11 minute read
historically Curious
History has always been popular at The Perse, with many of our alumni pursuing the subject at university and beyond. We hear from four OPs who are spending their careers finding out what the Romans (and Egyptians, Stuarts and Europeans) have ever done for us…
John Miller (1965)
i thoroughly enjoyed my time
at The Perse, from the Prep to the Upper Sixth. I “chose” my A levels largely by default. I felt I had reached my ceiling in maths, my physics was lamentably weak and my having studied only French ruled out modern languages. Of my other subjects, although I really enjoyed English, especially with the brilliant Douglas Brown, I preferred history, even though John Tanfield, the sixth-form teacher, told us repeatedly how much he disliked teaching it. If he aimed to put us off, he failed. A significant proportion of my year group read history at Cambridge.
Tanfield focused mainly on early modern England and Europe and by the time I arrived at Jesus College this was my main area of interest. Interpretations of the Civil War and Republic were in a state of flux. The Marxist-influenced preoccupation with economic and social change was questioned by younger historians who placed greater emphasis on politics and religion. Post-Civil War society was
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increasingly seen as divided not only horizontally (between classes) but also vertically (along religious and political lines). Moreover, historians of the Civil War now focused on Scotland and Ireland, as much as England.
This rethinking of the divisions within English and British society took many decades. I began research for my PhD in 1968, working on popery (and antipopery) under Charles II and James II. After the PhD I became a research fellow of Gonville and Caius, publishing a biography of James II and later a comparison between the French and English monarchies. I remained interested in popular anti-popery: bonfires and processions continued to play a significant part in urban I SHOULD FIRST LIKE TO RECORD MY GRATITUDE TO THE PERSE AND ITS TRADITIONS.
disturbances and conflicts between Whigs and Tories, Anglicans and Dissenters. My shift of emphasis from high to popular politics reflected a changing understanding of “political” history in terms of power relationships within towns, villages and other communities.
My shift from political to social history owed much to time spent teaching at Queen Mary College, (now Queen Mary University of London). I had always believed that good teaching required an element of fun, to make students want to learn. Queen Mary’s intake was diverse, so I learned to tackle different topics in different ways, developing my own ideas and understanding in the process. When I retired I drew together my ideas on British history in its widest sense, which I hope will prove useful to future generations of students, in Early-Modern Britain 1450–1750, (Cambridge 2017). To finish on a rare negative note, among depressing recent developments in universities is the tendency of administrators to value research above teaching, to define teaching in terms of sterile “aims and objectives”, and to assume that everything can be reduced to PowerPoint. For me, teachers need sometimes to surprise and to shock. I used to finish a lecture on Oliver Cromwell with extracts from his ferocious letter to the Catholic bishops of Ireland in 1650. It began “your Covenant is with death and hell” and concluded “ere long you must all of you have blood to drink: even the dregs of the cup of the fury of the wrath of God which will be poured out unto you.” At which point I would walk out, leaving in my wake some shaken but (I hoped) more thoughtful students.
harold James (1974)
i should first like to record
my gratitude to The Perse and its traditions. In particular the charismatic figure of John Tanfield has been a lasting source of inspiration: a man of deep learning, but also of passionate views and a love of theatre that was expressed in his whole demeanour. I don’t believe I would have become a historian without his influence. My historical research started in Cambridge University, where I was a student at Caius and then became a Fellow of Peterhouse. Again two inspirational figures pushed me in thinking about the catastrophes of twentieth century Europe: Jonathan Steinberg and Norman Stone, whose moving funeral in Budapest I attended earlier this summer.
My PhD thesis, and my first book, dealt with the interplay between economic collapse and the destruction of democracy in interwar Germany. That book, The German Slump (1986), set up the themes that I have been engaged with ever since. When I was writing it, I was struck by the similarities between the large and unstable capital flows of the 1920s
and the inflows into Latin America in the 1970s, and their reversal in the 1982 crisis: a reversal that produced a lost decade for development in Latin America. I looked at the whole of the postwar era in International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (1995), and then went on to think about the conditions in which globalisation can be reversed, and the world of the interwar Great Depression might return, in The End of Globalization (2001). That book was translated into ten languages, and came in for a great deal of attention after the financial crisis of 2007–8. More recently, I wrote about the origins of the European monetary union, and together with a German colleague at Princeton, the economist Markus Brunnermeier, and the former Deputy Governor of the Banque de France, Jean-Pierre Landau, produced a study that looked at the problems of the Euro in terms of long-standing differences of outlook between France and Germany. My most recent enterprise is the latest volume in the official history of the Bank of England, covering the period between the late 1970s and the eve of the financial crisis: in short, the years in which the Bank responded to globalisation and a new financial revolution.
I’ve always thought it important to draw on history and academic analysis in thinking about current problems, and indeed I write a regular column for Project Syndicate, which is then reprinted in many newspapers all over the world. The aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis – as was true after the interwar Great Depression – has been a revival of thinking in zero-sum terms: nations or regions are involved in a competitive struggle and what benefits one will hurt the others. It is particularly striking that the backlash against globalisation has been most politically dramatic in the two countries that built the successful and stable postwar order in 1944–45 – the United States and the United Kingdom. Deglobalisation is facilitated by a mode of thinking that regards general rules, of the sort required for effective international coordination, both on a global or a European level, as redundant or ineffective or even harmful. But the absence of such general rules – as the UK is discovering in the chaos of the Brexit debate – makes finding a way to keep society civil ever harder.
Jerry toner (1986)
For some reason I’ve always found the past more interesting than the future. At The Perse, this interest naturally led me towards studying Classics and I am now a Roman historian at Churchill College in Cambridge. My research focuses on finding out about ordinary Romans. What stories did they tell? What made them laugh? What did they worry about? How different were their tastes, cultural preferences, even language from those of the rich? This is not straightforward because nearly all the surviving texts in the canon of classical literature pay little more than passing attention to the nonelite, and hardly any were written by those who were not part of a narrow group of well-connected elite men. But there is nevertheless some material – and much more than most people imagine – which can offer us a glimpse of the world and world-view of the ordinary Roman in the street. There are fables, joke books, oracles, graffiti and visual representations of many kinds. Then there are sources such as astrological handbooks and a work on dream-interpretation.
All this evidence often reveals a grim world of high mortality. In one joke, for example, a man bumps into his teacher in the street and says, “I’m sorry my son wasn’t at school today but he’s dead.” Pretty bleak stuff. We also find a world where a very different mindset operated. A man once dreamt that he had sex with one of his slave girls and was worried that it meant that his children would end up as slaves. The dreaminterpreter, Artemidorus, reassures him that it simply means he will take pleasure from his assets.
There are many methodological problems in using this type of evidence. These popular texts are no more transparent than any others, and some of them may not be as popular as they seem. They all require literacy and it is very unclear how widespread this was. In the town of Pompeii, with a population of about 15,000, about 13,000 pieces of graffiti survive. Some level of modest
literacy must have existed quite widely. And who do we mean by “ordinary” Romans? The urban plebs, the peasants in the fields, or the artisan class? And what about women? Almost none of the graffiti were explicitly written by women. More often we have men writing about women, which adds a whole other level of difficulty.
The Perse gave me a tremendous basis for this work. The Classics department has always been strong and Stephen Kern and Paul McKechnie were excellent teachers and have remained supportive throughout my career. I recall that at the time they were working on an edition and translation of the so-called Oxyrhynchus historian, a late-fifth and early-fourth century BCE Greek writer whose text survives on an Egyptian papyrus, which in itself tells you something about their academic prowess. They made me realise that the narrowly focused set of elite-authored texts we were studying for A levels was only part of the story of the ancient world. i started at the Perse Prep in 2000 and lasted to the end of Sixth Form in 2011. For much of that time, I was generally known for one of two things: my fondness for Latin and my fascination with the social structure of the great apes. This somewhat unorthodox intellectual outlook made university choice rather easy: the only option where you could study apes while also continuing work with ancient texts was the Archaeology & Anthropology degree at Cambridge, so that is what I did.
The rationale behind the Cambridge course was that these two areas of research – commonly seen as rather disparate and rarely studied together – are in fact both crucial components of what makes us human. We are of course apes ourselves, and it is our sophisticated use of language which has allowed us to forge our own distinct identities. While at Cambridge, I learned two of the oldest languages ever recorded by humans – Ancient Egyptian and Akkadian, the language of Ancient Iraq. When the human ape first turned to writing over 5000 years ago, these are the scripts it first produced.
During my time at university, I became increasingly interested in how early complex societies in Egypt and Iraq were able to develop forms of normative behaviour that eventually developed into bodies of law. This research led me to some interesting places – including a remote sheep farm in Armenia and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Eventually, I completed a PhD on the evolution of judicial process in Ancient Egypt, working mainly on tomb inscriptions, seal impressions and papyri from archaeological contexts dating to 2700–1600 BCE.
I’m now a Research Fellow in Egyptology at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where I’m looking at how ancient ideas about justice circulated between Egypt, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa in the later second millennium BCE. I’m particularly interested in how early Semitic conceptions of enforceable order may have permeated into Egypt at a time when the Mesopotamian cuneiform script was becoming a lingua franca in the south-eastern Mediterranean basin. In the official rhetoric of the Egyptian state, foreigners were generally seen as bad, but the day-to-day reality of people from different backgrounds settling in Egypt paints a different legal and social story. By looking at a range of formal legal documents, stone monuments and private archives, I hope to shed more light on what may have been a floruit of intellectual globalisation almost a millennium before Classical Greece.
Looking back at The Perse, what I treasure most is the School’s focus on encouraging genuinely independent thought across a huge diversity of intermeshing disciplines. While this sounds like a cliché, there surely cannot be many places where you can combine seven A-levels, regular participation in archaeological excavations, fundraising for chimpanzee protection and developing a unique form of (admittedly rather clumsy) dance at the charity cabaret. Nor are there many places where I would have wanted to do all of these – and that for me is the School’s biggest achievement.
