It is all too rare that a scholarly book – the product of decades of research and careful thought – emerges at precisely the moment when it is most needed. This is a book about the role of morality in the practice of History, which also touches upon tense debates playing out in the public square. The murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement are only the most recent events which challenge us to think deeply about our relationship to the past – how it formed us, how and why we retell it, and, most challenging of all, how we are to judge it in a manner that is truthful, self-aware and consistent.
From Soviet symbols toppled across an independent Ukraine, to the statue of Cecil Rhodes which continues to loom over Oxford undergraduates, or to lecture theatres named after prominent eugenicists, each controversy carries unique features yet causes similarly disruptive effects. They rapidly draw academics into the public spotlight, prompting introspection and a confrontation with the shortcomings of their disciplines. The politics of the present can rapidly lead to the reformation of school curricula, university modules and reading lists, whether it takes the form of the inclusion of previously marginalised voices, or (as in Britain and Russia) to the rehabilitation of a country’s imperial past.
These rapid changes leave many historians deeply uncomfortable, as the transformations are seldom grounded in a deep and nuanced understanding of the complexities and contradictions of the past. These can feel like moral crusades, but moral judgement is something that historians have often been trained to avoid. These professionals have long been taught that the past is ‘a foreign country’ and, if we are to understand people in the past, we must understand them on their own terms and not according to today’s values (pp. 3; 14–15).
Donald Bloxham’s book powerfully demonstrates that there are no easy answers when dealing with morality, past or present. Masterfully spanning multiple academic disciplines, Bloxham takes us back to the very foundations of Western thinking, charting the development of our conceptions of core values like ‘truth’, ‘justice’, ‘responsibility’, and ‘guilt’. He shows that we need to understand the history of the concepts, rather than unreflectively applying the concepts to the history.
Bloxham, whose remarkable work on genocide and justice has grappled directly with some of the most morally challenging chapters of human history, presents us with a radical proposition: that we need to seriously reconsider what we think of as ‘normal’ professional practice.
It is helpful to keep in mind two distinct approaches to ‘doing History’, the seeming polarity of which is constantly challenged, undermined and nuanced by Bloxham’s piercing analysis, and his command of a vast array of historical debates, schools, and traditions.
Broadly speaking, in the past historians often had a clear moral compass to guide them: whether they believed in God, Enlightenment principles, or in Soviet Marxism, they were confident in a bright future and could therefore easily evaluate episodes in the past as being either positive steps towards, or negative deviations from, that promised future. Theirs was an unapologetically moral approach.
As modern historians, we are acutely aware how much we miss when we choose to live in these black-and-white moral universes. Today, it is a commonplace to say that history is a vast canvas of ‘grey zones’ which we must approach in the spirit of objectivity, through a process of careful contextualisation, and a willingness to enter the minds of people who committed terrible acts. Yet the cost of this more ‘scientific’ approach can be the appearance that our attempts to understand people on their own terms is next-door to exonerating them of any moral culpability.
Bloxham argues that, in truth, morality has gone underground in historiography. Beneath the surface of ‘objective’, contextual approaches, historians continue to make moral judgements and moral choices. Conscious or otherwise, historians are deceiving themselves if they believe that morality plays no part in their work, and, as contemporary events lay bare, this tension is increasingly unsustainable. Bloxham argues that historians must reckon with the unacknowledged morality which continues to – often unconsciously – shape their work.
Seemingly small choices convey inescapably moral judgements. The decision to say ‘settlement’ rather than ‘invasion’, or ‘discovery’ rather than ‘first contact’, inevitably conveys a particular stance. Whether or not the writer is conscious of these choices, the reader is left with the task of decoding the author’s assumptions and moral positions (p. 91). Other historians are more overt, creating ostensibly objective ‘balance sheets’ of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ aspects of a particular person or period. They present these as if they were dispassionate accountants of the past, but in reality this is a plainly moral exercise, which often functions to legitimise or delegitimise aspects of the present day, and of our contemporary self-image. These accounts constantly remind us that history remains grey, and that major advances can go hand-in-hand with terrible acts (and vice versa).
When focusing on individual stories, it can be immensely challenging to consistently appreciate the agency, and hence the moral culpability, of people in the past. Bloxham uses Timothy Snyder’s study of Ukrainian nationalists’ involvement in ethnic cleansing in 1943 to highlight this difficulty. When these men join up with the Nazis or murder Jews, they are simply living out the effects of the context in which they are trapped. Yet, when they do anything Snyder approves of (like fighting against the Soviet Union), they become free agents consciously choosing the right and honourable course of action (pp. 27–31; 39; 64–5). As Bloxham deftly puts it, if we are to treat historical subjects as more than mere ‘effects’ of various ‘causes’, we must accept that they make choices, and ‘where there is choice there is responsibility’ (p. 18), however limited these corridors of agency might have been. In any case, we should not accord people agency only when they take actions that we approve of.
This is just one of the many case studies that Bloxham explores in a work which spans millennia and encompasses multiple religious, legal and philosophical traditions.
A book which tackles so many complex and important issues is inevitably a hugely demanding read. It is best approached as a book of philosophy about History, and although anchored to abundant specific examples, its theoretical depth requires the reader to be alert and engaged at all times in order not to be left behind.
History and Morality will be immensely useful not only for a generation of historians wary of making value judgements about the past, but also for a new generation who, in their drive to bring morality back into the picture, are sometimes too hasty to appreciate the importance of context and the pitfalls of anachronism. Some commentators might naturally fear that re-evaluating the past through a moral lens may be tantamount to erasing it. But, as Bloxham wisely notes, to change our understanding of, for example, European witch trials, does not mean we storm into the archives and replace the ‘guilty’ verdicts with ‘not guilty’. The goal is not to erase what was believed in the past, but to change how we relate to it (pp. 115–7; 282).
Bloxham’s book is a call for nuance and self-awareness, arguing that moral judgement is not only important, but is actually inescapable. What matters is how we deploy it – and that we are conscious of doing so.