One of the latest examples, among the dispiriting many, of ideology taking precedence over historical truth is the row that has detonated over the claim by University College London’s Dr Jenny Bulstrode that Henry Cort, who is credited with inventing a ground-breaking iron-making process in 1784, actually stole the idea from Jamaican slaves. Bulstrode’s claim was published in an article by History and Technology and led to Bulstrode calling for reparations. How predictable.
According to Bulstrode, Cort’s method of turning scrap iron into superior wrought iron using grooved rollers was one that enslaved Jamaican metallurgists were already using, and when Cort patented the method, he was guilty of intellectual theft.
Key to Bulstrode’s narrative is her assertion that Cort heard of the iron-making process at a Jamaican iron-works called Reeder’s Pen from those on board a ship led by Cort’s cousin, John, that had sailed from Jamaica to Portsmouth. Portsmouth, significantly, was where Cort lived and had his foundry. Yet, as Bulstrode’s critics have shown, John Cort’s ship never went to Portsmouth, but sailed many miles away to Lancaster.
Bulstrode claims that her error over the destination of John Cort’s ship is not a defeater of her argument and that she has based her view on a plethora of sources such as “a combination of shipping records, old newspapers, and evidence in Jamaica.” So, perhaps she is right after all; therefore, let the debate between her and other historians begin until the truth is known.
What is equally troubling, if not more so, has been the way the editors of History and Technology, Amy Slaton and Tiago Saraiv, have defended Bulstrode. Rather than let the debate over Bulstrode’s claims play out in their journal, they regard her detractors as guilty of “profoundly selective historicism that support[s] white domination”. They go on to say that her critics are guilty of privileging “white, EuroAmerican attainments in historical accounts of industrialisation” which is a consequence of “the demographics of the history academy itself.” Most astonishingly, as history is an empirical subject, they argue that those who have censured Bulstrode have mistakenly taken the view that “facts are facts”. They say these things despite having to admit that “there is no direct reference in any source quoted by Bulstrode or in the archaeological record to grooved rollers used to work iron at John Reeder’s foundry” and “the historical record does not provide again any immediate proof that Cort knew about what was going on at Reeder’s foundry”.
The absence of evidence, however, does not put Slaton and Saraiv off-far from it. In their eyes and those of likeminded academics, white historians cannot be trusted to write history because they will write it in support of white supremacy. In other words, as Critical Race Theory contends, white historians (and white people generally) are uniquely, inherently and incorrigibly racist. Moreover, despite asserting the prejudice of white historians as a fact, Slaton and Saraiv deny there are such things as facts. Yet, we are expected to take it as fact from them that white historians cannot be trusted.
What we have in Slaton and Saraiv’s arcane word-salads is a toxic mix of intersectionality’s grievance culture and postmodern twaddle. The irony is that they are guilty of what they accuse white historians of doing. For them, history is the rewriting of history in line with their ideological commitments rather than an objective analysis of the sources. It is the kind of thinking that leads right-on activists to argue with stunning idiocy that logic is a tool of white oppression. Try telling that to the ancient Arab thinkers whose numerical symbols superceded clumsy Latin numerals and revolutionised mathematics.
So good for those Oxbridge academics such as Lawrence Goldman, Robert Tombs and David Abulafia who have challenged this latest case of the ravaging of history for political purposes. What is at stake is the integrity of history as a subject, and Goldman et al know it, hence their redoubtable defence of it. When history ceases to be a search for truth and becomes the slave of those who wish to twist its narratives to political ends, then the totalitarians have taken over, and that is really not something we should want at all.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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