introduction: richard overy
In public cultures, the salience of a discipline varies according to country (as well as, of course, over time). After 1945, history acquired a centrality in Britain beyond its place in any other Western country. In France the Annales school occupied—by reason of the novelty of its methods and concerns—a position ahead of any counterpart in Britain, widely acknowledged as such. Yet in intellectual presence and esteem it was probably eclipsed by philosophy, at times even anthropology—Sartre, Beauvoir, Lévi-Strauss more widely read and discussed than Braudel or Duby. In Germany, philosophy never lost its place at the helm of attention, as the career of Habermas would show. In the United States, economics, political science and, for a spell, sociology—Friedman, Huntington, Merton—dominated the scene, the first two embedded in successive administrations.
In England alone, history enjoyed public preeminence. AJP Taylor was the first scholar of any kind to become a media star, successively in the press, radio and television. His opponent Trevor-Roper took to journalism and polemic with near equal gusto, and bested him in academic patronage. Each born before the First World War, this Radical/Whig pair was displaced to the left in the next levy, formed during the Second World War and active after the war in the cpgb Historians Group of the forties—Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan. This was a Marxist stratum, which went on to found Past and Present, the journal that became Britain’s equivalent of Annales, with its own timbre and format but comparable in influence, in which historians of distinction, who were neither Marxist nor particularly of the left, came to play a no less significant role. Common to the work of what by the sixties was a mostly ex-Communist cohort was an initial and in some cases unswerving concern with the past of Britain itself, from the twelfth to the twentieth century—part of the reason for their influence, since perhaps more even than literature, history has long acted as a proving-ground of national identity.
With the thinning of the post-war generation and the downsizing of Britain’s status in the world, that focus diminished. In the next generation it became more common for leading historians to write about the past of societies other than their own, or subjects—empire the most persistent—engulfing while exceeding it. One great Marxist historian, Chris Wickham, produced a body of work as intellectually formidable as that of any of his predecessors; though by reason of the distance from the present of much—though not all—of it in classical antiquity and technical archaeology, has yet to achieve the kind of popular renown that Thompson or Hobsbawm enjoyed. More generally, the influence of Marxism faded, without the run of historians becoming more right-wing; if anything, the opposite.
In these altered circumstances, among the most remarkable minds to have risen to prominence and remained in the country are Ian Kershaw and Richard Overy. The two share beginnings in Old Labour and revulsion from New Labour; twenty-plus books apiece centred on the Second World War; and a wide audience won by gifts of style and skill in use of television as a medium capable of serious outreach. Where most of Kershaw’s corpus has concentrated on the figure of Hitler and the trajectory of Nazism in Germany, the leading Axis power ranged against the Allies, Overy’s oeuvre has from the outset been comparative, covering all the major combatants.
In this issue we publish an interview with Overy about his career and his thought. His work falls into four principal subject blocs: the origins and nature of the Second World War; fighting in the air as the major novelty of the conflict; aspects of British life and society; and reflections on the global history of warfare. Spanning some five decades, his thinking about these has altered over time, in ways that he explains. Perhaps the longest account he has so far given of his work as a historian, it is no complete survey of it: the relative weight of his writing about the advent of airpower and its consequences—currently in the course of spectacular further transformations—lacks commensurate representation here, as does the longue durée sweep of his planetary history of battlefields from earliest times. Limitations like these aside, Overy’s highly unusual qualities as a scholar stand out in what follows: the rare phenomenon of a military historian in command of the economics and technology of warfare; a comparative curiosity extending from one end of Eurasia to the other; analytic acuity and sobriety of judgement, free from any prevailing conformism; and an unfailingly humane response to the least humane activity of the species.
We’d like to explore the development of your thinking as a comparative
military and economic historian of the Second World War, leading up to your radical re-interpretation of it—in
Blood and Ruins and other recent work—as the outcome of a broader crisis in the world-imperial order.
footnote1 But may we start by asking about your background and how you became a historian of the war: how would you describe your family and your interests and activities in childhood, at home and at school?
Mine was a rather odd family. My father was an Irish immigrant to England, an engineer; my mother was the daughter of a senior civil servant, though she worked most of her life as a secretary. Both my parents were extremely right-wing. My twin sister and I were born in 1947, and from age eight grew up in a small village in Somerset. There was almost nobody else of my age in the village, so I spent a lot of time on my own, which forced me to find things to do. I went to local schools but was quite shy and isolated from the other children; I spent a lot of time in the playground on my own. I found the requirements of learning rather boring, too; I much preferred to teach myself. So I spent a lot of time reading things that had little to do with school.
My mother was fascinated by history, and I think it was through her that I became attracted to it in the first place. From a very early age I began reading the history books on her shelves; it was what interested me the most. What I really wanted was to be an archaeologist; I also spent a lot of time collecting fossils and things like that. Archaeology turned out to be a bit too scientific. I became quite involved in the Church, too. My mother always hoped that I would be a bishop. I kept up my enthusiasm for Christianity until I was about eighteen but shed it very quickly once I got to Cambridge. In the end I became very interested in modern politics and therefore in modern history.
You went up to Cambridge in the second half of the sixties, to read History at Gonville and Caius. What was your experience there, of the people you met and the courses you took? How did you feel about the student revolt of the period?
My time at Cambridge was also rather strange, because I was very right-wing when I arrived. It was in my first year that the blinkers came off, and I suddenly realized not only that I had become an atheist—which I still am—but also that the things that my mother and father and other people in Somerset had been saying about the world outside were simply not true. I felt very inhibited at first, as a grammar-school boy surrounded by very bright public-school products. I thought this was not going to be the place for me. Coming from a small village, it took time to adjust. But I soon found a circle of friends who shared the same views. We organized a poetry circle; wrote our own verse. I quickly moved to the left, joined the Marxist students, protested against Rhodesia, campaigned on student issues—we succeeded in acquiring a condom machine for the Junior Common Room; not perhaps my greatest triumph. Basically, I became part of the left-wing student body, which was very large. That was really the most important thing. Cambridge opened my eyes. It was an extraordinary experience.
But the important thing was that history gripped me—it was just what I wanted to do. I had no sense at first that I’d be able to make a life of it. In fact, I was very surprised to have got into Cambridge. I was the first person from my school to do so. For the first year or two, I wondered what I was doing there. Then, to my astonishment, I got the second-highest First in the university. That was when I realised that I could be a historian; I didn’t have to go off and be a banker—or a bishop.
So you stayed on in Cambridge for postgraduate work. A two-part question here. First, you say your orientation to modern history was—in part—through modern politics. How did this take you to the subject of the Second World War, and more specifically to the German aircraft industry for your PhD topic? And second, where and how did you acquire your command of German—and any other languages?