Approaches to Britain’s history

8/3/2019 Approaches to Britains history

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Images of Britain

Historians do not work in a vacuum. Our knowledge of the past is influenced by the

world in which we live and the way the past intrudes on us on a day-to-day basis. We

see images of the past all around us in paintings and, from the 1840s, in photographs

and, more recently, through moving images on film and television. But the past is also

interpreted for us in writing, whether in the fictional works of Daniel Defoe, CharlesDickens or Graham Greene, or the overtly non-fictional, though often self-justifying,

accounts left by participants. All of these shape how we see the country. But so too

does the language we use to talk about the past.

The rural landscape contains much about our past. In itself the countryside was in

1707 central to the economy, peoples living and everyday existence. The very nature

of country landscape tends to recall the past to us a slower pace of life, fewer services,

poorer houses and lower standards of education and culture. In the eighteenth cen-

tury, the bulk of people lived in small labourers cottages, most of which have long

since been knocked down. However, the aristocracy and gentry moved out of the

fortified structures or modest farmhouses of previous centuries and erected palatial

and elegant country houses amid parkland and gardens which today (through visits toNational Trust properties) dominate our appreciation of rural landscape and leisure.

The kinds of change that have taken place in the built environment reflect the

changes in social structures, in politics and in economics that have taken place in

Britain over the last 300 years. In almost all cities, there is an historic social division

between east end and west end one strongly middle-class and one working-class

in composition. In all cities, suburbs grew in the nineteenth century based on social

distinctions, with the better-off generally moving ever westwards to escape the smoke,

Approaches to Britains history


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4 INTRODUCTION

the smells, the crowds, the dangers of the centre, while the less well-off moved east-

wards. Within predominantly working-class areas, streets of the skilled and the clerical

were separated from those of the rough, whilst middle-class homes became larger to

accommodate servants. Although social divisions grew in British cities between 1707 and

1950, the geographies have been changing since then, with gentrification of city centres

and of some working-class suburbs, making our landscape history more complex.

A look at any townscape tells us other things about the past. The numbers of spires

and church towers many now put to secular uses reveal a highly religious society in

the last three centuries. A visit to any of the countrys great cathedrals dramatically

brings out the links between church and state the battle standards of British Army

regiments are still housed in the great Christian churches, alongside the memorials

commemorating wars against French, Russians, Afghans, Zulus, Boers and Germans.

Statues to heroes and (more rarely) heroines of the past still dot cityscapes. Military

ones proliferate, with long-forgotten generals present in abundance; few now recall the

importance of General Henry Havelock (statue in Trafalgar Square), General ColinCampbell (in Glasgows George Square), or the relatively unsuccessful General

Redvers Buller (in Exeter). Politicians and great aristocrats proliferate. Everywhere

in statues and street names there are Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, although

few other monarchs are so commemorated outside London. Most cities also have

their splendid town halls. These are often extraordinary statements about local pride,

wealth and power: Leeds town hall built in 1858 on woollen industry wealth,

Manchesters of 1888 on king cotton, and Glasgows, also of 1888, on shipbuilding

and engineering.

The history of our islands also come to us through art. John Constables painting

The Hay Wain (1821), with its thatched cottages with flowers growing up the wall;

Sir Edwin Landseers Monarch of the Glen (1851), with hills and heather behind the

mighty stag, and the darker social commentary of Hogarths London scenes or Joseph

Wright of Derbys paintings of industry and science in the eighteenth century provide

the visual grammar by which we understand Britains past. Artists, like historians, have

had a tendency to idealise the British countryside for its rustic values, and to regard

the cities that sprang up in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as dark and

forbidding places to be condemned for their poor environment and health conditions.

The idealisation continued with eighteenth-century paintings of individuals and

families (by artists like Allan Ramsay, Joshua Reynolds or Thomas Gainsborough) that

revealed a wealthy, peaceful elite, often with their country house in the background

and evidence of their culture by their side. By the early nineteenth century, a wealthymiddle class was also getting itself painted. However, it was photography that, from

the 1840s, changed images of Britain bringing not just the successful to our view but

also the exotic (with scenes from the British Empire of native peoples and places), and

the working classes and the poor at home. Photographs give us a strong sense of our

family history perhaps the most personal and universal way in which we each have

an investment in the past. Moving images also bring us fictionalised versions of the

past which have been extremely influential especially of Britons at war in William


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APPROACHES TO BRITAINS HISTORY 5

WylersMrs Miniver(1942), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburgers One of Our Aircraft

is Missing(1942), Lewis Gilberts Reach for the Sky (1956) and David LeansBridge on the

River Kwai(1957). The idea of Britain still depends to a great degree on the notion of

unity and heroism brought by the Second World War, lingering in television series as

well as films.

Language of the past

Particular images of the past also come from phrases in regular use a thousand years

of British history, the mother of Parliaments, our island history, and democratic

traditions and values. The 1980s saw a lively debate on Mrs Margaret Thatchers

invocation of Victorian values, echoed in John Majors Back to Basics campaign in

the 1990s and Gordon Browns promotion of Britishness in the 2000s. Nostalgia

for an undated lost age of order, of politeness, of neighbourliness, of respectability,of deference and patriotism has been a major factor in creating what, if polls are to

believed, is sometimes a discontented and unhappy society. The evidence on most of

these is that such a lost age never did exist, but the narrative to the contrary remains

the powerful one.

Of course, a great deal of the past that has been shown in paintings and films is

pure invention. History is often false history in the sense that it has been used to push

a cause or strengthen an institution, or merely to make money from a people keen to

celebrate its own virtues. This tendency to manufacture a past is particularly powerful

when a national history is involved. Historians and others have argued long and

hard over what a nation is, and how the sense of national identity is fostered and

developed. In a well-known study, the American Benedict Anderson argued that

nations do not exist other than in the imagination, in what he terms imagined com-

munities, invented and fabricated for political reasons not least to keep us in order.

In this argument, no one is born instinctively feeling English, Welsh or Scottish. It has

to be instilled. The historian Linda Colley has shown the efforts that politicians and

others went to in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to generate a sense of

Britishness, using anthems, flags, jubilees and parades. And this campaign to create a

sense of Britishness worked by making England and Britain largely synonymous, with

Welshness largely disappearing from the public view and the Scots rushing to identify

themselves as North Britons. However, this imagining of Britishness has been faltering.

In the 1920s, Ireland was partitioned between a British north and an Irish republicin the south. In the 1950s and 1960s, the British Empire ended, leading to Britain

becoming home to increasing numbers of black and Asian peoples, as well as, more

recently, to East European migrants. And since the 1970s, there has been rising

pressure for home rule and independence in Wales and Scotland, as the distinct iden-

tities of those countries emerge. In all sorts of ways, then, the unity of Britain and

Britishness established in the first two centuries covered by this book has in the last

century become vulnerable.


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6 INTRODUCTION

This means that the language of the past and present is not stable. Britishness has

changed meaning and resonance. It is a term which, by 2000, was being displaced by

competing multicultural identities of black, Asian, Scottish, Irish and Welsh, and

also the re-mergence of English identity. Yet, the British state still perpetuates

Britishness in parades, military regiments, national war memorials and pageants of

royalty and celebrity. Though monarchy was, by 2000, much less influential than it

had been even a hundred years before, it remains a symbol of political unity. As

nationalism rises in Scotland and Wales, and devolved government returns in the

2000s to Northern Ireland, Queen Elizabeth remains a vital source of identity for

most Britons, and confounds many predictions of the end of monarchy. More than any

other single institution, the Royal Family is the nations central vehicle for expressing

its history. But, like monarchy itself, the nations past is not a single, agreed under-

standing. History is like politics it is open to debate.

The disputed British past

History is dominated by debate, and historians of Britain are just as likely as any others

to disagree over interpreting the nations past. Sometimes, the debate is over what

happened. New knowledge, new information about events, based on documents or

other sources that have come to light, can change the basic knowledge of an episode

or process in the past. Most of the time, however, historians are not disputing facts

but debating the significanceof events and processes, and how to interpret them. It is

analysis and interpretation that drives forward new publications in books and history

journals. Looking at history writing (historiography, as it is called) is thus to consider

different interpretations and approaches to the past.

Historians will argue from evidence as to what is the best way to explain episodes

from the past. At the same time, though, there are different approaches. For example,

there are political historians, economic historians, social and cultural historians, intel-

lectual historians, historians of religion, historians of the labour movement, historians

of science and of philosophy. With the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s, the

history of women become a major part of the writing of history. More recently, there

has been a tremendous growth in environmental history, resulting from new knowledge

about climate change and the impact that humankind has had upon the planet. On

the other hand, with the decline of religion in Britain in the later twentieth century, the

emphasis on religious history has waned (though not disappeared). These instancesdemonstrate that the way history is written tends to be strongly influenced by the

concerns of the present time. With each decade, the past is re-examined to bring out

modern agendas and understanding, contemporary concerns and perspectives.

Economic historians, rather more than other historians, are given to constructing

their research around large questions that form the centres of debate. There are

several examples of these. Was the Industrial Revolution really industrial or a revolu-

tion? Did the British working classes benefit from industrialisation between 1760 and


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1830? Did the late Victorian economy fail? Was the British economy regenerated in

the 1930s? Was the British economy in decline from the 1960s? This book in part

reflects this tendency, with a greater than usual focus on disputed interpretations in the

chapters on economic matters. This reflects the way in which there is less emphasis on

an agreed narrative of British economic history than on exposing the lines of debate.

In other areas, historians are more prone to seek to produce consensus in their

narratives, and to seek to influence the way in which this narrative is produced by

introducing new areas of research and new angles on existing ones. Thus, topics like

social and cultural history, gender history, and the history of immigration and race

appear as part of the increasing diversity of the narrative of British history, rather than

as subjects based around clearly defined disputes. Of course, there are disputes going

on everywhere in the study of British history. But they are often complex and subtle,

rather than structural to the study of each subject.

Political history: putting the Great in Britain

The earliest history of Britain, dating from the eighteenth century, was written mostly

by men. As the Enlightenment evolved, the history they wrote moved further and

further away from medieval conceptions of the role of religion. Rather than seeking

religious lessons from the past, the Enlightenment prompted a rejection of the power

of religion in interpretation while sustaining a place for religion as a stabilising social

force. The Enlightenment encouraged a search for truth and objectivity, and stressed

the primacy of facts and the creation of policy from facts as both possible and supe-

rior to any other method. Studying the past could teach lessons and release modern

knowledge from the unwelcome power of religious fanaticism and superstition.

Nevertheless, behind the search for truth there lingered a strong romance about

the developing greatness of Britain. One consequence was a tendency to marry his-

tory with philosophy, as in David Humes History of Englandof the 1750s. Britain was a

nation envisaged as the culmination of intellectual and cultural progress, though in

Humes Tory/Jacobite view it lost merit because of the Hanoverian succession.

Moreover, the way in which historians such as Hume and Edward Gibbon wrote

placed emphasis on the creative imagination of events rather on documentary evidence

and scrupulous attention to detail. A sceptic of historical writing, Samuel Johnson,

wrote in 1775: We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real

authentick history. That certain Kings reigned, and certain battles fought, we candepend upon as true; but all the colouring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture.1

The romantic view of British greatness continued in nineteenth-century writing,

but in the work of one of the great exponents, T.B. Macaulay, the Tory view was

replaced by a Whig outlook of upward progress in a grand idealistic narrative. Here

1 Quoted in M. Bentley,Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London, Routledge, 1999), p. 13.


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8 INTRODUCTION

the romance of British greatness focused considerably on Britains constitutional

monarchy from 1688, which seemed to have modernised its outlook and legitimacy

whilst, in the anciens rgimesof European nations, there seemed to be a rigidity that had

led to revolution, the breakdown of social harmony and an end to progress itself. The

British system was seen as far superior to anything elsewhere in the world. There was

an assumption of the nationalistic uniqueness of the English and Scots as superior and

well-adjusted peoples who had systems of law, education and rational religion that

allowed for the dutiful acknowledgement of both the world of God and the world of

man. The history of Britain was written as the story of the gradual extension of consti-

tutional government since 1688 and resistance to any attempts to increase royal power.

English historians had particular faith in a trait of English character that seemed to

desire liberty, a desire they traced back to Anglo-Saxon times and which could never

be totally suppressed.

Historians writing at the peak of British imperial progress in the nineteenth century

found it difficult to avoid speaking in praise of the nation its progress, its leadershipand dominance, its superiority in religion, law, education and industry. This tendency

is one that underscores much of the writing of British political history until the mid-

twentieth century. Praise came for the absence of revolution and civil war on mainland

Britain after the 1740s, often attributed to the unwritten constitution and the facility it

allowed for change, together with the absorption of new elites into the hierarchies of

power. Social mobility was seen as a benefit to civil progress. The emphasis was on the

peculiar stability of Britain and its steady progress.

This gave rise to what is referred to as the Whig interpretation of British history,

which sought to trace a centuries-long progress of constitutional change, leading to the

present. The emphasis was on English exceptionalness because of the avoidance of

revolution (other than what was regarded as an exceptional and therefore Glorious

English Revolution in 1688) and the formation of an apparently free society. The focus

was very much on political history, and such an approach came under attack from the

1930s, with demands for other areas of history to be studied. Even so, it was still very

easy for historians to slip back into Whig interpretations that take the present as the

starting point and look at how things arrived there, and for these interpretations to be

embedded in other parts of the history discipline in ideas such as the rise of the

welfare state and the long march of labour.

One of the strongest challenges to the Whig interpretation was in Sir Lewis

Namiers study of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), which

presented a picture of politics not shaped by ideas but by the narrow self-interest ofindividuals. Constitutional reform came about as a result of manoeuvres among the

political elite, not as a result of pressures from outside. It encouraged the study of

the minutiae of a period or of individual lives, rather than trying to devise some grand

narrative. Influenced by such an approach, many historians of the mid-twentieth cen-

tury rejected the influence of ideas in determining human progress. In their view, ideas

did not cause history to change. On the contrary, ideas changed as a result of history

changing a vision of history matching what seemed the sensible, responsive, utilitarian

and pragmatic political system of Britain itself. This outlook suited the imperial


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mentality of the time as the British Empire moved towards the liberation of the old

colonies to constitute the British Commonwealth of independent nations. So, British

historians, like British imperial elites, saw the British as not fixated on ideas and prin-

ciples like the French or even the Germans. On the contrary in this outlook, Britons

subordinated ideas to the need to get the job done.

This vision of the past has been overtaken by more complex and varied narratives

in recent political history writing. Few historians now regard the British Empire or

restricted voting rights as having been an unalloyed good thing, but they adopt more

pragmatic criteria with which to judge the politicians and administrators who man-

aged the country under those circumstances. Unlike Namiers history style, however,

there is now a more nuanced understanding of the influence in previous centuries of

ideas and ideologies upon the minds of the great leaders and their formulation and

conduct of national policy. Significant in the origins of this trend was the emergence of

labour and social history.

Labour and social history

The reputed greatness of British history was challenged by emerging anti-industrial

intellectuals of the nineteenth century. William Cobbett (17631835) wrote in a diary

called Rural Ridesof a trip around England in the 1820s in which he saw industrialism

destroying the landscape and the yeoman people who were the backbone of the nation.

Like many radicals of the time, he developed a critique of Britains supposed greatness

that was essentially conservative yet which saw radicalism as the maintenance of the

tried and tested past. This established a tradition of combined scholarship and com-

mentary that regarded worker-radicalism not as revolutionary but as essentially

opposed to change; radicalism was seen asprotectingthe people from harmful change.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this tradition merged with the

growing Labour movement of trade unions, radical political campaigns and pronounced

revolutionary notions. With husband and wife historians, J.L. and Barbara Hammond,

there emerged in the 1910s a concerted critique of the benefits of economic and con-

stitutional progress for the plight of working people. The Hammonds wrote:

The social system produced by the Industrial Revolution reflected a spirit that we may

describe as a spirit of complacent pessimism, and this spirit has done more than any

event in English history to create the two nations of which Disraeli used to speak. . . .This age had taken for its aim the accumulation of economic power, and its guiding

philosophy was a dividing force, because it regarded men and women not as citizens

but as servants of that power. If the needs of that power seemed to conflict with the

needs of human nature, human nature had to suffer. In its extreme form this theory

made the mass of the nation the cannon-fodder of industry.2

2 J.L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer 17601832: The New Civilisation (London,

Longmans, Green & Company, 1920), p.vi.


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10 INTRODUCTION

In this way, capitalism itself became the target for historical criticism and, with

Marxist historians, became openly the object of assault by those in pursuit of the pro-

letarian revolution. Marxists looked upon Britain as the first industrial nation, which

should produce, or have produced, the first proletarian revolution. That it did not

aroused tremendous scholarly inquiry into what factors in Britains past prevented

this from happening. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the writing of British history

was radically altered by a generation of left-wing writers. British Marxist historians,

such as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P Thompson, were originally

members of the Communist Party and their scholarship of the 1950s and after grew

out of what was termed scientific Marxism. In this view, history was an ineluctable

progression through the states of primitivism, feudalism and capitalism towards

an ideal state of communal ownership (in which private possessions were reduced to

the level of individual need). According to Marx, what caused history to progress was

economic determinism, self-interest and the need to survive as social groups. As he

and Engels wrote: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of classstruggles.3 So the work of these scholars combined economic history with a new

strong social history, concentrating on the people, the downtrodden and the poor in

an empathetic manner. As E.P. Thompson wrote in 1963: 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.4

This group and others trained a generation of historians who, from the mid-1960s,

took the surge towards social history to new heights. University history departments,

especially in new and adventurous universities, were rapidly staffed with left-wing

social historians. Many of these took up the ideas of the Italian Marxist theorist

Antonio Gramsci to examine how the working people of Britains past were held down

not merely by economic oppression in the workplace, but also by what he called the

hegemony (or dominance) of the pervasive bourgeois culture in schools, colleges,

churches and public affairs in general. This brought historians to re-examine the flaws

of economic and political advance the oppression of the people through the loss

of rights to control the work process, and through declining cultural freedom.

Scholarship came also to look more directly at how the people resisted such pressures

and came close to erupting in that supposedly inevitable revolution to overturn

capitalism, but never quite did so. Indeed, much of British social history of the 1960s

and 1970s was devoted to answering the question why Britain, the first nation to

industrialise, failed to produce a proletarian revolution. This produced a vastexplosion of historical investigation into British labour history, the history of social

organisation and the social condition of the people.

3 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), which can be read at http://

www.marxists.org/archive4 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968 edn), p. 13.


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The rise of left-wing history writing was accompanied by a growing influence of

sociological theory amongst historians. Sociologists in the mid-twentieth century

developed a large and adaptable theory, the theory of modernisation, to explain the

emergence of modern society, principally from the eighteenth century onwards. The

theory positioned this transformation as a long-term one, incorporating intellectual and

social movements which fostered modern social relations and outlooks, and claimed to

explain much of the nature of the modern condition of a largely unreligious, socially

stratified urban world with few social bonds of paternalism and deference. In this way,

the rush to social history accompanied theories which seemed to permit historians

Marxist and right-wing alike to explain the creation of the secular, alienated, urban

consumerist society of the mid-twentieth century. One book typified this influence,

Peter Lasletts The World We Have Lost (1965), which in its very title conveyed the

hypothesis that there had been a golden age of social harmony and relative peace

before the Industrial Revolution, when primitivism and navet dominated. Of that

age, he wrote: All our ancestors were literal Christian believers, all of the time.5

This represents a powerful thread running through much left-wing historiography

golden ageism and the adverse impact of industrialism and urbanism upon the lives

of the people. In many ways it is the opposite of a Whig approach in that the pre-

industrial past (of the eighteenth century at least) is seen as one of good community

relations, individual worker freedoms, a calm pace of life and what E. P. Thompson

called a moral economy. Social and labour historians do not deny that standards of

living improved in more recent times, but they tend to look negatively at the impact of

the Industrial Revolution.

Economic history

Underlying the rise of social history, though not always in agreement with it, has been

economic history. With so many British historians viewing the progress of Britains

past in terms of material advance, it was understandable that economic conditions

were often at the forefront of explaining important moments of historical change.

At the same time, historians of the right, who favoured capitalism as the exemplar of

modernity and progress, were keen to provide a more systematic and scientific

understanding of what made Britain the first nation to industrialise and, from the

late nineteenth century, the first nation to experience what seemed to be economic

decline.Economic historians from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century

were optimistic and bullish. This was best seen in the influential work of an American

historian, W.W. Rostow, who in the midst of the Cold War in 1960 argued that

the British Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century should be exported to the

5 P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost(London, Methuen, 1965), p. 71.


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12 INTRODUCTION

developing nations of the world as a model for growth to counter the export of com-

munism from the Soviet Union.6 But whilst the British Industrial Revolution remained

an exemplar of economic progress, much of the history written about Britains recent

economic past was, by the 1960s, about failure. This became even more pronounced

in the 1980s when there was a challenge to what was perceived as a culture of decline

in British politics, marked by the rhetoric and politics of the Thatcher Conservative

government elected in 1979. Along with this came a great deal of historical writing

that looked at the economic origins of British decline, suggested cultural causes and, in

some cases, looked even for its moral origins. A few economic historians of the 1980s

were strongly influenced by the outlook of the Thatcher government, taking the

British economy to be in decline, and tracing the reasons for this in the negation of

the conditions of individualism and weak state power that had caused the Industrial

Revolution. History mattered politically.

From this arose the notion of a dependency culture which, fostered by the welfare

state after 1945, had eroded individuality, entrepreneurship and originality. It wasclaimed that insufficient numbers of people with drive and ambition, and willing to

take economic risks, lay at the root of Britains failure to move with the economic

times. A continued reliance on manufacturing of older staple products, and the domin-

ance in economic thinking of coal mining, shipbuilding, engineering and volume car

production, were held to have diverted investment and risk-taking away from exciting

new products like electronics, passing the baton of progress to countries like the USA

and Japan. At the same time, decades of poor industrial relations between trade

unions and company management were blamed for bad working practices; British

manufacturing methods bred labour-intensive operations, low investment in new

machinery and, above all, low productivity. On top of this, there was the so-called

British disease strikes that were seen to have crippled the British economy from the

1950s onwards. In the 1970s, they argued, successive disputes caused high wage

inflation, undermined savings investment, and produced immoral behaviour (includ-

ing the strike of grave diggers in 1979), finally contributing to the fall of the Labour

government of James Callaghan in that year.

Some economic historians trace these problems of Britain further back. The

shedding of empire in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was seen as one cause, diverting

excessive resources into the maintenance of overseas colonies in their declining years

prior to independence, and undermining the sense of British national purpose. Blame

now fell upon the Empire for a conglomeration of economic mistakes even earlier

notably, diverting investment overseas in the 18701914 period, just when it was mostneeded at home to re-invent manufacturing industry for new products and new

markets. Whilst reliance on the closed imperial market was seen to have been a benefit

to nurturing industry between 1760 and 1870, it became blamed for allowing British

6 W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press, 1960).


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manufacturers to rest on their laurels thereafter, relying on imperial sales, and not

keeping up with innovation by American, German and French manufacturers. This

developed into a theory of an economic climacteric in the late 18701914 period a

pinnacle of British progress from which British economic decline could be dated

which enjoyed considerable support amongst economic historians through the 1980s.

The cultural origins of Britains supposed decline had developed as an intrinsic

element in the economic story. But this cultural analysis pushed the origins of the

problem further back to the very foundations of the Industrial Revolution. The

argument here was centred on the idea that Britain never really accepted industrial

capitalism. Supporters of this argument spotted various elements. First, British

entrepreneurship was flawed by a constant preference for being gentlemen rather

than players for playing the game rather than playing to win. Secondly, there

was talk of a generational decline in entrepreneurship. The original founders of big

enterprises were innovative and risk-taking; the second generation began to turn away

from the firm and involve themselves in public affairs; and the third generation wereprepared to live off the profits of the firm but to take little interest in how they were

made, instead partying their familys fortune away on the French Riviera. The third

major argument was that the cause of this was a fundamental absence of a spirit of

industrial capitalism. The American historian Martin Wiener asserted that the British

were fundamentally hostile to industrial cities, to the grime and smog of such places,

and to the factory. We examine the Wiener thesis in Chapter 20, but it is important to

note here that this approach amounted to describing a failure of the industrial spirit in

Britain, bringing in failure in education and religion, and an aversion to urban living.

The moralfailings of Britain also entered the rhetoric of historians who argued for

the decline of Britain hypothesis. Led by Margaret Thatcher, there was a particular

denigration of what the youth culture of the 1960s had done to British moral fibre.

The rise of popular music, sexual promiscuity and drug-taking represented a loss of

inhibition and restraint that was blamed for social breakdown and the rise of crime in

Britain from 1957 onwards. With it, there was reputedly a decline of hard work and

thrift, which were replaced by increasing reliance upon the state for social handouts.

Whilst not all historians agreed with this analysis, there were scholars like Christie

Davies who argued from the 1970s onwards that moral deviance had become the

norm in British young people. A new moral right emerged in politics and, to some

extent, amongst scholars.

In the 1990s and 2000s, historians have once again begun to reshape the under-

standing of British economic history. With this, came reassessments of the post-warBritish economy. The first realisation was that during the period 195090, the British

economy was not in decline. It was growing and, moreover, at a very healthy rate.

At the same time, a series of myths that had developed were shown, under close exam-

ination, to be untrue. It had been widely believed that British productivity and rates

of investment had been low and that the British disease strike action had been

a massive problem that had distinguished British experience from that of the USA

and most European countries. The new research showed these statements to be false.


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14 INTRODUCTION

The statistical hard data, when looked at dispassionately and closely, showed that

Britain was either at the top or pretty near to the top of the economic performance of

advanced industrial nations, with other west European nations catching up with the

British position.

The second realisation was that the reason this account of the British past had

developed was that a culture of decline pervaded the British elites the top echelons

of government, including the civil service and political parties and was commonly

found in the British press, in overseas images of Britain, and amongst many historians.

This realisation led to the culture of decline itself becoming an interesting object

for study: just why did British commentators becomes so pessimistic about British

economic and cultural life in the 1960s and 1970s? Part of the answer, the pessimists

averred, was the loss of empire, and the loss of a role. Other explanations lay in

a desire to see failure in a period of change. The economy was adjusting to a post-

manufacturing age. There was cultural revolution in the air and these developments

were seen to be undermining British traditional values and experience. It thus becamevital to look at cultural explanations of economic history analysis and to think about

the different ways in which the nations economic past had been branded.

Cultural history

One of the powerful trends in the writing of British history since the 1980s has been

the rise of cultural history. This developed mainly within social history, but was to

spread across the whole discipline, and brought British historiography more closely in

line with historians ideas from Europe and elsewhere.

At the root of cultural history lay a series of concerns with social history. This

was seen as too dependent on sociological theories (like modernisation) which com-

pelled thinking in terms of progress or its reverse, as too obsessed with studying

Marxist-driven ideas about class struggle and the chances of worker revolution, and

as too little concerned with thinking about gender, race, religion and other categories.

The reliance on social science methodology supposed the past could be understood

with the certainties of science itself, creating the prospect of historians only ever being

chroniclers of modernisation. For some in the 1980s and 1990s, a new cultural history

grew directly out of Marxism a new cultural history of the left. But others traded

the theories of Marx, Gramsci and sociology for those of Barthes, Foucault and

Derrida for a modern cultural theory (sometimes referred to as postmodernismand poststructuralism).

Cultural historians had a significant impact on the way British history was studied.

Poststructuralism raised doubts about the validity of historians structures like social

class. Class came to be regarded as increasingly problematic for study because of

its variable and indeterminate meanings, and because too much reliance had been

placed on it by left-wing historians to explain British history. In its stead, many

womens historians placed gender as a category of analysis that was of immense and


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underrated importance, while historians of colour looked to race and ethnicity as

categories that required to be examined intensively in British domestic and imperial

history.

These impulses fostered amongst historians a cultural understanding of Britains

past. This has had a number of key characteristics. First, it has encouraged reflection

on the historians gaze: how factors in our own time determine what aspects of the

past interest us, and how our interpretations of the past derive from present concepts,

beliefs and ideologies. This starts with reflecting on the language we use to write

our historical narrative our use of terms (ranging from nation and empire, to

Industrial Revolution, social class and inequality) and what we are implying by

them. When we use these words, we must immediately consider whether the peoples

of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used them and, if so, whether

they understood them in the same way as we do today. History as a written account

is conjured by the words we invoke, and we carefully consider our meaning and the

meanings of past peoples. This interest is not limited to understanding individualwords, but encompasses wider representations. The cultural historian gains much by

reflecting on the meaning of entirely commonplace things, peoples and identities.

For example, what place did material things like cutlery, bowls and bed-sheets have in

the eighteenth-century world of status? How did a man foster a sense of masculinity

in industrialising Britain of the early nineteenth century? Why did so many married

women of the mid-twentieth century adopt housewife as a self-description? How

were arriving Afro-Caribbeans and Asians looked upon by a predominantly white

society in the 1950s? To answer these questions, the historian essentially explores the

differences in meaning between then and now. Looking at representations of such

objects in daily life results in a deeper appreciation of how each age understood itself.

A key device of the cultural historian, then, is to look at representations often

referred to as discourses. A discourse is an injunction or interpretation being

expressed by a representation to which people adhere in daily life. Discourses tell us

what, in a given time and culture, was considered to be ideal behaviour and what was

considered deviant or unacceptable. For example, we will see later in the book how,

from around 1800 to 1960, it was considered by most of the British middle classes

that a womans proper desire was to be married and that her place was in the home,

without a job, bringing up children, whilst her husband worked; to be a spinster was

seen as undesirable on the shelf , having failed to catch a man. Though very large

numbers of married women (especially of the working classes) did, in fact, go out to

work, this discourse was approvingly represented for many centuries in the wordhousewife. However, in more recent times, notably since the 1960s, the term and its

discourse have fallen from universal popularity; the approving meaning of housewife

has become more ambiguous (sometimes implying a woman who has missed out on

a career and worldly excitement), though it retains a greater power and significance

amongst some ethnic groups.

The study of a term like housewife and what it has represented in different times

and for different people is one example of how cultural history has changed ways of


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16 INTRODUCTION

viewing the past and has expanded the agenda of issues for study. This technique is

sometimes referred to as discourse analysis, and we will see its influence in a variety of

chapters in this book (including in sections on gender, sexuality and black Britain).

In this way, the former notion that British history is about the nation only, about

what powerful men did, and what irrefutable single visions can be used in writing it, is

no longer acceptable. Historians bring different skills to studying different themes, and

the nation has developed a rich, eclectic and multicultural history that has only

recently been more fully recognised. This book reflects the trend towards diversifying

the angles of approach to the history of Britain.

Further reading

Bentley, M.,Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London, Routledge, 1999)

Brown, C.G., Postmodernism for Historians(Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2005)

Burke, P., (ed.),New Perspectives on Historical Writing(Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001)

Cannadine, D., What is History Now?(Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)

Colley, L.,Britons. Forging the Nation 17071837(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992)

Green, A. and Troup, K. (eds), The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-century

History and Theory (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999)

Tosh, J., The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and Directions in the Study of Modern History

(London, Longman, 2000)

Documents

Approaches to Britain’s history