The Trevelyan Lectures in history follow a practice we would do well to emulate in Australia: not a single evening address, but a sequence of them that allows a more extended rumination. They encourage notable scholars to enlarge on their expertise and suggest its wider import. Fifty years ago, E.H. Carr used the Trevelyan Lectures to put the accepted methods of the discipline to question in What Is History? Cannadine was scarcely less ambitious in his decision to lecture on the undivided past. He wanted to persuade the audience that historians have helped to perpetuate division at the expense of ‘a common humanity’. Now he has enlarged on the lectures in a more extended presentation.

Cannadine considers six forms of identity that have been invented, established, and sustained to perpetuate antagonism: religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilisation. Each of them, he contends, has been used to promote collective interests; each claims a primary loyalty and presents the identity as innate, exclusive, and adversarial. Each is sustained by affirming memories and traditions that are intolerant of others, and historians have contributed to this ‘identity-obsessed way of seeing the world’.

The argument is presented through separate chapters on each of these forms of sectional solidarity. He relates how it formed and operated, identifies seminal figures who articulated its claims, considers its adverse effects. Hence we are reminded of the long history of religious persecution and religious wars, the ruinous consequences of nationalism and doctrines of racial exclusiveness, the follies of class conflict and gender politics, the way that George W. Bush was encouraged by Samuel Huntington’s crude model of a clash of civilisations.

Historians figure in these case studies in two roles. In the first they are part of the problem. Trained to look for divergences and disparities, rather than similarities and affinities, Cannadine claims that their relentless urge to draw distinctions blinds them to commonalities. He also finds that many historians were complicit in the bigotry and adopted a partisan stance to confirm and validate a spurious solidarity. Cannadine excels in such historiographical criticism, and among the historians he arraigns in the chapters on religion, nation, class and civilisation are Gibbon, Macaulay, Motley, Pirenne, Braudel, Toynbee, Christopher Hill, and E.P. Thompson. The chapters on gender and race treat historians more lightly.

In their second role, historians provide Cannadine with the evidence he uses to rebut the claims of difference. He draws on an impressive range of (mainly Western) historical scholarship. For every instance of an exclusive identity he uses this literature to show others cross-cutting the false monolith; for every antagonism he cites toleration and cooperation. Hence he confounds the project of the homogeneous nation-state that was brought into being in the nineteenth century with evidence of ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity; refutes the dictates of the clerisy with recent work on popular religion; undercuts Simone de Beauvoir and W.E.B. Du Bois with the forms of sociability that transcended gender and race.

Each of the chapters is prefaced by a pair of antithetical epigraphs, the one proclaiming a unitary and exclusive identity and the other rejecting it, but the ensuing discussions do little to close the gap. They examine the basis on which the identity was asserted and the division it engendered. They deny that the identity was decisive, and offer examples when it was not, but Cannadine provides little explanation of these divergent outcomes. He often plays one identity off against another, so that the nation is fissured by differences of ethnicity and faith, class by nationality and gender, and so on. This turns the problem of identity into a kind of spurious compartmentalisation, one that ignores the fact that it is possible to be an immigrant female worker who is also a mother, an atheist, and a communist. But Cannadine’s complaint that historians have turned this person into the bearer of a single, essential identity is surely spurious; rather, the historian seeks to understand the circumstances in which a particular identity made sense for her.

In calling on historians to abandon their preoccupation with identity history, Cannadine seems to me to overlook the tenor of historical scholarship over the past decades. Religious history has surely ceased to be confessional, historians no longer celebrate the national destiny, and the structural history of social and political movements based on class, race, and gender had given way by the 1980s to cultural history. Trans-nationalism, fluidity, and hybridity are now à la mode.

There is also a problem with Cannadine’s notion of identity. He sees his six targets as the principal forms of human solidarity, but they are not homogeneous: gender is a biological category, race a spurious construct of biology, while religion encompasses a wide variety of theological beliefs and practices. Religion comes first in his book, I think, because it yields the divergent impulses that run through his later case studies. As he notes, some gods were jealous and others tolerant. Some religions enclosed the elect, others stressed amity.

Religion is prototypical because of the Manichean strain. From the Babylonian prophet Mani came the cosmology of a struggle between good and evil, the spiritual world of light and the material world of darkness. Cannadine sees this Manichean view and its apocalyptic perspective as having been transferred and serially reiterated across history to an enemy nation, a hostile class, the other gender, a different race, and an alien civilisation. Summoning us against them, it perpetuates division. He quotes from President Bush’s final address in the Oval Office: ‘good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise.’

All of the identities he considers are extensive but restrictive. They achieve their solidarity at the expense of ‘common humanity’, a term that Cannadine uses repeatedly but that really needs a chapter of its own. It is meant to encompass the multiple and shifting identities that he sees as operating in ‘the messy, complex, contingent, multifaceted, interconnected, joined-up reality of human relations’. It needs its own chapter because it is surely a projection of contemporary liberalism, with its pluralism and emphasis on the autonomous individual, back onto a past where these values had no place.

Cannadine condemns Marxist historians for projecting their theory of class conflict to pre-capitalist times, and also for promoting a false interpretation of division and struggle. But historians did not invent the opposition of capital and labour; they did not make up the harsh work discipline and long hours of the factory, the squalor of the industrial city, the deprivation and repression. Nor were trade unions bearers of a false antagonism; on the contrary, they supported and sustained communal life. The challenge in our time, so riven by conflict, is to find the basis on which a common humanity might be sustained.