Good evening and welcome to this very special event at the Middle East Centre.
We are gathered here to celebrate the publication of the new book by Eugene Rogan.
Um, obviously. And for me, it's a pleasure.
It's an honour and a privilege to be asked to chair this event, because Eugene is one of my oldest and dearest friends.
He's also my co-editor for War for Palestine Rewriting the History of 1948.
And most importantly, he's very useful to me, because I can only say that some of my best friends I've made of.
Course. Eugene and I have done many double acts in the movie Senta in the last 33 years.
Some of them were quite funny. On one occasion I was chairing and he was giving a talk, but I forgot I was chairing.
So I started answering the questions. You know, Eugene stepped in and said, are there any more questions for Professor Schmidt?
We also have a long tradition of interrupting one another, but today we agreed that I'll speak for 30 minutes and [INAUDIBLE] speak for ten minutes.
I told you, we interrupt one another. So you are quite right.
It's the other way around. I'll speak for about ten minutes in Eugene.
Then we'll speak about this group about 30 minutes, and I'll be speaking for ten minutes.
Is a first smart device to keep an eye on the world.
But most seriously, I want to take this opportunity to offer a very broad overview of Eugene's development as a scholar since he came to Oxford.
33 years ago.
I can only speak about you in the most glowing terms, and I know he's going to be embarrassed because he's really modest in this respect.
This is unlike Uncle Joe, aka Joseph Stalin.
They published an article about study. We found that they always gave him the draft of the article, and usually he scribbled at the bottom.
They forgot to mention my modesty. Eugene came to Oxford for an interview for Electric Sheep in Middle East History in 1990.
I was a member of the selection committee at that time.
Eugene did not have his PhD. He was still up for doing a PhD at Harvard.
But he gave a very good talk and also he displayed platinum grade social skills.
One other candidate on the shortlist was a well-established professor who had published a great deal.
And Eugene said to us, had he done that professor X was a candidate, he wouldn't have applied.
And this went down very well, went down well with us.
I've been a university teacher for 53 years, and I can honestly say that Eugene was the best academic appointment in which I had been involved.
Eugene has, uh, co-authored four books.
I have written endorsements for the last three.
And I think that I know Eugene's work better than anyone, with the possible exception of his wife,
Naomi Watts, who is also an old friend of mine, because we both came to Oxford in 1987.
She is a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand and I say Alister Buchan leading international relations, and I was in my first Enfield class.
Eugene's first book, based on his Harvard PhD, is called The Frontiers of the state in the Late Ottoman Empire.
The book won two prizes. One of them was Albert, who won the prize.
It's a pioneering work in Ottoman historiography.
It shifts the focus from the centre to the periphery.
It's a very highly original piece of scholarship, which gives us the full panoply of primary sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and French.
It also upends the conventional wisdom on the subject.
The conventional wisdom says that the foundations of the Jordanian state was laid after the First World War by Britain and its Hashemite allies.
Hussein shows that the foundations of the Jordanian state were laid by the Ottomans in the late Ottoman period.
According to the British view,
there was nothing in Transjordan before they arrived and it's time to leave suggests that you at the time was it was a black hole,
and I think that I suggested was not a black hole. And very wisely he declined because.
The second rule was the Arabs a history.
This covers five centuries of our history and it displays great erudition, wisdom and empathy.
Western scholars often write about the Middle East from the outside looking in.
And in my own discipline. International relations.
Western scholars often write about the local actors as if they were mere driftwood on the sea of international affairs.
The thing about this book is that it gives the Arabs agency,
and another merit of the is that is not on the history of art, of history, but out of views of their own history.
So the Medley Centre has produced two classic general histories of the region.
One was Albert Hourani A history of the Arab Peoples.
And the other is Eugene's book, The Arabs, the History.
The fourth book is The Fall of the Ottomans, which was a bestseller and was translated into many languages.
How many foreign languages you choose between all the books?
It's 1818. How impressive.
It. Is you can reach a global audience and to have your work translated into 80 languages.
But it's not surprising, because this book is a very gripping account of the First World War from the vantage point of the Ottoman Empire.
It combines deep scholarship with a very lively narrative style, which makes it a pleasure to read.
Eugene's publishers asked me to write an endorsement, so they sent me an uncorrected proof copy.
And for four days I sat in an armchair in my study.
I didn't look at my emails, and I just read the book from cover to cover.
And it's a complex story. But he tells it with great clarity.
And one thing that was particularly striking was the scale with which he related developments on the battlefield to great power diplomacy.
And the fourth book is the one we are celebrating today.
The Masters events. Once again, the publishers asked me for an endorsement and sent me an uncorrected proof copy.
And what's remarkable about this is that usually uncorrected proof copies are riddled with mistakes, which are corrected later.
But in this case, I didn't detect a single misprint or typo.
It was completely perfect and a tribute to his meticulous scholarship.
Margaret McMillan also wrote an endorsement to this book.
I'm very glad to see her here, but I won't ask you to stand up because everybody knows you since you were the former warden of this college.
And sir. And Margaret is also my dearest cousin.
Now, this is what she wrote in her endorsement. In the hands of the distinguished historian and master storyteller Eugene Rogan.
An incident of communal violence in Damascus in 1860,
is at once an evocation of the vanished world of the Ottoman Empire and an ominous
foreshadowing of the communal violence tearing apart the Middle East today,
unquote. I couldn't have put it better myself.
So this completes my introduction, and I now call on Eugene to tell us about his book, in his own words.
And please welcome. Ivy, thank you so much for the ritual embarrassment that you just put me through.
I've lost on multiple occasions, but, you know, I expected nothing less.
I meant to warn you all. There should be a warning that comes on the poster every time you come to an event with Ivy chairing me, or vice versa.
That it just can be a little bit unpredictable.
I think, Ivy,
that you demonstrated in your very generous introduction just how unpredictable the direction of travel can be when you and I share a stage.
It's so lovely to see you all, and there is always a sense when you do a book launch under this roof of a kind of family event, a family gathering.
So I just want you to know that I can put my best suit on.
You know, I got a haircut on deck. I was, like, properly dusted off before I came before you today.
Because we're talking about a book which really does sort of stand out as the defining project of my entire time here.
This is the book that's taken 35 years to materialise.
And as you'll see, for those of you who've got the book and you open the first pages,
it starts back when I was a graduate student, back in 1989 on a visit to the American Archives,
when I went to consult counsel the papers from Jerusalem to Damascus,
that I stumbled on three volumes of Arabic handwritten reports by the first American vice consul to Damascus.
Uh, man celebrated in his own time as the smartest or the best educated man in the Arab world.
His name was behind him. He's well known for a history.
He wrote in Arabic the title of Jalalabad, or The Response to the Suggestion of the Loved Ones,
rendered in its brilliant English translation by Harvard scholar Wheeler Thaxton, and the slightly more salacious murder, mayhem, Pillage and Plunder.
It's the history of Syria and Lebanon in the 18th and 19th century.
And so Michalka was a known quantity. As I went to the archives to go and look up his reports,
and I was very disappointed when the archivist was unable to bring them out of the stacks for me.
And to make a long story short, I got an interview to go behind the scene into the stacks.
By the way, if ever you're in the American archives and you get the chance, take it.
Because seeing the miles of shelving is in many ways even more impressive than the
sort of neoclassical exteriors of the buildings in which these archives are housed.
So it was fun. And there, tucked away under all these sort of great big leather bound volumes with these three locally sourced notebooks.
And I realised I found the missing volumes and probably was the first person to
consult them since they'd been repatriated from Damascus to the archives of DC,
for all I knew. The last person to turn the pages would have been Mihai Vishakha or his son Seif, who succeeded an American vice consul.
And I was literally shaking with excitement as I took these volumes back into the reading room of the archive,
because I knew that I kind of stumbled on the things that archival historians dream of,
but almost never have happened to them, which is finding lost material in the archive.
And what a treasure trove that was. I recognised starting in 1859, just on the eve of the violence, that of the centre of this book,
that his would prove to be the most important new documentation on a story that was, well, deeply rooted.
And, uh, so one of those subjects that would be a perennial interest.
It was, as it turns out, of no use to my doctor. There was nothing there on Ottoman experiences in Transjordan, the subject of that first book.
But I came away. I photocopied every single page, knowing that Damascus was my second book project.
Any, you know, ambitious doctoral candidate thinking about what they want to do to your tenure is thinking about the second book project already?
That I had it. I had it in the shocker reports from the American Archives.
So this was the project that I brought to Oxford in 1991 to take up the post that Avi and his colleagues very kindly offered me to Albert,
Ronnie's middle, etc. A centre where Albert was very present still came every Thursday, every week in term time.
So someone that I really had the chance to spend time with and get to know.
And in that first year I was here,
Lila Fellows was just finishing up the manuscript for her book on the Damascus and Lebanese events, like occasion for War.
I remember offering her might be short of material, since I was still deeply mired in trying to publish my own doctorate.
And, uh, Lila didn't take me up on it. You realise when you get to the end of a manuscript,
the last thing you want is three volumes of new sources to read your way through and try and integrate into your book.
But she will always give you credit for being a very generous, collaborative scholar.
Don't believe a minute of it. Um, anyway, so.
And yes, this was it. Very much the Albert Irani Centre with the history option that I inherited from Albert.
As you all know, many of you from recent personal experience, the modern history of the Middle East starts in 1860 at Oxford.
So this was the project that I was very excited to be moving on to, but I still had to publish that doctorate.
And for those of you who are currently in that stage of Trinity.
Dissertations into books are not looking at anyone in particular. It took me seven years.
So, you know, patience and and hope for the good things to come from it.
It was worth waiting. Thank you all. He's biased.
He likes Jordan too. But when the book came out in 1999, that cleared my desk for me to begin to tackle the Damascus project.
So I started reading the Shaka's reports. And, you know, they're written a little notebook in a very crabbed hand.
They're hard going. The language is very much the language of 19th century Damascus already.
That creates a sort of opening into a lost world.
You're having to adapt to a different turn of phrase, a different language.
And I had so much to learn about the people and the institutions and the places of Damascus through those reports.
But I was working my way through the published primary sources, all the secondary literature.
And the thing about this topic that was so, on the one hand, daunting, but on the other hand exciting,
was that this is a subject where you really get to stand on the shoulders of giants.
When I look at the scholars who have worked on 1860 events in Mount Lebanon and in Damascus,
I really got to draw on the best to name, obviously starting with Albert Hourani himself.
But Kemal Salvi, the great historian of modern Lebanon at the time,
but also the great historian of Ottoman Syria, Philip Houry, my co supervisor at Harvard.
Lalitha was herself a real mentor figure to me all of her time at Tufts,
more recent scholars like my colleague Nasrallah Patton or something like this, he obviously and many, many more.
But when you approached this subject, you you really do it with an ability to engage with the body of literature.
It's quite rare in modern Middle Eastern history, actually,
where we're still filling in so many gaps that it's quite a joy to stumble into one of these areas where there is such depth.
I secured faculty funding to go after getting into this project for a couple of weeks,
research in Damascus itself, and it was such a pleasure to be able to go into the archives in the daytime hours,
to walk the streets where it all happened after archival hours,
and then spent late nights in the very rich library holdings of the French Institute in Damascus.
Don, you'll remember it well.
And any of you who've been working in Damascus before the current civil war shattered normal life like scholarship and research.
So it gave me this chance to do a deep dive engagement.
But it was while I was there in Damascus at the institute, that I first learned of the archive of attacks on New York City and Washington,
D.C., and Pennsylvania, for that was the 11th of September, 2001.
And in a sense, the events of nine over 11 were to in some way get intertwined with my experience with this book and this story.
I left Damascus at night, and it was a bizarre experience of going to the airport bags and had no ticket,
trying to wheedle a ticket out of the airlines as every single international flight.
Particularly those coming from the west. Cancel. Cancel. Cancelled. And you realise that this was going to be one of those.
Moments that was going to change the world, and indeed it did.
It also changed my research program. But here we go.
Having left Damascus that night, I was at Mesa the following year in a panel organised by our former student Martin Bunton.
Roger Owen was on it. It was thinking about what scholars should be doing in light of the attacks of 9/11 and the emergence
of an American led war on terror that had put the Arab and Islamic worlds in the crosshairs.
And there was a sense that we academics needed to play a more public role.
And my own idea there was to put Damascus down and to try and write a general history about the Arab world instead,
to try and give English readers a sense of modern art history,
as it's been experienced through Arab lives in Arab eyes, which is the genesis of the Arabs.
So I put Damascus down, wrote the Arabs, and that was followed by the fall of the Ottomans.
I need say no more on that, since Abby has spoken so generously about that.
And it's only now, after decades, that I finally got the liberty to return to a project that,
to be honest, I've never lost my excitement over since I first came across those reports.
Lost in the archives way back in 1989.
It's a different book today than what I would have written had I written it back in 2001 2002.
Syria is a different place. If I think of what might have influenced the interpretive lens I would bring to bear on my subject.
You know. I would have spoken in the early 2000s about the success of Ottoman initiatives to spare Syria a sectarian.
Order. So we had other problems. It had authoritarianism, baptism.
It had, uh, an intolerance of political dissent. It had political prisoners in jail.
It had had very violent encounters with the Muslim Brotherhood that led to devastations of whole urban quarters.
How much of that comes to mind in 1982? Post 2011.
Did I come at the subject in light of the current civil war in Syria?
It would instead be about a return of sectarianism, about a country that fragmented very much along the lines of communities.
Um, those communities in different coalitions, either for or against the government and each being driven by their greater fear.
So many Christian communities throwing their lot in with the regime, murderous as it is of the Assad,
because their greater fear with the Salafis, who had been extermination, ist towards minority communities.
And they all had stories about the horrors that they'd suffered at the hands of their enemies.
So a very divided and very sectarian Syria that emerged as a consequence.
But even there, you know, what could you say about 1860 that is relevant to Syria today?
I hope there is something in this book that will stand as a valuable lesson still about the ways that one can rebuild society,
even after deeply divisive horror. But as I say that, I say that with the recognition that the scale is so different in the story I tell you,
in 1860, 1500 houses were destroyed in a week of carnage.
There was unprecedented violence. And you'll you'll smell the smoke coming from the pages as you read the accounts of those who survived that horror.
So I don't mean to downplay it, but the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights gives a figure between 2011 and 2018.
So already six years ago, of 3 million houses partially or totally destroyed across Syria in this world.
You know, 1500. 3 million. You do the maths.
So it's very hard to know if there is indeed hope in the story of a Syria renaissance that might allow
Syrians to take from this experience a vision of how they might get reconstitute civil society.
In the end, as I read through the material, it was the analysis of the events as a genocidal moment where.
The Christians communities in both Mount Lebanon and in Damascus, for very different reasons, had come to be seen to represent an existential threat.
And faced with that Christian threat, extermination seemed a reasonable solution in both Mount Lebanon and in Damascus.
So this concept of a genocidal moment.
I distinguish a genocide a moment from one where the attention of the crowd is to exterminate.
But they are prevented from fulfilling their objectives, as happens in Damascus.
85% of the Christians will survive the events in 1860.
No spoiler alert here from an event in which the casualty toll takes it beyond a point where extermination is actually being achieved to some degree.
So a genocide genocidal moment versus a genocide.
And it's that theme which seems to have made this book more relevant since the events of the 7th of October.
But there is less. How might Syria recover from what it's done since 2011 to?
How might a society once take it to the brink by deeply divisive trauma drawn back from the brink?
And so I think that is the takeaway lesson for the book, as it was to come out written at this moment in history,
at this time in history, there is horror in the Damascus events, but there is hope to.
Beyond questions of the present relevance of writing this story.
It was also just the sheer pleasure of seizing the opportunity to write about a city whose history is so rich,
and whose society is so rich and diverse as 19th century Damascus.
And that deep dive was just. So satisfying.
This fascinating city seen through the eyes of very diverse contemporaries, starting with Michalka.
My main source, who is himself. You know, as I said, he is described by his contemporaries as the smartest,
best educated man in the Arab world, and he is in so many ways an intellectual force.
He's a polymath, he's an autodidact. He a man of very strong views and very strong opinions.
So you have this kind of exalted notion that, you know, he married a 12 year old.
Hello. And as I'm going through his list of lost property in the course of the events,
I learned that our enlightened converts to Protestantism through the efforts of the American missionaries himself was a slave owner,
and he's trying to desperately claim the money back for the slave of his that was stolen and impregnated.
I need the motor back anymore. And you're trying to reconcile all these different elements of a complex personality
who would fit so badly in our times and was so admired in his own times.
So to be able to be taken on a tour of 19th century Damascus by people like Bishop was part of what made this such an exciting project for me.
But not just me. Chaka. There have been a host of accounts by leading Muslim notables that have emerged in the years since the last major scholarship.
People like, well, compulsorily published the, uh, The Diary of Al-Qaeda.
Most people only focus on what do you have to say about the events itself.
But he was put in jail for a year as part of the clampdown.
And those accounts I've never seen anyone really delve into.
And for the crime and punishment side of our story.
You know, his account was absolutely breathtaking.
And he is himself or he was a Sharif, uh, member of a family that descended.
It's, uh, traced its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad in the early 20th century.
[INAUDIBLE] actually rise to become the titular sheriff for the head of the
guilds of those descendants of the Prophet Muhammad in the city of Damascus.
So when I see the wonderful to get his take also published in the 1990s, that of the preacher of the venerable Umayyad Mosque,
a man by the name of Alex, 20 we get very venerable Sunni family of Damascus, and his records going right back to 1840 are just quirky.
They tell you funny things about the city and society.
The things that he chose as news worthy to record were in themselves very telling about the man and his character.
Um, so, you know, getting these rich characters, Ottoman officials like, for one question, you know,
going to the Ottoman archives and reading through the reports filed at the time for what was writing huge,
long reports that are just full of wonderful details about the very delicate balancing act he is making,
trying to walk a path between bringing order back to Damascus and keeping the European
powers from intervening forcefully at the expense of all of its sovereignty.
The governors of Damascus as well.
I would say one of the novelties of this book, compared to the other ones I've written, is this cast of rich characters.
They all knew each other, they all crossed paths, they kind of reference each other and they stay with you in the book right through to the end.
In fact, when I get to the conclusion, I say goodbye to each one of them as they pass away.
Under the circumstances,
that leaves you feeling a little discouraging for the passing of a Damascus that they represented that was now gone and finished,
but that they were nonetheless the survivors of 1860, able to pass on to the next generation a better future.
Uh, in that I suppose, we find that there is hope to the story here of survival that I hope that you will all find makes reading the book a pleasure.
It does have a rough beginning, but it does have a happy ending.
Bringing out a book, of course, is a complex work that involves debts to a lot of people.
I'm going to start with the first people I turn to with the book idea, and that's my agents, Katherine Clark and the show talking here.
Absolutely.
Bryan Agency and George Lucas of the States did just a wonderful job in finding the very best publishers in both Britain and in the United States.
And I say that to bring a blush to Simon Windows chief, who's here with us tonight,
who took the book for Alan Penguin and really marshalled it through against the scepticism?
Uh, a publisher who, supportive of my writing,
still worried that this book might be more academic or monographic than the trade book meant for the general readership.
And I wanted to publish with Penguin out of Maine more than anybody else, and for the vote of confidence.
So I'm going to really grateful. And it's so exciting to see the book out and so beautiful.
So but I would say the same to Laura Hyman from Basic Books, where she here and to her or to your colleagues.
I say Annabel Huxley here at Penguin and Liz, that's.
So who are the people who get you the opportunity to do that article with the Ft or the interviews, or the time on radio or the book reviews?
So it's just it's such a pleasure and such a joy to get to work with these publishing houses.
Who now? This is my third book with both Basic and with Penguin and what a lucky man I am.
I would like to then thank those who floated my book even before it was out with pre-publication endorsements.
I've already read Margaret McMillan's obvious is no less generous.
We are, if you like, a confederacy of scoundrels, the way that we all sing the praises of each other's books.
I think this is more of an American thing. Every time I told Simon and Annabel about the endorsers that basic had lined up,
they kept groaning, saying, but they would have been such good book reviewers.
But that pre-publication vote of confidence makes me blush.
But it's so lovely to see. And I want to thank Margaret, and I want to thank Ivy, but also Simon Sebag Montefiore, Peter Frank, a pen in America,
as well as wonderful academic friends and colleagues like Libby Thompson at American Mailer for Law at Tufts,
and Samuel Wyatt, one of the young doyen of Damascene historians.
So lovely, if savvy, to give the seal of approval.
Very nice if you presume to write about someone else's country, someone else's city, then to say that it's okay what you've done.
This is such an Oxford book.
Every book I've written has been an Oxford book with supportive colleagues, and I want to thank Walter, and I want to thank Mariam,
and I want to thank Rayhan, who video this year, but also Michael and Lauren and Neil,
who have abandoned us for greener pastures as they go on sabbatical.
Uh, and I want to thank our amazing students. You're here in strength.
And as I said, you know from experience that the modern history of the Middle East begins in 1867.
This is very much for you. I want to thank my kids.
You'll see some beautiful flowers there. But, Richard, Isabelle couldn't be here today in person.
And I think they've chosen the most beautiful way to be here in spirit.
So I want to thank Richard. Is he as part of tonight saving my most important for last.
Oh. Get out your handkerchiefs.
Because this book is dedicated to not read for a good reason. Her support over the years.
Whenever I travelled to do the research or the writing, what if I was galloping off for a couple of weeks of Damascus, going trotting off to Istanbul?
Or indeed what?
I decided to spend a whole sabbatical year in Toulouse, and I got your fulsome support and regular visits to make sure I didn't feel too lonesome.
And wonderful encouragement all the way through. And then it's just a genuine interest.
You've taken to this subject from the very beginning. Diary, the regular conversations, the feedback on the early chapters.
Always encouraging, always positive.
You learned a long time ago that what we really want to hear is not the things we could get better, but that it's really brilliant.
If this book has been 35 years in the making. Diary, you've been my inspiration for the past 31 of them, so thank you.
This function publication date in the UK was last Thursday.
Very exciting. And in the Americas.
It was yesterday. But today.
Here. In the middle, etc. The book is launched.
I wish it well and I thank you for all of your good wishes.
We we have a bit of time. We could have a conversation.
Uh, or you could be civil or you can. Embarrassing. It's very, very highly civil.
So let's have a conversation. Right. But I want to thank you first for the fascinating account that you have given us of the writing of this book,
the making of this book over a very long period of time.
It was a really, truly interesting account.
And you also spoke in a very engaging way about the process of writing history and the joys of writing history, particularly archival research.
And you struck really lucky with these files.
But one of the excitements about working in an archive is that you never know when you might hit something really big and important,
but it's a real joy. And I have lectured in this room to the Enfield students about archival research, and I always say, what a joy it is.
And I don't know what young people do these days for fun. They probably go clubbing if I had to.
If I had to choose between going clubbing and working in archives, I would choose working in the archive any time.
It's a no brainer. But you've had big discoveries in the archive, and if I think about your conclusion across the Jordan,
you were one of the fortunate few to get access to material that other scholars had never seen before and can blow the lid.
Of the first Arab-Israeli War and and the genesis of the State of Israel.
So you know all about this. It was all in the Israeli archives.
My first book was called Collusion Across the Jordan King Abdullah of the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine.
And Israel has a state archive and a third Hebrew, which governs the review and declassification of official documents.
Israel copy the British 30 rule and used to apply very, very liberally.
And Benny Morris, Ellen and I were the beneficiaries of this liberal policy.
But, uh, Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't like critical history.
So he closed down the reading room in the state archives.
And now you can only apply online, and you have to know what you are applying for,
which takes away all the fun of working in an archive and, uh, ordering physical files.
So, um, when I worked on the book on King Abdullah, uh, everything was there.
There were a lot of a series of secret meetings in there, about three or 4 or 5 different Israeli accounts of what happened at these meetings.
And I, as a diplomatic historian, uh, simply reconstructed not just what was decided, but what the atmosphere,
the ambience and what was discussed and what was decided at the secret meetings that this is, uh, and the result was collusion across the Jordan.
Can I pause you for one second there? I just wanted to know if anybody had any questions for Professor Sharon.
I set you up for that one? Okay.
Yeah. So I want to make one other comment about you and the last part of your talk, which is thanking people, the acknowledgements.
It's what I call the end of a jumble sale.
Kind of a speech. That's when the headmaster thanks everybody who helped organise the jumble sale.
And you did it very elegantly. But I particularly want to highlight your thanks to the students.
And I want to associate myself with the thanks to our students, to our brilliant students.
And, uh, if you're an academic, there are two things in which you can distinguish yourself as a scholar and as a teacher.
And you have distinguished yourself. You have excelled in both.
And the Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian who was the master of Balliol College,
once said, if we are not here for the students, what the [INAUDIBLE] are we?
Well, I don't think the students have ever let go of you. So the question of the students, do you still allow Ivy to be associated with you?
I mean, who wants to say, is this allowed? And can I ask you a serious question?
I know is actually. You've written for history books.
Do you have a philosophy of history? Do you have an overarching view of what history is about, the purpose of history, and anything about methodology?
Because some eminent historians have written books towards the end of their career reflecting on on the writing of history.
There is each column. His lectures were called What is History?
Uh, Geoffrey Elton from Cambridge wrote The Historian's Craft.
Richard Evans from Cambridge. His book is called In Defence of History and Our Own.
Margaret Macmillan wrote a book on the use of celebrity history.
Uh, so what is your general view about the philosophy of history and historiography?
It's a really interesting question of, because I'm not philosophical about history, and I've got a very short attention span.
Seriously. So it's got to keep my interest.
And I think a lot of readers are that way too.
So I mean, to me, it's the human connection in history that's always driven it for me, which is why I so enjoy reading, uh,
first person narratives and why I always like going back to those who lived through
the events to try and get the insights that come with eyewitness experience.
I'm a narrative historian. I'm not a theoretical abstract historian.
I'm not a structuralist. I've never really bought into large frameworks of history.
I don't say that in any way dismissively, because most of the great historians in our field do just that.
And in that sense, you know, I will fail the Academy.
And never having put forward a big theoretical approach that is innovative in history in some way that others would imitate.
You know, at that level, I'm not a contributor.
Um, but I think. I write history that people can see the relevance to the world as it is today.
I was interviewed by one of my undergraduates for chair.
Well, recently the student newspaper and I made a throwaway line about, you know, the whole point is,
if you want to understand the mess we're in today, you've got to you got to do some history. And what I write is kind of grounded in the.
The present relevance of history being how it helps us to understand the issues of the present, the options moving forward,
the lessons from the past, both things you might want to do and things you absolutely want to avoid doing.
But. It's not a very rigorous theoretical or philosophical approach to history, if I'm honest.
I recommend following on from these comments. I recommend to all of you.
The essay that Eugene published in the F.T. the Weekend, the 4th of May on the lessons of history for the modern Middle East.
And, um, you'll see how well he uses this approach of, of um, how will he use this history in order to explain current events?
So this is something that you try the trick question to us to make sure that nothing less, because we, uh,
you know, this is something we have in common, that we are not organised and, um, obsessed with methodology.
Uh, we are narrative historians. In my case, it's I am a simple, uh, storyteller.
But I used to be in the Department of International Relations with Miri and the director of research in international relations, uh,
the director of research training, uh, asked me to give a lecture to our graduate seminar on my research methodology, and I said, I need 32nd.
My research methodology is to collect all the materials on my topic and to write each other.
So this is one thing we have in common. And the other thing that we have in common is that we were both born on the 31st of October.
Yeah. And as was Zaha Hadid who gave us this lecture with you.
Yeah. 31st October. It's a powerful day. And on this note, I'll bring the formal proceedings, not so formal proceedings to an end.
And there is a book sale in the foyer.
I'm going to ask you to stay in your seats, to allow Eugene to walk out and to sit down.
And he will be able to sign a copy of his book to anyone who buys it.
Now, I very, very strongly recommend this book.
Uh, it's the best book I've read since Middlemarch. But also possibly even since the middle of February.
Oh. I.