Tuesday 16 June 2020

Old Hat, Nouvelle Vague and the Historiographical Surprises of the mid-1970s


(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economic and social explanations for the events of the 1640s in England in particular came to be challenged and superseded.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.