A History of Britain

IF I CONFESS TO SOME ASTONISHMENT at writing this response, it is only because I am even more astonished-and moved-that the American Historical Review judged a fifteen-part television series worthy of sustained critical consideration in the pages of an AHR Forum. I would be churlish not to preface my comments without first thanking all three commentators for the intellectual generosity with which they approached their subject, and the marked absence of condescension toward a project which, had they tackled it themselves, they would, I believe, have discovered to be every bit as exacting as any more conventionally scholarly project. It is eleven years since I started work on A History of Britain, nine years since the first film shoot in Orkney, and six years since the last episodes were broadcast on terrestrial channels in Britain and the United States. (Although, gratifyingly, the series has had a continuing life on cable broadcasts and on DVDs, both as an educational tool and as popular entertainment.) So looking back on the enterprise from this distance is, for me at any rate, something of an exercise in cultural history itself. But it is also an opportunity to reflect on the part that the television documentary plays in diffusing historical knowledge; provoking debate and enriching the common culture with a sensibility informed by the past could not be more timely. For the scholarly community is surely at a crossroads in considering the forms by which history is communicated within and beyond the academy. The digital moment is no less pregnant with consequences for the survival of the interpreted past than was the transition from oral to written word in antiquity, and from written to print culture in the Renaissance. Whether we like it or not (and I have my own load of mixed feelings), we are unquestionably at the beginning of the end of the long life of the paper and print history book. The exigencies of economic austerity are likely to only hasten a process that is already under way. Print books will of course survive their eventual demise in the marketplace of knowledge, and monographs custom-printed from digital sources will doubtless endure as physical objects, perhaps even on library shelves. But in shorter order than the profession has yet taken in, most history will be consumed, especially beyond the academy, in digital forms: on interactive websites; as uploadable films; from electronic museum sites, archives, and libraries-a prospect toward which most university scholars seem (at best) cool, and to which we are taking precious few steps to acclimatize future generations of historians. While I was working on A History of Britain, moved by the possibility of passing on some insight to students about the ways in which scholarly history might be pop

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