The primary purpose of this article is to answer Nick Poyntz
claim that john Adamson's work "breaks new ground". It will do so within the
context of Adamson's revisionist historiography.
For the uninitiated Adamson's primary work has been the book
the Noble Revolt. Its basic premise is
that a small Junto made up of nobles led a revolt which caused the overthrow of
Charles 1st.
Adamson's book is well written and researched as you would
expect from a Cambridge University-based historian while the book contains new
material that is not enough to say that the book breaks new ground.
In order to break new ground or create new historiography,
he would have to at least absorb the two most crucial historiography that of
Whig and Marxist in order to create a new synthesis. Not doing this means he
has not created new historiography but continues with post revisionist
historiography.
As Mary Fulbrook perceptively writes"The empirical inductivism of revisionists, and their
somewhat strident anti- orthodoxy, have failed to provide adequate positive
theses to fill the vacuum left by their negative critiques. The over-emphasis
on the politics of patronage, apart from being inadequately established historically,
suffers from theoretical and metatheoretical shortcomings.40 Theoretically, it
can really only tell us something about the medium of politics; it is an
empirically open question whether or not there is any ideological content to
the formation and struggles of different political factions. Metatheoretically,
such exaggerated stress on patron-client relationships is at least as
philosophically degrading as any other form of downplaying the autonomy of
human action - such as seeing men merely as agents of historical forces - and
should, therefore, be rejected by revisionists on their arguments.”
In my opinion, for a piece of work to break new ground has
to be more than a well-reasoned argument or a rather large amount of text or
have high colour pictures. It must be able to define itself. Revisionism and
post revisionism is nothing more than a mishmash of theories that lead the
study of the English revolution into a dead end.
Noble Revolt
Whether or not as John Morrill said that the revisionism
that developed in the early part of the 1970s was a movement, it had one
defining characteristic; it was hostile to Marxism.
This hostility to Marxism was not so much from a historical
standpoint but more to do with politics. It is no accident that the growth of a
revisionist movement coincided with the rise of a right-wing political movement
spearheaded by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. This movement gained ground
with the final collapse of the USSR, which led to numerous theories that the
fall of Communism meant that the socialist project had failed. The most
pessimistic expression of these principles came with the End of History by
Francis Fukuyama. The English Civil War was not the only subject that had a
noticeable revisionist trend during this time. From the 1970s Studies of the
into the Russian Revolution and French revolution provoked a similar
revisionist backlash.
Historians and their historiography do indeed go out of
fashion. However, historiographies that were fashionable two hundred years ago
still can contribute to our understanding of the war, despite the protestations
of Christopher Thompson.
Adamson refers to the English gentry but does not go into
any extensive detail as to the class composition of the gentry. What was its
economic position towards the king? Adamson is a skilled historian, but a more
detailed description of the class struggle involving his Cabal would have made
the Noble Revolt far more precise and concrete.
Adamson's work has previously come under ferocious attack
from the historian Mark Kishlansky.
I am not saying that Adamson is a left-wing
historian by any stretch of the imagination, but it has been modus operandi of
right-wing historians to attack other historians in order to push them and
their study of history to the right. You only have to look at the"Storm Over
The Gentry" Debate to see this.
Kishlansky is first essay Saye What challenged Adamson’s
historiography. In reality, this essay was nothing more than a catalogue of
Adamson’s errors. Kishlansky’s critique of Adamson does seem to border on
academic bullying. In all probability, Adamson made some errors but who has
not.
What lies behind Kishlansky's attack is his opposition to
Adamson, concluding the facts. In this quote from Conrad Russell, he appears to
back Kishlansky's attack on Adamson saying“What makes a historian master of
his craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said
more than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released
from this discipline, risks acquiring dangerously Icarian freedom to make
statements which are unscholarly because unverifiable".
Kishlansky accuses Adamson of “tendentious interpretation”.
Well, you could blame every single historian that has written on the English
Civil War of this. Historians have the right to interpret the facts or sources
the way they feel fit without fear.
This dispute with Kishlansky clearly bothered Adamson so
much so that his book does contain a large number of footnotes 191 to be
precise maybe this was a defensive reaction to Kishlansky's critique.
Kishlansky alleged that Adamson was “deliberately abusing and misreading
sources
As Nick points out "the
unfortunate thing about the debate was that it tended to damn the rest of
Adamson's much wider thesis; unfairly, in my view”.
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