key: cord-0053599-h732alyk authors: Vinen, Richard; Langhamer, Claire; Siena, Kevin title: The 2020 Historical Research lecture: Writing histories of 2020: first responses and early perspectives() date: 2020-11-21 journal: Hist Res DOI: 10.1093/hisres/htaa029 sha: 31ef56d942188f9ac305c1844b0ab2b581c6dd6a doc_id: 53599 cord_uid: h732alyk The 2020 Historical Research lecture, ‘Writing histories of 2020’, asked how future historians might study and understand the global coronavirus pandemic. The lecture brought together historians with three distinctive perspectives: contemporary history and writing of the very recent past, histories of record keeping and current archive creation, and the history of contagious disease and its human consequences. The three speakers, Richard Vinen, Claire Langhamer and Kevin Siena, provided early responses on future histories of 2020 and how we might best prepare the ground for these studies. This article provides written versions of these commentaries. Common to each of the contributions, and subsequent discussion, is the ongoing challenge and responsibility of thinking historically at a time when history is clearly ‘in the making’. The I.H.R.'s Historical Research lecture, which takes places each July, offers scholars an opportunity to discuss approaches to and methods for studying the past. In February of this year, plans for the 2020 lecture were in place. Then of course plans everywhere began to change. It became apparent that our proposed lecture could not happen, though we sincerely hope to hold this, with its distinguished historian, at the Institute's London home in summer 2021. In rethinking the focus and format of this year's lecture, it was clear there was one subject we could not avoid: coronavirus and its implications for historical understanding and research. So extensive is this subject that we chose to approach it from three viewpoints, those of the contemporary historian, the historian of mass archiving and record keeping, and the historian of earlier episodes of contagious disease. Prior to the lecture, our three speakers -Richard Vinen, Claire Langhamer and Kevin Siena -were invited to consider the events of 2020 from the perspective of their research specialisms, and to offer some 'first responses and early perspectives' on 'writing histories of 2020'. This year's lecture, chaired by the I.H.R.'s director, Jo Fox, took place online on 29 July with an international audience running into the hundreds. We thank the journal's publisher, Oxford University Press, for supporting and promoting this year's lecture in its new format. In their presentations and in the subsequent discussion, our three speakers raised topics including how historians best engage with events that are so evidently 'history in the making'; how the Covid-19 pandemic might reshape historians' periodization of the early twenty-first century; the form that global histories of this global event might take; what records we should keep for future histories, and who decides how we remember; and how far historians' experience of researching and explaining earlier outbreaks of contagious disease, from plagues to HIV/AIDS, might inform preparations for histories of 2020. We are extremely grateful to Richard, Claire and Kevin for engaging so thoughtfully with these, and other, questions of historical purpose and method in an environment of such uncertainty; and also for writing up their contributions while preparing for new ways of working in the current academic year. This professionalism enables their talks to appear in the final issue of Historical Research to appear in 2020: at a time when the outcomes of the coronavirus pandemic remain unclear, and future histories of 2020 to be decided. The Editors * How will we see history through the prism of Covid? In the general confusion, he set himself to be the historian of that which has no history. Camus, La Peste (1947) . Historians, as Camus knew, have talked about plague since ancient times but the topic did not feature much in the historiography in the early twentieth century. Perhaps this was because historians then were primarily interested in Europe and plague seemed to have ceased to be significant in much of that continent or perhaps it was because they were primarily concerned with explicitly political issues. A celebrated exception was James Westfall Thompson's essay of 1921, comparing the social effects of the Great War and the Black Death, but even this seemed to occlude the influence of disease in recent times and did not mention the fact that there had been a flu pandemic in 1918. 1 Since the 1950s, however, plague has acquired many historians. It was a subject of particular interest to those innovative scholars associated with Annales in France and with Past & Present in Britain. Some epidemics of the pre-industrial period -the Black Death in Europe and the diseases that all but wiped out the indigenous population of some Oceanic countries after the arrival of the first Europeans -were seen as agents of revolutionary social change in themselves; though, in recent years, historians of Europe have mainly argued that the Black Death accelerated changes that would have happened anyway. Later diseasesparticularly cholera in the nineteenth century -were studied for what they revealed about the social and political structure of affected areas. 2 Margaret Pelling took a different approach, arguing that epidemics -sharp moments of crisis -are less useful to the social historian than the study of more persistent, endemic, diseases, such as tuberculosis. 3 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's study of the 'microbial unification of the world' in the late medieval/early modern period sought to transcend the distinction between endemic and epidemic diseases. He argued that the latter were not best understood as moments of crisis. Instead he brought a Braudelian emphasis on the long, or at least medium, term to the study of plague. 4 Individual outbreaks might seem terrifying and incomprehensible in the speed with which they worked their effects, but plague was endemic or, to use Le Roy Ladurie's rather Trumpian formulation, 'chez elle' in Asia. 5 Once individual plagues had been 'digested by global history', 6 they would appear as successive waves of a single phenomenon that were transmitted by new means of trade and communication rather than as isolated events. Disease was thus to be distinguished from the événenmentiel timescale of political history. How will future historians fit Covid into this kind of analysis? It will be a prism through which we will look at other historical episodes as well as, one day, being an object of historical analysis in itself. This means that how we will think about the period before Covid will depend partly on what comes after. It also means that any historical discussion of Covid is subject to much uncertainty. Now (I am writing in September 2020 and what I say may be out of date by the time that I correct proofs) we cannot even be sure about the purely biological trajectory of Covid, let alone about its social and political fall-outs. Having said this, in two respects, Covid seems new. The first of these concerns the speed with which it has exercised its effects. It has only come to human attention in the last eight months. Its total life so far, to use an analogy that Braudel and Ladurie would have recognized, is shorter than that of one of the more robust governments of the French Fourth Republic. The speed of its spread also means that Covid has affected the whole world at more or less the same time. Peter Baldwin wrote that reactions to infectious diseases in the nineteenth and early twentieth century owed much to 'geoepidemiological position', by which he meant that some places were exposed earlier and more severely to epidemics. 7 Now, by contrast, no country is protected by its geographical position and, indeed, Covid seems to have been most successfully contained in the very region where it originated. Past historians have drawn lessons about, say, Giolotti's Italy or liberal Hamburg, from responses to a particular outbreak of disease. 8 Future historians will write global accounts of Covid though these histories may also involve a return to something that has been unfashionable in recent years: comparison between different countries. Responses to Covid remind us that states remain important but also that there are such things as national societies -Korea, Sweden and New Zealand have had different experiences of Covid partly because Koreans, Swedes and New Zealanders behave in particular ways. Reference to global history, however, raises a question. Will Covid, which seems, as we experience it in the West, to operate in such a short time-scale, be seen in same way to historians who write its broader history? Back in 1973 and even when writing about the pre-modern period, Le Roy Ladurie hinted that a new kind of 'microbiological unification' brought about by mass air travel might be about to transform the world. Diseases transmitted in this way would include other varieties of influenza but they might also include AIDS -the 'patient zero' that historians once identified at the origin of the disease's spread in North America was a flight attendant. One might also note that Covid did not seem equally shocking in parts of the world that had already been affected by what one might term the 'jet plagues'. This is obviously true of Hong Kong, which has been relatively successful in containing Covid partly because of its recent experience with other varieties of influenza. It is also true of Kenya, where the casualties of Covid are still dwarfed by those of 'the time of death' that came during the early years of AIDS. 9 The second novelty of Covid concerns not the disease itself but the response to it by governments, media and society, and these certainly have functioned on an événenmentiel time scale. Covid has been seen as a matter for political intervention. Indeed politics in almost every country has revolved around Covid for the last six months. There is nothing inevitable about this. The epidemic of influenza that broke out at the end of the First World War was not seen as a central concern of political life. AIDS had a political effect in Haiti -the economic crisis produced by a sharp decline in tourism brought about revolution -but it had remarkably little political impact in rich countries, not even in San Francisco or New York where infection rates were relatively high. Perhaps the politicization of Covid is explained partly by the fact that handling the disease has so often been described in terms of 'war' and war is so obviously a matter for the state. Furthermore, today's politicians -unlike, say, the military doctors and engineers who sought to contain Malaria in British-ruled India 10 -tend to assume that the 'war' against the virus is a total one that will only finish with complete victory. 11 They do not anticipate the containment and cohabitation that has marked humanity's relation with AIDS, cholera or malaria and that has proved, at least so far as rich people in rich countries are concerned, relatively tolerable. The Covid crisis has been further dramatized by the media. In 1971, Pierre Nora, discussing the 'return of the event' to historiography, referred to 'monster events' that were magnified by the effects of the mass media. 12 Covid has proved to be the monster event par excellence and its effects have been magnified by rolling news, the internet and also by the economic crisis of newspapers and broadcasters, itself exacerbated by the Covid lockdown, which has made them ever hungrier for controversial stories. Covid has also occurred at a curious moment in the history of democracy. It is often said that populist revolts illustrate a lack of faith in politicians. In fact, though respect for politicians is very low, faith in them is high. Indeed, it is precisely because electorates seem convinced that politicians could do anything -reverse the economic rise of China, negotiate a Brexit deal that would involve no concessions on the British side -that 'failure' attracts such a heavy price. One is struck, in retrospect, by the extent to which strong politicians of a few decades ago emphasized the limits on their power. Kissinger anticipated that the West would have to accept the existence of the Soviet Union for hundreds of years; de Gaulle insisted that he could do nothing to restore the nineteenth century world, 'oil lamps and the fleet at sail', the passing of which he regretted; Thatcher told voters that she could not 'buck the market'. Now, by contrast, politicians are expected to offer opinions on, and solutions to, almost every problem and this means that anything that might, in any way, be linked to Covid is transformed into a political matter. How will Covid influence how future historians periodize their studies? Peter Hennessy has suggested that there will be a B.C. and an A.C. -a before and after Covid. He has also implied that Covid might be a turning point as important as the Second World War (at least so far as Britain is concerned) and even argued that a kind of 'second Beveridge report' might provide 'an appropriate memorial to the Covid fallen'. 13 Hennessy's reference to 1945 has special resonance because the early stages of the Covid lockdown coincided with the seventy-fifth anniversary of allied victory in Europe. This anniversary was marked with particular fervor in Britain where references to Covid have also become associated with a wider piety about the Second World War, partly because the 'Covid fallen' often belong to the generation that reached adulthood during the war. The queen (born in 1926) alluded to the wartime songs of Dame Vera Lynn and a flypast of Spitfires marked the anniversary of the National Health Service. One might also point out that memories of 1945 tend to be relatively benign in Britain precisely because British casualties in the war (though very much higher than even the worst predictions for the number of 'Covid fallen') were small compared to those of other countries. To put matters in perspective, the number of Japanese killed in the first fifteen minutes after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 (a date that is helpfully removed from national memory by the new focus on V.E. day) 14 was greater than the number of all the British people who died with Covid until 6 August 2020. Periodizing British, let alone world, history in a way that suggested some parity between 1945 and Covid, would have interesting consequences. Not only would it create a new chronological frontier but it would sweep away some previous ones. R. W. Johnson (born in 1943) wrote in 1985: When I was growing up people always referred to the times through which we were living as 'the post-war period'. After many years of this I became discontented: when would a new period start? Didn't history ever change and move on? We know the answer to this now. The post-war period ended in 1973 and a new era began. Clearly, I should not have been so impatient. For all the difficulties of this time the period from 1945 to 1973 is likely to be remembered as something of a golden age: no world wars, sweeping emancipation from colonial rule, growing détente between East and West, continuous and headlong economic growth. The period which began in 1973 looks altogether less hopeful and at worst it looks positively frightening. 15 Many historians have followed Johnson's lead and much writing on the three post-war decades (at least so far as western Europe and North America is concerned) revolves around the notion of a 'golden age'. This interpretation has also sometimes gone with a certain lack of attention to the details of what happened in the period. Peace and prosperity can be dull. Geof Eley referred to his own youth in the 'safe but dispiriting landscapes of the long postwar'. 16 By contrast, the period since the mid 1970s is often presented as being crowded with momentous historical events. Le Débat, the journal founded by Pierre Nora, recently devoted an issue to 1979 as a 'turning point' in world history. The terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 or the financial crash of 2007/8 were accorded 'historic' status almost as soon as they happened. There are two obvious, but radically different ways, in which Covid might make us rethink periodization. First, the consequences of the pandemic might be so dramatic and malign that they will overshadow all of recent history -perhaps making the importance attributed to, say, the financial crash seem overstated. Rather than seeing a postwar golden age that ended in the 1970s, we may, instead, see the whole period from 1945 to 2020 as a unity, characterized by continuous economic growth; indeed, in parts of the world, and even parts of western Europe, economic growth was faster in the decades after 1975 than it had been during the 'golden age'. If Covid has dramatic effects on the political life of countries or the relations between them, it may also be that future historians will be struck by the absence of direct conflict between great powers in the seventy-five years after 1945 and by the spread of liberalism and democracy in this period. The years between the end of the Cold War and the outbreak of Covid may be reconsidered. This period has not had a good press from historians 17 -in part, one suspects, because many were keen to distance themselves from what they saw as the naïve triumphalism of Francis Fukyama's End of History (1992). Perhaps, though, these years will come to seem benign in retrospect -much as the years immediately before the First World War were, eventually, defined as the European Belle Époque. 18 Alternatively, if the disease is contained quickly and economies recover fast, Covid may be seen as a comparatively trivial episode. Perhaps, indeed, it will be regarded as another example of the febrile propensity of observers in the early twenty-first century to attribute 'historical' importance to every event. Far from being regarded as an episode of comparable importance to the Second World War, future historians may suggest that reactions to Covid illustrate the ways in which people, in Europe and North America at least, had forgotten what real historical upheaval might look like. A feature of the historical self-consciousness that has gone with Covid is a desire to collect sources that might one day be used to write accounts of the pandemic. In this domain, as in so much else, Covid seems to have accelerated changes that were already in train -though these changes do not all involve moves in the same direction. On the one hand, historians are interested in 'big data'. Covid itself has been understood largely through statistical representations. Some of this will be studied to ask obvious questions. Cliometricians will turn away from simple numbers of those who 'died with Covid' to ask how far overall mortality was affected by Covid and/or by the measures taken to contain the disease. However, the big data will also cast light on all sorts of other matters. Measures against Covid are intrusive and intrusion is the friend of the historian. One assumes that historians of China -using databases of information derived from mobile phones -will, one day, be able to reconstruct the movements of every person in Shanghai in more detail than historians of medieval Europe can hope to reconstruct the progress of a royal tour. However, historians are also interested in the more small-scale and subjective information that might be yielded by 'ego-documents', such as interviews or life writing. Many institutions have responded to Covid by encouraging the collection of personal testimonies -diaries, photographs and interviews -relating to the experience of individuals. 19 But the treatment of personal testimony has changed in recent years and it seems likely that Covid will change it further. 'Ego-documents' were not always seen as simple acts of self-expression. Often, they involved witnesses who had been compelled to reveal things that they found painful. This was obviously the case of those early modern testimonies that were collected by the Inquisition. It was true in a less literal sense of much continental work that informed by a sense of political confession, particularly by former Stalinists. Two of the most important works in this genre -Edgar Morin's Autocritique (1959) and Arthur London's The Confession (1968) -deliberately turned communist techniques of self-criticism against the authors' own communist pasts. Morin's work, in turn, had an important influence on how French historians (particularly those grouped in Pierre Nora's collection on Ego-histoire) saw their own lives. 20 By contrast, more recent ego-documents owe much to experiences of counselling or therapy -processes that encourage the individual to regard talking about themselves as benign and as a matter of endless interest to their interlocutors. 21 The rise of social media has encouraged a sense that all personal accounts are of equal value. The Covid lockdown raises questions about personal testimony. Once such testimonies were valued because of what they said about society as a whole. A witness was useful either because they were themselves engaged in some important social or political process or because they commented on what they saw -early Mass Observation reports were largely intended to provide information about someone other than the person writing the report. However, in recent years, testimony has been increasingly valued not because of what it says about society but because of what it says about 'the self '. Lockdown testimonies -sometimes produced by people who are not able to leave their homesreinforces this tendency. Covid also raises questions, or perhaps reinforces questions that have already been raised, about the historian's relation to the subjectivities of those that they study. Even scholars who were particularly sympathetic to those that they studied once recognized that the views of their subjects might be, in some objective sense, wrong or, in E. P. Thompson's famous phrase 'deluded'. 22 Academic cultures have changed. Historians often talk about their subjects -particularly when those subjects are still alive -with something bordering on deference. This propensity is increased by the fact that the collection of testimony is often governed by rules on 'research ethics', largely derived from medical research, which means that providers of testimony are sometimes granted an effective veto about how historians might quote them. Perhaps this goes with a more general shift. Historians of subjectivity or emotion may be objective and detached; indeed, an emphasis on the cultural construction of emotion might encourage a certain cold-bloodedness. However, in the last few years, some historians have come to feel that they ought themselves to be emotionally engaged with their subjects -something that can be seen, for example, in reactions to the Black Lives Matter campaign. Covid, which has encouraged even epidemiologists to preface all reference to mortality statistics with the word 'sadly', has exacerbated this tendency. There is one curious and noteworthy absence in much discussion of emotional reactions to Covid and that is death. People talk of loneliness, separation and fear but not of what the end of life itself might mean. This may be partly because the number of deaths is relatively low. It is also because the very measures taken to contain Covid have tended to reinforce a phenomenon identified by Geoffrey Gorer when he remarked that death has become, in the literal sense of the word, obscene -that is, it happens away from the public gaze. 23 Covid victims, of course, have usually died in particular isolation and even funerals have sometimes been limited or curtailed. 24 There was once a close association between plague, death and religion. Some Muslims believed that fleeing from a plague-stricken area was itself impious and, as late as 1832, British legislation intended to contain the spread of Cholera referred to the will of God. 25 Camus' La Peste (1947) -is largely about religious questions, in spite, or because, of the fact that the author was not a believer. Now, in the West at least, religious references have been striking by their absence during the pandemic -there was little protest about the closure of places of worship in most countries. Perhaps this brings us back to the politicization of Covid and the sense that it presents problems that ought, in the public mind, to be 'soluble' rather than merely ones that present opportunities à la Camus for heroic but hopeless struggles against the absurdity of life and death. Much of the discussion of the pandemic has involved reference to social inequality. However, this sits oddly with the fact that historians (and almost all social commentators) are less and less likely to talk about social class, which would, fifty years ago, have been the most important category of analysis for many of them. The history of class once meant, in large measure, the history of the working class. Now middle-class attributes -home ownership or university education -are increasingly taken for granted and 'inequality' is often perceived, in rather Pikettyesque terms, as something that divides 'ordinary people' from the very rich. But the interest in workers has declined even among those who work on periods when they made up the majority of the population. The emphasis on ego documents, of course, implicitly privileges those who are relatively articulate, who have a degree of leisure and who belong to those social groups that assume that their experiences and opinions might be of interest to others. This tends to mean the middle class -though not necessarily the most privileged fraction of it. Indeed, one might argue that the 'history from below' of the 1960s has been replaced by a kind of 'history from the middle', particularly with regard to the recent past. 23 Gorer's ideas were first set out in an essay for Encounter on 'The pornography of death', which was pubished in 1955. His essay was reprinted as an appendix to his book Death Grief and Morning in Contemporary Britain (London, 1965 ). Gorer's book was an anthropological study based on questionnaires and interviews though it also contained an autobiographical introduction. Gorer suffered from 'Asian flu' in 1918 -though he mentions that epidemic only to describe how it influenced his attitudes to the Armistice (his father had been killed in the war). He says nothing about the effects of the epidemic itself on mortality. 24 Note the contrast with AIDS, which did entail much discussion of death -perhaps because the early victims of AIDS were mostly young and because, though their actual deaths may have occurred in private, they were conspicuously dying for such a long time. Perhaps too because western society was less secular in the 1980s than it is now and because AIDS was sometimes discussed in terms of sin and punishment. 25 Briggs, 'Cholera and society in the nineteen century'. Covid has reinforced this tendency to take a middle-class perspective for granted. Big data analysis is likely to miss that section of the population (a small one in industrialized countries but quite a big one on a global scale) who have no mobile phones and no regular access to healthcare. It is significant that reactions to Covid have revolved around that supremely middle-class institution 'the home'. Even in rich countries, there are parts of the population that live on the streets or who share cramped rented rooms. In the world as a whole, huge parts of the population still earn their living from manual labour -one reason for the decline in the working-class population of Europe and North America is simply that certain kinds of jobs have been exported. Huge parts of the world's population also still live in great poverty. One assumes that the notion of 'staying at home' must seem odd to those who live in shanty towns or refugee camps or to the Indian migrants labourers who were forced to take to the roads at a few hours' notice when the Indian government announced its lockdown in March 2020. One should finish by emphasizing, again, that how historians will look back on Covid will depend largely on what comes after it. It may be followed by, and perhaps partly cause, wider social and political changes that will come to put the disease itself in a brutal perspective. A Hamburg doctor recalled that the cholera epidemic of 1892 was 'like the caesura, the great divide between the Hamburg old and new'. But one of his contemporaries remarked that the sense of the history as being divided into 'before' and 'after' cholera was eventually overshadowed by the even more terrible events of the Great War. 26 Historians who study the fifteen years after 1930 will feel a chill run through them when economists announce that the economic contraction of the last few months is worse than that of the inter-war depression. The pandemic is not an existential threat. It will not wipe humanity out and it will not, in itself, undermine established institutions. We would do well to heed Margaret Pelling's reminder that we should pay more attention to the undramatic but persistent causes of mortality -'bosom vipers' -rather than to the spectacular effects of pandemic. One might add that in large parts of the world people still die from conditions that would be easily prevented or treated in rich countries. Indeed vipers are more than a figure of speech in this context. According to the World Health Organization, a million Indians have died from snakebites in the last decade (the W.H.O. estimated deaths from Covid in the first eight months of 2020 at about 800,000). Cobras and kraits may account for as many as 1 per cent of deaths among agricultural labourers in low-lying wet areas. 27 Many in such places would recognize the words that John McManners wrote with regard to eighteenth century France: 'Particular diseases were the indispensable infantry in Death's dark armies but his generals were Cold and Hunger'. 28 One should also note that there are still some threats to humanity that might realistically be described as 'existential'. One of these, not talked about much in recent years though it has hardly gone away, is nuclear war -the prospect of which seemed so haunting in the 1980s that even historians writing about disease in the nineteenth century evoked it. 29 The second threat, discussed almost obsessively in recent years, is climate change. One effect of Covid may be to stimulate a wider change in how historians perceive relations with the natural world and, particularly, what timescale they see those relations operating on. Adam Tooze, who began 2020 writing a book about climate change and finished 26 Evans, Death in Hamburg, p. 565. 27 [ that year and offered an account of coronation day that was markedly more complex than those offered by the national press. 34 It was out of these day surveys that Mass-Observation's more widely known wartime diaries and directives emerged; indeed these had replaced the May the twelfth diaries by the time the Second World War had started. It was not until 2010 that the 'new' Mass-Observation Project revived the 12th May Diary idea and it has since made the call on a yearly basis. 12 May 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of the re-animated Project. 12 May 2020 was a Tuesday and it should have been an ordinary working day for most of us. Yet this particular 12 May was, as one of the diarists explained, 'anything but ordinary'. 35 'As we post this call the UK is in lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic' the Archive staff had explained the previous month, 'We don't know how life will be on the 12 th May, but we would like your help to document it. Please tell your family and friends. It will be valuable to have a collection from people of all ages across the UK'. 36 Potential contributors were asked to send electronic copies, if at all possible, because the Archive itself was closed. Schoolchildren and community groups were specifically encouraged to get involved. In an acknowledgement of the difficulties many parents faced over these months it was suggested that 'This may be an activity for 30 Oxford Centre for Life Writing