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Historiography of the United Kingdom

March 04, 2023

The historiography of the United Kingdom includes the historical and archival research and writing on the history of the United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For studies of the overseas empire see historiography of the British Empire.

Medieval

 
Depiction of Bede from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493
Main article: Historians of England in the Middle Ages

Gildas, a fifth-century Romano-British monk, was the first major historian of Wales and England. His De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (in Latin, "On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain") records the downfall of the Britons at the hands of Saxon invaders, emphasizing God's anger and providential punishment of an entire nation, in an echo of Old Testament themes. His work has often been used by later historians, starting with Bede.[1]

Bede (673–735), an English monk, was the most influential historian of the Anglo-Saxon era both in his time and in contemporary England. He borrowed from Gildas and others in writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Latin: "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum"). He viewed English history as a unity, based around the Christian church. N.J. Higham argues that he designed his work to promote his reform agenda to Ceolwulf, the Northumbrian king. Bede painted a highly optimistic picture of the current situation in the Church.[2]

Numerous chroniclers prepared detailed accounts of recent history.[3] King Alfred the Great commissioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 893, and similar chronicles were prepared throughout the Middle Ages.[4] The most famous production is by a transplanted Frenchman, Jean Froissart (1333–1410). His Froissart's Chronicles, written in French, remains an important source for the first half of the Hundred Years' War.[5]

Tudor-Stuart

Sir Walter Raleigh (1554–1618), educated at Oxford, was a soldier, courtier, and humanist during the late Renaissance in England. Convicted of intrigues against the king, he was imprisoned in the Tower and wrote his incomplete History of the World. Using a wide array of sources in six languages, Raleigh was fully abreast of the latest continental scholarship. He wrote not about England, but of the ancient world with a heavy emphasis on geography. Despite his intention of providing current advice to the King of England, King James I complained that it was "too sawcie in censuring Princes."[6] Raleigh was freed, but later beheaded for offences not related to his historiography.[7]

English Reformation

Main article: English Reformation

The historiography of the English Reformation has seen vigorous clashes among dedicated protagonists and scholars for five centuries. The main factual details at the national level have been clear since 1900, as laid out, for example, by James Anthony Froude[8] and Albert Pollard.[9]

Reformation historiography has seen many schools of interpretation with Protestant, Catholic, and Anglican historians using their own religious perspectives.[10] In addition there has been a highly influential Whig interpretation, based on liberal secularized Protestantism, that depicted the Reformation in England, in the words of Ian Hazlitt, as "the midwife delivering England from the Dark Ages to the threshold of modernity, and so a turning point of progress". Finally, among the older schools was a neo-Marxist interpretation that stressed the economic decline of the old elites in the rise of the landed gentry and middle classes. All these approaches still have representatives, but the main thrust of scholarly historiography since the 1970s falls into four groupings or schools, according to Hazlett.[11]

Geoffrey Elton leads the first faction with an agenda rooted in political historiography. It concentrates on the top of the early modern church-state, looking at the mechanics of policy-making and the organs of its implementation and enforcement. The key player for Elton was not Henry VIII, but rather his principal Secretary of State Thomas Cromwell. Elton downplays the prophetic spirit of the religious reformers in the theology of keen conviction, dismissing them as the meddlesome intrusions from fanatics and bigots.[12][13]

Secondly, a primarily religious perspective has motivated Geoffrey Dickens and others. They prioritise the religious and subjective side of the movement. While recognising the Reformation was imposed from the top, just as it was everywhere else in Europe, it also responded to aspirations from below. He has been criticised by for underestimating the strength of residual and revived Roman Catholicism. He has been praised for his demonstration of the close ties to European influences. In the Dickens school, David Loades has stressed the theological importance of the Reformation for Anglo-British development.[14]

Revisionists comprise a third school, led by Christopher Haigh, Jack Scarisbrick and numerous other scholars. Their main achievement was the discovery of an entirely new corpus of primary sources at the local level, leading them to the emphasis on the Reformation as it played out on a daily and local basis, with much less emphasis on the control from the top. They emphasise turning away from elite sources and instead focus on local parish records, diocesan files, guild records, data from boroughs, the courts, and especially telltale individual wills.[15]

Finally, Patrick Collinson and others have brought more precision to the theological landscape, with Calvinist Puritans who were impatient with the cautious Anglican approach of compromises. Indeed, the Puritans were a distinct subgroup who did not comprise all of Calvinism. The Church of England thus emerged as a coalition of factions, all of them of Protestant inspiration.[16]

All the recent schools have lowered the relevance of Henry VIII and minimised hagiography. They have paid more attention to localities, Catholicism, radicals, and theological niceties. On Catholicism, the older schools overemphasised Thomas More (1470–1535), to the neglect of other bishops and factors inside Catholicism. The older schools too often concentrated on elite London, the newer ones look to the English villages.[17]

Puritanism and the Civil War

The rise of Puritanism and the English Civil War are central themes of 17th century English history.[18]

Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1609–1674), the conservative top aide of the King, wrote the most influential contemporary history of the Civil War, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702).[19] When he wrote about the distant past, Clarendon used a modern level of scepticism about historical sources, motivations and authority. In his history of the Civil War, however, he relapses to a premodern view that attributes critical events to the intervention of Providence.[20][21][22][23][24]

The foremost modern historian of the Puritan movement and Civil War is Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1820–1902). His series include History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642 (1883–4); History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (1893); and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660 (1903). Gardiner's treatment is exhaustive and philosophical, taking in political and constitutional history, the changes in religion, thought and sentiment, their causes and their tendencies. Gardiner did not form a school, although his work was completed in two volumes by Charles Harding Firth as The Last Years of the Protectorate (1909).[25][26]

18th century

The Enlightenment in both Scotland and England gave strong support to the writing of innovative histories.[27]

William Robertson

William Robertson, a Scottish historian and the Historiographer Royal, published a History of Scotland 1542–1603 in 1759, and his most famous work, The History of the Reign of Charles V, in 1769. His scholarship was painstaking for the time and he was able to access a large number of documentary sources that had previously been unstudied. He was also one of the first historians who understood the importance of general and universally applicable ideas in the shaping of historical events.[28]

David Hume

Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume in 1754 published the History of England, a six-volume work which extended "From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688". Hume adopted a similar scope to Voltaire in his history; as well as the history of Kings, Parliaments, and armies, he examined the history of culture, including literature and science. His short biographies of leading scientists explored the process of scientific change and he developed new ways of seeing scientists in the context of their times by looking at how they interacted with society and each other – he paid special attention to Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and William Harvey.[29]

He also argued that the quest for liberty was the highest standard for judging the past, and concluded that after considerable fluctuation, England at the time of his writing had achieved "the most entire system of liberty, that was ever known amongst mankind."[30]

Edward Gibbon

Edward Gibbon and his famous masterpiece Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) set a literary standard for historians, and set a standard of scholarly research that was widely emulated. In the 20th century, a number of scholars have been inspired by Gibbon.[31] Piers Brendon notes that Gibbon's work "became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory. They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome."[32]

19th century

Further information: Historiography of the Poor Laws

Whig history

Much of the historical writing by historians and novelists reflected the spirit of Romanticism.[33] Whig history typically prevailed—using an approach which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasized the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress. The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history (the history of science, for example) to criticize any teleological (or goal-directed), hero-based, and transhistorical narrative. The term "Whig history" was coined by Herbert Butterfield in his book The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931.[34]

Paul Rapin de Thoyras's history of England, published in 1723, became "the classic Whig history" for the first half of the 18th century.[35] It was later supplanted by the immensely popular The History of England by David Hume. Whig historians emphasized the achievements of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This included James Mackintosh's History of the Revolution in England in 1688, William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England and Henry Hallam's Constitutional History of England.[36]

A major restatement was made in the early 20th century by G. M. Trevelyan. David Cannadine says:

In 1926 he produced his one-volume History of England. This work set out what he saw as the essential elements in the nation’s evolution and identity: parliamentary government, the rule of law, religious toleration, freedom from Continental interference and involvement, and a global horizon of maritime supremacy and imperial expansion.[37]

The Whig consensus was steadily undermined during the post-World War I re-evaluation of European history, and Butterfield's critique exemplified this trend. Intellectuals no longer believed the world was automatically getting better and better. Subsequent generations of academic historians have similarly rejected Whig history because of its presentist and teleological assumption that history is driving toward some sort of goal.[38] Other criticized 'Whig' assumptions included viewing the British system as the apex of human political development, assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs (anachronism), considering British history as a march of progress with inevitable outcomes and presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph. J. Hart says "a Whig interpretation requires human heroes and villains in the story."[39]

Macaulay

 
Macaulay was the most influential exponent of Whig history, which said history shows a steady upward improvement toward the present

The most famous exponent of 'Whiggery' was Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859).[40] He published the first volumes of his The History of England from the Accession of James II in 1848. It proved an immediate success and replaced Hume's history to become the new orthodoxy.[41] His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history.[42] His 'Whiggish convictions' are spelled out in his first chapter:

I shall relate how the new settlement was...successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how...the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together;...how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance...the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.[43]

Macaulay's legacy continues to be controversial; Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote that "most professional historians have long since given up reading Macaulay, as they have given up writing the kind of history he wrote and thinking about history as he did."[44] However, J. R. Western wrote: "Despite its age and blemishes, Macaulay's History of England has still to be superseded by a full-scale modern history of the period".[45]

County and local history

Further information: Local history § United Kingdom

Before the impact of high-powered academic scholarship in the 1960s, local history flourished across Britain, producing many nostalgic local studies. Local historians in 1870–1914 emphasized progress, growth and civic pride.[46] Local history became fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries; it was widely regarded as an antiquarian pursuit, suitable for country gentry and parsons. The Victoria History of the Counties of England project began in 1899 with the aim of creating an encyclopedic history of each of the historic counties of England.[47]

Local history was a strength at Leicester University from 1930. Under W. G. Hoskins it actively promoted the Victoria county histories. He pushed for greater attention to the community of farmers, labourers and their farms in addition to the traditional strength in manorial and church history.[48] The Victoria project is now coordinated by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

H. P. R. Finberg was the first Professor of English Local History; he was appointed by Leicester in 1964.[49] Local history continues to be neglected as an academic subject within universities. Academic local historians are often found within a more general department of history or in continuing education.[50]

The British Association for Local History encourages and assists in the study of local history as an academic discipline and as a leisure activity by both individuals and groups. Most historic counties in England have record societies and archaeological and historical societies which coordinate the work of historians and other researchers concerned with that area.

20th century

Prominent historians

Thorold Rogers (1823–1890) was the Tooke Professor of Statistics and Economic Science at King's College London, from 1859 until his death. He served in Parliament as a Liberal, and deployed historical and statistical methods to analyse some of the key economic and social questions of the day on behalf of free trade and social justice. He is best known for compiling the monumental A History of Agriculture and Prices in England from 1259 to 1793 (7 vol. 1866–1902), which is still useful to scholars.[51][52] William Ashley (1860–1927) introduced British scholars to the historical school of economic history developed in Germany.

The French historian Élie Halévy (1870–1937) wrote a multivolume history of England, 1815–1914; it was translated and greatly influenced scholars with its exploration of the complex interactions among politics, religion, economics, reform and the absence of French-style Jacobite revolution. Halévy sought the answer not in economics but in religion. "If economic facts explain the course taken by the human race, the England of the nineteenth century was surely, above all other countries, destined to revolution, both politically and religiously." Neither the British constitution nor the Church of England was strong enough to hold the country together. He found the answer in religious nonconformity: "Methodism was the antidote to Jacobinism."[53]

G. M. Trevelyan (1876–1962), was widely read by both the general public and scholars. The son of a leading historian, he combined thorough research and primary sources with a lively writing style, a strong patriotic outlook and a Whig view of continuous progress toward democracy. He reached his widest audiences with History of England (1926). The book affirmed Trevelyan as the foremost historical commentator on England.[37] He began his career as a conventional liberal with faith in inevitable progress. Shocked by the horrors of the Great War he witnessed as an ambulance driver just behind the front lines, Trevelyan became more appreciative of conservatism as a positive force, and less confident that progress was inevitable. In History of England (1926) he searched for the deepest meaning of English history.

Cannadine concluded in G.M. Trevelyan: A Life in History (1992)

During the first half of the twentieth century Trevelyan was the most famous, the most honored, the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation. He was a scion of the greatest historical dynasty that (Britain) has ever produced. He knew and corresponded with many of the greatest figures of his time.... For fifty years, Trevelyan acted as a public moralist, public teacher and public benefactor, wielding unchallenged cultural authority among the governing and the educated classes of his day.

Lewis Namier (1888–1960) had a powerful influence on research methodology among British historians.[54] Born in Poland, his Jewish family was descended from distinguished Talmudic scholars and came to England in 1907. He built his career at Manchester. His best-known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) and the "History of Parliament" series (begun 1940) he edited with John Brooke.[55] He had a microscopic view of history as made by many individuals with few or any themes; it was called "Namierism" and his approach faded after his death. His books typically are starting points for vast enterprises which were never followed up. Thus England in the Age of the American Revolution ends in December 1762.[56]

Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) is best known for his philosophical approach to historiography.[57][58]

Professionalisation

Professionalisation involved developing a career track for historians, creating a national historical association and the sponsorship of scholarly journals. The Royal Historical Society was founded in 1868. The English Historical Review began publication in 1886.[59] Oxford and Cambridge were the most prestigious British universities, but they avoided setting up PhD programs and concentrated their attention on teaching undergraduates through tutors based in the colleges. The endowed chairs, based in the universities as a whole, had much less influence on the teaching of history.

Professionalisation on the German model, with a focus on the research PhD prepared by graduate students under a master professor, was pioneered by Manchester University. J. B. Bury (1861–1927) at Cambridge, Charles Harding Firth (1857–1936) at Oxford, and especially Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929) at Manchester led the way.[60]

At Manchester, Tout introduced original research into the undergraduate programme, culminating in the production of a Final Year thesis based on primary sources. This horrified Oxbridge, where college tutors had little research capacity of their own and saw the undergraduate as an embryonic future gentleman, liberal connoisseur, widely read, and mainstay of country and empire in politics, commerce, army, land or church, not an apprentice to dusty, centuries-old archives, wherein no more than 1 in 100 could find even an innocuous career. In taking this view they had a fair case, given the various likelihoods and opportunities for their charges. Tout's ally C. H. Firth fought a bitter campaign to persuade Oxford to follow Manchester and introduce scientific study of sources into the History programme, but failed; there was failure too, at Cambridge. Other universities, however, followed Tout, and Oxbridge slowly made fundamental changes to the selection of college fellows across all disciplines.[61]

Class issues: middle class and gentry

Further information: Storm over the gentry and Communist Party Historians Group

Marxist historiography developed as a school of historiography influenced by the chief tenets of Marxism, including the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Friedrich Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844; it inspired the socialist impetus in British politics including the Fabian Society, but did not influence historians.

R. H. Tawney was a powerful influence. His The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912)[62] and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history. He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in Max Weber's thesis on the connection between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism.

The "gentry" in Britain comprised the rich landowners who were not members of the aristocracy. The "Storm over the gentry" was a major historiographical debate among scholars that took place in the 1940s and 1950s regarding the role of the gentry in causing the English Civil War of the 17th century.[63] Tawney had suggested in 1941 that there was a major economic crisis for the nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries, and that the rapidly rising gentry class was demanding a share of power. When the aristocracy resisted, Tawney argued, the gentry launched the civil war.[64] After heated debate, historians generally concluded that the role of the gentry was not especially important.[65]

Marxist historians

A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1946 and became a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians, who contributed to history from below and class structure in early capitalist society. While some members of the group (most notably Christopher Hill (1912–2003) and E. P. Thompson) left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works. They placed a great emphasis on the subjective determination of history.[66]

In the 1950s to 1970s, labour history was redefined and expanded in focus by a number of historians, amongst whom the most prominent and influential figures were E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. The motivation came from current left-wing politics in Britain and the United States and reached red-hot intensity. Kenneth O. Morgan, a more traditional liberal historian, explains the dynamic:

the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics, the unions' winter of discontent [in 1979], and rise of a hard-left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within the Labour Party. The new history was often strongly Marxist, which fed through the work of brilliant evangelists like Raphael Samuel into the New Left Review, a famous journal like Past and Present, the Society of Labour History and the work of a large number of younger scholars engaged in the field. Non-scholars like Tony Benn joined in. The new influence of Marxism upon Labour studies came to affect the study of history.

In many ways, this was highly beneficial: it encouraged the study of the dynamics of social history rather than a narrow formal institutional view of labour and the history of the Labour Party; it sought to place the experience of working people within a wider technical and ideological context; it encouraged a more adventurous range of sources, 'history from below' so-called, and rescued them from what Thompson memorably called the 'condescension of posterity'; it brought the idea of class centre-stage in the treatment of working-class history, where I had always felt it belonged; it shed new light on the poor and dispossessed for whom the source materials were far more scrappy than those for the bourgeoisie, and made original use of popular evidence like oral history, not much used before.

But the Marxist – or sometimes Trotskyist – emphasis in Labour studies was too often doctrinaire and intolerant of non-Marxist dissent–it was also too often plain wrong, distorting the evidence within a narrow doctrinaire framework. I felt it incumbent upon me to help rescue it. But this was not always fun. I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff...when, for the only time in my life, I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind, playing the man not the ball, focusing on my accent, my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues.[67]

Christopher Hill specialized in 17th-century English history.[68] His books include Puritanism and Revolution (1958), Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965 and revised in 1996), The Century of Revolution (1961), AntiChrist in 17th-century England (1971), The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and many others.

E. P. Thompson pioneered the study of history from below in his work, The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. It focused on the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.[69]

Thompson's work was also significant because of the way he defined "class." He argued that class was not a structure, but a relationship that was mutable. He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working class. The British-Thai historian Chris Baker has cited Thompson's large influence on his career.[70]

Other important Marxist historians included Eric Hobsbawm, C. L. R. James, Raphael Samuel, A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce. Although Marxist historiography made important contributions to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and the methodology of history from below, its chief flaw was its argument on the nature of history as determined or dialectical; this can also be stated as the relative importance of subjective and objective factors in creating results. It fell out of favour in the 1960s and '70s.[71] Geoffrey Elton was important in undermining the case for a Marxist historiography, which he argued was presenting seriously flawed interpretations of the past. In particular, Elton was opposed to the idea that the English Civil War was caused by socioeconomic changes in the 16th and 17th centuries, arguing instead that it was due largely to the incompetence of the Stuart kings.[72]

Outside the Marxist orbit, social historians paid a good deal of attention to labour history as well.[73]

Paul Addison notes that in Britain by the 1990s, labour history was "in sharp decline" because "there was no longer much interest in history of the white, male working-class. Instead the 'cultural turn' encouraged historians to explore wartime constructions of gender, race, citizenship and national identity."[74]

Rostow's alternative to Marxism

Main article: Rostow's stages of growth

In 1960, American economic historian Walt Whitman Rostow published The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which proposed the Rostovian take-off model of economic growth, one of the major historical models of economic growth, which argues that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages of varying length: traditional society, preconditions for take-off, take-off, drive to maturity, and high mass consumption. This became one of the important concepts in the theory of modernization in social evolutionism. A product of its time and place, the book argued that one of the central problems of the Cold War as understood by American decision-makers, namely that there were millions of people living in poverty in the Third World whom Communism appealed to, could be solved by a policy of modernization to be fostered by American economic aid and growth.[75] Guy Ortolano argues that as an alternative to Marxist class=oriented analysis Rostow replaced class with nation as the agent of history. British history then became the base for comparisons. However Rostow never explicitly offered the British case as the ideal model for nations to copy. Many commentators assumed that was his goal and attention turned to issues of American exceptionalism, and the claim that Britain created the modern economy.[76]

Since 1945

First World War

The First World War continues to be a theme of major interest to scholars, but the content has changed over time. The first studies focused on the military history of the war itself and reached a wide popular audience.[77] With the publication of most of the critical diplomatic documents from all sides in the 1920s and 1930s, scholarly attention turned heavily toward the comparative diplomatic history of Britain, alongside France, Germany, Austria and Russia. In recent decades, attention has turned away from the generals and toward the common soldiers, and away from the Western front and toward the complex involvement in other regions, including the roles of the colonies and dominions of the British Empire. A great deal of attention is devoted to structure of the Army, and debates regarding the mistakes made by the high command typified by the popular slogan lions led by donkeys. Social history has brought in the home front, especially the roles of women and propaganda. Cultural studies have pointed to the memories and meanings of the war after 1918.[78]

Thomas Colley finds that informed Britons in the 21st century are in agreement that Britain has very often been at war over the centuries. They also agree that the nation has steadily lost its military prowess due to declines in its economy and disappearance of its empire.[79]

Prominent historians

Further information: List of historians by area of study

Arnold Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) had two careers, one focused on chronicling and analyzing 20th century diplomatic history.[80] However he became famous for his sweeping interpretation of world history, with a strong religious bent, in his 12-volume A Study of History (1934–1961). With his prodigious output of papers, articles, speeches and presentations, and numerous books translated into many languages, Toynbee was a widely read and discussed scholar in the 1940s and 1950s. Professional historians never paid much heed to the second Toynbee, however, and he lost his popular audience as well.[81]

Keith Feiling

Keith Feiling (1884–1977) was Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford, 1946–1950. He was noted for his conservative interpretation of the past, showing an empire-oriented ideology in defence of hierarchical authority, paternalism, deference, the monarchy, Church, family, nation, status and place. A Tory Democrat, he felt that conservatives possessed more character than other people, as he tried to demonstrate in his books on the history of the Conservative Party. He acknowledged the necessity of reform—as long as it was gradual, top-down, and grounded not in abstract theory but in an appreciation of English history. Thus he celebrated the reforms of the 1830s.[82] A.J.P. Taylor in 1950 praised Feiling's historiography, calling it "Toryism" in contrast to the more common "Whig history", or liberal historiography, written to show the inevitable progress of mankind. Taylor explains, "Toryism rests on doubt in human nature; it distrusts improvement, clings to traditional institutions, prefers the past to the future. It is a sentiment rather than a principle."[83]

Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was a highly respected essayist who explored ideas and philosophy.[84]

A. J. P. Taylor

A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990) is best known for his highly controversial reinterpretation of the coming of the Origins of the Second World War (1961). He ranged widely over the 19th and 20th centuries. Of major importance are his rich treatises surveying European diplomatic history, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford University Press, 1955), and 20th century Britain, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1965).[85][86] As a commentator in print and on the air he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age".[87]

Despite Taylor's increasing ambivalence toward appeasement from the late 1950s, which became explicitly evident in his 1961 book Origins of the Second World War, Winston Churchill remained another of his heroes. In English History 1914–1945, Taylor famously concluded his biographical footnote of Churchill with the phrase "the saviour of his country".[88] Another person Taylor admired was the historian E. H. Carr, who was his favourite historian and a good friend.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) was a leading essayist and commentator. He thrived on polemics and debates, covering a wide range of historical topics, but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. His essays established his reputation as a scholar who could succinctly define historiographical controversies. In the view of John Kenyon, "some of [Trevor-Roper's] short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books".[89] On the other hand, his biographer claims that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."[90]

Political history

Political history has flourished in terms both of biography of major national leaders, and the history of political parties.[91][92][93]

Postwar consensus

Main article: Postwar consensus

The post-war consensus is a historians' model of political agreement from 1945 to 1979, when new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, rejected and reversed it.[94] The concept claims there was a widespread consensus that covered support for a coherent package of policies that were developed in the 1930s and promised during the Second World War, focused on a mixed economy, Keynesianism and a broad welfare state.[95] In recent years the validity of the interpretation has been debated by historians.

The historians' model of the postwar consensus was most fully developed by Paul Addison.[96] The basic argument is that in the 1930s Liberal Party intellectuals led by John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge developed a series of plans that became especially attractive as the wartime government promised a much better postwar Britain and saw the need to engage every class in society. The coalition government during the war, headed by Churchill and Attlee, adopted white papers that promised Britain a much improved welfare state after the war. The promises included the national health service and expansion of education, housing and a number of welfare programs, as well as the nationalization of some weak industries. It was extended to foreign policy in terms of decolonization as well as support for the Cold War.

The model states that from 1945 until the arrival of Thatcher in 1979, there was a broad multi-partisan national consensus on social and economic policy, especially regarding the welfare state, nationalized health services, educational reform, a mixed economy, government regulation, Keynesian macroeconomic policies and full employment. Apart from the question of nationalization of some industries, these policies were broadly accepted by the three major parties, as well as by industry, the financial community and the labour movement. Until the 1980s, historians generally agreed on the existence and importance of the consensus. Some historians, such as Ralph Miliband, expressed disappointment that the consensus was a modest or even conservative package that blocked a fully socialized society.[97] The historian Angus Calder complained that the postwar reforms were an inadequate reward for the wartime sacrifices, a cynical betrayal of the people's hope for a more just postwar society.[98] In recent years, there has been a historiographical debate on whether such a consensus ever existed.[99] The revisionist argument is that the "consensus" was superficial because the parties were divided. The Conservatives clung to their pro-business ideals while Labour never renounced socialism.[100]

Business history

Business history in Britain emerged in the 1950s following the publication of a series of influential company histories and the establishment of the journal Business History[101] in 1958 at the University of Liverpool. The most influential of these early company histories was Charles Wilson's History of Unilever, the first volume of which was published in 1954. Other examples included Coleman's work on Courtaulds and artificial fibres, Alford on Wills and the tobacco industry, and Barker on Pilkington's and glass manufacture.[102][103] These early studies were conducted primarily by economic historians interested in the role of leading firms in the development of the wider industry, and therefore went beyond mere corporate histories. Although some work examined the successful industries of the industrial revolution and the role of the key entrepreneurs, in the 1970s scholarly debate in British business history became increasingly focused on economic decline. For economic historians, the loss of British competitive advantage after 1870 could at least in part be explained by entrepreneurial failure, prompting further business history research into individual industry and corporate cases. The Lancashire cotton textile industry, which had been the leading take-off sector in the industrial revolution, but which was slow to invest in subsequent technical developments, became an important topic of debate on this subject. William Lazonick, for example, argued that cotton textile entrepreneurs in Britain failed to develop larger integrated plants on the American model; a conclusion similar to Chandler's synthesis of a number of comparative case studies.[104][105]

Studies of British business leaders have emphasized how they fit into the class structure, especially their relationship to the aristocracy, and the desire to use their wealth to purchase landed estates and hereditary titles.[106][107][108] Biography has been of less importance in British business history, but there are compilations.[109] British business history began to widen its scope in the 1980s, with research work conducted at the LSE's Business History Unit, led first by Leslie Hannah, then by Terry Gourvish. Other research centres followed, notably at Glasgow and Reading, reflecting an increasing involvement in the discipline by Business and Management School academics. More recent editors of Business History, Geoffrey Jones (academic) (Harvard Business School), Charles Harvey (University of Newcastle Business School), John Wilson (Liverpool University Management School) and Steven Toms (Leeds University Business School), have promoted management strategy themes such as networks, family capitalism, corporate governance, human resource management, marketing and brands, and multi-national organisations in their international as well as merely British context. Employing these new themes has allowed business historians to challenge and adapt the earlier conclusions of Chandler and others about the performance of the British economy.[110]

Urban history

Main article: Urban history

In the 1960s, the academic historiography of the Victorian towns and cities began to flourish in Britain.[111] Much of the attention focused at first on the Victorian city, with topics including demography, public health, the working class and local culture.[112] In recent decades topics regarding class, capitalism and social structure have given way to studies of the cultural history of urban life, as well as groups such as women, prostitutes, migrants from rural areas and immigrants from the Continent and from the British Empire.[113] The urban environment itself became a major topic, as studies of the material fabric of the city and the structure of urban space became more prominent.[114]

Historians have always made London the focus. For example, recent studies of early modern London cover a wide range of topics, including literary and cultural activities, the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in an urban environment without the oversight typical of villages.[115]

Academics have increasingly studied small towns and cities since the medieval period, as well as the urbanization that attended the industrial revolution. The historiography on the politics of 18th-century urban England shows the critical role played by towns in politics (where they comprised four-fifths of the seats in the House of Commons), as well as the political dominance of London. The studies also show how townspeople promoted social change at the same time as securing long-term political stability.[116]

In the second half of the 19th century, provincial centers such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester doubled in size, becoming regional capitals. They were all conurbations that included smaller cities and suburbs in their catchment area. The available scholarly materials are now quite comprehensive. In 2000, Peter Clark of the Urban History Center of the University of Leicester was the general editor (and Cambridge University Press the publisher) of a 2800-page history of British cities and towns in 75 chapters by 90 scholars. The chapters deal not with biographies of individual cities, but with economic, social or political themes that cities had in common.[117][118]

Deindustrialization

The theme of deindustrialization has begun to attract the attention of historians. The first wave of scholarship came from activists who were involved in community activism at the time the factories and mines were shutting down the 1970s and 1980s. The cultural turn focused attention on the meaning of deindustrialization in the 2000s. A third wave of scholars look at the socio-cultural aspects of how working-class culture changed in the post-industrial age. Historians broadened their scope from the economic causes of decline and resistance to job loss, to its social and cultural long-term effects.[119]

New themes

Women's history

Women's history started to emerge in the 1970s against the passive resistance of many established men who had long dismissed it as frivolous, trivial, and "outside the boundaries of history." That sentiment persisted for decades in Oxbridge, but has largely faded in the red bricks and newer universities.[120]

History of Parliament

In 1951 scholars receive national funding for a collaborative "History of Parliament". An editorial board comprised leading scholars, most notably Sir John Neale and Sir Lewis Namier. Years of energetic research demonstrated a commitment to the new technique of "prosopography", or quantitative collective biography. However, Neale and Namier had sharply different interpretations of the project. Neale looked for definitive quantitative answers to specific technical questions, of the sort suggested by his traditional whiggish view of constitutional development. Namier, on the other hand, took a sociological approach to use the lives of MPs as an entry point to recreate the world of the governing classes. The editorial board was unable to synthesize the two approaches. Namier's team moved faster through the documents, so much of the work followed his model. The Conservative government entered the debate, led by Harold Macmillan and civil servants who wanted a finished product rather than a never-ending project. Namier's ambition was curtailed and, after his death in 1960, his own section was completed by his assistant, John Brooke, in a more restricted format.[55]

History of the state

The history of the state has been conceptualized first as a history of the ruling monarchs, and under Namier the study of individual personalities. Recently there has been a deeper exploration of the growth of state power. Historians have looked at the long 18th century, from about 1660 to 1837, from four fresh perspectives.[121] The first, developed by Oliver MacDonagh, presented an expansive and centralized administrative state while deemphasizing the influence of Benthamite utilitarianism.[122] The second approach, as developed by Edward Higgs, conceptualizes the state as an information-gathering entity, paying special attention to local registrars and the census. He brings in such topics as spies, surveillance of Catholics, the 1605 Gunpowder Plot led by Guy Fawkes to overthrow the government, and the Poor Laws, and demonstrates similarities to the surveillance society of the 21st century.[123] John Brewer introduced the third approach with his depiction of the unexpectedly powerful, centralized 'fiscal-military' state during the eighteenth century.[124][125] Finally, there have been numerous recent studies that explore the state as an abstract entity capable of commanding the loyalties of those people over whom it rules.

Global history

James Vernon proposes a global history of Britain centered on the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that made the market as the central principle of government. The story features the growth and collapse of the First and Second British Empires, as well as the global hegemony of the Anglosphere. Events, processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise, demise and reinvention. This history of Britain is then a global story, not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the global map so red, but because the entire world combined to make Britain.[126] To some extent the enterprise is already underway, making the Empire's history a central part of a new global history.[127] New maps were drawn around the oceans, yielding new perspectives such as "Atlantic history".[128][129]

Digital history

Digital history is opening new avenues for research into original sources that were very hard to handle before. One model is the Eighteenth Century Devon project, completed in 2007. It was a collaboration of professional historians, local volunteers, and professional archives that created an online collection of transcripts of 18th-century documents, such as allegiance rolls, Episcopal visitation returns, and freeholder lists.[130] Digital archives and digital periodicals are allowing much broader opportunity for research and primary sources at the undergraduate level.[131] Use of powerful search engines on large textual databases allows much more expanded research on such sources as newspaper files.[132]

See also

Timeline of British diplomatic history

Special topics

Prominent historians

Scholarly journals

Organisations

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Further reading

  • Bentley, Michael. Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870-1970 (2006)
  • Boyd, Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of historians and historical writing (2 vol. Taylor & Francis, 1999), 1562pp
  • Elton, G.R. Modern Historians on British History 1485-1945: A Critical Bibliography 1945-1969 (1969), annotated guide to 1000 history books on every major topic, plus book reviews and major scholarly articles. online
  • Furber, Elizabeth Chapin, ed. Changing Views on British History (1966)
  • Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England, volume 1. (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.)
  • Loades, David, ed. Reader's Guide to British History (2 vol 2003), 1610pp, comprehensive coverage of major topics and historians
  • Schlatter, Richard, ed. Recent Views on British History: Essays on Historical Writing Since 1966 (1984)
  • Thompson, James Westfall. A History of Historical Writing. vol 1: From the earliest Times to the End of the 17th Century (1942) online edition; A History of Historical Writing. vol 2: The 18th and 19th Centuries (1942) online edition
  • Tombs, Robert, The English and their History (2014 online review
  • Woolf, Daniel R., ed., A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (2 vol. Taylor & Francis, 1998).

Textbook surveys

  • Bronstein, Jamie L. and Andrew T. Harris. Empire, State and Society: Britain since 1830 (2012), 352pp; brief university textbook online
  • McCord, Norman and Bill Purdue. British History, 1815–1914 (2nd ed. 2007), 612 pp online, university textbook
  • Roberts, Clayton and David F. Roberts. A History of England, Volume 2: 1688 to the present (2013) university textbook; 1985 edition online
  • Willson, David Harris. A history of England (4th ed. 1991) online 1972 edition, university textbook

Period guides

  • Addison, Paul and Harriet Jones, eds. A Companion to Contemporary Britain: 1939–2000 (2005)
  • Cannon, John. The Oxford Companion to British History (2nd ed. 2002) 1142pp
  • Dickinson, H.T., ed. A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain (Blackwell, 2006); 584pp; essays by 38 experts;
  • Jones, Harriet, and Mark Clapson, eds. The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Twentieth Century (2009)
  • Williams, Chris, ed. A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Blackwell, 2006); 33 essays by experts; 624pp
  • Wrigley, Chris, ed. A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Blackwell Companions to British History) (2009)

Topics

  • Bently, M. "Shape and pattern in British historical writing, 1815–1945, in S. MacIntyre, J. Maiguashca and A. Pok, eds, The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 4: 1800–1945 (Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 206+.
  • Cannadine, David. “The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880-1980.” Past & Present, no. 103, (1984), pp. 131–172. online
  • Colley, Thomas. Always at War: British Public Narratives of War (U of Michigan Press, 2019) online review
  • Feldman, David, and Jon Lawrence, eds. Structures and Transformations in Modern British History (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
  • Hitsman, J. Mackay. " Canadian and British Military Historiography." In A Guide to the Sources of British Military History (2015).
  • Jeremy, David J., ed. Dictionary of business biography: a biographical dictionary of business leaders active in Britain in the period 1860-1980 (Butterworths, 1984).
  • Mort, Frank. "Intellectual Pluralism and the Future of British History." History Workshop Journal Vol. 72. No. 1. (2011).
  • Palmer, William. "Aspects of Revision in History in Great Britain and the United States, 1920-1975," Historical Reflections (2010) 36#1 pp 17–32.

Historians

  • Clark, G. Kitson. "A Hundred Years of the Teaching of History at Cambridge, 1873-1973." Historical Journal 16#3 (1973): 535-53. online.
  • Gooch, G. P. History and historians in the nineteenth century (1913) online
  • Hale, John Rigby, ed. The evolution of British historiography: from Bacon to Namier (Macmillan, 1967).
  • Kenyon, John Philipps. The history men: the historical profession in England since the Renaissance (U of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).
  • Smith, Bonnie G. "The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain, France, and the United States, 1750-1940," American Historical Review (1984) 89#3 pp 709–32. JSTOR 1856122
  • Soffer, Reba N. History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan (2009).

Medieval

  • Fisher, Matthew. Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Ohio State University Press, 2012)
  • Gransden, Antonia. Historical Writing in England: c. 500 to c. 1307 (Psychology Press, 1996) .
  • Taylor, John. English historical literature in the fourteenth century ( Oxford University Press, 1987).
  • Urbanski, Charity. Writing History for the King: Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography (Cornell University Press, 2013)

1485–1800

  • Devereaux, Simon. "The Historiography of the English State during ‘the Long Eighteenth Century’: Part I–Decentralized Perspectives." History Compass 7.3 (2009): 742-764.
    • Devereaux, Simon. "The Historiography of the English State During ‘The Long Eighteenth Century’Part Two–Fiscal‐Military and Nationalist Perspectives." History Compass 8.8 (2010): 843-865.
  • Johnson, Richard R. "Politics Redefined: An Assessment of Recent Writings on the Late Stuart Period of English History, 1660 to 1714." William and Mary Quarterly (1978): 691-732. JSTOR 1923211
  • Laprade, William Thomas. "The present state of the history of England in the eighteenth century." Journal of Modern History 4.4 (1932): 581-603. online
  • O'Gorman, Frank. "The recent historiography of the Hanoverian regime." Historical Journal 29#4 (1986): 1005-1020. online
  • Simms, Brendan, and Torsten Riotte, eds. The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (2007) excerpt
  • Trimble, William Raleigh. "Early Tudor Historiography, 1485-1548." Journal of the History of Ideas 11#1 (1950): 30-41.
  • Walcott, Robert. "The Later Stuarts (1660-1714): Significant Work of the Last Twenty Years (1939-1959)" American Historical Review 67#2 (1962) pp. 352–370 DOI: 10.2307/1843428 JSTOR 1843428
  • Woolf, Daniel R. The idea of history in early Stuart England: erudition, ideology, and the 'light of truth' from the accession of James I to the Civil War (U of Toronto Press, 1990.)

Since 1800

  • Brundage, Anthony, and Richard A. Cosgrove. The great tradition: constitutional history and national identity in Britain and the United States, 1870-1960 (Stanford University Press, 2007).
  • Burrow, John Wyon. A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981), covers Macaulay, Stubbs, Freeman and Froude.
  • Cevasco, G. A. ed. The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art, and Culture (1993) 736pp; short articles by experts
  • Goldstein, Doris S. "The origins and early years of the English Historical Review", English Historical Review, 101 (1986), 6–19
  • Goldstein, Doris S. "The organizational development of the British historical profession 1884–1921', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 55 (1982), 180–93.
  • Maitzen, Rohan Amanda. Gender, Genre, and Victorian Historical Writing (Taylor & Francis, 1998).
  • Maitzen, Rohan. "" This feminine preserve": Historical biographies by Victorian women." Victorian Studies (1995): 371-393. JSTOR 3828714
  • Obelkevich, Jim. "New Developments in History in the 1950s and 1960s." Contemporary British History 14.4 (2000): 143-167. online
  • Rasor, Eugene L. Winston S. Churchill, 1874-1965: A Comprehensive Historiography and Annotated Bibliography (2000) 712pp online at Questio; also online free
  • Reynolds, David J. " Britain, the Two World Wars, and the Problem of Narrative" Historical Journal, 60#1, 197-231. https://Doi.Org/10.1017/S0018246X16000509
  • St. John, Ian. The Historiography of Gladstone and Disraeli (Anthem Press, 2016) 402 pp excerpt
  • Simms, Brendan, and Torsten Riotte, eds. The Hanoverian Dimension in British History, 1714–1837 (2007) excerpt

Scotland

Main article: Historiography of Scotland § Further reading
  • Brown, Keith M. "Early Modern Scottish History - A Survey," Scottish Historical Review (April 2013 Supplement), Vol. 92, pp. 5–24.
  • Cameron, Ewen A. "The Political Histories of Modern Scotland." Scottish Affairs 85.1 (2013): 1-28.
  • Devine, T. M. and J. Wormald, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford University Press, 2012),
  • McDermid, Jane. "No Longer Curiously Rare but Only Just within Bounds: women in Scottish history," Women's History Review (2011) 20#3, pp. 389–402.
  • Lee, Jr., Maurice. "Scottish History since 1966," in Richard Schlatter, ed., Recent Views on British History: Essays on Historical Writing since 1966 (Rutgers UP, 1984), pp. 377 – 400.
  • Smout, T. C. "Scottish History in the Universities since the 1950s", History Scotland Magazine (2007) 7#5, pp. 45–50.

Wales

  • Johnes, Martin. "For Class and Nation: Dominant Trends in the Historiography of Twentieth‐Century Wales." History Compass 8#11 (2010): 1257-1274.
  • Koch, John T. (2006). Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO.

Empire. foreign policy, military

Further information: Historiography of the British Empire
  • Allport, Alan. Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War, 1938–1941 (2020)
  • Barnett, Correlli. Britain and her army, 1509-1970: a military, political and social survey (1970).
  • Carlton, Charles. This Seat of Mars: War and the British Isles, 1485-1746 (Yale UP; 2011) 332 pages; studies the impact of near unceasing war from the individual to the national levels.
  • Chandler, David G., and Ian Frederick William Beckett, eds. The Oxford history of the British army (Oxford UP, 2003).
  • Cole, D. H and E. C Priestley. An outline of British military history, 1660-1936 (1936). online
  • Higham, John, ed. A Guide to the Sources of British Military History (1971) 654 pages excerpt; Highly detailed bibliography and discussion up to 1970.
  • Messenger, Charles, ed. Reader's Guide to Military History (2001) pp 55–74; annotated guide to most important books.
  • Schroeder, Paul W. "Old Wine in Old Bottles: Recent Contributions to British Foreign Policy and European International Politics, 1789–1848." Journal of British Studies 26.01 (1987): 1-25.
  • Sheppard, Eric William. A short history of the British army (1950). online
  • Ward, A.W. and G.P. Gooch, eds. The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783-1919 (3 vol, 1921–23), old detailed classic; vol 1, 1783-1815 ; vol 2, 1815-1866; vol 3. 1866-1919
  • Wiener, Martin J. "The Idea of "Colonial Legacy" and the Historiography of Empire." Journal of The Historical Society 13#1 (2013): 1-32.
  • Winks, Robin, ed. Historiography (1999) vol. 5 in William Roger Louis, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire online
  • Winks, Robin W. The Historiography of the British Empire-Commonwealth: Trends, Interpretations and Resources (1966); this book is by a different set of authors from the previous 1999 entry online
  • Wyman‐McCarthy, Matthew. "British abolitionism and global empire in the late 18th century: A historiographic overview." History Compass 16.10 (2018): e12480.

External links

  • "Making History", Coverage of leading British historians and institutions from the Institute of Historical Research
  • Bibliography of UK historiography from the Institute of Historical Research

March 04, 2023
historiography, united, kingdom, historiography, united, kingdom, includes, historical, archival, research, writing, history, united, kingdom, great, britain, england, scotland, ireland, wales, studies, overseas, empire, historiography, british, empire, conten. The historiography of the United Kingdom includes the historical and archival research and writing on the history of the United Kingdom Great Britain England Scotland Ireland and Wales For studies of the overseas empire see historiography of the British Empire Contents 1 Medieval 2 Tudor Stuart 2 1 English Reformation 2 2 Puritanism and the Civil War 3 18th century 3 1 William Robertson 3 2 David Hume 3 3 Edward Gibbon 4 19th century 4 1 Whig history 4 2 Macaulay 4 3 County and local history 5 20th century 5 1 Prominent historians 5 2 Professionalisation 5 3 Class issues middle class and gentry 5 4 Marxist historians 5 5 Rostow s alternative to Marxism 6 Since 1945 6 1 First World War 6 2 Prominent historians 6 2 1 Arnold Toynbee 6 2 2 Keith Feiling 6 2 3 Isaiah Berlin 6 2 4 A J P Taylor 6 2 5 Hugh Trevor Roper 6 3 Political history 6 3 1 Postwar consensus 6 4 Business history 6 5 Urban history 6 5 1 Deindustrialization 6 6 New themes 6 6 1 Women s history 6 6 2 History of Parliament 6 6 3 History of the state 6 6 4 Global history 6 7 Digital history 7 See also 7 1 Special topics 7 2 Prominent historians 8 Scholarly journals 9 Organisations 10 References 11 Further reading 11 1 Textbook surveys 11 2 Period guides 11 3 Topics 11 4 Historians 11 5 Medieval 11 6 1485 1800 11 7 Since 1800 11 8 Scotland 11 9 Wales 11 10 Empire foreign policy military 12 External linksMedieval Edit Depiction of Bede from the Nuremberg Chronicle 1493 Main article Historians of England in the Middle Ages Gildas a fifth century Romano British monk was the first major historian of Wales and England His De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae in Latin On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain records the downfall of the Britons at the hands of Saxon invaders emphasizing God s anger and providential punishment of an entire nation in an echo of Old Testament themes His work has often been used by later historians starting with Bede 1 Bede 673 735 an English monk was the most influential historian of the Anglo Saxon era both in his time and in contemporary England He borrowed from Gildas and others in writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People Latin Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum He viewed English history as a unity based around the Christian church N J Higham argues that he designed his work to promote his reform agenda to Ceolwulf the Northumbrian king Bede painted a highly optimistic picture of the current situation in the Church 2 Numerous chroniclers prepared detailed accounts of recent history 3 King Alfred the Great commissioned the Anglo Saxon Chronicle in 893 and similar chronicles were prepared throughout the Middle Ages 4 The most famous production is by a transplanted Frenchman Jean Froissart 1333 1410 His Froissart s Chronicles written in French remains an important source for the first half of the Hundred Years War 5 Tudor Stuart EditSir Walter Raleigh 1554 1618 educated at Oxford was a soldier courtier and humanist during the late Renaissance in England Convicted of intrigues against the king he was imprisoned in the Tower and wrote his incomplete History of the World Using a wide array of sources in six languages Raleigh was fully abreast of the latest continental scholarship He wrote not about England but of the ancient world with a heavy emphasis on geography Despite his intention of providing current advice to the King of England King James I complained that it was too sawcie in censuring Princes 6 Raleigh was freed but later beheaded for offences not related to his historiography 7 English Reformation Edit Main article English Reformation The historiography of the English Reformation has seen vigorous clashes among dedicated protagonists and scholars for five centuries The main factual details at the national level have been clear since 1900 as laid out for example by James Anthony Froude 8 and Albert Pollard 9 Reformation historiography has seen many schools of interpretation with Protestant Catholic and Anglican historians using their own religious perspectives 10 In addition there has been a highly influential Whig interpretation based on liberal secularized Protestantism that depicted the Reformation in England in the words of Ian Hazlitt as the midwife delivering England from the Dark Ages to the threshold of modernity and so a turning point of progress Finally among the older schools was a neo Marxist interpretation that stressed the economic decline of the old elites in the rise of the landed gentry and middle classes All these approaches still have representatives but the main thrust of scholarly historiography since the 1970s falls into four groupings or schools according to Hazlett 11 Geoffrey Elton leads the first faction with an agenda rooted in political historiography It concentrates on the top of the early modern church state looking at the mechanics of policy making and the organs of its implementation and enforcement The key player for Elton was not Henry VIII but rather his principal Secretary of State Thomas Cromwell Elton downplays the prophetic spirit of the religious reformers in the theology of keen conviction dismissing them as the meddlesome intrusions from fanatics and bigots 12 13 Secondly a primarily religious perspective has motivated Geoffrey Dickens and others They prioritise the religious and subjective side of the movement While recognising the Reformation was imposed from the top just as it was everywhere else in Europe it also responded to aspirations from below He has been criticised by for underestimating the strength of residual and revived Roman Catholicism He has been praised for his demonstration of the close ties to European influences In the Dickens school David Loades has stressed the theological importance of the Reformation for Anglo British development 14 Revisionists comprise a third school led by Christopher Haigh Jack Scarisbrick and numerous other scholars Their main achievement was the discovery of an entirely new corpus of primary sources at the local level leading them to the emphasis on the Reformation as it played out on a daily and local basis with much less emphasis on the control from the top They emphasise turning away from elite sources and instead focus on local parish records diocesan files guild records data from boroughs the courts and especially telltale individual wills 15 Finally Patrick Collinson and others have brought more precision to the theological landscape with Calvinist Puritans who were impatient with the cautious Anglican approach of compromises Indeed the Puritans were a distinct subgroup who did not comprise all of Calvinism The Church of England thus emerged as a coalition of factions all of them of Protestant inspiration 16 All the recent schools have lowered the relevance of Henry VIII and minimised hagiography They have paid more attention to localities Catholicism radicals and theological niceties On Catholicism the older schools overemphasised Thomas More 1470 1535 to the neglect of other bishops and factors inside Catholicism The older schools too often concentrated on elite London the newer ones look to the English villages 17 Puritanism and the Civil War Edit The rise of Puritanism and the English Civil War are central themes of 17th century English history 18 Edward Hyde Earl of Clarendon 1609 1674 the conservative top aide of the King wrote the most influential contemporary history of the Civil War The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England 1702 19 When he wrote about the distant past Clarendon used a modern level of scepticism about historical sources motivations and authority In his history of the Civil War however he relapses to a premodern view that attributes critical events to the intervention of Providence 20 21 22 23 24 The foremost modern historian of the Puritan movement and Civil War is Samuel Rawson Gardiner 1820 1902 His series include History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603 1642 1883 4 History of the Great Civil War 1642 1649 1893 and History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate 1649 1660 1903 Gardiner s treatment is exhaustive and philosophical taking in political and constitutional history the changes in religion thought and sentiment their causes and their tendencies Gardiner did not form a school although his work was completed in two volumes by Charles Harding Firth as The Last Years of the Protectorate 1909 25 26 18th century EditThe Enlightenment in both Scotland and England gave strong support to the writing of innovative histories 27 William Robertson Edit William Robertson a Scottish historian and the Historiographer Royal published a History of Scotland 1542 1603 in 1759 and his most famous work The History of the Reign of Charles V in 1769 His scholarship was painstaking for the time and he was able to access a large number of documentary sources that had previously been unstudied He was also one of the first historians who understood the importance of general and universally applicable ideas in the shaping of historical events 28 David Hume Edit Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume in 1754 published the History of England a six volume work which extended From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 Hume adopted a similar scope to Voltaire in his history as well as the history of Kings Parliaments and armies he examined the history of culture including literature and science His short biographies of leading scientists explored the process of scientific change and he developed new ways of seeing scientists in the context of their times by looking at how they interacted with society and each other he paid special attention to Francis Bacon Robert Boyle Isaac Newton and William Harvey 29 He also argued that the quest for liberty was the highest standard for judging the past and concluded that after considerable fluctuation England at the time of his writing had achieved the most entire system of liberty that was ever known amongst mankind 30 Edward Gibbon Edit Edward Gibbon and his famous masterpiece Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 1776 1789 set a literary standard for historians and set a standard of scholarly research that was widely emulated In the 20th century a number of scholars have been inspired by Gibbon 31 Piers Brendon notes that Gibbon s work became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory They found the key to understanding the British Empire in the ruins of Rome 32 19th century EditFurther information Historiography of the Poor Laws Whig history Edit Much of the historical writing by historians and novelists reflected the spirit of Romanticism 33 Whig history typically prevailed using an approach which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy In general Whig historians emphasized the rise of constitutional government personal freedoms and scientific progress The term has also been applied widely in historical disciplines outside of British history the history of science for example to criticize any teleological or goal directed hero based and transhistorical narrative The term Whig history was coined by Herbert Butterfield in his book The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931 34 Paul Rapin de Thoyras s history of England published in 1723 became the classic Whig history for the first half of the 18th century 35 It was later supplanted by the immensely popular The History of England by David Hume Whig historians emphasized the achievements of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 This included James Mackintosh s History of the Revolution in England in 1688 William Blackstone s Commentaries on the Laws of England and Henry Hallam s Constitutional History of England 36 A major restatement was made in the early 20th century by G M Trevelyan David Cannadine says In 1926 he produced his one volume History of England This work set out what he saw as the essential elements in the nation s evolution and identity parliamentary government the rule of law religious toleration freedom from Continental interference and involvement and a global horizon of maritime supremacy and imperial expansion 37 The Whig consensus was steadily undermined during the post World War I re evaluation of European history and Butterfield s critique exemplified this trend Intellectuals no longer believed the world was automatically getting better and better Subsequent generations of academic historians have similarly rejected Whig history because of its presentist and teleological assumption that history is driving toward some sort of goal 38 Other criticized Whig assumptions included viewing the British system as the apex of human political development assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs anachronism considering British history as a march of progress with inevitable outcomes and presenting political figures of the past as heroes who advanced the cause of this political progress or villains who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph J Hart says a Whig interpretation requires human heroes and villains in the story 39 Macaulay Edit Macaulay was the most influential exponent of Whig history which said history shows a steady upward improvement toward the present The most famous exponent of Whiggery was Thomas Babington Macaulay 1800 1859 40 He published the first volumes of his The History of England from the Accession of James II in 1848 It proved an immediate success and replaced Hume s history to become the new orthodoxy 41 His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident sometimes dogmatic emphasis on a progressive model of British history according to which the country threw off superstition autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history 42 His Whiggish convictions are spelled out in his first chapter I shall relate how the new settlement was successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies how the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known how from the auspicious union of order and freedom sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example how our country from a state of ignominious vassalage rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers how her opulence and her martial glory grew together how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power compared with which every other maritime power ancient or modern sinks into insignificance the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical of moral and of intellectual improvement 43 Macaulay s legacy continues to be controversial Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote that most professional historians have long since given up reading Macaulay as they have given up writing the kind of history he wrote and thinking about history as he did 44 However J R Western wrote Despite its age and blemishes Macaulay s History of England has still to be superseded by a full scale modern history of the period 45 County and local history Edit Further information Local history United Kingdom Before the impact of high powered academic scholarship in the 1960s local history flourished across Britain producing many nostalgic local studies Local historians in 1870 1914 emphasized progress growth and civic pride 46 Local history became fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries it was widely regarded as an antiquarian pursuit suitable for country gentry and parsons The Victoria History of the Counties of England project began in 1899 with the aim of creating an encyclopedic history of each of the historic counties of England 47 Local history was a strength at Leicester University from 1930 Under W G Hoskins it actively promoted the Victoria county histories He pushed for greater attention to the community of farmers labourers and their farms in addition to the traditional strength in manorial and church history 48 The Victoria project is now coordinated by the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London H P R Finberg was the first Professor of English Local History he was appointed by Leicester in 1964 49 Local history continues to be neglected as an academic subject within universities Academic local historians are often found within a more general department of history or in continuing education 50 The British Association for Local History encourages and assists in the study of local history as an academic discipline and as a leisure activity by both individuals and groups Most historic counties in England have record societies and archaeological and historical societies which coordinate the work of historians and other researchers concerned with that area 20th century EditProminent historians Edit Thorold Rogers 1823 1890 was the Tooke Professor of Statistics and Economic Science at King s College London from 1859 until his death He served in Parliament as a Liberal and deployed historical and statistical methods to analyse some of the key economic and social questions of the day on behalf of free trade and social justice He is best known for compiling the monumental A History of Agriculture and Prices in England from 1259 to 1793 7 vol 1866 1902 which is still useful to scholars 51 52 William Ashley 1860 1927 introduced British scholars to the historical school of economic history developed in Germany The French historian Elie Halevy 1870 1937 wrote a multivolume history of England 1815 1914 it was translated and greatly influenced scholars with its exploration of the complex interactions among politics religion economics reform and the absence of French style Jacobite revolution Halevy sought the answer not in economics but in religion If economic facts explain the course taken by the human race the England of the nineteenth century was surely above all other countries destined to revolution both politically and religiously Neither the British constitution nor the Church of England was strong enough to hold the country together He found the answer in religious nonconformity Methodism was the antidote to Jacobinism 53 G M Trevelyan 1876 1962 was widely read by both the general public and scholars The son of a leading historian he combined thorough research and primary sources with a lively writing style a strong patriotic outlook and a Whig view of continuous progress toward democracy He reached his widest audiences with History of England 1926 The book affirmed Trevelyan as the foremost historical commentator on England 37 He began his career as a conventional liberal with faith in inevitable progress Shocked by the horrors of the Great War he witnessed as an ambulance driver just behind the front lines Trevelyan became more appreciative of conservatism as a positive force and less confident that progress was inevitable In History of England 1926 he searched for the deepest meaning of English history Cannadine concluded in G M Trevelyan A Life in History 1992 During the first half of the twentieth century Trevelyan was the most famous the most honored the most influential and the most widely read historian of his generation He was a scion of the greatest historical dynasty that Britain has ever produced He knew and corresponded with many of the greatest figures of his time For fifty years Trevelyan acted as a public moralist public teacher and public benefactor wielding unchallenged cultural authority among the governing and the educated classes of his day Lewis Namier 1888 1960 had a powerful influence on research methodology among British historians 54 Born in Poland his Jewish family was descended from distinguished Talmudic scholars and came to England in 1907 He built his career at Manchester His best known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III 1929 England in the Age of the American Revolution 1930 and the History of Parliament series begun 1940 he edited with John Brooke 55 He had a microscopic view of history as made by many individuals with few or any themes it was called Namierism and his approach faded after his death His books typically are starting points for vast enterprises which were never followed up Thus England in the Age of the American Revolution ends in December 1762 56 Herbert Butterfield 1900 1979 is best known for his philosophical approach to historiography 57 58 Professionalisation Edit Professionalisation involved developing a career track for historians creating a national historical association and the sponsorship of scholarly journals The Royal Historical Society was founded in 1868 The English Historical Review began publication in 1886 59 Oxford and Cambridge were the most prestigious British universities but they avoided setting up PhD programs and concentrated their attention on teaching undergraduates through tutors based in the colleges The endowed chairs based in the universities as a whole had much less influence on the teaching of history Professionalisation on the German model with a focus on the research PhD prepared by graduate students under a master professor was pioneered by Manchester University J B Bury 1861 1927 at Cambridge Charles Harding Firth 1857 1936 at Oxford and especially Thomas Frederick Tout 1855 1929 at Manchester led the way 60 At Manchester Tout introduced original research into the undergraduate programme culminating in the production of a Final Year thesis based on primary sources This horrified Oxbridge where college tutors had little research capacity of their own and saw the undergraduate as an embryonic future gentleman liberal connoisseur widely read and mainstay of country and empire in politics commerce army land or church not an apprentice to dusty centuries old archives wherein no more than 1 in 100 could find even an innocuous career In taking this view they had a fair case given the various likelihoods and opportunities for their charges Tout s ally C H Firth fought a bitter campaign to persuade Oxford to follow Manchester and introduce scientific study of sources into the History programme but failed there was failure too at Cambridge Other universities however followed Tout and Oxbridge slowly made fundamental changes to the selection of college fellows across all disciplines 61 Class issues middle class and gentry Edit Further information Storm over the gentry and Communist Party Historians Group Marxist historiography developed as a school of historiography influenced by the chief tenets of Marxism including the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes Friedrich Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 it inspired the socialist impetus in British politics including the Fabian Society but did not influence historians R H Tawney was a powerful influence His The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century 1912 62 and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism 1926 reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in Max Weber s thesis on the connection between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism The gentry in Britain comprised the rich landowners who were not members of the aristocracy The Storm over the gentry was a major historiographical debate among scholars that took place in the 1940s and 1950s regarding the role of the gentry in causing the English Civil War of the 17th century 63 Tawney had suggested in 1941 that there was a major economic crisis for the nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries and that the rapidly rising gentry class was demanding a share of power When the aristocracy resisted Tawney argued the gentry launched the civil war 64 After heated debate historians generally concluded that the role of the gentry was not especially important 65 Marxist historians Edit A circle of historians inside the Communist Party of Great Britain CPGB formed in 1946 and became a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians who contributed to history from below and class structure in early capitalist society While some members of the group most notably Christopher Hill 1912 2003 and E P Thompson left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works They placed a great emphasis on the subjective determination of history 66 In the 1950s to 1970s labour history was redefined and expanded in focus by a number of historians amongst whom the most prominent and influential figures were E P Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm The motivation came from current left wing politics in Britain and the United States and reached red hot intensity Kenneth O Morgan a more traditional liberal historian explains the dynamic the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics the unions winter of discontent in 1979 and rise of a hard left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within the Labour Party The new history was often strongly Marxist which fed through the work of brilliant evangelists like Raphael Samuel into the New Left Review a famous journal like Past and Present the Society of Labour History and the work of a large number of younger scholars engaged in the field Non scholars like Tony Benn joined in The new influence of Marxism upon Labour studies came to affect the study of history In many ways this was highly beneficial it encouraged the study of the dynamics of social history rather than a narrow formal institutional view of labour and the history of the Labour Party it sought to place the experience of working people within a wider technical and ideological context it encouraged a more adventurous range of sources history from below so called and rescued them from what Thompson memorably called the condescension of posterity it brought the idea of class centre stage in the treatment of working class history where I had always felt it belonged it shed new light on the poor and dispossessed for whom the source materials were far more scrappy than those for the bourgeoisie and made original use of popular evidence like oral history not much used before But the Marxist or sometimes Trotskyist emphasis in Labour studies was too often doctrinaire and intolerant of non Marxist dissent it was also too often plain wrong distorting the evidence within a narrow doctrinaire framework I felt it incumbent upon me to help rescue it But this was not always fun I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff when for the only time in my life I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind playing the man not the ball focusing on my accent my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues 67 Christopher Hill specialized in 17th century English history 68 His books include Puritanism and Revolution 1958 Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution 1965 and revised in 1996 The Century of Revolution 1961 AntiChrist in 17th century England 1971 The World Turned Upside Down 1972 and many others E P Thompson pioneered the study of history from below in his work The Making of the English Working Class published in 1963 It focused on the forgotten history of the first working class political left in the world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries In his preface to this book Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger the Luddite cropper the obsolete hand loom weaver the Utopian artisan and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott from the enormous condescension of posterity Their crafts and traditions may have been dying Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward looking Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance and we did not Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience and if they were casualties of history they remain condemned in their own lives as casualties 69 Thompson s work was also significant because of the way he defined class He argued that class was not a structure but a relationship that was mutable He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman who made similar studies of the American working class The British Thai historian Chris Baker has cited Thompson s large influence on his career 70 Other important Marxist historians included Eric Hobsbawm C L R James Raphael Samuel A L Morton and Brian Pearce Although Marxist historiography made important contributions to the history of the working class oppressed nationalities and the methodology of history from below its chief flaw was its argument on the nature of history as determined or dialectical this can also be stated as the relative importance of subjective and objective factors in creating results It fell out of favour in the 1960s and 70s 71 Geoffrey Elton was important in undermining the case for a Marxist historiography which he argued was presenting seriously flawed interpretations of the past In particular Elton was opposed to the idea that the English Civil War was caused by socioeconomic changes in the 16th and 17th centuries arguing instead that it was due largely to the incompetence of the Stuart kings 72 Outside the Marxist orbit social historians paid a good deal of attention to labour history as well 73 Paul Addison notes that in Britain by the 1990s labour history was in sharp decline because there was no longer much interest in history of the white male working class Instead the cultural turn encouraged historians to explore wartime constructions of gender race citizenship and national identity 74 Rostow s alternative to Marxism Edit Main article Rostow s stages of growth In 1960 American economic historian Walt Whitman Rostow published The Stages of Economic Growth A Non Communist Manifesto which proposed the Rostovian take off model of economic growth one of the major historical models of economic growth which argues that economic modernization occurs in five basic stages of varying length traditional society preconditions for take off take off drive to maturity and high mass consumption This became one of the important concepts in the theory of modernization in social evolutionism A product of its time and place the book argued that one of the central problems of the Cold War as understood by American decision makers namely that there were millions of people living in poverty in the Third World whom Communism appealed to could be solved by a policy of modernization to be fostered by American economic aid and growth 75 Guy Ortolano argues that as an alternative to Marxist class oriented analysis Rostow replaced class with nation as the agent of history British history then became the base for comparisons However Rostow never explicitly offered the British case as the ideal model for nations to copy Many commentators assumed that was his goal and attention turned to issues of American exceptionalism and the claim that Britain created the modern economy 76 Since 1945 EditFirst World War Edit The First World War continues to be a theme of major interest to scholars but the content has changed over time The first studies focused on the military history of the war itself and reached a wide popular audience 77 With the publication of most of the critical diplomatic documents from all sides in the 1920s and 1930s scholarly attention turned heavily toward the comparative diplomatic history of Britain alongside France Germany Austria and Russia In recent decades attention has turned away from the generals and toward the common soldiers and away from the Western front and toward the complex involvement in other regions including the roles of the colonies and dominions of the British Empire A great deal of attention is devoted to structure of the Army and debates regarding the mistakes made by the high command typified by the popular slogan lions led by donkeys Social history has brought in the home front especially the roles of women and propaganda Cultural studies have pointed to the memories and meanings of the war after 1918 78 Thomas Colley finds that informed Britons in the 21st century are in agreement that Britain has very often been at war over the centuries They also agree that the nation has steadily lost its military prowess due to declines in its economy and disappearance of its empire 79 Prominent historians Edit Further information List of historians by area of study Arnold Toynbee Edit Arnold J Toynbee 1889 1975 had two careers one focused on chronicling and analyzing 20th century diplomatic history 80 However he became famous for his sweeping interpretation of world history with a strong religious bent in his 12 volume A Study of History 1934 1961 With his prodigious output of papers articles speeches and presentations and numerous books translated into many languages Toynbee was a widely read and discussed scholar in the 1940s and 1950s Professional historians never paid much heed to the second Toynbee however and he lost his popular audience as well 81 Keith Feiling Edit Keith Feiling 1884 1977 was Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford 1946 1950 He was noted for his conservative interpretation of the past showing an empire oriented ideology in defence of hierarchical authority paternalism deference the monarchy Church family nation status and place A Tory Democrat he felt that conservatives possessed more character than other people as he tried to demonstrate in his books on the history of the Conservative Party He acknowledged the necessity of reform as long as it was gradual top down and grounded not in abstract theory but in an appreciation of English history Thus he celebrated the reforms of the 1830s 82 A J P Taylor in 1950 praised Feiling s historiography calling it Toryism in contrast to the more common Whig history or liberal historiography written to show the inevitable progress of mankind Taylor explains Toryism rests on doubt in human nature it distrusts improvement clings to traditional institutions prefers the past to the future It is a sentiment rather than a principle 83 Isaiah Berlin Edit Isaiah Berlin 1909 1997 was a highly respected essayist who explored ideas and philosophy 84 A J P Taylor Edit A J P Taylor 1906 1990 is best known for his highly controversial reinterpretation of the coming of the Origins of the Second World War 1961 He ranged widely over the 19th and 20th centuries Of major importance are his rich treatises surveying European diplomatic history The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848 1918 Oxford University Press 1955 and 20th century Britain English History 1914 1945 Oxford University Press 1965 85 86 As a commentator in print and on the air he became well known to millions through his television lectures His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as the Macaulay of our age 87 Despite Taylor s increasing ambivalence toward appeasement from the late 1950s which became explicitly evident in his 1961 book Origins of the Second World War Winston Churchill remained another of his heroes In English History 1914 1945 Taylor famously concluded his biographical footnote of Churchill with the phrase the saviour of his country 88 Another person Taylor admired was the historian E H Carr who was his favourite historian and a good friend Hugh Trevor Roper Edit Hugh Trevor Roper 1914 2003 was a leading essayist and commentator He thrived on polemics and debates covering a wide range of historical topics but particularly England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany His essays established his reputation as a scholar who could succinctly define historiographical controversies In the view of John Kenyon some of Trevor Roper s short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men s books 89 On the other hand his biographer claims that the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books on the subject which he has made his own By this exacting standard Hugh failed 90 Political history Edit Political history has flourished in terms both of biography of major national leaders and the history of political parties 91 92 93 Postwar consensus Edit Main article Postwar consensus The post war consensus is a historians model of political agreement from 1945 to 1979 when new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rejected and reversed it 94 The concept claims there was a widespread consensus that covered support for a coherent package of policies that were developed in the 1930s and promised during the Second World War focused on a mixed economy Keynesianism and a broad welfare state 95 In recent years the validity of the interpretation has been debated by historians The historians model of the postwar consensus was most fully developed by Paul Addison 96 The basic argument is that in the 1930s Liberal Party intellectuals led by John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge developed a series of plans that became especially attractive as the wartime government promised a much better postwar Britain and saw the need to engage every class in society The coalition government during the war headed by Churchill and Attlee adopted white papers that promised Britain a much improved welfare state after the war The promises included the national health service and expansion of education housing and a number of welfare programs as well as the nationalization of some weak industries It was extended to foreign policy in terms of decolonization as well as support for the Cold War The model states that from 1945 until the arrival of Thatcher in 1979 there was a broad multi partisan national consensus on social and economic policy especially regarding the welfare state nationalized health services educational reform a mixed economy government regulation Keynesian macroeconomic policies and full employment Apart from the question of nationalization of some industries these policies were broadly accepted by the three major parties as well as by industry the financial community and the labour movement Until the 1980s historians generally agreed on the existence and importance of the consensus Some historians such as Ralph Miliband expressed disappointment that the consensus was a modest or even conservative package that blocked a fully socialized society 97 The historian Angus Calder complained that the postwar reforms were an inadequate reward for the wartime sacrifices a cynical betrayal of the people s hope for a more just postwar society 98 In recent years there has been a historiographical debate on whether such a consensus ever existed 99 The revisionist argument is that the consensus was superficial because the parties were divided The Conservatives clung to their pro business ideals while Labour never renounced socialism 100 Business history Edit Business history in Britain emerged in the 1950s following the publication of a series of influential company histories and the establishment of the journal Business History 101 in 1958 at the University of Liverpool The most influential of these early company histories was Charles Wilson s History of Unilever the first volume of which was published in 1954 Other examples included Coleman s work on Courtaulds and artificial fibres Alford on Wills and the tobacco industry and Barker on Pilkington s and glass manufacture 102 103 These early studies were conducted primarily by economic historians interested in the role of leading firms in the development of the wider industry and therefore went beyond mere corporate histories Although some work examined the successful industries of the industrial revolution and the role of the key entrepreneurs in the 1970s scholarly debate in British business history became increasingly focused on economic decline For economic historians the loss of British competitive advantage after 1870 could at least in part be explained by entrepreneurial failure prompting further business history research into individual industry and corporate cases The Lancashire cotton textile industry which had been the leading take off sector in the industrial revolution but which was slow to invest in subsequent technical developments became an important topic of debate on this subject William Lazonick for example argued that cotton textile entrepreneurs in Britain failed to develop larger integrated plants on the American model a conclusion similar to Chandler s synthesis of a number of comparative case studies 104 105 Studies of British business leaders have emphasized how they fit into the class structure especially their relationship to the aristocracy and the desire to use their wealth to purchase landed estates and hereditary titles 106 107 108 Biography has been of less importance in British business history but there are compilations 109 British business history began to widen its scope in the 1980s with research work conducted at the LSE s Business History Unit led first by Leslie Hannah then by Terry Gourvish Other research centres followed notably at Glasgow and Reading reflecting an increasing involvement in the discipline by Business and Management School academics More recent editors of Business History Geoffrey Jones academic Harvard Business School Charles Harvey University of Newcastle Business School John Wilson Liverpool University Management School and Steven Toms Leeds University Business School have promoted management strategy themes such as networks family capitalism corporate governance human resource management marketing and brands and multi national organisations in their international as well as merely British context Employing these new themes has allowed business historians to challenge and adapt the earlier conclusions of Chandler and others about the performance of the British economy 110 Urban history Edit Main article Urban history In the 1960s the academic historiography of the Victorian towns and cities began to flourish in Britain 111 Much of the attention focused at first on the Victorian city with topics including demography public health the working class and local culture 112 In recent decades topics regarding class capitalism and social structure have given way to studies of the cultural history of urban life as well as groups such as women prostitutes migrants from rural areas and immigrants from the Continent and from the British Empire 113 The urban environment itself became a major topic as studies of the material fabric of the city and the structure of urban space became more prominent 114 Historians have always made London the focus For example recent studies of early modern London cover a wide range of topics including literary and cultural activities the character of religious life in post Reformation London the importance of place and space to the experience of the city and the question of civic and business morality in an urban environment without the oversight typical of villages 115 Academics have increasingly studied small towns and cities since the medieval period as well as the urbanization that attended the industrial revolution The historiography on the politics of 18th century urban England shows the critical role played by towns in politics where they comprised four fifths of the seats in the House of Commons as well as the political dominance of London The studies also show how townspeople promoted social change at the same time as securing long term political stability 116 In the second half of the 19th century provincial centers such as Birmingham Glasgow Leeds Liverpool and Manchester doubled in size becoming regional capitals They were all conurbations that included smaller cities and suburbs in their catchment area The available scholarly materials are now quite comprehensive In 2000 Peter Clark of the Urban History Center of the University of Leicester was the general editor and Cambridge University Press the publisher of a 2800 page history of British cities and towns in 75 chapters by 90 scholars The chapters deal not with biographies of individual cities but with economic social or political themes that cities had in common 117 118 Deindustrialization Edit The theme of deindustrialization has begun to attract the attention of historians The first wave of scholarship came from activists who were involved in community activism at the time the factories and mines were shutting down the 1970s and 1980s The cultural turn focused attention on the meaning of deindustrialization in the 2000s A third wave of scholars look at the socio cultural aspects of how working class culture changed in the post industrial age Historians broadened their scope from the economic causes of decline and resistance to job loss to its social and cultural long term effects 119 New themes Edit Women s history Edit Women s history started to emerge in the 1970s against the passive resistance of many established men who had long dismissed it as frivolous trivial and outside the boundaries of history That sentiment persisted for decades in Oxbridge but has largely faded in the red bricks and newer universities 120 History of Parliament Edit In 1951 scholars receive national funding for a collaborative History of Parliament An editorial board comprised leading scholars most notably Sir John Neale and Sir Lewis Namier Years of energetic research demonstrated a commitment to the new technique of prosopography or quantitative collective biography However Neale and Namier had sharply different interpretations of the project Neale looked for definitive quantitative answers to specific technical questions of the sort suggested by his traditional whiggish view of constitutional development Namier on the other hand took a sociological approach to use the lives of MPs as an entry point to recreate the world of the governing classes The editorial board was unable to synthesize the two approaches Namier s team moved faster through the documents so much of the work followed his model The Conservative government entered the debate led by Harold Macmillan and civil servants who wanted a finished product rather than a never ending project Namier s ambition was curtailed and after his death in 1960 his own section was completed by his assistant John Brooke in a more restricted format 55 History of the state Edit The history of the state has been conceptualized first as a history of the ruling monarchs and under Namier the study of individual personalities Recently there has been a deeper exploration of the growth of state power Historians have looked at the long 18th century from about 1660 to 1837 from four fresh perspectives 121 The first developed by Oliver MacDonagh presented an expansive and centralized administrative state while deemphasizing the influence of Benthamite utilitarianism 122 The second approach as developed by Edward Higgs conceptualizes the state as an information gathering entity paying special attention to local registrars and the census He brings in such topics as spies surveillance of Catholics the 1605 Gunpowder Plot led by Guy Fawkes to overthrow the government and the Poor Laws and demonstrates similarities to the surveillance society of the 21st century 123 John Brewer introduced the third approach with his depiction of the unexpectedly powerful centralized fiscal military state during the eighteenth century 124 125 Finally there have been numerous recent studies that explore the state as an abstract entity capable of commanding the loyalties of those people over whom it rules Global history Edit James Vernon proposes a global history of Britain centered on the rise demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that made the market as the central principle of government The story features the growth and collapse of the First and Second British Empires as well as the global hegemony of the Anglosphere Events processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise demise and reinvention This history of Britain is then a global story not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the global map so red but because the entire world combined to make Britain 126 To some extent the enterprise is already underway making the Empire s history a central part of a new global history 127 New maps were drawn around the oceans yielding new perspectives such as Atlantic history 128 129 Digital history Edit Digital history is opening new avenues for research into original sources that were very hard to handle before One model is the Eighteenth Century Devon project completed in 2007 It was a collaboration of professional historians local volunteers and professional archives that created an online collection of transcripts of 18th century documents such as allegiance rolls Episcopal visitation returns and freeholder lists 130 Digital archives and digital periodicals are allowing much broader opportunity for research and primary sources at the undergraduate level 131 Use of powerful search engines on large textual databases allows much more expanded research on such sources as newspaper files 132 See also EditCambridge School of historiography led by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson Economic history of the United Kingdom Historians of England in the Middle Ages Historiography of the British Empire Historiography of the Poor Laws Historiography of the causes of World War I Historiography of Scotland History of Christianity in Britain History of England History of Northern Ireland History of Scotland History of Wales List of Cornish historians Military history of the United Kingdom Politics of the United KingdomTimeline of British diplomatic history Timeline of Irish history Timeline of Scottish historySpecial topics Edit James Callaghan Historiography prime minister 1976 79Prominent historians Edit Lord Acton 1834 1902 editor Robert C Allen born 1947 economic Perry Anderson born 1938 Marxism Karen Armstrong born 1944 religious William Ashley 1860 1927 British economic history Bernard Bailyn born 1922 Atlantic migration The Venerable Bede 672 735 Britain from 55 BC to 731 AD Brian Bond born 1936 military Arthur Bryant 1899 1985 Pepys popular military Herbert Butterfield 1900 1979 historiography Angus Calder 1942 2008 Second World War I R Christie 1919 1998 18th century Winston Churchill 1874 1965 world wars J C D Clark born 1951 18th century Linda Colley born 1949 18th century R G Collingwood 1889 1943 philosophy of history Patrick Collinson born 1929 Elizabethan England and Puritanism Julian Corbett 1854 1922 naval Maurice Cowling 1926 2005 19th and 20th century politics Susan Doran Elizabethan David C Douglas 1898 1982 Norman England Eamon Duffy religious history of the 15th 17th centuries Harold James Dyos 1921 78 urban Geoffrey Rudolph Elton Tudor period Charles Harding Firth 1857 1936 political history of the 17th century Judith Flanders born 1959 Victorian social Amanda Foreman born 1968 18th 19th centuries Women Antonia Fraser 17th century Edward Augustus Freeman 1823 1892 English politics James Anthony Froude 1818 1894 Tudor England William Gibson ecclesiastical history Samuel Rawson Gardiner 1829 1902 political history of the 17th century Geoffrey of Monmouth died c 1154 England Lawrence Henry Gipson 1882 1970 British Empire before 1775 George Peabody Gooch 1873 1968 modern diplomacy Andrew Gordon naval John Richard Green 1837 1883 English Mary Anne Everett Green 1818 1895 John Guy born 1949 Tudor era Edward Hasted 1732 1812 Kent Max Hastings born 1945 military Second World War J H Hexter 17th century historiography Christopher Hill 1912 2003 17th century Gertrude Himmelfarb born 1924 Victorian Harry Hinsley 1918 1998 British intelligence World War 2 Eric Hobsbawn 1917 2012 Marxist 19th 20th centuries David Hume 1711 1776 six volume History of England Edward Hyde 1st Earl of Clarendon 1609 1674 English Civil Wars William James naval historian Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars George Hilton Jones III 1924 2008 David S Katz religious R J B Knight born 1944 naval David Knowles 1896 1974 medieval Andrew Lambert born 1956 naval John Lingard 1771 1851 survey from Catholic perspective John Edward Lloyd 1861 1947 early Welsh history David Loades born 1934 Tudor era Thomas Babington Macaulay 1st Baron Macaulay 1800 1859 The History of England from the Accession of James the Second Piers Mackesy born 1924 military J D Mackie 1887 1978 Scottish Frederic William Maitland 1850 1906 legal medieval Arthur Marder 1910 1980 20th century naval Kenneth O Morgan born 1934 Wales politics since 1945 Lewis Namier political history of the 18th century Charles Oman 1860 1946 19th century military Bradford Perkins 1925 2008 diplomacy with U S J H Plumb 1911 2001 18th century J G A Pocock born 1924 political ideas early modern Roy Porter 1946 2002 social and medical F M Powicke 1879 1963 English medieval Andrew Roberts Political biographies 19th and 20th centuries N A M Rodger naval Stephen Roskill naval A L Rowse 1903 1997 Cornish history and Elizabethan Conrad Russell 17th century Dominic Sandbrook born 1974 1960s and after John Robert Seeley 1834 1895 political history Empire Simon Schama born 1945 surveys Jack Simmons 1915 2000 railways topography Quentin Skinner early modern political ideas Goldwin Smith 1823 1910 British and Canadian Richard Southern 1912 2001 medieval David Starkey born 1945 Tudor era Frank Stenton 1880 1967 English medieval Lawrence Stone society and the history of the family William Stubbs 1825 1902 law A J P Taylor 1906 1990 19th century diplomacy 20th century historiography E P Thompson 1924 1993 working class A Wyatt Tilby 1880 1948 British diaspora George Macaulay Trevelyan 1876 1962 English history many different periods Hugh Trevor Roper Baron Dacre of Glanton 17th century Walter Ullmann 1910 1983 medieval Paul Vinogradoff 1854 1925 medieval Charles Webster 1886 1961 Diplomatic Retha Warnicke born 1939 Tudor history and gender issues Cicely Veronica Wedgwood 1910 1997 British Ernest Llewellyn Woodward 1890 1971 international relations Perez Zagorin born 1920 16th and 17th centuriesScholarly journals EditAgricultural History Review Anglican amp Episcopal History Anglo Saxon England journal Albion British Catholic History The British Journal for the History of Science Britain and the World formerly British Scholar Business History Review Cambridge Historical Journal Contemporary British History 133 The Economic History Review English Historical Review First World War Studies 134 The Historical Journal History of Education Journal of the History of Education Society 135 History Today popular History Workshop Journal Notes and Records of the Royal Society history of science Past amp Present Journal of British Studies Journal of Scottish Historical Studies formerly Scottish Economic and Social History Studia Hibernica The Scottish Historical Review Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Twentieth Century British History Urban History Victorian StudiesOrganisations EditBritish Association for Local History Centre for Contemporary British History Centre for Metropolitan History Dictionary of National Biography Economic History Society Federation of Family History Societies Historical Association Historical Manuscripts Commission History of Parliament Institute of Historical Research Oral History Society Royal Historical Society Society of Antiquaries of London Society of Genealogists Victoria County HistoryReferences Edit Molly Miller Bede s use of Gildas English Historical Review 1975 241 261 JSTOR 566923 N J Higham Bede s Agenda in Book IV of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People A Tricky Matter of Advising the King Journal of Ecclesiastical History 2013 64 3 pp 476 493 Charles F Briggs History Story and Community Representing the Past in ed Sarah Foot and Chase F Robinson eds The Oxford History of Historical Writing Volume 2 400 1400 2012 2 391 Michael Swanton The Anglo Saxon Chronicle 1998 John Jolliffe Froissart s Chronicles Faber amp Faber 2012 Nicholas Popper Walter Ralegh s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance 2012 p 18 J Racin Sir Walter Raleigh as Historian 1974 Froude History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada 12 volumes 1893 Wolsey online free R A F Pollard Henry VIII 1905 online free Pollard The History of England from the Accession of Edward VI to the Death of Elizabeth 1547 1603 1910 online free John Vidmar English Catholic Historians and the English Reformation 1585 1954 2005 W Ian Hazlett Settlements The British Isles in Thomas A Brady Jr et al eds Handbook of European History 1400 1600 Late Middle Ages Renaissance and Reformation volume 2 1995 pp 2 455 90 Slavin Arthur J 1990 G R Elton On Reformation and Revolution The History Teacher 23 4 405 431 doi 10 2307 494396 JSTOR 494396 Haigh Christopher 1997 Religion Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 281 299 doi 10 2307 3679281 JSTOR 3679281 deals with Elton A G Dickens John Tonkin and Kenneth Powell eds The Reformation in historical thought 1985 Eamon Duffy The English reformation after revisionism Renaissance Quarterly 59 3 2006 720 731 Richard Cust and Ann Hughes eds Conflict in early Stuart England studies in religion and politics 1603 1642 Routledge 2014 Duffy Eamon 2006 The English Reformation After Revisionism Renaissance Quarterly 59 3 720 731 doi 10 1353 ren 2008 0366 JSTOR 10 1353 ren 2008 0366 S2CID 154375741 R C Richardson The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited London 1988 R C MacGillivray 1974 Restoration Historians and the English Civil War Springer ISBN 9789024716784 Michael G Finlayson Clarendon Providence and the Historical Revolution Albion 1990 22 4 pp 607 632 JSTOR 4051392 Charles H Firth Clarendon s History of the Rebellion Parts 1 II III English Historical Review vol 19 nos 73 75 1904 JSTOR 549335 Martine Watson Brownley Clarendon amp the Rhetoric of Historical Form 1985 Hugh Trevor Roper Clarendon s History of the Rebellion History Today 1979 29 2 pp 73 79 B H G Wormald Clarendon Politics History and Religion 1640 1660 1951 F York Powell Samuel Rawson Gardiner English Historical Review 17 66 1902 276 279 JSTOR 548494 J S A Adamson Eminent Victorians S R Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero Historical Journal 1990 33 3 641 657 Karen O Brien English Enlightenment Histories 1750 c 1815 in Jose Rabasa et al eds 2012 The Oxford History of Historical Writing Volume 3 1400 1800 OUP Oxford pp 518 35 ISBN 9780199219179 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a author has generic name help Womersley David J 1986 The historical writings of William Robertson Journal of the History of Ideas 47 3 497 506 doi 10 2307 2709666 JSTOR 2709666 S K Wertz Hume and the Historiography of Science Journal of the History of Ideas 1993 54 3 pp 411 436 JSTOR 2710021 Hume vol 6 p 531 cited in John Philipps Kenyon 1984 The history men the historical profession in England since the Renaissance p 42 ISBN 9780822959007 Robin Winks Historiography 1999 pp 3 5 614 Paul Kennedy has much to say about Britain in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers 1987 Piers Brendon The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781 1997 2008 p xv G A Cevasco ed The 1890s An Encyclopedia of British Literature Art and Culture 1993 736pp short articles by experts Ernst Mayr When Is Historiography Whiggish Journal of the History of Ideas 1990 51 2 pp 301 309 JSTOR 2709517 Hugh Trevor Roper Introduction Lord Macaulay s History of England Penguin Classics 1979 p 10 The Nature of History second edition 1980 p 47 a b David Cannadine GM Trevelyan a historian in tune with his time and ours July 21 2012 Victor Feske From Belloc to Churchill Private Scholars Public Culture and the Crisis of British Liberalism 1900 1939 1996 p 2 J Hart Nineteenth Century Social Reform A Tory Interpretation of History Past amp Present 1965 31 1 pp 39 61 John Leonard Clive Thomas Babington Macaulay The Shaping of the Historian 1973 Hugh Trevor Roper Introduction Lord Macaulay s History of England Penguin Classics 1979 pp 25 6 John Clive Macaulay the shaping of the historian 1975 Thomas Babington Macaulay 1856 The History of England from the Accession of James II p 17 Gertrude Himmelfarb Who Now Reads Macaulay Marriage and Morals Among The Victorians And other Essays London Faber and Faber 1986 p 163 J R Western Monarchy and Revolution The English State in the 1680s London Blandford Press 1972 p 403 Alan G Crosby Urban History in Lancashire and Cheshire Northern History 42 1 2005 75 89 Ralph Bernard Pugh The Victoria history of the counties of England Baptist Quarterly 27 3 1977 110 117 online John Beckett W G Hoskins the Victoria County History and the Study of English Local History Midland History 2011 36 1 pp 115 127 Finberg HPR Skipp VHT 1967 Local History Objective and Pursuit David amp Charles pp 46 70 John Beckett et al The Victoria County History 1899 2012 a Diamond Jubilee celebration 2nd ed 2013 W J Ashley James E Thorold Rogers Political Science Quarterly 1889 pp 381 407 JSTOR 2139135 Alon Kadish Historians Economists and Economic History 2012 pp 3 35 Elissa S Itzkin The Halevy Thesis A Working Hypothesis English Revivalism Antidote for Revolution and Radicalism 1789 1815 Church History 1975 44 1 pp 47 56 Julia Namier Lewis Namier a biography 1971 a b D W Hayton Sir Lewis Namier Sir John Neale and the Shaping of the History of Parliament Parliamentary History 32 1 2013 187 211 John Brooke Namier and Namierism History and Theory 3 3 1964 331 347 Michael Bentley Who was Herbert Butterfield History Today 2011 61 11 pp 62 63 James Smyth Lewis Namier Herbert Butterfield and Edmund Burke Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 35 3 2012 381 389 Doris S Goldstein The origins and early years of the English Historical Review English Historical Review 1986 101 398 pp 6 19 Peter R H Slee Learning and a Liberal Education The Study of Modern History in the Universities of Oxford Cambridge and Manchester 1800 1914 Manchester University Press 1986 Reba Soffer Nation duty character and confidence history at Oxford 1850 1914 Historical Journal 1987 30 01 pp 77 104 William Rose Benet 1988 p 961 Ronald H Fritze and William B Robison 1996 Historical Dictionary of Stuart England 1603 1689 Greenwood pp 205 7 ISBN 9780313283918 R H Tawney The Rise of the Gentry 1558 1640 Economic History Review 1941 11 1 pp 1 38 JSTOR 2590708 J H Hexter Storm over the Gentry in Hexter Reappraisals in History 1961 pp 117 62 Harvey J Kaye History and social theory notes on the contribution of British Marxist historiography to our understanding of class Canadian Review of Sociology Revue canadienne de sociologie 20 2 1983 167 192 Kenneth O Morgan My Histories University of Wales Press 2015 p 85 86 JSTOR j ctt17w8h53 Hill John Edward Christopher 1912 2003 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed Oxford University Press January 2007 doi 10 1093 ref odnb 89437 Retrieved 29 June 2012 Subscription or UK public library membership required Edward Palmer Thompson 1963 The Making of the English Working Class IICA p 12 2017 07 13 Ayutthaya and Writing Thai History Today YouTube Perry Anderson Arguments within English Marxism Verso Books 2016 See his essays The Stuart Century A High Road to Civil War and The Unexplained Revolution in G R Elton Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government Volume II Cambridge University Press 1974 John McIlroy Asa Briggs and the Emergence of Labour History in Post War Britain Labour History Review 77 2 2012 211 242 Paul Addison and Harriet Jones eds A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939 2000 2005 p 4 David Milne America s Rasputin Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War 2008 pp 60 65 Guy Ortolano The typicalities of the English Walt Rostow the stages of economic growth and modern British history Modern Intellectual History 12 3 2015 657 684 William Philpott Military history a century after the Great War Revue Francaise de Civilisation Britannique French Journal of British Studies 20 XX 1 2015 online Martin Francis Attending to ghosts Some reflections on the disavowals of British Great War historiography Twentieth Century British History 2014 25 3 pp 347 367 Thomas Colley Always at War British Public Narratives of War U of Michigan Press 2019 online review William H McNeill Arnold J Toynbee a life 1989 Alexander Hutton A belated return for Christ the reception of Arnold J Toynbee s A Study of History in a British context 1934 1961 European Review of History 21 3 2014 405 424 Reba N Soffer History Historians and Conservatism in Britain and America From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan 2009 A J P Taylor Essays in English history 1976 p 18 John Gray Isaiah Berlin Princeton University Press 1996 John Boyer A J P Taylor and the Art of Modern History Journal of Modern History 1977 49 1 40 72 Kathleen Burk Troublemaker The Life And History Of A J P Taylor Yale University Press 2000 Richard Overy 30 January 1994 Riddle Radical Ridicule The Observer A J P Taylor 1965 English History 1914 1945 Oxford Clarendon Press p 29 Quoted at Adam Sisman An Honourable Englishman The Life of Hugh Trevor Roper 2010 p 414 Sisman An Honourable Englishman The Life of Hugh Trevor Roper 2010 p 375 Paul Readman The State of Twentieth Century British Political History Journal of Policy History 2009 21 3 pp 219 238 John Callaghan et al eds Interpreting the Labour Party Approaches to Labour Politics and History 2003 online also online free Kit Kowol Renaissance on the Right New Directions in the History of the Post War Conservative Party Twentieth Century British History 27 2 2016 290 304 online Richard Toye From Consensus to Common Ground The Rhetoric of the Postwar Settlement and its Collapse Journal of Contemporary History 2013 48 1 pp 3 23 Dennis Kavanagh The Postwar Consensus Twentieth Century British History 1992 3 2 pp 175 190 Paul Addison The road to 1945 British politics and the Second World War 1975 Ralph Miliband Parliamentary socialism A study in the politics of labour 1972 Angus Calder The Peoples War Britain 1939 1945 1969 Daniel Ritschel Daniel Consensus in the Postwar Period After 1945 in David Loades ed Reader s Guide to British History 2003 1 296 297 Kevin Jefferys The Churchill Coalition and wartime politics 1940 1945 Manchester University Press 1995 see Business History Archived 2011 04 14 at the Wayback Machine John Wilson and Steven Toms J S Fifty years of Business History Business History 2008 50 2 pp 125 26 Leslie Hannah New Issues in British Business History Business History Review 1983 57 2 pp 165 174 Chandler A Scale and Scope The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism Cambridge Mass Belknap Press 1990 William Mass amp William Lazonick The British Cotton Industry and International Competitive Advantage the state of the debates Business History 1990 32 4 pp 9 65 Howard L Malchow Gentlemen capitalists the social and political world of the Victorian businessman Stanford University Press 19920 William D Rubinstein Wealth elites and the class structure of modern Britain Past amp Present 76 1977 99 126 Julia A Smith Land ownership and social change in late nineteenth century Britain Economic History Review 53 4 2000 767 776 JSTOR 2598603 David J Jeremy ed Dictionary of business biography a biographical dictionary of business leaders active in Britain in the period 1860 1980 Butterworths 1984 Toms Steven and Wilson John F Scale Scope and Accountability Towards a New Paradigm of British Business History Business History 2003 45 4 pp 1 23 Gary W Davies The rise of urban history in Britain c 1960 1978 PhD dissertation University of Leicester 2014 online With detailed bibliography pp 205 40 H J Dyos and Michael Wolff eds Victorian City Images and Realities 2 vol 1973 Kevin Myers and Ian Grosvenor Birmingham Stories Local Histories of Migration and Settlement and the Practice of History Midland History 2011 36 2 pp 149 162 Simon Gunn Urbanization in Chris Williams ed Eight Companion to 19th Century Britain 2007 pp 238 252 Vanessa Harding Recent perspectives on early modern London Historical Journal 47 2 2004 435 450 Peter Borsay Geoffrey Holmes and the Urban World of Augustan England Parliamentary History 28 1 2009 126 136 D M Palliser ed The Cambridge Urban History of Britain vol I 600 1540 2000 online P A Clark ed The Cambridge Urban History of Britain vol II 1540 1840 online M J Daunton ed The Cambridge Urban History of Britain vol III 1840 1950 online See review by Albert J Schmidt Journal of Social History 2003 36 3 pp 781 784 JSTOR 3790746 Steven High The Wounds of Class A Historiographical Reflection on the Study of Deindustrialization 1973 2013 History Compass 2013 11 11 pp 994 1007 Bonnie Smith The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain France and the United States 1750 1940 American Historical Review 1984 89 3 709 32 Simon Devereaux The Historiography of the English State During The Long Eighteenth Century Part Two Fiscal Military and Nationalist Perspectives History Compass 2010 8 8 pp 843 865 Oliver MacDonagh The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government A Reappraisal The Historical Journal 1 1 1958 52 67 Edward Higgs Identifying the English a history of personal identification 1500 to the present 2011 John Brewer The Sinews of Power War Money and the English State 1688 1783 1990 Aaron Graham The British Fiscal military States 1660 c 1783 2015 James Vernon The history of Britain is dead long live a global history of Britain History Australia 13 1 2016 19 34 Rachel K Bright and Andrew R Dilley After the British World Historical Journal 60 2 2017 547 568 D Armitage and M J Braddick eds The British Atlantic world 2002 E A Alpers The Indian Ocean in world history 2014 D Armitage and A Bashford eds Pacific histories ocean land people 2014 Simon Dixon Local History Archives and the Public The Eighteenth Century Devon People and Communities Project Assessed Archives 2008 33 119 pp 101 113 Kristin Mahoney and Kaitlyn Abrams Periodical Pedagogy in the Undergraduate Classroom Victorian Periodicals Review 2015 48 2 pp 216 231 Adrian Bingham The Times Digital Archive 1785 2006 Gale Cengage English Historical Review 2013 128 533 pp 1037 1040 See See website See WebsiteFurther reading EditBentley Michael Modernizing England s Past English Historiography in the Age of Modernism 1870 1970 2006 Boyd Kelly ed Encyclopedia of historians and historical writing 2 vol Taylor amp Francis 1999 1562pp Elton G R Modern Historians on British History 1485 1945 A Critical Bibliography 1945 1969 1969 annotated guide to 1000 history books on every major topic plus book reviews and major scholarly articles online Furber Elizabeth Chapin ed Changing Views on British History 1966 Gransden Antonia Historical Writing in England volume 1 Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1974 Loades David ed Reader s Guide to British History 2 vol 2003 1610pp comprehensive coverage of major topics and historians Schlatter Richard ed Recent Views on British History Essays on Historical Writing Since 1966 1984 Thompson James Westfall A History of Historical Writing vol 1 From the earliest Times to the End of the 17th Century 1942 online edition A History of Historical Writing vol 2 The 18th and 19th Centuries 1942 online edition Tombs Robert The English and their History 2014 online review Woolf Daniel R ed A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing 2 vol Taylor amp Francis 1998 Textbook surveys Edit Bronstein Jamie L and Andrew T Harris Empire State and Society Britain since 1830 2012 352pp brief university textbook online McCord Norman and Bill Purdue British History 1815 1914 2nd ed 2007 612 pp online university textbook Roberts Clayton and David F Roberts A History of England Volume 2 1688 to the present 2013 university textbook 1985 edition online Willson David Harris A history of England 4th ed 1991 online 1972 edition university textbookPeriod guides Edit Addison Paul and Harriet Jones eds A Companion to Contemporary Britain 1939 2000 2005 Cannon John The Oxford Companion to British History 2nd ed 2002 1142pp Dickinson H T ed A Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain Blackwell 2006 584pp essays by 38 experts Jones Harriet and Mark Clapson eds The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Twentieth Century 2009 Williams Chris ed A Companion to Nineteenth Century Britain Blackwell 2006 33 essays by experts 624pp Wrigley Chris ed A Companion to Early Twentieth Century Britain Blackwell Companions to British History 2009 Topics Edit Bently M Shape and pattern in British historical writing 1815 1945 in S MacIntyre J Maiguashca and A Pok eds The Oxford History of Historical Writing Volume 4 1800 1945 Oxford University Press 2012 p 206 Cannadine David The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880 1980 Past amp Present no 103 1984 pp 131 172 online Colley Thomas Always at War British Public Narratives of War U of Michigan Press 2019 online review Feldman David and Jon Lawrence eds Structures and Transformations in Modern British History Cambridge University Press 2011 Hitsman J Mackay Canadian and British Military Historiography In A Guide to the Sources of British Military History 2015 Jeremy David J ed Dictionary of business biography a biographical dictionary of business leaders active in Britain in the period 1860 1980 Butterworths 1984 Mort Frank Intellectual Pluralism and the Future of British History History Workshop Journal Vol 72 No 1 2011 Palmer William Aspects of Revision in History in Great Britain and the United States 1920 1975 Historical Reflections 2010 36 1 pp 17 32 Historians Edit Clark G Kitson A Hundred Years of the Teaching of History at Cambridge 1873 1973 Historical Journal 16 3 1973 535 53 online Gooch G P History and historians in the nineteenth century 1913 online Hale John Rigby ed The evolution of British historiography from Bacon to Namier Macmillan 1967 Kenyon John Philipps The history men the historical profession in England since the Renaissance U of Pittsburgh Press 1984 Smith Bonnie G The Contribution of Women to Modern Historiography in Great Britain France and the United States 1750 1940 American Historical Review 1984 89 3 pp 709 32 JSTOR 1856122 Soffer Reba N History Historians and Conservatism in Britain and America From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan 2009 Medieval Edit Fisher Matthew Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England Ohio State University Press 2012 Gransden Antonia Historical Writing in England c 500 to c 1307 Psychology Press 1996 Taylor John English historical literature in the fourteenth century Oxford University Press 1987 Urbanski Charity Writing History for the King Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography Cornell University Press 2013 1485 1800 Edit Devereaux Simon The Historiography of the English State during the Long Eighteenth Century Part I Decentralized Perspectives History Compass 7 3 2009 742 764 Devereaux Simon The Historiography of the English State During The Long Eighteenth Century Part Two Fiscal Military and Nationalist Perspectives History Compass 8 8 2010 843 865 Johnson Richard R Politics Redefined An Assessment of Recent Writings on the Late Stuart Period of English History 1660 to 1714 William and Mary Quarterly 1978 691 732 JSTOR 1923211 Laprade William Thomas The present state of the history of England in the eighteenth century Journal of Modern History 4 4 1932 581 603 online O Gorman Frank The recent historiography of the Hanoverian regime Historical Journal 29 4 1986 1005 1020 online Simms Brendan and Torsten Riotte eds The Hanoverian Dimension in British History 1714 1837 2007 excerpt Trimble William Raleigh Early Tudor Historiography 1485 1548 Journal of the History of Ideas 11 1 1950 30 41 Walcott Robert The Later Stuarts 1660 1714 Significant Work of the Last Twenty Years 1939 1959 American Historical Review 67 2 1962 pp 352 370 DOI 10 2307 1843428 JSTOR 1843428 Woolf Daniel R The idea of history in early Stuart England erudition ideology and the light of truth from the accession of James I to the Civil War U of Toronto Press 1990 Since 1800 Edit Brundage Anthony and Richard A Cosgrove The great tradition constitutional history and national identity in Britain and the United States 1870 1960 Stanford University Press 2007 Burrow John Wyon A Liberal Descent Victorian Historians and the English Past 1981 covers Macaulay Stubbs Freeman and Froude Cevasco G A ed The 1890s An Encyclopedia of British Literature Art and Culture 1993 736pp short articles by experts Goldstein Doris S The origins and early years of the English Historical Review English Historical Review 101 1986 6 19 Goldstein Doris S The organizational development of the British historical profession 1884 1921 Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 55 1982 180 93 Maitzen Rohan Amanda Gender Genre and Victorian Historical Writing Taylor amp Francis 1998 Maitzen Rohan This feminine preserve Historical biographies by Victorian women Victorian Studies 1995 371 393 JSTOR 3828714 Obelkevich Jim New Developments in History in the 1950s and 1960s Contemporary British History 14 4 2000 143 167 online Rasor Eugene L Winston S Churchill 1874 1965 A Comprehensive Historiography and Annotated Bibliography 2000 712pp online at Questio also online free Reynolds David J Britain the Two World Wars and the Problem of Narrative Historical Journal 60 1 197 231 https Doi Org 10 1017 S0018246X16000509 St John Ian The Historiography of Gladstone and Disraeli Anthem Press 2016 402 pp excerpt Simms Brendan and Torsten Riotte eds The Hanoverian Dimension in British History 1714 1837 2007 excerptScotland Edit Main article Historiography of Scotland Further reading Brown Keith M Early Modern Scottish History A Survey Scottish Historical Review April 2013 Supplement Vol 92 pp 5 24 Cameron Ewen A The Political Histories of Modern Scotland Scottish Affairs 85 1 2013 1 28 Devine T M and J Wormald eds The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History Oxford University Press 2012 McDermid Jane No Longer Curiously Rare but Only Just within Bounds women in Scottish history Women s History Review 2011 20 3 pp 389 402 Lee Jr Maurice Scottish History since 1966 in Richard Schlatter ed Recent Views on British History Essays on Historical Writing since 1966 Rutgers UP 1984 pp 377 400 Smout T C Scottish History in the Universities since the 1950s History Scotland Magazine 2007 7 5 pp 45 50 Wales Edit Johnes Martin For Class and Nation Dominant Trends in the Historiography of Twentieth Century Wales History Compass 8 11 2010 1257 1274 Koch John T 2006 Celtic Culture A Historical Encyclopedia ABC CLIO Empire foreign policy military Edit Further information Historiography of the British Empire Allport Alan Britain at Bay The Epic Story of the Second World War 1938 1941 2020 Barnett Correlli Britain and her army 1509 1970 a military political and social survey 1970 Carlton Charles This Seat of Mars War and the British Isles 1485 1746 Yale UP 2011 332 pages studies the impact of near unceasing war from the individual to the national levels Chandler David G and Ian Frederick William Beckett eds The Oxford history of the British army Oxford UP 2003 Cole D H and E C Priestley An outline of British military history 1660 1936 1936 online Higham John ed A Guide to the Sources of British Military History 1971 654 pages excerpt Highly detailed bibliography and discussion up to 1970 Messenger Charles ed Reader s Guide to Military History 2001 pp 55 74 annotated guide to most important books Schroeder Paul W Old Wine in Old Bottles Recent Contributions to British Foreign Policy and European International Politics 1789 1848 Journal of British Studies 26 01 1987 1 25 Sheppard Eric William A short history of the British army 1950 online Ward A W and G P Gooch eds The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy 1783 1919 3 vol 1921 23 old detailed classic vol 1 1783 1815 vol 2 1815 1866 vol 3 1866 1919 Wiener Martin J The Idea of Colonial Legacy and the Historiography of Empire Journal of The Historical Society 13 1 2013 1 32 Winks Robin ed Historiography 1999 vol 5 in William Roger Louis eds The Oxford History of the British Empire online Winks Robin W The Historiography of the British Empire Commonwealth Trends Interpretations and Resources 1966 this book is by a different set of authors from the previous 1999 entry online Wyman McCarthy Matthew British abolitionism and global empire in the late 18th century A historiographic overview History Compass 16 10 2018 e12480 External links Edit Making History Coverage of leading British historians and institutions from the Institute of Historical Research Bibliography of UK historiography from the Institute of Historical Research Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Historiography of the United Kingdom amp oldid 1129293022, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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