Surveys the development of English historiography to the 1980s, focusing on the distinction between literary (i.e., politically minded, aristocratic, and/or ‘amateur’) and professional (postwar, specialized university) work. New social history, inspired by Namierite prosopography, sociology, and so on is prematurely seen to have failed: Kenyon didn’t account for ideology. As the Marxists and the Annalistes never much figured in the literary specialists’ treatment of the ancient constitution or the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, so their long march through the schools was not yet evident.

Raleigh was the first to discern political uses of antiquarian writing. Whiggish history commenced with Hume, whom Macaulay sought to eclipse. The contemporaneous opposition was not Voltaire’s philosophical reflections of universal relevance, but Ranke’s emphasis on re-creation of events and ideas. William Stubbs initiated premodern academic study at Oxford over 1866-84, unusually for his time working back into the medieval era to discern the origins of the modern British nation. English professionals (i.e., Oxbridge) trailed Paris, Göttingen, and Vienna. Early 20th-century practitioners were infatuated with scientific history, lacked degrees to rival the continental schools, and were already becoming overspecialized even as new institutions such as Manchester sprung up. Albert Pollard of University College Lond was the era’s driving force.

Trevelyan was perhaps the last of the aristocratic literary men. Elton, co-star with Namier of the postwar era, was England’s most Germanic practitioners; curiously both were immigrants. The former opposed conceptual history; history is the only truly empirical discipline, in which the author starts not with a thesis or paradigm to test but criticizes evidence, asks questions, examines authoritative claims – especially when the subject moves from narrow intellectual concerns (sexuality) to political matters that concern all. Plumb contended the point of undergraduate history is to prepare for public service and statesmanship, to embrace ideas and policies, the better see through forthcoming events. The quality of an age is not the work of the common man, though they must labor namelessly to support it.