Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I am beginning to question the well-known saying "History will tell". Does history really tell? Is it not based mainly on official documents which in almost every case reflect the official view, the government's account of events.

Whenever history is mentioned I am reminded of the well-known children's story of the five blind men who were asked to describe the elephant. One touched the tusk and said the elephant was like a needle, the second touched the ears and said it was like a fan, the third touched its trunk and said it was like a house, the fourth touched the legs and declared the elephant to be like a tree trunk, and the fifth touched the tail, saying it was like a fly whisk. Each of the blind men "saw" only one side of the creature, and mistook it for the whole. A picture of the elephant emerged only when they pooled their descriptions. Likewise history, I feel, with each supplying his own partial version of the story.

I've taken the history of Britain as an example, and I have in front of me two recently published books, the third volume of Simon Schama's The History of Britain: the Fate of Empire 1776- 2000, and Niall Ferguson's Empire, How Britain Made the Modern World, a Penguin book.

Let me start with Schama's book, which is based on a series of television programmes; hence the narrative form of the book. They are stories brilliantly told, dealing with the great and the lowly, queens and mistresses, kings and politicians, housewives and suffragettes. History takes the form of "the life of a nation". It would be impossible to recount the history of Britain as the author conceives of it, but it is worth mentioning that he believes history should be "alteration, mutation and flux rather than continuity and bedrock solidity". His writing comprises history "that does not lead inexorably to a consummation in the unitary state of Great Britain but sees that period as just an epoch among many in the evolution of these island nations".

Schama's history as dealt with in these three volumes is one in which national identity is not fixed, but decidedly shifting and fluid, a history in which the allegiance that mattered changed from generation to generation, and from place to place; it could be to clan or class, town or city, language or dialect, church or club, guild or family; it was never to flag or dynasty.

The author devotes a good part of the present volume to Winston Churchill who "has both written about and acted British history". The latter's book, A History of the English-Speaking People, reflects what he believed to be the "unbroken continuity of British history". Schama quotes what Churchill said to an American boy, "Study history, history, history. In history lie the secrets of state craft." Schama also describes him as a "true Imperialist" and "unequivocal Zionist", concluding with the statement, "Gone is the Empire over whose demise Churchill swore he would never preside." He also takes issue with Lord Curzon's famous assertion that the British Empire was "quite simply the greatest force for good the world has ever seen".

And it seems Niall Ferguson ironically agrees with the latter, since he states that "without the misfortune of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been developed by the majority of states in the world as they are today". In the absence of Empire, he suggests, the world would not have been the same or even similar. The fingerprints of Empire are discernible and difficult to expunge, he says, giving examples like the English language, the Common Law, team sports, representative assemblies and the notion of liberty which, according to Ferguson, sets the British Empire apart from its continental rivals and contemporary American imperialism, in the conviction that the Empire did more good than either. And so we have two different, almost contrary approaches to the same topic. It would take many more besides to find out the truth.