David Horspool 

The best history books of 2016

The Raj, Nazi Germany and rural England – David Horspool on ambitious, disturbing and daring works of research
  
  

Lieutenant-General Punjab tea Maharajas
Every aspect of Indian life … the Lieutenant-General of the Punjab has tea with five Maharajas, two Rajas, and one Nawab in April 1875. Photograph: Popperfoto

Perhaps the most ambitious, compelling and hard-hitting history book published in 2016 came out at the very beginning of the year. The magnum opus of the late David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 (Macmillan) is an attempt to bring the results of an outpouring of scholarship from the past three decades to a wider audience. But it is much more than a simple work of synthesis. Cesarani’s book is also a daring act of revisionism. The author’s own exemplary contribution to the world of Holocaust memorialisation gives force to his argument that commemoration is not the best route to understanding such a complex, multifaceted event. Cesarani’s combination of clarity and nuance allows him to make good on a startling claim: “Unlike most previous narratives, this account contests whether Nazi anti-Jewish policy was systematic, consistent or even premeditated.”

The effects of this tragedy of unforeseen consequences transformed individuals and families all over Europe. The human rights lawyer Philippe Sands takes up the crisscrossing strands of four of these stories as they intersected in the city of Lviv in Baillie Gifford prize-winning East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Sands’s book is partly a family memoir, written with urgency and sensitivity, but its range is much wider, following the story of the men who introduced the two concepts quoted in his subtitle, genocide and crimes against humanity, as well as one of the perpetrators brought to justice at Nuremberg, Hans Frank. The book is an extraordinary work of research and evocative empathy, in which consciousness of present effects is never allowed to trump the complexities of the past.

A third book on the second world war, Norman Ohler’s Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany (translated by Shaun Whiteside, Allen Lane) cannot, in good conscience, be recommended without something of a health warning. Ohler is a German novelist whose approach to history can be rather dizzying by comparison with his professional contemporaries. And in telling the story of the Nazis’ (and Hitler’s own) addiction to artificial stimulants, especially methamphetamine, he is not afraid of making bold, possibly overblown statements. He describes the tablet prescribed to so many Germans, for example, as “National Socialism in pill form”, and interprets Hitler’s doctor’s notes to show the maximum possible use of such drugs. While he is careful to argue that neither Hitler himself nor the German population at large can possibly be exonerated on the grounds of their mind-altering habits, it has been suggested that the book’s popularity in Germany may have something to do with that very interpretation. But, for his description of the effects of drug consumption on the course of blitzkrieg alone, the book is well worth reading, even if with a sceptical eye.

Conquest comes in many forms, and Jon Wilson’s polemical India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire (Simon & Schuster) is a forceful reminder that Britain has its own messy past to come to terms with. Wilson junks any notion of a “civilising mission” early, but another casualty of his account is an impression of the Raj as a “stable and authoritative regime”. Wilson’s narrative focuses as much on those Indians the British tried to rule over, with varying degrees of success, as it does on the “imperial servants” themselves. He delves into every aspect of Indian life, from law to religion, the economy to education, to show how the interaction between rulers and ruled played out in unexpected and often calamitous ways. Overshadowing it all, despite the best efforts to imply the opposite, was “the perennial British sense of danger”, to which they responded by making a “fearful effort to destroy any centres of authority in India that displayed the smallest flickers of independence”.

Two 19th-century trials from opposite ends of the social spectrum were the inspiration for a contrasting pair of histories this year. The first is Elizabeth Foyster’s account of the bizarre case of the third Earl of Portsmouth, whose family attempted in 1823 to have him declared insane, and thus prevent him from running his own estate. It didn’t help the earl’s cause that he appeared to have declared himself the “King of Hampshire”. When questioned about that at the trial, he tried to explain that “he was a sort of king”. He further admitted that he had ordered a throne, and that he expected to be seated on it to “receive the congratulations of his friends on his return”. The Trials of the King of Hampshire (Oneworld) is a well-informed, sympathetic portrayal of an extraordinary world.

The second trial is an altogether grimmer affair. Robert and Nathaniel Coombes were accused of stabbing their mother at their house in Plaistow while their father was away at sea, and calmly going about their business until her rotting corpse was discovered days later in her bedroom. Not the least shocking of the details of the case at the time was the fact that the boys had made barely any attempt to conceal what had happened. On the two days after the murder, they attended Lord’s to watch WG Grace compile a patient century for the Gentlemen against the Players. Kate Summerscale brings the same painstaking intensity to her description of the case and its aftermath in The Wicked Boy (Bloomsbury) as she did to her bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. Summerscale’s signature virtue is her attention to detail, crucial in any mystery, but here the question hanging over the case is not whodunit, but why. In following Robert’s story to Broadmoor and beyond, she gives all the participants back their humanity.

Historians, like journalists, tend to focus on misfortune, but there was some light among the shade. A perfect example is Adrian Tinniswood’s The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House between the Wars (Jonathan Cape), which tells an unexpectedly upbeat story of a brief revival in the fortunes of this British institution. Those who were not born into it could simply “buy themselves a piece of the past”. Wittily written and beautifully illustrated, Tinniswood’s book recreates a world far more peculiar, but at times rather more enviable, than any fictional version.

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Best book lists of 2016

 

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