Political history
Most of the history written in Britain until relatively recently would now be considered political history, dealing with power, policymakers and the institutions connected to them. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was common for such histories to be teleological, for instance the 'Whig' historians saw the past in terms of a development, interrupted or not, towards the liberal and democratic institutions of the present. The rise of economic and social history with its emphasis on underlying causes and the study of non-elites challenged this approach, but more recently, with the loss of confidence in grand narratives of explanation and the growth of interest in the history of ideas, political history in new forms has achived some of its old prominence.
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- Historians:
- Butterfield, Herbert
Cobban, Alfred Bert Carter
Cowling, Maurice John
Elton, Geoffrey Rudolph
Namier, Lewis Bernstein
Plumb, John Harold
Pocock, John Greville Agard
Russell, Conrad Sebastian Robert
Skinner, Quentin
Trevelyan, George Macaulay - Institutions:
- History of Parliament
Institute of Historical Research
The National Archives - Themes:
- Constitutional history
International history
Legal history
Military history
Whig history
Related publications
- Michael Bentley, 'Victorian politics and the linguistic turn', The Historical Journal, 42, 3 (1999), 883–902
Richard Brent, 'Butterfield's Tories: 'high politics' and the writing of modern British political history', Historical Journal, 30, 4 (1987), 943–54
Steven Fielding, 'Review article: looking for the 'new political history'', Journal of Contemporary History, 42, 3 (2007), 515–24
J. G. A. Pocock, 'The politics of historiography', Historical Research, 78, 1999 (2005), 1–14
