The nature of ‘international history’

The status of ‘diplomatic history’ today is not what it should be, or what it used to be. It enjoys a bad press both in Britain and in the United States. It is supposedly devoid of intellectual content, a refuge only for painstaking plodders, ‘dry-as-dusts’, unable to see the wood for the trees. In France and elsewhere it comes under the general ban laid on all examples of I'histoire événementielle. Even in Britain, despite its metamorphosis over the last twenty-five years into ‘international history’ (the history of ‘international relations’), it is dismissed as élitist by social historians, largely ignored by economic historians, and lies almost totally outside the ken of oral historians, psychohistorians and the various attempts now being made to adapt mathematical and statistical techniques to the study of historical data. It is equally a matter of contempt to many students of the new branch of the study of political ‘international relations’. To them it is devoid of intellectual content; its practitioners are men who are afraid of any conceptual approach to the subject, persons only concerned with the study of minutiae.

In view of this persistent hostility, and in view of the theme of these essays, it is worth while beginning with an exposition of the concept of ‘international history’ and a defence of the concept against its detractors. Historically speaking, the study of international history originated in the study of the relations between states; in particular, of the relations between the major European states in the nineteenth century and of the culmination of these relations in the First World War.