What is History / by Edward Hallett Carr - Universal History Library

WHAT IS HISTORY
of English history, which already weighs like a dead hand on our curriculum, with a more
insidious and equally dangerous parochialism of the English-speaking world. The history
of the English- speaking world in the last 400 years has beyond question been a great
period of history. But to treat it as the centre-piece of universal history, and everything
else as peripheral to it, is an unhappy distortion of perspective. It is the duty of a university
to correct such popular distortions. The school of modern history in this university seems
to me to fall short in the discharge of this duty. It is surely wrong that a candidate should
be allowed to sit for an honours degree in history in a major university without an
adequate knowledge of any modern language other than English; let us take warning by
what happened in Oxford to the ancient and respected discipline of philosophy when its
practitioners came to the conclusion that they could get on very nicely with plain everyday
English. It is surely wrong that no facilities should be offered to the candidate to study the
modern history of any continental European country above the text-book level. A
candidate possessing some knowledge of the affairs of Asia, Africa, or Latin America has
at present a very limited opportunity of displaying it in a paper called with magnificent
nineteenth-century panache 'The Expansion of Europe'. The title unfortunately fits the
contents: the candidate is not invited to know anything even of countries with an important
and well-documented history like China or Persia, except what happened when the
Europeans attempted to take them over. Lectures are, I am told, delivered in this university
on the history of Russia and Persia and China - but not by members of the faculty of
history. The conviction expressed by the professor of Chinese in his inaugural lecture five
years ago that China cannot be regarded as outside the mainstream of human history' has
fallen on deaf ears among Cambridge historians. What may well be regarded in the future
as the greatest historical work produced in Cambridge during the past decade has bees
written entirely outside the history department and without any assistance from it: I refer
to Dr Needham's Science and Civilisation in China. This is a sobering thought. I should
not have exposed these domestic sores to the public gaze, but for the fact that I believe
them to be typical of most other British universities and of British intellectuals in general
in the middle years of the twentieth century. That stale old quip about Victorian insularity
'Storms in the Channel - the Continent Isolated', has an - uncomfortably topical ring today.
Once more storms are raging in the world beyond; and, while we in the English-speaking
countries huddle together and tell ourselves in plain everyday English that other countries
and other continents are isolated - by their extraordinary behaviour from the boons and
blessings of our civilisation, it sometimes looks as if we, by our inability a unwillingness
to understand, were isolating ourselves from what is really going on in the world.
In the opening sentences of my first lecture I drew attention to the sharp difference of
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