Obituary: David Abulafia – Distinguished Historian Who Became Champion of Academic Freedom

One of Britain’s most distinguished historians, Professor David Abulafia CBE, who developed pioneering expertise in the history of the Mediterranean, has died aged 76.

Elected as a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, at just 25, he was appointed Professor of Mediterranean History in 2000 and elected a Fellow of the British Academy a decade later. He won the Wolfson History Prize in 2020 for The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, and was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2023 for services to scholarship.

It is in another of his acclaimed books, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011) – which won the British Academy Medal in 2013 – that one sees most clearly the historiographical instinct animating his later work. In this panoramic history of the Mediterranean world, Abulafia provides a counterpoint to the multi-temporal structuralism associated with the French Annales school, with its tendency to valorise the longue durée (long term) – a “quasi-immobile history”, as he puts it, of structures and systems whose movement is measured in centuries. Abulafia stresses instead histoire événementielle, the history of events, which represents, he says, but the mere “agitation of the surface, the waves that are raised on the seas by their powerful movements… a history of brief, rapid, nervous oscillations”.

In the longue durée, of course, we’re all dead – as Keynes (almost) said – so it’s perhaps hardly surprising that historians working in this tradition can often sound a little jaded, as if human progress were just one damned Kondratieff wave after another. Nowhere do the sepulchral tones become more pronounced than in Fernand Braudel’s oft-quoted line from The Mediterranean: “When I think of the individual,” the doyen of the Annales school moaned, “I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand.”

For Abulafia, however, historical insight lay precisely in those smaller, ostensibly irrational or unexpected human decisions by merchants, exiles, pashas and pirates that were not simply the epiphenomenal froth upon a predetermined tide, but could – and did – have consequences that rippled across the whole region. The historian’s task, as he presents it, was to capture the Mediterranean’s “swirling changeability”: its dispersals and entrepôts, its haste and improvisation, “in the diasporas of merchants and exiles, in the people hurrying to cross its surface as quickly as possible, not seeking to linger at sea, especially in winter, when travel became dangerous”.

There is surely a continuity here between this resistance to accounts of human action that erase any meaningful sense of agency and his emergence, following retirement, as a prominent public intellectual on questions of free speech and academic freedom. He perceptibly saw that at stake were the epistemic conditions of scholarship itself: the defence of reasoned argument, evidence and truth-claims that don’t collapse into the pieties of woke-inflected relativism. Scholarship, he understood, depends on the freedom to argue, dissent and test ideas in public, and he never hesitated to speak plainly when academic institutions drifted towards censorious habits. He saw how the managerial university was beginning to resemble a secularised, pettifogging version of Braudel’s deterministic cage, forever attempting to subordinate the personal trajectories, intellectual inclinations and curiosities of academics to its collective ends: allegiance to EDI, ‘anti-racism’, the ‘climate crisis’ and the supposed necessity of policing vague, ill-defined harms such as ‘hateful’ or ‘offensive’ speech.

In 2021, for instance, Abulafia publicly criticised Cambridge’s anonymous “Report + Support” system for reporting “inappropriate” behaviour, warning that a mechanism of this kind could easily be weaponised by those seeking to undermine a colleague, triggering complaint-handling processes and reputational harm. The controversy centred on the scheme’s attempt to codify “microaggressions” as intentional or unintentional “slights, indignities, put-downs and insults” to which minority groups were said to be subjected, including praising the English of a non-native speaker, or raising eyebrows when a black member of staff or student is speaking.

Abulafia was especially scathing about the ideological framing embedded in the guidance. The scheme’s definition of racism as a systemic “oppression” that “sets whiteness as the norm” was, he wrote, “straight out of critical race theory textbooks”. Not only was this approach rooted in inaccurate and ignorant historical generalisations, but it amounted to a totalising framework in which dissent can only be intelligible as an effect of the very phenomena it posits: white privilege and systemic racism.

Following the backlash, Cambridge removed the “Report + Support” website while the disputed guidance was withdrawn and reviewed – a retreat from that most censorious iteration, even if anonymous reporting mechanisms have not entirely disappeared from university life. Sadly, younger academics, fearing for their career, are scarcely any less reluctant even so to put their head above the parapet, given the wider institutionalisation of critical race theory, where ‘anti-racism’ priorities permeate recruitment and funding decisions. As David observed: “One college after another has established a junior research fellowship specifically in ‘racism and anti-racism’, offering up to four years of stipend, accommodation and high-table meals, as if this will somehow atone for any ancient links with Caribbean slavery.”

In another high-profile intervention in 2024, Abulafia attacked the decision by the newly elected Labour Government to pause implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, describing it as a retreat from enforceable protections for expression on campus. “Once one could debate openly with Marxists and others with whom one disagreed, and engagement with opinions one did not hold was stimulating and worthwhile,” he wrote. And now? “When speakers attempt to put forward views with which radical activists disagree, for instance on biological gender, they are shouted down by an angry mob banging on the doors; or, just as bad, opponents book most of the seats and then stage a walkout, depriving others who would have wished to attend of the opportunity to do so.” It was this, he concluded – the “steep decline” in the ability of universities to act as “places of open debate, apolitical in character” – that made implementation of the legislation “ever more urgent”.

Writing in a Spectator obituary, Lord Biggar noted that many readers will have enjoyed Abulafia’s journalism over the years – his wry humour and blunt, uncompromising judgement – without quite registering how much scholarly weight sat behind it. That’s surely true. But you can sometimes catch a glimpse of all three at once, as in this passage on the epistemic temptations of identity politics, where popular culture and high academic erudition mingle effortlessly, and the turn of the argument suddenly forces the absurdity of the present to reveal something altogether darker about our future:

Historians feel embattled at the moment, since this outlook has become all-pervasive in the age of identity politics. Feelings trump facts. I only need to quote the words of a member of the Royal Family now living in California, presumably recast by his ghost-writer: “Whatever the cause, my memory is my memory, it does what it does… and there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.” For in some versions, influenced by frequently incomprehensible French philosophers from the Left Bank of the Seine presumably unknown to the Prince, there is no real past; everyone has his or her own valid version of the past. As Sir Richard Evans has pointed out in his book In Defence of History, this approach opens the door to Holocaust denial and other mendacious ways of describing past events.

Better, surely, to act – and to speak – as if the closing of such doors is still in our hands, than to retreat into structuralist fatalism while they swing silently open.

Dr Frederick Attenborough is the Research Manager of the Committee for Academic Freedom.