HISTORY’S PEOPLE

MARGARET MACMILLAN is the renowned author of the international bestsellers The War That Ended Peace, Nixon in China and Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, the Hessell-Tiltman Prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize, and the 2003 Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada. The past Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, she is now the warden of St Antony’s College at Oxford University.

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives, and Daughters of the British Empire in India

Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War

Nixon in China:
The Week That Changed the World

The Uses and Abuses of History

Extraordinary Canadians:
Stephen Leacock

The War That Ended Peace:
How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War

MARGARET MACMILLAN HISTORY’S PEOPLE

PERSONALITIES AND THE PAST

This edition published in Great Britain in 2016 by

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First published in Canada and the USA in 2015

by House of Anansi Press Inc.

Copyright © Margaret MacMillan and Canadian Broadcasting Association, 2015, 2016

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 78283 189 1

To the memory of my mother Eluned Jane MacMillan, 1921–2015

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One:
Persuasion and the Art of Leadership

Chapter Two: Hubris

Chapter Three: Daring

Chapter Four: Curiosity

Chapter Five: Observers

Note on Readings

Sources and Further Reading

Permissions

Acknowledgements

Index

INTRODUCTION

HISTORY, I SOMETIMES THINK, is like a rambling, messy and eccentric house. It has been built, added to and renovated repeatedly over the centuries. Its foundations are buried in that conveniently vague place “the mists of time” but some of the spade work was surely done in the Near East by the anonymous author or authors of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in Europe’s classical world by Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus and Livy, or in China by Sima Qian, the great historian of the Han dynasty, while Homer, Virgil, or the Arab traveller Ibn Battuta have added their decorative flourishes. Monkish scribes, Chinese scholars, Arab chroniclers, all painstakingly have placed their bricks and stones. The Renaissance produced some elaborate rooms devoted to understanding princes and popes while the Reformation and Counter-Reformation created some sober undecorated spaces with strongly moral tales. In the nineteenth century the inhabitants added orderly libraries and well-organized files while the twentieth century brought tiled laboratories where the past could be dissected and analysed. There is one wing, the post modernist one, where there appears to be no order at all and no clear style; every room, say those who live there, is as valuable or as meaningful as any other.

It is impossible to discern a single use or a dominant style in history’s house. Nor can anyone tell where it begins or ends for it is eternally under construction, and there is always a new corridor to discover or neglected rooms which might be worth cleaning up and letting in the light. Strange noises come from the basement or the attics. Some rooms are like those in Blue Beard’s Castle striking dread into anyone who draws near the door much less opens it. Other rooms still open to gardens where it looks like a new spring is coming.

Historians, if I can continue the metaphor just a little bit more, are the house’s caretakers. Some of us, like the mediaeval chroniclers, believe in visiting one room after another in the order in which they were built while others prefer to settle on a particular part of the house and get to know it in the round. One group of caretakers thinks it is important to focus on what they deem to be the house’s most powerful and influential inhabitants. Yet another insists that we cannot understand the house without gathering as much information as we can on the millions whose toil ensured its construction and upkeep as well as the food and clothing for its inhabitants. Each age brings its own preoccupations which produce an ever-shifting perspective on the past and so we ask different questions when we interrogate the past. Not surprisingly, environmental history or the history of economic booms and busts are increasingly popular subjects today.

Differences among historians sometimes spill over into civil wars which can make us forget that we are all engaged in the same endeavour to unearth and analyse the past. Yet history needs us all, from the material to the intellectual historians. The products of agriculture or of manufacturing can tell as much about past societies as the ideas which animated them. Cultural and social historians help us to understand the values, assumptions and social organization of long gone peoples while political or economic historians bring out the forces that shape societies or have brought change. We also need to compare, to study other histories than the ones we know best. And we should use the insights of other disciplines. Archaeology comes to mind at once but anthropology, sociology, biology, all can and have enriched history.

So does biography although the relationship between historians and biographers is often an uneasy one, marked by mutual suspicions. Historians complain that biographers do not properly understand or short change the context while biographers feel that historians miss out the individuals who help to make history. That tension in turn feeds into the long-standing debate in history over whether events are moved by individuals or the great objective forces such as economic and social changes or technological and scientific advances.

My own view is that there is no right or wrong answer. Individuals are enmeshed in their times. We are all products of our own histories but those in turn are themselves shaped by class, place, ideas, values, institutions and the wider history unfolding around us. Yet, having said that, we have to face the possibility that sometimes a single individual can alter the course of events. If Napoleon had never existed, was there anyone else in France at the time with his combination of talents, intelligence and ruthlessness who could have seized power and taken France to the dominance of Europe? Without Karl Marx to sum up socialist thinking and create of it a powerful and persuasive theory would so much of the twentieth century have been shaped by that particular ideology? Marx himself was aware of the need to find a balance between individuals and their times. As he wrote in 1852: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

For all of us, and not just historians, there is something exhilarating in becoming aware of other human beings from very different worlds to our own. They will never know us but we can think about them and an individual life can be a way into another time. From villains to saints, with all the great variety humanity is capable of in-between, we can wonder why the figures of the past behaved as they did and what that meant. “The poetry of history”, the great British historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote, ‘lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow.’

When I started to plan this book, I made a list of personality traits which I felt were important in shaping human affairs. Love, fear, hatred, jealousy, ambition, altruism, loyalty, integrity: we can all add still others to the list. My problem was to narrow those down to a manageable few. In the end too I tried to find a balance between those qualities of personality which could be rightly said to change worlds and those which make it possible for us to have contact with the past. I also wanted to be able to find the people who could best illustrate what I meant. I decided first to look at those leaders who were effective, who managed to persuade sufficient numbers of their contemporaries to support them, and who achieved great ends. I then turned to those who also possessed many of the qualities that make good leaders but who, in the end, threw their position or their people away because they had become convinced that they were invariably right. Perhaps I have been slightly provocative in lumping together Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin but each in his or her own way fell prey to what the ancient Greeks described as hubris. The third characteristic I chose — that of daring — is again something that leaders often have but I wanted to focus in on the moments when a willingness to take risks had momentous consequences, whether it was Samuel de Champlain venturing across the Atlantic to the New World in the seventeenth century or President Richard Nixon going to Beijing in 1972. Then, in the last two chapters, I considered those who asked the questions and took the notes that make the understanding of others and history itself possible.

This book is the result of my own experiences over many years of reading and writing and, always, enjoying history. I have taken the opportunity offered here to discuss the people from the past I have found most interesting. My choices are highly personal but I hope they will serve to raise some of the important issues we must all think about as we look at the past. History matters and we must do it well. When it is false or one-sided it can be used to mobilize people for evil ends. At its best history can explain others and help us to better understand ourselves and our world. It can also remind us that what we think is normal or the only way of doing things is not necessarily so. There have been other worlds with other values than our own and we need to be reminded of that, if only to give us some sense of humility. In the end I love history because it is such a marvellous combination of enlightening and fun.