The Future of the Past: Big Questions in History - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2002

The Future of the Past: Big Questions in History. Peter Martland, editor. Pimlico Original. [pounds sterling]12.50 p.b. 164 pages. ISBN 0-7126-6856-X. This collection began life as a series of lectures in Cambridge's History Faculty in 1999-2000 and it was the Faculty that collectively has published this volume, a successor to Globalization in World History.

The lectures' aim was to place 'a range of broad historical themes and ideas' into 'some kind of perspective'. After a brief introduction by Prof. Christopher Andrew there are nine essays examining a wide range of topics: religious authority among Christians and Mohammedans; the Carolingian inheritance in Europe; an essay on 'What is Europe?'; the importance of population history; a new look at industrialisation; the nature of American domination of the twentieth century, or at least most of it; the nature of civil liberties; the collapse of those political ideologies that so dominated and corrupted life in the twentieth century; and, finally, 'culture at the start of the new millennium'. The essays are designed to stimulate thought and to encourage students to see the value of a 'long perspective' on current problems that only history can give.