Kmflett's Blog

Controversial Histories

I owe an apology to the historian E P Thompson. He died in 1993 but better late than never.

In his 1980 collection Customs in Common he published research he had done on Wife Sales. Until 1858 any form of divorce in England was extremely difficult and matters were not liberalised further until 1937.

One way of getting around this was for a man to put his wife up for sale. She would be brought by someone, leaving the man to re-marry. In most cases the buyer would be the woman’s lover. While we can see why the practice took place, and Thompson found numbers of recorded instances, it is obviously abhorrent in the modern era, suggesting forms of ownership and slavery.

Along with Raphael Samuel I was one of those who criticised Thompson in History Workshop Journal suggesting that he might find more positive things to research and write about

I now think its important both not to overlook difficult and controversial issues in our history but also not to overplay them either.

This brings us to the manufactured furore over an introduction that Jeremy Corbyn wrote in 2011 to a new edition of J A Hobson’s Imperialism. As the eminent historian Donald Sassoon pointed out in The Guardian the book contains 10 lines of anti-Semitic comment in around 400 pages.

Corbyn has answered the criticism of his introduction, by a Tory Peer in the Murdoch Times, by pointing out that in a brief introduction he chose to emphasise the parts of the book that are still of interest now- and mean it is on many University syllabuses- rather than the racism, which extends well beyond comment on Jewish people.

I think that was right but it doesn’t mean we can ignore awkward history. Corbyn no doubt wrote the introduction to Hobson because, as EP Thompson noted in Peculiarities of the English, he is one of the more important figures in Twentieth Century social democratic thought. Important enough indeed for Gordon Brown to quote him uncritically in a 2008 speech which has undoubtedly been read by many more people than have looked at Corbyn on Hobson.

Sassoon in his Guardian letter pointed out that Sidney Webb who wrote the original 1918 Labour Party Constitution was on record as being pleased that there weren’t Jews in the British Labour Party unlike on the Continent, a seriously unpleasant view but not one much criticised.

As a socialist historian I sometimes quote the work of William Cobbett a radical active in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Cobbett played an important role in the development of working class thought but he was also virulently anti-Semitic. Not many commentaries on Cobbett mention this. In my view they should but without taking away from his importance historically.

It is a matter of balance. If we take the impressive protests of the gilets jaunes in France there is persistent criticism that they contain elements of both the far right and the left and these are essentially the same. This is ahistorical claptrap. The crowd, or the mob as the right have called it historically, always has had contradictory elements in it, some reactionary, some not. That must be acknowledged while noting that in the main both historically and now it tends to be the progressive elements that come to hold sway.

History isn’t all about great victories and glorious defeats. Sometimes its about dead ends, things, words and ideas that we’d prefer to forget. We shouldn’t do that but nor do we need to dwell on them either.