5 0 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

no essay in historical re-creation is proof against the values of the

enquirer (see Chapter 7).

Public history

But historians who renounce relevance in the cause of objective

knowledge are not only pursuing a chimera; they are also evading

a wider responsibility. Intellectual curiosity about the past for its

own sake is certainly one reason why people read history, but it

is not the only one. Society also expects an interpretation of the

past that is relevant to the present and a basis for formulating

decisions about the future. Historians may argue that since their

expertise concerns the past not the present, it is not their job to

draw out the practical import of their work. But they are in fact

the only people qualified to equip society with a truly historical

perspective and to save it from the damaging effects of exposure

to historical myth. If professionally trained historians do not carry

out these functions, then others who are less well informed and

more prejudiced will produce ill-founded interpretations. What

Geoffrey Barraclough, a veteran champion of contemporary

values in history, said more than fifty years ago applies with equal

force today:

Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and

if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will

integrate it by a history implicit and false. The challenge is one which

no historian with any conviction of the value of his work can ignore;

and the way to meet it is not to evade the issue of ‘relevance’, but to

accept the fact and work out its implications.38

One of those implications is to develop channels through which

a wider public can be addressed. If some (at least) of historians’

work touches on questions of topical interest, they surely have an

obligation to write for a readership that goes well beyond their

academic peers and their students; they should engage in public

history. Thirty years ago this was an unfamiliar concept. It is now

well understood, but with a somewhat broader definition than the

context in which I am using it here. Public history is an umbrella

term to cover the varied ways in which historians make a public

impact. The best known of these is the advisory work that

scholars carry out for heritage institutions, particularly museums.

‘Public history’ is also sufficiently elastic to include both community projects (working with local history groups, for example)

chimera

A creature of the

imagination, an illusion.

The uses o f his t ory 5 1

and policy advice for government departments. All these activities

help to raise the profile of the profession with the public; all of

them contribute to the level of historical knowledge in society.

But advocates of public history sometimes lose sight of what, in

a liberal democracy, is its most critical function: disseminating

historical perspective on weighty or contentious public issues.

Very occasionally a court case provides the means of doing

so. In 2000 the historicity of the Holocaust was put to the test

when a leading ‘revisionist’ historian, David Irving, claimed that

Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and her publisher,

Penguin Books, had libelled him by describing him as a ‘Holocaust

denier’ who suppressed and distorted the documentary record. In

order to rebut the charges, the defence needed to prove both that

Irving was dishonest in his use of evidence, and that the historical

events which he denied had actually taken place. As a result, the

views of professional historians were as central to the case as the

arguments of legal counsel. One historian, Richard Evans, was

retained specifically to investigate the validity of Irving’s research

procedures by tracing his statements back to the sources on which

they were purportedly based. For three months the court heard

a mountain of evidence of this kind. The verdict, delivered in a

350-page judgment, was an unequivocal defeat for Irving: he was

found to have flouted accepted research methods and to have

manipulated the evidence to suit his political prejudices. The case

not only diminished the credibility of Holocaust denial; it also

showed that what professional historians do matters – that some

events in the past can be authenticated beyond reasonable doubt,

and that society has a vested interest in the maintenance of scholarly standards.39

Alongside a high-profile event of this kind, historians fulfil

their public history brief by writing for a lay readership books

that bring a critical and informed perspective to current affairs.

Most promising – because it testifies to an ongoing commitment

– is the History and Policy website, founded in 2002 as a window

of topical historical research aimed at policy-makers and the

general public.40 It has now posted over sixty papers. The majority

put forward a historical perspective on social issues – policing,

adolescent crime, girls’ performance in school, and so on; a smaller

number engage with international topics like the Iraq war. The

format of these papers – a maximum of 4,000 words and no footnotes – has drawn allegations of dumbing down. But if historians

5 2 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

are to fulfil their social obligations and reach a public audience,

they have to modify their mode of presentation accordingly.

Treating the conventions of academic discourse as non-negotiable

is a sure way of cutting off historians from their public audience.

The need for contemporary history

One implication of public history is that the recent past has a

strong claim on historians. This is the province of contemporary

history, usually defined as the period within living memory (a

favoured starting point is the end of the Cold War in 1989–92).

It can be argued that scholars today are too close to the events

of this period to achieve sufficient detachment, and that they are

further handicapped by their limited access to confidential records

(see Chapter 4). But although the job cannot be done as well as

historians would like, it is important that they do it to the best of

their ability. For it is the recent past on which people draw most

for historical analogies and predictions, and their knowledge of it

needs to be soundly based if they are to avoid serious error. The

recent past has also often proved a fertile breeding ground for

crude myths – all the more powerful when their credibility is not

contested by scholarly work. Academic neglect of contemporary

history therefore has dangerous consequences.

VI

A cultural subject, or a social science?

The argument of this chapter can be briefly summed up by situating

history in the context of its neighbours among the academic disciplines. Traditionally history has been counted, along with literary

and artistic studies, as one of the humanities. The fundamental

premise of these disciplines is that what mankind has thought and

done has an intrinsic interest and a lasting value irrespective of any

practical implications. The re-creation of episodes and ambiences

in the past has the same kind of claim on our attention as the recreation of the thought expressed in a work of art or literature. The

historian, like the literary critic and art historian, is a guardian of

our cultural heritage, and familiarity with that heritage offers insight

into the human condition – a means to heightened self-awareness

and empathy with others. In this sense history is, in Cobb’s phrase,

The uses o f his t ory 5 3

‘a cultural subject, enriching in itself’41 and any venture in historical

reconstruction is worth doing.

By contrast the social sciences owe their position to their

promise of practical guidance. Economists and sociologists seek to

understand the workings of economy and society with a view to

prescribing solutions to current problems, just as scientists offer

the means of mastering the natural world. Historians who believe

in their subject’s practical functions habitually distance it from the

humanities and place it alongside the social sciences. E.H. Carr

did so in What is History? (1961):

Scientists, social scientists, and historians are all engaged in different

branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment,

of the effects of man on his environment and of his environment

on man. The object of the study is the same: to increase man’s

understanding of, and mastery over, his environment.42

On this reading, historical re-creation has value primarily as a

preliminary to historical explanation, and the kinds of explanation that matter are those which relate to questions of social,

economic and political concern.

In this discussion I have given pride of place to the practical uses

of history because these continue to arouse such strong resistance

among many professional historians. But the truth is that history

cannot be defined as either a humanity or a social science without

denying a large part of its nature. The mistake that is so often made

is to insist that history be categorized as one to the exclusion of the

other. History is a hybrid discipline which owes its endless fascination

and its complexity to the fact that it straddles the two. If the study of

history is to retain its full vitality, this central ambivalence must continue to be recognized, whatever the cost in logical coherence. The

study of history ‘for its own sake’ is not mere antiquarianism. Our

human awareness is enhanced by the contemplation of vanished

eras, and historical re-creation will always exercise a hold over the

imagination, offering as it does vicarious experience to writer and

reader alike. At the same time, historians also have a more practical

role to perform, and the history that they teach, whether to students

in schools and colleges or through the media to the wider public,

needs to be informed by an awareness of this role. In this way a

historical education achieves a number of goals at once: it trains the

mind, enlarges the sympathies and provides a much-needed perspective on some of the most pressing problems of our time.

5 4 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

Marxism and the English Revolution

Marxism, the philosophy of Karl Marx (1818–83), was one of

the most influential political and intellectual movements of the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marx held that all human

history can be explained in terms of dialectic, the conflict between

different social classes for control of the main means of economic

production. This produces a succession of stages from feudalism

to capitalism, and from capitalism to a communist society, in

which workers enjoy the benefits of their own labour. The English

Civil Wars (1642–9) were for many years understood essentially

as a conflict for authority between king and Parliament. Marxist

historians working in the twentieth century, notably Christopher

Hill (1912–2003), saw it in much more radical terms, as an attempt

to create a new society on principles of equality and individual

liberty. In this sense it constitutes an English Revolution in the same

way as the later revolutions in France and Russia, as a shift from

aristocratic to bourgeois and even working-class hegemony.

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a fifteenth-century European cultural

and intellectual movement which began in Italy and eventually

spread to France, Germany, the Netherlands and England. It

drew inspiration from new discoveries in the art and writings

of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Artists experimented with

perspective and depth, while sculptors created remarkably lifelike

reproductions of human and animal forms. Renaissance writers

explored Greek philosophy and sought to marry its ideas with

those of Christianity.

Transformation: by peace and by war

In 1948 the white Afrikaaner government of South Africa

imposed a policy of strict racial segregation known as apartheid.

Black African resistance came to centre on the imprisoned

African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela. By the 1980s

South Africa seemed close to civil war, but concessions by the

government of F.W. de Klerk, and especially the release of Nelson

Mandela in 1990, enabled the country to undergo a remarkable

peaceful transition to democracy. In 1994 Nelson Mandela

became the first black President of South Africa.

Nineteenth-century Germany presents a contrasting example.

Germany consisted of a large number of separate states. German

The uses o f his t ory 5 5

Further reading

John Tosh, Why History Matters, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Gordon Connell-Smith & Howell A. Lloyd, The Relevance of History,

Heinemann, 1972.

Beverley Southgate, Why Bother With History? Ancient, Modern and

Postmodern Motivations, Routledge, 2000.

Jeremy Black, Using History, Arnold, 2005.

Michael Howard, The Lessons of History, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997.

Peter Mandler, History and National Life, Profile, 2002.

Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History, Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1984.

Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Verso, 1998.

Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History, Profile, 2009.

Richard E. Neustadt & Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of

History for Decision-Makers, Free Press, 1986.

Stuart Macintyre (ed.), The History Wars, Melbourne University Press,

2001.

Notes

1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Hamish

Hamilton, 1992.

2 A.J.P. Taylor, War by Timetable: How the First World War Began,

Macdonald, 1969, p. 45; Richard Cobb, A Second Identity, Oxford

University press, 1969, p. 47.

nationalists wanted to amalgamate them into a single, unified

German empire, but Austria, the largest and most powerful

German state, presented a problem, partly because it had a large

non-German empire of its own, and partly because it had long

dominated Germany and was unlikely to welcome the creation

of a large, independent German state. In the event, in 1871

Germany was united into a single empire under the leadership of

the militaristic north German kingdom of Prussia; Austria and its

empire were excluded.

5 6 THE P U R SUI T O F H I S TOR Y

3 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern

Masculinity, Oxford University Press, 1996, ch. 8.

4 Interview with N.Z. Davis in Henry Abelove et al. (eds), Visions of

History, Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 114–15.

5 Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century

England, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974, p. 284.

6 Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations,

Cambridge, 1977, p. 181.

7 Pat Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present

Issues, Oxford University Press, 2000.

8 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’,

History & Theory, VIII, 1969, p. 53.

9 James Joll, Europe Since 1870, Penguin, 1976, p. xii.

10 Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, p. 27.

11 Gordon Connell-Smith and Howell A. Lloyd, The Relevance of

History, Heinemann, 1972, pp. 29–31, 123.

12 W.S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 4 vols, Harrap,

1933–8; Roy Jenkins, Asquith, Collins, 1964.

13 Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance

Statesman (Ricordi), Harper & Row, 1965, p. 69.

14 See, for example, Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking

in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, Free Press,

1986; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Unwin

Hyman, 1988.

15 David H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1971, ch. 9.

16 Hobsbawm, On History, pp. 29, 233.

17 E.H. Carr, What is History? 2nd edn, Penguin, 1987, p. 69.

18 These assumptions underpinned Donald Denoon, Southern Africa

Since 1800, Longman, 1972, and many other texts of the time.

19 Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian

England, 1850–1895, Princeton, 1989.

20 Michael Anderson, ‘The relevance of family history’, in Chris Harris

(ed.), The Sociology of the Family, Keele, 1980.

21 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, Yale

University Press, 1992; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. II:

Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Verso, 1998, pp. 41–73.

22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983.

23 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double

Consciousness, Verso, 1993.

24 Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern

The uses o f his t ory 5 7

England, Cambridge University Press, 1993; Clare Midgley, Women

Against Slavery, Routledge, 1992.

25 William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, Peter Davies, 1926, p. 176.

26 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home

in Victorian England, Yale University Press, 1999.

27 For an introductory selection, see P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault

Reader, Pantheon, 1984.

28 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays,

Methuen, 1962, p. 165.

29 G.R. Elton, ‘Second thoughts on history at the universities’, History,

LIV, 1969, p. 66. See also his The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969,

pp. 66–8.

30 V.H. Galbraith, in R.C.K. Ensor et al. (eds), Why We Study History,

Historical Association, 1944, p. 7; see also his An Introduction to the

Study of History, C.A. Watts, 1964, pp. 59–61.

31 Peter Mandler, History and National Life, Profile, 2002, p. 10.

32 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity, Oxford University Press, 1969,

p. 47.

33 Jeff Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, Longman, 1979.

34 David Cannadine, ‘British history: past, present – and future?’, Past

& Present, cxvi, 1987, p. 180.

35 See, for example, G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials, Cambridge

University Press, 1990, pp. 84–7.

36 See W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, Penguin,

1970.

37 Harold James, in Pat Hudson (ed.), Living Economic and Social

History, Economic History Society, 2001, p. 166.

38 Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World, Blackwell, 1955,

pp. 24–5.

39 Richard Evans, Telling Lies: History, Holocaust, and the David

Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001.

40 www.historyandpolicy.org

41 Richard Cobb, A Sense of Place, Duckworth, 1975, p. 4.

42 Carr, What is History? p. 86.

chapter three

Mapping the field

Much of the history students encounter is concerned with political

events, but that is far from the limit of the historian’s interest

or concerns. Historians have greatly widened the range of their

studies since the heyday of Victorian constitutional history. Today

no aspect of human thought and activity is excluded from the

scope of historical study. Economy, society, mentality and culture

all have their place in the curriculum. This chapter describes and

classifies this richness.

Whether history is studied for practical purposes or on

account of its intrinsic value as a cultural resource, it is

almost impossible to set limits on its scope. The implications are

truly formidable if history is defined as the study of the entire past

of humankind; they are only marginally less so if we limit this

definition to the periods and places for which there is a written

record. All history has some claim on our attention, but making

sense of history demands that we categorize the very wide range

of approaches that can be taken in studying the past. Nearly all

historians accept a defining label; even those who call themselves

world historians or global historians are not claiming omniscience, but are foregrounding one perspective at the expense of a

great many others. Several labelling schemes are in use. Historians

have for a long time identified themselves by the period they

study, as for example, ‘medievalists’, ‘early modernists’ or ‘contemporary historians’, and in practice the period for which they

have an acknowledged expertise is likely to be limited still further

– to a century perhaps in the case of a medievalist, and often no

more than a decade in the case of a specialist in the nineteenth

early modern

Usually taken to mean

the period from the

Renaissance to the French

and Industrial Revolutions,

equating roughly to

the Tudor, Stuart and

Hanoverian periods in

English history.

Mapping the field 5 9

or twentieth centuries. Then there is specialization by locality.

Particular periods are generally studied in relation to one country

or region only. The specialist in the English Revolution of the

seventeenth century, for example, would naturally be interested

in those countries of Western Europe which, like France and the

Netherlands, experienced their own political crises at the same

time, but his or her knowledge of them would probably not be

founded on anything more than a reading of the secondary literature – and regrettably in many cases only the literature in English

and one other European language. Those historians with firsthand research experience in more than one country or period are

a small minority (see below, pp. 160).

In addition to the specialization of time and place, there is also

the specialization of theme. Whereas modern historical scholarship achieves a more or less steady output for all the periods

and countries that are reasonably well documented, its choice of

theme is much more subject to changing fashion. The claims of

social relevance, the development of new techniques of research,

and the theoretical insights of other disciplines all influence historians in determining which aspects of the past should enjoy

research priority. For these reasons, choice of theme gives a much

clearer indication of the actual content of historical enquiry than

does choice of period or country. It is also much the best way of

conveying the richness of contemporary scholarship, since the

range of historical themes has greatly expanded over the past fifty

years. I begin with what might be regarded as the senior branch

of historical study, though it is no longer the dominant one.

I

Political history

Political history is conventionally defined as the study of all those

aspects of the past that have to do with the formal organization

of power in society, which for the majority of human societies

in recorded history means the state. It includes the institutional

organization of the state, the competition of factions and parties

for control over the state, the policies enforced by the state, and

the relations between states. To many people, the scope of history

would appear to be exhausted by these topics, mainly because

that was what they had studied in school. In recent years both the

6 0 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

National Curriculum and television programmes have reflected

a broader range of interest. But political history has not lost its

appeal, and it capitalizes on its central place in historical scholarship since ancient times.

The reasons for this traditional dominance are clear enough.

Historically the state itself has been much more directly involved

in the writing of history than with any other literary activity. On

the one hand, those who exercised political power looked to the

past for guidance as to how best to achieve their ends. At the same

time, political elites had an interest in promoting for public consumption a version of history that legitimized their own position

in the body politic, either by emphasizing their past achievements,

or by demonstrating the antiquity of the constitution under which

they held office. Moreover, political history has always found an

avid lay readership. The rise and fall of statesmen and of nations

or empires lends itself to dramatic treatment in the grand manner.

Political power is intoxicating, and for those who cannot exercise

it themselves, the next best thing is to enjoy it vicariously in the

pages of a gifted writer. The consequences of pandering to this

popular preference have long been deplored. Arthur Young, the

English agronomist famous for his descriptions of the French

countryside on the eve of the Revolution, was blunt:

To a mind that has the least turn after philosophical inquiry, reading

modern history is generally the most tormenting employment that

a man can have: one is plagued with the actions of a detestable set

of men called conquerors, heroes, and great generals; and we wade

through pages loaded with military details; but when you want to

know the progress of agriculture, or commerce, and industry, their

effect in different ages and nations on each other ... all is a blank.1

Political history in turbulent times

In fact, during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a

‘philosophical’ turn of mind was rather more evident than Young

allowed for. Voltaire’s historical works ranged over the whole field

of culture and society, and even Gibbon did not confine himself

to the dynastic and military fortunes of the Roman Empire. But

the nineteenth-century revolution in historical studies greatly reinforced the traditional preoccupation with statecraft, faction and

war. German historicism was closely associated with a school of

political thought, best represented by Hegel, which endowed the

lay readership

Readers outside the

academic historical

profession.

Arthur Young

(1741–1820)

English writer and

agriculturalist, and author

of detailed accounts

of tours through the

agricultural areas of

England, Ireland and

France. He visited France

each year between

1787 and 1790, and

his accounts therefore

provide historians with

an invaluable account,

from an intelligent and

informed outside observer,

of the state of French rural

society on the eve of the

Revolution.

Voltaire (1694–1778)

François Marie Arouet

de Voltaire, one of the

most celebrated writers

of the French eighteenthcentury Enlightenment.

Voltaire was best known

for his witty satires on

contemporary manners

and ideas, but he also

wrote historical works,

including studies of Louis

XIV and of the Swedish

King Charles XII, and a

treatise on Newtonian

physics.

faction

A political grouping,

usually held together by

patronage or personal,

rather than party, loyalty.

Mapping the field 6 1

concept of the state with a moral and spiritual force beyond the

material interests of its subjects; it followed that the state was

the main agent of historical change. Equally, the nationalism that

inspired so much historical writing at this time led to an emphasis

on the competition between the great powers and the struggles

of submerged nationalities for political self-determination. Few

historians would have quarrelled with Ranke when he wrote, ‘the

spirit of modern times . . . operates only by political means’.2

 The

Victorian historian, E.A. Freeman, put it more simply: ‘History

is past politics’.3

 The new university professors in the Rankean

mould were essentially political historians.

What should political history be about?

Yet, as the definition given earlier would suggest, political history

can mean different things, and its content has been almost as

varied and as subject to fashion as any other branch of history.

Ranke himself was chiefly interested in how the great powers of

Europe had acquired their strongly individual characters during

the period between the Renaissance and the French Revolution.

He looked for explanations less to the internal evolution of those

states than to the unending struggle for power between them. One

of Ranke’s legacies, therefore, was a highly professional approach

to the study of foreign policy. Diplomatic history has been a

staple pursuit of the profession ever since, its appeal periodically

reinforced as historians have responded to a public demand to

understand the origins of the latest war. In the aftermath of the

First World War especially, much of this work verged on nationalist propaganda and it was too heavily dependent on the archives

of a single country. At times, diplomatic history has been reduced

to scarcely more than a record of what one diplomat or foreign

minister said to another, with little awareness of the wider influences that so often shape foreign policy – financial and military

factors, the influence of public opinion, and so on. Nowadays

the best diplomatic history deals with international relations in

the most comprehensive sense, rather than the diplomacy of a

particular nation. In her book Peacemakers (2001) Margaret

Macmillan provides a masterly account of the six months of

negotiation that led up to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Her

account revolves around the intense negotiations between the three

key players: Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Clemenceau

6 2 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

of France, and Lloyd George of Britain. But Macmillan shows

how their decisions were conditioned not only by the disposition

of forces at the end of the war, but by the strength of popular

feeling in their respective countries.

Many of Ranke’s contemporaries and followers emphasized

instead the internal evolution of the European nation-states, and

constitutional history was largely their creation. This emphasis was

most pronounced in Britain, where history became an academically

respectable subject during the 1860s and 1870s almost entirely

on the strength of constitutional history. Its central theme was of

course the evolution of Parliament, considered by the Victorians to

be England’s most priceless contribution to civilization, and thus the

appropriate focus for a national history. England’s constitutional

history was seen as a sequence of momentous conflicts of principle,

alternating with periods of gradual change, stretching back to the

early Middle Ages; it was enshrined in a succession of great state

documents (Magna Carta and the like) which required disciplined

textual study. For fifty years after the publication of Stubbs’s threevolume Constitutional History of England (1873–8), constitutional

history carried the greatest academic prestige in Britain, and major

The ‘Big Four’ at the

Paris Peace Conference,

1919: seated left to

right: Orlando (Italy),

Lloyd George (Britain),

Clemenceau (France) and

Woodrow Wilson (United

States). Most of the

business of the conference

was settled in meetings

between them. They

were subject to incessant

lobbying by the many

other powers represented

at the conference.

(Getty Images/Time & Life

Pictures)

Mapping the field 6 3

revisionist work continues to be done to this day. In the hands of

Stubbs’s followers – most of them medievalists, as he was – the

subject was diversified to encompass two closely related specialisms: the history of law and administrative history. Legal history

attracts relatively little interest today, but administrative history

shows every sign of enjoying a new lease of life as historians seek

to interpret the massive increase in the functions and personnel of

government that has taken place in all Western societies during the

last century.

The fine grain of politics

It would be very misleading, however, to suggest that the practice

of political history remains wedded to the categories marked out

in the nineteenth century. In Britain especially, reaction against

the traditional forms of political history has turned on the contention that none of them directly confronts what ought to be a

central issue in any study of politics, namely the acquisition and

exercise of political power and the day-to-day management of

political systems. From this perspective, the Stubbs tradition, with

its emphasis on constitutional principles and the formal institutions of government, seems unhelpful.

The most influential spokesman for this reaction was L.B.

Namier, whose writings on eighteenth-century England marked

something of a turning point. What interested Namier was not

primarily the great political issues of the time or the careers of

the leading statesmen, but the composition and recruitment of the

political elite as revealed by the personal case-histories of ordinary

MPs. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III

(1929) and later works Namier asked why men sought a seat

in the Commons, how they obtained one, and what considerations guided their political conduct in the House. He cut through

the ideological pretensions with which politicians clothed their

behaviour (aided and abetted by later historians), and neither

their motives nor their methods emerged with much credit. As a

result, most of the accepted picture of eighteenth-century English

politics was demolished – the two-party system, the packing of the

Commons with government placemen, and the assault on the constitution by the young George III. Namier’s method was quickly

taken up by historians working on other periods, and towards the

end of his life he enshrined it in the officially sponsored History

6 4 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

of Parliament, which will eventually comprise biographies of

everyone who sat in the House of Commons between 1485 and

1901: twenty-eight volumes have so far been published.4

Such an approach, in which the analysis of motive and

manoeuvre is allowed full play, makes for a fascinating study in

the psychology of political conflict. But it illuminates the surface

only. As soon as it is conceded that politics is not only about personalities but also about the clash of competing economic interests

and rival ideologies, then the wider society outside the rarified

atmosphere of court or Parliament becomes critically important.

This is self-evident in the case of periods of revolutionary change

One of the most significant ideas to come out of the French Revolution was the concept of the nation as a focus

for group identity, instead of loyalty to a dynastic ruler. Nationalism was often linked to liberalism, although it was

also taken up by illiberal conservatives. Nineteenth-century Europe saw a number of revolutionary nationalist risings,

although Italy and Germany, the two main examples of nineteenth-century states established along nationalist lines,

both owed their existence more to the manoeuvres of statesmen than they did to revolutionaries. The nation-state

was at the heart of President Woodrow Wilson’s policy of national self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference

of 1919. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

Mapping the field 6 5

when the political system broke down as a result of changes in the

structure of economy or society. In more stable political situations

the dimensions of class and ideology may not be so clearly articulated, but they are present nonetheless, and any analysis of political

trends beyond the short term demands that they be understood.

At the very least, historians have to be aware of the social and

economic background of the political elite and the role of public

opinion. More than any other branch of history, political history

depends for its vitality on a close involvement with its intellectual

neighbours, and particularly with the fields of economic and social

history.

II

History beyond the elite

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for Ranke’s generation

economic and social history did not exist. By the late nineteenth

century, however, Western Europe and the United States were

emerging from a major economic and social transformation which

historical study as then practised was manifestly incapable of

explaining. Although Marx’s thought has been rigorously applied

to historical research in the West on a large scale only during the

past fifty years (see Chapter 8), his emphasis on the historical

significance of the means of production and of relations between

classes had already gained wide currency among politically literate people by the early twentieth century. Moreover the effect

of the rise of organized labour and the mass socialist parties was

to push issues of economic and social reform more insistently

on to the centre of the political stage than ever before. Developments

in the early twentieth century pointed in the same general direction. For many, the First World War dealt a fatal blow to the

ideal of the nation-state, whose rise had been the great theme of

nineteenth-century historiography, while the recurrent slumps

and depressions in the world economy confirmed the need for a

more systematic grasp of economic history.

Around the turn of the century the narrowly political focus of

academic history came under increasing attack from historians

themselves. Manifestos calling for a new and broader approach

were launched in several countries – most self-consciously in

the United States, where they sailed under the flag of the ‘New

historiography

The study of the writing

of history, although the

term is sometimes also

used to denote the range

of historians’ writings on a

particular theme.

6 6 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

History’. In Britain the connection between historical study and

current social issues was particularly evident in the careers of

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, social reformers and historians of the

British Labour movement; economic history featured from the

start in the curriculum of the London School of Economics, which

they founded in 1895.

Learning from other disciplines: the Annales

school

It was, however, in France that the implications of broadening history’s scope were most fully worked out. This was the achievement

of Marc Bloch, a medievalist, and Lucien Febvre, a specialist in

the sixteenth century, whose followers today probably command

greater international prestige in the academic world than any

other school. In 1929 Bloch and Febvre founded a historical

journal called Annales d’histoire sociale et économique, usually

known simply as Annales.

5

 In the first issue they demanded of

their colleagues not just a broader approach but an awareness of

what they could learn from other disciplines, especially the social

sciences – economics, sociology, social psychology and geography

(a particularly strong enthusiasm of the Annales historians). While

conceding that the practitioners of these disciplines were primarily concerned with contemporary problems, Bloch and Febvre

maintained that only with their help could historians become

aware of the full range of significant questions that they could put

to their sources. And whereas earlier reformers had called for an

inter-disciplinary method, it was systematically put into practice

by the Annales historians in a formidable corpus of publications,

of which Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society (1940) is probably the best

known outside France. From this basic premise, historians of the

Annales school have continued to broaden and refine the content

and methodology of history, with the result that many of the new

directions that the discipline has taken in the past fifty years owe

much to their contribution. At the same time, the Annales school

heaped considerable scorn on the traditional pursuit of political

narrative – a reaction that was shared by many economic and

social historians in Britain: in R.H. Tawney’s words, politics was

‘the squalid scaffolding of more serious matters’.6

It is mainly because of the initiatives taken by the Annales historians and their contemporaries that the range of history writing is

Sidney (1859–1947) and

Beatrice (1858–1943)

Webb

British social historians

and reformers, prominent

in the 1910s and 1920s.

They took a leading role in

the socialist Fabian Society

and in the trade union

movement. Convinced of

the importance of social

and economic history,

they published a History

of Trade Unionism and in

1895 they helped to found

the London School of

Economics.

Mapping the field 6 7

today so vast. The vitality of economic, social and cultural history

is testimony to those efforts. Meanwhile new specialisms continue

to be added, like global history, environmental history, the history

of the body and the history of the book, and nothing seems to

be abandoned. An inventory of what historians do can easily

read like a dizzying catalogue in which all coherence is lost. The

confusion is compounded when we recognize that work in one

area may be divided by theoretical approaches, and these same

theories may be found in other areas (Marxism being an obvious

example). In this chapter I pursue the metaphor of ‘field’ by taking

three different cross-sections; each is composed of paired opposites. Together they capture something of the range of historical

study, and they provide a grid on which any individual historical

work can be placed. The first cross-section contrasts the individual

with society or the mass of the people. The second contrasts the

material world with the mental or cultural aspects of experience.

And the third juxtaposes the local with the global, reflecting the

very different spatial frames employed by historians.

III

Biography

The common factor behind the new histories that came to the fore

during the twentieth century was that they were about ‘society’.

The traditional conventions of academic history stood condemned

for their concern with small elites and with individuals – the

makers of foreign policy, the statesmen who promoted or resisted

constitutional change, and the leaders of revolutionary movements. Yet such figures continued to attract both academic study

and a popular readership. This human curiosity has been indulged

by historians in the form of biography for as long as history has

been written. It has, however, often been overlaid by intentions

that are inconsistent with a strict regard for historical truth.

During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance many biographies

were frankly didactic, designed to present the subject as a model

of Christian conduct or public virtue. In Victorian times the characteristic form of biography was commemorative: for the heirs

and admirers of a public figure the most fitting memorial was a

large-scale ‘Life’, based almost exclusively on the subject’s own

papers (many of them carefully preserved for this very purpose)

didactic

With an overtly

educational purpose.

6 8 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

and so taking the subject at his or her own valuation. Figures

in the more distant past were treated hardly less reverently.

Honest, ‘warts-and-all’ biography was practised by only a few

brave spirits. The Victorian reader of biographies was therefore

confronted by a gallery of worthies, whose role was to sustain a

respect for the nation’s political and intellectual elite.

For historians, the essential requirement in a biography is that

it understands the subject in his or her historical context. It must

be written by someone who is not merely well grounded in the

period in question but who has examined all the major collections

of papers that have a bearing on the subject’s life – including those

of adversaries and subordinates as well as friends and family. A

historical biography is, in short, a major undertaking. Yet even

biography that meets the requirements of modern scholarship

is not without its critics. Many historians believe that it has no

serious place in historical study. The problem of bias cannot be

lightly disposed of. Although there has been a vogue for debunking

biography ever since Lytton Strachey exposed the human frailties

of his ironically named Eminent Victorians (1918), anyone who

devotes years to the study of one individual – something that

Strachey never did – can hardly escape some identification with

the subject and will inevitably look at the period to some extent

through that person’s eyes. Furthermore, biographical narrative

encourages a simplified, linear interpretation of events. Maurice

Cowling, a leading specialist in modern British political history,

argued that political events can only be understood by showing

how members of the political establishment reacted to one

another. ‘For this purpose’, he wrote:

biography is almost always misleading. Its refraction is partial in

relation to the [political] system. It abstracts a man whose public

action should not be abstracted. It implies linear connections between

one situation and the next. In fact connections were not linear. The

system was a circular relationship: a shift in one element changed the

position of all the others in relation to the rest.7

It is hard to deny that, with the best will in the world, biography nearly always entails some distortion, but there are

good grounds for not dismissing it. First, Cowling’s objection

carries much less weight in the case of political systems where

power is concentrated in one man. Ian Kershaw, author of

the most substantial biography of Hitler, has recounted how

reluctant he was initially to attempt the task, since in his

warts-and-all

Honest, showing the bad

points as well as the good.

The term comes from a

portrait of Oliver Cromwell

by the painter Sir Peter

Lely. Cromwell, who had

one or two warts on his

face, told Lely he did not

want a falsely flattering

portrait, but wanted to be

painted ‘warts and all’.

Lytton Strachey

(1880–1932)

British writer and member

of the famous group of

literary figures known

from the area of London

where many of them

lived as the Bloomsbury

group. Strachey’s Eminent

Victorians (1918) shocked

many readers by taking

a satirical, sarcastic

approach to four revered

figures from the previous

century, including Florence

Nightingale and General

Gordon.