 | Professor Jonathan Haslam
Professor of the History of International Relations, University of Cambridge (S5) History of thought in international relations; history of Soviet foreign policy; contemporary history of Chile; biography (E H Carr)
I am an ordinary Englishman on one level but, like some others of my generation, from a colonial family (on one side) as my father was born in Agra and his family had been in India from the beginning of the 19th C. My grandfather, a civil engineer, was deputy chief of telegraphs at Karachi before dying in his early forties. So my father was English only on the outside (pin-stripe, rolled umbrella and bowler). He was in fact entirely oriental on the inside - .he spoke an Indian language (I don't know which) from birth which he never lost; he went to Thailand in the Depression and mastered the language; and then Chinese in a Japanese internment camp during the war, as a way of keeping sane. So I am a natural for the international. My first political memory was the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It was the only time I saw my father afraid (having survived internment he feared nothing and no one) as he thought it entirely possible - through his London contacts - that we would all be blown up. Now I know how close we came. I have thus spent most of my life in pursuit of an explanation for the Cold War by focusing on the Soviet Union: perhaps the most difficult subject I could have chosen in the history of international relations. I had to begin by teaching myself Russian in my spare time at school. It is still a tremendous challenge; not least because, having declassified selected documents from their archives (a process I contributed to on the periphery), the Russians effectively erected barriers to further research. So the challenge has been to find back doors into a secure building which I have largely done: through alternative archives, including those of the East Germans in Berlin, the Italian Communist Party in Rome, CIA etc. I have also taken advantage of friendships with those involved in the execution of policy in Moscow, London and Washington. The result should appear in 2010 courtesy of Yale University Press. But I have worked on other subjects, including a biography of the controversial historian of Russia, E.H. Carr, formerly my supervisor; another enigma. My approach to international relations is through history including the history of thought: a fascinating field, traced from medieval Italy through to the American present. I worked in the United States from 1984 to 1988 and took most of my sabbaticals in the leading universities: treasure troves of knowledge with libraries we can barely aspire to. My other passion is my family: my wife Karina and little boy Timothy. |
