Tom Stammers – författare

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments - not just financial but also emotional and imaginative - in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

Offering a broad and vivid survey of the culture of collecting from the French Revolution to the Belle Époque, The Purchase of the Past explores how material things became a central means of accessing and imagining the past in nineteenth-century France. By subverting the monarchical establishment, the French Revolution not only heralded the dawn of the museum age, it also threw an unprecedented quantity of artworks into commercial circulation, allowing private individuals to pose as custodians and saviours of the endangered cultural inheritance. Through their common itineraries, erudition and sociability, an early generation of scavengers established their own form of 'private patrimony', independent from state control. Over a century of Parisian history, Tom Stammers explores collectors' investments - not just financial but also emotional and imaginative - in historical artefacts, as well as their uncomfortable relationship with public institutions. In so doing, he argues that private collections were a critical site for salvaging and interpreting the past in a post-revolutionary society, accelerating but also complicating the development of a shared national heritage.

Before the tragedy of the Holocaust, many of the leading art and antiques dealers across Europe were Jewish, establishing dynamic cross-Channel, international and transatlantic networks. Aside from a few famous examples, however, we are only at the beginning of exploring the diversity of Jewish dealers' commercial and cultural worlds, and reflecting on the particular conditions that made possible their dramatic expansion within the profession.Adopting a wider geography than any previous study, this book brings together a team of distinguished international contributors to consider Jewish art dealers as an interconnected cohort, tied together by common strategies and a shared vulnerability. After an extended historiographical introduction, the volume presents case studies and trends from 1860-1940, including: Jewish family businesses in Western Europe; the role of Jews as mediators of art from East Asia; the antisemitism and suspicion faced by Jewish dealers; Jews as theorists, exhibition makers and promoters of modern art ; and the geographical mobility and professional reinvention of Jewish dealers in times of economic and political crisis.With a wide variety of illustrations, including paintings, decorative arts, historic photographs and archival material, the volume adopts a mix of methodological approaches to analyse a key chapter in Jewish cultural history and in the history of the international art market.Includes Afterword by Charles Dellheim, author of Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (2021).

Before the tragedy of the Holocaust, many of the leading art and antiques dealers across Europe were Jewish, establishing dynamic cross-Channel, international and transatlantic networks. Aside from a few famous examples, however, we are only at the beginning of exploring the diversity of Jewish dealers' commercial and cultural worlds, and reflecting on the particular conditions that made possible their dramatic expansion within the profession.Adopting a wider geography than any previous study, this book brings together a team of distinguished international contributors to consider Jewish art dealers as an interconnected cohort, tied together by common strategies and a shared vulnerability. After an extended historiographical introduction, the volume presents case studies and trends from 1860-1940, including: Jewish family businesses in Western Europe; the role of Jews as mediators of art from East Asia; the antisemitism and suspicion faced by Jewish dealers; Jews as theorists, exhibition makers and promoters of modern art ; and the geographical mobility and professional reinvention of Jewish dealers in times of economic and political crisis.With a wide variety of illustrations, including paintings, decorative arts, historic photographs and archival material, the volume adopts a mix of methodological approaches to analyse a key chapter in Jewish cultural history and in the history of the international art market.Includes Afterword by Charles Dellheim, author of Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern (2021).

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans – many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal – to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it – as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book – more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and psychological pressure?Ordinary Men is a microhistory, the detailed study of a single unit in the Nazi killing machine. Browning evaluates a wide range of evidence to seek to explain the actions of the "ordinary men" who made up reserve Police Battalion 101, taking advantage of the wide range of resources prepared in the early 1960s for a proposed war crimes trial. He concludes that his subjects were not "evil;" rather, their actions are best explained by a desire to be part of a team, not to shirk responsibility that would otherwise fall on the shoulders of comrades, and a willingness to obey authority. Browning's ability to explore the strengths and weaknesses of arguments – both the survivors' and other historians' – is what sets his work apart from other studies that have attempted to get to the root of the motivations for the Holocaust, and it is also what marks Ordinary Men as one of the most important works of its generation.

The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hobsbawm's vision is important – he was a lifelong Marxist whose view of history was shaped by a fascination with social and economic history, yet who privileged evidence over political theory – but the real power of these works, and especially The Age of Revolution, emanates from the wide range of the author's reading and his mastery of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. It is this skill that allows Hobsbawm to combine insights drawn from decades of reading into an original thesis that sees the crucial "long 19th century" as a period shaped by "dual revolution" – the twin impacts of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the French Revolution on the continent. Hobsbawm supplemented his evaluative excellence with a firm grasp of reasoning, crafting a volume that contains brilliant, clearly-structured arguments which explain complicated ideas via well-chosen examples in ways that make his work accessible to intelligent general readers and scholars alike.

Georges Lefebvre was one of the most highly-regarded historians of the 20th century – and a key reason for the high reputation he enjoys can be found in The Coming of the French Revolution. Lefebvre's key contribution to the debate over what remains arguably one of history's most contentious and significant events in history was to deploy the critical thinking skill of evaluation to reveal weaknesses in existing arguments about the causes of the Revolution, and analytical skills to expose hidden assumptions in them. Rather than seeing events as driven by the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie – which then lost power to the urban workers – as was usual at the time, Lefebvre deployed years of research in regional archives to argue that the Revolution had had a fourth pillar: the peasantry. Painting the upheaval as complex and multi-layered – while still privileging a predominantly economic interpretation – Lefebvre provides a compelling new narrative to explain why the French monarchy collapsed so suddenly in 1789: one that stressed the significance of a ‘popular revolution’ in the rural countryside.

Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians. For Goldhagen, a chief reason for German actions was not the mundane good comradeship stressed by Browning, but a longstanding hatred of Jews and Judaism specific to Germany that dated back well into the previous century. Debating which historian is right, which has made better use of the available evidence, which has most successfully written objectively – and which advances the most secure interpretation of contested documents – forces students to think critically about one of the most important and (on the surface at least) incomprehensible events of the past century.

Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the study of the texts themselves. While In Defence of History addresses all aspects of historical method, its key focus is on an extensive evaluation of this postmodern thinking. Evans judges the acceptability of the reasoning advanced by the postmodernists – and finds it badly wanting. He is strongly critical both of the relevance and of the adequacy of their arguments, seeking to show that, ultimately, they are guilty of failing to accept the logic of their own position. All texts are equally valid, or invalid, they suggest – while insisting that the products of their own school are in fact more ‘true’ than those of their opponents. Evans concludes by pointing out that this same argument could be advanced to suggest that the works of Holocaust deniers are just as valid as are those of historians who accept that the Nazis set out to commit genocide. So why, he demands, is no postmodernist willing to say as much? A devastating example of the usefulness of relentless evaluation.

Before Browning’s 1992 book, most Holocaust scholarship focused either on the experience of the victims or on the Nazi political ideology driving the slaughter. Browning investigates something else: the men who carried out acts of extreme violence.

Richard Evans wrote In Defence of History at a time when the historian's profession was coming under heavy attack as a result of the ‘cultural turn’ taken by the discipline during the late 1980s and the 1990s. Historians were being forced to face up to postmodern thinking, which argued that, because all texts were the product of biased writers who had incomplete information, none could be privileged above others. In this reading, there could be no objective history, merely the study of the texts themselves. While In Defence of History addresses all aspects of historical method, its key focus is on an extensive evaluation of this postmodern thinking. Evans judges the acceptability of the reasoning advanced by the postmodernists – and finds it badly wanting. He is strongly critical both of the relevance and of the adequacy of their arguments, seeking to show that, ultimately, they are guilty of failing to accept the logic of their own position. All texts are equally valid, or invalid, they suggest – while insisting that the products of their own school are in fact more ‘true’ than those of their opponents. Evans concludes by pointing out that this same argument could be advanced to suggest that the works of Holocaust deniers are just as valid as are those of historians who accept that the Nazis set out to commit genocide. So why, he demands, is no postmodernist willing to say as much? A devastating example of the usefulness of relentless evaluation.

The Age of Revolution is the first of four works by Eric Hobsbawm that collectively synthesize the ideas he developed over a lifetime spent studying the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hobsbawm's vision is important – he was a lifelong Marxist whose view of history was shaped by a fascination with social and economic history, yet who privileged evidence over political theory – but the real power of these works, and especially The Age of Revolution, emanates from the wide range of the author's reading and his mastery of the critical thinking skill of evaluation. It is this skill that allows Hobsbawm to combine insights drawn from decades of reading into an original thesis that sees the crucial "long 19th century" as a period shaped by "dual revolution" – the twin impacts of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and the French Revolution on the continent. Hobsbawm supplemented his evaluative excellence with a firm grasp of reasoning, crafting a volume that contains brilliant, clearly-structured arguments which explain complicated ideas via well-chosen examples in ways that make his work accessible to intelligent general readers and scholars alike.