Historiography of the United Kingdom

His De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (in Latin, "On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain") records the downfall of the Britons at the hands of Saxon invaders, emphasizing God's anger and providential punishment of an entire nation, in an echo of Old Testament themes.

[33] Whig history typically prevailed—using an approach which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy.

This work set out what he saw as the essential elements in the nation’s evolution and identity: parliamentary government, the rule of law, religious toleration, freedom from Continental interference and involvement, and a global horizon of maritime supremacy and imperial expansion.

[41] His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression.

[42] His 'Whiggish convictions' are spelled out in his first chapter: I shall relate how the new settlement was...successfully defended against foreign and domestic enemies; how...the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known; how, from the auspicious union of order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together;...how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a maritime power, compared with which every other maritime power, ancient or modern, sinks into insignificance...the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.

The French historian Élie Halévy (1870–1937) wrote a multivolume history of England, 1815–1914; it was translated and greatly influenced scholars with its exploration of the complex interactions among politics, religion, economics, reform and the absence of French-style Jacobite revolution.

The son of a leading historian, he combined thorough research and primary sources with a lively writing style, a strong patriotic outlook and a Whig view of continuous progress toward democracy.

Shocked by the horrors of the Great War he witnessed as an ambulance driver just behind the front lines, Trevelyan became more appreciative of conservatism as a positive force, and less confident that progress was inevitable.

His best-known works were The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), England in the Age of the American Revolution (1930) and the "History of Parliament" series (begun 1940) he edited with John Brooke.

[59] Oxford and Cambridge were the most prestigious British universities, but they avoided setting up PhD programs and concentrated their attention on teaching undergraduates through tutors based in the colleges.

This horrified Oxbridge, where college tutors had little research capacity of their own and saw the undergraduate as an embryonic future gentleman, liberal connoisseur, widely read, and mainstay of country and empire in politics, commerce, army, land or church, not an apprentice to dusty, centuries-old archives, wherein no more than 1 in 100 could find even an innocuous career.

Tout's ally C. H. Firth fought a bitter campaign to persuade Oxford to follow Manchester and introduce scientific study of sources into the History programme, but failed; there was failure too, at Cambridge.

Friedrich Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844; it inspired the socialist impetus in British politics including the Fabian Society, but did not influence historians.

He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in Max Weber's thesis on the connection between the appearance of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism.

While some members of the group (most notably Christopher Hill (1912–2003) and E. P. Thompson) left the CPGB after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works.

Kenneth O. Morgan, a more traditional liberal historian, explains the dynamic: the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics, the unions' winter of discontent [in 1979], and rise of a hard-left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within the Labour Party.

I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff...when, for the only time in my life, I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind, playing the man not the ball, focusing on my accent, my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues.

In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below: 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.

In particular, Elton was opposed to the idea that the English Civil War was caused by socioeconomic changes in the 16th and 17th centuries, arguing instead that it was due largely to the incompetence of the Stuart kings.

In recent decades, attention has turned away from the generals and toward the common soldiers, and away from the Western front and toward the complex involvement in other regions, including the roles of the colonies and dominions of the British Empire.

A great deal of attention is devoted to structure of the Army, and debates regarding the mistakes made by the high command typified by the popular slogan lions led by donkeys.

He was noted for his conservative interpretation of the past, showing an empire-oriented ideology in defence of hierarchical authority, paternalism, deference, the monarchy, Church, family, nation, status and place.

[94] The concept claims there was a widespread consensus that covered support for a coherent package of policies that were developed in the 1930s and promised during the Second World War, focused on a mixed economy, Keynesianism and a broad welfare state.

[96] The basic argument is that in the 1930s Liberal Party intellectuals led by John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge developed a series of plans that became especially attractive as the wartime government promised a much better postwar Britain and saw the need to engage every class in society.

[102][103] These early studies were conducted primarily by economic historians interested in the role of leading firms in the development of the wider industry, and therefore went beyond mere corporate histories.

For economic historians, the loss of British competitive advantage after 1870 could at least in part be explained by entrepreneurial failure, prompting further business history research into individual industry and corporate cases.

William Lazonick, for example, argued that cotton textile entrepreneurs in Britain failed to develop larger integrated plants on the American model; a conclusion similar to Chandler's synthesis of a number of comparative case studies.

[104][105] Studies of British business leaders have emphasized how they fit into the class structure, especially their relationship to the aristocracy, and the desire to use their wealth to purchase landed estates and hereditary titles.

[112] In recent decades topics regarding class, capitalism and social structure have given way to studies of the cultural history of urban life, as well as groups such as women, prostitutes, migrants from rural areas and immigrants from the Continent and from the British Empire.

James Vernon proposes a global history of Britain centered on the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that made the market as the central principle of government.