In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The State of Twentieth-Century British Political History
  • Paul Readman (bio)

To mark its one-hundredth issue, the prestigious journal Past and Present commissioned Jacques Le Goff to carry out a survey of the articles it had published between 1959 and 1982. Based on the subject-matter of these articles, Le Goff concluded that the attention of the journal—Britain's equivalent of Annales—had been overwhelmingly focused on the sixteenth-to nineteenth-century period. As with antiquity and (to a lesser extent) the Middle Ages, the twentieth century had been "somewhat neglected," accounting for just over 7 percent of all articles, with the years after 1945 being especially underrepresented.1 This reflected the persistence of a disdainful attitude toward the study of the recent past among professional historians, including historians of modern British politics. Citing temporal proximity to the subject matter and unavailability of still-to-be released archival sources, scholars appeared content to surrender the field to political scientists and journalistic amateurs.

Happily things have since changed, and the historiography of twentieth-century British politics can now be described as flourishing. There are a number of reasons for this, but key enabling factors have been the advances made in the study of oral history, the waning of the narrow-minded "cult of the archive," and the growing realization that there is not necessarily any positive correlation between historical "objectivity" (assuming this is possible or desirable) and temporal distance. One notable indicator of the growing interest in twentieth-century political history has been the success of the Institute [End Page 219] of Contemporary British History (ICBH) in promoting the historical study of government and policy. Another is the establishment of specialist journals such as Oxford University Press's Twentieth Century British History and the ICBH's Contemporary British History (first published as Contemporary Record). The syllabi of History departments in universities now pay far more attention to twentieth-century political history, including that of the post-1945 period. This has helped stimulate and sustain scholarly activity, and there is now a very respectable body of monographic literature.

The explosion of interest is not surprising: the political history of twentieth-century Britain has big stories to tell. As in other European countries, the development of the welfare state and the process of democratization—especially as regards the incorporation of women into the political nation—are among the biggest of these, and are staple features of the scholarship. Arguably, however, it is the party political stories that have posed the most complex questions and spawned the best work. The debate on the rise of Labour and the concomitant decline of the Liberal party has now reached an advanced level of sophistication, with historians turning away from deterministic class-based "sociological" explanations and toward more fashionable "textual" approaches that place emphasis on the transformative impact of political language. But perhaps the most interesting question of all is why the Right—so fearful of democratization and the rise of the central state—became the dominant force on the twentieth-century political scene. Between 1900 and 2000, the Conservative party was in office either alone or as the principal element of a coalition for sixty-eight years, a statistic that lends justification to the idea of a "Conservative century."2

In addressing these questions, historians have often taken an Anglo-centric approach, focusing attention on Whitehall, Westminster, and London-based party political institutions. Recent years, however, have seen at least some historians adopt a wider British perspective.3 This has been stimulated by the "four nations" methodology famously expounded by J. G. A. Pocock and Hugh Kearney, but also by the efflorescence of high-quality scholarship on the history of Wales and Scotland, which the revivified nationalist movements and the associated devolution processes in those two countries have done much to foster.4

To begin with Scotland, Christopher Harvie's No Gods and Precious Few Heroes: Scotland since 1914 (new ed., Edinburgh University Press, 1993) provides a concise and stylish introductory account, situating twentieth-century Scottish politics in their wider cultural, social, and economic contexts. There are also the convenient overview essays in T. M. Devine and R. J. Finlay, eds., [End Page 220...

pdf

Share