The State of International History: Where We’ve Been, Where We Are, and Where We’re Going

There are two things I’d like to talk with you about today. First, I want to talk about how our field—“diplomatic history, ” as it used to be called, or the history of international relations, or even just plain “international history”—has changed over the last thirty or forty years—that is, even since I did my own graduate work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And then I want to move on to what many of you might find a more interesting, although not unrelated, topic, and that’s the question of how this field should develop in the years to come. But let me start by talking neither about the past nor about the future of the discipline, but about the present. Where do we stand now? What are we to make of the kind of work that is being done today? This is not an easy question to answer in any simple way. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the sentence that Charles Dickens used at the start of A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—but I couldn’t get that sentence out of my mind when I was trying to decide what to say here today. In some ways, we’re living in a golden age: the best works today—I think, for example, of Adam Tooze’s history of the “making and 2 breaking of the Nazi economy, ” his book The Wages of Destruction—are quite extraordinary, better than anything that had been produced in the past. Just compare that book with another book on the same topic that came out in 1959, Germany’s Economic Preparations for War by Burton Klein. Tooze’s analysis is just much deeper and more penetrating: what is impressive is not simply the mass of evidence that he presents, although that’s extraordinary in itself, but the way that evidence is marshaled into an argument—and even more the way that argument forces you to rethink, in a very fundamental way, your whole understanding of the origins of the Second World War. Or compare Paul Kennedy’s Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism (which came out in 1980) with Raymond Sontag’s Germany and England: Background of Conflic