A cup of tea with Professor Margot Finn

Contrary to how the subject is taught in schools, history is an unbounded subject that is changing constantly.

Join Professors Judy Stephenson and Margot Finn, FBA, Professor of Modern British History, as they discuss the importance of re-examining evidence, and how students' use of AI can limit their critical engagement. Plus, find out more about Prof Finn's surprising first publication.

Read more of Prof Finn's work in The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857, edited by Profs Margot Finn and Kate Smith. This book, available as a free PDF from UCL Press, explores imperial culture and its British legacies, focusing on how the Empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents.

What is UCL Press Play?

Step into the minds of leading academics with UCL Press Play: a podcast and documentary series featuring groundbreaking voices and cutting edge ideas.

Join UCL academics as they uncover ground-breaking new ideas and fresh insights on diverse topics such as queer histories, neurodiversity, and climate justice.

Season 4: A Cup of Tea With… is your chance to share a tea break with inspiring academics from UCL (University College London). Join Professor Judy Stephenson, Professor of Economic History of the Built Environment, to learn how they got into their field and hear insights from their research. Plus, find out how they like their tea!

Website and transcripts: https://uclpress.co.uk/ucl-press-play/

Judy Stephenson: Hello. Welcome to a cup of Tea. I'm Professor Judy Stephenson, and I'm going to bring ten questions to our academics about research, about what drives them and about what the challenges ahead are. A cup of tea is a global commodity. It's also a British tradition. Let's get started.

Judy Stephenson: Welcome to a Cup of Tea, where we're interested in how academic research can make the world better. Today I'm having tea with Professor Margot Finn, historian and friend. A cup of tea is a global commodity, but also a British tradition. So, Margot, I believe you are taking builders tea. Why? And how do you take it?

Margot Finn: I take it with milk. No sugar.

Judy Stephenson: No sugar. Sweet enough?

Margot Finn: Sweet enough.

Judy Stephenson: Is that always your tea choice?

Margot Finn: Yes. Predictable. Reliable. Well, relative to some other times.

Judy Stephenson: Relative to some other times.

Margot Finn: Also, I just don't like Earl Grey tea.

Judy Stephenson: Okay. So one of the questions we have for you is if you have 1 million pounds for research. 1 million pounds to spend researching anything you could. What would you spend it on and why?

Margot Finn: I enjoyed thinking about that last night on the tube. I think what I would do with one million quid would be a study of outmigration and in-migration, either from Lydd in Kent, which is where my father's father's family was from, or from the Black Isle, Cromarty- a place like that, which is my mother's mother's. And I'd like to see a very long history where we took maybe a parish, maybe a town, and looked at the outmigration. And that would be both nationally and globally, and then took all the places outside of Britain that those people went to and looked at the in-migration back. To get a scoping two way vision of the migration history of a particular parish or a town that I come from.

Judy Stephenson: Wow. That's cool. But since when? Which when would you start?

Margot Finn: Well, that's- I didn't have a long enough tube ride to decide that. I'm mainly an 18th, 19th century historian. I think that rooting it in the 18th century, which is, of course, a period of enormous population growth and turmoil and outmigration. So either late 18th century, late 1700s or early 19th century. That's what I would do. Maybe just a decade. Because you're only giving me a million. I mean, I could do more with two.

Judy Stephenson: You know, who do you think are the people going in, in, let's say, the 1780s?

Margot Finn: So 1780s is again, I think this is a period of maritime expansion, globally for Britain. Yeah. And you're going to have, impressment, for example, lads being oppressed into the Navy and then fighting the French. They might be fighting the French and Caribbean theatres of war. They might be fighting the French in the south Asian theatres of war. They might be in the Mediterranean. So you've got that sort of out-migration, and some of those people will end up in those places. Many of them will, of course, die, at sea or on land in battle. But just to have a sense of that, and the way in which, already in the 18th century, these small parish places that we think of as innately English or innately Scottish are braided into these wider global histories already in the 17th century. Way pre Windrush.

Judy Stephenson: What would you expect to find?

Margot Finn: Well, I think two things. One would be a lot more outmigration than one thinks. And I think that would also help frame the way in which people are talking about in-migration to Britain at present. Start with the outmigration and then look at the end migration. So I think the second thing we would find would be if you connect migration out with migration in, we might be able to have a better discussion of migration in the UK.

Judy Stephenson: So for you. Is that an is the modern or the current migration- in the current migration situation coming, you know, in the channel, is that, is that, a useful context?

Margot Finn: I wouldn't want to conflate the two. I don't think they're equivalent. As a historian, it's impossible not to think and know that they're connected, that the world that is sending people today is a world that was shaped by the sending people in the 18th century. So people coming in small boats is obviously different than the lads being impressed and then seeing large bits of the world, but the forced nature of migrations I think can then be situated within the willing migrants. Willing in the sense of typically being projected out by unimaginable horrors. Though also by economic desire and need, and family ties. All of those things. And we can see those in the 18th century as well. So I wouldn't want to conflate because I don't think they're directly equivalent, but it's impossible not to say they're entangled and propulsively so.

Judy Stephenson: Cool.

Margot Finn: That's my next million.

Judy Stephenson: So you know, within that context- Tell us a little bit about how you got into history and about what's happening in history now.

Margot Finn: All right. So I got into history by an unusual route. My first degree was in biology and biochemistry, and I had two years of that degree in the molecular genetics lab. So weirdly, for a historian, my first published work is on sequencing and structure mapping RNA using the Max and Gilbert technique. So I didn't come into history straight. I guess I would say, and I decided really partly based on that lab work experience, that I didn't want to go to graduate school in that, but I really did want to get a doctorate and try and have a research career. And I simply basically jumped ship, directly into history, which does mean I have huge gaps in historical knowledge. Until quite late in my career, I used to worry obsessively that someone would ask me to lecture on the Spanish Civil War, and I would have to find out when it was and who won. So, I went straight into a doctoral program at Columbia University in the 80s. And Columbia was then known as the Uganda of all graduate programs. They took just about anyone, including me, and chucked most of them out at the end of the first year. And I clawed on by my fingernails and got in. And I guess quite often in my career, serendipitous things have led me to do what I've done. So my dissertation, which became my first book, was a project on what was the impact of the continental European refugees from the 1848 revolutions, in particular, English radicalism and socialism and liberalism. And I fell into that project, for my doctorate, by failing my Russian exam on the first go.

Judy Stephenson: Serendipity and research. It's very important. So what is then the biggest misconception about the field of history, do you think?

Margot Finn: Because everyone does history at school, I think everyone has some sort of a belief that they understand how it works. And history in school is wildly different from history as it's practiced by historians, academic historians at least. And I think that cognitive dissonance between how people experience memorising things, you know, or there being a right answer or, sort of an A-level approach where you can argue 50% of this and 50% that, and then say, in my opinion, which is not remotely how, you know, university historians do history. I think that is a misconception that's really difficult to disabuse people of when you do public history. What's the nature of evidence? How can we ask questions that are different from how people have asked questions before? Those sorts of things don't really come out very well from history in schools, even though, history school teachers, I think, do an absolutely brilliant job, but with a pretty flawed, examination structure.

Judy Stephenson: True. I mean, the nature of evidence-

Margot Finn: Is the topic of our times.

Judy Stephenson: It's been the most important thing there. So, I mean, there's a conceptual misconception that somehow we know what the evidence is and that we can be-

Margot Finn: Yeah. And that there's really only one way of reading that. That if you get this evidence, this tricky evidence, and if you go into the dusty archive. And of course, archivists know that archives are not dusty. And if you go into that archive, then it's pellucid. It's clear. It's just easy then to interpret it, because history is just what happened, right? It's just this chronology that happened. Whereas the real excitement in history is the different methodologies you can bring and the way in which having a different methodology makes you ask a different question. And an example of that, I can think of from my second book, which is down by Judy there, was a book on debt and credit in the 18th and 19th century in Britain. So I was up in Lincoln in the archive looking at these county court records. And it was just when Apple Macintosh had released really easy to use spreadsheets. And so I thought, well, I'll just make a database, you know, with this and just sort of see- see what happens. And the moment you database it, you realise that these courts where men's debts- men's small debts, working class debts- mainly were being litigated. The person who was appearing in court again and again, again was his wife. Now married women in the 19th century and in the period that I was looking at do not have legal authority. They cannot appear in a court notionally, but there they were. And if you database them, you saw that they were about 90% of the cases were being litigated by these women who had no legal agency of their own. So again, the method allows you to see with a particular rapidity. And then, of course, you begin to ask all sorts of different questions that just aren't there to be asked if you only read what's on the page in a flat line. So method matters.

Judy Stephenson: So what are you currently working on?

Margot Finn: I am currently finishing - she said, hopefully - an interminable book on the family and the East India Company. That's been a project for a long time. I've done parallel things out of it, including my UCL Press book for the Leverhulme project, which was on country houses and the East India Company. And that's a chapter in this book.

Judy Stephenson: So tell us why family and the Company.

Margot Finn: I want us to rethink first why and then how Empire happened in India. Because it's an insanely ridiculous thing to do. In the 18th century, when the significant developments begin to happen, you've got at least a 50% chance of just dying within the first two years. So this just doesn't seem to be one of the more intuitive things to do when you could be going to North America, or you could be trading in the Mediterranean. So one of the questions I just have is why? Why are they doing this? And I think the available answers are just inadequate to the task, partly because the people who are doing that empire through the East India Company in South Asia are conceptualised as being adult white men who are acting as if Adam Smith was speaking directly to them. They had this conception of the isolated, autonomous individual driving everything that happens that's either explicit and implicit in the literature. And when I was reading around an East India Company literature, again, that was the serendipitous way in which I came into this project, that reading round. It's very, very clear that that just didn't map onto the evidence in any meaningful way. And what did motivate these people were families, including mums sending 13 year old boys out to India, and just being very, very clear that that was what they were going to do. And then I began to locate that in the demographic revolution of the 18th and early 19th century and thinking, well, historians of the Industrial Revolution think that the demographic Revolution sent scads of people into factories. What if we look at the elite that runs the East India Company and asks the question of how many babies are they having? And they are very prolific. Most men will also have illegitimate children. So the total number of children of the men in the elite, you know, first- that sort of range, might have very often over 12, once you add the bastards into the legitimate children. And that's a propulsive force that empire is there to soak up this population to some extent. And it also very conveniently kills part of that population of- Yeah, that's sounding a much more vulgar version of the argument that I am trying to develop. But I think that we don't attend a democracy and we don't attend to families, and we don't attend to women at our peril.

Judy Stephenson: Who's your favourite writer or researcher either in your field or, you know, UCL and why.

Margot Finn: So I'm not I'm not sure I do favourites. But I would say an inspirational historian for me would be Maxine Berg. Who was my colleague at oh, for many years. She, with Pat Hudson, was one of the foundational writers about the industrial revolution. Yeah. And she founded - and I was head of department and helped this happen - the global history centre at Warwick. So I just admire the- and her most recent book with Pat Hudson is about Atlantic slavery. So I admire the scope- the you can see a strand through her work that she hasn't done what some historians do, which is rewrite the same book several times over. And she's made fields and done it with practical collegiality and generosity.

Judy Stephenson: As an economic historian. What Burke and Hudson - and Burke herself - did for the 18th century, we're still all trying to-

Margot Finn: Foundational to. Yeah.

Judy Stephenson: It's absolutely. Yeah.

Margot Finn: And it was really difficult, I think, to be a woman in economic history. You know, when she started out.

Judy Stephenson: Just in terms of how we're bringing young researchers, though, the idea that you need a career that is wide and deep, isn't something- Because we're encouraging people to be- to get lots of papers out, to get lots of books out, out on things that are interesting and topical, rather than have what you know, you're describing, which is interests and connections, you know.

Margot Finn: The, I mean, the expectations of young academics today are just unimaginable compared to what we were expected to do. Nobody expected PhD students, when I was a PhD student, to publish an article. And it was just, you know, it would have almost been vulgar, if one had done it. So I think that's, you know, a problem. I think we do need to be giving people more experimentation scope-y time. But the institutional context isn't really very much in that direction.

Judy Stephenson: It's hard.

Margot Finn: Yeah.

Judy Stephenson: So, what are the three significant problems in the world today that researchers in history can contribute to solving?

Margot Finn: So I would go back first to the problem of evidence. I think that at every level - political, economic, climate collapse, etc. - we have to get better at understanding what evidence is, how it works, why it changes, why if it doesn't change, that's a problem. And I think that to go back again to something I said earlier on, because everyone does history, that it's an available space for explaining that better and that if we could explain it better for history, we could explain it better for pandemics, we could explain it better for other things. The virtuous instability of evidence, the fact that if we learn more, do more, do the research, of course the answer is going to change - and that's not scary, it doesn't mean we were wrong or malicious or stupid before. I think that history could be a mechanism for introducing that broad concept, which could then be developed appropriately for epidemiology for, you know, climate, assessing, climate risk, etc., etc.. So that would be my first. I think it'd be a good seedbed for understanding evidence better. And we desperately need to understand evidence better. Just to get back to the PhD students, the PhD students of whom one despairs are the ones who deliver the PhD that they promised at application stage.

Judy Stephenson: You know, if it's that banal that you could predict- it's meant to be a hypothesis, it's not the answer. The answer is going to change.

Margot Finn: And the solutions are going to lead you in directions that you don't expect and often don't like. Yeah, and that's okay, because that's how we learn new things and ask different questions.

Judy Stephenson: So historians need to be part of this conversation about what we deal with. So what is AI going to do to your job, do you think both of this researcher and perhaps as a teacher?

Margot Finn: I can definitely say what it's done already. Which, like most academic teachers, has been pretty appalling. Its use has made marking a nightmare. And made it much harder, I think, to talk to students meaningfully about how difficult learning is. So, I have definitely had students who have used it and been failed. I was chair of the exam board in the first exam season when ChatGPT came in. And that was very interesting. Partly because, and this is true at all UK universities at the moment, I think, there was a desire on the part of senior educational needs to make performative statements about the fact that we were at the forefront of this new development. And you could see that across the four nations in the UK. Whereas those of us in the trenches, knew, first of all, nobody was at the forefront of this, and secondly, that we did not in that very rapid introduction period, have mechanisms to do anything except to tell students the moment you open the app, you have committed academic misconduct, knowing full well that that was not going to be something that would be sustainable. So that my first interaction is that it's a complete pain from that perspective. My concern, sticking with teaching- that it grows into a research concern, my concern is that if we already are struggling to teach students how to think critically and analytically at this very different university from school level, that if we allow them to not attain those skills by allowing them to integrate ChatGPT and other chatbots and everything they do, the amount of cognitive offloading that will happen will be just utterly detrimental to their ability to go forth, you know, into the world and and into master's degrees and PhDs as well. So I think it's a real worry. So are the things that artificial intelligence can do very well, and I'm sure it can do very well in history? Absolutely. And I certainly know people, you know, are making interesting uses of it. But critical engagement is surely essential. And what else are universities but for that critical engagement?

Judy Stephenson: We all need to get back to doing that. I mean, in some ways, it's exciting, Particularly if you're interested in archives and whatever else. There's the opportunity to gather more, I mean, to see more. But there's the question of interpretation that's the problem, because the answer will change.

Margot Finn: There's a league table. I think it's Forbes magazine, but I could be wrong about this, of which professions are going to be rendered obsolete by ChatGPT, and I think history is number two in their league table. And in a way, again, if you understand history only from the perspective of school textbooks, I can see why they would think that, because they think historical knowledge is bounded; we already know, you know, pretty much everything. So it's just a matter of digesting it in different ways, and a chatbot can do that, and that just so mistakes the entire field that you slightly despair.

Judy Stephenson: Yeah. So it's not going to transform?

Margot Finn: I think it will, I do think it will have transformative effects. But it's a bit like, and you know this more than I do because you're a proper economic historian and I'm the improper one, technological transfer, technological development doesn't happen in the way that people think it does.

Judy Stephenson: It's- it's a spaghetti, not a linear-

Margot Finn: Exactly.

Judy Stephenson: It's the law of unintended consequences.

Margot Finn: And it certainly doesn't happen the way that people who are trying to sell it say it happens, you know, capitalism people.

Judy Stephenson: Bearing that in mind then, what are your worries about where research and universities are at the moment and what are your hopes, your optimism. You know, you're optimistic that-?

Margot Finn: I think universities have handled artificial intelligence very poorly. I think part of that is coming out of pandemic, which was a very, very difficult time, you know, for universities. I think it's partly conditioned by, the real economic problems that universities in the UK are facing. But I think it was also a failure of will. The acceptance, in institutions that are normally very difficult to change, the willingness just to say 'oh, it's out there. We can't do anything about it'. I really find that quite outrageous. We should just be asking better questions than I think on the whole are being asked, and there are many honorable exceptions. But surely if the university is good for anything, it's good for thinking - not just for undergraduates, not just for master's students, not just for PhD students, not just for our own research - about where is this appropriate? How is this appropriate? When is this dangerous? When is this actually incredibly exciting? How can we do do this better? And certainly, I would also emphasise, I think universities have been appalling at addressing the energy and the environmental impact of AI, I just, it was shocking to me that that is not front and centre of discussions of its use. I don't know a university that's handling that part well. But I do know a number of universities that know they will miss their net zero plans and that are not willing to engage with 'how does encouraging all of your students to use generative AI, all of the time count in that'?

Judy Stephenson: Yeah. No, that's it's a it's a big impact- a more silent one.

Margot Finn: If we get the energy usage wrong, if we just build data centres that extract required water rather than cooling by other means, and yes, I know people argue, AI will solve the problem that it is creating, but there's just no evidence in the short to medium term that that's actually the case. And given the fact the number of the chatbots leading these technologies are climate collapse deniers and often believe that society is going to come to an end very shortly anyway, I'd be a bit skeptical about that.

Judy Stephenson: But there's exciting things in what you say about you know, society needs people who are going to think about these things and they're in universities because, you know, we're not just training people for capital. There's many more. We're- we've got we've got a role.

Margot Finn: Yeah. No, I think so.

Judy Stephenson: Margot Finn, thank you very much for one of the most interesting cups of tea I've ever had.

Margot Finn: Thank you very much, indeed. It's fun.