Michael Braddick, Christopher Hill and an historiographical puzzle

I have been very puzzled to read the transcript of Michael Braddick's interview at Housman's Bookshop in London earlier this month. It was part of the process of promoting the biography composed by Braddick (All Souls College, Oxford) and was, I suspect, given in front of an audience sympathetic to Hill's beliefs and career. What appears to me to be a problem in the talk is the connection drawn between the appearance of 'revisionism' in early to mid-17th century historiography and the rise of Thatcherism in British political life. In fact, the criticisms of Marxist and Whig historiography associated with Conrad Russell, John Morrill, Kevin Sharpe and others came into print in the mid to late-1970s under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. Russell's essay on Parliamentary politics was published in 1976 as was John Morrill's book on the Revolt of the Provinces. Kevin Sharpe's edited volume of essays appeared in 1978. None of them could remotely be described as apostles of Thatcherism. Nor, indeed, could the essays that were to be found in The Journal of British Studies and the Journal of Modern History across the Atlantic in 1976 and 1977 respectively. One of Lawrence Stone's most distinguished postgraduate pupils at Princeton at that time  told me relatively recently that Stone had been unaware - 'blindsided' was his word - by developments in the United Kingdom. In Hill's case, despite the origins of 'revisionism' amongst former and current Oxford University-trained historians, he had been completely unaware of the developing reaction against his soft determinism and Marxist preconceptions. Well before the Conservative victory in the 1979 General Election in Britain, Hill and Stone had ceased to make the historiographical weather. Dismissing 'revisionism' as a form of antiquarian empiricism as Stone did or repeating the analytical claims of the 1960s as Hill tried to do simply did not work. Both had been sidelined by then.

 

Housman's Bookshop interview extract  earlier this month. 

"In the nineteen eighties, there's a very different reaction to his work. Right? You know, it's kind of belated in some ways, but it, you know, it it's a fierce reaction. Yeah. You know, what happened in that moment and and to him in particular, but also, you know, because I think it ties so closely with a political moment in Britain.

Braddick: The Thatcherite Yeah. Yeah. Moment Yeah. Yeah. Affected Hill incredibly.

Yeah. And it hit here also I I don't wanna talk about me, but I enter the story a little bit here because this is part of why I want to write the book that my elder brother and sister, read Hill at A level. I didn't. And when I went to university in 1981, I'm only four years younger three years younger than my elder brother. But when I went in '81, we were given Hill as this is the the wrong idea.

So Hill was the object of revision, not the oracle anymore. And it had happened really quickly, in the  early Thatcher years. And it's taken a long time to disentangle, I think, a political critique of Marxism and what was claimed to be a Marxist domination of the British universities. And as, you know, we hear it still, you know, British universities are centers of progressive heresy, to disentangle that from some technical problems with Hill's work, which are genuine. So I think, there is a generational effect in history writing."