Varieties of history (i): ‘traditional history’

Abstract

modern historical scholarship emerged in the nineteenth century, although the history written during this period was of a very particular sort. In France, Germany and Britain, the principal mode of operation was empirical, by which is meant the scientific interrogation of sources. Prior to this period, history writing generally took on grand themes, written from the perspective of charting human progress or the emergence of civilisation. History was the remit of a variety of thinkers, writers and commentators, but, in the eighteenth century and before, it was based more on creative observation, or some master plan (such as the presence of God’s will on earth and the improvement and perfectibility of the human spirit), than upon the rigorous interrogation of primary materials. During the twentieth century, the empirical school of historiography — personified by Ranke, the nineteenth-century father of this approach — came under fire. The period from the 1880s in Britain saw the growth of an embryonic interest in social and economic history. From about the same time, on the Continent, the theories of Karl Marx, and later those of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, influenced the reassessment of history, and its shaping into a social science, rather than humanities, discipline. In Britain, however, despite the work of many historians and social commentators, the empirical mode continued to flourish.