Can we trust the historians?

As statues fall, and debate roils about the West’s colonial past, we need expert witnesses. Does Edward Colston belong in the street, a museum, or the river? What about Cecil Rhodes or Oliver Cromwell… or Winston Churchill? We want historians’ evidence and informed judgment to deal with complex questions of guilt and responsibility.

But is that what we’ll get? Some examples suggest not.

David Starkey denied in an interview that the slave trade was genocidal. It couldn’t have been, or “there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks”. He resigned from his position at Cambridge and lost his job at another university. Professor Starkey has form for careless language. He claimed “whites had become black” during the 2011 riots. Meanwhile, Priyamvada Gopal from Cambridge tweeted “white lives don’t matter” – “qua white lives”, she added. She kept her job, but received death threats and switched her Twitter account to private.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, was caught out live when she claimed that gay men were executed for sodomy in the 19th century. She had misinterpreted a key phrase in the court records. An honest mistake, maybe, but the research came out of her 2015 PhD in history from Oxford. You might have expected better fact-checking.

Okay, Dr Wolf is a full-bore conspiracy theorist, and Professors Starkey and Gopal are trolls – and perhaps their remarks don’t reflect the quality of their research. But consider Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains. It told the story of James Buchanan, the economist who helped to invent “public choice” – the economic study of government decisions. The book described Buchanan as a conspirator with the billionaire Ed Koch to tie down democracy. It was a finalist for the US National Book Award. But libertarians on the internet found that Maclean had truncated quotes misleadingly. For example, she quoted Tyler Cowen:

 The weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome.

In fact he wrote:

While the weakening of checks and balances would increase the chance of a very good outcome, it would also increase the chances of a very bad outcome.

She described Cowen as “creating a handbook for how to conduct a fifth-column assault on democracy”. Cowen’s essay said: “I explicitly favor more democratic systems”.

An academic review in the Journal of Economic Literature described the book as “at best sketchy… replete with significantly flawed arguments, misplaced citations, and dubious conjectures.” 

Closer to today’s issues, historians of the “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) view slavery as central to early capitalist development. Their books have been controversial. The Economist magazine published a critical review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, then retracted it in the face of online criticism. But economic historians of slavery were scathing. Reviews in two journals described the school as “substitut[ing] more and better anecdotes for tables of regression results”, and accused Baptist of selectively quoting and merging evidence from slave records so as to mislead the reader. One review ended:

As the NHC matures, it might embrace the enduring strengths of traditional historical scholarship, including citing sources correctly, conducting close (and accurate) readings, drawing inferences that are actually supported by the evidence, and integrating its findings into the broader historiography. It should also stop making stuff up.

Zing. Yet the New History of Capitalism played a major role in the New York Times’ 1619 project, which put slavery and racism at the heart of American history, and Baptist’s thoroughly debunked statistics were quoted by Ta-Nehisi quotes at a Congressional hearing.

There are often fierce debates between different intellectual schools. That’s not the issue here. These books were credibly accused of misleading their readers. That is, they were dishonest.

Do not think this is just a left wing thing. Orlando Figes was caught pumping his own books with anonymous reviews on Amazon. Niall Ferguson, the biggest media don of all, misleadingly edited quotes  when he joined the debate about the effects of Obamacare. (In 2018, he resigned from Stanford after asking for “opposition research” on a progressive campus activist.)

Dishonesty exists in all of academia. But mostly, when it is found out, it is punished. Diederik Stapel – the “Lying Dutchman” – who invented all of the data for his experiments in social psychology, is no longer an academic. Nor is Michael Lacour, who ran a fraudulent study on persuading people to support gay marriage. Discovered scientific fraud ends careers. Quotations are a key tool of historical research, so you’d expect similar standards to apply: misleading quotation is data falsification. In fact, most of the above historians are still in academia, and didn’t even lose their jobs or their book awards.

What’s up with that?

One underlying reason might be intellectual trends. There was a period when quantification was fashionable in history. Times changed, and historians drew back from this – perhaps because they reasonably believed that historical narrative cannot be supplanted by data analysis. (The same arguments are now being refought in a new debate on “cliometrics”.) History became influenced by the post-structuralist and post-modern turn, including skepticism towards truth in narrative. Speaking to historians at my university recently, I found that these ideas remained influential: “of course, all remembering is misremembering,” said one, as if this were a truism. This attitude may have made it easier to get away with phoney, but rhetorically persuasive, arguments.

Another possibility is loose standards. Historians surely have shared ideas of what counts as good work. But they may not be as precise or technical as in other disciplines. Econometricians obsess over identification of causal effects. Statisticians have rigorous mathematical conditions for estimating parameters of a model. History might by nature be more diverse than that, and this could let shady work fall through the gap. Historians often rely on the telling anecdote. This is not a flaw: just as in a law court, a single fact really can demolish a historical case. But when the supply of possible examples gets large, the ability to make your case by careful selection increases along with it.

Lastly, incentives matter. Engineers with a new idea can build and sell a better mousetrap. Medical advances turn into treatments that face randomized controlled trials. Economists can get paid making policy recommendations. None of these leads to perfect incentives for scientific honesty. But one thing that makes you a big name in history is writing a successful book. This gives a certain incentive to please the public, perhaps by telling it what it wants to hear. Indeed, the Amazon reviews for Maclean’s work are glowing. There’s an audience for the story that economist intellectuals conspired to overthrow democracy... even if it is just a story.

Whatever the reason, we need historians to get their house in order. The “hard” data-crunching social sciences, on their own, cannot teach us about our past. Narratives matter, but they can’t just be any old story. Psychology is processing its reproducibility crisis. Economics has had its credibility revolution. Where is history’s civil war of the footnotes?