‘What does he know of England who only England knows?’ That quotation (from Kipling) has long resonated with me. Of course in Kipling’s case it was meant to direct people’s attention to his beloved Empire, which he believed (erroneously in my view) manifested the true essence of ‘England’, but was largely neglected in Kipling’s time. (See my The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 2004.)

But it could also be read in an entirely different way. If you are only interested in England, or in its history (my field), without knowing about other countries and their histories, then you deprive yourself of some of the context which might make more sense of ‘England’ than focussing on that country alone. Why was England’s development distinct from, for example, France’s, with whom she was almost bodily conjoined at one time? What was it about other European countries that made them different – or in some cases the same? How did England’s conjoined nations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland come into this? What did Britain learn from other European countries, and they from her? Then again: how was her development either similar to or – more often – different from those of extra-European countries, and especially the great civilizations of Africa, Asia and South America, over time? What can that tell us about her history, as well as theirs? – We can’t know, until we learn about the latter, in order better to understand ourselves.

In many countries history teaching is very parochial. I remember once in the USA a student telling me of a neighbour who seemed genuinely puzzled why he (my student) wanted to study British history: ‘America has the best history in the world’. (It sounds like Trump, doesn’t it?) So far as I know – and I have no up-to-date knowledge; I would be happy to be corrected  – American school and college history courses are still mainly focussed on the history of the USA, and on a somewhat heroic version of US History at that. I believe – although again without having researched it – that the same is true of most European countries; as it certainly is of Sweden, where I mostly live.

But it’s not generally true of British colleges and universities; for which I’m grateful, having been brought up on a diet of European, mediaeval and (marginally) world history there, with modern British history comprising no more than 25% of my studies overall. At university I took more courses in continental history than in British, and about a quarter in American. One of the courses on the syllabus (although I didn’t take it) was on British imperial history, which Kipling would have approved of; except that by that time it had come to be more of a history of the countries Britain had colonised, than of British imperialism itself. So students were introduced in this way to non-British, ‘alien’ cultures, which was all to the good. (Some of the critics of ‘Imperial history’ misunderstood this. It wasn’t imperialist.) My first teaching jobs were in university departments where, again, non-British subjects – mediaeval European, French, Dutch, German, Russian, American, South-East Asian, continental political philosophy – proliferated over ‘British’. I myself was very much a ‘British and Imperial’ historian; but I was in a minority. I approved of that.

I would go further. A proper consideration of any nation’s history should also compare it with speculative ‘alternatives’, or ‘What if’s. What if the Germans had won World War II, for example; or India had colonised Britain rather than the other way around; or the counter-Reformation had succeeded more widely; or the Neanderthals had won over homo sapiens; or (obviously) if Kamala Harris had won the US Presidential election of 2024? – This happens to be quite a popular literary genre just now, with ‘counter-factual’ novels, films and radio programmes coming up frequently, to satisfy the taste for it. For serious historians, however, it’s an equally important approach,

Because to know why something happened in history, we need to know why other things didn’t happen, and vice-versa; and to do that we need to have speculated, at least, about alternative scenarios. Not to have these imaginative points of comparison must limit our understanding of ‘real’ history to a bare recital, without ex-planation, of what actually happened. That’s why those who only study British, or American, or Swedish (or whatever) history cannot fully comprehend even those national stories. Their minds will be limited to their own nations’ experiences; with nothing to compare these to.

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Which brings me on – at last – to Science Fiction. For I’ve been a reader of this literary genre, on and off, from boyhood; usually rather shame-facedly, I must confess. It probably started with ‘Dan Dare’ in the Eagle comic, when I was ten. ‘Dan Dare’ was not the most cerebral kind of Sci-Fi, being mainly based, as I remember, on recognisable tropes from the time (just after World War II): space-ships looking like Lancaster bombers shorn of their wings, distant planets covered in very earth-like jungles, Dan himself effectively a public school-educated World War II pilot (and with a working-class Lancastrian batman to boot), space conflicts uncannily like the Battle of Britain, green-skinned villains owing much to Hitler, and with good always triumphing over evil (the Eagle’s founder and editor, Marcus Morris, was a Church of England vicar). But it occasionally made you wonder at what might be.

Other Sci-Fi authors do this more deliberately, by inventing whole societies – humanoid or non-human – which are clearly alien, and yet seem plausible, and so possible to empathise with. Many Sci-Fi films, stories and even comic books can do this; but my own favourite contributors to the genre are HG Wells (of course), Olaf Stapledon (he was a philosopher too), Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin (the greatest, in my view), and – quite recently – the amazing Chinese writer Cixin Liu. Douglas Adams (who incidentally went to my school) might also be included here, if he’d been a bit more serious. Star Wars, Dune and Star Trek also very occasionally have solid ‘alternative reality’ themes (‘It’s life, Jim,but not as we know it.’). And there’s more of this than you might expect in the SF ‘pulp magazines’ – Astounding SF, and the like – hidden among the spaceships, monsters, death rays and space heroes.

I have to admit that Science Fiction has not been the most comforting of my enthusiasms. It can be somewhat belittling, to be made constantly aware of the enormous – infinite? – size of the universe, and the multiplicity of alternative environments, societies and lives that it must embrace. It makes what I do, and what indeed we all do – even Donald Trump – seem petty: which is depressing, but perhaps also chastening. And – to get back to my main theme – it can provide yet another layer of context for whatever we’re engaged on at the time.

Another popular quotation from Britain’s age of Empire is: ‘Wider still and Wider may thy bounds be set’. That of course is a line from Land of Hope and Glory; not by Kipling, as it happens, but it could well be. Just like ‘What does he know of England’, it might also be adopted as the main theme of this post. To understand any country’s history, we need to trawl ‘wider’, beyond that country’s shores; to take in other countries, imagined countries, and even other worlds. ‘Context is all’.