When President Bush came to Britain in June, a number of historians were among the dinner guests at 10 Downing Street. One, David Cannadine, was a mover in setting up a History and Policy Unit, in the hope that, when politicians are contemplating such weighty matters as regime change, knife crime or ID cards, they might call on a historian to evaluate past precedents.

Yet Professor Cannadine has just published a book in which he maintains that the morale of professional historians (whose collective name in AL Rowse’s time was reputedly “a poison”, and is now supposedly “a malice”) is at an all-time low. Andrew Roberts, another Downing Street invitee, agrees. He has called for a regulatory authority for historians and suggests it could be called Ofhist. Its task would be to protect what he designates “proper historians” from incursions by “amateurs” into writing history books, and to restrain literary editors from commissioning “Clist celebs” and the writers of “chick lit” to review such historians’ work.

So, where does the truth lie? Are historians the repository of the nation’s past wisdom, essential policy wonks’ adjuncts? Or an endangered species in need of protection from today’s nasty, dumbed-down world? Let’s attempt a historian’s answer: it depends where you stand. Certainly, if that’s in most parts of Europe, the answer would be that the reputation of British historians has never been higher.

Professor Sir Ian Kershaw’s two-volume biography of Hitler, Hubris and Nemesis, has been a huge critical and commercial success in Germany as well as in Britain, where a single-volume abridged paperback comes out in September. “It’s hard to imagine,” says Kershaw, who was knighted for services to history in 2002, “that the British public would give a warm welcome to a biography of Churchill written by a German historian.” Yet Kershaw’s is seen in Germany as the definitive biography of the Führer.

Richard Evans, whose third volume in a series on the Nazis’ rise to power, The Third Reich at War, is scheduled for an October release, also sells well in Germany. “Although, of course, I’m drawing on the work of German scholars,” says Evans, professor of modern history at Cambridge, “I am doing something German historians in general don’t do - that is, providing a broad-based history that is accessible for the general reader. The first two volumes have been translated into 12 languages, including Dutch, French and Italian, and the second volume has proved even more popular in America than it is here.” Anne Louise Fisher, a literary scout with a talent for finding serious nonfiction (as well as literature) for European publishers, agrees. “Ian Kershaw’s book is being published in translation this autumn in Denmark, Sweden, Finland - that’s relatively new. Scandinavian countries used to buy small quantities of such books in English, but now they are having them translated and selling to a bigger market, particularly to history book clubs, which are flourishing over there.”

Why should this be when, as Kershaw points out, there is scant reciprocity? Try to recall a European historian who has made a big impact on the British trade (rather than specialist academic) market and it’s a long haul - back to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, in 1978, or Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, soon afterwards. The consensus is that it’s the ability to write authoritative, broad-brush history, with appeal to the bookshop browser as well as the specialist, that makes British historians such stars abroad. “We have an embarrassment of riches at the moment,” says the historian of Russia, Orlando Figes. “British historians are acknowledged as being the best in the world.”

Evans agrees about the tremendous influence British historians have in other countries: “No German interested in the history of his or her own country can afford to ignore the work of Ian Kershaw, no Russian the work of Robert Service or Geoffrey Hoskins, no Spaniard the work of Paul Preston, no Italian that of Denis Mack Smith or Lucy Riall, no French man or woman Theodore Zeldin. The list goes on.” Historians like these, and others such as Lisa Jardine, Linda Colley, Simon Schama and Orlando Figes, are all university academics, giving them an authority and credibility Europeans value. The latter is key to their success, but so, Fisher insists, is the fact that they write engagingly.

Evans makes the point that, on the Continent, the divide between academic and popular history is far deeper. Elsewhere in Europe, history is seen as a social science (Wissenschaft), so it tends to be written in “high academese”, a technical, theoretical style that can be impenetrableto all but the committed specialist. In Britain, history is seen as a branch of literature, rather than science, and the tradition of writing narrative, empirical history, often with an emphasis on biography, provides a vivid “story” that can be appreciated by the educated reader.

Simon Winder, who publishes Kershaw, Evans and other bestselling historians at Penguin, thinks British historians have a particular ambition to engage with a wider public, a tradition of wanting to tackle large themes and make them comprehensible to a general audience. His view is that it is also sometimes easier for an outsider to write about a country whose history is still sensitive. He cites Vichy France, the Spanish civil war, Stalin’s Russia and, of course, Nazi Germany. Evans, while saying that there is “pretty much a consensus about Hitler now”, does recognise that an outsider can come to a painful subject without the inhibitions a local historian might have, and can push a wedge into a wall of silence that opens a space for that country’s own historians to be able to write about it.

Paul Preston thinks the “distance factor” has certainly been important in writing about Spain, first with Hugh Thomas’s ground-breaking book on the civil war, then his own work and that of Antony Beevor. Indeed, when the 70th anniversary of the Spanish civil war was coming up, it was Beevor that the Spanish publisher Critica approached to write a completely new version of his 1982 book The Battle for Spain. It went straight in as a No 1 bestseller in that country, where divisions still run deep. Arabella Pike, Preston’s publisher at HarperCollins, says his next book is about the “Spanish holocaust” - the victims of Franco’s genocide - using witness accounts. It’s a subject that would still be difficult for a Spaniard. The book also already has a publisher in America, Italy and, of course, Spain.

Winder mentions Christopher Clark’s work on Prussia. “After the second world war, Prussia was a dirty word. Probably even today, no German historian would tackle it.” Yet Iron Kingdom, published in 2006, has been - according to Clark’s German publisher, Thomas Rathnow, of Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, who also publishes Kershaw and Evans there - “an almost totally unexpected, word-of-mouth runaway success”. Der Spiegel interviewed Clark at length, and he was invited to meet the president.

Yet the “outsider” is not welcome in every market. So far, Figes’s books on Russia have been translated into 23 languages, including those of the former Soviet satellites Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. Not one, though, has been published in Russia, though there is talk of his prizewinning The Whisperers - previously unpublished accounts of everyday life in the Stalin era - appearing in Russian bookshops. There, according to Figes, there is “only a small market so far for the sort of history we do so well in Britain - it’s either unreadable collections of historical papers or really sensationalist stuff, of the ‘I Was Stalin’s Bodyguard’ or ‘The Secret Life of Rasputin’ sort”.

When Beevor’s Berlin was first published in 2002, the Russian ambassador in London told him sternly: “You must understand, victory is sacred.” Beevor adds: “The Red Army just will not face up to its past.” Yet Berlin, a No 1 bestseller in nine countries and published in at least 27, has now been made available in Russia. “It was brave of AST [the publishers there] to do it,” he concedes.

It was regime change that made Norman Davies a celebrity in Poland. When God’s Playground was published in 1981, it shot up the UK and US bestseller lists, but in Poland anyone found with a copy was liable to go to prison. The flat of a woman who was engaged on a secret translation was repeatedly raided by the police. When underground copies were published, they were immediately impounded. With the collapse of Communism in 1989, the Polish minister of culture phoned Davies to say: “Now is the time.” Ever since, Davies’s is the book that has given young Poles a history of their country. He is fêted whenever he visits and has been given a flat by the state.

Why, then, does Britain seem so resistant to foreign imports? It is part of our insularity, thinks Will Sulkin, the publishing director of Bodley Head: “We are parochial.” After all, we don’t translate many novels, either; and, unlike the Greeks, says Mark Mazower, who has written about their history, we don’t seem that interested in what others might be able to tell us about ourselves. We are not a receiving culture in the same way as other Europeans. In Germany, Thomas Rathnow agrees: “English authors and publishers take it for granted that they will be published elsewhere, often for a considerable advance, even though many of their histories are long, 800 pages or more, and expensive to translate. It is rare for an English publisher to translate nonfiction unless there is a substantial subsidy on offer.”

Anne Louise Fisher adds: “Almost all the European publishers I deal with are fluent in English. So they can assess any book that comes across their desk. That is just not the case in Britain.”

“Maybe,” counters Simon Winder, “but I can’t say there are many books that have come out in Europe in the past few years about which I can say ‘I should have published that’, though I do scour all the lists.”

British historians are writing more fluently than ever, and with authority, on subjects people want to read about. Furthermore, with the decline in university funding, they are more professional and commercially orientated than they used to be. A decade ago, few academic historians had agents; now all the powerhouse agencies have a small but lucrative clutch of professional historians whose books they know they can sell worldwide.

For how long, though? Linda Colley, a British historian with a chair at Princeton, whose most recent books, Captives and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh, have a global cultural reach, is pessimistic. “With the decline of language teaching in schools,” she wonders, “how many graduate students will have the linguistic ability to immerse themselves in foreign archives?” What will that do for Britain’s hegemony in writing the world’s history? Now that really should be on the agenda for the History and Policy Unit.

Juliet Gardiner is the author of Wartime: Britain 1939-1945. She is writing a history of the 1930s for HarperCollins, to be published in 2009

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