Abstract
This issue of EHQ marks fifty years since the launch of European Studies Review in January 1971. Based at the University of Lancaster, with J. H. Shennan as editor, ESR’s first editorial panel consisted entirely of academics from that institution. Its title reflected the then-fashionable notion that ‘European Studies’ – embracing history, politics, geography, languages and so on – represented a natural grouping of specialisms, and its editorial panel included scholars from Lancaster’s Departments of History, Politics, French Studies and Russian and Soviet Studies. A subscription to ESR for that year cost three pounds and fifteen shillings. Its first publisher was Macmillan, but within three years the journal had been taken on by SAGE, which has remained our publisher to this day.
Both Europe and European Studies looked very different in 1971 from how they appear today. In the UK, a Conservative government was about to lead the country into the European Economic Community. A multifaceted study of ‘Europe’ was taken seriously by both students and academic administrators in Britain: the University of East Anglia, for example, where EHQ is now largely based, had a dedicated School of European Studies, embracing both modern languages and area studies. The need for Britain to produce specialists on European affairs seemed self-evident. Europe itself remained a potential political and military flashpoint. The post-war division of the continent into a capitalist West and a state-socialist East dominated by the USSR seemed to be a permanent feature of European politics. Academic co-operation across the ‘iron curtain’ was extremely difficult, and in the Humanities it was very unusual. The study of Eastern Europe and the USSR outside the Soviet bloc was conducted largely from afar, sometimes by émigrés who could not readily visit their native lands. Nonetheless, Europe at this stage was still some way from the neat image of 1989, 18 years into the future, in which the continent’s modern, affluent, liberal-democratic West could be starkly contrasted with a supposedly stagnant, communist-ruled, illiberal East. In 1971, the southern flank of capitalist Europe still contained three far less affluent right-wing non-democracies: Portugal, Spain and Greece.
Despite its title, ESR from the outset saw its main remit as interdisciplinary history, welcoming submissions on ‘European history, literature in an historical context, social and political thought over the period c. 1500–1945’. The switchover of the journal’s title from European Studies Review to European History Quarterly at the start of 1984 was made because ‘it seems wise frankly to acknowledge the Review’s identity and strengths through a change of title’, as the editorial in the first issue of the reincarnated journal explained. This was a sensible choice, and the name has stuck.
In the early 1970s, academia was considerably less globalized than it is today. This is reflected in the contributions to the journal in its early years, which were overwhelmingly from scholars based in the UK or USA. There were physical, political and cultural reasons for this. Speculative submission of articles in the days before cheap photocopying – never mind electronic communication – was very expensive. The division of Europe by the Cold War, and the restrictions on communications imposed by most Soviet bloc authorities, effectively precluded many scholars from half the continent from submitting anything at all to a British journal. In addition, there was much less pressure on academics in non-Anglophone countries to publish in English. Instead, ESR’s ‘Information for Contributors’ very generously stated: ‘Articles may be submitted in any European language for translation’. This was subsequently, and probably sensibly, amended to ‘any major European language’, but the journal’s willingness to consider texts in numerous languages, and offer translation in some cases, lasted – on paper, at least – until 2003, when it ceased to be based at Lancaster.
It is interesting to compare some metrics from the first and fifth decades of the journal’s existence. In the first 10 volumes, 1971–1980, an absolute majority of submitted articles came from within the UK: more than 78 (there are seven issues out of 40 missing from the EHQ office collection, so some of this data is incomplete). Next came the USA, with more than 32, while Australia came a distant third, on five. There were remarkably few articles from other European countries: two from Germany, one each from Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Poland and Hungary. There was a stark imbalance between the sexes of the contributors: 118 articles published were by men, and only 22 were by women. In a few cases in the earliest volumes, there is no information about the authors other than initials, surnames and institutions; they have been omitted from these figures. Then, as now, most issues carried between four and six articles, of which one or two would normally be from the ‘early modern’ period, with the others dealing with ‘modern’ history. Geographical coverage was patchy, although, then as now, some articles had a thematic focus and were not primarily concerned with specific states or nations. With due allowance made for the massive and ongoing changes in Europe’s states and borders since the early sixteenth century, we can say that Germany and the German states were the area most commonly discussed, in no fewer than 47 articles. The next most popular area was France, which featured strongly in 36 articles. Spain (18 articles) and Russia/USSR (17 articles) lagged some way behind. Other parts of Europe received only sporadic attention.
The tradition of occasional themed special issues was established early in the journal’s life: the first decade saw volumes on ‘Public Commentary and Private Observation: Europe 1610–1945’, ‘Germany’, ‘Early Modern France’ and ‘Modern Spain’, as well as the perennially germane topic ‘Britain and Europe’.
In January 1979, J. H. Shennan stood down as editor of ESR. He was replaced by his Lancaster colleague Martin Blinkhorn, who held the reins for 24 years – the longest service of any of our editors. During his tenure not only did the journal change its name, but the post-war division of Europe into capitalist and state-socialist blocs came to an end, Germany was reunited while the USSR, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia broke up, and historians of Europe found a treasure-trove of new primary sources in Eastern bloc archives. The proliferation of new states in Europe’s East also meant a proliferation of new national histories, although the economic collapse which blighted that region and its academic life in the early 1990s delayed the impact of this development on British academic publishing.
From the narrower point of view of the journal itself, the development of digital communication technology during the 1990s and early 2000s made it much easier to receive submissions from anywhere around the world, find referees, edit and subedit contributions and submit them to the publisher. It also meant that editorial work did not all need to be concentrated in one institution. Therefore, when Martin Blinkhorn stood down in 2003, having successfully established EHQ and maintained its reputation as one of the most respected journals in its field, it was relatively easy to run it from two locations: Birkbeck College in London and UEA in Norfolk.
The data for the journal’s most recent decade, Volumes 41 to 50 (2011–2020), give an impression of how far we have come since the 1970s. The total pagination for EHQ, at up to 800 pages per year, is almost twice what it what for most of our first decade. This expansion has been largely the result of carrying many more book reviews than in the early years. Spanish history is now the most common topic by some considerable margin, with 46 articles solely or largely devoted to it over that decade. Italian history, with 26 articles, has second place, followed by France on 23 and Germany on 15 articles. Russia/USSR and Poland had eight articles apiece. It would be interesting to explore the reasons for this further, as academic publishers’ catalogues show that research on Germany and Russia remains buoyant. Overall, EHQ’s geographical coverage has become more comprehensive, and occasional articles now appear discussing less commonly studied places such as Albania or Iceland. Certain other regions, however, such as Scandinavia and Finland, continue to receive less attention than they merit. The themes of the guest-edited special issues have become more specialized, with issues covering such topics as Spanish national identity in the twentieth century, armed strikebreaking in the Belle Époque, or early modern European archives.
The articles published in Volumes 41 to 50 were also submitted from a much wider range of countries than in the 1970s. Although articles originating in UK institutions remain the largest single category (67), and those from US institutions retain second place (31), EHQ is now publishing many more articles from scholars at European institutions, notably from Italy (18), Spain (14) and Germany (11). This reflects two distinct strands of academic globalization: the pressure to publish in English now endemic across the continent, and the emergence of prestigious transnational research-intensive Euro-institutions, such as the European University Institute in Florence. Meanwhile, the long march towards sex equality has been proceeding less rapidly: the published articles have 137 male compared with 57 female authors. Women account for just under 30 per cent of the total, compared with just under 16 per cent in the 1970s.
Given all the changes in European politics and society, academic life and technology over the past five decades, in some respects EHQ has not changed very much. It remains what it has always been – a journal of essentially empirical history, with a particular penchant for social and political topics, and a tendency to avoid abstract theory. Scholars from around the world continue to submit articles at a healthy rate. But – what of the future? Will an editor be able to look back on ‘100 years of EHQ’ in 2071? There are serious challenges. The rapid and accelerating development of information technology, which has revolutionized the publishing world over the last 25 years, has also revolutionized the readers’ relationship with journals. Few readers ever see a physical copy of EHQ these days, and most of them access not a journal, but an individual article, served up by an online search on a university library system. The sense of a journal’s distinct identity may still exist in the minds of its producers, but its consumers may scarcely notice the provenance of what they are reading unless they need to reference it in a footnote. Similarly, the economic model of academic publishing which has developed over the decades is now under increasing pressure, as the psychology of ‘free’ access to online resources becomes increasingly entrenched in the public consciousness. But, as Doris Day sang in 1956, ‘The future’s not ours to see’. For the present, the editorial team remains committed to publishing the latest high-quality research on European history and seeking ways to widen and diversify further our pool of contributors.
The Editors