On 29 November, Antony Hopkins and Brett Bennett commenced their conversation in high spirits. The interview was the last of a series of conversations that the two had been having about global history and globalization since Hopkins first visited Western Sydney University in 2013 to participate in a university-sponsored global history workshop. The interview focused on Hopkins’ research trajectory since joining the University of Texas at Austin shortly after 9/11 in 2001, his views on intellectual fashion, and his thoughts on the writing of history. Hopkins is currently Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History and Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge University, and the former Walter Prescott Webb Chair in the History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin. Hopkins has a forthcoming book with Princeton University Press situating American history within the context of globalization.

Brett: Let’s start where you left off in your autobiography in Burnt Orange Britannia.Footnote ¹ After you had come to America for a semester-long appointment at Harvard University and then had taken up the Walter Webb Prescott Chair in History in the University of Texas at Austin. Your move to the United States happened just one day before the 9/11 attacks. This event and its aftermath influenced your decision to learn more about the history of the United States. Can you describe how this turned your attention towards the subject of your forthcoming book?

Tony: I did indeed arrive in Boston on the evening before 9/11. I was to teach the semester at Harvard. So, the next morning, fully jet-lagged, I arrived quite early in Robinson Hall, the headquarters of history department. There weren’t many people there, though a few secretaries were frozen in front of the TV screen. I asked what was going on, and was given the news. I remember standing there as if I was swallowing a very large paving stone, and saying to myself: what on earth have I done? I meant in leaving Cambridge and coming to the USA.

I thought: “someone foreign, a long way away, is going to be hit very hard.” That was not a prophetic statement—it seemed to me pretty obvious. The other aspect I observed as an alien, so to speak, and as somebody who had been used to the IRA bombings in London, Manchester, and elsewhere, was the reaction of the authorities to the crisis. Understandably, the US authorities had no experience of anything like this. The president of Harvard immediately closed the university, which was of course a very unwise decision because everyone piled onto trains, which then became highly vulnerable. No one had thought that through. The university was closed for a couple of days and it took a couple of weeks to get back to normal. It was a very strange and disruptive period for me to start a new life.

Although I had made that banal prediction about someone being invaded as a punishment for the destruction of the twin towers, it wasn’t clear when that was going to happen or who would be hit. So, I then started at the University of Texas in January of the following year, and got into my studies and teaching there. I began to return to a long-term project, which to my embarrassment, has never been finished, namely to produce a second edition of my Economic History of West Africa. I’ve got more than notes, and even have drafts. Well, it was March—spring break—in 2003, and I had sat down to get on with the new edition when the invasion of Iraq took place. Although I had thought that something like this was going to happen, I was totally shocked by what was going on: the construction of a catastrophe, for everyone involved. I simply put my book down and became obsessed with the newspaper reports and all the discussions of the event, and it was that, really, that got me started trying to answer the question “how has this all come about.” It was then that I became more involved in US history.

Brett: It seems that this was an amazingly important event that caused you to drop something old and start something new. You’d written two major books before that. Was this unique, or can you point to similar events that inspired your other works?

Tony: Yes, I think it was unique. Historians are always influenced by the events around them. My first book was conceived within the great decolonization mood of the 1960s. My second book on British imperialism was much more of an academic, intellectual enterprise, which in a sense I was criticised for, as it was a reaction against the advance of area studies. I should add that I was in no way hostile to this field, which I had played a small part in developing. It was just that the advance of area studies, that is work on India, Asia, Africa, et cetera, had progressed so far that the study of the colonial presence had been neglected and was in danger of being stereotyped.

Brett: You get people who just stay on one theme, topic, or region for a whole career. Some others move around a bit more. It seems that a lot of people who move between subjects are following fashion. For instance, there are some prominent scholars who started out as Marxists, then became postmodern cultural historians, and then rejected the postmodern foundations of cultural history. Your trajectory is not a rejection of previous work, but rather seems to build progressively even though your geographic focus has changed considerably. Is it the economic history background that has led you to make transitions that are different, but still building on each work?

Tony: That’s a very good question because it goes back to the point I made that historians have to situate themselves in their own setting—class, race, gender, all these are inescapable—and they shape the way we look at subjects. So, that is a good thing, as it is a source of inspiration. The problem arises when the inclinations people have turn into priorities that then appear to make claims, if not for the total truth, at least for the most valid interpretation of historical themes in relation to events around the world. Here is the danger and the problem. Historians cannot ignore this. We must take note and adjust. If we go along entirely with whatever is the mood of the moment, we devalue our individuality. Our books become tombstones in graveyards no one visits any more. Fashions in history all share this characteristic. The devaluation of individualism is something we have to struggle to avoid.

You are right to suggest that the economic theme is one that has pervaded my own work. So much so that, during the postmodernist phase, someone who shall remain anonymous referred to me as an “unreconstructed economic historian,” meaning that I had failed to move with the times. There was a certain truth in that. I was not at all happy with the claims of postmodernism, and I did not absorb them. Where I would criticise myself is that I didn’t give that phase, or other phases, the degree of sympathy I could have done. In holding on to a line of thought I had some gains, but there have been some disadvantages too. I think my latest book, and certainly my last ambitious book, on the United States, is different because I have made a conscious attempt to interconnect economic, political, and cultural themes in the story I’m telling.

Brett: We will want to continue talking about the American book. But I want to talk a little about your work as an economic historian. As you know, we are increasingly encouraged to make an impact outside our field and also have an influence on policy. You have continually engaged with scholarship, especially the social sciences, outside of history. Do you consider your work interdisciplinary? What can be gleaned from your career about how to engage with policy or think about disciplines outside of history?

Tony: It depends on your point of view. Economists-as-historians do not regard me as being one of them, that is an economist who writes history, whereas historians might see me as an economic historian. There are great gradations in the field of history. One’s answer depends on a point of view as well as on disciplinary training.

Stepping back from the question a bit, one of the lessons of history, or rather historiography, is that while there are new things under the sun, it remains true that the current policy dilemmas and other problems we all face have roots in some much cited but typically unread classical writer. You may know from my teaching that I’ve always laid a great stress on historiography, that is, the study of how the subject itself has developed. This involved, to the degree that time allowed, a study of the great writers who have influenced their own times and beyond. By influencing commentators beyond their own age, we call them classics.

Many policy-makers today don’t know much history. The link between history and economics was severed in the 1960s. Economics departments shed history and economic historians had to find homes elsewhere, typically in departments of history. Historians themselves focused increasingly on non-economic aspects of the past. This separation has meant that many policy-makers, economists, and others, unless they are exceptional, do not have a firm grasp of history. Lacking that, there is a great danger in assuming that what is new to us is unprecedented. If you look back, more often than not you will find that many of the great issues we are tackling today are those that, at least in their analytical form, were discussed at great length by our noted predecessors.

Take the question of globalisation. What we now call “globalisation” was referred to in previous centuries in different ways. The problems arising from integration, and the development issues it gave rise to, have been discussed for several centuries. There was a lively debate in the eighteenth century, for example, about whether what we call globalisation was “good or “bad,” whether free trade or protection was the better route to development, and whether greater integration with other societies would erode or revitalise the domestic social order. These debates are relevant to the present, even if the particulars of today are different.

Brett: I’d like to follow on from your point about how people in the past have understood issues that we are trying to grapple with today in different forms. There is a type of empathising involved in understanding those debates. Not all historians view empathy in the same way. How do you empathise with people in the past whilst separating yourself from the past?

Tony: The historian’s task involves tying two different things together. The first point is the one you make about empathy. One of the great achievements of area studies was the way the best research looked beyond colonial rule and into the societies, the values, the minds of the recipients. Many propositions which were known through the colonial literature about the “benefits of empire,” and so on, could be looked at afresh and challenged by the perceptions of those on the receiving end. That is one aspect of the necessary task of reconstruction.

The second task of the historian is of course to use hindsight. When you reconstruct empathetically the mind—inspirations, values, et cetera—of indigenous people in local societies in some part of the non-Western world, you are reconstructing a cosmic view that could not take account of what we know happened subsequently. More than that, contemporaries could not see the wider context. You can understand how a village responded to a certain event in a particular moment, but what the historian can do in addition is to look at that example and see whether it connects up with other examples elsewhere, and what the total picture might be. So the ideal historical work, which I haven’t written, puts these together to create a synthesis that is not just a top-down reconstruction.

Brett: We seem to, crudely, have had historiographical phases of a pro- or at least neutral imperial history and then the development of area studies, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies, et cetera, that were decidedly critical of colonialism. It is recognised that the pro-empire proponents overstated the benefits of colonialism. Have postcolonial critics of empire overshot the mark in their criticisms of empire? You make some points in Burnt Orange Britannia about how violence has increased in Nigeria. You also mention in your Journal of African History paper about how poverty does not appear in cultural histories of Africa. Is it possible to write a balanced history of empire?

Tony: I think the problem here is that one person’s nuance is another person’s prejudice. In other words, there is a subjective element about the “costs and benefits” of empire that is very difficult to resolve. I’d like to make two points. Firstly, without dismissing the integrity or the value of judgements made in any particular time, we are often in danger of projecting onto the colonial world the priorities and preferences of ourselves, or of that section of our ourselves that writes history, which is not the same as the greater part of the population.

For instance, there is, let us say, a women’s liberation movement in the US that translates into an inquiry into the status of women in the undeveloped world. Books and articles are produced which purport to explain their status and pass judgement on it. On the one hand, the priority at home provides an inspiration for a subject that had not previously been discussed. On the other hand, the danger is that we are imposing our values on to people we are studying in the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth centuries. There is a danger here of an anachronism that is not always caught before it enters into the conclusions of such work. In other words, this is a post hoc reconstruction that is not sufficiently calibrated by the need for empathy you referred to earlier.

The second point is that there is a problem in assessing accountability. At what moment do you draw the line in the accounts of colonialism? If you strike the balance when colonial rule was at its height, say in the 1930s or 1940s, there is a lot of evidence of racial prejudice and economic hardship that characterised the record. At that point, you could conclude by saying that colonialism was not doing a whole lot of good for the greater part of the colonial world. On the other hand, you could take a longer view of the problem and look back at countries that are running their own affairs and are developing quite rapidly, and where the standard of living has risen considerably. In this regard, you can think of some countries in Southeast Asia as well, now, as countries in Africa, not a lot, but some. By taking the long view, you could say to yourself that the penalties suffered by the grandparents are being compensated to a degree by the life opportunities—increasing wealth, the decline of infant mortality, rising longevity, et cetera—of the next generation. Some part of these benefits, arguably, could be ascribed to colonial rule, as well as to the record of independent governments.

I’m not saying that I espouse either of these views, but I think they are the two possibilities, one a very short-term view that risks imposing current priorities on others, and the other one, the long-term issue of exactly when you draw the line in the accounts.

I should just close by reminding you of Marx’s view, which summarised the position quite nicely, namely that imperialism was exploitative but it was also progressive. Ultimately, Marx thought, the modern world of industry, with its problems as well as its benefits, would be transferred to the rest of the world. One of the reasons why we don’t use the term the ‘third world’ with the same frequency that we used to is that the world has become more heterogeneous. You can’t easily link Malaysia with Gambia. Not only do they have different cultures, of course, but they are on different rungs of the development ladder.

Brett: This is a good way to transition into the question of globalisation, the focus of this issue and much of the edited work that you’ve done. What inspired you to begin working on globalization?

Tony: What inspired me to work on globalisation was the realisation that in the 1990s, I had congratulated myself on my impressive criticism of postmodernism, but then realised that anyone can become a devastating critic. The problem is to try and construct something, which immediately opens you up to criticism from all sides, and is very hard to do. It requires a degree of initiative and originality which of course are extraordinarily demanding. So, at the end of the 1990s, I began to sit down and think about alternative possibilities. As a result of my social science interests, I came across a store of literature in that field that had not really been tapped by historians at that time. It had started in the early 1990s, when economists, political scientists, and sociologists paid increasing attention to globalisation. I caught up with some of that work and begin to think about ways that it could be applied to history. I published a paper in Past and Present in 1999 that alluded to these ideas in a half sort of way, and then a more substantial book with my Cambridge colleagues in 2002.

What I am doing now in my US book is to illustrate the idea that globalisation has passed through significant phases by connecting the history of globalisation to the history of empires since the beginning of the eighteenth century. The connecting argument is that, during this period, empires were the principal agents of globalisation. They were not the only agents; there were informal networks and so on, but empires were major proponents of globalisation in its different phases. This leads me to the concluding argument, which is that after World War II, not immediately but growing from the 1950s, we entered a different phase of globalisation, the one we are in today, which is inimical to empire building. I explore the reason for this, and see it as the final crisis of the previous stage of globalisation, which can be summarised as the trend towards decolonization. After then, we have plenty of examples of attempted hegemony and other forms of dominance, but territorial empires of the kind I described in the previous centuries are no longer necessary, workable, or feasible. The era we live in today is one that makes it very hard for any attempt at empire-building to be successful. The invasion of Iraq in 2003, if you assume that it was aimed at building an empire, despite the denials, was a case in point of the failure of that impulse.

Brett: Your view of American history, in addition to being informed by 9/11 and the aftermath, is uniquely informed by your expertise in African history, British imperialism, and economic history. Can you explain your interpretation of American imperial history because it seems that you have pointed your finger to some huge blind spots in American history, which is, with some major exceptions, written by Americans.

Tony: I see the term “empire” in relation to the US in the following way: in the nineteenth century I argue that although the US was formally independent after 1783, it was in fact a decolonizing state like many of the others that were to follow in Latin America and elsewhere in the twentieth century. It had a struggle to achieve effective independence, which is something I look into. There is a case for considering an “American empire” as continuing to the extent that the British were particularly influential during at least the first half of the nineteenth century. Then, beginning in the 1860s, the US joined the modernising world at the same time as the powers of Western Europe did.

The US had to become unified after the Civil War. It took a while, but it was an important start and complemented the creation of Italy and Germany, and the efforts of existing countries, like Japan and France, to reconstruct their polities and economies. This was all part of the effort to build national-industrial states. So, the trajectory was very similar. Then, when you get to the age of high imperialism in the late nineteenth century, you find that the US again joined in at exactly the same time as the rest of the European and other modernising imperial powers began to partition large segments of the world.

The war between Spain and the USA in 1898 was the high point of this movement. Now, there are a huge number of books published on the war with Spain in 1898, and every possible detail has been examined, as far as one can tell, but the moment the peace of Paris had settled who got what out of it, most historians leave the scene; they have little interest in what follows. They go back to resuming the story of liberty and democracy in one country.

Your question, which is an excellent one, is why should this be? Well, you can come up with one or two obvious and quite persuasive answers. The first one that comes to mind is that the territorial empire acquired in 1898 was actually rather small. It consisted of a myriad of islands, the most important being the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and you could add Cuba as a protectorate. You could say that these are tiny places that didn’t even matter to US national interests and so dropped out of public view.

There is a second reason. That is, the acquisition of an insular empire rapidly became controversial and embarrassing for what was purportedly a democratic republic. It didn’t worry the French, who also claimed to have a democratic republic, but it did the Americans. This anxiety manifested itself in the lack of a bipartisan policy towards empire. Britain and France, despite the differences between left- and right-wing politics, nevertheless had more or less consistent policies. Both accepted that the national interest required that empire be upheld. The left argued, broadly speaking, that the empire should be reformed but not abandoned. In the United States, however, the Republicans were rather saddled with the consequences of 1898 and the Democrats fashioned the insular empire into political weaponry. Consequently, there was constant infighting between the two main parties, which made it difficult to formulate a coherent policy, let alone establish conditions for a settled colonial career, because the Democrats said that they were going to get rid of the empire. Politically, it was a very awkward matter, so it was dropped, and as far as possible became invisible, even though in 1940 there were about 23 million people in the insular empire, if you include Cuba, which is a considerable total.

Simply put, historians did not consider the empire to be part of the historical agenda. Policy-making was pretty obscure because it was all a matter of lobbies and infighting. To put it sharply, there was no huge national interest involved in the empire, whereas in Britain and France you could reasonably claim that what happened in the empire was going to affect the national interest.

The last comprehensive book written on the management of America’s insular empire was published in 1962 in Leiden and rapidly forgotten, even though it is still a worthwhile study.Footnote ² So, that is what I think happened.

There is one other point to add to that. When decolonization gave area studies a new impulse in the 1960s, new impetus was given, too, to the study of the “islands,” as I shall refer to them collectively. What we now have, and I wish to emphasis the point, is a series of splendid, detailed studies of all the different islands, each contributing to the reconstruction of insular perspectives. Yet, at the moment there is no study that attempts to step back, and ask “what were the principles governing these territories, how did they compare to those of Britain and France, how successful were they, were there differences between the islands, or between the Caribbean and Pacific branches?” In other words, there is no synthesis of this detailed work. I will not claim to have achieved the synthesis we need. But I do claim to have put out an agenda that others will no doubt correct and advance in the future.

Brett: You became interested in American history due to external events, but brought your imperial and African history background. This gave you a somewhat broad knowledge that you then applied to the global American context. There is a push now to encourage researchers to do “global” research or to extend the temporal and geographic scales of history. What lessons have you learned about how to write global history? Are there dangers of people jumping into global history without having a deep knowledge of multiple regions of the world?

Tony: What we can call for the moment the “global turn” has undoubtedly captured the historical world. Indeed, when I started to write my first chapter, which sets out the main theme of the book, I had a struggle. Had I written this in 2001, I could have claimed that globalisation was a novel subject for historians, but in 2016 every man and his dog, it seems, is talking about it. Now, that means, on the one hand, that my work will be immediately recognisable. But then I run into exactly the same danger that has attended previous trends, namely, of being overtaken by current fashion and being swallowed by it. So, I had to spend quite a lot of time working out how to establish that what I was doing was within the framework of the current fashion, or priority, but at the same time had not been duplicated by work that had already been published. What I have done is to say that, while there have been huge achievements in current studies of globalisation in getting us to spread out and in reintroducing material considerations among others, there are still profound limits. The national curriculum is still the one that prevails everywhere. My work attempts to fill one of the spaces that the current literature has not yet occupied.

One other problem is that the global turn has encouraged scholars to use the term “globalisation” without having read the segment of the social science literature that is relevant to their own study. What you have in many cases is a form of window-dressing to make sure the student or author looks relevant and fully up to date. There are obvious dangers in that. What I then try to do is to establish what I mean by globalisation and then to lay out the question of whether we are to regard globalisation as something that starts small and gets bigger, or whether we are to see it in distinct phases. And, of course, I elaborate the second point. I hope I am correct in this, but amazingly, there has been very little informed discussion by historians of the types of phasing or sequences that we can attribute to globalisation. Accordingly, I think there is an opportunity for me to say something that will help to anchor the study of globalization in history in a way that will get away from the vagueness that otherwise encompasses much of the treatment of the subject.

Brett: This book, similar to your other two, is sweeping in time and space. You say it is nearly 300,000 words, so it is also massive. How have you been able to do such long-term, big-picture historical research? Do you think that current publish-or-perish regimes are making it more difficult for scholars to pursue big-picture work over long periods of time? I think of Australia, where we are measured on publications every three years, or in the UK where I believe it is every five years.

Tony: It is certainly possible to write generally at an early stage of your career, but I don’t think I could have written this book—good, bad or indifferent—at any other stage except now, which is towards the terminal point. The reason is that, whatever historians lose in the course of time, they can gain in their reading and knowledge, and perhaps a little bit in their understanding too. My book on the United States draws on my work on Africa, not that it appears as such, but in terms of what you said about empathizing with the recipients. That is why I have several chapters that attempt to look at the islands before and after 1898 from the perspective of those engaging with advancing American influences. That is one thing.

Then, the book on British Imperialism gave me some awareness and knowledge of the great sweep of British imperial history, Britain being intimately involved with the US historically, too, as we all know. Finally, of course, my work on globalisation since the late 1990s has given me a smattering of that subject too. So, I think that to write a major synthesis, and to do it thoroughly, you do have to have had the time to accumulate more data than you hope you have either lost or forgotten. In summary, there is a long-term element to a project like this that is inescapable for anyone aiming to master the literature and then trying to rise above it.

There is another problem, which you rightly allude to. Because works of synthesis take time, and because the pressures to publish or perish are increasing by the year, it is very difficult for anyone other than an eccentric or an exceptionally talented scholar to do this type of work at earlier stages of their careers. I can recall when Peter Cain and I decided to do a book on British imperialism we said to one another that “at least we have tenure now.” We were clear that scholars, not all of course, have to attack the big problems. We had written a couple of articles and gained some confidence, so we said “let’s give it a whirl and see so what we can do.” We knew it would take a long time, but of course it took longer than we imagined, as it usually does. When I look at the academic world around me now, I am concerned that younger scholars will not have time made available for them, or perhaps the understanding of their seniors, who have to tick boxes about productivity and publications, to do something of this kind that is thoroughly researched and carefully considered.

Brett: We are all pushed to publish and do research. This has in many ways led to an explosion of journals. People are taking on larger themes, something that in the 1970s to 1990s was generally frowned on for methodological reasons, such as not having a deep knowledge of place, embracing metanarrative, et cetera. What is your view on the quality of contemporary scholarship? Do you have any advice on how to navigate the pitfalls of publication and choosing research topics?

Tony: What I would say about your first observation is that historical scholarship today has changed significantly. I do not believe that standards have fallen. The subject, as so many other things in the world, has expanded very rapidly. It has expanded quantitatively in terms of the sheer number of historians, and the number of journals and publications. It has also expended thematically. I mean, half century ago, much history was really top-down political history with a little sprinkling of economic history and a few other things. Now we have many sub-fields, including your own, environmental history, which you can scarcely call a sub-field because it is so enormous. So, the subject has expanded and the number of historians has expanded. The consequence is that there is probably a greater variety in the quality of the work being produced than there used to be when historians were a much smaller and more homogeneous group. What I would say is that the quality of the tail-end is not particularly good, but at the top end it is probably better than anything that we could, or I could, do. Standards at the top are really very high. I have huge admiration for scholars who are able to produce the kind of syntheses we have been talking about despite the growing pressures of the day.

As for advice for historians, well, I was going to say that I didn’t want to pontificate, but someone at my age is obliged to pontificate. I would say that one of the great things about history is its variety. You don’t have to be a lumper or a splitter, so to speak, because you can move between those things, if you want to, in the course of time. I have written some of the most obscure work that anyone can possibly conceive. You can make your career entirely by doing very detailed work on a specialised subject, and that is absolutely essential. Or you can make your career, if not at the outset, by developing into these broader themes. You can also move between the two, as many famous historians have done. I think young historians should pick the subjects that attract them, that they feel comfortable with, that the skills they need are within their grasp, and that, above all, they should follow their interest. With luck and fingers crossed, the quality of their work will be recognised, whether it is very detailed—like Le Roy Ladurie’s studies of Languedoc, for example—or whether it is very broad—like Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life. There is a huge range of possibilities that we should take advantage of, always remembering that the fashion of the day will try to turn us in a particular direction. At the moment, everyone is into globalisation. Whatever you pick, you have to keep the current mood of the profession in mind, but also to do your level best not to be captivated by it.

Brett: Looking to the future, what do you see as a subject or topic that needs to be done? Or, to think of it another way, what advice do you have for younger historians?

Tony (laughing): You remind me of a famous quote in a book by Peter Winch, the philosopher, some sixty or seventy years ago, about prediction. When the jazz trumpeter, Humphrey Lyttelton, was asked “which way jazz was going,” he replied, “if I knew where jazz was going I’d be there already.”Footnote ³ If we could predict the future accurately we would be there ourselves, and the prediction would not then be useful.

Now, that is a sensible answer but it dodges the question a bit. Would I go into globalisation now? I’m not sure I would unless I could anchor my work, as I have said, to one of the key controversies. One big question, for example, is whether globalisation is incompatible with the nation-state. To answer that, historians could look at nation-states and globalization in the past in a way that they have not done so far. There is still room for some really important, novel studies: your own specialisation in environmental history is just one example. But if this is something that does not attract young scholars, then another approach is to start thinking contra-cyclically. In other words, if this is the big subject of the moment, what is the antonym or the alternative? If people start to talk about globalization as becoming boring, what would they do next? What you could have is a revival of regional and local studies pointing out that we need to get below macro generalizations.

I’m not predicting that this is the way to go. It would be bold move for a young student to engage with that because they would be stepping outside the current wisdom. Nevertheless, that would be one way in which a new type of novelty, or resurgent novelty, could be constructed. Given the present reaction against globalisation, a move in this direction might be a smart one. It might also fit the changing mood and create a new one. You read it here first!

Closing off, I would like to make one point, which is a failure on my part to answer a previous question properly. You asked me about what effect being in Texas had on my studies, apart from the remark I made about the invasion of Iraq.

This event, following 9/11, stirred me up in ways that I had not anticipated, and didn’t particularly want, but led me to ask questions: “Why is this happening?” “What degree of awareness does the US have of the outside world?” “How much empathy, to use your phrase, is there with alternative values, and how much understanding of different political structures, and how they hold together, whether we like them or not?” All these questions struck me as being the obvious ones to ask, and clearly had not been asked. So, that gave me my start by saying: “I really must try to understand this.” At that moment, it was an attempt to understand the contemporary world. Of course, as a historian, I realised how naive I was not to have realised this immediately, and that to understand the contemporary world I had to dig into the past. It then became clear to me that if I intended to spend a reasonable amount of time in Texas, it would be absurd not to use the final stage of my career to learn something in greater depth about the United States. I had the perfect location for doing so, I had wonderful colleagues, I had the British Studies seminar, I had colleagues in the department who know much more about these things than I did or do now. The questions turned into a more explicit, positive inspiration. I’m glad, too, my that my book has taken a long time because had it been written quickly, I might have produced something that was much more of the moment. Many hundreds of books were written about the invasion of 2003; most were produced speedily and without much reflection and are not cited today. I don’t know whether spending all this time has been worth it or not, but it has certainly been a remarkable exercise in self-education.