 International History at King's College London's War Studies Department and part of the leadership team at the Centre for Grand Strategy, which is one of the organising parties for this series of seminars along with the University of Cambridge's Centre of Geopolitics and the Foreign and Common Wealth and Development Office's historians. And we're very excited to have three of the FCDO's distinguished historians with us today to kick off our series. They will say a little more about their work and I don't want to tread on their toes but just as a way of introduction I just wanted to say that the FCDO historians are responsible for providing a long-term policy relevant perspective on diplomatic and strategic issues. In essence they are at the cutting edge of applied history and have been practicing it as an institution for decades and so we're very privileged to have them with us today to discuss this work. Just to let you know that we'll be recording today's session and we're very excited to have you with us. If you want to pose a question to our panel or if you have any comments please put it in the Q&A at the bottom but for the moment I'll hand over to Sir Patrick Salmon who will be talking to us today. Thank you Charlie and thank you for this opportunity to present our work to a wider audience than usual and indeed to kick off this new series of applied history seminars. The first thing I'll do is introduce my colleagues first of all my former boss Joe Bennett former chief historian here at the FCDO as it then was and Richard Smith the deputy head of the historians team and myself as chief historian and what I'm going to do tonight is what we want to do is to explain how our team of in-house historians and of course it's unusual for any government department to have such a team in many ways I think we're quite unique how we helped our department the foreign and Commonwealth office which in September became the foreign Commonwealth and Development Office to respond to the series of crises and challenges that arose during 2020 and of course it was an extraordinary year for everyone but it proved a remarkable year for us too it was a year in which we were busy than ever more called upon than ever in ways that we just could not have anticipated I think a year ago almost a year ago today. What I'm going to do first is share my screen and I want to just I'll do it in a minute it takes a bit of time and I'll now put it on to the slide show this also takes a bit of time it should be there now I hope I've put this pie chart up here simply to give you a range an idea of the range of the things we've done in the past year graphically on the right hand side but but in more detail I'll in a list on the left hand side we won't have time to talk about all those things tonight but they're there as a sort of checklist and there may also be a reminder I'll put it up again later there may also be a reminder when we come to answer questions later on well this is how we plan to divide things up tonight first of all I'll hand over to Richard who will place our role in context explain really how historians have provided policy advice to ministers over the last 100 years I will then talk about the way in which we supported the FCO, FCDO during the COVID-19 pandemic moving on to an issue that came up in the summer and remains very much unfinished business but extremely important and that is the department's response to the Black Lives Matter movement then finally Jill will talk about the ways in which we provided historical perspectives on some of the policy challenges that arose during the year they include things like Russian revisionism and again very topically the integrated review so I'm going to move on one more slide and I'm going to stop speaking and Richard will take over thank you thanks very much Patrick good evening everybody and as Patrick suggested what I just wanted to do here was to take a little bit of time just to talk about you know how historians came to be in the foreign office to take us back to really where it all began to put our present working context so I mean there have been historians in the foreign office for over 100 years now and in fact it was the latter stages of the First World War which brought a group of academic historians who were originally based in the Admiralty into the foreign office in February 1918 to form a historical section and their task was to prepare briefing for the peace conference that took place in Paris in 1919 and led to the Treaty of Versailles now the historians in the historical section overlapped with another group of historical experts the political intelligence department who came into the foreign office around the same time headed up by James Hedlum Morley now the historical section went on to produce 174 studies bound up in 26 peace books on subject ranging from Zionism to the Easter Island from Spitzburg to the Kiel Canal anything basically that they thought might be raised at the conference at Versailles and members of the historical section and PID subsequently attended the Versailles peace conference and Hedlum Morley said that he quote fulfilled the secret desire of many international historians by attending and influencing proceedings now another historian present was the 19th century diplomatic historian Charles Webster who was there because of his knowledge of peacemaking after the Napoleonic wars and he wrote a peace handbook on the Congress of Vienna which was later published in 1919 by OUP and became a classic history text now Webster of course returned to the foreign office in 1942 in the economic and reconstruction department where he played a major role in post-war planning not least the setting up of the United Nations and you know in that task he brought both his academic knowledge plus his practical experience of peacemaking at Versailles so if the ref had existed back then Webster would have been well placed when writing his entry on impact now the historical section the PID were both closed down on grounds of economy in 1920 but James Hedlum Morley remained as historical advisor to the foreign office and in 1922 he set out in a minute the duties of the historical advisor beginning with a statement that quote it is obviously necessary for the successful handling of diplomatic negotiations that full and reliable information should be speedily available as to the previous history of each matter that comes up in other words his primary task was to provide historical context and he dealt with these either in conversations through short minutes or longer memoranda he added value basically when information was required from sources over and above what could be found in the foreign office archive by the librarians and when a more general knowledge of modern European history was needed now his other main task was to keep abreast of official literature relating to the origin and responsibility for the First World War he was more and more convinced that the full story of British policy before the war must be published and he would later edit the first volume of the series British documents on the origins of the war published in 1926 on the July crisis of 1914 I should say that Hedlum Morley is the character the man you can see on the top right hand side of the slide here now this series documents on the origins of the war were started in 1924 when a decision was taken by the Labour government under Ramsey McDonald to publish a series of documents to counter the influence of the famous German series you can see here De Grosse Politique whose aim had been to undermine the war guilt clause of the Treaty of Versailles and this decision in 1924 really kickstarted the document publishing program that still forms the core of a core function of our work today and you can see that the origins of the war series was followed by an interwar series covering 1919 to 1939 and then later on after in the 1970s there was a decision taken to start a third series documents on British policy overseas which follows British foreign policy post 1945 and that's the series we work on today now the post of historical advisor lapsed with Hedlum Morley's death in 1929 but was revised twice since in 1963 Foreign Secretary Douglas Hume appointed Rowan Butler a fellow of all souls and historian of 18th century France to the post now since 1945 Butler had been an editor on the second document series DBFP and 1949 was also the year when the historical section was reformed in order to support the work of the external editors in their publishing work now Butler's letter of appointment specified only two duties preparation of historical memoranda and narratives and the development of channels of communication between the foreign office and the historical profession now the post lapsed again on Butler's retirement in 1982 and was revived briefly for the last time when Roger Bullen was appointed historical advisor by Sir Geoffrey Howe in 1987 only he died tragically young yes and less than the year later so and the the figure at the bottom on the right hand side here is Rowan Butler now from 1990 onwards the operation has been entirely in-house and today we have a chief historian rather than a chief historical advisor fcdo historians are heirs to two distinct but connected traditions one is inward looking and comprises a provision of historical information and advice to policymakers and the second one looks outward and aims at contributing to a greater understanding of British Ryan policy through the publication of diplomatic documents both these functions are closely related because they rely on historical training and expertise and each reinforces the other and to these two original tasks have been supplemented a host of other tasks and some of those you are going to hear about in more detail now from Patrick and Jill so Patrick over to you thanks thank you very much Richard um well I'm going to talk about what happened at the beginning of last year and what happened at the beginning of last year was COVID-19 um the effect on us was very immediate and it was a drastic reduction in the size of our team at the start of the pandemic we were a team of six four historians and two support staff Richard and another colleague were redeployed for several months to duties engaged in with repatriating British citizen from overseas and enormous tasks but that left really Jill and I as the only two specialist historians and I can recall feeling quite disorientated at that time wondering how I could do my bit perhaps as someone might have done at the beginning of the First World War you know what did you do in the war daddy and all that but I did remember that in another life the university lecturing life more than 20 years earlier I delivered a series of lectures on epidemic and pandemic diseases this was a course on world history that we're running at Newcastle University I dug them out updated them as much as I could and converted them into a series of blogs that were published on the FCO internet very early in the pandemic on the strength of that I was contacted by a member of the FCO's policy unit who was writing a paper on post-pandemic planning and wanted to know what sort of lessons might be drawn from previous pandemics well what I then did was simply search I actually mostly what I did was just search through JSTOR in the classic way I typed the word pandemic into the search engine and saw what came up and it threw up a host of historical examples some of which found their way into the policy unit paper in one sense that was quite a simple task but at the time there was no one else who could have done it and I think no one else with the historical judgment to work out what the relevant lessons might be the one that sticks in my mind and that found its way into the paper was that local solutions to pandemics were usually more effective than national ones and I think a lot of countries might have found the same thing in the last year over the last year an example is I found a very geographically very widely spread some of the most interesting ones came for instance from Ireland in 1918 the Spanish flu pandemic or the South Pacific having done that I was still looking for something to do and rather arrogantly I decided I would try to write an official history of the FCO's response to the pandemic an idea quickly dropped but I did retain the idea that it might be worth trying to construct a simple timeline of the FCO's response this could serve as the basis for someone else's narrative or contribute to the FCO's response to a public inquiry when that eventually came I played around with all sorts of models and I didn't really know where to look for information but I dragged it from whatever place I could my breakthrough came when I actually came into contact with the FCO's COVID-19 task force and got hold of one vital source an email chain recording the foreign secretary's daily meetings on the pandemic and I again quite simply and quite laboriously and quite boringly but again no one else could do it I extracted the key decisions and put them in a word table it seemed simple but in fact it required endless judgments about what constituted a decision who actually made it how it was communicated how it was acted upon and so on and I kept doing that diligently for several months up to the point at which the COVID-19 team had reached the point where they had enough resources and enough perspectives to start thinking about constructing their own record of events and at that point I simply handed over all my work and that was the last I saw of it except I saw a number of very detailed Excel spreadsheets recording the whole exercise in which I could you know I could rather flatteringly see evidence of my own work that kept me busy probably up to about June and around about June thank goodness Richard came back to the team and then something else happened and that of course the Black Lives Matter it didn't come entirely out of the blue as a team we knew that issues of ethnicity and diversity were already important for many colleagues in the FCO and in 2018 we had actually published a study of foreign office policy on race since 1945 which attracted a good deal of attention a good deal of praise actually from both within and outside the office we also knew that the artworks in our main building in King Charles Street were controversial Vice Magazine had run a critical article following one of our open door days a couple of years ago and moreover they were not only controversial but extremely uncomfortable for many colleagues who were working in the building on a daily basis they simply did not like walking past some of these items and then of course the murder of George Floyd brought these issues to the surface in the most dramatic way possible it prompted a debate among staff which hasn't yet run its course and it's required a response from the foreign office as an institution in which I think the historians have been called upon to play quite an important part our response has really taken two forms one is to do with education training awareness if you like and that has mainly been a matter of modernizing and adding to course a course on the imperial Britain's imperial legacy that we constructed for the diplomatic academy a couple of years ago that academy has been renamed the international academy since the merger of the two departments and we're greatly expanding that course we hope to be able to launch it probably in May but Richard who's taken most of the responsibility I think would testify that it's extremely difficult thing to do the language is extremely sensitive and it's very very difficult to get right and it's not just a matter of on the one hand the empire did good things on the other hand the empire did bad things it's far more complex than that so I'm not sure we've got it right but we're doing our best and I think there's a great deal of institutional support for that effort the other question was what to do with the imperial legacy of the building itself you can see a corner of the building in the left hand picture here a building constructed completed in 1868 really at the height of Britain's imperial experience not only the building but of course the artworks that it contains this is one of the things it contains a series of extraordinary murals on the grand staircase in the most ornate and impressive part of the building a series of murals depicting the rise and expansion of the Anglo-Saxon race completed by an artist called Sigismund Goetzer as late as 1921 even though the style looks about 50 years earlier the images of the of Britannia and the Anglo-Saxons and so on are controversial enough but most of all I think most offensive of all is this image here on the bottom right hand corner of the central panel which depicts Britannia as peacemaker at the end of the First World War and I feel sorry for Goetzer in a way because he had planned this thing before the war even broke out and he had to change it rather short notice but he had to add a lot of figures to the mural and actually remove one important figure and that was Germany the Germany is now represented by a series of broken armaments on the ground in the front but he also added the figure he obviously felt he had to add the figure a figure to represent Africa and as he put it and I quote we have in front a little Swahili boy bearing tropical fruits reminding us of our obligations and possibilities in the dark continent well it was a well-meant image I think in 1921 but it's one that now many colleagues in the FCDO find at best patronizing and at worst offensive we then move on to another part of the building and that's the former India office this was constructed following the demise of the East India Company and the taking over of India under then directly under the British crown and in this very ornate and richly decorated part of the foreign office we find works of art brought from headquarters of the Old East India Company like this painting on the left which celebrates Britain's economic exploitation not only of India actually but also of China and you can see on the right the way in which imperial imagery was built into the fabric of the building itself there are many many statues including this one like the one one of Warren Hastings and these images pose a dilemma what should we do with them basically should we perhaps cover them up should they be removed they many of them do not form part of the fabric of the building after all many of them we don't even own they may be owned by the government art collection or the British library or should we perhaps leave them in place and explain their significance and that's the route we've decided to take and it's a it's one of course that we haven't decided to take is one that's a policy decision I think and that's the that's the challenge that really has faced Richard and me in particular since last summer I have to say that COVID has transformed and greatly facilitated the way we do this since last summer Richard and I have delivered a large number of presentations online either via teams or via zoom to many different groups within the fcdo I usually focus on the guts and murals Richard usually talks about the India office and I think we've become over the last less than a year quite expert in our respective subjects our audiences have ranged from the tens of the tens to the hundreds these are audiences rather like the present one actually that we're in now which are far larger than we could ever imagined in the old days the old days barely a year ago when we were pleased if we got 50 in into a room well it's too early to know whether this will be enough to meet the concerns of staff I hope it will be but more generally I think it points to again the value that we add to the fcdo the value of having people on the spot who know their audience who can respond quickly using our existing expertise or as we've done in the last year acquire new knowledge quickly and then we can adapt it to the requirements of a particular audience large or small that's the point of which I can stop sharing my screen and hand over to Jill thank you I'm just doing the same as Patrick thank you very much Patrick I hope I hope you can now see my slides um well while all this was going on um to do with Black Lives Matter and the art um the art works and so on um I was in also extremely busy last year on a whole range of other historical issues and I can't talk about them all but I'm going to talk about some of them and one area that I dealt with particularly is that of revisionism and disinformation now um part of this is the question is what is the relationship between them and some people would argue that revisionism is by definition disinformation but as a historian I spent a lot of time saying that that's not necessarily the case revisionism may be a part of a wider disinformation campaign but um sometimes it is rooted in genuine concerns by a range of countries obviously Russia comes to mind but it's by no means only Russia and in 2020 the impetus for a lot of these campaigns was the fact that it was 75 years since the end of the Second World War and of course there were a lot of commemorative events planned and from the point of view of Russia in particular they had a pretty good idea that they were not going to be included in many of these commemorative events and that only fed into an enduring sense of insecurity and feeling that their contribution during the Second World War had not been properly recognised and so one big piece of work that that I did was in the wake of an article published by Vladimir Putin which was called The Real Lessons of the 75th Anniversary of the Second World War and this article provoked a lot of media comment and a lot of criticism but in very detailed analysis of it shows that really there's a great deal of factual information you can quibble about interpretation but actually that's not a productive way to look at this kind of material it's more important from the point of view of foreign policy of policy makers to understand where it was coming from and I identified in particular three themes on which this material was based in security both political and economic and suspicion of other people's intentions and a sense of betrayal that is achievements ignored promises broken bewilderment that Russia in the view of the the Russian regime is disrespected of a powerful state now the point about all this is not whether their arguments are are justified or not but the fact that they exist at all and for the benefit of departments within the office itself and indeed in the embassy in Moscow there there was a historical analysis to be done here to talk about certain aspects that they didn't necessarily know so for example the fact that Russia has a very strong archival tradition indeed archival work is regarded as almost a patriotic duty and the 75th anniversary of the war was bound to intensify a lot of already existing feelings in particular the Putin article looked at the European parliament declaration in 2019 which if you read it from a Russian point of view you could say is inflammatory because it really almost blames the war on the Nazi-Soviet pact and as the Russian said it doesn't even mention Munich now of course the Nazi-Soviet pact and Munich are not the same thing but in a sense there is a historical link because while Russia is still always been sensitive about the fact that between the signature of the pact in August 1939 and the entry into the war after the German invasion in 1941 they were if you like on the wrong side Britain actually remains sensitive on the subject of Munich for rather different but related reasons so my argument really was that Putin's version of history has to be seen in the wider context of contemporary international criticism of Russian policy in the Ukraine and elsewhere and the failure of the West in Russian eyes at a time of global instability to take full account of Russia as a significant player by retelling the story of the lead-up to World War II pointing out that mistakes were made on all sides but Russia eventually saved the day Putin is drawing an analogy to the present so I did a lot of work on this and it's not just Russia I would say it's China as well for example and in September 2020 for example there was a joint Russian-Chinese narrative being put out on their respective roles in the Second World War and a desire to safeguard their interpretations of what had happened indeed in April Russia moved its official end of the war and from the 2nd of 3rd September to make it the same day that China celebrated victory so a lot of work went on not just on Russia and Putin but on revisionism and disinformation generally now a light to this and this is more drawing on my work as an intelligence historian is the question of well what can you do about disinformation and I've done quite a lot of speaking and writing about this question of using the tools of the intelligence trade for disinformation one thing that I have often spoken about and written is that there's lots of people out there identifying disinformation there's fewer people analyzing what its impact and the question of instance and impact is one that I think these tools of the trade can help with so of course there's absolutely nothing new about disinformation I mean you know when I give a real talk about it we go back to Plato but it has always been a tool of statecraft both offensive and defensive but historical examples plus an intelligence-based approach can help identify disinformation and build in resilience against it so that is my but we're not doomed to lose the struggle against disinformation and history can help us win it and I'm not going to go through all the things on these slide in your I'm sure a lot of the people in this webinar will recognize some of these equations and some of these factors and lots of people have written about that kind of thing but I do think there is a very good basis for using history to counter disinformation and last year I was called upon to do a lot of work in this area and related to this various works on intelligence of different sorts so for example well I always do blogs both internal external blogs but a joint piece with the GCHQ historian David Abratat and on the question of co-breaking up lecture part because of course that again was part of the commemorations for the 75th anniversary the relevance for the FCDO is that you know the work done by crypt analysts at Bechtley Park and indeed not just at Bechtley Park but as the the new official history of GCHQ points out by by concept communication security and the Y service other aspects of SIGINT did make a huge contribution to success in the war as well as binding veterans to the code of silence for life and today the work and the secrecy of GCHQ is also a vital importance to Britain's security it's interesting that the rules drawn up by a winter bottom in April 1945 justifying the secrecy included that you couldn't give the Germans any possible excuse to explain a way defeats by the force of arms they had to think it was because they haven't got to think it was because we were breaking their codes or intersecting their messages and winter bottom said we may well need ultra for underground German activities after the war at any hint of course during the far eastern war of ultra would compromise the pacific war he said other enemies may arise in the future and were they to know what had been achieved by altering this war they would be on their guard less the same thing before then of course the irony of all that is that it was winter bottom who actually broke the secret out in his book in the early seventies so a certain amount of work on intelligence how it plays into foreign policy how it plays and there's the investing intelligence initiative which the historians have been involved with together with information policy department within the fcdo so far has been my part in it is really to be involved in interviews online interviews for an internal audience for example with john ferris about the gchq history um with sir david omand about his book house by his think and more recently with Nigel inkster about his book on china and cyber so it's by having discussions online bringing a historical perspective that this is making intelligence matters more familiar to people within the office and the final thing i want to mention is this historiopedia which is a new initiative that we launched last year we have been thinking about it for a while but it was actually launched just before lockdown last year and this is really um i mean you all know about wikipedia this is a version for within the fcdo um of course you can look up things on google you can look up things on wikipedia and it may be very good indeed but it's not going to be specifically policy relevant to people within the fcdo so the idea is to have a tool to help staff better understand historical events that still have relevance to their work today so for example i mean the nazi soviet pact is one of them but also you see other examples lend lice death of general shikorsky things that come up again and again the use of the u n vito the storming temple and they are short um equivalent of a page and a half two pages they have a paragraph on what is the fcdo relevance of whatever it happens to be a brief factual summary of what it's all about and suggestions for further reading and you won't be surprised that we always point people in the direction of documents on british policies overseas when it contains further information about this and finally i just want to mention that the 75th anniversary of the angler american financial agreement which fell in december last year we did a number of things to mark that of course it was covered in one of our volumes in some detail but we had an online event which included people from the united states diplomatic network and the embassy in washington and so on of course because of the you know the way we can have online webinars they are all able to join in so we had an event at which i and professor george peaton emeritus professor history at um at university sterling who's a specialist on all these areas and also michael hotkins uh from university in liverpool and we talked about the agreement and its implications and of course in a situation where now um there is likely to be a negotiation with the united states on trade coming up there are a lot of very topical um elements which come up during that so these are just some of the historical things i mean everything we do is historical but these were fairly tricky issues that came up and kept us all as patrick said extremely busy um during 2020 so i'm going to stop there because i think we're probably now ready to have questions i'll just take over gel and um thanks very much um that's really all we have to say in detail but what i might just might just say a few words in conclusion uh really to reinforce some of the points we've all been making i think what the last year has shown is that if i may put it this way the city was quite lucky to have a team of in-house historians um because the team is instantly available it knows its audience and it knows where to find the answers to the questions that arise sometimes we know those answers ourselves um and if not we usually know where to find them and that's above all i think the benefit of having close links with the academic community um richard quoted the original brief for roan butler as chief historical advisor back in the 1960s to maintain links to the academic community and that's very much what we still do having said all that sometimes we run out of information or we just haven't got it to hand quickly enough and then we have to simply educate ourselves and that is really what we've been doing i think all of us one way or another over the last year all of us are a lot more knowledgeable than we were this time last year and i think that has to be a good thing so i'll stop there thank you very much and uh we look forward to trying to answer your questions that's great thank you patrick jill and rich it's really fascinating just to hear all the work that you all been doing over the past year and um yeah just a great insight into the range of interests and the range of expertise that you have in house i was just wondering um just as just a sort of a kickoff question um one of the other things that's happened over the past year has been the change in name of the uh from the fco to the fcdo and and with bringing in in development and incorporating diffid has that changed your work in any way has there been were there um were there people in house at diffid as well who are looking at some of these things and we're now working in your team or is there people who focus specifically on the development part of things um i'll answer that if i may that's a very good question and it's a question we ask when we joined with with diffid and the quick answer is no it's not surprising really um they don't have any in-house historians um and what we've been trying to do i think is to of you know adapt ourselves to offer offer try to offer some insights into development history uh for uh ex diffid colleagues if i can put it that way it's quite difficult because we're not experts ourselves but interesting enough two former permanent secretaries of diffid have written histories of international development one actually wrote on history of the per go down one of the less fortunate episodes and uh we ourselves have done some work on this in that one of our retired colleagues Keith Hamilton wrote a history of the know-how fund which was the development fund for eastern europe in the 1990s and we you know we did a whole seminar on that so i think we're trying to make an offer to to ex diffid colleagues and we are getting some interest i think um one of our other colleagues has written two long blogs on history of overseas development since the 60s um we're not there yet it'll take quite a while i think but i think the beginnings of interest are there that's great thank you i can see there's a question the chat from neil about um he said hi and thank you for this talk do you have any recommendations for how more historically minded colleagues without access to an in-house historical team could better integrate history into policymaking i'm going to pass the back on that one jill rigid we do have um we do have uh we are part of what's known as the whitehall history network and whilst we are probably one of the only departments with in-house historians um you know doing history although the service branches have their own historical branches there are there is a lot of interest across government you know the whitehall departments um relating to you know history so the treasury for example don't have historians but they do have people who have a treasury history network and they get academics in from outside you know through organizations like history and policy for example um you know and different parts of the treasury partner um with different academics to give talks on you know whatever it is that whatever it is that policy officials want to know about um so and there's a growing interest i think there are a lot of different departments about for transport you know departments that you might not think are particularly historically minded um there are people in other departments who are interested and so that the whitehall history network really is a way in which we can share expertise and best practice amongst government departments and all keep in touch with what we're doing and you know pass on information and things like that so um you know other government departments can access history um and academics even though they don't have their own you know in-house team like the scdo does that's great thank you um sarah dolman asked he uh she said could you talk a bit about your relationship with the ra cadra many of whom are historians as i discovered to my suppliers when i was seconded to africa directorates i'd always assume they were more political science oriented in fact much of what much the work that they did was was was deeply historical um yes uh yes we the answer is we work very closely with them and and it's absolutely right that many of them are historically trained um they have a different function from us in but they are very closely linked to to death they literally sit with the pot with the policy desks usually on a geographical basis but there's also thematic ones like international organizations and they are slightly different from us in that there is more interchange between the researcher analyst and the regular diplomatic service than we have some of them go and serve overseas for some years some of them have served as ambassadors for instance but on a daily basis we work together quite a lot we often have to to share questions come in i have one today about um um jordan for instance it's a hundred years this year since jordan um um became independent and um i don't know much about the history of jordan but i know research analysts who do so i pass the question on to them so that's just one small example that's a great thing if i could just just add to that i think i mean as patrick said the research analysts tend to be country specific or region specific apart from the teams like multilateral and so on and and there's no i mean people have asked before is there a kind of cut off what where do you start being historical i mean there isn't a definite we do work closely but for the very recent things we they tend to deal with that rather than we do it if it's a bit older it might tend to come to us but the other difference is that the historians really have to take whatever thrown at us it can be any region of the world any period in history anything and we might not know but it's it's absolutely serendipity where um the research analysts are more focused on a particular area that's great thank you um yes another question here um i'm sorry i don't have the name of the of the individual but it's outside the document series approximately what percentage of our time is devoted to publishing historical work in academic journals and other scholarly venues i think not as much as we would like i think it's quite difficult actually to maintain an independent academic career i mean i know this myself because i you know i was an academic i'm sort of mainstream academic and until uh until i moved across here in my early fifties and i've i've kept i've kept a hand in as it were but i haven't done major work there simply isn't isn't the time you have to do it in your spare time if you're very lucky your research interests will coincide with your foreign office related duties but it doesn't happen very often we'll publish a bit um gil gil since retiring has published a great deal but i think of a true gil it is hard to get much done until you retire yes it was and um even though retirement seemed a bit emotional in 2020 i have to say but yes um uh it obviously is but then it i've definitely found it helpful of course because the thing about working as an in-house historian within within what any department is that you actually get to know a lot more how things work and what goes on and that does help you in writing our own work but we don't yeah patch it's quite right we don't do a bit a lot of kind of submitting articles to scholarly journals and so on but of course as a as a team we do put out apart from the volumes we do publish quite a lot um online history notes which can be on all sorts of things um and also last year we also had a new we christened a new series of publications actually ritchie why don't you talk about those because that was another new initiative wasn't it yeah i mean this is uh it's called documents on um documents from the british archives and where it might take several years patrick's holding one of the where it might take several years to produce a volume a dbp of volume this was a way of making um you know information available more quickly and more cheaply so we took a tentative step into online publishing with amazon um so we publish hard these these books hard copy on amazon for not very much money basically at cost so they're you know cheaply available for students and we also put it on our website because we retain the copyright and there's no problem with that we put it on our website for free so people can download it from wherever they are in the world and the first one we did was on the potstown conference because last year it was the um or it had been 75th anniversary potstown um and what we did is we took documents from across eight different dvp of volumes and compiled them into into one volume and we added some intelligence material which wasn't available at the time that the original dbp of volumes were were published um and then we published that uh you know partially to to mark the anniversary and we've subsequently done another one on um preparatory talks for the cse for the Helsinki conference um and we're doing another one at the moment um for this august for the berlin crisis in 1961 so it's a way in which we can either supplement what's already in dbp of volumes or you know extract material from multiple volumes and package it in a in a different way more cheaply and excessively for for people and that was something which we could do join lockdown when we didn't have any access to the to the archives and you know limited access to the fco and tna archives thank you and i can say all of your work is heavily cited by by scholars in the um in in the academy and there's just such a wealth of material that you you put out both in primary sources and in terms of your own material which is just which is just excellent um alex madougal has a question about has the work you have done on china increased in recent years if it has what themes have you organized your research amount and have you found anything particularly interesting uh i'll i'll answer that quick then probably hand over um by by coincidence we are actually working on a volume of documents in our dbpo series on british-u k relations with china from the late 60s to the early early 70s around the time of the cultural revolution but that wasn't specifically related i think to any any recent developments have been running it's been a volume you've been in production for some years um general rishard might want to say more i don't think there's a huge amount of extra work we've done in relation to china recently but they may want to add more no i mean that document series is that that volume is is our main uh you know activity relating to china china does have a huge it does have a large research analyst cadre so um you know there are lots of uh there's lots of expertise historical expertise relating to china uh you know over and above anything that we might be able to bring we have done there are some historiopedia entries that um that that's not on things like for example the box of rebellion and and it has come up um as i mentioned in my presentation in to do disinformation and so on there's been a certain amount of work on that so i think it's also likely that we'll be doing more on china in the future but working closely with the research analysts because they have a big expertise on this a couple of quick questions about um about archives um first from shaw and kerr kerr how how do you think um do you think there are going to be significant challenges posed to historians and the documentary record by the modern means of communication and do you have any plans for how you might combat the issue and from rasmus uh burtelsen many developing countries may lack archival resources and today academic history resources how may that limit their foreign policy today how can the uk and other west and say it provides support uh very very quickly on the first one i mean i think yeah it's going to be a may it is going to be a major challenge to construct historical narratives on the basis of the records that exist or do not exist um in the digital era um which i think really is probably from the mid mid 90s onwards i'm not pessimistic as pessimistic as some people are about this i mean i think the formal record keeping it has almost come to an end actually in in most government departments everywhere i think um there's just huge masses of emails and some that pile up but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's an intractable massive material or that it cannot be organized and searched in some ways perhaps ways that we don't even know about yet and i think that um if you look at the work the national archives are doing on the transfer of digital records from government departments including the fcdo um what they're doing is quite remarkable and they're also developing ways of digitally sensitivity reviewing digital documents and as opposed to um happy to read paper documents all these things i think are doable and i think um i did try and a short a small experiment a few years ago could i construct a narrative of a particular event on the basis of only digital records and i dug out a few relating to a summit conference i can't remember it was in the in the early 2000s and i concluded in the end that i could my problem was i didn't know whether i'd found all the material or not if it'd been a paper file i could be pretty sure where it ended but with a digital search i could have used different search terms and it might have come up throughout quite different answers but i think in principle people are going to solve those sorts of problems um it'll be different from what we do now but it won't necessarily be worse i think on the other question about countries which haven't got very good archives um i just dragging dredging my memory here but there are people who work with developing countries on maintaining and improving archival resources we don't do that and i don't know the detail myself but but such people exist and that's as far as i get for now i'm afraid and what my what you do do is work with other countries who are producing not necessarily the same kind of volumes as us but the international conference of editors of diplomatic documents i mean there are more and more countries now getting involved with this network aren't there i mean when we first started it all those years ago it was like you know four or five countries who did it now how many they are there now richard there must be about 20 i think that's a good way of sharing expertise on on on archival use and you and cast has got a question about how mindful of history do you think the recent integrated view is or should be and i know you mentioned integrated view at the beginning of your remarks um and you insist classical violists for instance would argue that history is deeply important for the development and implementation of contemporary foreign policies is this your understanding of the UK's overall approach many thanks for such an insightful and interesting introduction to this series well my quick answer is well john view wrote the integrated review or something or words along those lines um i think it's more historically informed than any that i know of um i haven't read it in detail jill has and jill that just had some input into the sort of things you've been doing at kings actually of the last months also so again she could say more about this i think i better stop and let someone else take over jill well in the sense that i was involved with the the the the paper's on strategic reset which andrew and you were organizing last year so my particular contribution was on whether there was a strategic reset after sue is and i argued that there wasn't and there was a series of of essays which i gather now are going to be published and all looking at strategic resets of various sorts and that all fed in to the integrated review i mean you know these kind of documents the integrated review are obviously having to serve a great many different purposes and i haven't quite finished looking through it all but i have looked quite a lot of it and i was i have actually been impressed at the the level of that it is rooted in history obviously it it wouldn't be right for it to be citing a lot of historical examples but um all i can say is you can see john rees hand at work i think which is as far as we're concerned a very good thing that's great thank you um uh hugo minter asks he says thank you very much for the interesting discussion i was wondering whether the panel has considered the work of richard noistata known as may thinking in time um for the mid eighties and if so do they think the conclusions of the authors could be feasible today in using history within policymaking i can certainly say the um for the nature of of the whole endeavour that we're engaged in that book is very much a founding text and and very influential but i'd love to hear um uh the news on it well i could do that one if you because that book was directly responsible for the book that i wrote um which was published in 2013 which was called six moments of crisis inside british foreign policy and i i use the techniques and and the process that noistata may use i was only looking at foreign policy whereas they look at domestic um questions as well but absolutely um it is a a seminal text and i i like to think that um that i brought it a bit more into the modern age and indeed um i i have you know it was published in 2013 i know that it has been used quite widely in the office which is very pleasing and great to have that obviously the main news that was very much focused with sort of an american um to have that different focus that our system works quite differently yeah so any extremely important text and um yeah so that that's it's a great work um can i um go to martin now who um was asking about about your scope problems rewards experience et cetera in working with the press um we don't work very closely with the press i mean one reason is the foreign foreign fcdo has a press office or media media office which deals directly with the press um and although we have we do have contacts with journalists and they come to some of our events um i would think it's a sort of um it's a relatively distant relationship i don't know whether jill or richard would well it used to be a lot closer um at one time i would say perhaps in the 90s but i think um you know there was a discipline in which was imposed upon white hall um with with the with the the labor government that came in in 97 and the hand of alistair cambell and i'm not complaining about that because it was actually from my point of view as a historian it was it was positive because we were trying to get everybody to realize what everybody else was doing and that if somebody made it an announcement it wasn't directly crossing over what somebody else was doing but part of all that was a much more um streamlined press um operation now obviously sometimes um we do work with as patrick said we do work with journalists uh sometimes press office consult us about things but on the whole um they have probably take them they don't tend to consult as much as they used to i'm not you know worse the other way we don't always tell them what we're doing either i'm going to collect um a few questions now because um we've got quite a few in the in the q&a and i wanted to get to get to all of them if possible firstly from martin browns um saying sadly as a historian i increasingly identify a creeping dislocation in public discourse between complex historical truths and simplistic historical myths with stubborn myths sometimes proving more influential than the facts how difficult or easy is it to cure policymakers from certain myths that they might hold dear and then we have a couple of other questions in relation to archives uh one um uh from an anonymous attendee saying thank you for an interesting talk as an outsider i would be grateful for any comments you may have on historical papers and the criteria for their release under the 30-year rule and who may delay their release and what the reasons may be to delay it also you're able to access these and other restricted or classified papers for any submissions you may make in an advisory capacity and then finally from ramsey how much of your time is usually spent at the national archives have you been limited in the material you can access over the past year lots of interesting questions um it's truth versus myth there's a difficult one i think i'll dodge that one for a minute i might come back to it on the archive our criteria for release and so on um basically the idea a lot of stuff is discarded because it's deemed ephemeral and not and doesn't meet the criteria for preservation laid down by the national archives what remains is is policy related stuff and a large proportion of that material comes from the foreign office than anywhere anywhere else in government except the cabinet office um and basically everything is released except things that are deemed unreleasable and those things are mainly to do with um national security or intelligence and i think that i think there's an outsider when i was an outsider didn't quite understand how these things work there's an insider i can see that the impetus is all for openness rather than being closed the people involved the retired diplomats who um review the material have a series of very strict criteria which they apply and they try and their their instinct is to open up as much as possible um and what they close is is closed usually for good reasons and there's always a review a review period and after some years it's often quite clear that there's no point in holding the stuff back any longer stuff that was sensitive at one point is no longer sensitive and it can be released um on whether we can use closed materials ourselves yes we can we can have access to all the material in the national in the foreign office archive before it goes to the national archive and we also have access to the national archive um we don't have the right to necessarily to publish it uh anything we propose to publish has to be reviewed like everything else um and there are things that we're not allowed to publish which also mainly relate to uh intelligence our access to the national archives has been very restricted like everyone else's in the last year but when we've asked for help they've been extraordinarily helpful i think jill in particular would would agree with the some of the stuff that they've got out for us and gone in quite difficult circumstances and photographed and so on so i've dodged the question about truth and truth and myths uh in relation to policy makers but i'll ask my colleagues perhaps to deal with that one well can i talk about myths for me i mean i would regard nearly all my career um spending an awful lot of time in trying to um correct myths deflate myths whatever you do with this and indeed conspiracy theories which are another thing that um though that tends to be something that not necessarily ministers um hold conspiracy theories but certainly people assume that there are big conspiracies within white hall which is really not the case myths are very difficult because ministers do perpetuate certain things um you know i have to grip my teeth when i hear somebody saying it's another sues it's another Munich it's another and what we can do as historians within the office is to retell the story again and again with the facts um putting in the different aspects and it's impossible to eliminate it because people get things in their heads and you get a new set of ministers coming in and they've got a new set of ideas but at least um when it happens we are able to say actually this is this is a myth this is not the case they may not accept it you can't do anything about that but you can certainly um try not to make sure it's not perpetuated and there are a lot of myths just only just to add to patrick's point about uh file transfer to the national archives it's important to note that when um when foreign office uh documents um are ready for transfer to the national archives and they're sensitivity reviewed before they go and you know some bits may be redacted and some files may be withheld but the criteria for withholding or redacting are the same exemptions that apply in the freedom of information act so it's set down in legislation when you can and can't um you know redact something and you have to apply one of those exemptions in the freedom of information act so the fact that it may be embarrassing to the government is not a factor for withholding information uh that eventually finds its way to the national archives so um it is it is it does have a legislative framework it's not just a kind of free form it's great thank you i'm going to do two more rounds of questions the first ones are two slightly longer ones so i'll put those together and then um three shorter ones afterwards so the the two longer questions are um first thank you for the really interesting presentations what perspective past did you all take to become historians at the fcdo it is essential to be is it essential to be an established academic to realistically seek a role as an fcdo historian or do you also find recent graduates early career historians applying for roles in the team and the second question was about um looking at Winston Churchill in light of Black Lives Matter the discussions surrounding statues and recently the Churchill College Cambridge seminar um this person that says that they think further discussion of his attitudes towards race and empire might be useful particularly coming from the official historians thank you for your work on the murals i think there's some loaded questions there i mean the easy one to answer is our our paths to the foreign office um first of all not about me but about one of our most recent appointments quite a few years ago now but it was a classic early career appointment it was someone who got a phd not long before and had a bit of experience in working with various parts of the government parliamentary system actually my own path was very very late in very late in life i was already an established professor in a provincial university i was getting so fed up with the way university was going i saw an advert in the garden and applied that's my answer jill well i i started um i came in as a research assistant um very young um and and basically never left but i did um have a five year period in mid uh career if you like when i did three other posts within the foreign office not not related to history and that was an extremely useful experience and then i was asked to go back as chief historian after that so um i have i am a lifer in terms of the foreign office in history um but and as you see although i retired 15 years ago i'm still here i mean my own i'm not i mean i wasn't an academic i obviously did a phd um but then worked for an organization called the historical manuscripts commission which joined with the public record office to become the national archives back in 2003 and at that point i went to work for the department for cultural media and sport as a you know regular civil servant and then came to the foreign office from there so i kind of came back to do history from a kind of policy um policy department um so that's my pathway to uh to the foreign office on the on the Winston Churchill question i mean i i i don't know the answers to this one really um either was not going to garden today or yesterday i think by um the person who organized the um the seminar at Churchill College and on Churchill uh and how much abuse they got for for having done it at all and i mean i find Churchill extremely problematic because i think he's an absolutely wonderful admirable figure in so many ways but also an extremely flawed figure and i think that's how most people are but he just had both virtues and and vices in on a larger scale than most other people i mean i spent a long time in my earlier career looking at his career at the admiralty for instance and you know some of the decisions he made they were awful um and disastrous um it was largely church who got us into the disaster in Norway 1940 for instance but that doesn't distract from the fact that we know we would have lost the wall if he hadn't been prime minister i think that's that's fairly clear um and his views on race are very very well documented and they're they were pretty pretty objectionable even by contemporary standards um how we deal with that i don't know i'm i'm afraid you know the views on people like Churchill have become more polarized and it's been it's now less easy to discuss them historically than it was um some years ago i think and that's a courseening of the national debate which has happened in many other many other spheres as well i had no answer on me for it i think it's important to say i mean or to remember that we are civil servants at the end of the day and not academics and so you know we don't have that kind of academic freedom you know to at the end of the day to say whatever we like to certainly not in a public forum so i just said it haven't i well some great answers and very helpful on the background to your careers um i'm just going to go to the last these were the last three questions so sorry if people did have questions they didn't get a chance to answer to ask firstly from van jeves in how important are historical analogies for historians advising on foreign policy issues and do you think there is a danger of over reliance on analogies that might be simplistic or obvious and then two final questions one for an anonymous attendee do you have involvement with the training of diplomats before they go overseas was that more often done by the r.a.'s the researcher assistants and another one many commentators have likened the current pandemic to the Spanish flu and other such events how useful are historical analogies when trying to explain the present so yeah a couple of questions dealing with analogies at the end well i they're very helpful questions thank you i mean there are different kinds of analogies i think and the and the the analogies that were raised by the first question are more like the ones that jill was talking about which are which are myths um and you the analogy an analogy between a problem today and the sewers crisis or munich is extremely unhelpful and the analogy between the current pandemic and the Spanish flu is extremely helpful because they're they're they're cognate phenomena if you like they're the same sorts of things which are producing the same sorts of responses i think you can you can use historical examples of disease a lot more helpfully than you can use historical examples of foreign policy or military decisions um my colleagues may want to say more on that subject involvement with training um well there is a general training program in the international academy and we do contribute to that when diplomats go overseas um it's usually the research analysts you're right who make those who provide the training very occasionally i've i've actually spoken to people about countries that i know about mainly in Scandinavia and the Baltic before they go on on post but that doesn't happen very often um so it's a bit random again if we have little bits of knowledge we can contribute other my colleagues might want to say more usually the research analysts for pre-post training might get in outside academics who are experts in the economy of a particular region or you know know the political um you know political setup in a particular country you know in great detail so um they do draw an academic outside academic expertise for that kind of thing as well in terms of analogies we always are very careful really on the whole if you're asked to provide advice to officials or indeed to go to ministers um you would not really want to be saying you certainly would never say this is just like x because it never is um but obviously from our point of view from the work you can find in certain episodes aspects which may be helpful in formulating the kind of advice you give um but really this is kind of one of the reasons why we started the historiopedia function because we found that you know officers especially younger officers would say well you know i've heard of the Nazi Soviet pack or whatever but i can't i can't remember what it is now yes they can google it but what they need to know is why is this still relevant to us now why does it keep coming up again now and there are certain things like that which come up again and again they may be very old but they still come up again and again even if they're not old like for example they have stinky final accords or a treaty or all sorts of things abel archo is is an example and but it doesn't mean we're not saying this was just like x but we are saying there are these aspects in a particular episode or treaty or whatever which can which are still relevant to your business and you ought to know about them it's rather that's the way we would approach it thank you so much um that was a great way to finish um this this session and some really really fascinating answers and to get an insight into the way in which some of these things in form policy has been really enlightening so um obviously i'm sad i have to call this to an end because i know there'll be a lot of other people wanting to ask questions and um i think the the the quality of the questions and the is a testament also to the quality of the the presentations and just what a fascinating discussion that we've we've had here today and so yes before we before we finish off i just wanted to thank um all three of you for a really excellent stimulating presentations and discussion and really the ideal way to kick off this uh this series of events um and to everyone else um thank you for coming thank you for your participation and please keep an eye out for future events we're going to be running a whole series of these and um yeah this this is um if if if if if fathers follow on in in the in the footsteps of what we've done today then uh i think this is going to be a very exciting series so thank you so much to all three of you thank you Charlie