Richard Drayton

Richard Drayton interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 26th September 2017

0:05:11 I was born at five minutes past midnight in a pitch-black room in Georgetown [British Guiana] Public Hospital in 1964. I think it is significant that the room was pitch-black because a bomb had gone off in the electricity generating plant in the city, this being just about the climax of the intervention of the Americans and British to remove from power the Cheddi Jagan government; so I was born into the midst of a kind of turmoil and I have been resolving that turmoil ever since. On my mother's side, my mother was a McCracken and they asserted, although we have never actually bothered to do the genealogical work, that they were descended from Henry Joy McKracken the United Irishman who was hanged in Antrim in 1798; what we do know for sure is that three generations later someone who was probably his grandson or great-grandson had become the keeper of a gaol, so in the space of three generations that family had moved from a quasi-Jacobin troublemaker group into the keepers of order; James Elderfield McCracken would have been the keeper of the gaol in Chaguanas in Trinidad; his own father was a merchant travelling between Belfast, Dublin and Port of Spain; their grandson, my mother's father, was born around 1906; he married my grandmother whose maiden name was Cedeño who was born in Venezuela; she was born of a Venezuelan father and a mother who was a Donatien, a family of jewellers who had left Alsace Lorraine at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, and had gone via Martinique and Trinidad; on my paternal side these are potentially the earliest documented non-indigenous people of my ancestors to come to the Caribbean; my surname in Drayton and the Draytons come to Barbados in the 1640s; most of them, at least the ones with lots of money, leave in the 1670s and go to the Carolinas but there is a Drayton line that continues; what we know is that a man called David Drayton who on his birth certificate is marked as racially mixed, comes in the 1890s from Barbados to British Guiana to work in the gas company; there he marries a woman called Jeffery who was in fact half or three-quarters Amerindian and their son, Alec, is my father's father; Alec woos although he does not wed a woman called Agnes Da Camara who is a descendant of the Madeiran Portuguese migrants to British Guiana in the middle of the nineteenth century; so really between the Amerindian and the bit of African that is certainly there in my father's side, there is Portuguese, French, Spanish. I am a fairly typical New World Creole

4:51:05 Both my father and my mother were the first people in their families to have gone to university and they were part of that extraordinary generation in the Caribbean which was formed in the latter decades of the colonial period but who participated in the making of what they hoped would be an independent Caribbean, and indeed a nice Caribbean in the 1950s and 60s; I could just say that my father ended up educated as a biologist and did work as a virologist, later on he was involved in starting the University of Guyana and was involved in public health activities in the Caribbean; but that in a way would be to sell him short and almost more interesting than that, certainly more important too, were the kinds of connections he had formed through his particular journey with an entire generation of people in Grenada, Jamaica and Britain which meant that I grew up in a home in which one time or another most of the writers, intellectuals of the Caribbean passed through; in particular I grew up with a very important circle of people who in Caribbean culture we would call uncles and aunts, that is to say people who were very close friends to your parents, aren't themselves blood related but who take a significant interest in your development, people who were very much involved in the development of Caribbean literature, history writing, painting, poetry, in the middle of the twentieth century; I had a strong sense of parentage, not just simply by my own parents, extraordinary though they were, but also by that entire generation; I had a sense really of coming of age at a time when the world was moving extremely rapidly; Ranke says somewhere that his historical intelligence was constituted in that span, when at the age of ten he's seen the Prussian soldiers retreating from the battle of Jena and when again as a youth of seventeen he'd seen the French troops retreating in the other direction from the battle of Leipzig; I certainly had a very strong sense as a child of having been born into a period of history in which things were moving extremely rapidly; it is difficult from the vantage point of the twenty-first century to recover the sense which people in the Caribbean, and indeed I think around the post-colonial world had in the 1960s and 70s of the tables turning, of an entirely new world being created, on the brink of the possible; in some ways that generation of my parents had a somewhat hubristic sense of how fast history could change; we can understand in a way; they had lived through in the space of twenty, thirty, forty years of their lives, a movement of societies in which 95% plus of the population did not have the right to vote, in which it was assumed that the structures of political, economic and cultural life would be perpetually controlled by foreign actors, in particular by the English, to societies in which they not only had the vote but they could see all the way around the world the attempts to create forms of modernity which were expressive of the peculiar conditions of their own societies; when we think about the global 1968 moment we tend to think of only the kinds of political developments which surrounded that specific late twentieth century moment, whether in Prague, Paris or the United States, but I think in the Third World that global 1968 moment really felt like the culmination of decades and centuries of political and cultural struggle in which there was, it appeared to be, the opportunity for a kind of making of a new Caribbean - I imagine that for Africans it would have been a new Africa - which in some ways both realized the best of all the ancestral traditions and which represented also a genuine contribution to world civilization; what was very interesting about the nationalisms of that generation was that they also were committed to forms of cosmopolitan engagement; they considered themselves as having a particular mixture of opportunities and responsibilities towards bringing global society towards new kinds of climaxes; the novelist Wilson Harris has the phrase somewhere, "We are the first generation which could inhabit the ancestral home", and this comes out of the mouth of a character who's confronting the fact that all of the communities of Guyana in the 1960s were the products of forms of violence and in the vast majority the products of forms of immigration; but the flip side to that is that what we had in the Caribbean were opportunities for Africa, Europe, Asia and the ancestral cultures of lowland South America to meet on new terms, that they were opportunities for forms of new kinds of art which would be expressive of our own peculiarity, at the same time of a global culture; when one looks at the poetry of Derek Walcott, for example, or the novels of Wilson Harris, one finds in fact this very clear attempt to be at the same time profoundly expressive of local particularities and also in some ways to do justice to the entire wealth and richness of all of the traditions of humanity; to turn John Locke's phrase "In the beginning all the world was America", we instead were going to be the pioneers in making a very different kind of human experience in which there would be new registers of value, new kings of sensibility, coming out of these forms of trans-cultured, hybrid, syncretic, Mestizo, cultural arrangements; what was profoundly important for that generation which has in fact marked my own work would be, first of all, a recognition of the importance of that experience which we call Imperialism, but by which we mean a very complicated mixture of experiences of migration, violence, new kinds of proximity, new kinds of cultural exchange, new kinds of mixtures and refusals of mixture in different kinds of rehearsals over three or four centuries, and on the other hand a profound belief that forms of hybridity and mixture represent not just the peripheries of normal experience but indeed instruments through which we can make sense of metropolitan centres; let me put that in another way; the way in which we have tended to do the history of the social sciences has tended to come out of the particular cultural experience of societies which have had long periods of stability, or which have had some period of relative cultural and political coherence which has established a particular structure of values which then has embedded itself into a structure of ideas which then becomes a set of tools which the world has made sense of; the experience of societies which were at the peripheries of these processes of Empire-making has in fact never to have been at the centre of their own systems; but the advantage here is that they then become able to bring back to the centre tools and ways of thinking about mixture, about instability, about fragmentation; that it seems to me is the resource which we have in the midst of our tragedy; what's interesting is that as early as the Latin American and Caribbean thought of the nineteenth century, so if you look at someone like José Marti in Cuba; then if you look at the twentieth century thinkers like Vasconcelos, like Fernando Ortiz, who respond to Marti, what they are often concerned in doing is reclaiming this experience of fragmentation, hybridity, mestizaje, and bringing this from the peripheries of analysis towards the centre; so we begin to then think about not just simply a question of arguing for the particular cultural authority of that which is broken and fragmented and hybrid and peripheral, where the whole genre of what you might think of as defensive literatures, where people respond to Gobineau in the nineteenth century as Haitian intellectuals such as ,Anténor Firmin did, but something quite different where the argument comes to be made. particularly with somebody like Ortiz c.1940 that mixture is in fact the norm, and what is in fact a bit perverse is the idea of purity, the idea of there being a kind of cultural coherence, so that we are connoisseurs of the margins but from that basis we find tools with which to bring to the centre; that's a rather long trajectory away from the original question

17:45:14 My parents were extraordinarily encouraging and stimulating; I think a lot of the stimulation came non-verbally in the form of the encouraging smile when you said something or asked a particular question, the serious depth at which they took you on as an interlocutor; it was not just my own experience but I talked to some of my contemporaries and they remember my mother distinctly being the only adult who spoke to them as if they were a serious individual whose views deserved to be understood; I think that from quite early on we were encouraged to participate in the conversation of the home, and I think quite unusually among my parent's friends we would tend to be sitting among the adults participating in the conversation even if only as listeners; this was encouraged by our parents who never followed the more common idea of having the children to go off and play somewhere else while the adults enjoyed themselves

19:29:04 I would have met C.L.R. James when I was very young and didn't meet him again until towards the end of his life, in January 1989 in London; the person that I knew him well through was the novelist George Lamming who was an exceptionally close family friend from childhood and who became a very important mentor to me when I was a teenager and into my early adulthood; I think much of my thinking style matured really in a dialogue with his thinking; George has the following aside in a speech; he says that "What the novelist is doing is attempting to make the feeling think, and what the prose writer is trying to do is to attempt to make thought feel"; this particular formula has been very useful to me in terms of trying to understand what it is I was aiming to do with prose, which is in a sense to create forms of meaning which are understood as structures of feeling as much as structures of thought

21:26:22 I first went to school in Guyana at a school called St Margaret's which was started by a wonderful woman called Mrs Hunter; I then went to school for three years in a little school in Barbados run by Mrs Taylor - the model of dame schools was still strong; what I can remember quite distinctly from that school experience was her decision to have us read English mediaeval history in primary school; in a way it was extraordinary because it meant that we read and thought about a society which was very different from our own which I think is a tonic in terms of preparing you to read and think about a variety of other kinds of societies which are not your own; it was a school which was very committed to preparing you for an examination; so one of the great rituals of my childhood was sitting the common entrance examination which, depending on how well you did, provided entry to various secondary schools; in that span of ages 7-10 I was extraordinarily conscious of having discovered the world; very early on I wanted to become an adult and I recognised that becoming an adult could be achieved through reading adult books; within a year or two of learning how to read I began to do things like memorize atlases, to pick up books at random from my parent's shelves and leaf through them; at the age of seven I had over my bed the large Alexander Korda photograph of Che Guevara, not because my parents had put it there but because I had found it in a magazine and for whatever reason had decided it was a very attractive object and asked for it to be placed on the wall; I can remember leafing through the onion skin above the photograph of Lenin or Mao in various bound volumes on the shelves; I can remember pulling down chemistry books; how much of this actually remained in my head after I'd looked at it I think varied a great deal, but I was creating the beginnings of files into which later on I would put other things; what I also remember doing is starting to read 'Time' magazine when I was about eight and we came to Barbados and my parents subscribed to 'Time'; I would open the magazine the moment it arrived so that I can remember quite distinctly in 1972 following the course of the American Presidential election; when I look back at it I was barely eight years old but I was following it on a week by week basis; I followed the peace negotiations with Vietnam in Paris; I was aware of all these things that were happening in the world; I had a scrap book in which I would cut out things from the newspapers; I had clippings about the 1973 Yom Kippur war, about the formation of OPEC, so really before I came to secondary school I had quite an extraordinarily developed sense of what was happening in the world; around the age of six and a half to seven I got to my father's typewriter and I have in my office at King's a Cabinet which I created because I had discovered the idea of Cabinet Government; I created a Cabinet which was presided over by my father, appropriately; interesting to see how backward I was in gender terms as my mother was my father's secretary, but it also had as serving cabinet ministers Richard Nixon, Mao Tse Tung, as well as many Guyanese politicians; by seven I already had this slightly confused sense of the structures of the world but by the time I was eight, nine or ten, I was increasingly populating those ideas of structure with the actual facts of the world; by the time I was about eleven-twelve I came across in my parents' library a book by a man called Georges Politzer who was a Hungarian Jewish Communist in France, 'Elements of Philosophy'; it was a wonderfully vulgar, but very attractively vulgar presentation of materialist philosophy so that I became a keen vulgar materialist, so there was a clear division of thinkers between materialists and idealists, and that the path to materialism lay primarily through the natural sciences and the forms of knowledge which natural science would constitute; by the time I was in my mid-teenage years, what I had decided I was going to be was a scientist; so I had I kind of Comtean/J.D. Bernalian view of the scientist being at the vanguard of history and I was going to be that; there was probably a little bit of resolved Oedipal complex since my father had been a scientist, so when I came to sixth form I did only science subjects and no history because I thought I was going to be a biochemist; however, what is very interesting as I look back is that I continued to read a great deal of history and I also began to write bits of history entirely outside of any academic structure, so that in the midst of our school magazine I presented my own good solid vulgar materialist history of the world that was an explanation of the journey of human society from small communist, primitive societies via monarchical slave states, feudalism, capitalism towards what would be the inevitable, indeed imminent revolution which would constitute socialist society; this would then be the prelude to the age of universal abundance for which, of course, science would both be the means and the end, a future international age of communism; this was essentially who I was by the age of sixteen to eighteen; to say that I was a positivist, I also wrote a great deal of poetry, I read almost anything I put my hands on, and when I did get to university at eighteen, what I ended up doing was essentially a massive rebellion against all of the commitment I'd previously made to the natural sciences; it began relatively quickly in my first week at university; I was at Harvard on a Barbados national Scholarship to do science, and that required some negotiation later on as I had got a scholarship to do molecular biology; of course, the nature of an American undergraduate degree is that one only spends about half of one's time actually working on courses associated with your subject; you spend another quarter distributed around a range of other subjects in a formal required way, and another quarter in which you spend on optional courses; I arrived there thinking I would have to do chem21, maths21A, and in my very first week I wasn't enjoying the mathematics; I met a lovely and intelligent woman, Paula Gabriel, who suggested I go with her to a seminar on Safavid painting which was being taught by Stuart Cary Welch who was one of the great connoisseurs of Safavid and Mughal painting; I thought at the time that spending two hours on Friday afternoon in a dark room looking at slides with this person seemed like a rather interesting idea; that was sort of the beginning of my defection, and really in the course of my first year I realized that I did not actually want to be a scientist; particularly influential for me was an extraordinary man called Donald Fleming; Fleming never published very much, just a couple of things in the 1950s, but he was the most extraordinary lecturer and he gave a year long sequence which was called European Intellectual History, which ran from Kant through to Structuralism; he was one of the most extraordinary lecturers I have ever come across; a Fleming lecture would begin with a particular note being sounded by a quotation or a source; he then would open this up and he'd follow one path, then switch to another path, then another about forty minutes in, then in the last twenty minutes there would be this most extraordinary tying together of the threads that he'd laid; exactly as the bell rang to end the lecture things would be brought to this twist, and you would walk out of the room with these ideas being set into motion; then you would return to the lecture two days later and he'd pick up exactly where he had dropped off and take you into another passage; if he had extensive notes I am not aware of it; he probably had points and these were repertoires which he developed; I took extensive notes, I can scarcely read my handwriting now but I still have the file, but I think Fleming's course really opened up an entirely new world for me which had to do really with taking that range of thinkers who I'd previously designated as idealists, rather more seriously; it is really via Fleming that I first got a taste of Weber and I began to think about ways in which ideas and structures of culture and feeling can operate as material forces in history also, in other words, one can be a historical materialist while recognising that forms of sentiment can also operate, as can structures of feeling, as material facts in the world

36:05:01 My parents were both raised as Catholics but both rebelled against that relatively early on; they thought of themselves as atheists and certainly we were not baptised, although both of our grandparents did it with the bath water; what is the case is that the societies that I grew up in, in particular Barbados, are places which are profoundly marked by Christianity, and the schools that I went to, both primary and secondary, had a very strong Anglican tradition; from the time that I was in secondary school I became very much involved in the process of hymn singing, thinking about what praying meant, and I think I became interested in religion and in the structures of religious life, but from the perspective of thinking of religion as a really precious cultural technology; in other words, I think that as a child and teenager I paid a lot of attention to prayers and to scripture because I could see the point in them, they represented ways of understanding yourself and the world which had an intrinsic weight; when I became house captain I actually developed quite a strong line in writing prayers, I'm not sure that many of my contemporaries are aware of this; we had house assembly on Tuesdays and Thursdays with full assembly on the other days, and often they would be doing one of my little prayers; for example, I wrote one when Sadat was assassinated; I think that I was quite clearly shaped, as everyone who has passed through schools like this will have been shaped, by the structures of prose of the Bible, by the forms of community that are constituted through collective singing, and I carried then a kind of very strong sense of religious associational culture; at the same time as ideologically I was consciously critical and hostile to the idea of Christianity, or indeed of any sort of God-based system of life which was quite a difficult thing to do in Barbados; I know in fact one or two of my teachers who were extremely hostile to me because I was an atheist; for example, I happen to know that when the issue arose of who should become a prefect or house captain, one of the house mistresses of my house actually resigned on my appointment as house captain; so that is where I was; so I arrived at Harvard in 1982 and was going through this intellectual broadening and reconstitution, but it's also combined with the great shock which happens in the Autumn of 1983 with the suicide of the Grenada revolution; for people on the left in the Caribbean in the 1970s into the 1980s what had happened in Grenada in 1979 was exactly what we thought was going to happen across the Caribbean as a whole, and what the Grenadians were achieving in terms of popular literacy campaigns, creating a new kind of economy, transforming structures of welfare, this was in fact going to be the model which other societies would follow in the Caribbean as a whole; we had no idea how this experiment was functioning on a very fragile base, and what happens between 1981-3 is that there is a kind of Leninist coup within the revolution which ends up in the murder of half, certainly the most interesting half, of the political leadership in that revolution in 1983; in the aftermath of that there is the invasion of Grenada, but that is not terribly interesting - the Americans invade when they have a chance; the interesting bit is what happened within that society and within that political movement; for me, coming into that second year of university I had a number of nagging questions about some of the ways of understanding the world which I had been operating under; in the winter of 1984, in that very traumatic aftermath of the murder of these people, many of whom I had known personally in one context or another; for instance, when I was sixteen to eighteen I was part of a small, semi-clandestine student organization which published a newspaper called 'New Scope' which led to me at sixteen going to attend what were the second anniversary celebrations of the Grenada revolution; I had been to the houses of people who in fact became the murderers - Bernard Coard, Hudson Austin, I had shaken hands and spoken with Maurice Bishop who was killed, so this was a world to which we had been intimately connected; in any event, this was quite a psychic shock, I imagine it was similar to the impact of 1956 or 1968 in parts of the European left; so I had a period in 1984 when I became a very keen keeper of company with the Memorial Church in Harvard which was presided over by the most extraordinary sermoniser I have ever come across, a man called Peter J. Gomes, who was the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, an African-American aristocrat from New England; I suspect with a name like that he probably was a descendant of some Sephardic-Jewish family which then converted to Christianity in the nineteenth century; he was an extraordinary figure in the Harvard of my generation; in terms of maintaining a kind of salon in which he was willing to keep company with varieties of kinds of sinners and to have lots of extremely interesting conversations about the political and social issues of the day; in that period I began to write prayers for my own personal, private, pleasure and to constitute myself as a kind of Christian; there is another kind of answer I could have given to your question which is to say that growing up as I did in the Caribbean my education was not only the education I had in my home or in school but there was quite a different education which I had in the street, and I wandered in the streets and cities from the time that I was a boy of six; I would step out of the door of our house in Pere Street in Kitty in Georgetown and I'd walk down the road all on my own, no one bothered in those days; I would watch music being made, and I think that I carried in me as all Caribbean people do, an awareness more or less articulate of structures of religious feeling which are of West African provenance; I think that what took me a slightly longer period to come into self-conscious awareness of was the extent to which I also carried ideas about life, death, immortality, the relationship of past and present, which were not those of my formal education but were those which were part of the popular intellectual life of ordinary people, of a kind of intellectual life which has a semi-articulate quality which finds its most clear expression in the forms of Christianity which they practice; if one looks at popular Christianity across the Caribbean it is strongly penetrated by forms of West African spirituality in a more or less self-conscious way; so that was I think an important set of structures which by my early twenties I began to think about in a more deliberate way, in part through reading and working with some of the texts of George Lamming in which he described his own experience of encountering in Haiti in the late 1950s a ritual which he calls the Ceremony of Souls, which is an encounter between the living and the dead, which in the space of what one might think of as a kind of continuous present, there are problems which are negotiated, in which those aspects of the human personality which are banal and trivial are allowed to die and wither and the aspects which are immortal and have to do with values and forms of ethical and spiritual achievement, these are then assimilated to some kind of higher principle; I think for Lamming this experience made him think a lot about what was going on in terms of his own work as a writer, recovering from the experience of the Caribbean people those structures through which he would then organize the space of prose; what it did for me was to make me think about what is engaged in the work of the historian in terms of the attempt to engage in a form of conversation between the past and the present, aimed towards liberating an idea of the past which has value, not just in its own right but in terms of how it mediates a future relationship between human actors to come and the present; what this really gave me a sense of was of the sense of the calling of the historian as a kind of pruner in the vineyard of the collective memory, that the work of the historian which has to begin not just in the head but in the viscera, is the work of trying to find one's way to something that has meaning to you, and to discover through working on the contemporary original sources surrounding that thing that has meaning what you thought that was actually meaningful, to give flesh to that; and it is inevitable that that particular enterprise is going to be connected to one's sense of what is urgent, what are the forms of meaning and truth that you wish to bring from the past towards the future; so that is one important connection between what you describe as a kind of religious sentiment and the constitution of my own personality

52:42:03 So having realized that I was not going to be a scientist I began to look around; first of all I went to some lectures by John Womack, a Latin Americanist, about the history of Latin America; in the course of those lectures I thought that possibly I should do a PhD in history, so having first of all switched from molecular biology to the history of science I began to look towards doing research in history; at the end of the undergraduate degree at Harvard one of the thing that one does is an undergraduate thesis, and trying to process, I suppose, my experience as a scientist my first research idea was to do a thesis on the impact of German nationalism on the making of the German scientific tradition in the nineteenth century; I began to learn German and quickly realized that I wasn't going to make that much progress; then when I went home one Christmas holiday I had a long conversation with a man called Colin Hudson who was the inventor of the green cane harvester, a British expatriate who had come out to the Caribbean; he said there was a scientific discovery which was made in the Caribbean that nobody had looked at before which was the discovery that sugar cane was fertile and could be bred, which happened in Barbados in the 1880s; that became my undergraduate project and I was able to get a research grant within Harvard to come to Britain to do six weeks of archival research as an undergraduate; I spent my 21st birthday under the blue dome of the Reading Room of the British Museum and I discovered this wonderful story which had to do with a scientific discovery which had been made not once but twice; in the first case in the 1850s it was made and then it disappeared; in the second case in the 1880s it was made simultaneously in five different places; so that is a very interesting instance of a problem in the history of science of simultaneous and independent scientific discovery, particularly coupled with this kind of lag between the first sighting of the problem, and I wanted to explain this; that really is the beginning of the first bit of the puzzle in terms of almost all the other research that I've done; my problem was trying to explain why the first discovery had been ignored; the answer to that was very simple, because it had emerged within the structures of a colonial society and had been made by a field worker; why was it that the discovery in the 1880s was taken seriously? Because it was made by somebody who was part of the newly emerged colonial scientific apparatus connected to this institution, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew; anyway, my undergraduate thesis was on sugar cane breeding in Barbados, and that led me to realize that there was a very large research project to be done on science and colonialism; in particular what struck me was much as Eric Williams, who was an extraordinarily important presence in the intellectual life of the English speaking Caribbean, had argued that it was through the forms of economic expansion connected with the slave trade and sugar production that circuits of exchange were generated which were formative of economic and social modernity within Britain; that is sometimes vulgarly oversimplified by people incorrectly to be about profit; it is not about profit; what his argument was actually about was the circuits of exchange which emerge; in much the same way the argument could be made for the natural sciences, that all of what I went on to call the sciences of collection and comparison, which included astronomy, geophysics, as well and botany, zoology and anthropology, these are all disciplines, forms of knowledge, which depend on the world to make sense and therefore in a way were shaped by and constituted by forms of European expansion; so that was the problematic which I committed myself to for the first bit of my work in terms of thinking about how it is that forms of knowledge are created through exchange and movement, often through those processes of creolization, transculturation, hybridity which I mentioned earlier, but also created through the structures of imperial accumulation, so one ends up by the nineteenth century with what are mature disciplines which have their centres in London and Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, but which are the products of, in particular, the intensified forms of global exchange which emerged in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

58:40:18 I found a number of supervisors; I first came to Yale expecting to do a project on Caribbean federalism, and in particular to try to explain the failure of the Caribbean West Indies Federation; I ended up realizing that I had a far more interesting project in terms of going back to this idea that had emerged in my undergraduate work; I had some difficulty finding a supervisor who worked exactly on this kind of topic, so I found two; on the one hand I had Paul Kennedy who was very interested in the structures of empire, and on the other I had a man called Frank Turner who you might know through his book 'The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain', but who was very interested in the structures of Victorian intellectual and scientific life; I also had a span when I was able to be in Oxford for a couple of years as a Rhodes Scholar in which I had very useful conversations with John Prest who was my moral tutor at Balliol, and who had just written this wonderful little book 'The Botanic Garden and the Recreation of Paradise'; I also then came in contact with Richard Grove and began to think about environmental history, and around that time I also began to look at the kinds of arguments which Chris Bayly was making about the making of the second British empire; so all of these things really came together in a PhD which I finished here in Cambridge as a Research Fellow in the 1990s, and which then later on I worked up as a book while I was at Oxford and then at Virginia; I had four years at Harvard, then I went to Yale to do the PhD; I left after two years and went to Oxford; I came back to Yale two years later when I had used my two years of Rhodes money and I wanted another year of funding to finish the PhD; I then came to Cambridge as a Research Fellow which in some ways I think of as the luckiest break of my career in terms of not just the research time, and there's no more precious research time than your years as a research fellow because one really has a chance to both work very deeply and also read very widely; also the people I was able to come into contact with at that time; I was in Chris Bayly's college and worked very closely with him, but I also became friendly with Chris Clark and with a number of other people who are still part of my extended Cambridge world

1:01:56:00 Chris Bayly had an extraordinary gift for listening and for intelligent conversation, and for helping others recognise what it is they should be reading or thinking about next; Chris tended to have his best conversations when you were sitting around his fire with a glass, and he might ask you what it is you had been doing that day; he would say "that's very interesting, have you thought of this?", so he was in a way, after I had finished my PhD, to the extent that one has a kind of post-doctoral supervisor; that was the role that he filled; and around that time too, he was himself turning to work on science and writing 'Empire and Information', so that the traffic worked in both directions

1:03:26:00 My experience of being an undergraduate at Harvard is that there was a kind of enthusiasm about intellectual life that I've never actually seen among even the brightest English undergraduates; we would come back from our lectures in the morning to lunch and we would talk over lunch about what we had learnt in our lectures and what we thought about, and one would discover courses which you yourself might want to take; I think that has to do with the fact that the nature of the academic trajectory in the best American universities is that is driven by the decisions which the student makes on a term by term basis about which courses they are going to attend; this means that students have a sense of responsibility and also power in terms of crafting their path; this meant that one could choose to go to do a course with Seamus Heaney on the history of poetry, one could go to Stephen J. Gould's lectures on the history of evolution, to Daniel Bell's lectures on sociology, so one had this very active sense of wanting to know more about the things one did not know about and this was something quite alive in terms of undergraduate conversation; this didn't just involve reading or lectures, it also involved forms of what you might think of as cultural consumption; somebody would say to you, "I'm going after lunch to museum to see the exhibition. Would you like to come?" or a conversation would arise that at seven we would go to the Harvard film archive to see 'Battleship Potemkin'; so there was a whole kind of cultural education which was happening side by side with what was happening in the classrooms; I think it is a very expensive system, it lasts four years, but I'm a strong advocate of the American system in terms of allowing undergraduates to change their minds about what it is that they are interested in; our system is very unforgiving about choices made by ill-informed eighteen year olds about what it is they want to do; what Harvard meant is that I could do about quarter of my courses on art history, I did courses not just in the sciences in my first year but also in history, philosophy, Chinese studies, language courses; I thought the spirit of Harvard in my time was certainly much more intellectually curious than I certainly found Oxford, which was my first British experience; I think that I grew a lot in Oxford but I grew through my own work and through the specialist seminars in my own sub-discipline, so I was trained as a professional, as an Imperial historian, in Oxford which I would not have been anywhere else, but I continued to live off the things which I had read between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, and develop the kinds of ideas and insights which had come to me as an undergraduate; the graduate school experiences are also very different; I was at Yale as a graduate student and as with all American universities there is a very long period of course work; some people think this is a waste of time and I've heard some undergraduates say that they don't have the time to spend five years on a PhD, but for me it was an extraordinary enriching experience in which I was able to work my way into all sorts of historical literatures which previously I hadn't read seriously; once again that represents a body of capital which I've lived off for a very long time; the advantage of the British system, and I've seen this in it's products, is it's unfussy attitude towards the business of writing; I think the English undergraduate system provides the most extraordinary training in the production of essays and in a kind of attitude to writing which treats writing not as a kind of romantic long task but is something which involves several clearly defined performances which are contained within particular structures of time and which are followed by other performances; I think the upshot of this is that if you take an English trained undergraduate and you provide them with clues as to what they should be thinking and reading about, they actually move very rapidly into new areas of expertise; so I think they come often with far less capital but they are able to move with an extraordinary amount of confidence and power - I'm talking of course of the more able ones - coming out of this very focused 'A' level followed by undergraduate disciplinary training; I do think there is a problem with PhD in the British university system; I think that three or four year PhDs is probably too short, in particular where people are going to do forms of archival research or fieldwork which requires them to travel or learn new languages; so I think, even though it's a more expensive system, I would err on the American side; I think that it tends to produce more substantial PhDs, but it is true to say that the flip side of that is that Americans can spend an awfully long time producing something which may not, in fact, be quite so paradigm shifting

1:10:45:10 I have always aspired towards titles which to a greater or lesser extent express the argument so the title of my PhD thesis was 'Imperial Science and a Scientific Empire: Kew Gardens and the uses of nature'; the argument was essentially working in two directions simultaneously, looking at the role of European expansion in constituting the natural sciences, and in the other direction at the role of the natural sciences in both making possible, making profitable, and also making ideologically possible forms of imperial expansion; the argument which came out of that then became the central argument of the book 'Natures Government' is that what we have in the western tradition in the early modern period is the emergence of an idea that those who had the most full and complete knowledge of nature had both special responsibilities and prerogatives to organize and govern nature, and that there is therefore a kind of ideology of empire which comes out of natural history and the transmutation of forms of Christian providentialism into political economy which at least by the nineteenth century world creates what we can think of as a kind of Imperialism of the Enlightenment where empire comes to be justified not just in terms of the benefits it will yield to us but the benefits it will yield to the colonised; so I became interested in thinking about the kinds of connections between science as a set of practices but also science as ideology, science which is something that is contained in particular ideas of imperial prerogative and right; I think that if you were to rewind the tape to our earlier conversation, what in a sense I was exploring was precisely the Comtean/Bernalian positivist attitude which I had had as a boy from twelve to fifteen; in some ways what I ended up looking at as expressed within the theatre of European colonial formation was essentially a particular kind of positivistic scientific doctrine married to a doctrine of political prerogative which I was being moved by in one way at an early period of my own life

1:13:55:11 On the idea that the European empires were fundamentally different I would probably argue the exact opposite, that this is the narcissism of small differences; if one looks at the structures and processes and institutions of European expansion from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries there is an extraordinary convergence between the forms of European empire from the Spanish across to the French and the British; this isn't just simply in terms of structure like the Casa de Contratracion and Consejo de Indias being models for things like the Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies and the Colonial Office and the Colonial Committee of the Privy Council, but also in terms of many of the political, economic, cultural, ambitions, even the forms of society; the great person on this is Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra at the University of Texas who has really been ploughing this furrow for quite a while particularly from the Hispanic side to show the ways in which in fact the forms of seventeenth century Anglo colonization particularly in the future United States and New England essentially follow on directly from Spanish precedents; there has also been a very nice article done by Elijah Gould on the kind of connected histories; this is an argument which in fact in terms of my own work at the moment I'm actually trying to give a larger expression of; in terms of thinking about the ways in which forms of imperial collaboration in fact have been in the midst of a great deal of competition and violence, have in fact been characteristic of the European Imperial out-thrust; when we think of the Hapsburg empires in the early-modern period, or when we think of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what we are looking at really are multi-national European empires operating underneath the flag; they are in the phrase that I've used on one occasion in one text, they are "masked condominia", and they are essentially condominia which are operating under the mask of a particular European national flag, whether British or French; for example, if you a looking at the British Empire in India in the early nineteenth century you have got an awful lot of German medical and scientific personnel; similarly in terms of the early period of Hapsburg expansion you have got Irish, Hungarians, people from every part of the continent who are present within the structures of Spanish imperial expansion; so I think there is a whole theatre, range of phenomena, which remain to be discovered when we start to see the forest and not just the trees, and look at the forms of interdependence and of connection which exists between quite distinct strands of European imperial out-thrusts

1:18:19:01 Having just set up a Masters in World History, obviously world history does not mean a history of every part of the world all at the same time, but it opens up the lens of a historian to pay attention to phenomena in dispersed places via one of two methodologies, one is the comparative methodology which looks at phenomena in different places and seeks to understand through acts of reciprocal comparison how it is that historical phenomena constituted in one place happen to be related to phenomena similar to or different from processes which emerge in another, and one can help to recognize the distinctive features of one society through these kinds of comparison; or indeed the connective methodology where one instead seeks out those processes, structures, personalities, who or which provide forms of linkage and connection between otherwise dispersed historical phenomena; so the work of the world historian becomes the process of research, not into the world as a whole necessarily, but into these processes which can be understood as having occurred in different places but which can fruitfully be compared to or understood through their connection with phenomena elsewhere; so that what we do in terms of training them is to provide them with a core course in transnational history; now I have passed on the leadership of this course to one of my colleagues but at least in my day what that involved was thinking about oceanic history, global economic history, environmental history, the debates around Histoire Croisée, entangled histories, thinking about comparatively connected histories methodologies, thinking about ideas of cultural hybridity, thinking about how one would set about constructing some kind of research project in trans-national history; it has to be said that it is quite likely that most of these students once they have done this course will end up doing a piece of research for their Master's thesis which is thoroughly grounded within a national historiography, simply because it is in fact a lot harder to actually do the kind of multi-archival, multi-national, multi-linguistic work which world history requires; so to a certain extent world history represents a kind of aspiration but it is a very demanding game, and essentially when we operate in a space in which the resources of history are still organized on a national basis, and which most of our students come to us with very little foreign language skills, we end up doing rather a lot of things in or through British archives; that's simply the nature of the game

1:22:33:21 We first met when you were giving a seminar on Braudel at Patrick O'Brien's series; he in some ways kick started global history in Britain in the mid 1990s which was a series on global history over the very long term in which he sought to approach the subject by having papers given by a number of speakers about particular global historians; you gave a paper mostly on Braudel's Mediterranean with a little bit on Civilization and Capitalism; I was talking a bit about my childhood; the Caribbean which I grew up in had three historians of extraordinary cultural prestige; these were Eric Williams who at that time was Prime Minister of Trinidad, C.L.R. James who was then in exile in London, and Walter Rodney; of the three of these only Rodney was a close family friend, but of the three, Williams was indeed probably the most profound influence; Williams' arguments in an extremely subtle book, a book which in the last decade or so has found its way back into scholarly visibility having been in some ways exiled for a generation and a half; 'Capitalism and Slavery' first emerged as an Oxford DPhil in 1938 and was published in 1944, although not published in Britain until 1964; Williams' argument is essentially about interdependence of historical phenomena in several places, and about the ways in which the forms of economic dynamism created by Atlantic trade proved to be quite critical in terms of the constitution of forms of economic and social modernity within Britain; this of course is an argument which runs somewhat counter to the kinds of orthodoxies which were prevalent when, for example, you were coming of age as a historian when there was a very strong set of arguments about the endogenous origins of things like capitalism and the industrial revolution, and Williams' argument is a strongly exogenous one; it's saying that something happens between 1500 and 1800 which changes everything; I think that that in some ways we are on different sides of a spectrum of global history because I think that your own work as a global historian has had very much at the centre of it the idea of there being far longer continuities which both persist within these early-modern global transformations, and shape them, shape the kinds of outcomes which constitute modernity; my own interpretive bias is towards asking the question -- more or less productively -- “what difference did these forms of imperial process make for the kinds of phenomena which appeared to continue from the medieval into the late modern period?”; in other words, how do we bring global history into the question of the transition to capitalism, into the question of the origins of the scientific revolution and its development, into the question of the origins of the industrial revolution; in terms of all three of these big questions my own interpretive bias is towards thinking that the world mattered a great deal; I'm comforted for example by some of Simon Schaffer's and Nick Dew's work on the later bits of Newton's 'Principia' in which what they are able to argue is that it's very nice that Newton can do interesting mathematics in Cambridge, or out in a village, or do some interesting experiments at the Mint, but so much that occurs in the second book of the 'Principia' depends on the measurement of tides in the Bay of Fundy, depends on the astronomical and pendulum observations in several parts of the world, and really for something as apparently endogenously derived as Newtonian physics one actually does need the world as a whole to make sense; this principle applies equally I think if one thinks of the transition to capitalism or the industrial revolution; I am quite attracted to the (somewhat under-developed as a full argument) suggestion of James Blaut that what we have in the Atlantic economy in the early modern period is an important set of exchanges which help to expand the space for the market form in the societies of western Europe; the idea of a transition to capitalism deriving simply from forms of saving and consumption and exchange within the European continent cannot explain the kinds of transformations that take place over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for which in fact these kinds of long-distance exchange are critical; I think this for me is a persuasive insight; it's not, in other words, that forms of capitalist relations begin in that period let alone in some place, as indeed you've shown, like England, but it is certainly the case that the emergence of the market society in its dominant form depends on the kinds of exchanges, and particularly on things like the kinds of bullion inflow which are the products of this expansion of Europe into the wider world; when we come to this mysterious thing called the industrial revolution, even if we argue that it only really reaches its machine-production climax in the middle of the nineteenth century as the economic historians were telling us from the 1970s, there are a number of really important transformations that depend on long-distance trade; for this the work of Joseph Inikori and Nuala Zahedieh is extraordinarily valuable; Inikori's demonstration of the importance of African consumers for broadcloth production; Nuala Zahedieh description of the importance of the Atlantic economy for the emergence of a copper industry in Britain in the seventeenth century; these are all parts of the puzzle towards not a kind of simplistic recuperation of the Williams' thesis, that is to say, any attempt to argue that it's the profits in any simple sense in slaving or the slave trade which produces the industrial revolution, that would quickly run adrift, but what we are looking at here is new forms of economic infrastructure which derive from these structures of international exchange; this is all part of my response to the Williams position; the other person who has been extraordinarily important to me was Braudel; Braudel died while I was an undergraduate and I happened by chance to read a wonderful very short tribute to him, written by Bernard Bailyn, an extremely clever American historian at Harvard; Bailyn's piece on Braudel turned me onto Braudel so that by the time I was in my third year at university I was reading the whole line of things, not just the Mediterranean things but also some of the methodological essays; what I was finding, for example, when I came to do the thesis on sugar cane breeding what was very important to me was that description that Braudel makes in volume 1 of 'The Mediterranean' about what he calls the "Mediterranean Atlantic", and the particular pattern of social transformations that are associated with the expansion of sugar production, and that set of processes which we call the sugar revolution; that became in a way an anchor for the line of interpretation that I followed in the thesis in which I looked at the structures of colonial society and its impact on processes of cultural life; so Williams twined into Braudel and then twined into this other figure, Walter Rodney; when I look back at it now it's quite an abrupt and, in some ways, vulgar argument, but the argument of how Europe under-developed Africa which looks essentially at the impact of the slave trade in terms of turning Africa's economies into something which was organized around and through international exchange with long-term enduring consequences; I think it is actually a very profound argument; so that that set of analyses which surround Rodney, about the development of under-development also I think were very influential in having me think about what are the kinds of linkages which exist between metropolis and periphery, how are metropolis and periphery co-constitutive, how are the forms of, not just centres of brokerage and exchange, but also the centres of knowledge accumulation, centres of calculation in the Latourian sense, as they are constituted in the metropolitan centres, how are these related to the forms of coloniality which emerge at the periphery which organise peripheries in a particular way relative to centres? Those I think are three early and persistent influences; I think later on someone like Chris Bayly became very important in terms of thinking about the idea of polycentric historical change; it is an idea that Chris is developing in 'Birth of the Modern World' although it's not taken I think to its fullest maturity; there is certainly more to be done, but there is a nascent argument there which is half developed about the ways in which the kinds of processes that we think of of constituting the nineteenth century world depended on the forms of interaction between historical process between several places at the same time; this it seems to me is a very powerful methodology to bring to global history where we don't assume that there is "a" centre or that there is "a" axis around which the world turns, but instead there is this complicated conversation, rather like an interference pattern in physics where one has several centres generating shock which culminate in complicated matrices of interactions; but this is exactly what's happening in global history; there are forms of multiple centres; so the book which I am trying to finish at the moment which is called 'The Caribbean and the Making of the Modern World' is about the Caribbean, not as "the" maker of the modern world but as this very important crucible in which sets of global experience come to be constituted in new ways; so that if we are looking at elements of the making of the modern western European economy as I've just talked about in terms of the history of capitalism, or whether we are thinking about the constitution of forms of ideology like pan-Africanism or pan-Americanism, this particular little region of the world has an extraordinary role in terms of constituting these forms of cosmopolitanism within it's particular compass, not on it's own but in dialogue with these other partners in that system of exchange which we call global history