By Yulia Tulegenova
Most popular history is written about events people chose: revolutions, campaigns, movements. Richard Vinen has spent much of his career on the opposite material, the things that happened to people whether or not they had views about them.
He is Professor of History at King's College London, a specialist in twentieth-century Britain and France, and the author of a body of work whose common subject is compulsion: being conscripted, being occupied, being governed by someone whose project you did not endorse.
National Service
National Service: Conscription in Britain, 1945-1963 won the Wolfson History Prize in 2015, and it is the clearest example of the method.
Between the end of the war and 1963, more than two million British men were called up in peacetime. That fact sits oddly in national memory. It is too recent to be history and too universal to be a story: everyone's father or grandfather did it, which is precisely why almost nobody wrote it down as a subject.
Vinen's book takes it seriously as a social experience rather than a military one. What did it do to class relations to put a public schoolboy and a Glasgow apprentice in the same barracks? What did it do to the men who found it the most significant thing that ever happened to them, and to the men who found it two wasted years? What did the country think it was for, given that the strategic argument for it had largely collapsed before it ended?
The answers refuse to consolidate into a thesis, and that is the point. The book is about a shared experience that produced no shared conclusion.
Thatcher's Britain
Thatcher's Britain: The Politics and Social Upheaval of the Thatcher Era does something similar with material that is far more contested.
The temptation with Thatcherism is to write either prosecution or defence. Vinen's approach is to treat the period as a set of things that happened to a society, many of them not intended by anyone, and to keep asking how much of what is attributed to a political programme was in fact the working out of forces the programme did not control.
That produces a book that annoys partisans on both sides, which is generally a sign of a historian doing the job.
The other books
The Unfree French examines life under occupation, again from the angle of ordinary constraint rather than heroic resistance. A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century argues, structurally as well as in its title, against the tidy narrative arc that century histories usually impose. The Long '68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies looks at 1968 across several countries and pays unusual attention to the enemies, the people the standard account of that year treats as scenery.
Why the approach matters beyond his subjects
There is a specific difficulty in writing about the recent past: the participants are alive, they remember, and their memories are shaped by what came afterwards. Vinen writes as if that difficulty is the material rather than an obstacle to it.
The result is history that is unusually resistant to being used. It does not supply lessons, it does not supply villains, and it rarely supplies a sentence that can be lifted for a political argument. For a period as heavily mythologised as postwar Britain, that restraint is itself an argument.
Sources: Richard Vinen's faculty profile at King's College London; "National Service: Conscription in Britain, 1945-1963" (Allen Lane, 2014; Wolfson History Prize 2015); "Thatcher's Britain" (Simon and Schuster, 2009); "The Long '68" (Allen Lane, 2018); "The Unfree French" (Allen Lane, 2006); "A History in Fragments" (Little, Brown, 2000).
