Context is important. All serious historians know this. It’s what makes us chary of making judgments of people’s actions in the past; actions which could in fact be largely attributable to the Zeitgeists within which they acted.
That won’t entirely excuse, for example, 18th-century slavery and slave-trading, which a significant part of the contemporary British Zeitgeist was hostile to; or British imperialism, which also had its enemies and critics at the time. (Zeitgeists were not homogenous.) But it should help us to understand them better. Slavery was not so unusual in the world in the 1700s, and imperialism not as excoriated in the 19th century, as they are today. That’s what their apologists are always telling us, quite rightly: not to judge the past by today’s standards, or – to put it another way – according to our current preconceptions.
Apart from anything else, it leaves our generation open to be hoisted by the same petard fifty or a hundred years hence. One can imagine a future in which people will judge us just as badly for permitting cigarette smoking, for example, or gross inequality, or ‘Public’ schools, or golf. (Sorry; golf is a particular bugbear of mine.) Or, if the Zeitgeist moves in another direction, we could be criticized for our naïve liberalism, our tolerance of immigrants, and our ‘wokeness’ (whatever that means). In other words: most historical judgments are based on the predominant assumptions of their times.
Which is a reason why we professional historians should – and generally do – seek to avoid such judgments altogether; and instead explore why people and societies believed and acted as they did. In many cases that will be because they were at the mercy of broad historical forces they had no real control over, often manifested in religions (the worst offenders), or other ideologies. My own assumption – which again will have been heavily influenced by the Geist of my Zeit – is that in modern European and world history these underlying forces were primarily economic, with the development of capitalism, through its several stages, determining the broad progress (or regress) of most western societies, quite impersonally. Move over Thatcher and Reagan, and give the Zeitgeist its due.
Porter’s Pensées 
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I wonder if you agree with the following hypothesis, Bernard:
There was a substantial, though not majority, strand of anti-imperialism in British society in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Part of it may have initially been attributable to opposition to national service and the Suez debacle, but much more of it was driven by class tensions, hatred of “the establishment”. You can see it in films like The Charge of the Light Brigade, Oh! What a Lovely War, If, and in the comedy of Beyond the Fringe and later Ripping Yarns.
Despite its radical attire, this strand never really engaged with the experience of colonialism from the point of view of the colonised. [Of course, that’s a lot to ask, and technically difficult for the historian, but that’s another question.] The locus classicus of this for me is Kenneth Griffith’s excoriating take on the (Second) Boer War, passionate and clever in its presentation but scarcely interested in African views and actions. Paradigms have since shifted, and as you know, the war is now often referred to as the South African War to reflect African involvement. [The period of the First Boer War is now usually subsumed under the broader “Wars of Confederation”].
In the 70s and 80s there were big changes in both South Africa and the UK. The deepening crisis in South Africa was taken up by a growing Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain. I am sure you will want to highlight the role of cricket in this development, Bernard, perhaps seeing the 1968 D’Oliveira affair as a turning point! For me, the provocative 1976 words of Tony Greig (England’s formerly South African captain) about the West Indies “grovelling” provided one key moment. Viv Richards, Bob Marley, Rock Against Racism and a new Black British pride and political activity all seemed of a piece somehow. Of course, I’m not entirely serious about a cricket-based theory of social change, but that West Indies team really did make a difference.
As the “Zeitgeist” changed, so did the research priorities of students. And the dominant, dry old “official mind” studies began to look a bit suspect, not so much for what they said (though that was disputed) but for what they failed to even investigate. I think that was a change for the better, not because the older generation of historians were so wicked (I believe Ronald Robinson took a keen interest in development issues) but because it is healthy for us to know more about the experiences and views of colonial subjects, of the previously neglected role of women, and yes, of colonial violence.
I should add that I don’t think the “culture wars” are entirely new to history. They are more prominent now, but in the past there was a discreet but sometimes deep hostility between Marxists and conservative historians.
You make some big assertions in this post and your last but one, some persuasive, others less so, too many to attempt to answer even if I had either the expertise or the time. But if I had to voice a misgiving about the current “culture wars” debate, it is that it risks becoming insular and self-absorbed, whether in guilt or self-exculpation, and ignoring what goes on “beyond a boundary”.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/sep/18/uk-overseas-aid-cuts-ngo-warning
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Bernard, You must tell us sometime about your problem with “golf”…..yes, indeed, I probably share it, if I kn ew what it was. John E
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I quite like golf. I like the way golfers fume when you casually walk across their acre-hogging courses and impotently swear and threaten when you politely wish them good morning while strolling over their greens. It adds the icing to the cake of a pleasant walk.
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