(I have made an appeal on Twitter for readers of this
blog to be more proactive with comments or preferably an article no matter what
length. The first response comes from Christopher Thompson. Hopefully, it is
the beginning of many such posts. The posts will not be edited and do not have
to agree with my historiography or political viewpoint).
Changes in historiographical perspectives are a recurrent
feature in the work of academic historians. Established explanations and
current orthodoxies come to be challenged and repudiated. One generation of
historians wedded to these older interpretations gives way to another.
Conflicts and disputes between the two are by no means unknown. But, with the
passage of time, new explanations and orthodoxies come to be established and
the quarrels of the past remain of interest to the surviving participants and
to later students of the discipline.
This is particularly true in seventeenth-century history
when the long-term economic and social explanations for the events of the 1640s
in England in particular came to be challenged and superseded. Figures like
Christopher Hill and Lawrence Stone apparently thought that their
interpretations were sound and generally accepted as their contributions to the
Folger Institute’s conference on ‘Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688 and
1776’ suggested. Both men had been educated at the University of Oxford where
Hill remained as Master of Balliol while Stone had decamped to Princeton in
1963. Two of the other major participants in the ‘Storm over the Gentry’, Hugh
Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper, were also Oxford dons while J.H.Hexter, the
remaining figure of significance in that spectacular historiographical episode
was in the U.S.A. where he had reached a rapprochement with Stone after 1964.
This focus on Oxford was also apparent amongst the
figures who came to challenge the determinism underlying the works of Hill,
Stone, Manning and others. Conrad Russell, Nicholas Tyacke, John Morrill and
Kevin Sharpe had all been undergraduates and postgraduates at Oxford before
securing posts at other universities. There had been a feeling amongst Oxford
historians in my recollection that it was the most important
centre for work on the English Revolution and that what was going on elsewhere
was interesting but not of critical significance.
In my own case, I was aware
that, in Cambridge, for example, there was new work being done by the Cambridge
Group on Population Studies and by historians of political thought like John
Dunn and Quentin Skinner. Quite how far-reaching the impact of this work proved
to be only became clear to me rather later. As far as Princeton was concerned,
I was reasonably well-informed since I saw Theodore Rabb in the Institute of
Historical Research or the British Museum during his annual visits in the
summers. What was going on in the rest of the U.K. or in the U.S.A. was
something I learnt about in both institutions.
What is surprising about the revolt against the
Whig-Marxist or quasi-Marxist synthesis of the early-1970s is that it came as a
more or less complete surprise to Hill, Stone and other historians of their
persuasion. One of Stone’s pupils at that time recently told me that he had had
no idea what was going on amongst younger historians in Oxford or in the U.K.
More surprisingly still in theory, neither had Christopher Hill. But
Christopher Hill had never been a denizen of archive repositories or of
seminars addressed by postgraduates other than his own. (It can also be
detected in the comments of figures like Brian Manning and even of David
Underdown, although his pupil, Mark Kishlansky, probably knew better than most
about the new forms of interpretation.)
Their sense of surprise was more than
evident in the reactions to ‘revisionism’ in the editions of the Journal of
Modern History and in Past and Present devoted to refuting the antiquarian
empiricism of the new generation of early modern historians.
Why did the ‘old guard’ fail to hold their ground? The
answer to that question lies partly in their assumptions – for example, in
believing that the political history of early-Stuart England had been
satisfactorily explained by S.R.Gardiner and Wallace Notestein; partly, one
suspects, because the researches in local or county history inspired by Thomas
Barnes and Alan Everitt were irreconcilable with theories about ‘class
conflict’: but, mainly, because, they had been overtaken by the passage of time
and the increasingly severe problems faced by their own interpretations. The
historiographical past belonged to them: the future, at least until c.1990, to
their critics.
