Intellectual Pluralism and the Future of British History

It is both an opportunity and a challenge to assess the state of modern British history in twenty minutes, and I shall venture three sets of observations. The first is focused on what I see as the increasingly pluralist agenda of modern history over the past quarter of a century; its possibilities and its problems. The second set is more particular, and here I make some specific points about the direction of cultural history, using my own recent work. In conclusion, I locate discussion in the context of the political debate about history teaching forcibly generated by the educational direction of the coalition government. In each case, my thoughts are stimulated by the authors of the Structures and Transformations collection, but most especially by Gareth Stedman Jones's own commitment to a radical project for political and social history over more than forty years. I will try to indicate my debts along the way.

The imperial ambitions of an earlier generation of social historians to write a new version of l'histoire totale are long gone, write David Feldman and Jon Lawrence in their overview of the state of the field.¹ The reasons they give read like a slice of the recent intellectual and political history of Britain - a sort of updated version of Noel Annan's Our Age, without the vitriol!² One key factor is the partial move from macro to micro investigation, or perhaps better from large-scale structural analysis to deep-context case studies, which reflects growing uncertainty about the possibility of writing in a genre of totalizing history. Equally significant is the productive impact of interdisciplinary methodologies, challenging older marxist and labourist narratives that sustained social history at its inception in the 1960s and 1970s. In a related sense, the long march of the new social movements (and their offspring) through the profession has complicated the foundational categories of experience and class identity, especially via the ongoing work of gender historians and historians of sexuality. Further, Gareth's own pioneering insights in Languages of Class renewed the study of social movements by closer attention to the linguistic and imaginary structures that have shaped modern political subjects.³ Finally, the provincializing and globalizing of Britain, as a result of imperial and colonial decentring and through transnational and comparative histories, has involved the redefinition of a field that was originally more comfortable with political and cultural versions of national belonging. One important effect of these varied intellectual agendas has been the diminution of claims for clear causalities in favour of exploring 'patterns of interconnection' and lines of convergence and divergence - between politics and culture, elites and subalterns, society and the economy - conceived of as fluid processes rather than as fixed structures.⁴

Many of these initiatives are to be found in the essays in the collection. Let me cite just three examples out of a whole range of possibilities. Tristram Hunt's emphasis on modern cities as they are made and remade in culture and the imagination, quite as much as through socio-economic infrastructure and design, registers the ongoing impact of a project that has revitalized the historical study of urbanism. This was promoted by Outcast London itself, with Gareth's immensely suggestive use of anthropological understandings of 'the gift' and the 'deformation of charity' as symbolic motifs of class-cultural relationships in the late nineteenth-century metropolis.⁵ Hunt's study of early nineteenth-century Manchester reveals that Friedrich Engels's 'precociously Marxist' city needs to be understood as a product of Engels's engagement with Feuerbachian philosophy, quite as much as with his actual exploration of 'cottonopolis'.⁶ Layered and heterogeneous, this shock city of industrial modernity was the product of multiple urban ethnographies and social utopias and dystopias.

Moving closer to the present, read David Feldman's convincing arguments about the provenance of multi-culturalism in his article 'Why the English like Turbans' (a great title). Feldman draws attention to the ways in which late twentieth-century ideas about racial pluralism, far from being associated solely with liberals or the left, were rooted in an older history of...