Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice – a new departure

On 6 January 2020, protestors stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC. As an American citizen watching from afar, I felt powerless to do anything about the rending of the American body politic that was occurring. A year after these events however, as Congress began its investigation into the attempted insurrection, I was invited to submit a statement for the official record, placing the spread of the misinformation that had helped trigger the attack into historical context.

I was asked to provide policy recommendations which could help prevent such an event happening again. This was not an unusual request for select committees to make — those occupied with policymaking are regularly drawn to history to glean lessons of value from the past to inform their actions in the present and the future. But for an academic historian, providing such recommendations involved crossing a professional line.

For decades, it has been common for historians to reject the idea of learning lessons from the past, seeing such a pursuit as subsuming the exploration of the past to the needs of the present. This “presentism” has been disparaged as a flattening of the past, a narrow-minded pursuit of the similar at the expense of the different, and — against the logic of history itself — a preference for the recent due to its perceived greater relevance. Furthermore, presentism is sometimes suspected of imposing contemporary sensibilities on the analysis of the past, blocking self-criticism, and failing to consider the present as an outcome of long-term historical processes.

These opposing views, between the contemplative academic approach to history per se, and the active, applied version desired by policymakers, have meant that there has long been mutual incomprehension and a lack of collaboration between academic historians and practitioners. In recent years however, the anti-presentist consensus among professional historians has begun to erode, with a growing number of scholars expressing concern with the underlying conservatism of history’s self-imposed neutrality in the face of growing global challenges.

Just as I felt a personal and professional responsibility to utilise the past to engage in the contemporary debate regarding America’s political stability, the volatility of contemporary affairs — the brutality and aggression of warfare, the failure to address climate change, and the refugee crises that have resulted from both of these things — alongside new challenges to long-established human rights, have prompted calls for the historical discipline to reclaim its political responsibility.

Southampton’s new Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice MA represents the history department’s own engagement with this recent turn. Constructed to train postgraduates from a wide variety of disciplines how to use history to inform approaches to global challenges, designing the course has forced us to ponder how best to avoid the pitfalls of presentism while at the same time being present orientated.

A good place to start was defining what a historical lesson can be. While context can confer a certain temporal sophistication, it offers no grand conceptual scheme for universal application. Human existence is too complex and diverse to ever repeat, yet it does often rhyme, moving in uniformities and patterns that can be studied and applied. So, while direct historical comparison rarely helps, considered historical analogies, which highlight structural similarities as well as differences, can be more fruitful.

As well as requiring an understanding of the context within which challenges emerged, sustainable problem solving also requires a foray into the future to predict how proposed solutions will play out. While it may seem counter-intuitive that a discipline predicated upon looking backwards can equip someone to look forwards, speculation is a natural component of historical research.

Writing history is an act of reconstructing the past from the long-distance perspective. It is a disciplinary approach that involves not simply reliance on archival records, but also an act of imagination, informed by the best available evidence. And this imagination can be turned forwards as well as backwards. “Good historians”, wrote the historian EH Carr, “have the future in their bones.”

This is not to suggest that knowledge of the past can unravel the secrets of what is to come. Instead, as the scholar Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr. warned, it forces us to understand “the extreme difficulty, the intellectual peril, the moral arrogance of supposing the future will yield itself so easily to us.” Thus, history’s greatest lesson is its unpredictability. So, more modestly, the relationship between past, present, and future can only ever be a projection of the continuities and patterns that a knowledge of the past enables us to construct. Any chronology is an imagined journey from a past to a future, and by bringing to bear such self-reflexivity in our exploration of both past and present, we can display foresight, urge prudence, and temper hubris.

Global Challenges: History, Policy, Practice is a new departure for the department, and a course which reflects the times we live in. Just as professional historians are increasingly unwilling to sit on the sidelines in neutrality while events unfold in unsatisfactory ways, so too we have found that our students are increasingly keen to use their degrees to try to make a difference. Engaging with contemporary issues such as current wars, the climate crisis, flows of migration, and shifting identities and rights is not purely the purview of social scientists and engineers. The humanities, in particular history, have a lot to offer in the pursuit of solutions. So, this course captures our shared desire to utilise history to intervene and effect change.

If you have any further questions about the degree course, please feel free to contact me. (c.fuller@soton.ac.uk)