In the Light of History (Book Review)

J H Plumb In the Light of History (1972) Essays, reviews, and occasional pieces by a historian with a distinguished academic record (for which he was knighted in 1982), yet not one who made much of a splash outside the universities. His specialty was England in the eighteenth century, but  judging from this book he read widely beyond that narrow focus. I liked his occasional pieces best, written for a general magazine audience in the 1960s. He’s good at presenting a brief sketch of what we think we know, then carefully, and often wittily, revising it in the light of documents that professional historians have hunted out and published. This is the light of history of the book’s title.

     Plumb’s gift is to present to us the way people lived. He believed that there was no point in knowing what happened in politics, war, and trade, if you couldn’t imagine what it was like to live in that time and place. What mattered then as now is that people of different classes lived different lives. What matters now is that our lives have become very different from those of our ancestors. Plumb is on of the few people to recognise that technology drives change because it changes the time and effort spent on daily living, and because it expands the range of available choices. We interpret this as progress because for most of us these changes give us more comfortable, healthier, less work-intensive lives. It also changes power structures, which is why the conservative reaction to changes has become so vicious. The old patterns of wealth and power are undermined when ordinary people can live better than their betters did a couple or three generations before.
     Plumb made some astute predictions. He noted in an essay on hippies that these people focus on themselves, on the satisfaction of their emotional and aesthetic needs, and withdraw from politics. This is dangerous, for it allows fascism to breed in the political vacuum created by their disengagement. An article in the New York Times is a useful gloss on this insight:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/04/opinion/the-downside-of-liberty.html
     A book that is both entertaining and instructive. Recommended. ***