David Starkey's "authority" as a historian

Update:  Here's another re-heated blog post from some time ago, now that yet another historian (see the last one about Niall Ferguson) has yet again decided to blow out a bumful of noxious prejudice under the cover of his "authority" as a historian.  In this instance, Dr Starkey informs us that "it is 'ludicrous' to suggest that historical novelists have authority".  Well, I'm not really sure why he thinks historians and historical novelists do the same thing. Hilary Mantel, for example, makes no claim to be a historian, and I expect that nearly all if not actually all her readers agree that there's a difference between what historians do and what historical novelists do.  But let's focus on Starkey and his claims to be an "authority".  I wrote the post below in response to Dr Starkey's claim, during the London riots of 2011, that the cause of those riots was a "particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture" that was, he said, "black" in origin, citing Jamaican roots, though he's clear that part of the problem, in his view, is that whites have adopted this Malady Of Black Origin. (I'd like to be clear--I'm not accusing him of racism.)  I repost the post now because of what it reveals about Dr Starkey's lack of authority as a historian.  He is no doubt a very great authority on the history of the Tudor court and the history of monarchy in general, and there is nothing wrong with that.  However, in contrast to most historians of monarchy, Starkey seems entirely ignorant of other aspects of history, as if the last 50 years of the discipline's development are entirely alien to him.  For example, *if* it's true that the riots were attributable to black-in-origin nihilism, then where does that nihilism come from?  As the post says, Starkey mentions Jamaica, but fails to connect Jamaica to its past in the violence of the slave trade and slavery.  At best, Starkey is a very insular historian, at worst a deeply ignorant one, and in either case not an "authority". *It isn't.

Here's the latest from Starkeyland: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10049866/David-Starkey-it-is-ludicrous-to-suggest-that-historical-novelists-have-authority.html

Here's the old post.
  
On Newsnight the other night, David Starkey, one of Britain’s most eminent historians and certainly Britain’s most stentorian historian, made what, frankly, can only be described as a complete arse out of himself.  Asked about the recent riots, he said he’d been re-reading Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.  What Powell got right, said Starkey, was that immigration would lead to violence.  What he got wrong, apparently, was that the violence would not be racial in the sense of black versus white, but that black culture has pervaded white culture and made white culture violent as well.  In Starkey’s words: “the whites have become black.”  Now, to be fair, as this suggests, if Starkey is a racist, he is not any kind of biological essentialist.  As he also said, “It’s not skin colour, it’s culture.”  On that basis, he says that a “particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion.  Black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois that’s been intruded on England.”  There are links below to excerpts from Powell’s speech (you can find the whole 20-minute enchilada on Youtube, if you can stand it) and to the full Newsnight debate (just over 10 minutes long). 

Powell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23MEL7424aQ

Starkey: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14513517

Okay, then.  As a historian myself, I feel I must say something about this.  Several things, actually....  To begin with, David Starkey first made himself famous as a historian of Henry VIII, who, as Starkey is very much aware, was a double-divorcee, who had two other wives executed, killed most of his chief ministers, trashed the monasteries, and who generally behaved like a tyrannical psychopath.  So, while there is no evidence that Henry was black, there is nonetheless no doubt that he had issues.  Furthermore, having done a whole TV series on the history of the English/British monarchy since the days when kings had such fabulous names as Athelstan, Ethelwulf, Offa, and Cnut (the Danish Connection), Dr Starkey also no doubt knows about how the modern monarchy was founded in 1066 by a man called William the Bastard, and how his son William Rufus was possibly assassinated in the New Forest, a forest claimed by the crown to the exclusion of peasants who would be executed for trespassing on to feed themselves.  Then there was the unfortunate misunderstandings over Thomas a Beckett, and the lurid business of how Edward II was killed by a roasting spit being inserted into his bum, and the princes in the Tower, and so on, and so, and so on, and so on. And indeed we could continue all the way through to recent times when Edward VIII was a Nazi sympathiser, and indeed the present, as Princess Michael of Kent is also reputedly somewhat right wing, and the Duke of Edinburgh isn't exactly famous for the kindess of his remarks about the foreign and the brown.  No doubt Starkey will be able to recount how there are numerous complex historical explanations why violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of royalty culture is entirely different from violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of gangsters.  And let’s take him at his word and on his own terms.  For the sake of argument, at least for the time being, let’s assume that a millennium and more of often murderous monarchical mayhem is somehow more respectable or at least explicable than the apparently more appalling and, for Dr Starkey, black, TV-thieving antics of a small minority of modern Britain’s multicultural yoof.  It’s difficult, I know, but if we try really hard we can do it.  And there is a point to doing this, as you’ll see later on, if you’re patient enough....    

And let’s look as well a little further down at the lower end of social scale—and although Starkey is no social historian, he is undoubtedly a practiced expert on looking down on those on the lower end of the social scale—and let’s see if we can find any evidence of violent, destructive, nihilistic [insert politically-charged epithet here] culture there.  Some may see clearly political movements as the Peasants’ Revolt, Chartism, trades’ unionism etc as entirely different from the rioting and looting etc that we’ve recently seen.  Many would say, as Starkey said himself, that the former had clearly articulated political grievances and aims and the latter did not.  Nevertheless, I find it hard to separate entirely the sense of entitlement and the antics of the rioters from those of the bankers who wreaked havoc on our national and on the global economy, and from the politicians who stole not tens or hundreds but thousands from the taxpayers for their duck houses, moats, and phantom second homes.  What’s good for the goose and so forth....  Of course what’s really different are the scales of damage and the scales of punishment in operation here.  The particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of the economic and political elite is immeasurably more destructive than that of the looters, and yet is far, far less subject to any kind of punishment.  And if that’s not a political issue, then I sure as hell don’t know what is. 

Anyhow, I said let’s take Starkey on his own terms, and then I failed to do so in the above paragraph, so, to get back on track....  Let’s say that the whites have become black and therefore now exhibit a particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture.  That would require us to pretend that this kind of behaviour on the part of whites is new.  That is, to propose that there’s never been any such thing as, for example, a violent, destructive, nihilistic culture of football hooliganism.  A proposition that will come as a surprise to many people.  Or else that football hooliganism is completely different from the recent rioting, or else perhaps football hooliganism was a black thing too.  And let’s pretend that Britain's city streets at night are entirely free of aggressive drunks, unless they’re black, or whites who have become black.  And let’s pretend that all white Englishmen overseas behave themselves with impeccable manners, and never resort to shouting, fighting, vomiting, and urinating in public in the cities of continental Europe.  Indeed, let’s pretend that Britain before the Windrush was and white Britain since still is a place of calm communality entirely populated by well-behaved ladies and gentleman.  And let’s say that all the violent, destructive nihilism of today owes its existence to a language which is wholly false, which is a Jamaican patois that’s been intruded on England.  Let’s pretend all these things.  Now, as a historian, Dr Starkey ought to be curious about where this new language (and behaviour, presumably) came from, what its historical origins are.  And I think we can trace it all back, as Starkey's own words about Jamaica almost admit, to the British Empire.  I’ll try to be brief—the point is made easily enough. 

That empire had its origins in the privateering (i.e. legalised piracy) of Francis Drake (“el Diablo”, as the Spanish called him) and other “sea dogs” who looted Spanish towns and treasure ships which were carrying booty that was itself looted by the Spanish from the New World and its native peoples.  When that ended after Elizabeth I died and King James made peace with Spain, English adventurers took to colonising the so-called "New World," whihc of course was hardly new to the people who lived there already and who were subjected to expropriation and genocide by European colonizers. Anyway, the richest colonies were the islands of the West Indies, including, of course, Jamaica, which was invaded by the English and taken from the Spanish in 1655 as part of Oliver Cromwell’s “Western Design”.  The reason Jamaica and the other islands were so rich was because their new inhabitants grew sugar.  But sugar was highly labour intensive, and so British merchants got themselves very lucratively involved in the business of capturing and kidnapping Africans and selling them to West Indian planters who would then use them and their descendants as slaves.  Those slaves soon outnumbered resident whites in the West Indies by as much as ten-to-one, and the small white minority had to use literally spectacular violence in a not-entirely-successful attempt to oppress as well as exploit the people they enslaved.  The Barbadian slave code, the model for other islands and to a lesser extent the North American mainland colonies, described blacks, without irony, as “an heathenish, brutish, and an uncertain dangerous kind of people,” and they were treated by law and beyond the law accordingly.  If you want details, check out Trevor Burnard’s Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World: full of sex and violence and a stonking good read.  But the point is, and I think it’s pretty clear by now: whites never needed to become black to become violent, destructive, and nihilistic.  And if black culture is violent, destructive, and nihilistic, who did they learn that from?  I’m tempted to say that the blacks have become white.  But I won’t, because that would be a noxious bumquack of reductive nonsense also.