Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2023 Wolfson History Prize. How does it feel to be shortlisted?
I am delighted to be in the company of the many fine historians that the Wolfson History Prize has shortlisted in the past. Big histories of broad topics risk trespassing onto the turf of specialists, and also risk falling between stools – booksellers do not know which shelf to put them on. It is very affirming to find that the judges have picked my book up and put it on the shelf of the Wolfson shortlist.
Why do you feel it is important to celebrate history writing?
I believe that it is the task of historians to question received understandings of the past. Those understandings come to us refracted through many layers of human subjectivity but it is still, I think, possible to determine which are closer to the truth than others. If we are fortunate enough to come up with a fresh understanding, we need to test it against the evidence, at least to better educate our guesses into the gaps of history.
The argument may be complicated, and the testing dense with detail, but it can still be made fascinating, even dramatic. Trying to do this is part of the job, because ivory-tower discussions with a handful of colleagues are of little use to anyone. Historians have a special obligation to engage with a wider public, because it is history that makes us who we are.
The Wolfson Foundation funds a wide variety of museums, historic buildings and landscapes. Do you have a favourite historical place or a place that has inspired you?
The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford always reminds me of the way in which perceptions change, and yesterday’s anthropology becomes today’s racism. It is a museum of the museum.
The Pitt Rivers Museum. Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash.
What does the research process look like for you? What were the key milestones along the way?
Research for The World the Plague Made has been a long and challenging journey, but also an exciting one. My initial question was ‘Why Europe?’ – what were the causes of European expansion and industrialisation, and could they be better understood without Eurocentrism? I soon found that ecological and economic dimensions had to be meshed with political, social and cultural ones. The next milestone was grasping that, for much of history, it was not just Europe we should be looking at, but also its wider settings of West Eurasian and global histories. It took me several years of inquiry to realise that an ecological factor – the Black Death – was the great missing variable in the story of Europe’s rise. It was the feeling of discovering better answers to questions that had long vexed historians that kept me going over the long haul.
Read an extract from The World the Plague Made.
