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History, economic history and the numbers game

The larger issue, the academic/popular divide, has provoked professional historians to air their troubled views in books, articles and inaugural lectures. Meanwhile, journalists with historical or literary tastes have used reviewing as a convenient platform from which to lambast academics for grinding the past into boring dust. For the history-conscious public the gap has had filling of a sort provided by television and tourism. They have combined to feed a nostalgia for a past which has come to be enshrined in museums and theme-parks, in castles and country houses; to be grubbed up by archaeological digs or metal-detectors; or to be discovered by dressing up to recreate 'Tudor experiences'. Fact and fiction have been cheerfully conflated by films generating bogus history or by the fashionable television device of the 'drama documentary'. It has all helped to keep the heritage business buzzing. If disenchanted professionals have watched such manifestations with growing distaste, some have come to locate the cause of the trouble in their own ranks. Over the years academic historians have been periodically denounced by colleagues for failing to reach the lay public. Calls for a revival of narrative have in some instances grown into a sense of guilt about their own learned analyses. One member of the professional clan, David Cannadine, has recently revived the denunciatory calls, making his point in terms which seem to verge upon the apocalyptic.