John Coffey on Justice

Yeah, so I traditionally would've called myself an Early Modernist. I particularly worked on the 17th century, especially the English Civil War, English Revolution period. And I've done quite a lot of work around Puritanism, religious descent, debates about religious persecution and toleration. But I've shifted in recent years to working on what historians call the Age of Revolutions, which is the period inaugurated really by the French, the American, and the French revolutions in the late 18th century, which have massive ramifications going on into the early 19th century and beyond. And I'm particularly working on projects related to slavery and abolition in that period. So there are two main projects: one's a team project fortunately, which is to produce an edition of the diaries of William Wilberforce, the MP and spokesman for British abolitionism. They amount to about a million words. So we have almost a daily record of his life over 50 or so years.

03:21We also have something like four or 5,000 of his letters catalogued, and hundreds of his speeches. The other project is in a way to offset that, and it's a real contrast because it's a study of slave revolt that broke out from a missionary chapel in Demerara, which was a British colony in what's now Guiana in South America, and it's sort of on the extreme edge of the British empire. So I'm moving from looking at somebody who's incredibly well documented to looking at people whose lives are barely documented at all, who are really marginalized and disregarded. So it's a different kind of challenge. On the one hand, I'm sort of overwhelmed with material; on the other hand, really struggling to find fragments of evidence to piece together details about these people's lives.

Well, in some ways they were in conversation at the time because the Demerara revolt is partly triggered by rumors by what Wilberforce and other abolitionists are doing back in Britain. And in turn, it has a huge impact back in Britain itself because the repression of it is really brutal. The missionary is put on trial and dies in a colonial prison. He becomes a sort of martyr figure. So it really galvanizes the British abolitionists in the 1820s and is one of the factors that's leading to emancipation, the Emancipation Act in the 1830s.

Yeah, so it's interesting reflecting on this because I think historians have always been interested in questions of power and in particular men in power and who wields power. So traditionally historians focused very much on monarchs, statesmen, influential intellectuals, religious leaders, military commanders, and so on. And there's still that work that goes on. But certainly, since the 1960s, there has been a huge attempt to retrieve and rediscover the lives of people at the bottom of the pile, if you like, a great emphasis on history from below to study the governed, the marginalized, the subjugated, and that's borne fruit in all kinds of different ways. So you obviously have fields like black history and Subaltan history, women's history in some ways was part of that move as well. An attempt to do justice to people in the past had been neglected. The focus on race and slavery is part of that.

06:21So there's a new book out on scholarship on 18th Century America, and it's a study of 400 articles and leading journals. And it points out there's only one article on the origins of the American Revolution in the last 10 years, which was one of the classic topics that historians used to argue about. Whereas there are about 70 articles on race and slavery. So the preoccupations of historians have really shifted, and I think that is driven partly by concerns about justice. It's interesting to me, I mean, one of the key figures in this move in the sixties was the historian E.P Thompson. He was one of the British Marxist historians who popularized working class history and history from below and has a famous phrase about recovering people from the enormous condescension of posterity.

And it's interesting reflecting to me how much that derives from his Marxism and how much of it derives from the fact that he was raised a Methodist and his father was something of a Methodist political activist. So even though he had lost his own faith, he still had some sort of sympathy for a radical levelling style Christianity. And the biblical scholar, Richard Balkin, when he is reflecting on the gospels, says that actually you could see the gospels as in some way, an example of history from below, because the really important figures in the gospels aren't Pilot or Caiaphas or Herod. It's these marginal figures that should be, they don't count at all as far as the empire's concerned, and yet they're being presented as absolutely central to the whole story.

Yeah, it was interesting. I was reading recently, rereading, Max Weber's famous lecture on science as a vocation, and he's not talking about the hard sciences as much as the human sciences. And Weber doesn't have much time for activism. So Weber has a very austere dramatic approach to scholarship and sociology, social sciences, the human sciences as something that isn't about activism. And he says one of the principal jobs of the teacher is to confront students with inconvenient facts. And he says, this doesn't just apply to the facts that are inconvenient for students, but facts that are inconvenient for me as a teacher. So it's introducing people to moral complexity and to the complexity of the record.

09:09And of course, there is a strong tradition in history about pushing back against presentism, of trying to be past-minded, to leave as many of your presuppositions behind to be something like an ethnographer. In some ways going into the past, it's as much a foreign country as if you're working on a tribal group in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. So your job is to see things from the native point of view and to see things their way and to set aside your own view of the world. So that's kind of an historical ideal that many historians are striving for and one that actually I have quite a lot of sympathy for. I guess its critics would often push back for a couple of reasons: I think one is they would argue that that's, if you like, illusory; that none of us can actually do that very easily.

10:05There's a great deal of interest now in positionality, what's called positionality. So the life experience of the scholar and how that influences and shapes their view of the past. The idea that all history is contemporary history in the sense you can always tell that we're writing from a particular point of view, the kind of preoccupations, even the sort of questions we ask about our sources usually reflect our contemporary interests and preoccupations. I mean, race and slavery would be a good example of that. And then people will also argue that in some ways its responsible to try and be impartial or scientific in the way that Weber was thinking about. And clearly there is a case that the Holocaust or racial slavery when a sort of moral neutrality is quite inappropriate and almost an abdication of responsibility. So it does seem to me as a sort of tension on the one hand because historians and other people in the humanities and the social sciences are working on human subjects.

11:10There's inevitably a moral component to what we do. On the other hand, we're not just moralists and we've got more tasks than just to moralize. And part of that is kind of explaining why people did things and believed things that we might deplore. I'm going to actually cut my teeth as a PhD student on Samuel Rutherford, who was the 17th century Scottish Presbyterian who was said to have written the finest, the ableist defense of religious persecution in the 17th century. Now, I didn't particularly relish Rutherford's defense of religious coercion, but part of my job as an intellectual historian was to understand and explain the way he saw the world and why he argued in that way without being too interventionist, if you like, in the way I made my moral judgments. So I do think there's a tension there that all scholars in the humanities live with.

So it can be very confusing if you read the scholarship on this subject because if you listen to someone like Samuel Moyne, he will argue that the human rights revolution of the 1970s really invents human rights or maybe grudgingly the 1940s and the conservative statesmen who created the UN declaration of human rights in that period. Others, of course, would root it in the enlightenment. And I guess this is a classic answer. It's the enlightenment and the French Revolution with its Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen, which is really at the heart of the story of rights. But then early modernists and medievalists pushback, they see natural rights language, the idea of individual subjective rights that one has simply on the basis of one's humanity. These are distinct from legal rights, but they're individual natural rights that they would see this concept emerging in the middle ages with canon lawyers and Juris and so on, and then being embraced by various 17th, 16th, 17th century groups up to Locke.

14:23And I think there are different things going on here. One, of course, is that there are turf wars between historians in different periods who want to draw attention to their period as being really seminal in various ways. People have talked about the revenge of the medievalists, the early modernists and the Renaissance specialists who made so much emphasis on this being a radical break from the dark mediaeval past that mediaevalists have always been keen to push back against that and to point to the mediaeval roots of a lot of modern concepts. But I think there's also more going on here. I think in some ways it's part of a bigger argument about political and to some extent economic liberalism as well, because rights language has been so important for liberals, whether they're talking about politics or talking about economics. So you have an example of rival genealogies being used for political purposes, if you like, to both problematize and legitimize, right?

Yeah, yeah. I think it's important to emphasize this because there's also been a long tradition of suspicion of rights language among Christians, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. I mean, this has obviously been true in the Catholic church in the 19th century where there was deep suspicion of liberalism and the individualism associated with it and rights language was regarded with a great deal of suspicion by many traditionalist Catholics. But it's also true in Protestant circles as well, among some high Anglicans. But you could see it in the Dutch Calvinist tradition, they founded an anti-revolutionary party after the French Revolution, which is very critical of the political language which emerges from that event. So it's interesting to see how historians and intellectual historians in recent decades have recovered what you might call the theological origins of rights talk. And that's true of people like Brian Tierney writing about the mediaeval era and showing the kind of seminal influence of various mediaeval theorists of natural law, but also natural rights.

17:03And certainly, when you get to the period I'm most familiar with from the 17th century onwards, groups like the Levellers are not just talking about native rights or legal rights that they have as Freeborn Englishmen. They're also talking about universal natural human rights that individuals have on the basis of their humanity. And it's in that period in the 17th century that people begin really for the first time to talk about freedom of religion as a natural right. I mean, you don't see that in the Middle Ages. It's a development that emerges within particularly radical Protestantism in the 17th century. Though interestingly, it's also tied to the idea of duties. So because we have a duty to worship God according to our conscience, consciences must be left free and the individual must have a natural right to worship God according to their conscience, because otherwise they wouldn't be able to please God if they just follow the dictates of the state or the state church that they wouldn't be able to worship in a way that's pleasing to God. So it is interesting the way the argument works. It's theistic grounded in a sense, but it applies not just to Christians, it applies to other kinds of religious worship, to Jews, to Muslims, to heathens and so on.

18:26And you can see more widely a theological grounding for rights in figures like Locke. And that's encapsulated, obviously famously in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson drafted in 1776, that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights’. So this idea that we have certain rights that we cannot transfer over to the state, that we can alienate them over to the state, they're inalienable, and we have a solemn responsibility before God to protect them. So yeah, I mean, it's certainly by the 18th century, this rights language is absolutely flourishing within Protestant circles, and you can see it being taken up quite significantly in the abolitionist movement in the 1780s, though people are also shying away from it in the 1790s because of the French Revolution and Tom Payne's rights of man and so on. But if you read 19th century American religious abolitionists, people like Frederick Douglas or William Lloyd Garrison or others, they're using the language of natural rights, pretty insistently.

Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right, and it's one reason why we should be wary about just tossing, tossing rights language out as some kind of secular poisoning of the, well, a, it does have some deep roots in Christian thought, but it also, rights language is also designed as one of the weapons of the weak, if you like. It's a way to defend those whose claims are often ignored and to assert their human dignity. So it's why it gets taken up so much by religious minorities, by those who are pushing for widening the vote and suffrage maybe to all men, maybe eventually to women. The anti-slavery movement is using it, and of course, by the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement.

Yeah, and if you look in the 1790s, it's interesting because it's from that period really the language of left and right starts to emerge, and those on the right are very much concerned about law and order. They look across at France and they see disorder and the guillotine and regicide and Civil War and the exile of Catholic priests and so on, and it's extremely alarming for them. So the emphasis very much shown law and order, and they become extremely alarmed by the way that rights language has been used to undermine order. So it's classically articulated at that divide between Edmund Burke on the one side and Tom Payne on the other. What's interesting in the British context, is you'll find sort of devout Protestant Christians on both sides of that. So Wilberforce would be very much on Burke's side in this argument, but the founder of the London corresponding society in the 1790s, a man called Thomas Hardy, he's actually a devout Scottish Calvinist, and he's absolutely on board with this rights language. And so different religious groups will be divided over this.

Yeah, it's an interesting moment, isn't it presently, and particularly an interesting moment for historians because there's so much contest over the past. But I don't think that's necessarily unusual in that the stories we tell ourselves are very important to our own identity. They've also historically been very important to legitimizing any particular order or regime. Those in power are always going to be keen to get their story, get their story straight. It's interesting in terms of the kind of current ‘moral reckoning’ as it's been called about Britain's past or America's past to some extent, is of course the product of decades of historical research. So that the work on, say, the Atlantic slave trade has been going on for the last 50, 60 years, 50 years, I suppose, really seriously, and something like the Slave Voyagers database is the product of a huge amount of painstaking historical labor, which shows us the full scale of the Atlantic slave trade.

23:46Or more recently, the legacies of the British Slavery Project run from UCL, which follows the money essentially of those who were compensated at the ending of slavery. And the British West Indies, the enslavers were the people compensated, not those who'd been enslaved, but that has made us much more aware of the way in which many people in institutions in Britain profited from slavery. So historians in a way have contributed to this current reckoning. It's also though clearly a product of demographic shifts in some ways, the empire’s come home in that Britain today, demographically is a very different, far more diverse place than the world I was growing up in in the 1970s. My son went to a school in Leicester. He's white, but he went to school in Leicester where he was very much the ethnic minority. Ninety percent of the school would've been South Asian background.

24:44So Britain today is very different, and we're hearing a much wider variety of voices, I think, of people with very different perspectives on the British past and the British Empire and so on. I think one interesting thing to note is that it isn't just an Anglo-American thing. I think it's particularly, perhaps particularly intense in Britain and America. The culture wars, the history wars. But I mean, just this week we've heard from India about the move to downgrade or maybe remove units on mogul India from the textbooks because that Islamic phase of Indian history, of an Islamic empire, is one that's uncomfortable to Hindu nationalists and so on. So we have these kind of history wars being fought in various places around the world. They do, of course, tend to lead to polarizing discourse. And social media I think very much amplifies that. So I think on the one hand, there are those who want, if you like, a unifying and comforting history, don't want to look too closely or shed too much of a light on the darker areas of the past.

25:59There are others who really want to tear the plaster off and examine the wound. And I think one of my former students put it this way, that in the United States, you have some people who find it hard to say anything bad about the American past. It's just a purely celebratory patriotic narrative. On the other hand, you have those who find it very hard to say anything good about the national past. It's almost entirely a kind of history of oppression. And that makes it difficult to find a narrative that will actually function as a kind of national narrative, one that can be honest, but also bring people together.

Yeah, I think it's interesting that the Bible is actually quite preoccupied by power, by people in power and what they do with it, and also by those on the receiving end. And there are a couple of things that are particularly noticeable. I, one is that the biblical narrative, at least from the vantage point of the great empires of the ancient world, is written from the underside of history. It's written from the margins of history by people who are colonized or exiled. And the biblical writers recognize the need for law and order, the need for authority, but they're not rosy-eyed about it. They have a pretty skeptical eye on the mighty and Mary’s Magnificat, and many other summaries of scripture, so many passages in scripture are about serving a great God who can bring down the mighty from their thrones. So on the one hand, I think there is a kind of critique of power in scripture, but it's also interesting that the Hebrew scriptures have this very powerful element of self-critique as well.

28:11I think it was Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi, who once said the other nations recorded their victories, but Israel recorded its defeats, its failures. So much of the Old Testament in particular is a record of failure and failing to live up to the covenant and straying and idolatry and so on and injustice. And in the example of the Hebrew prophets, of course, you have this very powerful example of people from within the community powerfully confronting injustice. So there's an element of self-critique there. And so even as Israel's facing out and critiquing the great empires of the ancient world, there's also this sort of ferocious internal critique and that sense that you get with Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago has that famous line about the line between good and evil running not between peoples or regimes, but running through every human heart. And I do think that's of course a theme which runs right through scripture. The victim and oppressor binary is there, if you like in the Bible, but there's also this sort of powerful sense that everyone needs forgiveness. So there's a certain humility that's inculcated by the biblical narrative, which is I think very important.

Yeah, I mean, in some ways a good place to start is with a fairly mundane observation that one of our main duties is to master our craft and to apply our trade as well as we can so that mastering our disciplines and trying to do as good work as we can is a significant vocation and contribution in itself. I also think in this context of Micah and [his] advice to the people of God that they should ‘do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with their God’. And it's interesting the way in which justice and mercy are put together there. I think they're quite often divorced in current discourse. So justice is very, very important to Micah and to the Hebrew prophets. You can't read the Old Testament without seeing this constant emphasis on the need to do justice to the poor and the widow and the orphan and the oppressed.

31:11I mean, it's something that runs right through the scriptures. At the same time, there is this emphasis on mercy and on humility as well. So I think in terms of the virtues we need to cultivate, humility is a really important one. As we think about the subjects we study, whether they're safely in the past or in the present, we do have a duty to them. I mean, because I work on people long dead, I don't have to fill in those research ethics forms that people in the social sciences and people doing 20th century history often have to fill in. But on the other hand, I do think that I do have a sense of responsibility to the people I'm writing about. There's a sense in which I've got a certain amount of power and influence because they can't talk back in the way that living subjects might do. And so you have a responsibility to treat them with justice and with mercy and with a dose of humility as well on your own part.

Thank you so much, Bethan, thank you.