A shot across the bow of American historians

"We have an embarrassment of riches at the moment," says the historian of Russia Orlando Figes, in this piece in the (London) Times. "British historians are acknowledged as being the best in the world."

That's the thesis of the author of the article, too, and she cites David Cannadine, Andrew Roberts, Ian Kershaw, and Richard Evans -- as well as Figes -- as among those who combine exemplary scholarship with extraordinary writing, their books bought by an eager public, their counsel sought by politicians.

Mostly, she's comparing England with the rest of Europe, where history is a more specialized, techical affair. America is oddly elided: Simon Schama (Columbia) and Linda Colley (Princeton) get placed in the lauded British-historian category, with no discussion of the significance of their current addresses.

There's something to the thesis, certainly. Princeton's Anthony Grafton once told me that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton each had a British "ringer": Someone who was simultaneously professionally pre-eminent but who could also sell books. He was thinking of Colley, Paul Kennedy, and Niall Ferguson. Somehow, Americans have a harder time pulling off that double-feat. (And it's all the more impressive that people like Kershaw and Figes stay in England, given that they could probably double their salaries by moving to a top U.S. college.)

The Times piece is not entirely self-congratulatory, acknowledging that Britain is parochially uninterested in scholarship from other countries.

P.S. England may or may not have the best historians, but copy-editing is a different story, to judge from the headline on that article (at least as of 8/1/08).