Last month, British historian David Starkey caused controversy on the BBC’s Question Time program after mistakenly calling journalist Medhi Hasan ‘Ahmed’. The response to Starkey’s mistake saw him labelled a ‘bigot’ and a ‘xenophobe’. Perhaps just as significant as Starkey’s gaffe however, was the long speech that immediately preceded it. Discussing freedom of speech in relation to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Starkey suggested that a lack of civil liberties had restricted the intellectual and cultural development of Islam. 

Of course, Starkey is entitled to his opinion and understanding of history. But this is not the first time he has made highly controversial remarks. Explaining the London Riots of 2011, he infamously claimed on the BBC’s Newsnight programme that “The problem is that the whites have become black”. Inevitably, these remarks caused a huge backlash against Starkey. Critics have often accused him of being nothing but a ‘troll’, an individual who deliberately insights anger in order to get a response. This might be true, but the controversies surrounding Starkey highlight that ‘History’, and the way people choose to remember it, are still deeply political, and capable of stimulating ferocious debate. History is a study of the past, but it has modern implications.

A prime example, and someone Starkey alluded to in his comments on free speech, is David Irving. In 2006 Irving was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for, “trivialising, grossly playing down and denying the Holocaust”. He was released after thirteen months, but has since been banned from entering Austria, Germany, Canada and Italy.

Holocaust denial, the act of downplaying or outright denying the holocaust, is illegal in a host of countries. Irving, who has subsequently denied his denial of the holocaust, still sticks to many of his revisionist claims about Nazism, the Second World War and Jewish history. Through selected use of evidence, he has tried to suggest that the history of Nazi Germany and its treatment of Jews has been distorted for ulterior motives. Irving is widely discredited as a historian, with few taking his work seriously. As an artefact however, he is deeply informative, embodying the continued connection between the past, the way it is remembered, and the present.

Another example of a historian who revealed this continuing connection between the past and the present was the late Eric Hobsbawn. Hobsbawn was, and still is, a hugely respected historian. His trilogy of books on the origins of the modern world; The Age of Revolution (1962), The Age of Capital (1975) and The Age of Empire (1987), were groundbreaking in their fusion of the relationship between social sciences, history and economics, and are still read by history students to this day. ...