Historiography of the United Kingdom

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.

Medieval

Depiction of the Venerable Bede from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

Main article: Historians of England in the Middle Ages

Gildas, a fifth century monk, was the first major historian of England. His De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (Latin for "The Ruin and conquests 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 is often been used by later historians, starting with Bede.

Venerable Bede (673 – 735), an English monk was the most influential historian of the Anglo-Saxon era In his day and in modern England. He borrowed from killed us and others in writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Latin: "Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum"). He saw English history as a unity, based around the Christian church. N.J. Higham argues 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.

Numerous chroniclers prepared detailed accounts of recent history. King Alfred the Great commission the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 893, and similar chronicles were prepared throughout the Middle Ages. 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.

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." Raleigh was freed, but was later beheaded for offenses not related to his historiography.

18th century

William Robertson

William Robertson, a Scottish historian, and the Historiographer Royal published the 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.

David Hume

Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume in 1754 he published the History of England, a 6-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, as well. 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.

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."

19th century

Whig history

The term Whig history, coined by Herbert Butterfield in his short book The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931, means the approach to historiography 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 been also 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.

Paul Rapin de Thoyras's history of England, published in 1723, became "the classic Whig history" for the first half of the 18th century,. 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.

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. 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."

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). 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. 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. 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.

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." However, J. R. Western wrote that: "Despite its age and blemishes, Macaulay's History of England has still to be superseded by a full-scale modern history of the period".

County and local history

Further information: Local history § United Kingdom

Local history became fashionable in the 18th and 19th centuries; it was widely regarded as an antiquarian pursuit, suitable for country parsons. The Victoria History of the Counties of England project began in 1899 with the aim of creating an encyclopaedic history of each of the historic counties of England.

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. 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. 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.

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

Marxist historiography

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) 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. Economic historian R.H. 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. After heated debate historians generally concluded that the role of the gentry was not especially important.

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 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.

Christopher Hill's studies on 17th-century English history were widely acknowledged and recognised as representative of this school. 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.

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 changed over time. He opened the gates for a generation of labor historians, such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes.

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 problematic aspect 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 outcomes. It increasingly fell out of favour in the 1960s and '70s. 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.

In dealing with the era of the Second World War, 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.

Since 1945

The theme of deindustrialization has begun to attract the attention of historians. First wave the scholarship came from activists, who are deeply 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 broaden their scope from the economic causes of decline and resistance to job loss, to its Social and cultural long-term effects.

Women's history started to emerge in the 1970s, against the passive resistance of many established men who had long dismissed it 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.

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 and online collection of transcripts of 18th-century documents, such as allegiance rolls, Episcopal visitation returns, and freeholder lists. Digital archives and digital periodicals are allowing much broader opportunity for research and primary sources happy undergraduate level. Use of powerful search engines on large textual databases allows much more expanded research on such sources as newspaper files.

See also

• Economic history of the United Kingdom
• Historiography of the British Empire
• Historiography of the Poor Laws
• Historiography of the British Empire
• Historiography of the United Kingdom
• 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 Kingdom
• Religion in the United Kingdom
• Timeline of British diplomatic history
• Timeline of Irish history
• Timeline of Scottish history

Further reading

• Boyd, Kelly, ed. Encyclopedia of historians and historical writing ( 2 vol. Taylor & Francis, 1999)
• 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)
• Woolf, Daniel R., ed., A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing (2 vol. Taylor & Francis, 1998).

Period guides

• Addison, Paul and Harriet Jones, eds. A Companion to Contemporary Britain: 1939–2000 (2005) excerpt and text search
• 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; excerpt and text search
• Jones, Harriet, and Mark Clapson, eds. The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Twentieth Century (2009) excerpt and text search
• Williams, Chris, ed. A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Britain (Blackwell, 2006); 33 essays by experts; 624pp excerpt and text search
• Wrigley, Chris, ed. A Companion to Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Blackwell Companions to British History) (2009) excerpt and text search

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+.
• 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).
• 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

• 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. in JSTOR

Medieval

• Fisher, Matthew. Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England (Ohio State University Press, 2012)
• 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

• Trimble, William Raleigh. "Early Tudor Historiography, 1485-1548." Journal of the History of Ideas 11#1 (1950): 30-41.
• 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).
• 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. in JSTOR

Scotland

• Devine, T. M. and J. Wormald, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford University Press, 2012),
• Kidd, C. Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Empire

• 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

Scholarly journals

• Agricultural History Review
• Anglican & Episcopal History
• Albion
• British Catholic History
• Britain and the World, formerly British Scholar
• Contemporary British History
• English Historical Review
• First World War Studies
• The Historical Journal
• History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society
• History Today, popular
• History Workshop Journal
• Notes and Records of the Royal Society, history of science
• Past & Present
• Journal of British Studies
• Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, formerly Scottish Economic and Social History
• Studia Hibernica
• The Scottish Historical Review
• Twentieth Century British History
• Urban History
• Victorian Studies