There has been an explosion in the writing of history in the last half-century. Those who believe in the importance of the humanities in a civilised society cannot but welcome the vast flow of books on ancient, medieval and modern history in the English-speaking world, books that now encompass the history of just about every country on the planet. The tale that is being told is again and again the tale of the human condition: how we have become what we are from what we were, or, to put it even more succinctly, who we are. In a short and ambitious book The History Manifesto, Jo Guldi and David Armitage (a justly celebrated historian of ideas from Harvard) have now extended the idea of who we are so that it becomes who we will become. They challenge the idea that history is all about the past by insisting that the insights of historians will enable us to cope more confidently with problems in the future, particularly the course of climate change. 

This is not simply a variant on the idea that we can learn from the past, something we are not very good at doing (just consider the recrudescence of anti-Semitism in contemporary Europe). Their programme of "looking at the past in the service of the future" has an ethical dimension. Does capitalism even out inequalities or increase them? Who should take the blame for the damage being done to the earth's climate?  With questions such as these, historians should surely join national and international debates alongside economists and sociologists; indeed, these authors maintain, historians are better placed to contribute to these debates because they are able to handle evidence drawn from very long periods of time. If you go back to the election of Thatcher or Blair, you might find an answer to the question of whether the poor have become poorer during the last few decades; but that quite obviously is not the whole picture, which has to be placed in a much longer setting, and taken out of the hands of party politicians.

Guldi and Armitage are well aware of a problem. The historians whose company they keep, in the universities, are not generally interested in the very big picture. This has often been tackled by talented historians outside the universities, such as Tom Holland (for the ancient world) or Antony Beevor (for the 20th century). Meanwhile, academic historians have for several decades been talking of themselves as a "profession". This idea of history as a profession has created barriers between those writing history and their readers, who do not just consist of fellow-historians and students, but of all those with a curiosity about the past.  Maybe, indeed, it is intended to do that.  Among too many university-based historians, the writing of history has become something of an esoteric art that demands the use of opaque and pretentious language to mask banalities (remember the Emperor's New Clothes). Right across the humanities, in every university, scholars produce a succession of monographs that are read by a few dozen specialists and that then gather dust on the shelves of university libraries. What one has to show is that one's arguments are more sophisticated, more deeply researched, more important, than one's rivals, whom one can of course damn in the review pages of equally little-read journals. The dividend is appreciable: promotion step by step up the slippery ladder that takes a humble Junior Research Fellow towards a full Professorship.