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Penultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain

A return to the grand themes

Wm. Roger Louis
I.B. Tauris, 320pp, £35,

Raymond Carr

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Raymond Carr reviews the new book from Wm. Roger Lewis

These contributions by divers hands must be seen against the changes in the writing of history in the 1960s that are described in this book by Sir Keith Thomas, a former president of the British Academy. When I went up to Oxford in 1938, modern European history was considered as the domestic political history and international rivalries of the great powers of the 19th and 20th centuries. This was history seen from above. In the 1960s a generation of Marxian and left- leaning historians, absorbing the lessons of the social sciences, anthropology and sociology in particular, saw history as the history of the common man. It was history seen from below. This was a rejection of the legacy of the great Prussian historian Leopold Von Ranke (d. 1886), the founder of history as a recognised university discipline, who believed in the ‘primacy of politics’. The slogan of the new historians of the 1960s was ‘all history is social history’. It seemed, at the time, an exciting relief from conventional political and diplomatic history as a dry-as-dust affair far removed from life as lived by men and women.

Wm. Roger Louis came to Oxford as a student of the historian A. J. P. Taylor, the favourite butt of the social historians of the 1960s, but at the same time dismissed by the Oxford historical establishment as an unreliable publicity-seeking radical. The subtitle of this book, ‘Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain’, signals a return to history as seen from above. The lecturers include the Duke of Norfolk and a posse of distinguished diplomats, politicians and generals. It is a return to the concerns of conventional history: the rise and fall of empires, the causes of wars that slaughtered millions. Louis is perfectly aware of the contribution of the social historians to history but they were more concerned with the personality of an Italian flour miller than with that of the great political figures of the past.

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