman view of “civil war” depend on a

particular notion of justice?

2. Does the distinct ancient Roman concept of “citizenship” render

their criterion for “civil war” irrelevant to the present day?
 V. What Is To Be Done?
Applying historical understanding to the modern world

HB: You’ve passionately and eloquently articulated a view of the

importance of the Roman worldview and the legacy of ancient
Rome in terms of our understanding of civil war and subsequent
interpretations of civil war.
You have, however, evaded my silly question, so I’m going to
ask it again—which is, imagine, if you will, that we have evolved as a
society to the level where we currently find ourselves and we pursued
a different historical trajectory than that of the Roman Republic and
the Roman Empire. Imagine Hannibal and his Carthaginian buddies
won the Punic Wars, say, or something like that, and somehow we
more or less evolved, historically, to the same point.
I’m trying to get a sense of how it might be possible to
understand this notion of civil war independent of the fundamental
historical reference point of “bellum civile”.
Could you imagine a world where we still have the concept of
civil war—somehow meaningfully distinguishing between “internal”
and “external” conflicts—without that Roman backdrop; and if so,
what it might look like?

DA: Well, it might look a lot like our contemporary world. For
instance, if you talk to international lawyers, or you talk to the people
who run NGOs, or you talk to military commanders now, in the 21st
century, they tend to use their own common language to describe the
kinds of conflicts you’ve just spoken of as internal conflicts, rather
than external or international conflicts.
That language comes down to the rather unwieldy terms
“conflicts of a non-international nature”, “armed conflicts of a non-
international nature”, or, to use the much snappier acronym, NIACs,
that is, “non-international, armed conflicts”.
The term “civil war” is less often used in what we might call
“expert speech”, where the term NIAC is more commonly invoked.
This comes from the debates over the Geneva Conventions and their
revisions after the Second World War.
So the language of “civil war”, in those arenas, isn’t always
necessary, because we have this other term which deliberately
avoids the term “war” as being too contentious, and also deliberately
sidelines the term “civil”—perhaps because it has too many meanings.
The more precise and apparently more easily-defined conception of
this particular species of conflict therefore avoids both “civil” and
“war” in preference for “non-international, armed conflicts”, where
“armed conflict” substitutes for “war”, and “non-international”
substitutes for “civil”.
In that way, we don’t have to imagine a world where civil war is
not a leading concept—we live in such a world.
However, we do, in fact, live in a world where the Roman Empire
and its long running vocabularies still remain with us, so we live
in a world where some people talk about civil war. Often people on
the ground using vernacular speech in their own languages, and
various different forms of the term, talk about “civil war” even as the
International Committee of the Red Cross, or the United Nations, or
international legal organizations, use the term “non-international,
armed conflicts”.
So what we get is a cacophony of differing conceptions,
some overlapping, or in some cases concentric, but non-identical
conceptions of how to describe these particular kinds of conflicts with
rather different implications.
And that’s what fascinates me. We don’t have to create
counterfactuals, as it were, fictitiously: we have actual counterfactuals
in the sense of competing, sedimented conceptions which are
colliding with each other—often with people talking past each other
without realizing why, without realizing that the nature or origins of
their contentions, in fact, come from very different histories.
The history of ideas of non-international, armed conflict goes
back to the 1940s. The history of ideas of civil war, as such, goes back
to the 1st century BCE.
And these are in dialogue with each other and carry their own
histories, their own contested histories, along different time scales
and from different communities, but they’re in dialogue with each
other in the present.

HB: Well, that’s really where I was interested in going with my

question, because I can imagine somebody saying something like:
“Well, this is all very nice, David. I understand that you’re a
historian, and you’re interested in tracing these ideas, and the wording,
and the concepts, and how different notions have been used in different
contexts—sometimes overlapping strongly, sometimes not so much.
“On the other hand, I’d really like to have definitions, legal
definitions. I would like to have an understanding of when we might
intervene in various different conflicts. I’m happy to have history to
guide me, and I’m happy to have you point out various authors who
have written about this so that I can examine and contrast examples
in the past with my present instances. But what I’m really keen on is
to find a way to move towards a system of laws, or at the very least
a system of widespread understanding about what constitutes what.
How is it that your historical understanding can inform these sorts of
decisions in such a way that we can coherently move forwards?”
Part of the problem that I personally experience from reading
these sorts of things is that I’m left with saying things like, “Well, it’s
all very complicated.”
One person says one thing and someone else says another. One
person interprets things like this and other like that. You mention this
fellow Emer de Vattel who says all sorts of curious things. He argues
that you can intervene in one particular set of circumstances, and
then along comes what we now call the American Revolution, which
other people were calling a civil war as you mentioned earlier, and
there are various geopolitical games being played where England and
France were saying things like, “We can intervene in this particular
circumstance because it fits this set of criteria”, or what have you,
as they rigorously went about trying to maximize their perceived
national self-interest.
That’s very interesting and it’s very subtle, but it naturally
makes it very complicated. Meanwhile, I want to know what to do. I
want to know what to do in places like Iraq. I want to know how we
can go forwards. I appreciate that it’s hardly your job to give me a pat
prescription that can be universally applied, but at the end of the day
all of this subtlety just confuses me. So how do I move forwards?

DA: I always say that engraved over the doorway of every history
department should be the motto, “It’s all very complicated,” since
that’s the historian’s answer to almost any question that the kind
of policymaker that you’re ventriloquizing, for instance, brings to
historians.
That is to say, the policymaker or the politician, for instance,
wants the bullet point, or wants the answer, or maybe two or three
answers from which she can choose.
And the historian says, “No, it’s all tremendously complicated.
There are multiple and competing histories behind all of this”, and
at that point, the policymaker says, “Well, I’m going to go and talk
to my friend the economist or my friend the social scientist, because
they’re much better at packaging their conclusions in ways that can be
actionable.”

HB: Right. Or, “Maybe I won’t talk to anyone at all and just go ahead
and do something.”

DA: Exactly. “It was a big mistake to talk to academics. They just make
us more confused.”
 So there are many possible answers to that very important
question, one that’s been very much on my mind writing the book.
The first is that we should always be cautious about the desire
to look for clarity in things like definitions.
The moral of the book, as it were, is that yes, of course
politicians, policymakers, military officials, NGO representatives and
so forth, are looking for that kind of clarity—and it’s understandable
that they should be—but part of the story of the book is that we
should look at all these other attempts in the past, at least since the
19th century—some, in fact, going back to the 18th century—to do
exactly that, and recognize how contentious they proved to be and
how interminable the debates that ensued from the attempts to
create clarity were.
That’s the first moral, as it were: to be very cautious about that
impulse to drive towards clarity, because it often creates more conflict
and more unclarity in its wake than one might imagine—and the book
gives many examples of precisely that.

HB: Ticklish business.

DA: Exactly, yes. I think probably the main conclusion I’ve derived
as a historian from my reflections on the past is that it’s not just
that it’s all very complicated, but rather history is mostly about
unintended consequences rather than intended consequences; and
the unintended consequences of the attempt to create clarity, to
put boundaries or limits around something which is inherently
impossible to pin down, have been the source of many of the conflicts,
large and small, in the histories that I’ve studied over the past few
hundred years.

HB: So “Be careful.”

DA: Yes, be extremely careful. Be very cautious about asking why you
want that clarity and what you want it for, but also realize there will
be consequences you can’t foresee in the attempt to narrow down the
proliferation of potential meanings of these extremely contentious
terms.
The second moral is, listen to the variety of voices who are using
these languages and imagining conflicts in these terms.
Don’t imagine that, because you come from a professional
community with its own forms of expert speech and its own history
of action through language—whether legal language, bureaucratic
language, military language, political language, whatever it may be—
that you have a monopoly on truth.
To take a relatively recent example, it’s important to appreciate
that for a considerable period of time, people on the ground in
Syria had been saying, “We are engaged in a civil war,” yet it took a
substantial period of additional time for the International Committee
of the Red Cross (ICRC) to formally say, “This is a civil war, but this is a
non-international, armed conflict,” which triggered certain provisions
of international humanitarian law, triggered certain provisions in
relation to humanitarian aid that could go into Syria.
So, listen to the people on the ground and their conception of
what was going on, rather than imagine that the policymakers, the
NGO officials, representatives of international organizations and so on
had a monopoly on the truth.
While it was tremendously important that the ICRC should
have eventually made that determination, the delay between those
key understandings on the ground and external understandings
represented a period during which tens of thousands of lives had
been lost or imperilled.
So question your own monopoly of definitions, or even of truth.
Listen to the voices of those who may know best what’s going on,
and try to negotiate some rapprochement between those different
understandings and different groups of people, especially those who
are bearing the brunt—losing their lives, their families, their homes—
in the context of those conflicts. I think that’s one poignant part of
this.
The other, perhaps more hopeful moral, is to say that history
actually provides us with a repertoire of possibilities: that going back
through the past and looking at some of these earlier definitions,
earlier debates, and earlier arguments about civil war, can actually
provide a suite, or an armoury, of conceptual, practical, political, even
rhetorical resources in the present, which is broader than the toolkit
that most politically or practically active professionals have available
to them.
That’s one of the lessons that, for instance, Quentin Skinner has
often reinforced from intellectual history: that, by going back through
the past, we can discover intellectual resources which may have been
abandoned, sidelined, marginalized, or forgotten for various reasons,
which may still be practically helpful in the present.
You alluded to Vattel. Vattel is an unknown name to most people
now. If he’s known at all, it would be to a few international lawyers,
but he was a tremendously influential legal writer in the middle of the
18th century. He wrote a book called The Law of Nations, which was a
kind of compendium or handbook of contemporary understandings
of what we would now call “international law”, which was influential
for at least a century and had a vast global impact.
A key part of his discussions in that immensely influential book
was about the nature of civil war and how it could be understood—in
particular, in relation to the issues that you mentioned a moment ago:
the question of intervention. Was a civil war a divisive force of such
enormity that, for instance, as he argued, it effectively created two
nations?
The example that would later be drawn on by Edmund Burke in
the context of the French Revolution was that, after 1789, the French
nation had in fact divided into two nations: one that supported the
monarchy and the King; and another, which had set off in a very
different and more destructive direction.
 And in that context, because France was two nations, the
other nations of Europe had to choose which of those two nations
they would support—and having chosen whether to support them,
whether to intervene on behalf of whichever nation they believed had
justice on its side.
For Edmund Burke, for instance, in the context of the French
Revolutionary Wars, he believed that the nation still attached to the
French monarchy was the legitimate and just combatant, as it were;
and therefore, Britain should intervene on behalf of the restoration
of the monarchy and assist in the destruction of the revolutionary
forces. That was, in fact, a very radical doctrine of intervention.
Many might say that conceptions of intervention and questions
concerning the limits of intervention are the most contentious of all
issues arising from contemporary civil wars.
What level of humanitarian assistance is at one end of the
spectrum leading all the way to “boots on the ground”—and debates
about Syria, Libya, and all the way back to Iraq, hinge upon those
ideas of the legitimacy of intervention, or the right to intervention by
external powers.
That debate, in its modern form, goes back to those debates
about civil war from the 18th century and Vattel and his rather radical
doctrines, which have been ameliorated both politically and legally
since.
But understanding that range of possibilities, that spectrum
of arguments, can enrich current debate and lead to a wider
range of options, but also some knowledge of the consequences of
earlier interventions, which might provide—again—cautions to
policymakers and others who are shaping political interventions of
various kinds in the present.
 Questions for Discussion:

1. To what extent is a background in history necessary for a

successful career in politics and international relations?

2. How might modern technology be used to help us get the best

possible sense of what people “on the ground” are thinking and
feeling?
 VI. Historical Relevance
More prevalent than often recognized

HB: I’m hesitating a bit, because I don’t want to ask the same question
again, but I fear that I will likely end up doing so anyway. So let me try
to be as clear as I can be, and let me also now explicitly reference The
History Manifesto, which you co-wrote with Jo Guldi. First off, I will
put my cards squarely on the table just in case you might be tempted
to conclude that I am unduly harassing you.
I love what you do. I find this notion of exploring the history
in ideas of various concepts through the ages tremendously
intellectually stimulating. I find it fascinating to get a sense of how
our understanding of various concepts has been prejudiced by past
societies and past beliefs that we might not even be aware of, and
how they, in turn, go on to influence other societies; and how this
cumulative process frames our understanding of these ideas.
So I pick up The History Manifesto, which is a passionate
invocation for long-term thinking, highlighting the fact that one of the
scourges of our age is that everybody’s thinking for the short term,
and that if we were to recognize the intrinsic and inherent value of
taking the longer view, we would all be better off.
And I agree with all of that. I think we would all be better off if
we lived in a cultivated, educated society filled with people who had a
deeper and broader sense of historical awareness. That would, among
other things, most definitely diminish the likelihood of being saddled
with ignorant politicians unthinkingly invading various foreign lands,
say, without any genuine understanding of the associated cultural,
religious, economic and political factors and thereby causing untold
death and destruction, while at the end of the day making the world
considerably less safe for everyone involved.
 But sometimes I wonder—it’s a variant on my wondering about
whether the world would actually be better off if people thought
about things the way I do—if once you sift through all of this, all
you’re left with aren’t merely admirable sentiments and “motherhood
and apple pie” phrases that reaffirm what anyone who would buy
something called The History Manifesto would be overwhelmingly
likely to believe in the first place. Yes, things are, in fact, considerably
more subtle and complicated than the way they’re invariably
portrayed in the media and by political representatives. Yes, we
really should be aware of what’s actually happened before and should
generally encourage longer-term thinking among the populace.
As it happens I’m less convinced that we should do such things
for immediate practical economic reasons. In fact, the idea that we
are now living in an age where businesspeople are obsessed with
the short term when they used to think in the long term—well, I’m
actually quite sceptical of that. I think the only thing that has changed
is that technology has compressed those timelines more and more,
not so much that corporate types 400 years ago were more visionary
or long-term in their thinking.
But be that as it may, what I’m really grappling with are rather
more immediate and pressing issues: there are odious strongmen in
various parts of the world today who are feeling protected by the fact
that they have come into a position, by hook or by crook, to be able
to run sovereign states, and therefore feel that they can simply do
whatever the heck they want to do to any of their citizens they judge
will impede their personal agendas.
What sort of workable, effective solutions can we come up with?
How do we actually get there? After all, we have to do something. We
have to be able to be in a situation where we can not only actually
formulate law but actually enforce it.
And in so doing, I’m quite willing to be convinced that we should
look long and hard at what people like Vattel did, and more generally
evaluate which past actions have failed and which have succeeded,
and so forth.
 Perhaps it would also be appropriate if we understood deeper,
historical aspects too, such as what it means to be cultivated
individuals of the Roman Republic and Empire—maybe, maybe not.
I’m rather less convinced about that, but it’s possible.
But at the end of the day we have to achieve this goal, we have to
get to some sort of real solution in real time. And we have to be able
to see if we’re actually making progress.
I guess my question is, Are you really going to help us get to
something concrete? Are we really going to be able to get there?
Let me be super-explicit here, because it’s important to
emphasize that I am not of the view that, if we can’t—or at least can’t
through efforts of you and your colleagues—then I think that your
project is worthless. I’m not saying that at all. I think it has all sorts of
intrinsic merits to it and I hope you write zillions more books and all
the rest.
But a work like Civil Wars: A History In Ideas strikes me as
potentially different, given that it is all about the very real and
pressing notion of civil war—rather than, say, a re-interpretation of
how various cultural factors manifested themselves in the writing of
the Treaty of Versailles.
And I’m still not convinced that there is a practical aspect to this
in real time, in my life.

DA: I’ll respond first with a wonderful quotation from a late, great
Harvard colleague, Ernest May, who was very invested through much
of his career in, not just the history of policy, but the way in which
history could inform policy.
He said, in one of his co-authored books, that, “The future has
nowhere to come from but the past.”
One way you can unpack that very pregnant phrase is to say
that all thinking about the formation of particular policy is historical
thinking, but most of those who engage in policy formation don’t
explicitly recognize the fact that what they are doing is historical.
Usually what they’re doing is based on inadequate information,
underinformed by the kinds of subtleties that historians engage with
in their handling of evidence and argument, for instance.
And if we made explicit the notion that much of policy
formation is based on the gathering of past data, the explication of
patterns within that data, the attempt to create scenarios based on
assumptions about the past, their relation to the present and how
they could inform the future; then we might have more thoughtful
policy formation itself.
The parallel that springs to mind—and this comes back to
an earlier part of our discussion—is with counterfactual history. I
always argue that all history is counterfactual history, but most of
the time we don’t acknowledge that. As we’re trying to make sense of
historical evidence, we’re always forming plausible and implausible
explanations, or scenarios, or narratives, around that material, and
abandoning those that are implausible in favour of those that seem
plausible as an explanation for all the available evidence.
That’s counterfactual thinking—we’re imagining ways in which
the evidence could fit together in such a way that it has explanatory
power or that it coheres as a narrative.
So I believe that it’s important to recognize that, to be explicit
about what one is doing: All historians are engaging in counterfactual
history all the time, but they don’t acknowledge it to themselves. All
policymakers and those who are trying to project potential futures,
and shape those potential futures, are engaged in some kind of
historical work, but don’t acknowledge that or haven’t been brought
to realize that.
And I believe that this is one of the contributions that historians
can make—not just simply taking up one chair at the expert advisory
table—but by their presence emphasize the necessary historical
component to the task at hand.
So in a debate about the future of healthcare in the United
States, or the UK, or anywhere else, it’s obviously very valuable to
have professional historians who have studied health systems, the
history of medicine, the proliferation of social care, and so on.
 To consistently reinforce the idea that shaping the future is
dependent upon understandings about the past and the evidence
that comes from the past is, I think, a very basic way in which we can
contribute to those debates in a more positive way.
Again, coming back to something that I was saying before, to
see the past not as something which is necessarily shaping the future,
but provides—pick your metaphor: a treasure chest, a toolkit of
possibilities, of ideas, of examples, of potential futures—that can be
very helpful to policy formation; to say not only, “Here are terrible
mistakes which have been made in the past. Avoid them”, but also,
“Maybe there’s something that we can recover from the past that
might be helpful for us to think forward in the future. Consider that
possibility”.
In relation to the question of going far back in the past, in The
History Manifesto, we quote Winston Churchill, who said during the
Second World War, “The further back you can look, the further forward
you can see”—that is to say that having a longer perspective in history
can give one at least a larger range of plausible futures from which
to choose; and having a larger range of those plausible scenarios for
the future gives one a more concrete range of possibilities for the
formation of policy as well.
 Questions for Discussion:

1. How might historical understanding help develop a more effective

international effort to combat human rights abuses? (Readers
particularly interested in this issue are referred to the Ideas
Roadshow conversation Improving Human Rights with Emilie
Hafner-Burton.)

2. Do you agree with David’s remark that ,“All history is

counterfactual history”? How would appreciating this point lead to a
deeper historical understanding?
 VII. Oceans of Possibilities
Future work

HB: I’d like to talk a bit now about future work. You’ve just spent
a large chunk of your life writing this book, but presumably, as a
productive and prolific fellow, you’re already thinking about other
projects. Do you have something in mind?

DA: I’ve got two or three smaller projects that I’m working on at the
moment. One is looking at the origins of post-colonial approaches
to international law. I think I’ve discovered the origins of that in the
work of a Polish-British lawyer working in Madras—now Chennai—
in the 1950s, editing his materials, and thinking very hard about
the impact of decolonization on understandings of, once again,
sovereignty, statehood, and relations between European and non-
European peoples.
I’ve also been working for some time on an edition of John
Locke’s colonial writings. John Locke, the alleged father of modern
liberalism in the West, spent a good part of his professional career
deeply involved in the practical business of organizing and promoting
English colonialism in the Atlantic world, including the promotion
of the institution of slavery and its proliferation on the Western side
of the Atlantic. How that could be compatible with his commitment
to individual freedom and rights has been a very important question
for political theorists, but it’s one that has often been pursued with
inadequate evidence, so I’m pulling together all the available evidence
on that question.
Having worked on civil war for about ten years, I thought it
was time to move in the other direction, as it were—so with a friend
and colleague, I’m co-editing a book on peace: looking at the cultural
history of peace in the Age of Enlightenment, from the mid 17th
century to the early 19th century, which is a remarkably understudied
topic compared to the amount of work that has been expended on
understanding war. But arguably ideas of peace and practices of peace
have been at least as important in shaping our modern world and
deserve ample attention as well.

HB: Presumably, if peace is merely defined as the absence of war, then

it’s not deemed worthy of too much attention. So one can look at it
differently, I imagine.

DA: Exactly, yes.

And an important vein of my work up to this point has been
on the history of oceans. I began as a historian of the Atlantic world.
I more recently worked on the Pacific, and with two colleagues at
Cambridge I recently started a new series on oceanic history, with
Cambridge University Press. We’re planning a book, possibly a
conference, on oceanic histories, bringing together the histories of
the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the
Caribbean, the Great Southern Ocean and so forth.
More generally, I’m now in the situation that I was in a few
years ago when I was at the Huntington Library looking for the next,
as it were, solo project—these projects I’ve just mentioned are all
collaborative or editorial projects, but the next big book is still a
twinkle in the eye. I’m not quite sure what it will be yet. But get back
to me on that.

HB: I very much hope to do so.

You mentioned slavery just now, with respect to John Locke.
One of the things that was illuminating for me when I was reading
your book on the Declaration of Independence book was to develop
a deeper sense of awareness of how some of the specific wording of
that document changed—how some of Jefferson’s original wording
was deliberately modified to accommodate the interests of various
slave-owning states, and slave-owning interests—because, of course,
it’s so incredibly jarring when one looks at that second paragraph
of the Declaration and one thinks, How is it possible that people who
were citing the rights of man can, at the same time, be a slave-owning
society?

DA: As was pointed out by contemporaries as well—Samuel Johnson

said, “Why is it that those who cry loudest for liberty are also the
drivers of Negroes?” So that hypocrisy was observed even at the time,
and it has become clearer and clearer to us since.

HB: When did the British ban the slave trade? Was it before the
Declaration of Independence?

DA: No, it was in the early 19th century.

HB: Okay. Well, that doesn’t work, then—I had a counterfactual

thought in mind but the dates got in the way.

DA: Well, an interesting counterfactual that a couple of historians

have proposed is, If the American Revolution hadn’t happened, would
abolition have taken place earlier on the North American mainland
than it did?
Obviously, the abolition, first of the slave trade and then of
slavery itself, took place earlier in the British empire and in the
Caribbean than it did in the United States, and it didn’t need a bloody
and cataclysmic civil war to effect it.
So the counterfactual might run, If what became the United
States had remained within the British Empire, perhaps there might
have been abolition two, three, or four decades earlier.
HB: This is related to another one of your ruminations in your civil
war book, when you mention how one of the things that is anomalous
about the American Civil War is that it happened so long after the
War of Independence, and one could well have imagined that such an
event might have happened quite a bit earlier.

DA: Yes.

HB: Are there any questions or comments that you have before we
wrap up? Is there anything we missed, or failed to capitalize on, or
glossed over?

DA: Nothing that I can immediately think of. That was very
penetrating and well informed.

HB: Well, it was very enjoyable. Thank you very much, David.

DA: My pleasure. Thank you.

 Questions for Discussion:

1. Do you think that if the American Revolution hadn’t happened,

slavery would have been abolished much earlier than it was? What do
you think, more generally, contemporary North America might look
like had the American Revolution never occurred?

2. Do you agree with David’s implication that a “collaborative” work

is necessarily less substantial than a “solo” one? To what extent does
this depend on the temperament of the scholar and/or the nature of
the discipline?
 Continuing the Conversation

Readers are encouraged to read David’s book, Civil Wars: A History

in Ideas, which goes into considerable additional detail about many
of the issues discussed here.

Ideas Roadshow offers an extensive collection of individual

conversations in history, including:

• Embracing Complexity – A Conversation with David Cannadine

• Constitutional Investigations– A Conversation with Linda Colley
• The Two Cultures, Revisited – A Conversation with Stefan Collini
• The Passionate Historian – A Conversation with John Elliott
• China: Up Close and Personal – A Conversation with Karl Gerth
• Science and Pseudoscience – A Conversation with Michael
Gordin
• Religious Entrepreneurs? – A Conversation with Nile Green
• Sheathing the Bodkin: Combating Suicide – A Conversation with
Jennifer Michael Hecht
• Battling Protestants – A Conversation with David Hollinger
• Enlightened Entrepreneurialism – A Conversation with
Margaret Jacob
• The Derveni Papyrus – A Conversation with Richard Janko
• Pants on Fire: On Lying in Politics – A Conversation with Martin
Jay
• For the Love of History – A Conversation with Margaret
MacMillan
• Byzantium: Beyond the Cliché – A Conversation with Maria
Mavroudi
• Deconstructing Genius – A Conversation with Darrin McMahon
• Turning the Mirror: A View from the East – A Conversation with
Pankaj Mishra
 • Apocalypse Then: The First Crusade – A Conversation with Jay
Rubenstein
• Religion and Culture: A Historian’s Tale – A Conversation with
Miri Rubin
• The Consolations of History – A Conversation with Teofilo Ruiz
• Quest for Freedom – A Conversation with Quentin Skinner
• The Epicurean Republic – A Conversation with Matthew
Stewart
• Herculaneum Uncovered – A Conversation with Andrew
Wallace-Hadrill

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History of Ideas and Conversations About History, Volumes I-III.

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