Engaging with Government: History as Part of Policy Making

In 2002, a group of scholars established History & Policy, a network of academic historians dedicated to the principle that access to historical knowledge and expertise can make for better policy-making. The current director of History & Policy, Philip Murphy, explores this relationship and its implications for the ways academics interact with government. What are the incentives for historians to engage with governments? Conversely, with a rapid turn-around in staff and the move to digital communication, the challenge for departments in preserving and accessing ‘institutional memory’ is greater than ever. Yet the pressures of contemporary policy-making leave officials with little time to absorb conventional historical outputs. How can and should these outputs be repurposed to make them more policy-relevant? And finally, what are the implications of the rise of populism and the resurgence of ‘culture wars’ for the relationship between historians, politics and the state?