Things I did not know about the Kaiser

From The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 by Sir Richard Evans. Without having read him I was very prejudiced against him indeed, but I may well have been wrong. 

He is left-wing, but so was the incomparable A.J.P. Taylor, though in sharp contradiction to Taylor Sir Richard is passionately in favour of what was the EEC and is now the EU. 

Of course, his politics has in itself nothing to do with how good a historian he is. However, being on the left usually makes even great historians lack a dimension. Tony Judt, for example. 

When it comes to left-wing history, Marxists are usually better historians than liberals, because they see through liberalism and moderate socialism.

A.J.P. Taylor, though left-wing Labour was a 'Tory historian', meaning he wrote detailed, factual history as a sceptic without any political bias. Reading the Guardian's review of The Pursuit of Power, it is clear that Sir Richard Evans is not only very politically engaged but that his political engagement flows into his writing. It is probably something to do with his Welsh blood.

'Evans is clear that ideas about racial superiority were central to the imperial project: in 1895, the secretary of state for the colonies called the British “the greatest governing race the world has ever seen”, while schoolbooks described the “subject” peoples as “ugly”, “filthy” and “savage”. The white man’s empires were a burden on the colonised, Evans writes, not the other way round.'

His radical politics are annoying but do not matter - but it sounds as if they get in the way of explaining what happened. It is hard for people who bubble over with anger at things that happen in the past to be objective about the past. 

Historians realise that what is now long in the past was in the future but they should genuinely respect the strong arguments for colonialism, legitimism, hierarchy and inequality generally, both at the time and now. This is hard for historians on the left because the left is a quasi-religion, not a pragmatic guide to understanding how things work.

All historians write about their own era when they write about the past, but this is much more true of left-wing and liberal ones than of conservatives. The American historians writing about slavery in the 1960s and 1970s were really about the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. Expect to see many histories of Europe or of England that are really about Brexit. Oh what fun they will be.