Who cares if this UCL academic 'undermined' Britain's history?

There’s a long list of academics, some of whom are on the right, who have had their lives made difficult by fellow academics. Now, for a change, a left-wing academic is feeling the heat. 

Dr Jenny Bulstrode, a history lecturer at University College London (UCL), has been accused of ‘undermining the history of Britain’ without evidence. The allegation came after Bulstrode claimed in a paper that an English ironware maker, Henry Cort, stole his invention from slaves. Before conservatives engage in too much self-congratulation, however, they should stop and think carefully about whether this attack against Bulstrode is really something to celebrate. 

History and Technology, where Bulstrode’s article appeared in June, is a fairly typical abstruse academic journal of the kind you don’t normally expect to hit the headlines. But Bulstrode’s article has done just that. The gist of the piece is that Cort, an eighteenth-century ironmaster seen as pivotal to the Industrial Revolution because he developed a revolutionary and efficient means of turning scrap metal into pig-iron, had pilfered the whole idea. The technique, it was claimed, had been in earlier use in a Jamaican ironworks, and had been created and perfected by the slaves who worked in it. The process had later been noticed, brought to England and monetised by Cort, who had then used his connections to engineer the demolition of the original foundry, thus obscuring an embarrassing history and allowing his patent to provide convenient ‘false mirrors for imperial eyes’.

Dr Jenny Bulstrode claimed that an English ironware maker, Henry Cort, stole his invention from slaves

The Bulstrode thesis, if correct, is obviously very significant for our reading of imperial history. But is it right? Perhaps unusually, there has been some lusty pushback. The original article has been forcefully rubbished in another piece (available here), and also excoriated by a senior Oxford historian, professor Lawrence Goldman. Both suggested that Bulstrode’s idea is based on a partial reading of the sources, coupled with implausible inference piled on unsupported speculation. 

The matter has now, however, become public and personal. Dr Bulstrode’s university has been called on to investigate whether the article represents academic malpractice. The journal is, we are told, doing its own investigation. Dr Bulstrode is, in short, in hot water. Her defence is that she relied upon ‘a combination of shipping records, old newspapers and evidence in Jamaica’ and that her paper was peer reviewed.

‘The comments raised are now being reviewed by the journal,’ she said, ‘and should I be asked, or where new evidence arises I will work with the journal to strengthen the evidence or add any addendums as is usual in academic discourse.’

There can be no doubt where our sympathies should lie in this intellectual spat, and that is with Dr Bulstrode. This may sound odd, especially since very possibly indeed her critics are right and her ideas are ill-supported ideologically-tinted hogwash. But there are any number of reasons why, however much we don’t like attacks on this country’s history of imperialism which we see as unwarranted and probably politically motivated, we should see any movement to go further and possibly discipline her as highly dangerous.

For one thing, as everyone knows, universities now put immense pressure on their lecturers to publish, and especially to publish pieces they call ‘innovative’; that can mean expressing a view not found elsewhere that contradicts existing beliefs. Where they do so in good faith, and with closely argued reasoning, as Dr Bulstrode has done, any institution should think twice before intervening because someone else has disagreed forcibly or suggested that they have got things seriously wrong. The same goes for academic periodicals. 

Secondly, the fact that an academic’s view is seen to go beyond the available evidence, to contradict what looks like overwhelming proof the other way, or to emanate from a politically-loaded way of looking at historical facts, needs keeping in perspective. Far from being a knock-out reason to prevent or penalise publication, it can often amount to a rather strong argument the other way.

Intellectual life can be much enriched through suggestions that are, at least at present, impossible to support with irrefutable evidence and contain what looks like frankly outrageous speculation. There is a big danger in a safety-first intellectual atmosphere that demands meticulous support for every proposition advanced. This can discourage leaps of faith and (as happens all too often with peer review in the humanities) tends towards rejection of any academic article that in the reviewer’s opinion gets the balance of the evidence wrong. The result is a dreary academic monoculture where academics play safe and only write pieces where there is no evidence-bucking or speculation that might put in doubt the all-important acceptance letter. 

Thirdly, if we want to preserve any serious academic freedom, accusations of academic misconduct also need keeping carefully in check, and reserving for the most serious cases of fraud. No-one here is alleging any academic dishonesty in the sense of deliberately misstating evidence, suppressing some vital finding or inventing facts that are not there. The complaint about the Cort piece, even if it is right, is essentially about reasoning, balance and the proper treatment of evidence the other way: in short, an allegation of too little evidence and too much speculation. That is not malpractice. There is nothing wrong with a certain amount of tendentiousness and even at times outrageous speculation in the academic humanities. The cure for it, if one thinks that an academic has got things entirely wrong or provided wholly inadequate support for a view, is another article saying just that. 

If you are a right-of-centre academic feeling a touch of schadenfreude here, tread carefully. This week’s demand is for a left-wing academic to be censured on the basis that she has allegedly been guilty of speculative and politically-motivated misapplication of the plain evidence. Remember, however, that next week it might just be you.