Margaret MacMillan’s Peacemakers deservedly attracted the highest praise. It was illuminating and a compelling read. Equally, her Women of the Raj evoked the lost world of the memsahibs — courag- eous, often narrow and intolerant, but dauntless as they nearly always were. Now, from her eminence as Warden of St Anthony’s College, Oxford, she stands back a little and considers the uses and abuses of history.
The result is not a long book — always an attractive characteristic — but it is a worthy one. It will certainly bring back memories for those who, in the mid 20th century, offered a special paper as part of their A-levels or who attempted the Modern History School at Oxford shortly afterwards.
Why should we study history? Can we learn anything from it? Can history be used for purposes moral and immoral? Is history dangerous? MacMillan asks all those questions and with a carefully calibrated liberal judgment. In doing so she is not hugely complimentary to the 19th- or 20th-century giants who asked the same questions more magisterially. Indeed, not for her more than a passing reference to von Ranke and Renan and none at all to Sir Herbert Butterfield.
MacMillan’s subject is an interesting one. One of the phenomena of every age is what she calls ‘the power of the past’. She observes how even revolutionary regimes have imitated their predecessors. Napoleon’s court, for instance, was largely modelled on that of the Bourbons, and the Red Tsars lived behind the walls of the Kremlin like their predecessors. Today, the obsession with the past is not confined to our new lords and masters, the bureaucrats. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that, if they know any history, they choose to ignore it. Rather, it is the general public who are becoming obsessed with the past. Perhaps the bureaucrats’ loathing of nationhood and contempt for those whom the haut fonctionnaires of France used to call ‘les administrés’ has prompted a reaction among their victims. As our liberties and individualism are threatened by Whitehall, Brussels and the increasing homogeneity of the developed world, perhaps, in reaction, we search for a connection with a past that, however bleak for many, at least allowed us an identity. MacMillan has some sympathy for this view. She suggests that ‘we call on the past . . . at least in part because we no longer trust the authorities of today.’
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