Postwar British Historiography: From Social History to the Cultural Turn

The landscape of British historiography underwent profound transformation in the decades following the Second World War, driven by social change and intellectual revisionism. The late 1950s and 1960s were a period of significant disturbance, marked by mass immigration, the rise of consumerism, and the political humiliation of the Suez Crisis. This climate of change directly influenced historical scholarship, fostering a new "history from below" that sought to recover the agency of ordinary people. This populist mood, informed by Marxist analysis but extending beyond it, found its greatest icon in E. P. Thompson.

Thompson’s seminal work, "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963), argued that the working class was an active participant in its own creation, not merely a passive spectator. His powerful prose and persuasive persona temporarily insulated his work from criticism, establishing a new paradigm for understanding the period from 1790 to 1830. However, his edifice was gradually chipped away by empirical scholars who critiqued his documentary selectivity. By the mid-1960s, Thompson’s debates with Perry Anderson and Louis Althusser signaled a fracturing of effective Marxist scholarship in Britain, inadvertently creating space for the ascent of the New Right.

A direct challenge to this Marxist-inflected social history emerged from the Cambridge School, sometimes provocatively termed the Peterhouse School. Scholars like Maurice Cowling and John Vincent explicitly rejected class conflict as the central determinant of British political history. Through intensive chronological scrutiny of small periods, they constructed a counter-narrative emphasizing high politics, evidence, and individual agency, explicitly slapping a gauntlet before the Left. Their work provoked a backlash that, ironically, sought to move historical explanation away from politics itself.

This shift reignited interest in the history of ideas, a flame kept alive earlier by the tussle between Herbert Butterfield and Lewis Namier. From the late 1960s, a new generation, led by the formidable Quentin Skinner, transformed intellectual history. In his seminal 1969 essay, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas", Skinner argued that historical texts could only be understood within their specific linguistic and temporal contexts. Alongside the work of J. G. A. Pocock and John Dunn, this approach revitalized the study of political thought, insisting that ideas were central to historical explanation, not an optional supplement.

Simultaneously, a broader anthropological vision began influencing the discipline. Medievalists felt the impress of thinkers like Peter Brown and the French Annales School scholars, such as Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz and his concept of "thick description" became a cult figure for historians exploring culture. While wilder post-structuralist theories attracted limited British engagement, terminology like discourse, mentalité, and culture became ubiquitous in historical colloquia.

The concept of gender also evolved significantly during this period, outgrowing its origins in women’s history to offer a sophisticated analysis of power relations in all sexual relationships. This broadening perspective was partly driven by theorists like Hayden White, but often stemmed from an unconscious fashion among historians to engage with new intellectual trends from France and the United States. The goal was often to avoid seeming inarticulate in the face of new theoretical languages.

Closer to home, the Thatcher years engendered an English nationalism and a concomitant crisis of British identity. Scholars began questioning the viability of "British history" as a coherent field, a debate notably ignited from New Zealand by J. G. A. Pocock. In his 1973 lecture, Pocock pleaded for a reconsidered, plural history of the "Atlantic archipelago", emphasizing the interactions within the Anglo-Celtic frontier. This "archipelagic" framework challenged the dominant Anglocentric narrative.

Pocock’s intervention touched an exposed nerve in a profession facing funding cuts and a sense of drift. Historians like David Cannadine lamented over-specialization, while Keith Robbins championed the interpenetration of Scottish, Welsh, and Irish histories with England’s story. Across the UK, scholars advanced these national histories, rejecting their subordinate status. Key figures included J. C. Beckett in Northern Ireland, Geoffrey Barrow and Christopher Smout in Scotland, and R. R. Davies for Wales.

Fragmentation extended beyond geography to the subject’s very epistemology. The onset of postmodern frames of mind and "presentism" undercut traditional, positivist methodologies, though rigorous training in source criticism (Quellenkritik) provided a strong native resistance to extreme relativism. While few British historians embraced Michel Foucault uncritically, his themes—power, sexuality, the body—permeated the discipline. This led to new histories of the marginalized, driven less by class analysis than by a softer culturalism seeking "relevance."

The 1980s thus contained both bewilderment and inspiration, with a growing awareness of theory among younger researchers. Quentin Skinner’s work on the return of "grand theory" and Roger Chartier’s studies on print culture were pivotal. Chartier’s work, in particular, nudged scholars toward the "cultural turn" that would define the 1990s. This shift was marked by an explosion of publications with "cultural history" in their titles, covering everything from nations to specific phenomena like food, ghosts, or handwriting.

This cultural turn proved more enduring in Britain than the earlier "linguistic turn" because it did not demand heavy philosophical training; it allowed the application of traditional empirical methods to new, tangible subjects. It was fueled by influential texts like Robert Darnton’s "The Great Cat Massacre" (1984) and Roger Chartier’s "Cultural History" (1988), and became commercially successful, feeding the rise of the celebrity historian. However, it remained a pursuit largely of a younger generation, with senior figures often skeptical.

The core of traditional British historical education—emphasizing empirical enquiry, source criticism, and the Special Subject dissertation—fostered a critical, negative disposition resistant to abstract theory. This ingrained methodology has ensured continuity, even as new trends emerge. The most esteemed postwar historians, from Hugh Trevor-Roper to Keith Thomas, are celebrated for deep scholarship and elegant prose, not for overturning paradigms. Thus, modern British historiography is defined by this persistent tension between entrenched empirical traditions and the periodic, transformative waves of revisionist innovation.