We Have to Talk About Ian Leslie…
The author of popular psychology books, Ian Leslie, has thoughts to share with us about the allegedly parlous state of academic history today. In his lengthy article, ominously entitled ‘The End of History: Academic historians are destroying their own discipline’, we learn that:
Whole fields of historical study seem to have turned into competitions for who can generate the most eye-catching narrative of identity-based injustice, and if that means making blatantly implausible empirical claims, so be it. To me, this seems a very bad thing for the authority of History as a discipline.
History is suffering ‘an institutional malaise’. Partly for this reason, applications to study history at universities are down thanks to an assault from ‘within’, like a particularly nerdish Fifth Column. Apparently,
a cohort of academics who have been raised in the deadening, homogenising discourse of critical theory (or a [sic] rather, a degraded version of it) and who are now abandoning the principles which made their discipline authoritative and vital in the first place.
Leslie does not tell us which universities provided this diet of “critical theory” in their curricula, presumably for around at least a decade ago or more, which has led to this dire situation. Yet, when I was a student in the distant past of the mid-2000s, little truck was given to “critical theory”. (In fact, as PhD student, I asked my supervisor if I should engage with this kind of material and, after a look of pained exasperation, was told “As an historian, you don’t do ‘theory’”.) Regardless, the solution to this malaise?
To save the discipline from irrelevance, historians of integrity need to stand up and start calling this bullshit out, loudly, rather than muttering behind their hands while quietly going along with it.
So, what is the basis for Leslie’s breathless diagnosis of this “bullshit”?
First, a BBC news article about the skeletons of individuals who perished during the Black Death in 14th Century London. The study was conducted by anthropologists and archaeologists from the Museum of London. They found that the female African population were more likely to be among the bones if those killed during the same period. Presumably, like so many others, they perished as a result of the plague or its aftermath.
Second, Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a historian at UCL, published a speculative article in History and Technology, making the case that the industrialist Henry Cort may have adopted the methods of African slaves in Jamaica to develop a new technique in reconstituting scrap metal into iron bars. This, however, was not the central point of the essay, instead, it was to ‘engage with the practices and purposes of some of those Black metallurgists on their own terms’.
In the case of the mortality among apparently African Londoners during the Black Death, Leslie has not read the actual study, which has yet to be published, but the BBC news report about it. Based on his doubtlessly vast expertise in sampling, anthropology and archaeology, he tells us that these scientists ‘should be asking serious questions about [their] methodology.’
Quite what these archaeologists and anthropologists and archaeologists — again, whose study he has not read — should instead conclude from the data, we are not told. Merely that,
either there was some utterly wild disparity in the way different races were hit by the bubonic plague in London — or maybe the researchers aren’t identifying what they think they’re identifying. I rather suspect the latter.
Leslie leaves the ‘latter’ a detective puzzle for us to solve. But the really important point is that the University of London study which he has not read, data he cannot otherwise explain via any other conclusion, is “bullshit”. There is some talk of sample sizes, but Leslie appears to conflate historical research with opinion polling.
More mysterious is what this press piece tells us about the state of academic history — purportedly the subject of Leslie’s piece. The basis for the piece’s inclusion is apparently because it uses the limited archaeological evidence available to comment on race and mortality and thus about ‘structural racism’ — the bête noire of right-wing culture warriors.
Yet, even if we accept Leslie’s contention that the study is “bullshit” (once again, he has not actually read it), it tells us precisely nothing about academic history. Anthropology and archaeology, while both concerned with the human past are not the same discipline as history. So, the first of Leslie’s two examples, which he labours for nearly a thousand words and approximately the first third of his article about the problems in academic history, was not actually the product of academic historians. Oh…
The second example on offer fails to directly address Bulstrode’s piece at all. In fact, rather like his earlier hatchet job, Leslie shows zero actual evidence of having read the original piece. Instead, he relies, in both his screeds, on other people’s reviews of the original essay. This is a perplexing decision given that Bulstrode’s essay is available for free on History and Technology’s webpage. (I don’t think Leslie has read it at all. Any nods he makes to it can be found in the reviews or a 30 second scan of the article itself.)
As such, Leslie draws primarily on three “reviews” of the original article, one by Dr Anthony Howes (a thoughtful — and in my view highly invaluable — reflection on evidence and the limits of speculation in academic history) and the second, an analysis of some of the evidence by “Oliver Jelf” (a weaker piece, which singularly fails to get to grips with the wider purpose at the heart of Bulstrode’s article, and instead concerns itself with getting into the weeds of the evidence regarding Cort). The third talking point is the result of an internal review of the article by the editors of History and Technology, who explain at length precisely what they believe Bulstrode was attempting to do, what she achieved in doing, and what she added to the field.
It is notable, that Cort and the origin of his innovation are of limited concern to the editors of History and Technology — much to Leslie’s apparent chagrin. Why? Cort is of secondary concern to Bulstrode’s article. His alleged theft of ideas was, in her words, ‘not the central concern of this paper.’ Instead, the writer was, in the words of E.P. Thompson, interested in rescuing the slave foundry worker, from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity.’ The point of the paper which Leslie is angry about, specifically Cort’s alleged adoption of slave metallurgical techniques, draws upon circumstantial evidence and lacks a “smoking gun”.
Leslie makes much of this, including an admission, highlighted by the editors or History and Technology, is that Bulstrode made a mistake. A ship carrying a possible relative of Cort landed not at Portsmouth, but Lancaster. In Leslie’s mind this is fatal. The idea that people regularly corresponded or even travelled within the island of Great Britain does not appear to have entered his thinking.
But to return to the point. While nice to have a “smoking gun”, much historical scholarship lacks this. Historical evidence is typically fragmentary. Historians arrange what they uncover to make innovative, speculative arguments about what happened in the past. It is then left to other historians to agree or disagree, and delver their own evidence and interpretation to the table. Hopefully, once the dust settles, we all have a more informed view of the past.
Leslie does not understand this. He thinks of historical journals as being like a courtroom in a criminal trial, where the evidence presented must be of the highest standard to secure a criminal conviction. Indeed, he draws upon the language of the legal system to make his point. The editors of History and Technology, in his words, ‘put themselves in an odd position of being both jury and counsel for the defence, and they do not give an inch on behalf of their client.’
Yet, as those same editors make clear, the speculation in question, and built around a considerable sum of circumstantial evidence amassed by Bulstrode, is compelling. They write and Leslie quotes,
It is thus sound to conclude, as Bulstrode does, that people who were so familiar with both sugar and iron production overlapped in their approaches to the two operations and passed bundles of scrap metal through grooved rollers.
It is fine to disagree with this, as Howes does — as indeed does Leslie. Yet the difference between Howes and Leslie is that the former uses the piece to make a learned argument about the limits of speculation and the use of evidence. He has added to the debate. Which is the very point. Leslie has not. Indeed, his entire piece is a condemnation of history as a discipline because, to use the stolen language of the culture warrior, it has become “woke”.
To summarise: Leslie has created a lazy caricature of an entire discipline he evidently knows little about. It is based on one piece of research by scholars who are not historians and which he has not read, and a second piece — this time actually by a historian — which he has not understood.
