The Wolfson History Prize 2021
Rebecca Clifford
Rebecca, congratulations on your nomination for the Wolfson History Prize of 2021 from Aspects of History. Why did you choose your particular subject?
This is a two-pronged answer. Most important prong, I’ve worked with oral history for a decade now, and I’m curious about the nature of memory. How we remember our past and our childhoods and what meaning that has to us over time. In particular, the reason I got interested in child survivors of the holocaust is that so many of these children had memories which they couldn’t make sense of. Childhood memory is very fragmentary. Often the children in my book had fragments of memory that nobody could help piece together. I wanted to answer this question: Let’s say you’ve got these memories, or maybe you don’t have them, or just fragmentary pieces and you can’t put these memories together into a cohesive story. You don’t know the details of where you came from, so you don’t know who you are. That’s the fundamental question of the book. I chose the subject to answer that question.
The other prong is that it’s a book about children who survived the holocaust and my mother was a very young child who survived it as well. So the book is an attempt to understand what my mother went through as a child and how this affected her life and my life. I have a lot to say about that – the book was a very useful way of exploring some of these issues that affect my own family directly.
What was the most challenging thing you experienced during the research and writing of the book?
This is a book full of extremely challenging themes and a lot of very emotional and upsetting material. I think the most challenging – challenging is not the right word, one of the things I loved about the book is how continually the material shocked me and I think we need to be very attuned as historians as to when we are shocked, because what that really means is that our assumptions are being challenged. In the book, the material I worked with deeply challenged some of my most basic assumptions as a historian, and as a human being, especially around the issue of family. There’s some shocking material in the book about family reunions. And emotionally that was very challenging to work with, but actually from an intellectual perspective I found that absolutely inspiring because its wonderful to have your assumptions challenged. You might not realise you have them until suddenly they’re being torn to shreds – that’s what we want as historians. That’s something I can talk a lot more about, especially with regard to this issue of how awful the child survivors found it to be returned to their parents after the war, which is really not what we expect, I think.
Was there an exciting moment or piece of research that you uncovered, one that gave you a thrill?
It’s a bit of what I just said actually, there were many things that shocked me, but in the shock was also a thrill. Because every time you stop and say to yourself why did this shock me? There’s a thrill that’s a flip side because you realise you’ve assumed something that’s wrong, and its wonderful to see and to have those illusions shattered. That’s what makes really good history – it should be about smashing illusions and rethinking things from a different perspective and so these shocking episodes allowed me to do that. One exciting moment – there were so many – but in the first few pages, there’s a case of this girl, I use the pseudonym ‘Mina’ because I couldn’t find her to ask for her consent to tell her story. She’s a girl who describes her mother being shot through the head in front of her, this was when she was in a care home in 1946. Lo and behold, when I worked through the documents in this particular care home, I discovered that this girl’s mother was alive, and showed up several years later to claim her, and obviously had never been shot through the head at all. This made me think: what was going on when this girl told this story? In the book I spent a lot of time unpicking that. The discovery that the mother, said to be murdered in front of the girl, was actually alive and well was a really exciting moment.
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true?
No. I don’t think anybody in this book would feel comfortable calling themselves a victor, but it is a book about their histories. I have this whole part of the book about the fact that so many of these child survivors were told they were lucky to survive. In fact, they were referred to as the ‘lucky ones’ and sometimes they referred to themselves as lucky, but it is a very loaded term. There’s nothing lucky about losing your whole family. They have survived, and sometimes that’s all they’ve done in their own opinions, and its not a victorious story. But there are aspects worth celebrating as well. Its complicated, but the short answer is no.
If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, either as a student or when you first started out as a writer, what would it be?
There are some really important things I learnt in writing this book. Do I wish I had known them earlier in my career? I’m not sure I was ready to know them. The first thing I had to learn when writing this book was a new way of writing in which a I abandoned a lot of the things you’re told to do as an academic writer, in favour of a much more approachable writing style and fluid and open writing style. I don’t think I would have been placed well in my earlier career to be able to write in that way, because you have to be in a place of security to abandon those conventions of academic writing, but I will never go back to the old way of writing.
I guess that thing I wish I could tell others that to write in this way takes two precious things that we never have as academics: it takes time and it takes space. You need unobstructed time to think and to write and to experiment with new ways of writing. And I mean unobstructed by email, by social media, unobstructed by interruptions. We have less and less of this type of time as academics so I think it’s vital to carve off sections of your day and week in which you say no internet, no phone, no social media and definitely no email. It shouldn’t be a luxury, it should be fundamental to our jobs. It’s become harder and harder to access. The other thing you need is space, they go hand in hand. you need space that is your own. Not your kitchen table, as we’ve all been dealing with the pandemic, it’s not a space that’s conducive, so you need a space where you won’t be interrupted where you can have your notes and your archival documents – basically a space that’s yours and it’s a mental space as much as physical, it has to be both. A space just for your and your thoughts.
Have any historians influenced your career or the writing of your shortlisted book?
So many, but I would like to tip my hat to my dear friend Professor Josie McLellan at the University of Bristol History Dept. because we have written together. I’m in Swansea and she is in Bristol and we’ll sit together and write via Skype and now Zoom. That’s a very important space for writing. She’s the one who encouraged me to try writing in a different way. We shared books about creative writing and started to think about our work in terms of having some of the characteristics of fiction: plot, characters, scene. That was extremely eye opening for me and I owe her an awful lot.
Can you tell us a little about your next project?
Also, when we flip the story round and look at it the other way, these children were subjected to an experiment without their consent, and were largely unaware of yet keep in mind some of these children were also experimented on in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, which is very disturbing. I want to tell the story from perspective of experts and also from the perspective of the children. It has some of the same characters as Survivors, and some of the same themes, but it is a book of ethics: who owns children’s stories, and who has a right to tell them?
Can you tell us which of the previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize you’d most like to recommend?
Robert Gildea’s Marianne in Chains, the winner in 2002. In 2003 I started my PhD with him, at the time I knew nothing about him, but here we are all these years later, and he is a central figure in my life and a very important historian, a wonderful mentor and great friend. Goodness knows, there are some fabulous historians if you look at the list of previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize.
Rebecca Clifford’s Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust is available now.
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Sudhir Hazareesingh
Sudhir, congratulations on your nomination for the Wolfson History Prize of 2021 from Aspects of History. Why did you choose your particular subject?
Why did you choose your particular subject?
I have previously worked on charismatic leaders such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Léon Gambetta and Charles de Gaulle, as well as the tradition of revolutionary republicanism in France. I wanted to write a book about French colonialism – a completely new subject for me – but which also drew on these earlier lines of research, and so this is how I ended up with Toussaint Louverture, the emancipated slave from the French colony of Saint-Domingue who became the flamboyant leader of the Haitian revolution.
What was the most challenging thing you experienced during the research and writing of the book?
Toussaint left an enormous paper trail: he gave speeches, wrote hundreds of letters every day, as well as despatching regular reports to the French authorities about political and military matters. But a lot of this material is scattered across different archives in France, and also in smaller collections in the USA, Britain and Spain. Gathering all this material was quite a challenge.
Was there an exciting moment or piece of research that you uncovered, one that gave you a thrill?
In the enormous collection of papers about late colonial Saint-Domingue in the French archives, I found the complete municipal records of the coastal town of Môle Saint Nicolas in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; these documents, written by municipal representatives and local town clerks, shed a fascinating light on how ordinary citizens of the colony experienced the revolution, and in particular how they responded concretely to the policies of Toussaint Louverture.
Which of your characters would have been the most entertaining dinner guest and why?
I would have loved to have Toussaint as a dinner guest: he was a charming person and it would have been wonderful to try and get him to reveal some of his secrets (he could be very enigmatic at times). Finding the right menu would be a challenge, as his eating habits were quite Spartan (he once attended a banquet and only ate a small piece of gruyère).
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true?
This was definitely so with the history of the Haitian revolution, which was long written out of mainstream narratives. Napoleon’s legend posthumously reinvented him as a progressive liberator, rather than the leader who restored slavery in the French colonies, and the writings on the age of revolution long tended to focus exclusively on the American and French cases, rather than the Haitian one. But things are now different, and we appreciate that the most radical revolution of this era took place in Saint-Domingue: it was a democratic, anti-colonial, and egalitarian revolution which was also, in the end, a war of national liberation.
If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, either as a student or when you first started out as a writer, what would it be?
To finish that book on the history of the French Left which I had always wanted to write, and even found a publisher for; in the end I got distracted by other projects.
Have any historians influenced your career or the writing of your shortlisted book?
Absolutely! The best book on the history of the Haitian revolution remains The Black Jacobins, by CLR James. I read it when I was a student and was swept away, both by the thrilling account of the revolution and CLR’s magnificent portrait of Toussaint Louverture.
Can you tell us a little about your next project?
I am still in search of it, not least because I have not been able to visit the French archives for more than a year. But I would like to stay in the general area of anti-colonialism, while perhaps focusing on a 20th century figure.
Can you tell us which of the previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize you’d most like to recommend?
I would pick two classics of the Wolfson History Prize: Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, a masterpiece which demonstrated the pervasiveness of supernatural ways of thinking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and Death in Paris by Richard Cobb, a grippingly forensic evocation of life in the poorer parts of the French capital in the 1790s. These are great archivally-based books which challenged conventional wisdoms, and are full of wonderful and often touching stories about the existences of ordinary men and women.
Sudhir Hazareesingh’s Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture is available now. It is reviewed here. You can also read Sudhir’s piece on Louverture and Napoleon.
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Judith Herrin
Judith, congratulations on your nomination for the Wolfson History Prize of 2021 from Aspects of History. Why did you choose your particular subject?
In the introduction to my book, Ravenna Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe, I describe my extreme irritation on discovering no account of the city’s importance in early medieval Europe in any of the guidebooks I purchased there. In particular, the presence of Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora in the church of San Vitale was not explained. Why were there they, so prominently portrayed in the apse area, as if carrying their gifts to the altar? Since they never went to Ravenna, who felt it was appropriate to put up their portraits there? As a Byzantinist, I knew that many images of the ruler and his wife had been erected in Constantinople and other cities of the Roman Empire, but these were the only surviving mosaics. They are constantly reproduced in books about Justinian and Theodora. So from the questions that prompted me to investigate the history of these imperial panels I got caught up into a much longer study of Ravenna’s status, significance and influence during the four centuries from AD 400-800.
What was the most challenging thing you experienced during the research and writing of the book?
The most challenging aspect was understanding how many of the sources, literary and material, had disappeared or had been transformed by rebuilding and redecoration. While it was possible to reconstruct, or re-imagine, some of them, the losses remained huge and left enormous gaps in the information on which the city’s history could be written. The fact that one half folio of a manuscript that had recorded events in Ravenna through the fifth century, year by year, was all that survived, drew attention to a tradition of record keeping that would have provided an extraordinarily rich chronology. And like many fifth century documents, it was only preserved in a later copy, of which just one half folio ended up in the cathedral of Merseburg archive. Many questions about Ravenna’s history remained unanswered, and it was necessary to try and find new ways of investigating the surviving sources.
Was there an exciting moment or piece of research that you uncovered, one that gave you a thrill?
Yes, I was thrilled to discover the names of so many inhabitants of Ravenna in the lists of witnesses to papyrus documents. Thanks to the patient work of Jan Tjäder, many papyri written in Ravenna have been tracked down and edited – facsimile editions are now available in Chartae Latinae antiquiores. Most of them concern financial matters, transfers of land, donations to the church of Ravenna and the wills of individual residents, so I had not anticipated the fascinating detail in the lists of witnesses. But there they are: high ranking Roman officials, members of all three senatorial grades, clergy ranging from bishops down to doorkeepers, honesti, freed slaves and wives and women who make the sign of the cross because they cannot sign their names. Relationships between them are sometimes spelled out, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and additional material about their origins provides details about those who came from the East Mediterranean, like the Syrian traders, or George, the silk merchant whose father lived in Antioch, who wrote their signatures in Greek.
But even more exciting were the discoveries made by colleagues working in the archive of Verona cathedral that a number of medieval Latin texts had been written on previously used parchment, on which the original Greek or Gothic was still partially legible. These palimpsests, manuscripts which have been scrubbed and washed to remove a text in order to reuse the parchment to write another, may have come from Ravenna, where both Greek and Gothic had been used in the sixth and seventh centuries. Later, when those languages were no longer in regular use, the manuscripts were acquired by scribes in Verona, who needed extra writing material. This reuse of Gothic texts is particularly exciting because so many were destroyed when the Arian faith observed by the Goths was condemned as heretical. In Visigothic Spain the conversion of King Reccared in 589 provoked a bonfire of Gothic liturgical and biblical manuscripts, so it’s interesting that many copies of Isidore of Seville’s works were written over some Gothic texts that escaped the flames. Similarly, the palimpsested texts discovered in Verona reused both Greek and Gothic documents written in Ravenna. This discovery has prompted further exploration of palimpsests in other collections, leading to new material from Bologna, which has added the Gothic word for lion to the dictionary.
Which of your characters would have been the most entertaining dinner guest and why?
I’m not convinced that the individuals I identified in Ravenna would necessarily have been much fun at dinner. Would King Theoderic have been prepared to take time from eating to discuss his plans for draining the swampy marshes around the city that lay in the delta of the River Po? I’d rather have eavesdropped on his council meetings at which he dictated his plans to scribes and told Cassiodorus which letters to write to his distant relatives in Spain and western France. That said, I imagine Galla Placidia would have had a great deal to say about imperial administration, good government and the duty of churchmen to encourage Christian virtues.
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true?
This is clearly true of the Gothic period in Ravenna, when the victorious incoming ruler Theoderic imposed his own ideas on the city, Italy and a very large part of the Roman Empire in the West that he controlled. There is very little evidence for the reaction of local people to this tumultuous change of government. Yet in turn, the Gothic domination was in due course reduced and often physically removed by the Catholic Christian authorities who condemned Arian beliefs. What did the remaining Goths think of Archbishop Agnellus removing their king’s images from his palace church (now S Apollinare Nuovo)? All that emerges from the documentation is that once their churches were officially taken over by Catholic Christians the Gothic communities gradually abandoned their own Arian faith, and the language in which it had been celebrated. This development is closely linked to the imperial prohibition of heretics making wills that would secure the transference of material goods from one generation to the next. Once this traditional method of conserving family property was taken away from them, the Goths accepted a change of Christian identity and adopted Catholic definitions of the faith.
If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, either as a student or when you first started out as a writer, what would it be?
I’ve been fortunate enough to pursue a rather uncharacteristic career, which involved long periods of unemployment. This is becoming increasing unfeasible as academic openings are now so few and younger scholars feel obliged to accept positions in which they have to teach beyond their specialism. My only suggestion would be cherish the particular research they wish to undertake and insist on pursuing it and including it in their teaching where possible. With all the pressures currently laid on younger members of staff, it’s hard to persist, but sticking to the research issues that really excite you is an essential aspect of academic satisfaction.
Have any historians influenced your career or the writing of your shortlisted book?
Of course. I’m deeply indebted to historians who influenced my career and led indirectly to the writing of Ravenna. First, Philip Grierson, the distinguished numismatist, who inadvertently introduced me to Byzantium, via its coinage, and then challenged me to learn Greek in order to study it. Second, Anthony Bryer who was building the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at Birmingham University in the late 1960s and 70s. With his encouragement, I also studied in Athens, Paris and Munich, where great teachers confirmed my impression that the Byzantine Empire needed serious study and gave me the techniques necessary to pursue research in the field. I was profoundly influenced by Nikolaos Oikonomides and Evelyne Patlagean, who analysed documents with a view to seeing what they implied about underlying but often unexplored social and economic arrangements, and by feminist historians like Elizabeth Clark and Kari Børresen. The support of Peter Brown and Antonio Carile was critical to the decision to embark on a history of Ravenna, and I’m acutely aware of my debts to Deborah Deliyannis, whose translation of Agnellus and thesis on the monuments of the city first made me aware of its riches.
Can you tell us a little about your next project?
I have a project based on the writings of the Anonymous Cosmographer that develops from Ravenna. This unknown author prompted me to devote a chapter to him, but I think he deserves closer study, particularly in relation to his account of all the harbours and major points of interest in sailing around the Mediterranean. This combines a study of early medieval maps, routes between different coastal and inland sites, and the identity of the many sites named. There are other projects as well – and not enough time to pursue them all!
Can you tell us which of the previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize you’d most like to recommend?
I’d warmly recommend Christopher De Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (2017); Catherine Merridale’s Red Fortress (2014) and Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island (2011), to name only some of the recent winners.
Judith Herrin’s Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe is available now.
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Helen McCarthy
Helen, congratulations on your nomination for the Wolfson History Prize of 2021 from Aspects of History. Why did you choose your particular subject?
Ever since I can remember I’ve had a love of women’s history, but it was undoubtedly the experience of becoming a mother – and feeling the pressures that parenting brings to your working life – which pushed me towards this topic. There is a vast and wonderfully rich historical scholarship on women’s paid and unpaid work, stretching from medieval and early modern times and covering different parts of the world, but very few books place the lives of mothers centre-stage. I wanted to ask how women’s working worlds were shaped by the demands of childcare and home-making over the life course, how others saw them and how they saw themselves, and how the conditions of their lives changed over time and why.
What was the most challenging thing you experienced during the research and writing of the book?
I knew that I wanted to write a pacey narrative history which would tell a ‘big’ story over time, but I didn’t want to flatten out the particularities of women’s lives or simplify what was a very complex set of forces driving change. Keeping all those different moving parts in the frame – women’s experiences, shifting social and economic structures, the political context and the ideas and discourses whirling around in the wider culture – was quite a challenge. I hope that I’ve pulled it off.
Was there an exciting moment or piece of research that you uncovered, one that gave you a thrill?
I became interested in a sociologist named Viola Klein who wrote a lot about women’s work in the post-war decades and whose papers are held at the University of Reading. I was expecting to find mostly correspondence and notes relating to her life, but, to my delight, I also discovered over a thousand handwritten replies to a questionnaire which Klein conducted in the early 1960s on the topic of graduate women’s careers. She asked respondents about their education, employment histories and career breaks and their feelings about returning to paid work after marriage and motherhood. It wasn’t wholly clear from the catalogue what the boxes would contain when I called them up, so it was a welcome surprise to find such a wealth of personal testimony. These sources had not, as far as I knew, been used by other historians, so it felt like a real treasure trove.
Which of your characters would have been the most entertaining dinner guest and why?
I would very much like to invite the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb round for dinner. She appears in my book not as a working mother, but as a prominent intellectual who wrote about women’s wage-earning and who viewed employment and child-bearing as largely incompatible. She decided not to have children herself when she married her husband Sidney Webb in the 1890s, as she feared that motherhood would interfere with the work they wished to do as investigators and reformers. I might seat her next to Clementina Black, also a socialist and of the same generation as Webb, but someone who believed that paid work offered mothers a much-needed degree of financial independence and who fought for better pay and conditions for all women in the workplace. I’d enjoy listening to them lock horns on the subject!
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true?
This is partially true for my subject in so far as it’s the white, well-educated, professional working mother who has left the richest trace in the archive – as the case of Viola Klein’s questionnaires bears out. It’s much easier to recover the life of a working mother like, say, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, a pioneer doctor in the Victorian era, than to reconstruct the experiences and feelings of a poor home-working mother in Whitechapel. Much of what we know about those poorer working mothers comes from the reports and investigations of middle-class investigators and reformers. However, it’s not quite right to present privileged women like Garrett Anderson as ‘victors’. Whilst their material circumstances may have been vastly superior, middle-class mothers also had to fight very hard against discrimination and prejudice from employers, husbands and wider society if they wanted to work for pay.
If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, either as a student or when you first started out as a writer, what would it be?
Exploring the past is an open-ended, dynamic and ongoing process: you mustn’t expect to solve every puzzle or find closure to every story. Any book that you write should be regarded as an invitation to conversation, not the final word on your subject.
Have any historians influenced your career or the writing of your shortlisted book?
Far too many to mention here! But let me mention some of the feminist historians who pioneered the existing scholarship on women’s labour and have been a source of inspiration, such as Sally Alexander, Denise Riley, Ellen Ross, Susan Pedersen, Eileen Boris, Deborah Thom, Penny Summerfield, Sonya Rose and many, many others…
Can you tell us a little about your next project?
I’m doing more research into the life and career of Beatrice Webb, and I’ve become very interested in the woman who wrote the first biography of Webb and edited her famous diaries in the 1950s, Margaret Cole. Cole was also a Fabian socialist and became a sort of keeper of the flame for both Beatrice and Sidney Webbs after their deaths. I’m interested in how Beatrice and Margaret’s intergenerational friendship might offer a new way of thinking about histories of women, politics and socialism across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Can you tell us which of the previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize you’d most like to recommend?
In Command of History: Churchill Writing and Fighting the Second World War by David Reynolds, which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2005, is such a clever and revealing book. Just when you thought there could be nothing more to say about the ‘great man’, along comes Reynolds to explain how fundamental writing was to Churchill’s life and how skilfully Churchill constructed a dominant narrative of the War which placed himself at the centre. It’s a book which also manages to smuggle in some important lessons about how the historiography of the Second World War has evolved. That’s tricky to do when writing for a non-specialist audience – it can very quickly become dry and academic – but Reynolds succeeds magnificently.
Helen McCarthy’s Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood is available now.
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Richard Ovenden
Richard, congratulations on your nomination for the Wolfson History Prize of 2021 from Aspects of History. Why did you choose your particular subject?
The subject presented itself to me over a number of years. I had become increasingly concerned that libraries and archives were not getting the recognition of the role they played for society, and that underfunding was becoming acute. I was also concerned that the idea of preservation of knowledge more broadly conceived had lost its traction in society, having given way to the mantra of access. The real trigger however came with the revelation that the Home Office, in the midst of the implementation of the ‘hostile environment’ – the immigration policy that was so damaging to UK citizens who had come as part of the Windrush generation – had destroyed an archive of documents that could have been used by the same citizens to prove their right to remain. A classic example of the social importance of the preservation of knowledge, and what we stand to lose when knowledge is attacked.
What was the most challenging thing you experienced during the research and writing of the book?
The most challenging aspect were the harrowing stories from the Holocaust and from Bosnia. In both places a cultural genocide – attacks on libraries and archives on a mass-destructive scale were heralds of a human genocide on an equally horrific level. In both cases librarians and archivists lost their lives trying to preserve the knowledge of their communities which had been in archives and libraries. The intensity of their desire to continue to preserve and make these books and documents available, and to use them to bear witness, is both tragic and inspiring at the same time.
Was there an exciting moment or piece of research that you uncovered, one that gave you a thrill?
Learning of the incredible survival of books and documents from the ancient civilisation of Mesopotamia has been a great revelation. These library and archival collections survive on a phenomenal scale – hundreds of thousands of documents some of them 6 or 7,000 years old, and documents that describe those communities in incredible relatable details. They also show how the professions of librarian and archivist had some identifiable precursors in those civilisations.
Which of your characters would have been the most entertaining dinner guest and why?
A hard one! I would love to have met John Leland, the antiquary employed by Henry VIII to ‘peruse and diligently search’ the medieval libraries of Great Britain. He spent time in the 1530s visiting libraries that would be destroyed forever. Only a small fraction of the contents of these collections are known to survive today, and he saw them on the eve of their destruction, handling books that would be torn up and sold to butter makers to wrap butter!
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true?
It is to a true to an extent, but enough records survive for historians to be able to bring their skills to bear to disinter the propaganda from the fact. This is why we will always need to have historians, and a historical approach to issues of the present, so that we can determine the truth behind any situation.
If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, either as a student or when you first started out as a writer, what would it be?
Spend more time in the archives and the library! Read more, take more notes, and as Robert Caro says: ‘turn every page’!
Have any historians influenced your career or the writing of your shortlisted book?
I owe a huge intellectual debt to Prof Timothy Garton Ash, whose writing on contemporary history remains an inspiration, and on Sir Keith Thomas and Margaret Macmillan for their scholarship and the beauty of their historical writing. On the history of books and libraries I am still missing Richard Sharpe, who died last year, but also turn time and again to the work of Robert Darnton, Tony Grafton and Ann Blair.
Can you tell us a little about your next project?
I am turning my attention to the role of librarians, archivists, collectors in the vital social roles of preserving organising, and sharing knowledge. Again, I hope to take a broad chronological and geographical sweep, and to look at the roles, and successes (and failures), but also tell the stories of some of the extraordinary individuals who are behind these institutions.
Can you tell us which of the previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize you’d most like to recommend?
All of them! But Rosemary Hill’s God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, and Fiona MacCarthy on William Morris: A Life in Our Time especially.
Richard Ovenden’s Burning of the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack is available now.
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Geoffrey Plank
Geoffrey, congratulations on your nomination for the Wolfson History Prize of 2021 from Aspects of History. Why did you choose your particular subject?
Why did you choose your particular subject?
I have long been interested the influence of organised violence in allocating power and wealth around the world. At the start of my career this led me to research the British conquest of Acadia and other violent episodes in British imperial history. More recently I have studied seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious pacifists who agonised over the realisation that the entire Atlantic economy depended on warfare, dispossession and slavery. Proceeding from those studies, it made sense for me to examine the way violence shaped life comprehensively around the Atlantic.
What was the most challenging thing you experienced during the research and writing of the book?
Chapter Twelve. If you look at my book, you’ll see that it isn’t there. My original plan included one more chronological chapter, taking the story further into the nineteenth century. The pattern of warfare I discuss in this book came to an end in the aftermath of the Age of Revolution, but It was impossible for me to identify a precise endpoint. After struggling with the implications of this for the organisation of my book, I decided that my argument would be clearer if I ended my detailed discussion with the Atlantic revolutions, and discussed the aftermath more briefly in the conclusion. I like the result. In my conclusion I sum up a large part of U.S. history in a single paragraph.
Was there an exciting moment or piece of research that you uncovered, one that gave you a thrill?
As I was doing my research for Atlantic Wars, I was constantly looking for episodes that implicated several of the principal themes of the book at once. I was particularly happy to discover the story of Anthony Gaviallo, for example. He served as a oarsmen on a galley defending Havana, and he was identified as an “Indian man.” In 1745 his galley was surrounded by a fleet of privateers from New York and New England, and surrendered. Most of the crew were released, but 18 men identified as “Indians Molattos & Negroes” were taken to New York and Rhode Island to be sold as slaves. Gaviallo had never been a slave, and he pleaded for the New York admiralty court to free him. There are several elements of this story that implicate important themes raised in the book: Spain’s use of galleys to defend its ports in the Caribbean, the widespread presence of indigenous Americans on ship crews around the Atlantic world, and the perils faced by sailors of African or indigenous descent if their ships were captured. The privateers who came to Havana had executed, in effect, an Anglo-American seaborne slave raid. In this case the Spanish imperial authorities intervened to help secure Gaviallo’s release.
Which of your characters would have been the most entertaining dinner guest and why?
Nearly everyone in my book would have dramatic stories to tell. A few of them wrote up their war stories engagingly with the intention of making them entertaining. Thomas Raymond served as a soldier in the Thirty Years’ War, and that may sound grim, but his account of his experience is filled with jokes. But there’s a limit to the entertainment value of war stories at the dinner table. I’d prefer to invite the Inuit angakkuq, or shaman, who told a Danish missionary in the eighteenth century about the Inuit’s communal memory of the Norse colonisation of Greenland. Rather than recounting his own experience, he recounted conflicts from centuries past. Most accounts of Norse Greenland are a little gloomy, because the colony failed to survive. One of the most remarkable things about the angakkuq’s story is that it was hopeful. It contained an implicit message about the possibility of survival, reconciliation and peace.
The common phrase is that history is written by the victors. Do you think this is true?
Historians need to recognize that powerful people are able to broadcast their interpretations of events more loudly, consistently, and consequentially than others. This happened, for example, after revolutionary movements swept across the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A variety of communities including enslaved Africans, Europeans, colonists in the Americas and indigenous Americans pursued revolution. But in the aftermath of those struggles, dominant historical interpretations suggested that the white revolutionary leaders in the United States, Europe and Latin America were innovators. By contrast, most revolutionaries of indigenous American or African descent in the Andes, the Caribbean, the North American Great Lakes region or the Ohio Valley were dismissed as primitives and denigrated as irrationally violent. This is an example of history written by victors. We now know that there were many other stories to tell about this period of revolutionary struggle. Historians digging through buried evidence have recovered meanings various actors – not just Europeans and white colonists – attached to the events of the Age of Revolution.
If you could give a piece of advice to your younger self, either as a student or when you first started out as a writer, what would it be?
I think I, like most young historians when they’re starting out, worried too much about the possibility that other people might be researching my topic, the nightmare being that someone else would publish a book or article saying everything I intended to say. We all have our own perspectives, materials, skills and agendas, and this makes it highly unlikely than any two authors will duplicate each other’s work. It makes more sense to be thankful for the work of other scholars, rather than fretting about getting scooped.
Have any historians influenced your career or the writing of your shortlisted book?
After a conference in Canada in 2009, Wayne Lee worked with me and several others to produce a collection of essays entitled Empires and Indigenes emphasising the importance of military alliances between colonisers and indigenous peoples. That work helped inform Atlantic Wars. As I was refining the plan for Atlantic Wars, I consulted Lee several times. He is an expert military historian, interested in all parts of the world and every era since the last ice age.
Can you tell us a little about your next project?
I am thinking of writing a book about Gibraltar. At least since classical times, sailors have identified Gibraltar as a dividing line between seas. After the expulsion of Jews and Moors from Spain, the Strait of Gibraltar acquired additional significance as a perceived boundary between continents and faiths. The British acquisition of Gibraltar in the eighteenth century brought Jews back, and in other ways complicated the outpost’s geographical significance. Britain used Gibraltar as a base for establishing trade links and projecting military power across the Mediterranean and beyond. Inquisitive British soldiers, chaplains and natural philosophers studied Gibraltar’s archaeology, bird life and caves to find out what Gibraltar could reveal about the relationship between Europe and Africa. Today Gibraltar is the only territory in Europe included in the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories. Its inclusion on that list contradicts common assumptions about European imperialism. Gibraltar provides an excellent context for examining the ideological and political significance of categories like “continents,” “oceans,” “empires” and “faiths” from ancient times to the present.
Can you tell us which of the previous winners of the Wolfson History Prize you’d most like to recommend?
David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans. Abulafia makes a powerful argument for the historical importance of oceanic exploration and trade over millennia. Particularly importantly for me, he highlights the unique strangeness of the Atlantic at the start of the early modern era. Continuing his narrative right up to the present, he demonstrates in detail how much we still rely on the seas. The oceans have long been, and continue to be, the conduit for most of the world’s commerce.
Geoffrey Plank’s Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution is available now.
