BA in History
Research, evidence, argument, and the long view of how systems change.
My History degree at the University of Hull gave me a foundation in evidence-led thinking, structured argument and the interpretation of complex human systems. At first glance, history and product management may seem like very different disciplines. One studies the past, the other helps shape future products. In practice, the connection is much stronger than it first appears.
History is not simply the study of dates, kings, wars and the occasional alarming hat, to contradict Toynbee it isn’t just one damn thing after another (we will not use the ruder version of this quote from the Alan Bennett play the History Boys!). It is the study of change and continuity over time. It asks why events happened, which forces shaped them, whose interests were involved, what evidence survives, what has been excluded, and how different interpretations can be built from the same set of facts.
History as Interpretation
E. H. Carr’s famous argument in What Is History? is useful here. Carr challenged the idea that history is just a neutral collection of facts waiting to be discovered. Facts matter, but they do not organise themselves. The historian selects, interprets, connects and explains them.
That idea has stayed with me because product management works in a similar way. Data, customer feedback, support tickets, sales input and operational evidence do not automatically tell you what to do. They need context, judgement and interpretation and different people use the same evidence in different ways. That way of thinking has been highly relevant to my professional work. Product management often involves dealing with incomplete information, conflicting stakeholder perspectives, inherited systems, organisational constraints, customer behaviour and long chains of cause and effect. A history degree trains you to work in exactly that kind of messy environment.
The University of Hull’s History programme placed emphasis on understanding local, national and global challenges through historical context. The course covered areas such as social and cultural history, war and politics, sudden events and long-term change. That range was important because it showed that history is not one single story. It is a set of overlapping systems involving people, institutions, economics, technology, power, geography, culture and belief.
Some of the most valuable topics I studied included British shipping history, the Crusades, medieval pilgrimage, the British Empire and modern political strategy. These subjects may appear very different, but each of them involved analysing how people, organisations and societies respond to power, risk, belief, logistics, economics and changing circumstances.
British Shipping History and Hull’s Maritime World
My dissertation focused on a Hull-based shipping firm, which was especially meaningful given Hull’s maritime history. That work helped me understand shipping not simply as a commercial activity, but as a system of trade routes, ports, labour, capital, regulation, technology, risk and local identity. Shipping firms did not operate in isolation. They were shaped by global markets, imperial networks, technological change, labour conditions, political decisions and the practical realities of moving goods across distance. That has obvious relevance to my current work in transport management software. Modern logistics may use digital platforms, APIs, telematics, planning tools and automated workflows, but many of the underlying problems are historically familiar. Goods still need to move through constrained networks. Assets still need to be allocated efficiently. Delays still cascade. Commercial promises still meet operational reality. Information still has to move as reliably as freight.
Studying shipping history gave me a long view of logistics. It showed that transport systems are never just technical systems. They are commercial, operational, political and human systems. That perspective is highly useful when working on software used by hauliers, planners, drivers, customer service teams and finance departments. A transport management system is not just a database with screens. It is a digital layer sitting on top of a complex operational world with its own history, constraints and habits.
The Crusades: Power, Belief and Logistics
The Crusades were another important area of study because they showed how ideology, power, logistics, economics and narrative can combine to mobilise large groups of people. They were not simply military events. They involved religious belief, political legitimacy, land, trade, status, violence, diplomacy, supply chains and communication across huge distances.
That matters today because modern organisations are also shaped by narratives, much like the Crusaders in the First Crusade were inspired by the narrative provided by Pope Urban II in 1095. People rarely act only because of facts. They act because of stories, incentives, loyalties, fears and shared beliefs. Product management depends on understanding that. A product strategy is not just a list of features. It is a narrative about what matters, why change is needed and how a better future can be reached.
Medieval Pilgrimage and Change as a Rite of Passage
Medieval pilgrimage was another topic that stayed with me. Pilgrimage can be understood as a liminal or liminoid phenomenon: a journey that takes people out of normal life, places them into a transitional state and returns them changed in status, identity or understanding. In simpler terms, it is a rite of passage, but with better architecture and significantly worse footwear.
That idea is surprisingly relevant to modern product and organisational change. Many digital transformation programmes are also journeys through uncertainty. Users leave behind familiar processes, pass through a difficult transition and eventually arrive at a new way of working. During that transition, people may feel uncertain, resistant, exposed or sceptical. That does not mean they are being difficult. It means they are moving from one operating model to another.
This is highly relevant in software implementation. When a business adopts a new transport management system or changes a core workflow, the change is not purely technical. It affects identity, confidence, routine, status and control. A planner who has worked successfully with spreadsheets for years is not simply being asked to use a new tool. They may feel that their expertise, judgement and established way of working are being challenged.
History helps you see that change is not just a process problem. It is a human problem. Successful product management needs to account for that.
Evidence, Popper and Business Secrets of the Pharaohs
The degree also developed my ability to work with evidence. Historical study requires you to assess sources critically, compare different accounts, identify bias, understand context and build a coherent argument from imperfect material.That is directly useful in product management, where decisions should be based on customer evidence, operational data, user research, commercial signals and technical input rather than opinion alone.
This links closely to Karl Popper’s philosophy of knowledge. Popper argued that strong ideas should be open to criticism and testing. A theory that cannot be challenged is weak because it cannot be improved. That is a powerful mindset for both history and product management. In product work, assumptions should be treated as hypotheses rather than truths. A roadmap assumption can be tested. A customer problem can be validated. A commercial claim can be challenged. A proposed feature can be examined against evidence. A delivery forecast can be updated when new information arrives. The product manager’s job is not to defend an idea at all costs. It is to find out whether the idea survives contact with reality.
That Popperian habit of thinking is extremely useful. It encourages scepticism without cynicism. It means being willing to ask, “what evidence would prove us wrong?” before investing months of effort into building something. It also helps avoid the common organisational problem where a confident opinion slowly hardens into strategy.
There is a useful warning here from Mark Corrigan’s Business Secrets of the Pharaohs. Behind the joke is a serious point: confidence, presentation and ambition are not the same as knowledge. Organisations often produce their own version of this, where a weak assumption is dressed up as strategy, a vague idea becomes a roadmap item, or a half-tested belief becomes a board-level commitment. History, and Popper in particular, teaches the opposite habit. Do not ask whether an idea sounds impressive. Ask what evidence supports it, what would falsify it, and whether it survives contact with reality.
Product Storytelling and Narrative
History is excellent training for product storytelling. It teaches that facts matter, but facts alone do not persuade. They need structure, context and meaning. A roadmap, a product strategy or a business case is not just a list of items. It is an argument about what matters, why it matters, what should happen next and what consequences are likely to follow. My History degree also strengthened my interest in narrative. Historians do not simply collect facts. They build explanations. They connect events into arguments. They show how people make sense of the world through stories, institutions, identities and shared beliefs. That has become increasingly relevant to how I think about products. Products are partly technical systems, but they are also narratives. Customers buy into a view of how their work could be better. Teams align around a shared idea of what should be built. Companies invest in products because they believe in a story about future value.
Conclusion
Overall, my History degree gave me much more than subject knowledge. It developed the analytical habits that sit behind strong product thinking: evidence, context, interpretation, argument, communication, scepticism and an understanding of change over time.
It taught me to look beyond the immediate event and search for the underlying pattern. In product management, that distinction matters. A single customer escalation may dominate the week, but the more important signal may be a gradual rise in support demand, repeated workarounds, declining adoption, manual processes spreading across teams, or a product architecture becoming harder to change.
That long view is particularly relevant in Business software. Business operations are shaped by legacy processes, customer expectations, commercial constraints, planning habits, regulatory requirements, technology choices and deeply embedded operational routines. A new feature rarely enters a neutral environment. It enters a living system with history. This is where Carr, Foucault and Popper still feel useful. Carr reminds us that evidence needs interpretation. Foucault helps reveal the hidden power of institutions, categories, workflows and systems. Popper reminds us that ideas should be tested, challenged and refined rather than protected because they sounded convincing in the first meeting. Those ideas have practical value in product work. A roadmap should not be treated as sacred text. A business case should not be immune from evidence. A product assumption should not survive purely because it was written confidently in a slide deck.
Understanding history makes me a better product manager because it encourages me to ask why processes exist before trying to replace them. It reminds me that users are often responding rationally to constraints that may not be obvious at first. It also helps me see that resistance to change is not always negativity. Sometimes it is historical knowledge wearing a hi-vis jacket.
History helps explain how things came to be. Systems thinking helps explain how things interact. Product management asks what should change next. Together, they create a practical way of understanding complexity.
Perhaps most importantly, my History degree taught me that every system has a past and if you want to change a system intelligently, you need to understand how it got there.