Whig Interpretation Research Articles

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

Avoiding Whig interpretations in historical research: an illustrative case study

PurposeThe main aim of this paper is to illustrate the importance of avoiding Whig interpretations in historical research. It does so by highlighting examples of what may occur when this is not done. The paper also aims to promote interdisciplinarity, in the form of working with those from other disciplines, as a means to avoid this occurring.Design/methodology/approachThis paper includes an in-depth study of the bookkeeping and financial reporting of two 18th century Portuguese state-sponsored companies using archival sources. The companies were selected because of conflicting insights across disciplines concerning the quality of their bookkeeping and financial reporting – historians have been very critical, while accounting historians have seen little wrong. These differences of opinion have never previously been investigated. The authors demonstrate how information was distributed among the account books and other records of the two companies. The approach adopted enabled a reader to fully understand the recorded economic events. The authors also present and explain the procedures, criteria and accounting terminology used in their annual reports.FindingsThis paper demonstrates how easy is to inadvertently adopt a Whig interpretation of accounting history when the focus of interest is something of which the principal researcher has insufficient understanding or expertise. It also illustrates how important it is to embrace interdisciplinarity by working with those from other discipline to avoid doing so.Research limitations/implicationsThe conclusions from the case study are company-specific and cannot be generalised beyond those companies. However, the implications of this study go beyond the companies in its illustration of the importance of fully understanding historical evidence within its own context.Originality/valueThis paper unveils primary archival sources never previously presented in the literature. It also contributes to the literature by providing an evidence-based justification for the calls previously made to accounting historians to study accounting in its social context and engage with historians from other disciplines.

Where does theory go in military history?

This article presents a critique of Whiggish approaches to military history. It begins with this quotation from Dennis Showalter – ‘military history is arguably the last stronghold of what historiographers call the “Whig interpretation”’ – and notes that Showalter’s assessment was a reflection on both the general absence of theory and the linked poverty of the fallback theoretical basket of the subject, with such staples as War and Society, Face of Battle, and Military Revolutions. Recognizing the shortcomings of numerous approaches to military history, the author identifies the challenge – writing military history that incorporates multiple regions and takes a global approach. As the author concludes, the problem for the historian remains how best to address the complex interactions of, in particular, change and continuity, structure and conjuncture, the West and the wider world, and to do so to produce an account that is able to identify and probe crucial issues and key questions.

Matthew C. Augustine. Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89.

Matthew C. Augustine. <i>Aesthetics of Contingency: Writing, Politics, and Culture in England, 1639–89</i>.

Writings of the Luddites

When I mentioned to a friend that I was going to review this book, he replied: “Luddites? You mean, the Flat Earthers?” There is a distinction, I reminded him, between science and technology, and the Luddites had no problem, qua Luddites, with modern science. They objected to a few machines that were ruining their lives as artisans in the English textile industry. I could have added that Jeffrey Burton Russell's book Inventing the Flat Earth demonstrates that, “with extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century BC onward believed that the Earth was flat” and that even the belief that people had believed the Earth was flat did not arise until around 1870, in a time of controversy between scientists and the general culture over the theory of evolution. My friend is not a historian or scientist (but then neither am I), and I concluded that his remark meant no more than “It's high time you got a cell phone.” When reading an article on historiography and genetics some time later, however, I came across a famous geneticist quoted as saying that, among anthropologists and historians of prehistory, “there are a small number of Luddites who want to break our machines.” He meant that the anthropologists and historians resented the interference of geneticists in their disciplines. But the Luddites held no brief against transmission electron microscopy or carbon dating or microbiome sequencers.Misunderstandings and misapplications of the term Luddites (which, literally, means followers of the English general Ned Ludd, who never existed but was said at the time to live, like Robin Hood, in Sherwood Forest) are regarded as artifacts of something called “Luddite silence.” The Luddites, it has been taught, were more or less illiterate and left no texts to interpret. The aim of Binfield's Writings of the Luddites—an annotated collection of poems, songs, manifestos, and threatening letters written between 1811 and 1817—is to demonstrate that “the Luddites were not silent.” Their opponents constructed the myth of silence by “ignoring, reducing, or rendering curious or impotent those Luddite texts . . . known to exist.” The Luddites’ chief opponents were not engineers, let alone scientists, but “dishonorable capitalist depredators” who were met with “the sturdy self-reliance of a community prepared to resist for itself the notion that market forces rather than moral values should shape the fate of labor.” The myth that “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver,” and “the ‘utopian’ artisan” were silent resisters of industrial progress was a product, according to E. P. Thompson, of “the enormous condescension of history” to their social class. Writings of the Luddites may be understood as participating in Thompson's project of restoring to view, in Binfield's words, “the existence of a number of English subcultures with constitutive codes of their own.” Herbert Butterfield argued that English society of the Luddite era had become “dangerously diverse” and was only saved from revolution by the encouragement of belief, in all classes and subcultures, in historical progress (“the Whig interpretation of history”). Indeed, an anonymous Luddite letter of 1812 in this collection, addressed to “the principle Magistrate for this District” (Milnsbridge near Huddersfield), avers that “if this Machinery is suffer'd to go on it will probable terminate with a Civil War.”The Luddites lit many fires and destroyed much property in 1811–12, and as I write it is impossible not to think about the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 of this year. But the disaffected intruders of 2021, while contemptuous of science (only a handful wore masks, in a crowd, during a pandemic), clearly adored the technology that “capitalist depredators” had persuaded them they needed to buy. They were all carrying “smartphones,” taking “selfies”—and their leader was in close touch with them on Twitter.

WILHELM OSTWALD PARA ALÉM DO ANTIATOMISMO

WILHELM OSTWALD BEYOND ANTIATOMISM. The Baltic German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) had his scientific prestige eclipsed in the history of chemistry due to his rejection to atomic theory, which suggests the permanence of the whig interpretation on history of chemistry in the narratives about him. In this paper, we intend to present elements on Ostwald’s biography far from his role in the atomic controversy from the 19th century, as for example his efforts for the popularization of physical chemistry; his role as a teacher and a textbook writer, and his role as a chemical researcher, being responsible for relevant studies on chemical affinity and catalysis, for example. Finally, we conclude this paper defending that Ostwald’s trajectory cannot be neglected for those interested in history of science.

James Doherty Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Irish Home Rule Crisis, 1909-14 (review)

Reviews James Doherty, Irish Liberty, British Democracy: The Third Irish Home Rule Crisis, 1909–14 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2019), 320 pages. What a pleasure it is to read a book on the Third Home Rule Bill which places it firmly in the politics of the state – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – in which it was by far the most important political issue in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. This is in stark contrast to the current ‘decade of centenaries’ commemorations in Ireland, where the Third Home Rule Bill is portrayed as the beginnings of an ascent which, barring a few serious stumbles such as partition and civil war, leads inevitably and inexorably to the sunny uplands of Irish self-determination – an Irish nationalist version of the Whig interpretation of history. The struggle for Irish Home Rule in this period was a metaphor for the transformation of the United Kingdom into a fully-fledged democracy. To most British democrats, which included Liberal Party members, backbench Liberal MPs and the Labour Party, the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill was the test of whether the 1911 Parliament Act had, through emasculating the powers of the non-elected House of Lords, been successful. Viewed from this perspective, Irish Home Rule was the litmus test of Britain’s democratisation, far surpassing in importance other contemporary issues besettingAsquith’s Liberal government, such as women’s suffrage, industrial unrest and the naval race with Germany. Successful Home Rule legislation for Ireland would both symbolically and actually prove that the entire United Kingdom had made the transformation into democracy. The book is revelatory in many ways. The similarities between the structures and tensions of the Liberal Party and the Irish Party are remarkable. Both were loose coalitions and the strains and tensions inside both parties were at times at breaking point. The British Liberal Party and Liberal government were dominated by liberals who were not necessarily democrats. Men like Asquith, Haldane and Grey believed in liberty, but had substantial reservations about equality. They were leading a party which, by now, was heavily influenced by the philosophy of New Liberalism, that required the state to take a far more pro-active role in promoting a new era of equality and democracy. These social democrats were firm in their belief Studies • volume 109 • number 435 336 Autumn 2020: Book Reviews that the passage of the Third Home Rule Bill was totemic of their drive to democratise Britain and both Liberal Party members and backbenchers saw the Irish Party and their demands as advancing democracy throughout the entire United Kingdom. Even many Nonconformist Liberals, dubious about Irish Home Rule and its perceived threat of the resurgence of a rampant Roman Catholicism, were swayed by appeals to their reason, sense of justice and religious liberty, and these usually trumped any reservations they may have otherwise had. The New Liberals, now the majority in the party, regarded Home Rule as the battering ram for democratisation, even though they recognised that it took up valuable parliamentary time which could have been used for social reform. The author argues that by 1914 Asquith was under no illusion that defying radical Liberals, Irish nationalists and Labour on Home Rule would lead to the shattering of his party. The recipient of all this support from the radical wing of British politics – the Irish Party – was even more a broad church than the Liberal Party. For a start, the Irish Parliamentary Party was hardly a party. It was racked by residual rivalry and hostility dating back to the Parnell era, particularly between John Dillon, T M Healy and William O’ Brien. The Irish Party’s political dominance in Ireland arose practically in default of effective alternative movements. It was led by John Redmond, an imperialist at heart like so many others in the Irish Party, to whom there was no incompatibility between Irish nationality and imperial patriotism. These Irish nationalists wanted a self-governing Ireland to play a prominent role in the affairs of the Empire along the lines of the white settler dominions such as Canada and Australia. Rather than lead to the break...

European Constitutional Imagination: A Whig Interpretation of the Process of European Integration?

In this essay, we challenge the characterisation of European law as a constitutional order from two related standpoints, namely, the ambiguity of what is meant when characterising European law as constitutional, and the lack of a well-argued narrative explaining how European law became constitutional and what type of constitutionalism it has developed. We start by clarifying the concept and conceptions of constitution, emphasising the centrality of the structural and normative conceptions of constitution. This preliminary conceptual work facilitates the task of elucidating what is exactly being argued when it is claimed that European law is constitutional, and what implications are consequently justified. We then note that while the process of constitutionalisation plays a key role in structuring European law as a discipline, normative reasons underlying such characterisation remain, if anything, more assumed than explicit and fully demonstrated. This leads us to conclude by arguing that may be preferable not to imagine contemporary European law in constitutional terms. At the same time, however, we note that the power effectively held by the European Union reaches so many corners of national legal and socio-economic structures as to render insufficient to merely reject any claim to its constitutionality. The predicament of European Union law is that of a legal order that de facto discharges functional tasks proper of constitutional orders while lacking the requisite democratic and social credentials.

‘This is not right radicalism’: Thomas Carlyle's dialogue with John Stuart Mill in The French revolution

ABSTRACT Thomas Carlyle's morally conservative mindset and post-Burkean imagery have rarely been linked to some of the most politically and artistically radical passages in The French Revolution: A History (1837), the general assumption being that it is Carlyle's rejection of the Presbyterian heritage that sponsors his most innovative social and political thought. This article argues that Carlyle's Scottish Calvinist perspective sponsors a radical cultural language at a time when his support for the French Revolution is scorned upon even in the professedly radical John Stuart Mill's Westminster Review. Carlyle draws from Mill's early fascination with the active role of the people in shaping the political reality and gives it a radical voice long after Mill had already lost his enthusiasm and adopted the Whig interpretation of the French Revolution as a necessary evil in the march of progress. In this context, Mill's early paean to Carlyle's French Revolution as a contemporary ‘epic poem’ is read as a doubtful compliment which obfuscates the more politically scandalous passages in Carlyle's oeuvre, such as Carlyle's deeply sympathetic depiction of the storming of the Bastille.

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's History of Modern Europe (1789–1792)

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's <i>History of Modern Europe</i> (1789–1792)

Concepts and Paradigms in the Historiography of Educational Change: Some Reflections on the Uses of the Past

Ever since Butterfield 's seminal critique of the Whig interpretation of history, historians have held that judgements about the past should remain independent of the present. With reference to Kuhn and the application of concepts from the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, this paper examines the process by which present-day meanings enter into judgements about the history of educational change . Contrary to the establi shed view, it argues that this phenomenon, better known as presentism, is an unavoidable and , ironically perhaps, a necessary condition for the study and teaching of history.

The ideology of progress in nineteenth-century accounts of New Zealand

ABSTRACTBy the nineteenth century, emergent ideas about social development were coalescing into an ideology of progress, the tenets of which were devised largely by British philosophers. The influence of this ideology in shaping perceptions of the non-European world by British writers is explored here in the context of works published about New Zealand in this era. The employment of the ideology of progress added a teleological dimension to representations of New Zealand and its inhabitants, and coincided with the philosophical basis of the Whig interpretation of history that predominated British works in the discipline at this time. Thus, several accounts of New Zealand produced in this period tended to contain predetermined ideological understandings about the form and trajectory of the country’s progress, often at the expense of the ambiguities, contradictions, or tensions identified by historians in the following century. An awareness of this doctrine, and the extent to which it framed the way New Zealand was written about in the nineteenth century, offers another significant basis on which the context and evidentiary value of this source material can be evaluated.

Historical Romance and the Mythology of Charles I in D’Israeli, Scott and Disraeli

ABSTRACTThe mythology surrounding the figure of Charles, forged during the unique events of his time, was often employed in response to socio-political situations and debates of the late eighteenth and then the nineteenth century. Isaac D’Israeli, Sir Walter Scott and Benjamin Disraeli, writing at a time when the interpretation of history was dominated by Whig historiography, sought to negate, counter or dismantle those representations of modern British history by referencing Charles and his fate. Against the Whig premise that the Glorious Revolution heralded, in fact was, the exordium to British modern history, D’Israeli and Scott saw the need to construct agonistic, Tory interpretations of the past, countering Whig interpretations of history relating to the Civil War, and to the regicide specifically, by reinventing the mythology of Charles I. Benjamin Disraeli employed the mythology of Charles I differently from its use by his father and by Scott: in order comprehensively to denounce and dismantle Whig interpretations of history from medieval to then-contemporary times, and to construct an alternate, inherently Tory perspective on the social ills of his time in his fiction and non-fiction.

Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith

Reviewed by: Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith Michelle Orihel (bio) Keywords Whig, Politics, Voting, Democracy, Political parties Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War. Edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Pp. 304. Cloth, $49.50.) In Practicing Democracy, Douglas Bradburn observes: “American historians have overwhelmingly been Whig historians” (26). The phrase “Whig history” originated in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, published in 1931. Whig historians used the past, Butterfield argued, to explain and sanction the triumph of liberal democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. By orienting their studies toward that achievement, historians failed to understand the past on its own terms. In the United States, Whig history manifests itself in the democratization model of development. This model presents the nation as democratizing steadily over time, with democracy encompassing free elections, an expanding electorate, and a two-party system. Andrew Robertson contends that historians of nineteenth-century American politics have especially adopted a Whig perspective (99). Many historians search for the roots of democracy in the early republic, and trace its rise from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln. The ten essays in this compelling new volume edited by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith challenge that Whig trajectory. While Whig histories chart a linear path to democracy, the essays in Practicing Democracy present case studies of uneven development, improvisation, and instability. John L. Brooke conceptualizes historical time as “lumpy and punctuated” rather than “smooth and continuous” [End Page 155] (75). Similarly, Robertson depicts a “tortuous trajectory” of development, one in which “democratic ideology and practices ebbed and flowed” (99). Political participation also varied by ethnicity, sex, race, and class. Irish and German immigrants in New York City, Tyler Anbinder finds, remained largely disengaged from controversies like the Kansas–Nebraska Act that polarized Americans in the 1850s. Instead, immigrants focused on local issues such as schooling that affected them directly. Reeve Huston further stresses “the geographic and temporal unevenness” of democratic practices (55). Illustrating these variations, Daniel Peart demonstrates that during the Era of Good Feelings voter turnout was much higher in Illinois, a frontier state that lacked organized parties, than in Massachusetts, a state where partisanship persisted. This conclusion challenges the standard interpretation of that era as one of political apathy in which partisanship subsided. The era, Peart claims, should be called “the Era of Experimentation,” a label that applies to early republic politics in general (138). Graham A. Peck also highlights this political improvisation. A rapid turnover in officeholding in Illinois, he argues, gave voters numerous opportunities to elect new representatives. In constant dialogue with voters, politicians changed positions on issues to “reflect voters’ interests and judgments” (145). He concludes that the historical category “Second Party System” fails to convey that dynamism. Yet, many historians remain attached to the “Party System” concept, arguing that competitive political parties fueled democratization. Americans inherited this obsession with a two-party system, Bradburn argues, from early modern England: “The men who built the first party politics in the United States were ideological Whigs whose histories of England were filled with sharp dialectical fights between advocates for prerogative power and martyrs for liberty,” from the Parliamentarians and Royalists of the Civil War to the Whigs and Tories thereafter (40). This legacy, Bradburn maintains, shapes “the way too many American historians still write the history of their country” (41). Whig historians begin their inquiries with the two-party system, and then look backward to explain its origins and development. In his study of the movement to consolidate the city and suburbs of Philadelphia in 1851, Andrew Heath stresses that looking backward can be deceptive. Previous historians have seen consolidation as foreshadowing the urban machine politics of the late nineteenth century, but Heath argues that if one “look[s] forward from [End Page 156] . . . 1851, . . . the rise of boss rule does not seem preordained” (224). Instead, the consolidation movement reflected the reform and anti-party sentiments of elite Philadelphians in the 1850s, a group more...

The Latest Instalment in the Whig Interpretation of Australian Education History: Catherine Byrne's JORH Article “Free, Compulsory and (not) Secular”

The original meaning of the term “secular” in the “free compulsory and secular” nineteenth‐century Australian public education acts is often contested, and has recently become part of a contemporary debate about the presence of confessional religion in state schools. I outline four different interpretations expressed in Australian education history writing, then review the recent Journal of Religious History article “Free, Compulsory and (not) Secular” by Catherine Byrne, arguing that it belongs to the secular liberal or “Whig” interpretation of the meaning of “secular” in the acts. The article is critiqued for forcing sources to conform to an overly rhetorical narrative device: a polarised structure valorising Victorian legislator George Higinbotham, and demonising New South Wales legislator Sir Henry Parkes. The article is also criticised for sub‐optimal source‐work, lack of awareness of the corpus of Australian education history, and overt contemporary policy agendas. I also suggest that the larger “Whig” interpretation of “secular” as part of a liberal progress narrative, underemphasises a religious hermeneutic and a critical theory hermeneutic: that a Protestant consensus about state schooling and “secular” in the Public Education Acts was also a deeply sectarian device for excluding Catholics from a dominant social settlement, just one part of a systemically divided and prejudicial culture.

1688: Literature, Politics, and the Long Restoration

1688:Literature, Politics, and the Long Restoration Corrinne Harol When William of Orange sailed to England in 1688—an act variously described as a response to a polite invitation, a coup, or a foreign invasion—he brought along a veritable toolkit for linking the emergent cultures of politics and literature: 40,000 men, 500 ships, 50 cannons, and one printing press.1 William did not bring radical new political ideas: England had deposed and beheaded Charles I forty years earlier, and thus its modernization of political structures and philosophy was well under way. Neither did he bring modern print culture to England: Restoration England already had a lively print culture of polemical, sensational, devotional, philosophical, didactic, and ribald writing. Still, the events of 1688-9—the end of the Stuart dynasty and the settlement with parliament that saw William and Mary assume a limited sovereignty under a constitutional monarchy—have long been seen as a watershed moment in English history, credited with liberalizing England’s political system and with inspiring foundational laws and theorizations of democratic capitalism, including The “English Bill of Rights” (1689) as well as John’s Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689/90).2 “1688” has been so crucial to histories of England that the historiography of 1688 has been a focal point of deliberation about the nature of historiography itself, in debates about Whig history and method.3 Literary critics have tended to rely on historical accounts of 1688 for periodization of both the end of the Restoration (though this journal resists that trend) and the history of the novel, as well as for the kinds of narratives—of progress, of secularization, and of the importance of individual rights and freedom—that underpin both the facts and norms of much literary scholarship in eighteenth-century studies and beyond. In short, liberal political history and modern literary history are related legacies of 1688. But while liberal history imagines progress towards the abstractions of secularity, individuality, equality, and universality, literary history of the long eighteenth century has long been associated [End Page 5] with conservative elite culture and tradition. Thus, while they are disciplinarily distinct and in some respects philosophically opposed, these twin legacies of 1688 share a complex history of entanglements and estrangements, a history, moreover, in which the meaning of 1688 and the methods of scholars both figure centrally. This special issue of Restoration developed out of a panel at the 2014 ASECS meeting that explored this legacy of how politics and literature developed in relation to each other and in response to the ways that 1688 allowed English writers to narrate and to imagine their history and their values. The essays in this collection investigate 1688 through key concepts in liberalism—sovereignty, revolution, progress, rights, democracy, populism, party politics—as well as through key issues for literary history: historiography, aesthetics, satire, performativity, politeness. Interpretations of 1688 have tended to be the province of historians. Readers of this journal are all familiar with the critiques of what has been called derisively the Whig interpretation of history—the tendency of Whig historians, for whom 1688 is key, to cast history as a struggle between the modernizing force of progress and the conservative pull of tradition. In this scholarly trajectory, 1688 is seen either as a salutary watershed of liberalizing progress (“the glorious revolution”) or as the conservative triumph over the radical politics of the civil war years (“the bourgeois revolution”).4 But both Whig historians and their revisionist critics have tended to assume a norm of history that is progressive and tied to class mobility, to secularization, to increasing emphasis on individuality, and to nationalism. A recent wave of scholarship on the revolution by historians has stretched the limits of this scholarly trajectory. For example, Tim Harris situates the revolution in its larger geopolitical context; Steven Pincus recasts the debate over the “revolution of 1688” as not one between ancients and moderns but rather as a competition between different visions of modernization; Scott Sowerby (recuperating James II from a very different perspective) finds conservative thinking to be instrumental to ideas of religious tolerance that we associate with liberalism; and Lisa Jardine and Jonathan Israel deem the...

Williamite Propaganda in the Anglo-Dutch Revolution

The primary aim of this essay is to provide a revision of the events of 1688-89 in England, which – for over three hundred years – have been known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’. I wish to argue that without the military intervention of William of Orange, Stadholder of the United Provinces, the Revolution would not have taken place, thus it would be more appropriate to refer to these events as the ‘Anglo-Dutch Revolution’. Williamite propaganda – which the paper describes in details – played a crucial part in the success of the Revolution, as well as in the shaping of the interpretation (the so-called Whig interpretation) of the events after 1689, which dominated historiography for almost three hundred years. There is special emphasis in the essay on the analysis of the most important instrument of William of Orange’s propaganda, the “Declaration of Reasons” (issued on 30 September 1688), which justified the invasion and explained the Prince’s intentions.

Christians, Muslims and the State in Twentieth-Century Egypt and Indonesia

Surveys of the historical relationship between Christianity and other faiths often suggest that through a process of theological enlightenment the churches have moved from crusade to cooperation and from diatribe to dialogue. This trajectory is most marked in studies of Christian-Muslim relations, overshadowed as they are by the legacy of the Crusades. Hugh Goddard’sA History of Christian-Muslim Relationsproceeds from a focus on the frequently confrontational inter-communal relations of earlier periods to attempts by Western theologians over the last two centuries to define a more irenic stance towards Islam.1 For liberal-minded Western Christians this is an attractive thesis: who would not wish to assert that we have left bigotry and antagonism behind, and moved on to stances of mutual respect and tolerance? However laudable the concern to promote harmonious intercommunal relations today, dangers arise from trawling the oceans of history in order to catch in our nets only those episodes that will be most morally edifying for the present. What Herbert Butterfield famously labelled ‘the Whig interpretation of history’ is not irrelevant to the history of interreligious relations. In this essay I shall use the experience of Christian communities in twentieth-century Egypt and Indonesia to argue that the determinative influences on Christian-Muslim relations in the modern world have not been the progressive liberalization of stances among academic theologians but rather the changing views taken by governments in Muslim majority states towards both their majority and minority religious communities. Questions of the balance of power, and of the territorial integrity of the state, have affected Christian Muslim relations more deeply than questions of religious truth and concerns for interreligious dialogue.

HARD, SOFT, AND FUZZY HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this essay, the author both reviews Scott Sowerby's book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (2013) and makes a late contribution to, or comment on, the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” (2011 – 13). Sowerby opposes the “Whig interpretation” that James II was attempting to reinstate Stuart “popery and arbitrary government” and instead presents James II's policies as aimed at liberation of the Stuart monarchy from the borough, county, and clerical elites that had brought it back to power and regarded restoration of the Church of England as their instrument and identity. The king thus had his own reasons for upholding the liberty of conscience, and so James II can be found using the language of a skeptical Enlightenment, while at the same time affirming the absoluteness of his authority and incurring the suspicion of popery. How “toleration” of Catholics and dissenters came about in Britain must be told by narrating the “hard” histories of various state structures, but there is a larger and “softer” history of Enlightenment to be extracted from that of the European ancien régime, in whose history and downfall “British history” has a part that can be narrated in both “hard” and “soft” terms. The recent revisionist accounts of James II — of which Sowerby's is said in this review to be among the best — offer the king a new role at that regime's beginnings. This review concludes by arguing that the pursuit of history as it has come to be practiced is among the “softest” modes of explanation — since it consists of the unending and unlimited pursuit of the contexts in which actions, words, and processes have been situated and need to be studied — and that the more there are of these, the more meanings the actions may bear and the fewer reasons there are for the use of Occam's razor. “The notion of ‘fuzziness’ ” does not disturb historians, as it does scholars in some other disciplines, since historians have at their disposal an established contextualist “means of navigating it.”

An Ecclesiastical Descent: Religion and History in the Work of William Stubbs

This article explores the relationship between religion and historiography in the work of the historian and bishop William Stubbs (1825–1901). Previous studies of Stubbs have neglected the High-Church influences which demonstrably pervaded his thought, and shaped his ideas of the English past, of the Christian purposes of history, and of the historical process itself. Recovering the confessional bent of Stubbs's approach to the past challenges assumptions about not only academic professionalisation, but also the prevalence through the Victorian period of a ‘Whig interpretation’ of history.