Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870-1970

The Wiles Lectures

by Michael Bentley

What came before 'postmodernism' in historical studies? By thinking through the assumptions, methods and cast of mind of English historians writing between about 1870 and 1970, Michael Bentley reveals the intellectual world of the modernists and offers the first full analysis of English historiography in this crucial period. Modernist historiography set itself the objective of going beyond the colourful narratives of 'whigs' and 'popularizers' in order to establish history as the queen of the humanities and as a rival to the sciences as a vehicle of knowledge. Professor Bentley does not follow those who deride modernism as 'positivist' or 'empiricist' but instead shows how it set in train brilliant new styles of investigation that transformed how historians understood the English past. But he shows how these strengths were eventually outweighed by inherent confusions and misapprehensions that threatened to kill the very subject that the modernists had intended to sustain.

Genres: History

245 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

A specialist in British politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Michael John Bentley, FRHistS, is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and is currently Senior Research Fellow in History at St Hugh's College, Oxford.

Reviews

[C. B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book falls short of the mark, but it's not uninteresting. Bentley states in the preface that he wanted to tackle broader themes than he did in his original lectures (these focused more exclusively on Butterfield and Namier). Bentley admits, too, that his lectures assumed a level of knowledge which would be inconsiderate to carry over to a publication: ‘I was addressing an audience who knew the historical material well and had even been personally involved with the lives and work of my protagonists’. How is it, then, that the book still feels quite clique-ish?

I'm not the only one who’s felt this. In The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Peter Stansky criticises Bentley for indulging in the ‘irritating tendency of some English historians to make allusions and little jokes that only those in the know can fully comprehend’. A strong comment, but probably a fair one. It’s not that I wholly dislike this kind of specificity — it can be kind of fun — but it does grate a bit when you just can’t follow along (and this has to be the most recent publication I’ve seen to include piles of untranslated French). In The American Historical Review, Robert Colls is slightly more elegant: ‘Reading this book is like listening in on a conversation only half intended for you. After a couple of hundred pages, I thanked Bentley for his efforts and left high table. I will not be the only one’. Yes, that’s it...

Still, the book is fascinating in parts. While I struggled to find a unifying thrust to the first half, the second half gives a good taste of what drove the modernists. Bentley argues well that historiographical epochs are not as discrete as is sometimes made out. Methods and ideologies overlap messily. I also like this idea that the whigs may have more contemporary relevance than the modernists, if only because the former weren’t as obsessed to eradicate ‘bias’ as the latter were (fool's gold in contemporary historiography). I’m interested to read Peter Mandler’s book History and National Life off the back of this, as Bentley cites it quite often and it looks like the sort of thing I should have read before tackling this.

There are lots of loose ends here, but it's worth it if you're seriously interested in English historiography.