As I’ve remarked before, I am never going to become a popular writer of history: my books will never be sold in railway stations or airports, or reviewed in proper newspapers or included in celebrities’ Books of the Year choices; they won’t ever have embossed gold writing on the cover; I won’t ever be invited to the Hay Festival or the Chalke Valley History Festival or the like, and as for television… Partly this is the result of wilful refusal to submit to mainstream tastes (no, Lord Bragg, I won’t talk about bloody Spartacus…), and partly sheer inability to think or write in the right sort of terms even if I wanted to – I mean, my idea of an accessible work for a general audience was a polemical account of modern theories of imperialism and the reception of the Roman Empire…
This is fine; I accept my limitations. Yes, obviously I’m envious of the fame and the money, and the gold embossed lettering, but not to such an extent that I’m willing to make any of the necessary compromises. What I would stress is that this isn’t an ivory-tower refusal to engage with non-academic audiences, or an elitist dismissal of popular tastes, let alone an insistence that only proper academics ought to have the right to present the past. It’s true that part of me still thinks there ought to be more scope for less traditional and more challenging approaches to the past (i.e. mine); but so long as there’s a demand for conventional narrative and descriptive accounts, there’s obvious scope for the professional writers of such accounts – those whose claim to attention is primarily their writing ability rather than their original research – to do their thing, not least because someone like me isn’t remotely capable of doing it.
Of course it isn’t that simple. There are some seriously heavyweight academic historians who are capable of producing popular, accessible narrative histories of the ancient world or the Roman Empire, without losing an iota of their academic credibility; it’s just that I’m not one of them. I don’t know how far they perceive a distinction between their more and less academic publications, or whether it’s more of a spectrum – and I would say that, however they view it, it is occasionally a problem when it comes to advising students on bibliography and citation, as I do get the sense that they often assume that a given author operates always in the same register, and therefore a popular book by historian X carries the same intellectual heft in a footnote as X’s JRS article.
And on the other side, there clearly are popular historians who would resent my implication that they lack the credentials of a ‘proper’ academic. I was once asked to do a review of a proposal for a trade book, which was a very strange experience (and I don’t imagine the publisher will ask me again in a hurry…). The author had published various books on different aspects of ancient history, and now proposed to move into a specialised sub-field, despite having clearly read only a couple of relevant bits of scholarship; the pitch could be caricatured as “yes, there’s a load of tedious academic analytical stuff on this topic, but I can produce an exciting narrative which no one else has bothered to do”. The possibility that this topic might not really lend itself to a conventional politically-focused narrative wasn’t considered.
Now, I’ve no way of knowing whether the author was proposing to spend several years reading up on existing research before writing the book, or whether they had already reassured themselves that this wasn’t necessary. In either case, it was clearly assumed, by author and publisher alike, to be a perfectly normal thing for someone to switch from one aspect of ancient history to a completely different one. The contrast with reviewing proposals for academic publications, let alone research grants, where the track record and credibility of the proposer in relation to the specific topic is a central concern, is striking. I can only make sense of it as the belief that it’s the author’s proven ability to write a popular book that matters, not any other sort of specialist expertise – and yet the proposal was also built around the dismissal of academic work in the field, proposing to offer a powerful interpretation where the narrow specialists had feared to tread.
Whereas the academic historian has to present their credentials in order to win a contract to publish – and I imagine this was probably true of people like Mary Beard and Greg Woolf when they began to write more general works – for the popular historian, it’s the book itself (and their publishers’ efforts) that then establishes their credibility when it comes to that topic, and gets them invitations to book festivals etc. No, it’s not the sort of credibility that will win them invitations to serious academic conferences; but expecting such invitations seems as presumptuous as me demanding fame, money and gold-embossed lettering when I’m not prepared (or able) to write the sort of books that merit them.
Sphinx 
Very interesting. I’m wondering whether it isn’t possible for some authors to bridge the divide – not writing in two genres but writing weighty academic scholarship that also sells well. Maybe it’s more common for history of other periods. I’m thinking of something like Tony Judy’s Post War. Was everywhere in the bookshops but – lack of footnotes aside – was a pretty serious work of scholarship, or Chris Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, or some of Schama’s Embarassment of Riches, just to give a few examples. Maybe it’s just academic ancient history that doesn’t sell?
It’s perfectly possible – but I’m not sure it’s very common anywhere. Probably is easier with more modern topics. Interesting that attempts by ancient historians to write Big Books have tended to be long-term overviews – Ian Morris, Walter Scheidel.
Incidentally, should have mentioned that this was partly inspired by your blog post this morning – students relying heavily on ‘popular’ history books is at least as problematic as them relying on out-of-date ones…
I think there’s a terrific trade book that you could write, that pretty much nobody else could, that American publishers in particular would fight for, and that (I don’t think) would require much by way of intellectual compromise on your part. It’d be in three parts: 100+ pages on Thucydides, 100+ pages on the subsequent reception of Thucydides over 2,000+ years, and 100+ pages on the uses of Thucydides in contemporary international geopolitics. I can think of academics who could do one or perhaps two of those things, but not I think all three. And it’s the final section that would engage the American publishers, because, as you know better than the rest of us, American political science in general and American international relations in particular is weirdly invested in him. I think you have a lot to say about Thucydides, and I think there’s a much broader audience for what you have to say outside the academy than there is inside. And I think you could write it pretty much in your sleep, because it’s clear from everything that has gone up on this blog over the years that you don’t have a problem writing clear, straightforward, non-academic prose. If you don’t ever want to write that book, that’s fine. Horses for courses, each to his own, and so on. But you absolutely could, you would get some of the worldly rewards that flow to people who write popular books if you did, it’d be a cracking book, and you wouldn’t get people like Glen Bowersock pointing out that you don’t really know what you’re talking about, which is a bonus.
Was about to say that I didn’t think this contradicted my argument, and then realised that the relevant paragraph was in draft post but dropped out of the final version, partly because I think I’ve made similar comments before… In brief, my sense is that history (whether trade books or television documentaries) is especially conservative – recall the debate around the Chalke Valley History Festival last year, in which one argument was pretty well “what public wants is Nazis, WWII, and Tudor biographies, so we can’t help ending up with lots of male speakers”. Lots of narrative, lots of biography, all nice and safe and familiar. In popular science and social science there seems to be much more scope for books that reveal the world to be more complex, that focus on the processes of discovery and the continuing debates rather than just presenting a load of information as ‘known’. A Thucydides book in straight ‘history’ terms is Donald Kagan on the Peloponnesian War or Victor Davis Hanson on western warfare. I could write the sort of Thucydides book you suggest precisely because it *isn’t* such a straight history book…