What are you reading? I’ve been reading Ged Martin, Past Futures: The Impossible Necessity of History (from University of Toronto Press, 2004).
Ged Martin is a British historian long interested in Canada and other countries that were Britain's empire. He has written some good and provocative books, notably on constitutional history. What distinguishes this book – the most entertaining work about the hows and whys of doing history I’ve encountered since Historians’ Fallacies – is his extraordinary range of reference.
Maybe Ged Martin hasn’t read everything, but he’s read most of it, and he was taking notes all the time. This book is about how to do history, but he illustrates his propositions with fresh, funny, startling quotations or anecdotes by the score, usually demonstrating someone's incomprehension of either his or her own time or some past time. Because he has worked so much on Canadian subjects, many of the best are Canadian. But he also quotes liberally from British, Australian, Irish, and American sources. They are worth the price of admission in themselves.
I discovered some years ago that I owe something to Ged Martin, and I’ve felt oddly about it ever since. I once interviewed him in the early 1990s for a radio program I was making. Years late I wrote a book on the subject. And years after that, I discovered, glancing at the “Ideas” transcript, that an elegant observation I made in the preface of the book was not my own fresh and original musing, as I fondly imagined, but a very direct borrowing from what Ged Martin had said to me in our interview. I remembered the specific ideas almost verbatim, but I so completely forgot where I got them that I thought they were my own.
I’m glad to say my book 1867 did warmly acknowledge Ged Martin’s wisdom and wit. But the shock gave me a vivid appreciation of how easily a writer can slip into the position from which accusations of plagiarism arise.
So I am relieved not to appear in Past Futures as an example of egregious appropriation (or worse) by historians. And glad, too, to catch in it a hint of influences exchanged. Martin briefly cites my Louisbourg Portraits in Past Futures, and he also mentions something about the song “Rule Britannia” that sounds quite like something I had said about it in my book. If his idea draws on mine, he’s welcome.
The philosophy of history is a minority taste, I suppose. But if you are part of that minority that ponders what history is for and how it can be done well, I recommend Ged Martin. That’s Past Futures: The Impossible Necessity of History, from University of Toronto Press in 2004.
