Cambridge Modern History Research Articles

Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, by Jon Agar

In the wake of the Great War, the ‘chemists’ War’, a scandal was denounced. The great Cambridge Modern History, which had appeared just before 1914, had included almost no reference to science. The recent hostilities had so highlighted the contemporary importance of science that, to many, its past could no longer be ignored. The claims of such critics as Oxford’s Charles Singer, in his 1929 ‘Scientific Humanism’ published in the launch issue of The Realist, have continued to be pressed. The histories of the atomic bomb, industrial research, the tremendous extension of life expectancy and of climate change each have scientific dimensions. Since the time of Singer, of course, a flourishing discipline of the history of science has developed. Yet, until recently, the balance of that discipline’s concerns has been problematically related to the claims that generated it. From the point of view of sheer quantity, the entire historiography of science should be dominated by studies of the twentieth century. Almost all the scientific papers ever written, experiments conducted or careers pursued date from the years since 1900. Yet we are still woefully short of understanding what scientists did in the twentieth century. This is, in part, because of the scale of science, which is daunting—whether measured in the millions of scientists and papers published or the magnitude of huge laboratories. In part it is due to the commercial secrecy and national security which have turned a large part of scientific activity into invisible ‘dark matter’. We must admit the analytical difficulty of understanding such a decentralised, poorly demarcated, multinational enterprise. And, finally, there is the historiographical challenge of conveying all this technically difficult work in narrative. The solution of the biography of the iconic figure has worked far better for the past than for recent years. The study of Newton, Lavoisier and Darwin has engendered industries with which no twentieth-century figure save Einstein can compare.

Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950 (review)

Reviewed by: Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950 David Finkelstein (bio) Leslie Howsam, Past into Print: The Publishing of History in Britain, 1850–1950 (London and Toronto: British Library and the University of Toronto Press, 2009), pp. xvi + 181, £50 cloth. This work is about the publishing of history books in Britain (or, more accurately, England, as there are no Welsh or Scottish examples) during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, developed from a prestigious series of lectures delivered at Oxford in 2006. As Leslie Howsam acknowledges at the start, the chapters are more work-in-progress than final statements, aimed at pushing boundaries between history, book history, and bibliography, and challenging historians to examine the material production of history books issued by English-based publishers during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Howsam’s prodding of the professions is astute and timely: as she reminds us, the study of the material production and shifting themes of past historical texts is a neglected area of historical enquiry in contemporary historical circles. In part this is due to the constant renewal and superseding of academic and cultural interests: where one period might favour sweeping narratives focused on policy and national aspiration, another might see value in chronicling history “from below.” What is written before is discarded and revised. Howsam’s goal is to demonstrate how “obsolete” texts such as school textbooks can be immensely valuable artefacts for evaluating the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. Likewise, interrogating the production and editorial processes of history book publishing tells us a great deal about the commercial and career motivations that steered such projects to fruition. [End Page 449] Howsam concentrates her efforts on case studies gleaned from the archives of three publishers of the late Victorian period: Macmillan, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press. What emerges from her research is an interesting tension between (1) the professionalization of history within English university circles, which though evident in publishing terms from the 1860s onwards, really develops at the turn of the century through the stimulus of commissioned multi-volume history series; and (2) the expansion of history book publishing in the same period in the form of school textbooks, general readership narratives, and narrative-led work. The shift in focus at the academic level from anecdote-led accounts to more scientifically aimed, objective, and rigorous analyses of events increasingly clashed with publishing interests focused on commercially attractive material aimed at contemporary readers. Alexander Macmillan was one key player in this debate, capitalising on and expanding English-speaking markets for history texts from the 1860s onwards; commissioning popular authors such as Charlotte Yonge, Charles Kingsley, and Edward E. Freeman to produce visually arresting and accessible children’s history books; supporting the founding of key journals in the academic field (such as the English Historical Review, which after long negotiations was eventually initiated in 1886 under the imprimatur of Longman & Co.); and creating popular collections such as the long-running “English Men of Letters” series, edited by John Morley. On the other side stood the university presses of Oxford and Cambridge, whose energies became increasingly focused on multi-volume, collaborative series of academic works from the 1890s onwards. By the Edwardian period, Cambridge and Oxford had supplanted Macmillan as preeminent players in the field of history publishing, shaping the look, format, and readership expectations of historical material in such key publications as the Cambridge Modern History series, issued between 1902 and 1912, or through imaginative linking of contemporary literary figures with historical narrative, such as Oxford’s commissioning in 1918 of a European History schoolbook from D.H. Lawrence. Such activity fed into late Victorian and Edwardian debates about the difference and value of serious history written for academic consumption and popular history written for mass readership. In flagging up the significant input of publishers in shaping this debate, Howsam pays close attention to key figures in the relevant publishing firms, such as Richard Wright, Cambridge Press secretary, who wrote much of the marketing material for the Modern History series, and Philip Lyttelton Gell, Secretary of the Clarendon Press between 1884 to 1897, who was a driving force...

Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds), The Cambridge history of science: vol. 3, Early modern science, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xxvii, 865, illus., £90.00, $160.00 (hardback 978-0-521-57244-6).

Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds), The Cambridge history of science: vol. 3, Early modern science, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. xxvii, 865, illus., £90.00, $160.00 (hardback 978-0-521-57244-6). - Volume 52 Issue 4

Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge history of science. Vol. 4: Eighteenth-century science, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xxx, 912, £65.00, $95.00 (hardback 0-521-57243-6).

Although best known for his prolific writing on the history of medicine, the late Roy Porter's reputation among general historians and a generation of Cambridge graduates was first and foremost as the author of the outstanding Penguin paperback, English society in the eighteenth century (1982). He was therefore the obvious authority to edit the fourth of eight volumes synthesizing our knowledge of the history of science. The Cambridge history of science has been planned since 1993 as a complement to Cambridge University Press's fourteen volume Cambridge modern history. It is intended to be an up-to-date account of science “from the earliest literate societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the beginning of the 21st century that even nonspecialist readers will find engaging” (p. xxx). In Eighteenth-century science, Porter masterminds thirty-five contributors in a sweeping survey of the longue duree (curiously a temporal category not used by any of the contributors) between Newton's Principia (1687) and the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Although Porter did not live to see the volume through the press, he contributed a vintage twenty-page introduction that seamlessly links the authors' papers together. He observes that while Enlightenment sciences lacked the drama of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century or the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth, the century was anything but dull. During it natural philosophy became part of Western culture and “public knowledge”, and natural philosophy itself underwent what Porter terms “balkanization” as the unified nature of tradition broke up into specialist disciplines. It is unfortunate that Porter chose not to contribute a chapter. As it is, Thomas H Broman's essay on the medical sciences (pp. 463–84) is confined to a treatment of medical theory as articulated by university-trained physicians. It is a fine chapter, but its account of a world without surgeons, apothecaries, patients and the medical market place is hardly representative of the scholarship of the last twenty years. (Indeed, readers interested in eighteenth-century medicine would be better directed to Porter's rumbustious chapter in his Greatest benefit to mankind, 1997.) The bulky but sturdily-bound volume is organized into five sections. Eight preliminary essays on science and society cover the Enlightenment, universities, institutions, science and government, popular science (an entertaining and perceptive essay by Mary Fissell and Roger Cooter), the image of the man of science, women, and how historians have deployed prosopography. Part 2 has a dozen essays on scientific disciplines; besides the obvious sciences collateral to medicine, these include treatments of the classification of natural knowledge and of the marginalization of sciences such as animal magnetism, physiognomy, astrology, alchemy and Hutchinsonianism under the twin pressures of Enlightenment reason and social attitudes. A shorter section of five essays follows on special themes such as instrument making, printing and the book, scientific illustration, and the significant subject of scientific voyages during the century. The book then looks at non-Western traditions in Islam, India, China (over brief, and strangely achieved without a single reference to the work of Joseph Needham) and Spanish America. Each of these, but particularly the last by Jorge Canizares Esguerra, pays particular attention to medicine. Science in the Ottoman empire, Africa and Australasia are not covered except by default in scattered references by several authors to exploration during the century. A final section of five excellent essays surveys some of the ramifications and imports of the century's events and concerns in religion, literature, the philosophy of mind, commerce and Empire, and technological change. The latter two chapters, by Larry Stewart and Ian Inkster, are the only ones that deal explicitly with industrialization. Porter admits to having had difficulties in commissioning non-British or American contributors, but given the global reach of the volume Anglo-American bias is minimized and the treatment of French and German sources is excellent. The comprehensive indexing required in such an encyclopaedic survey seems reliable and helpful, though it is puzzling why some, but not all, footnotes are indexed. While the volume does not offer a comprehensive survey and analysis of the medical sciences in the eighteenth century (the lack of a chapter on pharmaceutical developments is a serious omission), historians of medicine will undoubtedly find this a useful reference book for help in contextualizing their teaching and research. It achieves Porter's intention of providing a stable platform upon which scholarship on the nineteenth-century can be built. At the same time it shows how the eighteenth century was much more than the consolidation of the revolutionary changes that had taken place in the century before.

Lord Acton and "the Insanity of Nationality"

The sixty-year period that culminated in the First World War witnessed a momentous transformation in the European state system. Italian and German unification, the expulsion of the Ottomans from southeastern Europe, the destruction of the three remaining empires—the Austrian, German, and Russian—as casualties of the war, their replacement by a band of successor states stretching from the Baltic to the Balkans: these developments completely altered the face of Europe, as dynastic states gave way to nation-states. Looking back on this transformation once the war was over, many Europeans believed the decision to rebuild their continent on the basis of nation-states made perfect sense. To establish the principles of self-determination and democracy would contribute to peace and prosperity by solving the nationalities problem that had caused such mischief in the past. But in the 1860s, as this transformation was just beginning, the question looked very different, especially to the young John Dalberg Acton—the future Lord Acton, famous for the Cambridge Modern History—as he contemplated without benefit of hindsight the rise of the modern nation-state. 1 [End Page 129]

Homo ET Machina: Of Divided Labour, Revolutions and a History of Marvels

We have but one simple method of delivering our sentiments, namely, we must bring men to particulars and their regular series and order, and they must for a while renounce their notions, and begin to form an acquaintance with things. [Translated from Francis Bacon, Novum organum, 1620]1 Truth, he [Bacon] wrote, was not the daughter of Authority, but of Time. [ The Cambridge modern history, 1902]2

The Cambridge Modern History: Genesis of a reference publishing tradition

Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford: the names of these universities instantly conjure up images of the highest attainments of higher education. Of course, great universities also operate great university presses. So any reference book with the name of Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard in the title possesses immediate credibility and saleability. But it was not always so. Prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century the Oxford and the Cambridge University Presses were known to the public primarily as publishers of the Bible. Oxford broke into reference publishing, and along with it widespread public recognition, by means of its famous dictionaries, of which the pinnacle was the massive Oxford English Dictionary. The Cambridge University Press [hereafter referred to as CUP] took a different approach to publishing scholarly reference works by producing authoritative and encyclopedic histories. According to S.C. Roberts, a long‐time secretary to the Syndics of the CUP, “apart from the Bible, the first book that made the Press well known to the general public was the Cambridge Modern History.”

The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume II, Second Edition: The Reformation, 1520-1559, edited by G.R. Elton

"The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume II, Second Edition: The Reformation, 1520-1559, edited by G.R. Elton." Canadian Journal of History, 26(3), pp. 496–497

The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume Two, 2nd edition: The Reformation, 1520-1559

The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume Two, 2nd edition: The Reformation, 1520-1559

Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians

Myth and history are close kin inasmuch as both explain how things got to be the way they are by telling some sort of story. But our common parlance reckons myth to be false while history is, or aspires to be, true. Accordingly, a historian who rejects someone else's conclusions calls them mythical, while claiming that his own views are true. But what seems true to one historian will seem false to another, so one historian's truth becomes another's myth, even at the moment of utterance. A century and more ago, when history was first established as an academic discipline, our predecessors recognized this dilemma and believed they had a remedy. Scientific source criticism would get the facts straight, whereupon a conscientious and careful historian needed only to arrange the facts into a readable narrative to produce genuinely scientific history. And science, of course, like the stars above, was true and eternal, as Newton and Laplace had demonstrated to the satisfaction of all reasonable persons everywhere. Yet, in practice, revisionism continued to prevail within the newly constituted historical profession, as it had since the time of Herodotus. For a generation or two, this continued volatility could be attributed to scholarly success in discovering new facts by diligent work in the archives; but early in this century thoughtful historians began to realize that the arrangement of facts to make a history involved subjective judgments and intellectual choices that had little or nothing to do with source criticism, scientific or otherwise. In reacting against an almost mechanical vision of scientific method, it is easy to underestimate actual achievements. For the ideal of scientific history did allow our predecessors to put some forms of bias behind them. In particular, academic historians of the nineteenth century came close to transcending older religious controversies. Protestant and Catholic histories of post-Reformation Europe ceased to be separate and distinct traditions of learning-a transformation nicely illustrated in the Anglo-American world by the career of Lord Acton, a Roman Catholic who became Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and editor of the first Cambridge Modern History. This was a great accomplishment. So was the accumulation of an enormous fund of exact and reliable data through painstaking

Newton on a Horse: A Critique of the Historiographies of ‘Technology’ and ‘Modernity’

“In the absence of a guiding theory, problems of technology, like those of the most primitive fields of science, had to be solved empirically” ( The new Cambridge modern history, concerning 1688–1751). “The striking fact is not merely that mathematical aptitude was diffused amongst large numbers of dons, divines, physicians, antiquaries and gentry …; but that it had become with many of them a passion, a supposed key to the knowledge of man, society and the universe … in the unspecialized imagination of the seventeenth century, the key that unlocked the secrets of the universe was essentially the same as that which might unlock the vaults of social wealth” (C. Wilson on England's apprenticeship 1603–1763).

Maitland to Acton

These nine letters written by Maitland to Acton over the years 1896–98 are part of a large number of letters received by Acton from potential contributors to the Cambridge Modern History which Acton was planning and to which Maitland eventually contributed a chapter on “The Anglican Settlement and the Scottish Reformation.” When in 1895 Acton had been appointed Regius Professor of Modern History, Maitland had had his doubts. “Glad as I am that he should come here, I fancy that Oxford was the place for him,” he wrote privately to Lane Poole at Oxford, and he continued to have his doubts as to Acton's talents as an academic politician. As a background to the first letter Maitland had remarked to H. A. L. Fisher in a letter earlier that year: “That History Board still consumes endless time and after all I do not think that I can sign their proposals. At present Acton=0. I wish he would bless or curse or do something.” But for Acton the historian Maitland's regard was unqualified. When Acton died, the loss to Cambridge, Maitland wrote to Leslie Stephen, was “irreparable,” and writing to Lane Poole in 1902 he spoke more fully: “For myself I learnt to admire A. enormously—and on his merits, for I was not by any means prejudiced in his favour.”

The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume IV. The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609–;48/59. Edited by J.P. Cooper. Cambridge University Press,1970. Pp. xxi + 832. £4·00.

The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume IV. The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609–;48/59. Edited by J.P. Cooper. Cambridge University Press,1970. Pp. xxi + 832. £4·00. - Volume 16 Issue 3

Universal History for Our Times

History as a serious discipline reached maturity with the national state. Historical research has ordinarily been carried on within national boundaries, and school curricula were until recently dominated by national history. When so-called world history was taught in the Western countries, the world was generally understood to include Europe and the United States only. Since World War II historians have been confronted with an increasing demand for the presentation of history within a larger context, especially from teachers who felt that they could not go on teaching international cooperation in political science classes while propagating the more or less self-centered myths of national history in history classes. This movement has been accompanied by a growing interest in the national histories of the new states of Asia and Africa, and it is to the latter kind of history most of the research that is breaking through the established boundaries has been diverted. So far very few historians have devoted themselves to comparative or truly global studies on which a universal history might be built, and the syntheses of Fernand Braudel and William H. McNeill are the only serious attempts at presenting global history, not as a more or less shapeless mass of information, but within a well-defined theoretical framework. Thus the great collective enterprises are still the most important points of departure for the study of general history and will no doubt remain so for many years to come. Considerable interest must therefore be attached to the editorial principles of these series and to the preconceptions and judgments of their editors and authors. Through popularizations and through teachers the underlying ideas will spread all over the world and contribute toward forming the minds of coming generations. I frequently remind myself that what I teach my students today they may be teaching verbatim (though I hope not) in the year of 2020 to pupils who may be at the head of affairs in 2070. Looked upon in this way, the teaching of history is quite a serious matter. In the English-speaking world the two most important general history projects started after World War II are the New Cambridge Modern History and the History of Mankind, sponsored by UNESCO. Both series are now approaching their conclusion. This review article will concentrate upon two recently published volumes,1 but the main interest will be a discussion of the

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

REVIEWS OF BOOKS Get access The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. iv. The decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609-459. Edited by J. P. COOPER.(Cambridge: U.P., 1970. £4). R. J. KNECHT R. J. KNECHT University of Birmingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LXXXVIII, Issue CCCXLVII, April 1973, Pages 380–383, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LXXXVIII.CCCXLVII.380 Published: 01 April 1973

The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. IV: The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609-48/59.

The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. IV: The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War, 1609-48/59.

The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. IV: The Decline of Spain and The Thirty Years War, 1609-48/59

The New Cambridge Modern History. Vol. IV: The Decline of Spain and The Thirty Years War, 1609-48/59

The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume IV The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War 1609-48/59.

The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume IV The Decline of Spain and the Thirty Years War 1609-48/59.

Reviews and Short Notes

Reviews and Short Notes

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article Logical Investigations. By Edmund Husserl. Translated from the second German edition of Logische Untersuchungen by J. N. Findlay. Vols. 1, 2. Fallacies. By C. L. Hamblin. The Brain‐Mind Identity Theory. Edited by C. V. Borst. Respect for Persons. By R. S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer. The Sovereignty of Good. By Iris Murdoch. What is Redaction Criticism? By Norman Perrin. In Search of the Historical Jesus. Edited by Harvey K. McArthur. New Testament Issues. Edited by Richard Batey. The Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. By Willi Marxsen. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810. By James T. Burtchaell. Encyclopaedia of Biblical Theology. Edited by J. B. Bauer. Translated by J. Blenkins New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England. By R. W. Pfaff. The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More: Volume 5: Responsio ad Lutherum, Part I: Latin and English Texts; Part II: Introduction, Commentary, Index. Edited by John M. Headley. The New Cambridge Modern History. Volume VI. The Rise of Great Britain and Russia 1688–1725. Edited by J. S. Bromley. Philosopher King. The Humanist Pope, Benedict XIV. By Renée Haynes. Irish Anglicanism 1869–1969. Edited by Michael Hurley, S. J. Classical Islam, A History 600–1258. By G. E. VON Grunebaum. Translated from the German by Katherine Watson.