Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

31

LA LONGUE DURÉE

Between September and November 1965, the United States National Science Foundation vessel Eltanin was cruising on the edges of the Pacific-Antarctic Ocean, collecting routine data about the seabed. This ship was essentially a laboratory belonging to the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, part of New York’s Columbia University. Oceanography had received a boost in World War II because of the need to understand U-boats and their environment, and since then with the arrival of deepwater nuclear submarines. The Lamont Institute was one of the most active outfits in this area.¹

On that 1965 voyage, Eltanin zigzagged back and forth over a deep-sea geological formation known as the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, located at 51 degrees latitude south. Special equipment measured the magnetic qualities of the rocks on the seabed. It had been known for a time that the magnetism of rocks for some reason reversed itself regularly, every million years or so, and that this pattern told geologists a great deal about the history of the earth’s surface. The scientist in charge of legs 19, 20, and 21 of the Eltanin’s journey that time was Walter Pitman III, a Columbia-trained graduate student. While on board ship, he was too busy to do more than double-check that the instruments were working properly, but as soon as he got back to Lamont, he laid out his charts to see what they showed. What he had in front of him was a series of black-and-white stripes. These recorded the magnetic anomalies over a stretch of ocean floor. Each time the magnetic anomaly changed direction, the recording device changed from black to white to black, and so on. What was immediately obvious, that November day, was that one particular printout, which recorded the progress of Eltanin from 500 kilometres east of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge to 500 kilometres west, was completely symmetrical around the ridge.² That symmetry could be explained in only one way: the rocks either side of the ridge had been formed at exactly the same time as each other and ‘occupied the position they did because they had originated at the ridge and then spread out to occupy the seabed. In other words, the seabed was formed by rocks emerging from the depths of the earth, then spread out across the seafloor – and pushing the continents apart. This was a confirmation at last of continental drift, achieved by seafloor spreading.’³

It will be recalled that continental drift was proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915 as a way to explain the distribution of the landmasses of the world and the pattern of life forms. He took the theory for granted, based on the evidence he had collected, but many geologists, especially in the United States, were not convinced. They were ‘fixists,’ who believed that the continents were rigid and immobile. In fact, geology was divided for years, at least until the war. But with the advent of nuclear submarines the U.S. Navy in particular needed far more information about the Pacific Ocean, the area of water that lay between it and its main enemy, Russia. The basic result to come out of this study was that the magnetic anomalies under the Pacific were shaped like enormous ‘planks’ in roughly parallel lines, running predominantly north-south, each one 15–25 kilometres wide and hundreds of kilometres long. This produced a tantalising piece of arithmetic: divide 25 kilometres by 1 million (the number of years after which, on average, the earth’s polarity changes), and you get 2.5 centimetres. Did that mean the Pacific was expanding at that rate each year?⁴

There was other evidence to support the mobilists. In 1953 the French seismologist Jean Pierre Rothé produced a map at a meeting of the Royal Society in London that recorded earthquake epicentres for the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.⁵ This was remarkably consistent, showing many earthquakes associated with the midocean ridges. Moreover, the further the volcanoes were from the ridges, the older they were, and the less active. Yet another spinoff from the war was the analysis of the seismic shocks sent shuddering across the globe by atomic bomb explosions. These produced the surprising calculation that the ocean floor was barely four miles thick, whereas the continents were twenty miles thick. Just a year before the Eltanin’s voyage, Sir Edward Crisp Bullard, a British geophysicist, had reconstructed the Atlantic Ocean margins, using the latest underwater soundings, which enabled 1,000-metre depth contours to be used, rather than sea-level contours. At that depth, the fit between the continents was even more complete.⁶ Despite these various pieces of evidence, it wasn’t until Eltanin’s symmetrical picture came ashore that the ‘fixists’ were finally defeated.

Capitalising on this, in 1968 William Jason Morgan, from Princeton, put forward an even more extreme ‘mobilist’ view. His idea was that the continents were formed from a series of global, or ‘tectonic,’ plates, slowly inching their way across the surface of the earth. He proposed that the movement of these plates – each one about 100 kilometres thick – together accounts for the bulk of seismic activity on earth. His controversial idea soon received support when a number of ‘deep trenches’ were discovered, labelled subduction zones, up to 700 kilometres deep, in the floor of the Pacific Ocean. It was here that the sea floor was absorbed back into the underlying mantle (one of these trenches ran from Japan to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, a distance of 1,800 kilometres).⁷

Continental drift and the wanderings of tectonic plates (many geophysicists prefer the term blocks) were initially of geological interest only. But geology is a form of history. One of the achievements of twentieth-century science has been to make accessible more and more remote areas of the past. Although these discoveries have arrived piecemeal, they have proved consistent – romantically consistent – in helping to provide the basis for one story, one narrative, culminating in mankind. This is perhaps the crowning achievement of twentieth-century thought.

In the same year as the Eltanin’s crucial voyage, twenty-seven scientists from six nations met at a conference at Stanford University in California to consider how America had been populated. These were members of the International Quaternary Association – geologists, palaeontologists, geographers, and ethnographers interested in the most recent of the four basic geological periods – and the papers presented to the conference all concerned a single theme: the Bering land bridge. Although Christopher Columbus famously ‘discovered’ America in 1492, and whether or not you accept that he was beaten to it by the Vikings in the Middle Ages – as many scholars believe – equally clearly there were ‘native’ populations throughout the New World who had arrived there thousands of years before. Around 1959, as we have seen, palaeontologists were beginning to accept the view that Homo sapiens had evolved first hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Rift Valley of East Africa. Work on tectonic plates had shown that this valley was the edge of just such a plate, perhaps accounting, for some unknown reason, for why mankind should have emerged there. Since that time, unless man evolved separately in different parts of the world, he must have spread out across the earth in an order that, in theory at least, can be followed. The farthest large pieces of land from East Africa are Australia, Antarctica, and the Americas. To get to the Americas, early man would either have had to navigate huge distances across the oceans, in enough boats to create the numbers needed for propagation at the destination (which they could not have known about in advance), or crossed the narrow (56-mile) gap between Siberia and Alaska. It was this possibility that the Stanford conference was called to consider.

The idea was not new, but the conference was presented with archaeological and geological evidence that for the first time fleshed out a hitherto vague picture. It appeared that man crossed the land bridge in three waves, the first two being between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago, and the third between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago.⁸ The basic long-term context of the migrations was determined by the ice ages, which locked enormous amounts of water in the glaciers at the poles, reducing sea levels by up to a hundred metres, more than 300 feet (the Bering Straits are 24 fathoms deep, or nearly 150 feet). The idea of three migrations came initially from an analysis of artefacts and burial techniques, later from an analysis of art, language, and genes. Calculations by C. Vance Haynes in Denver, made the year after the conference, suggested that a tribe of only thirty mammoth hunters (say) could increase in 500 years to as many as 12,500 people in perhaps 425 tribes. The Clovis hunters, who comprised the third wave, distributed their characteristic spearheads (first found at Clovis, New Mexico, near the Texan border) all over the continent. According to Haynes they would have needed to migrate only four miles to the south each year to reach Mexico in 500 years. Thus the geological and ethnographical evidence for early man in America fits together very well. It also fits neatly into the ‘one story’ narrative.

The recovery of the American past was matched by developments in Africa. Here, the seminal work was Basil Davidson’s book Old Africa Rediscovered, first published in 1959, which proved so popular that by the early 1960s it had gone into several editions.⁹ The book followed an explosion of scholarship in African studies, with Davidson pulling the picture together. His achievement was to show that the ‘dark continent’ was not so dark after all; that it had its own considerable history, which a number of well-known Western historians had denied, and that several more or less sophisticated civilisations had existed in Africa from 2000 BC onward.

Davidson surveyed all of Africa, from Egypt and Libya in the north to Ghana, Mali, and Benin in the west, the coast of Zanj (or Zinj) in the east, and the south-central area around what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He covered the appearance of ‘Negro’ peoples, about 3,000–5,000 BC, according to an analysis of some 800 skulls discovered at a site from predynastic Egypt, and the evidence of early migrations – for example, from the Nile area to West Africa (‘The Forty Day Road’). He described the Kush culture, emerging from the decadence of imperial Egypt, the enormous slag heaps of Meroe (‘the Birmingham of Africa’), about a hundred miles from modern Khartoum. Besides the palaces and temples, only a fraction of which has been excavated, the slag heaps are evidence of Meroe’s enormous iron-smelting capability, on which its great wealth was based.¹⁰ Having described the great coastal civilisations of Benin, Kilwa, Brava, Zanzibar, and Mombasa, Davidson’s most remarkable chapters concern the great inland civilisations of Songhay, Jebel Uri, Engaruka, Zimbabwe, and Mapungubwe, mainly because such places, remote from foreign influence, most closely represent the African achievement, uncomplicated by international trade and the ideas such trade brings with it. Engaruka, on the borders of Kenya and Tanganyika, as it then was (now Tanzania), had been first discovered by a district officer in 1935 but excavated later by Louis Leakey. He found the main city to consist of nearly seven thousand houses, supporting a population, he thought, of at least thirty to forty thousand. The houses were well built, with terraces and engravings that he thought were ‘clan marks.’¹¹ Three hundred miles from the coast, Engaruka was well defended on a steep escarpment of the Rift Valley and, Leakey felt, dated to the seventeenth century. There were stone structures he took to be irrigation channels and evidence of solitary burials. Later excavation showed that the city was surrounded by eight thousand acres that were once under grain, producing a surplus that was traded via roads to the north and south – villages of up to a hundred houses were grouped along these roads. Iron-using techniques spread south through this area of Africa from about 500 AD.

Great Zimbabwe is a vast group of stone ruins a few miles off the main road which links what is now Harare (Salisbury when Davidson published his book) and Johannesburg in South Africa, featuring an ‘acropolis’ and an elliptical ‘temple.’ All the buildings are made of local granite, flat, bricklike stones chopped from ‘leaves’ of exfoliated rock. The form of the defensive work, terraced battlements, shares some features with the building at Jebel Uri several hundred miles away, raising the possibility of commerce and the exchange of ideas over large distances. Zimbabwe and Mapungubwe both lie near the centre of a vast mining area – gold, copper, iron, and tin – which stretches as far north as Zambia and the Belgian Congo (now Zaïre) and as far south as Pretoria and Johannesburg in the Transvaal. Some scholars believe that Zimbabwe is as old as 2000 BC, with the main period of inhabitation between 600 and 1600 AD.¹²

Mapungubwe is less well known than Zimbabwe and even more mysterious. It is found on a small table mountain about 200 miles to the south, just across the Limpopo River. It was regarded as ‘a place of fear’ by the locals, but when it was finally visited (via a narrow ‘chimney,’ found to have holes cut in it opposite one another, so that a ladder could be built into the walls), the top of the flat mountain proved to contain thousands of tons of soil imported from the surrounding countryside, clearly evidence of a crop-growing civilisation. But what most attracted the attention of the people who found the site were the gold artefacts they discovered – and the skeletons.¹³ One skeleton (twenty-three were unearthed) was covered in gold bangles. Analysis of the skeletons showed an absence of Negroid features; they were, rather, ‘pre-Negro.’ The burial practices were Bantu, but the skeletons were partly Hottentot and partly similar to those found on the coast. They buried their own dead and their cattle, evidence of religion.

Davidson took care to emphasise that much remained to be discovered in Africa. But he achieved his aim, adding to the contributions of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and others, who were showing that Africa had a voice and a history. More, Davidson was helping flesh out the greater history of mankind across the globe – his book also explored the way stone tools and metal technology spread. The history of Africa, like history elsewhere, was shaped by larger forces than mere individuals.¹⁴

The extent of those larger forces of history – economic, sociological, geographical, and climatological – rather than the actions of significant individuals, has been the main shift in history as an academic discipline throughout most of the century. And within this overall paradigm the two most prolific schools of thought have been the French Annales historians and the British Marxists.

The 1960s saw the publication of three enormously influential books from the so-called Annales school of French historians. These were: Centuries of Childhood, by Philippe Ariès (1960); The Peasants of Languedoc, by Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie (1966); and The Structures of Everyday Life, by Fernand Braudel (1967), the first volume of his massive, three-part Civilisation and Capitalism. The 1960s were in fact the third great flowering of the Annales school – the first had been in the 1920s and the second in the 1940s.

Of the three authors Fernand Braudel was by far the most senior. He was older and was a close colleague of the two founders of the Annales school, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. These two men came together at the University of Strasbourg in the 1920s, where they founded a new academic journal, the Annales d’histoire économique et social. As its name implied, Annales from the first sought to concentrate on the social and economic context of events rather than the deeds of ‘great men,’ but what set it apart was the imagination that Febvre and Bloch brought to their writing, especially after they both returned to Paris in the mid-1930s.¹⁵

Bloch (a resistance hero in World War II) wrote two books for which he is remembered today, The Royal Touch and Feudal Society. The Royal Touch was concerned with the belief, prevalent in both England and France from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, that kings – by the mere act of touching – could cure scrofula, a skin disease known as ‘the king’s evil.¹⁶ But Bloch’s study ranged much further than this curious belief; it drew on contemporaneous ideas in sociology, psychology, and anthropology in search of a context for what Bloch called the mentalité of the period. In Feudal Society, published on the eve of World War II, he attempted to re-create the historical psychology of feudal times, something that was completely novel.¹⁷ For example, he explored the mediaeval sense of time, better described perhaps as an ‘indifference’ to time, or as a lack of interest in the exact measurement of time. In the same way, Febvre’s Rabelais explored the mentalité of the sixteenth-century world. By an analysis of letters and other writings, the author was able to show, for example, that when Rabelais was denounced as an atheist, his critics didn’t mean what we would mean today.¹⁸ In the early sixteenth century, atheist had no precise meaning, simply because it was inconceivable for anyone to be an atheist as we would recognise the term. It was, instead, as Peter Burke confirms in his history of the Annales school, a general smear word. Febvre also explored time, showing for example that someone like Rabelais would not have known the year in which he was born, and that time was experienced not in a precise way, as measured by clocks, but rather by ‘the length of an Ave Maria’ or ‘the flight of the woodcocks.”¹⁹ It was the ability of Bloch and Febvre to get ‘inside the heads’ of individuals remotely removed in time that readers found exciting. This felt much more like history than the mere train of events that many historians wrote about. And it applied even more to Braudel, for he took the Annales approach much further with his first book, The Mediterranean, which appeared in 1949 and created a bigger stir.²⁰

This book was conceived and written in extremely unusual circumstances. It had begun as a diplomatic history in the early 1920s. Then in 1935–7 Braudel accepted an appointment to teach at the University of São Paolo, and on the voyage back he met Febvre, who ‘adopted him as un enfant de la maison.’²¹ But Braudel didn’t get round to writing the book until he was a prisoner of war in a camp near Lübeck. He lacked notes, but he had a near-photographic memory, and he drafted The Mediterranean in longhand in exercise books, which he posted to Febvre.

The Mediterranean is 1,200 pages long and divided into three very different sections. In the first part, Braudel treats his readers to 300 pages on the geography of the Mediterranean – the mountains and rivers, the weather, the islands and the seas, the coastlines and the routes that traders and travellers would have taken in the past. This leads to a discussion of the various cultures in different geographical circumstances – mountain peoples, coastal dwellers, islanders.²² Braudel’s aim here is to show the importance of what he called la longue durée — that the history of anywhere is, first and foremost, determined by where it is and how it is laid out. The second part of the book he called ‘Collective Destinies and General Trends,’ and here the focus of his attention was on states, economic systems, entire civilisations – less permanent than the physical geography, but still more durable than the lives and careers of individuals.²³ His gaze now centres on change that occurs over generations or centuries, shifts that individuals are barely aware of. Exploring the rise of both the Spanish and the Turkish Empires, for example, he shows how their growth was related to the size and shape of the Mediterranean (long from west to east, narrow from north to south); he also showed why they gradually came to resemble each other – because communications were long and arduous, because the land and the available technology supported similar population densities.²⁴ And finally, there is the level of events and characters on the historical stage. While Braudel acknowledges that people differ in character, he thinks those differences account for less than traditional historians claim. Instead, he argues that an understanding of how people in the past viewed their world can help explain a lot of their behaviour. One example he makes much of is Philip II’s notorious slowness in reacting to events. This was not just due to his personality, says Braudel. During Philip’s reign Spain was financially exhausted (thanks again to geographical factors), and communications were slow – it could take two months to travel from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. Philip’s deliberation was born as much of Spain’s economic and geographic situation as anything.²⁵

Whereas Bloch’s books, and Febvre’s, had created a sensation among historians, The Mediterranean broke out of its academic fold and became known well beyond France. He himself was very ambitious for this to happen.²⁶ People found the new type of information it contained every bit as fascinating as the doings of monarchs and prime ministers. For his part, Febvre invited his enfant de la maison (now turned fifty) to join him in an even more massive collaborative venture. This was a complete history of Europe, stretching over four hundred years, from 1400 to 1800, exploring how the mediaeval world became the modern world, and using the new techniques. Febvre said he would tackle ‘thought and belief,’ and Braudel could write about material life. The project hadn’t gone very far when Febvre died in 1956, but Braudel carried on, with the book eventually taking almost as long to complete as did his earlier work. The first volume of Civilisation et capitalisme, known in English as The Structures of Everyday Life, appeared in 1967; the last in 1979.²⁷

Here again Braudel’s conception was threefold – production at the base, distribution, and consumption at the top. (This was Marx-like, rather than specifically Marxist.) In the realm of production, for example, Braudel explored the relationship of wheat and maize and rice to the civilisations of the world. Rice, he found, ‘brought high populations and [therefore] strict social discipline to the regions where they prospered’ in Asia.²⁸ On the other hand, maize, ‘a crop that demands little effort,’ allowed the native Americans much free time to construct their huge pyramids for which these civilisations have become famous.²⁹ He thought that a crucial factor in Europe’s success was its relatively small size, plus the efficiency of grain, and the climate.³⁰ The fact that so much of life was indoors fostered the development of furniture, which brought about the development of tools; the poorer weather meant that fewer days could be worked, but mouths still had to be fed, making labour in Europe relatively expensive. This led to a greater need for labour-saving devices, which, on top of the development of tools, contributed to the scientific and industrial revolution. The second volume, The Wheels of Commerce, and the third, Perspective of the World, followed the rise of capitalism. Braudel’s central point was that geography governed raw materials, the creation of cities (the markets) and trade routes. There was in other words a certain inevitability about the way civilisations developed, which made Europe, rather than Asia, Africa, or America the cradle of both capitalism and science.³¹

Braudel’s influence lay not just in his books but in the inspiration he offered to others (he died in 1985). Since World War II, the Annates school has spawned a very successful series of investigations, among them The Peasants of Languedoc; Montaillou; Centuries of Childhood; The Hour of Our Death; The Coming of the Book; The Identity of France; The Great Cat Massacre; Catholicism from Luther to Voltaire; The Birth of Purgatory; and The Triumph of the Bourgeoisie. Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie was widely regarded as Braudel’s most brilliant pupil.³² He too was interested in la longue durée, and in The Peasants of Languedoc and Montaillou he sought to recreate the méntalité of mediaeval Europe. Montaillou, situated in the Ariège region of southwest France, was in an area that had been ‘home’ to a number of nonconformists during the Cathar heresy of the fourteenth century. These heretics were captured and interrogated by the local bishop, and a written record of these interrogations has survived. This register was used by Ladurie, who interpreted it in the light of more recent advances in anthropology, sociology, and psychology.³³ Among the names on the register of interrogations, twenty-five came from one village, Montaillou, and for many readers Ladurie brought these individuals back to life. The first part of his book deals with the material aspects of village life – the structure of the houses, the layout of the streets, where the church was.³⁴ This was done with wit and imagination – Ladurie shows, for instance, that the stones were so uneven that there were always holes in the walls so that families could listen to their neighbours: privacy was unknown in Montaillou. But it is in the second part of the book, ‘An Archaeology of Montaillou: From Body Language to Myth,’ that the real excitement lies. Here we are introduced, for example, to Pierre Maury, a gentle shepherd, but also politically conscious, to Pierre Clergue, the obnoxious priest, too big for his boots and the seducer of Béatrice des Planissoles, impressionable, headstrong, and all too eager to grow up.³⁵

The Annales school has proved very influential. Its attraction for many people lies in the imaginative use of new kinds of evidence, science added to a humanity that provides a technique to bridge the gap across the centuries, in such a way that we can really understand what happened in the past, and how people thought. The very idea of recreating mentalités, the psychology of bygone ages, is ambitious, but for many people by far the most intriguing use of history, the closest to time travel we have ever had. A second reason why the Annales form of history has proved popular is its interest in ‘ordinary’ people and everyday life, rather than in kings and parliaments, or generals and armies. This shift of interest, very marked during the century, reflected the greater literacy achieved in Western countries at the end of the nineteenth century; poorer readers naturally wanted to read about people like themselves. It was also yet another fruit of World War I – that disaster affected the lives of ordinary people far more profoundly than it affected the generals or the leaders. Finally, the shifts in history writing formed part of a general trend: with the growth of mass society, of new media and popular forms of entertainment, the worlds of ‘ordinary’ people were a focus of interest everywhere.

But in some quarters there was a more specific reason, and this found an outlet particularly in Britain, in the work of a small but very influential group of Marxist historians. The British Marxist historians were less original than their French counterparts but more coherent in their aim, which was essentially to rewrite British history from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘from the bottom up’ (a favoured phrase, which soon became hackneyed). Most of its seminal works were produced in or near the 1960s: Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, by Christopher Hill (1958); Primitive Rebels, by Eric Hobsbawm (1959); The Age of Revolution, by Hobsbawm (1962); Studies in the Development of Capitalism (1963), by Maurice Dobb; The Making of the English Working Classes (1964) by E. P. Thompson (‘the pivotal work of British Marxists,’³⁶ ‘probably the most important work of social history written since the Second World War’); Labouring Men, by Hobsbawm (1964); Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, by Hill (1965); A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century, by Rodney Hilton (1966); Reformation to Industrial Revolution: A Social and Economic History of Britain, 1530–1780, by Hill (1967); The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England, by Hilton (1969); Bandits, by Hobsbawm (1969); God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, by Hill (1970); and Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Movements and the English Rising of 1381, by Hilton (1973). Three men stand out in this history of the lower orders, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, and E. P. Thompson. The issues they focus on are the way feudal society changed to capitalist society, and the struggle which produced the working class.

Rodney Hilton, professor of history at Birmingham University, was like the others a member of the British Communist Party until the events in Hungary in 1956. His main interest was in the precursors of the working class – the peasants – and besides his own books on the subject, he was instrumental in the founding of two journals in the 1960s, the Journal of Peasant Studies in Britain and Peasant Studies in the United States.³⁷ Hilton’s aim was to show that peasants were not a passive class in Britain in the Middle Ages; they did not just accept their status but were continually trying to improve it. There was, Hilton argued, constant struggle, as the peasants tried to gain more land for themselves or have their rents reduced or abolished.³⁸ This was no ‘golden time,’ to use Harvey Kaye’s words, in his survey of the British group, when everyone was in his place and satisfied with it; instead there was always a form of peasant ‘class-consciousness’ that contributed to the eventual decline of the feudal-seigneurial regime in England.³⁹ This was a form of social evolution, Hilton’s point being that this struggle gave rise to agrarian capitalism, out of which industrial capitalism would emerge.⁴⁰

The next stage in the evolution was examined by Christopher Hill, fellow and Tutor of Balliol from 1938, who devoted himself to the study of the English revolution. His argument was that just as the peasants had struggled to obtain greater power in mediaeval times, so the English revolution, traditionally presented as a constitutional, religious, and political revolution, was in fact the culmination of a class struggle in which capitalist merchants and farmers sought to seize power from the feudal aristocracy and monarchy. In other words, the motivation for the revolution was primarily economic.⁴¹ He put it this way: ‘The English revolution of 1640–60 was a great social movement like the French Revolution of 1789. The state power protecting an old order that was essentially feudal was violently overthrown, power passed into the hands of a new class [the bourgeoisie], and so the freer development of capitalism was made possible…. Furthermore, the Civil War was a class war, in which the despotism of Charles I was defended by the reactionary forces of the established Church and conservative landlords. Parliament beat the king because it could appeal to the enthusiastic support of the trading and industrial classes in town and countryside, to the yeomen and progressive gentry, and to wider masses of the population whenever they were able by free discussion to understand what the struggle was really about.’⁴² He added that the revolution also took some of its colour from recent developments in science and technology, very practical concerns that could in time be converted into new commercial outlets.

Like Hilton and Hill, E. P. Thompson also left the British Communist Party in 1956. Like them he remained convinced that English history was determined mainly by class struggle. In a long book, The Making of the English Working Class, one of his aims was to ‘rescue’ the working classes from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ and render visible such neglected people as weavers and artisans. In the process, he redefined the working classes as essentially a matter of experience. It was the experience – between 1790 and 1830 – of a declining and weakening position in the world. This, he said, was the essence of the industrial revolution for the working class in England – the loss of common rights by the landless, the increasing poverty of many trades brought about by the deliberate manipulation of employment to make it more precarious.⁴³ Part of the attraction in Thompson’s book lies in the fact that it is so vividly written and humane, but it was original in a social Darwinian sense too. Before 1790 the English working classes existed in many disparate forms; the experience of oppression and the progressive loss of rights, far from resulting in their extinction, proved to be a major unifying (and therefore strengthening) force.⁴⁴

The final element in this ‘Great Leap Forward’ of historical studies came in 1973 from the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, in Britain. Like the Annales school and the Marxists, and like archaeologists everywhere, he had an interest in la longue durée. But, again like the French and British historians, his main aim was less an obsession with dating as such as with a new understanding of history. Then professor at Southampton University, and now at Cambridge, his book was entitled Before Civilisation: The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe.⁴⁵ The title sold the book short, however, for Renfrew gave an admirably clear, albeit brief history of the development of dating in archaeology in the twentieth century and how – and this was his main point – it has changed our grasp of the past, not just in terms of chronology but in the way we conceive of man’s early development.

He began with a crisp statement of the problem, so far as archaeology was concerned. Various early-twentieth-century studies by geologists in Switzerland and Sweden had confirmed that the last ice age endured for 600,000 years and ended 10,000 years ago. The problem with ancient human history therefore stemmed from the fact that the written records stretched back no further than about 3,000 BC. What had happened between the end of the ice age and the birth of writing? Renfrew’s main aim was to take a look at archaeology in the wake of the various new dating mechanisms – dendrochronology, radiocarbon dating, and potassium-argon dating. Radiocarbon dating was first devised by Willard F. Libby in New York in 1949 (he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1960 for his innovation), but his insight was added to significantly by the American Journal of Science, which in 1959 started an annual radiocarbon supplement, which quickly became an independent publication, Radiocarbon. This provided an easily accessible forum for all the revised dates that were then being obtained from across the world. It was perhaps the biggest intrusion of science into a subject that had hitherto been regarded as an art or a humanity.

Before Civilisation had two core arguments. First, it revised the timing of the way the earth was populated. For example, from about 1960 on it was known that Australia had been occupied by man as early as 4000 BC, and maybe even as early as 17000 BC. Maize, it was established, was gathered systematically in Mexico by 5000 BC, and well before 3000 BC it was showing signs of domestication. The real significance of these dates was not just that they were earlier than anyone had thought hitherto, but that they killed off the vague theories then current that Meso-America had only developed civilisation after it had been imported, in some indefinable way, from Europe. The Americas had been cut off from the rest of the world since 12000–13000 BC, in effect the last ice age, and had developed all the hallmarks of civilisation – farming, building, metallurgy, religion – entirely separately.⁴⁶

This revision of chronology, and what it meant, was the second element in Renfrew’s book, and here he concentrated on the area he knew best, Europe and the classical world of the Middle East. In the traditional view, the civilisations of the Middle East – Sumer and Egypt, for example – were the mother civilisations, the first great collective achievements of mankind, giving rise to the Minoans on Crete, and the classical world of the Aegean: Athens, Mycenae, Troy. From there, civilisation had spread farther north, to the Balkans and then Germany and Britain, and west to Italy and then France, and the Iberian peninsula. But after the C¹⁴ revolution, there was suddenly a serious problem with this model.⁴⁷ On the new dating, the huge megalithic sites of the Atlantic seaboard, in Spain and Portugal, in Brittany and Britain, and in Denmark, were either contemporaneous with the civilisations of the Aegean or actually preceded them. This wasn’t just a question of an isolated date here and there but of many hundreds of revised datings, consistent with each other, and which in some cases put the Atlantic megaliths up to a thousand years earlier than Aegean cultures. The traditional model, for Egypt, the Middle East, and the Aegean, still held. But there was, as Renfrew put it, a sort of archaeological ‘fault line’ around the Aegean. Beyond that, a new model was needed.

The model he came up with started from a rejection of the old idea of ‘diffusion’ – that there had been an area of mother civilisations in the Middle East from which ideas of farming, metallurgy, and, say, the domestication of plants and animals had started, and then spread to all other areas as people migrated. It seemed clear to Renfrew that up and down the Atlantic coasts of Europe, there had developed a series of chiefdoms, a level of social organisation midway between hunter-gatherers and full-blown civilisation as represented in Egypt, Sumer, or Crete, which had kings, elaborate palaces, a highly stratified society. The sovereign areas of the chiefdoms were smaller (six on the Isle of Arran in Scotland, for example), and they were centred around large tombs and occasionally religious/astronomical sites, such as Stonehenge.⁴⁸ Associated with these chiefdoms were a rudimentary social stratification and early trade. Sufficient numbers were needed to build the impressive stone works, funerary religious monuments around which the clans cohered. The megaliths were always found associated with arable land, suggesting that chiefdoms were a natural stage in the evolution of society: when man settled with the first domesticated crops, chiefdoms and megaliths soon followed.⁴⁹

Renfrew’s analysis, now generally accepted, concentrated on sites in Britain, Spain, and the Balkans, which illustrated his argument. But it was his general thrust that counted: although early man had no doubt spread out to populate the globe from an initial point (maybe East Africa), civilisation, culture – call it what you will – had not developed in one place and then spread in the same way; civilisations had grown up in different times at different places of their own accord.⁵⁰ This had two important long-term intellectual consequences, quite apart from killing off any idea (which still lingered then) that American civilisations had been seeded by European ones (such as the ‘lost tribe’ of Israel). First, it demolished the idea that, culturally speaking, the history of man is one story; all cultures across the world were sui generis and did not owe their being to a mother culture, the ancestor of all. Combined with the findings of anthropologists, this made all cultures equally potent and equally original, and therefore the ‘classical’ world was no longer the ultimate source.

At a deeper level, as Renfrew specifically pointed out, the discoveries of the new archaeology showed the dangers of succumbing too easily to Darwinian thinking.⁵¹ The old diffusionist theory was a form of evolution, but a form of evolution so general as to be almost meaningless. It suggested that civilisations developed in an unbroken, single sequence. The new C¹⁴ and tree-ring evidence showed that that simply wasn’t true. The new view wasn’t any less ‘evolutionary,’ but it was very different. It was, above all, a cautionary tale.