The State of Modern British History

It is a pleasure to be here on this occasion, to celebrate Gareth Stedman Jones's work together with the festschrift edited by David Feldman and Jon Lawrence that is being launched in his honour, and to take this opportunity to think with others about the state of modern British history.¹ I am very aware of the varied routes that historians have taken in these decades, the proliferation of sub-disciplines and the scale of professionalization, much of it driven by the exigencies of higher education. It is quite impossible to 'know' the full field of modern British history but I do know the particularity of the routes that I have taken. My reflections are necessarily partial and cannot do justice to the range of work represented in the book, which provide a very welcome sign of the diverse approaches being actively pursued by modern British historians.

I first met Gareth in a garden in Richmond in 1963 when he was playing cricket - not an occasion which I imagine he would remember but etched on my memory - a hot summer's day and a group of young men, scions of the New Left, taking their game quite as seriously as their politics. Gareth and I are the same generation - shaped by the politics of the early 1960s, the beginnings of the disintegration of the Cold War blocs, the emergence of new social movements, the events of 1968, the development of the women's movement, the failures of both socialism and labourism. We have shared a broadly similar political and intellectual project - reacting both to the narrow political and constitutional history that dominated the professional agenda in the 1960s and to the group of British Marxist historians who were so formative for us. We share the view that history matters, that it is never confined to the academy, that the historical imagination flourishes in diverse spaces, that history writing is always theoretically informed, and that the task of the historian is to bring the past into the present - finding ways, as Gareth has put it, 'of challenging greed, exploitation and misery'.²

One of the early fruits of that political moment was History Workshop - both the journal and the movement that was connected with it. The historical vision it celebrated was an opening up of the subject, not closing it down in either a spirit of sectarianism or exclusive professionalism - of hearing the voices of worker historians, of thinking about popular culture, about living memories, about archives and sources as the tools of historical work that should be widely available, of valuing argument and debate as ways of thinking, of being wildly, but collectively ambitious in the spirit of Raphael Samuel. The History Workshop movement drew on the many historians active in the wider society - in adult education classes, among teachers, local and community groups - encouraging political activists to historicize their understandings of radicalism in its many guises.

We are now in 2011 - a very different political moment - and discussing the state of British history in what I imagine is a predominantly academic audience. I would like to make three points.

1. The question that Gareth asked as a graduate student, that he comments on in his own essay on his historical practice, and that David Feldman and Jon Lawrence take up in their introductory essay to their volume, was not the question addressed by the generation of English Marxist historians who preceded us - how to recast the Whig narrative of a peaceful and evolutionary line of development and trace the English revolutionary tradition - whether in the medieval, early modern or modern world. Nor was it the question addressed by the generation who seized New Left Review in 1962 and moved it away from its connections to a movement, demanding theoretical rigour as the only way forward in addressing the failure of revolutionary thought. Rather, Gareth asked what accounted for the decline of radicalism and the political and cultural shift after 1850? How did E. P. Thompson's working class become Richard Hoggart's working-class men and women exposed to the temptations of affluence and consumerism? Why...