Persuasion by Priya Satia

You can find the adapted version here. 

This forum on the trouble in British history aims to “inspire…us to advocate for a way forward,” according to Asheesh Siddique’s opening piece. Our critical temperaments and skill at discerning connections across time and space makes this a particularly challenging call for a group of historians: We have to ensure that our recognition of the long-standing and widespread nature of the crisis does not lead to fatalist acceptance or defeatist laments that British history isn’t worth saving anyway—at least not in a forum devoted to finding a way forward. As Kate Fullagar’s helpful contribution on the state of the field in Australia concludes, the need is for “persuasion (over cynical attack).”

The faults that inspire James Vernon’s question “Should British Studies Survive,” echoed by Christienna Fryar, seem to be rooted entirely in the very crisis that this forum seeks to address. Fryar’s complaint about the field’s hostility to innovation sits awkwardly alongside her description of the cross-pollination of ideas about empire, emotions, and settler colonialism from North America, the UK, and the South Pacific—which has yielded much work critiquing precisely the “underpinnings of the nation” that Fryar also regrets British Studies does not do. (Vernon’s and Fullagar’s pieces offer further testimony of innovation.) British higher education’s lack of support for Black British history and British Asian history seems evidence not of the field’s hostility to innovation but of the dire job crisis that this forum is meant to help find a way out of. The terrible work conditions and lack of institutional support that Fryar and Vernon document seem rather to restate and reinforce the need to address the crisis in the field than to question the need for its survival.

Vernon discourages the “worlding” of British history and foregrounding of Black British history as a way forward because they create a trade in overworked Black bodies—but this again is simply a restatement of the job crisis. Vernon himself goes on to argue that speaking to the imperial histories that shaped “the forms of capitalism, migration, and environmental degradation that haunt our present and shape our futures” will make our field interesting to scholars of other parts of the world—is this not the “worlding” of British history? While at once implying we have not done this for “decades,” Vernon cites a “plethora of recent work” that reminds us that the field exceeds the bounds of the empire and “is at its best when…in conversation with scholars…in other fields and disciplines.” Again, is this not precisely the “worlding” of the field that he, a few paragraphs above, saw as futile?

This confusion may partly result from merging the problems of distinct worlds of British history production. The “default whiteness” that Vernon associates with the field may perhaps be more prevalent in the British sphere than in North America, where, as Fryar explains, the field has long “emphasized that British history and British imperial history were not separate endeavors.” This has certainly been my sense of the field since the early 2000s, when many scholars began jumping on the empire “bandwagon”—to the considerable amusement of historians of the until-then separate field of the British empire (like Thomas Metcalf). These local distinctions matter—as I’ll get to more below.

Vernon is right that the attack on the humanities in the US has constrained hiring across fields, but his evidence that Britain is still disproportionately over-represented in American departments, vis-à-vis Asian, African, Latin American, Caribbean history, is a 2013 AHA column. That column ended with a call for change, and some change followed over the last decade—fueled further by the 2020 George Floyd protests. Even within the constrained capacity for hiring, many departments have added new lines in such fields, while not renewing lines in older fields like British history—indeed, in place of such fields, precisely because of the budget constraints arising from neoliberal defunding of the humanities. The frightening decimation of tenure-track jobs in British Studies is something we can and should be able to address without implying a threat to or endangering the survival of other important fields of history. Neoliberal universities may see the makeup of history departments as a zero-sum game (cut British history to hire in African history), but if our call is to push back on neoliberal transformation of higher education, we must resist that logic as well: We want more of all kinds of history. After all, these fields need each other.

And this is part of the case we (more on who this “we” is below) need to make to departments, universities, and publics: that a history department cannot function properly without scholarship and teaching on “British history,” under whatever name it is pursued. As Fullagar explains, in Australia, such work transpiring under rubrics like “settler-colonial studies” makes thematic connection with adjacent fields. From my own Californian experience, I would say this is true even for work done under the more conventional rubric of “Britain and the British Empire” or “Britain and the World.” And the connection is often geographic, too: If less engaged with some historians of Britain itself, those working on British colonialism in South Asia are in frequent exchange with historians of South Asia—and analogously for other geographic fields.

Moreover, the historical entanglement of the historical discipline and the British empire means that this field, however relevant today, remains a site of a deep and vast historiography, including theoretical and methodological innovations that have proven essential across subfields and geographies, from women’s history to social history to economic history and more. In addition, it is the site of major interventions in debates about global-historical events and processes, such as the causes and effects of the industrial revolution, slavery and abolition, imperialism and capitalism, state formation, nation-building, the formation of political agency and subjectivity. Because of this disciplinary history, faculty with expertise in this field are necessary to the teaching and research functioning of any serious history department, above and beyond what the field of British history might have to offer itself.

Thirdly, insofar as history departments aim to, and ought to, prepare students and scholars to understand and engage with their times, the presence of historians of Britain in history departments everywhere is especially important in this moment, when debates about Britain’s past have become particularly ferocious and consequential in Britain and all over the world, including questions of apologies, restitution, reparations, monuments, and climate justice. Undergraduate enrollments in my classes have been fueled not only by the popularity of cultural phenomena like “The Crown” and “Bridgerton” that Siddique mentions, but also by this intense public debate, including, most recently, the crisis in Gaza. This is not about historians functioning as “fact checkers in the service of liberal democracy”—the potential stakes of issues like reparations are much higher than that—but of historians fighting for space in “the university in ruins” for the sake of the students and publics who are our duty.

Indeed, some of the contraction of hiring in the field is a result of the far-right attacks triggered by these debates (as Vernon notes), which, our own work teaches us, must be countered. But some of it is incidental to these debates, part of the general condescension towards the humanities (strengthened by the artificial austerities of the neoliberal university) as useless or self-indulgent (and thus for elites only). As Fullagar shows, given popular cultural dispositions, lobbying to defend the humanities is needed even with an ostensibly left-wing government in Australia.

Whatever its varied causes, killing lines in British history at this particular historical juncture is dereliction of pedagogical, scholarly, and public duty by many higher education institutions. When we add to all this that the research in the field right now is truly stunning, as evident from the list of paradigm-shifting, truly innovative work on capitalism, migration, the Anthropocene, and more that Vernon lists, the stakes for letting go of British history positions are undeniably clear. The manuscripts submitted to the new series on British Histories that I’m editing with Stanford University Press offer further proof of flourishing creativity.

This is the case that we need to make. There is no lack of demand or need for the field. There are only convenient myths denying that enduring need, and it is our job to expose such lies rather than succumb to far-right or neoliberal gaslighting about the value of what we do.

This gets us to the question of tactics for moving forward. The causes of the current crisis are many and, to me, defy a clear political approach. On the one hand the job market problem is fueled by a crisis of research funding emerging, Siddique explains, partly from what might be characterized as Leftist political concern for social justice and the need to support more precarious, untenured scholars. At the same time, as Vernon emphasizes, our universities are under attack by the far-right. Some of the skepticism about the value of fighting for the field that percolates through this forum is rooted, I suspect, in a sense of hopelessness about the practical possibility of doing so, given this range of adversarial forces. To pursue this struggle, beyond appreciating the problem and its stakes, we have to have a sense of how to address it and who should address it. The question of tactics is largely a question of whose responsibility it is to act.

There is an existing body, the NACBS representing British Studies in North America, with regional branches as well. Preservation of the field of British history is essential to its mission—and survival. If, as Siddique writes, cuts to research funding spread the view that British history is not a worthwhile research enterprise, the NACBS (in coordination with organizations representing other subfields) might be the appropriate body to make the case for the field to the Mellon, the SSRC, the ACLS, and so on, as part of a “coordinated field-wide strategy.”

There is also work for us as British historians and members of the NACBS: we must actively make the case to colleagues in other fields for why British history matters to the health of the discipline more broadly. When you give a talk in a department that does not have a British historian, ask questions, make it a source of embarrassment, and arm colleagues in other fields there with arguments that they can make to their departments and universities to push for tenure-track hiring in British history and, importantly, to forestall further losses in the field. We might also do this as alums interacting with our undergraduate and graduate programs, as advisors who write letters recommending our students to PhD programs, as colleagues who write tenure review letters. Our everyday interactions with other history departments are opportunities to press the case for our field, and to create a reputation cost for not having it.

This is a call to work locally and from the bottom-up rather than, as Vernon (echoed by Ted McCormick) advocates, taking on all the various crises in higher education to “first save our universities.” Not that that isn’t important and urgent and the root of the whole problem, across fields, but we might at the same time adopt a complementary tactical approach that might also be part of the overarching objective of saving our universities. As is clear from Fullagar’s account of alternative rubrics for British history in Australia, as much as the problem is global, local contexts matter—as we would remind any student working on a transnational question. Though he too ends on a “grim” note, without a sense of any scope for action, Glen O’Hara’s essay likewise makes clear the particular dynamics strangling the field in the UK.

The picture in Canada is yet again different, McCormick’s report shows. McCormick ends on a “bleak note” to urge recognition that the problems facing British history are not really about British history in Canada, where it remains popular and a site of “intellectual vitality.” It is rather “the crisis in academic employment, it is the crisis in university governance, it is the crisis of social disinvestment in learning.” This is true, and the local context matters: In the US, there is, arguably, also a particular crisis in British history, for the reasons mentioned above. It is not necessarily true that the lack of jobs in British history is entirely “insoluble apart from” the wider crises of the discipline and the university—which are ever-changing but perhaps never-ending (more on this below).

In short, making a case to a department in the UK for hiring in British Studies is a different problem from making a case to a department in California, which would in turn be different from Florida or Alberta. Different places will require different tactics; different kinds of institutions will require different tactics. What works for a private university will be different from what will work at a small college or public university. Some universities have unionized faculty, and those collective bodies might be helpful in making the case for British history. At wealthy private universities like mine, more informal lobbying might be productive. Some departments may indeed need to curb production of PhDs to avoid oversupply for a limited market, as Vernon advises, but some may need to be pressed to hire new faculty in British history with the capacity to train graduate students in the field. Improvement of the job market will make oversupply less of a problem.

Fryar is right to remind us that British history has always been an international enterprise, and that the NACBS brings together scholars from all over. But it does not necessarily follow from “rich intellectual collaboration” that our approach to solving the “global crisis” in the field be similarly international. While being “internationally informed” in our understanding of the problem, our actions to address it must attend to particular local contexts, not least because sometimes the burden of fixing everything makes it more difficult to fix anything.

Fullagar describes the important work of the Australian Academy of the Humanities—whose job it is to defend the humanities in Australia. I am calling for the NACBS to be that body for British Studies in North America—even despite its importance as a scholarly venue for those well beyond North America. I say this not because I wish the NACBS to be a more parochial institution, but because this struggle may be more effectively fought locally than globally. Partnering with organizations in the UK and Australia and elsewhere might prove more effective for the work of cultural change and political and institutional lobbying that is needed. Fullagar is right that we need multiple approaches: spreading awareness among different constituencies, from parents to the Mellon Foundation to university leaders, of the “utility” of our field and of its professional promise to undergraduates, and spreading awareness of the importance of curiosity for its own sake, not least because we often don’t know in advance what knowledge might prove useful, and because insofar as humanistic learning is what allows us to understand our existence as humans, which informs every aspect of economic, political, and social activity, no knowledge is actually without utility—the distinction is false.

As Fullagar wisely reminds us, this must be a permanent effort, and my hope is that this is work that the NACBS and its regional branches might incorporate in their mission. The NACBS cannot take on the far right; but it can lobby departments and funding organizations, inform them of the importance of British history, share these arguments with members, and keep track of which institutions lack faculty in the field,[1] and so on. Awareness of the complex and formidable global forces ranged against the survival of the field is necessary, but despairing in the face of such forces can lead only to counseling assisted death for the field. Doing nothing is not an option, especially when an organization to support the field exists; passivity makes us complicit in higher education’s undermining of the humanities, and the field of British history specifically.

After all, “saving” our universities is about re-making them, not about recovering something they once were. Before the neoliberal university, it was the Cold War university, and before that, the nationalistic and imperial university. Innovation in British history has for more than a century now been tied to efforts to reinvent the forms of higher education that were central to creating and sustaining the British imperial order, through the War on Terror.  Even the making of British social history during the Cold War was entangled with such experiments in an era in which the business priorities of universities were already plain, as E. P. Thompson’s volume Warwick University Ltd. (1971) made clear.

In short, collective struggle over higher education, over the content and purpose of historical education, and who should have say in those questions, is also permanent; it can’t be solved “first.” Moreover, it’s in the course of that struggle that the real education happens. Vernon has taught us about the costs of privileging print forms of communication (like scholarly history) that encourage private, individual forms of political agency and subjectivity at the expense of the more subversive subjectivities cultivated by collective uses of non-print media. 

Indeed, teachers from my family’s part of the world long ago recognized the distraction of the printed word and struggles for access to it from true understanding of human existence and purpose.[2] Scholarly work is transformative when it is part of a struggle to remake the academy. In the maw of climate crisis, our task as scholars is to help again forge collective consciousness of our interdependent existence—work that requires transcending the classroom and the printed page. And one site for it is the collective struggle to remake our educational institutions.

All this is merely a reminder of the priority of the longstanding anticolonial question “Should Universities Survive”? Within universities now, in the midst of current battles, fighting for the survival of British history can very much be part of the wider struggle for the higher education we actually want and need. As NACBS members, let’s focus our energies on ensuring that there are jobs out there for our PhD students, who are producing brilliant and important work, and, thus, that there are British history teachers and colleagues out there for students and scholars of the discipline.

Author: Priya Satia is the Raymond A. Spruance Professor International History and Professor of History at Stanford University, where she has taught British history for more than twenty years. Her most recent book is Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Belknap, 2020), and she has long been interested in how colonialism and anticolonialism have shaped the historical discipline and educational practices and institutions—questions she is exploring further in her new book project, Lake of Liberation.

[1] I’ll name Southern Methodist University and Kent State University here to start that list.

[2] Guru Nanak said, “Parhiye jeti arja parhiye jete saas; Nanak lekhe ik gal hor haume jhakhana jhaakh (You may spend your whole life in studying, but there is only one thing that matters [His name]; all else is the ego’s futile grappling).” Bulleh Shah echoed: “Ilmon bas karin o yaar; ikko alif tere darkaar (Stop this bookish learning, friend; you need just one letter, alif [the first letter of “Allah” and of the Arabic alphabet]).” For more on this idea’s influence in Punjab, see my essay in Why We Read, ed. Josephine Greywoode (Penguin, 2022). Recovery of indigenous forms of mentorship and ethical education, including those that prioritized experience led by a murshid or guru over book-learning, was an important part of South Asian anti-colonial thought and activity.