Historians of the present from Eric Hobsbawm to David Olusoga
The final of Celebrity Traitors gathered 11.1m viewers, the biggest overnight (TV and IPlayer) audience of 2025.
One of the two surviving faithfuls was David Olusoga, whose new series on Empire is currently airing on BBC2. The Guardian’s view:
despite the historian’s impressive record of reasoning himself to every wrong conclusion possible. I remain firm in my belief that David would have made the world’s greatest traitor, but as a faithful he was catastrophic. (Guardian review)
I think Olusoga is a brilliant historian. Firstly because he challenges the dominant Our Island Story narrative of British history. Secondly and relatedly he does this often by referencing archival research, a key part of the historical process- actual research.
In the 1950s Eric Hobsbawm urged the Communist Party Historians Group to become ‘historians of the present’ meaning they need to grapple with the history of the twentieth century.
Hobsbawm, while he never had the national media profile Olusoga has, was certainly someone who opined widely with an historical perspective on political issues.
Perhaps his best known piece was the Forward March of Labour Halted and controversial and disputed analysis of the state the labour movement in the 1980s. However he wrote widely on contemporary issues bringing an historical perspective too them. In my view these pieces were rarely as sharp as his historical work, interesting though they certainly were.
As for David Olusoga’s performance on the Traitors, deprived of an archive to research, he lacked a sharp analysis. However with 11.1m viewers he is without doubt the UK’s best known public historian
Leave a Reply