Feature: Modern British History * The State of Modern British History

Abstract

��� 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