Hardbody welcome Tony Snow's history. We're talking about history today, the history of how history was used in European Imperial Project, particularly the British Empire. I'm talking to Professor Priya Sacia, a professor of history at Stanford University. She's a Prize-Winning historian, prize winning author. And you're going to see why, because she's a bit of a legend. She's written an astonishing book called Time's Monster.

And as I was reading it, I was operating at the very extremity of my mental capacity. For many of you, this will be right in the middle of the ballpark, but for me, I was on the very edge. I was clinging to the edge of it. If you are interested in the issues raised in this podcast, for example, the British Empire's treatment of opposition in Kenya, India and elsewhere, we got lots of programs, lots of on history hit TV.

We have Operation Legacy, for example, history at TV, how the the British sought to cover up some of their colonial era atrocities in Kenya. We've got all sorts of other shows available in history at TV. This week is Trafalgar Week.

All week we're looking that hugely important battle in the genesis of the British Empire, a battle that confirmed Britain's dominance at sea over the French and Spanish and would be the last full scale fleet battle. The British fought against an opposing kind of global hegemonic power until the First World War, a hugely important battle to. But we're making history hit TV available at a super, super cheap rate. If you use the code Trafalgar, Trafalgar gets you a month for free and then your first three months as one pound euro or dollar.

So we've got a whole season of Trafalgar Nelson related content up there and lots more going up. Besides, in the meantime, everybody enjoy Sathya.

Prieur, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. This book blew my mind. Can I ask you I know you say it's not a history of history, but I found your discussion of the journey we've all been on since the cities and all of us on this kind of history journey. Can you tell me a little bit how you see the idea of history developing just briefly in the last three thousand years?

I'm sorry for that big question, but it's so good I can't let you go without it in your first chapter was so good.

Now, I mean, so we've always been telling stories about our past, right? Every civilization does it and every civilization has always done it. But the way we do it, the purpose of doing it shifts over time. So if you look at Herodotus, it's a history and he's considered the father of history. But there's fable mixed in there. Sometimes God intervenes directly in the world. The cities is different. Well, he's sort of taken as the father of modern history, I guess you could say, in the sense that he's trying to tell a story without God intervening in the world where human events just build on each other.

But those two words didn't necessarily shape how history was written. You know, since then, write those words so long as they rediscovered they're translated. They have different influences in different parts of the world. But what happens is in the Enlightenment, these philosophers in Europe are trying to think of a way to understand history where it has meaning and purpose, because if history of human events don't have meaning and purpose, then you're just stuck looking at the horrible human condition.

Right. And are the horrible things that humans always do. And and you have to just hope that in the afterlife there will be some meaning. So they're trying to think, OK, there we behave horribly, we are human, but perhaps we can imagine this in earthly time, having some kind of meaning or purpose. And that's the way we can understand how a good God allows evil to exist in the world, why there is even evil. Right.

And so what they decide is that, OK, God does not intervene directly in the world, but he exercises a kind of providential care so that we know that we shouldn't panic. We shouldn't even object when we see something that seems evil occurring, because it may be that in the long run, it has a very productive effect. And so this this new way of thinking about history in the 18th century, the argument I make in the book is that it changes sort of everyday ethical thought for first people in Europe who are coming up with these ideas.

But and then it's sort of exported all over the world.

Even more than that, you suggest that because of the their standpoint in that context, this providential guiding hand from God seemed to be delivering the world into the hands of said Europeans and thinkers of these thinkers were becoming politicians, our own right and in many cases or certainly in influencing politicians. And so history is a way of justifying the present arrangements.

Yeah, so so in the 18th century, Britain, for instance, is almost always at war. And some of these thinkers are looking at this and say, you know what? Doesn't seem to be a very good thing. A lot of people die. It's destructive, but maybe it's a necessary evil, right? Maybe in the end, this is going to do something for the better, not for Britain, but later on, then they start adding on this idea that for the world as well.

Right. And in fact, Britain wins all but one of those wars and British power expands steadily. And then these people at the turn of the 19th century are looking back and thinking, yeah, we were right. This has worked out well for the nation and this is a providential project, the expansion of British power. And from that point, all kinds of decisions relating to the spread of British power, even when it meant destruction on the ground or even the destruction of entire peoples at times.

Right. All of that can be justified by the idea that we're fulfilling a historic destiny, that in the end it will be it will be vindicated in time. We can't judge it right now. We have to suppress our ordinary kind of moral compunctions about what we're doing. We can them in our diaries, we write letters to our mothers in which we express this discomfort, but we do it nonetheless because its history is asking us to do it. It's very fatalistic, actually.

McCallie Hume, this idea of weakish history, which we still sometimes talk about in the UK, we and indeed with contemporary thinkers, I don't know whether it's Steven Pinker or Fukuyama. The big debate is like if everything was just slowly getting the ultimate dialectic, you know, if everything slowly was just getting better. But the seeds of of that modern impulse that we see that, yeah, the idea that history must be a.

Our progress, this is the birth of that idea, and even Marxists have it in their own version, right? There's liberalism and Marxism, the Whig interpretation in the markets, Marxist interpretation. And we know that they're on opposite sides in the Cold War. But the fundamental belief that history is going to be a story of progress is common to both. And what happens is in especially as you get into the 20th century, there are historians like Herbert Butterfield is the British historian who actually, I think the Whig interpretation of history, and he says, actually, this is totally wrong.

I mean, the job of historians is not to look back and judge things in the past and wish and history is the purpose of human life is not something that's going to come to fruition far, far in the future. It's about the here and now. So there are people who are criticizing this also even in the 18th century and all the way through the modern period. But as you mentioned, you know, people like Fukuyama, I mean, these are these remain really powerfully influential ideas in our kind of popular conceptions of history, even if within the Academy, I think there's there are more critical views.

OK, so let's get back to Empire. Talk to me more about these people that you talk about, whether it's Quaker gunsmiths or people on the crumbling frontiers of empire, that link between their understanding of history and their actions and their ability to justify things that they knew to be unethical at the time. That is a central new book I find so fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, the whole imperial project is so, so many people just feel guilty all the time. It's kind of. And so much is done in the name of atonement for earlier imperial sins. Right. So it's this constant effort to catch up with conscience. Right. So you have someone like Henry mean. I'll give you an example. He's a jurist and an historian who goes to India right after this massive Indian rebellion in eighteen fifty seven.

And it takes a year for the British to crush it. And they crush it very, very violently and brutally blowing thousands of people off cannons. I mean, there's some really horrendous stories. And then Henry Meme goes, they're determined to fix things. Obviously something has gone wrong, but when he gets there, he decides that, look, it's too late. We've already destroyed too much. We can't restore Indian civilization and culture to an administrative arrangements to what they were.

So we kind of have to live with our mistakes and we have to recognize the British power, by its very nature, is destructive in a really, really constructive way. I mean, he I don't have the quote at my fingertips, but he he basically spells that out, as you know, as much as I would have liked to make things right. I can't. And in service to hit of history, we have to all just be phlegmatic, you know that.

Sorry, the British kind of thing about the stiff upper lip, you know, and and put up with this feeling kind of stoically and do what history requires. This kind of change is going to come to India. We brought it maybe too quickly and ourselves, but India was going to change anyway. And so now we have a responsibility to finish the job as destructive as it might feel and as much as it makes our consciences weary. And so it's amazing how often it is someone like a historian who is in that position of administrative power making those calls.

So I think history was really practically helpful in enabling empires, whether it's McCawley you mentioned, or Maine or later, you know, even Winston Churchill or Seele.

You mentioned his great quote about the sort of school of statesmanship. Yes. So I'm understanding now, as I'm reading about the Times Monster, which is the title of your book, it is predictably clever because the Times wants to refer to the monstrous form of the British Empire. But the Times monster means that the British Empire was created by an awareness of the passing of what they thought was history and not the empire, the monster or the British a monster.

And I think I hope no one takes that of its history. History has times monster meant playfully, and it's like this idea of history that had such good intentions behind it that to make our peace with earthly life. So we're not always looking to the afterlife for meaning. That's a pretty nice thought. But by thinking that way, we created this monster that licensed us to behave in ways that we knew we weren't, that we knew were not right by a kind of ordinary ethics and gives us these amazing ideas that we still are still in modern parlance, they like to be on the right side of history.

And as Obama says, like bending the arc of history does not always run whatever.

I mean, lovely rhetoric, but kind of crazy, really.

Anyone can say, like, you know, here, Trump supporters say they are on the right side of history and and critics of Trump say they're on the right side of history. And the point is, like no one ever thinks they're on the wrong side of history. Right. So you can't really sit around waiting for history to judge. And I think it's more important to listen to what historians today are saying about to explain how we got here and then use your ordinary, more transcendent, non time based ethical idioms to figure out what's what's the right thing to do, like pay attention to the present and not wait for that future judgment.

You point out that the historians I mean, obviously, we we're recording this in October of twenty twenty. In fact, I think on Columbus Day, Columbus Day was yesterday and the Trump White House released an extraordinary statement that some kind of in many ways quite fascist, really in its conception of Columbus Day and history and revising history.

And you point out in your book, and I was reading it yesterday, that actually and I was very struck by that contrast, because you point out that until about 1945, historians were very much on the side of the establishment. And historians in the U.S. and the U.K., for example, were people that bolstered a narrative of imperialism and progress and white man's burden.

So to use an expression from the time and now the opposite seems to be the case. Now, the academy are regarded as enemies by people like Trump and I think here in the UK by some of the populist right as well. Yeah, absolutely.

And that's some I mean, there's a history to that, too. There was a kind of reckoning or a kind of realisation, especially after World War Two within. The academy that with history obviously does not look like it's about progress, you know, coming out of the Holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. And in that moment, a lot of people were understandably skeptical that history was really about progress. And they revised their understanding of, you know, what we're doing and we're doing history.

Why why we write history. Are we trying to justify moral wrongs in the past?

Are we trying to predict the future or are we actually just trying to recover what's lost and understand ways of being that we can access through historical sources that belong to the past and sort of commune with them and recognize our own humanity and that and the humanity of people in the past. That's a kind of basic human need and function. Right. So historians in the academy also I mean, there was a kind of realization even before World War two among some British historians also that, you know, history has been really complicit in enabling empire and they start rewriting the empire and rewriting the history of colonialism and more critical ways and so on.

And there's just more and more awareness of the power of governments and how they can control narratives and how that they have been doing that by coopting history all along. And so you see historians within the academy increasingly taking the position of critic of government or truthteller against the government, always, you know, informing the public about where they're being lied to by states that are democratic in name, but don't always want Democratic control of what they're doing. Right. They have their own agendas.

And so these ideas become popular, especially among the left and increasingly in the academy. But in popular culture, I think the idea that history is progress, it's about great men and great deeds still remains really, really influential.

It is difficult that idea of progress, because Predictify was an Enlightenment story writer and a thinker, and I'd seen the extraordinary transformation going on in and around me with unlocking the elemental forces of nature, the industrial revolution.

You could be forgiven for thinking that we were progressing from one place to another. It just turns out, as the 20th century showed, it wasn't necessarily the utopian sort of peaceful uplands that we once thought.

Yeah, I think in the industrial revolution, you know, that's it's the same time it lines up with the Enlightenment to and lines up with criticism of the Enlightenment, the romantic movement, for instance.

And people are looking at radical change happening and some people are saying it looks bad, some things are being changed very dramatically, but it's going to work out for the best in the end. And other people are saying, no, no, no, nothing can justify this utter destruction of people's lives and livelihoods. Right. So these two kind of modes of thinking about history sort of emerge at the same time. And you see critiques as well in from the perspective of colonial subjects as well, which is another thing that's covered in the book.

But I think besides World War two in the way that ended, I think right now today, the climate change which you can trace back to the industrial revolution is really what's happened, kind of forcing people to, again, really question, OK, maybe now time has proved that that expectation that emerged in the time of the industrial revolution, that this is all going to lead to a really good place. Maybe that was wrong because we've gotten to a really scary place.

Climate lose, I think rightly very large in this book, because it is a gigantically inconvenient fact for those who still talk about, you know, ideas of progress and marching towards the sunlit uplands.

Do you feel, though, when historians took a more critical position, you mentioned in your book a few times that also that meant that the voice of historians have been sidelined, ignored by by politicians, that historians haven't had as much say as you would your boss, your historian.

But I must say, as you and I and the people listening to this podcast would like, so I think people who are nostalgic for a time when historians were cozy with power like to make the claim that historians on the left, historians in the academy, have abdicated responsibility and are not informing public debate the way they once did and the way they should. And I think that was a false claim. I think historians work can be specialised just like the economists, or it can be specialised.

But just as economists continue to contribute to public debate, historians do, too. It's just that we're often taking a more critical position of what the state is doing. So some of the examples I give in the book is that, you know, we have the Iraq war in 2003 in which thousands of a. American historians wrote a petition through the American Historical Association saying, let's not do this. This is not a good idea. You know, there's no abdication of responsibility.

It's just that the government and U.S. government didn't like that opinion and didn't listen to that opinion. And the same thing with things like, you know, gun control, anything that immigration, whatever raised as a kind of historical question, you'll always find historians speaking about it. The question is whether they're heated or not.

What's the job of historians today? What's your job to teach to explain how we got here? To participate in conversations about the past, wherever they happen in public debate, in conversations about how to address the past going forward, so memorialisation reparations, restitution, apology, that whole set of conversations, but also to continue what we're doing when we talk about questions of gun control, immigration. So all of us having to continue doing the work that we are already doing.

But I don't think that we should be waiting for historians to in the future to figure out what we're doing now. I think people should read more history. And I think, you know, historians are not abdicating any responsibility. But there are areas where we could I hate to use this phrase, but sort of leaning more, you know, and and recognize that there are historians who are telling us what the past was like. But popular culture is so full of so many other forms of storytelling about the past, whether it's, you know, Netflix shows or Pageonce and commemorative events, everyone's own personal memories or pass down traditions.

I mean, there's just vast pool of culture that's grounded in stories about the past. And I really do think these new conversations we're having about memorialization and and reparations are just one way where we're forcing a reckoning with the past in a big kind of popular culture way. I really think that's a productive direction. Well, thank you.

Thank you so much. And your book in the U.K. is called Time's Monster History Conscious. The British Empire.

Remind us what it's called in the U.S. Times wants to how history made sense. It's such an interesting book. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. Such a pleasure. Hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go a bit of a favor to ask. Totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review.

I'd really appreciate that. It's. Well, world law of the Jungle out there. And I need all the fire support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you do, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.