Not long ago I attended a lunch at which the guests were invited to discuss the Iraq debacle. It was deep in red-state America, but everybody present was an academic, and expressed due sentiments of horror and outrage. Most were also historians of empire, and started casting about for parallels. Is Iraq like Suez, some wondered? Or Cyprus, perhaps? Or is it most like India, where the British scampered away on a hastily determined timetable, keeping their hands clean of the bloodshed that followed? Nobody mentioned Northern Ireland, the place where many British soldiers serving in Iraq were trained in counter-insurgency. For my part, I was less struck by any single imperial precedent than by the historians' insistence on the present-day relevance of their subject. That history shapes us and our world ought to appear so self-evident as to set it above tie-ins with newspaper headlines. Yet history never repeats itself exactly; and while 'lessons can be learned' from the past, one can always conjure a multitude of pasts to choose from.

LRB 5 April 2007 | PDF Download