 Hello, my name is Alex Cook, I'm a historian here in the School of History at the Australian National University and this week it's Alan Martin week 2017. Every year the ANU School of History brings an eminent historian from somewhere around the world to the ANU in order to come and share with us their knowledge and expertise both with our students, our staff and the wider community. So this year it's a great pleasure for me to welcome our guest, Professor David Armitage. He's the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and Professor Armitage is a well prize winning teacher and writer, the author or editor of 16 books I believe at latest count on an extraordinary range of subjects really from Shakespeare and Milton through to the British Empire, the Atlantic world, the Pacific world, the Age of Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the origins of international thought and most recently of course a book on civil wars. I suppose one of the first questions to ask given the extraordinary range of your interests and production over recent years is is there a single guiding interest or set of interest or theme that shapes your work as a whole? Well before I answer that big question Alex, thank you so much for the opportunity to come back to the ANU in the School of History. It's a real pleasure to be here to see old friends and to meet new friends as well and to take part in the intellectual life of the school for the honour of doing the Alan Martin week this week where we can talk about all of these big issues. Of course I'm stalling for time to answer that big question and I've always thought that the central topic that I've been interested in and it's not an unfamiliar topic obviously is the state. The state as a particular form of political and human organisation in a universe of other political and human organisations like empires for instance so when I was writing about empires early in my career it was as a counterpoint to the existing literature especially in the history of political thought on the state. When I wrote the book on the Declaration of Independence that you kindly mentioned that was about the process of state making, the introduction of new states into the international order starting in the 18th century and then tracing that process through world history, foundations of modern international thought which you also kindly mentioned was very much about how people came to believe that they lived in a world of states and then my most recent book on civil wars is about state breaking to follow on from those earlier reflections on state making as well so I think I tend to think I've only ever had one idea luckily it's quite a big one and it's one that intersects with a lot of fields historical, political and theoretical so I expect I'll be continuing to mine that particular scene from some time to come. Yes it is you know an important theme for anyone who's interested in the history of politics, the history of political thought or indeed the history of modern life. How did you come to develop your primary set of interest I suppose in the state but also in particular one of the things that's apparent in your early work is an interest in the empire particularly in the kind of international order in which states exist as much as or more than their internal life. I think it originated as a particular scholarly interest in an apprehension that I had that the history of political thought as it was practiced and this will sound paradoxical was too closely focused on the state as such that there was an implicit Weberian narrative of the emergence of the state especially its territoriality, its claims to jurisdiction, its monopoly of violence and Weber's famous definition and I wondered this was in the late 80s early 1990s what were the competitors of the state what other political forms had made parallel or sometimes competing claims to authority jurisdiction control over people and resources as well as over territory and the obvious answer to that was empires in the early modern period where my main research interests lay at that point and continue to lie the period between the 16th century and the early 19th century let's say more autobiographically I think that scholarly interest intersected with my own formation I was born in the middle of the 1960s in Britain at a moment of self-conscious decolonization around the world and a rather less self-conscious process perhaps even an amnesiac process of forgetting empire forgetting colonialism in Britain itself and so I think my generation coming to intellectual and scholarly maturity in the 90s wanted to reflect more openly about the legacies of empire in British history at that point so that scholarly interest emerging from within the specific field of the history of political thought intersected with again a generational interest in empire its impact on shaping Britain and those two interests one more personal and generational and the other one more precisely scholarly intersected in particular in my first book on the ideological origins of the British Empire which was a very self-conscious attempt to bring together domestic British history the history of the state and state formation with what had usually been seen as a quite separate field the field of the British Empire to see how the two interacted in the early modern period to cross those boundaries and so that became a matrix for many of my future studies as well leading out chronologically as well as conceptually and geographically indeed from that original work at the intersection of the history of political thought as traditionally understood in the history of empire as it was being reimagined in the period when I was doing my PhD in my early career years I mean leading on from that one of the really striking things about your work I think that's clear early on but has become more and more clear as as as your work has developed in your interest have developed is is the interest in and also the remarkable capacity to think about big picture issues and to think about history both both on a on a long temporal timeframe but also on a large geographical scale an interest in in relations and processes that go beyond the state and so on I mean that interest in a sense follows logically from from what you were saying but you've argued that it's increasingly important in our times for historians to think in those ways why do you think it's so important in our times well I think the challenges that we face within particular political communities trans nationally and internationally but even on a global scale our challenges which affect us in ways that cannot be contained within the boundaries of particular states any longer think about climate change in particular but other issues coming out of the financial crisis of 2008 which still continue to royal the world questions of migration refugee flows the relationship between foreign policies in power and the great powers of the world and the global south I mean all of these big questions are now increasingly cast on a on an interregional indeed a global scale and I also think as a historian that the roots of many of those problems lie not in even a single generation but in some cases over decades centuries and perhaps even millennia and I believe therefore it's our job as historians to insist on the necessity of finding the appropriate scale to examine those problems to see their dimensions to work out how we came to the dilemmas that we have arrived at in the contemporary world and to use our skills as historians our ability to juggle multiple timescales our ability to combine various causalities our ability to juggle multiple methodologies all of these things I think are characteristic of history as a discipline if not necessarily unique to it I think we do have a role in using our skills individually and collectively in giving a sense of complexity back to communities within and beyond the academy and to use those historical skills at the very least to frame the nature of problems if not necessarily to provide solutions which may be in the hands of other scholars policymakers activists as well so I've wanted for some time to think about the ways in which we can link the scholarly achievements of our disciplines even a discipline like intellectual history which has been in general somewhat distant from a large public for instance to find ways to communicate the fruits of our research in such a way that they're both comprehensible to wider wider publics and even in some cases actionable to those publics as well and that was certainly one of the major impulses behind writing my recent book Civil Wars a history and ideas in a way that I hope and I believe has been accessible to non-academic non-scholarly audiences in order to open up the possibility of rethinking key problems like the nature of conflict around the world at the moment using the fruits of historical research in this case scanning the horizon of a 2000 year period in order to show some of the roots of our present discontent it's one of the ongoing features of your work is as you just referred to of course is that you you work predominantly but by no means excuse exclusively as an intellectual historian you've you've devoted your career in various ways to tracing the way in which ideas and concepts travel through time are reconfigured contested and entangled with wider historical processes but large scale world histories have often been thought of predominantly by historians in terms of material and economic processes perhaps for the social process migration and so on not so much in terms of the domains of of the history of ideas why do you think that the history of ideas matters to those wider processes well I think I would turn that around slightly and say what I'm now calling history in ideas matters rather than the history of ideas as as you would know and others will be aware as well long range long dure a intellectual history under the name of the history of ideas got rather a bad name for itself over the course of the 20th century and not least because it it tended to seduce its readers into imagining that ideas themselves had an existence outside the realm of the human far away from the actors who deployed ideas so intellectual historians to some extent became victims of their own methodological precision in preventing the possibility of seeing the way in which ideologies concepts conceptual frameworks ideas themselves had been developed because they were deliberately deployed over long periods of time often very self-consciously and often in the context of unfolding and reimagined traditions and really what I've been trying to do recently is to reassert the importance of re-inserting that history in ideas into these longer range histories which exactly as you say have tended to be material in their foundations and sometimes explicitly Marxist sometimes implicitly Marxist in their understanding of what drives long range and long-term processes and I wanted to stake a claim for the importance of intellectual traditions and again these the self-conscious working of agents deploying ideas within those long range traditions of humanism classical thought more recently legal thinking international literature as prudence the social sciences to show some of the ways in which we might imagine that we are spoken by the discourses which we have inherited to put that in perhaps soft Foucaultian terms but to turn that around and to and to make again make evident make conscious the ways in which the language which speaks us can be something which we can control once we know where it came from what baggage it carries with it what dilemmas it's been used to solve and what what different layers of sediment in meaning and argument lie in some of our most contested concepts such as civil war for instance so I think it's it's not an attack on other kinds of long range or large-scale history but it's making a new claim for intellectual history the history in ideas as part of those longer conversations which we have been to some extent cut off from in recent years and have allowed that incipient or reflexive materialism of global history for instance to take over but I want to reinsert the claims of intellectual history into those broad broader conversations that brings me I think perfectly to a discussion of your recent book civil wars a history in ideas as you say and I was going to ask a question about the the change from of to win and the meanings that carried which I think you've explained beautifully this is in many ways an illustration of the method that you've outlined of your call for the importance of long-range histories that are that are not only transregional and transnational but in many ways global in scope this is a history of the concept of civil war rather than of intra-communal conflict that's chartered over over a period of two millennia from ancient Rome to the present you've chosen within that book three key moments as you call them to focus on one being ancient Rome and the ancient Mediterranean one being early modern Europe and then a third moment set really in the period after 1850 with more intensified globalization the emergence of new forms of international law and so on what was your reason for choosing those three moments I was struck by the continuity of the Roman tradition in particular again there's an autobiographical dimension to that that I went to a 15th century grammar school as a schoolboy I was schooled in the Roman historians and as I was reading my way into not just the early modern period but even deep into the 19th century I kept finding not simply not simply echoes but direct illusions to Rome so that seemed like an obvious starting point and I make a very specific argument of the book for why I begin with Rome rather than with ancient Athens in particular not these because it's the Romans who invent the very idea of civil war Bellum Kavile that's that's a Roman term and quite again self-consciously by the Romans invented to distinguish their own internal conflicts from those that they knew about from Thucydides and other Greek writers for instance then the early modern period of course with the Renaissance the revival of humanism the revival of Roman narratives of political transformation change upheaval and collapse seemed like an obvious switching point in the way in which those Roman narratives were transvalued in particular in the course of the late 18th century and age of revolutions which was also perceived by actors at the time as an age of civil wars as well so I became very interested in the the relationship between civil war and revolution as conceptual categories and how a modern narrative of unfolding revolutions was in a sense a palimpsest written over what was originally a Roman narrative unfolding and repeated and recurrent civil wars and then moving forward into the 19th and the 20th centuries I became interested in the ways in which part of that Roman heritage was left behind and again another set of narratives first a jurisprudential narrative and starting in the late 19th century as you mentioned and then a social scientific narrative and set of concepts starting in the Cold War in particular in the 1960s and onwards layered over but never entirely a faced the earlier ultimately Roman or Romanoid conceptions of civil war and the concluding parts of the book show the ways in which the successive waves of conceptual innovation transformation and reflection never entirely replace each other but still remain as it were jostling with our own conceptual vocabularies to this day and so really I think of the book as either intellectual archaeology or a genealogy peeling back the layers successively from a period in the early 21st century when they've been very bitter debates about the meaning and the application of the term civil war to conflicts for example in Syria Libya or Iraq and then backtracking from there to show the various layers of consideration social scientific jurisprudential historical in some cases even poetic that lie behind and lie underneath and continue to inflect our own considerations our own contested considerations of these forms of conflict into the present one of the things that I think comes through extraordinarily strongly in that book is the way in which understandings of civil war in given historical moments are in part constructed through a kind of recuperation of or a dialogue with or occasionally an appropriation of various past traditions of civil war so that in a sense as you say the history is still with us but it is also constantly being rewritten as part of a ongoing political context our contests often often with very serious consequences in the present I suppose in many ways it seems to me that reflects very strongly your own broader arguments that you've made in the history manifesto and elsewhere for for the importance of history and for the reason that the past remains with us but that we still struggle over it today you've been I think one of the most active spokespeople for for the role of history in contemporary life and for the need of historians to to take that responsibility seriously to reconnect with the public and and also to connect with contemporary policy debates one of the features of your own work which I think is quite striking from from early on is that despite its great sophistication in their addition it's actually very readable does that come naturally or was that a reflection of a particular decision or commitment well I think there are various ways to connect with audiences beyond the Academy one method that we tried with the history manifesto was open access publication very important means of opening up scholarship to broader audiences another one in the case of civil wars is to work primarily not with a scholarly press a university press but with a trade press and an excellent editor who helped me to frame my prose as well as the larger architecture of the book as well you ask if it comes easily no it doesn't I'm one of those people for whom writing is extraordinarily difficult and painful I don't find it flows readily at all I do try to pay a great deal of attention at the level of the sentence and the paragraph as well as the literary shape of a chapter and a whole book and I find that immensely strenuous so I'm particularly gratified that you say that it comes over as fluid and readable because that's absolutely not it feels like when it's coming down onto the page or through the keyboard so there's a lot of effort behind that and struggle so it's it's good to know that it does become readable in the end but I was educated from the very beginning even by my my teachers at school to to write as clearly as possible that simplicity and clarity are not the same things one can be very sophisticated and clear there is nothing to be gained from being obscure I think my goal and the goal of all scholars should be to inform rather than to impress and if that takes a great labour of crafting well-written prose in order to communicate complex ideas and hard one scholarship and I think that's our responsibility to do that so again thank you for affirming that this this has not been in vain in my case at least in some of my work I really appreciate that look it's been absolutely wonderful to speak with you thank you so much for for giving us your time and thank you for for being part of for being part of Martin week I know that everyone at the school is thoroughly looking forward to this evening's lecture and to the ongoing series of events thank you so much I think it thanks again to the school for the honour of being here this week