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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 February 2009
Because of paradoxes which lie in the very nature of historical knowledge, our branch of scholarship was two centuries late in accomplishing the equivalent of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Only in the nineteenth century was it possible to establish, and to put into general practice, those techniques of discovery and verification which enable the student really to feel his feet. And only after this could the subject itself take the leap into that course of ever-accelerating development which the scientist had achieved at an earlier date. In the 1850's the young Acton was entranced by the tremendous awakening of the historical consciousness that had occurred in Germany. He was exultant because history had come to preside over so many branches of thought and activity. But the experience that really changed his outlook, and was to hold the prior place in his memory, was a later one—the result of that wider opening of the archives which took place in the region of the year 1860. This was the key that seemed to unlock the last drawer, making men feel that, now at last, they could really get down to the study of history. We may wonder whether anybody will ever again have quite the exhilaration of those who had the run of the newlyopened archives. A quick hunt through the papers would at least give them a story to tell, and they might hope soon to expose the things which governments or churches had managed to hide in days when significant secrets could be kept.
page 159 note 1 Cambridge University Library, Add. 4908: ‘This has been really the beginning of history’. Add. 5011: ‘That H[istory] is only now begun.’ Add. 4931: ‘You had the secrets of archives without the regulations, the difficulty in admission etc. History till then not scientific.’
page 160 note 1 Sybel, H. von, ‘Pariser Studien’, Vorträge und Abhandlungen (Munich and Leipzig, 1897), p. 365. Cf. Acton, C.U.L. Add. 4929, 33: ‘Sybel says that he was the first to consult the papers of the C[ommittee] of P[ublic] Safety. Faris had used them before him for his MS. de l'an III'.Google Scholar
page 160 note 2 On Acton's MS. work see Butterfield, H., Man on his Past (Cambridge, 1955), PP. 80–81Google Scholar; watkin, A. and Butterfield, H., ‘Gasquet and the Acton-Simpson correspondence’, Cambridge Historical Journal, x (1950), pp. 99–105Google Scholar; and the ample further material in Conzemius, V., Döllinger-Acton Briefwechsel, i (Munich, 1963), p. 304 and pp. 353–566 passim. Cf. C.U.L. Add. 4392: ‘In 1864 … Antonelli sent me permission to use the secret archives. I obtained copies of some thousands of documents.’ In Add. 5011 Acton writes: ‘In the last thirty years I have tried to collect my information from more than 30 archives and public libraries.’Google Scholar
page 161 note 1 H. Butterfield, op. cit., p.85.
page 161 note 2 In an article ‘On the possibility of a strictly scientific treatment of universal history’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., n.s., iii (1874), p. 391, Dr G. G. Zerffi points out that, assuming the Mongols average 83 cubic inches of brain, while the Aryans average 92 cubic inches, the‘difference of intellectual power’ between 400 millions of Mongols and 400 millions of Aryans will be 3,600 millions of cubic inches of brain—the ‘intellectual force’ of which must be ‘immense’ and must have a great effect on ‘historical development’.Google Scholar
page 161 note 3 Acton, Historical Essays and Studies (London, 1919), p. 378. In C.U.L. Add. 4929F there is a list of 17 names under the title ‘The phalanx of historians at Berlin’.Google Scholar
page 162 note 1 Schieder, T., ‘Die deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft im Spiegel der Historische Zeitschrift’, Hundert Jahre Historische Zeitschrift, 1859–1959, ed. Schieder, T. (Munich, 1959) Pp. 3–5, 54 ff.Google Scholar
page 163 note 1 History of England, ed. Firth, C. H., i (illustrated ed., London, 1913), pp. 22–23:‘There is no country in which historians have been so much under the influence of the present… Both [parties] readily found [in history] what they sought; and both absolutely refused to see anything but what they sought.’Google Scholar
page 163 note 2 Usher, R. G., A Critical Study of the Historical Method of Samuel Rawson Gardiner (St Louis, 1915), p. 10.Google Scholar
page 163 note 3 English Historians on the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1968), especially chap. 16, ‘Conclusions’.Google Scholar
page 163 note 4 Stephens, H. M., A History of the French Revolution, i (London, 1886), Preface, p. xvii.Google Scholar
page 163 note 5 Creighton, M., History of the Papacy, iii (London, 1887), Preface, p. v: ‘I have striven to treat it [this period] with the same sobriety as any other period.…I have attempted to found a sober view of the time in a sober criticism of the authorities.’Google Scholar
page 164 note 1 Browning, Oscar, Memories of Sixty Years (London, 1910), pp. 277,293–94, 307, 310, 313.Google Scholar
page 164 note 2 Browning, O., The Despatches of Earl Gower (Cambridge, 1885), Pre. face, p. xi. Cf. p. xii: ‘Copies of English official correspondence have during recent years been sent in large quantities to Germany, and we are in danger of having our conduct in those critical circumstances described and judged by our enemies rather than by our friends.’Google Scholar
page 164 note 3 Browning, O., England and Napoleon in 1803 (London, 1887), Preface, p. xi. Browning again points out, p. x: ‘We not only neglect to place our case before Europe, but we allow it to be stated by foreigners.’Google Scholar
page 164 note 4 Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., n.s., xviii (1904), pp. 12, 26Google Scholar. Cf. ibid., xx (1906), P. Ashley, ‘The study of nineteenth-century history’, pp. 133–40.
page 165 note 2 Ruville, Albert von, Die Auflösung des preussisch-englischen Bündnisses im Jahre 1762 (Berlin, 1892) and succeeding works. Ruville used also the Public Record Office.Google Scholar
page 165 note 3 At the opening of the Preface to his Great Britain and Hanover (London, 1899)Google Scholar, Ward explains that he was unable to visit the Hanoverian archives. In the preface to The Electress Sophia and the Hanoverian Succession (London, Paris, New York, 1903) he writes, p. 4: ‘I desire to offer my cordial thanks to Dr R. Doebner, Director of the Hanover State Archives, for the assistance given me on the present as on previous occasions, in the course of my studies’. But he seems to have been concerned to secure museum pieces for a highly illustrated work, and what he specifies on page v are the copy of the Act of Settlement as transmitted to Hanover, and facsimiles of the handwriting of the Electress Sophia, of Sophia Dorothea and of Königsmarck. In the second edition (London, 1909), pp. 447–552, he prints much of the correspondence between Princess Sophia Dorothea and Count Konigsmarck, copies of which had been supplied to him by the Royal and State Archives in Berlin.Google Scholar
page 166 note 1 ‘The study of foreign policy (nineteenth century)’, American Historical Review, xxx (1928), p. 736.Google Scholar
page 166 note 2 Listed in my article, ‘Tendencies in historical study in England’, Irish Historical Studies, iv (1945), p. 211n. In 1924 the closed period had been extended to 1878.Google Scholar
page 166 note 3 Ashley, W. J., Surveys Historic and Economic (London, 1900), p. 85.Google Scholar
page 166 note 4 Lecky, W E. H., History of England in the Eighteenth Century, iii (London, 1882), mentions p. 277, n I, Board of Trade papers at the Record Office; p. 295, n 1, Plantation papers, often quoted from this point, but quoted from a published selection; and p. 243, n.2, Wilkes MSS at the British Museum. In iv (1882), p. 224, n.2, etc. are one or two references to Grafton's MS. Autobiography. But it is from v (1887), pp. 224, etc. that diplomatic papers from the Record Office, and e.g. vi (1887), p. 12, etc. from the French Foreign Office, are used—places, in the neighbourhood of the French Revolution, where Oscar Browning may have stimulated or helped Lecky (see O. Browning, Memories of Sixty Years, p. 293).Google Scholar
page 167 note 1 Romier, Lucien, Le Royaume de Catherine de Médicis, i (Paris, 1922). The ‘Preface’ to this book carrying the title ‘Les Témoinages’, is an interesting essay on what is required if the historian is to escape from an inherited framework of narrative and seeks to construct something more authentic. See, especially, p. ix: ‘L'histoire des guerres de religion … n’a pas été renouvelée dans son ensemble depuis Jacques-August de Thou. La raison principale en est que les auteurs…ne surent se degager de la methode…qui consistait a interpréter les documents à la lumière des textes narratifs…“relations” ou “memoires”’. Romier goes on to say that‘“l'insatiable desir de tout publier”, que l’on vit se manifester vers 1830, nous a légueé de vastes recueils’ but that these, and, still more, any publication of selected documents, might leave the historian still the prisoner of routine, unless care was taken to use them to break the older narrative tradition.Google Scholar
page 167 note 2 M. Creighton, op. cit., i, p. viii: ‘What I have found in MS. was not of much importance.’
page 168 note 1 Ben-Israel, H., English Historians on the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 250–54 on Acton's ‘reconstruction of the flight to Varennes’. Towards the end of his life Acton was preparing a Romanes lecture which he had been invited to give in Oxford, and amongst the materials for this were notes or drafts of another piece of work (largely about Macaulay) which he somewhere calls ‘my French lecture’. Amongst these notes, C.U.L. Add. 4931, is a comment on S. R. Gardiner which could properly be applied to a good deal of the narrative writing in the nineteenth century. After saying that ‘Gardiner dépasse ses devanciers par ses recherches’, he writes: ‘Il aime à former son récit [i.e. at any given moment in the narrative] sur une seule autorité. Il ne combine pas nombre de texts—tourmente et compare et combine. [Il est] sÛr et sage; ne paraît pas toujours aussi profond et abundant’.Google Scholar
page 169 note 1 Gras, N. S. B., ‘The Rise and Development of Economic History’ Economic History Review, i (1927–1928), pp. 14–17.Google Scholar
page 170 note 1 Knies, Karl, Die politische Oekonomie vom Standpunkte der geschichtlichen Methode (Brunswick, 1853), p. 10 also speaks of the ‘epochemachenden Umschwungs’, produced by Spittler and Heeren (both of Göttingen) especially the Ideen of the latter.Google Scholar
page 170 note 2 The ‘manifesto’ from Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die Staatswirthschaft. Nach geschichtlicher Methode (Göttingen, 1843) is translated in W. J. Ashley, ‘Roscher's Programme of 1843’, Surveys pp. 31–37. Roscher made a spirited case for ancient history also in Klio, i (Göttingen, 1842), Vorrede, p. viii. ‘Die alte Geschichte ist für sich schon verstandlich, während sie zum völligen Verstàndnisse der neuern immer vorausgesetzt werden muss. Sie hat den grossen Vortheil, schon beendigt zu sein, also ganz übersehen werden zu können, während die neueren Völker…noch in voller Kraft fortleben. Unzählige Dinge, deren Beurtheilung in der neuern Geschichte immer noch Parteifrage ist, liegen dem Alterthumsforscher klar und zweifellos vor. In demselben Verhältnisse, wie der Länderraum der alten Geschichte begränzter, gleichartiger ist, und die ganze Entwicklung, namentlich durch das Aufeinanderfolgen der politisch bedeutenden Völker, einfacher erscheint, sind auch die Quellen leichter zu bewältigen.’ In his Ansichten der Volks-wirthschaft aus dem geschichtlichen Standepunkte (Leipzig and Heidelberg, 1861), the first paper is ‘Ueber das Verhaltniss der Nationalokonomik zum klassischen Alterthume’ (a work dated 1849). It praises Thucydides page 7 as a ‘Kenner der okonomischen Angelegenheiten’, and says, page 9, ‘in alien acht Buchern seines Werkes, soweit ich sehe, kein staatswirthschaftlicher Irrthum zu finden ist’.Google Scholar
page 171 note 1 Ashley, W. J., ‘Economic History in University Studies’, Econ. Hist. Rev., i (1927–1928), p. 3, ‘Google ScholarThe study of economic history arose first of all in Germany among those economists who revolted against what they called the “old” Economics [The] “new” Economics…was to be “a doctrine of the economic development of nations”—that is to say, it was to consist of the largest generalizations to which Economic History should itself arrive. I believe I used language not unlike that myself long years ago.’ In an Inaugural Lecture entitled, ‘What is Political Science?’, delivered in Toronto 9 Nov. 1888 and quoted in Ashley, Anne, William James Ashley, a Life (London, 1932), p. 50,Google Scholar Ashley spoke of ‘the great achievement of German thought in the last fifty years—the discovery and application of the Historical Method’. He continued: ‘The Historical Method had already transformed the study of law when it passed to Political Economy. It began to be seen that economic principles could not claim to be true at all times and places.…It will have been seen that I regard these recent tendencies with sympathy. The method I mean is the method of direct observation and generalisation from facts, whether past or present.’ Ashley's Inaugural Lecture at Harvard, 1893, Surveys, pp. 2–3, clearly announces a change of view. ‘It would be idle to deny that the hopes which were entertained by the younger men of the “historical” or “inductive” school in Germany some 20 years ago, and by…English writers, have not hitherto been realized. They looked for a complete and rapid transformation of economic science…aiming…at the construction of a body of general propositions…[but] during this period the historical movement has been slowly pushing its way into its own true field of work…’; p. 6. ‘…the leaders of the school are throwing themselves into detailed research and feeling their way toward independent historical construction…[e.g.] Schmoller…’. For similar transitions in the ideas of Cunningham and Alfred Marshall see p. 172, n.4. In his Introduction (1888), p. 15, Ashley says: ‘It was owing to the work that Thorold Rogers did at Oxford…that the study of Economic History came to be regarded as a department of Economics.’ Thompson, J. W., A History of Historical Writing, ii (New York, 1942), p. 430, calls attention to Rogers's statement: ‘the laws which govern prices will, I think, be seen more clearly in these medieval records than they could be in a modern Price Current’.Google Scholar
page 172 note 1 William Cunningham, Why had Roscher so little influence in England? Publns. of American Academy of Political and Social Sciences No. 141[894]. The work to which Cunningham refers is ‘Zur Geschichte der eng- lischen Volkswirthschaftslehre’, Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, iii (1851). On page 3 Roscher put the ‘golden age’ of English ‘volkswirthschaftliche Literatur’ between 1742 and 1823.
page 172 note 2 ‘German Schools of History’, Historical Essays and Studies, p. 388. Cf. ibid., p. 391: ‘The service done by his enormous influence to political economy…is far less than his services to the cause of intelligible history. A large number of the most valuable works on England proceed from the movement he has promoted.’
page 172 note 3 Cunningham, Audrey, William Cunningham, Teacher and Priest (London, 1950), pp. 63–66. Marshall had apparently made matters worse by cutting down Cunningham's lectures on economic history and making him devote one term a year to political economy. In a revision of the Cambridge Tripos in 1889 Cunningham felt called upon to make a public stand for economic history.Google Scholar
page 172 note 4 In Why had Roscher so little influence in England?, p. 17, Cunningham referred to ‘the reiterated criticism of the real or historical school by Professor Marshall and his disciples.’ In an Inaugural Lecture delivered at Harvard after his appointment to the first of all chairs in Economic History, Ashley said (Surveys, p. 4): ‘Professor Marshall so clearly realises that the understanding of modern conditions is assisted by a consideration of their genesis.’ Marshall's Principles of Economics (London, 1890)Google Scholarcontained a sketch of the economic history of Europe, but when he failed to correct in a second edition some errors that Cunningham had pointed out, the latter produced ‘The Perversion of Economic History’, Economic Journal, ii (1892) where he confesses, p. 492Google Scholar, that in the first edition of his Growth of English Industry an commerce (Cambridge, 1882), p. 389Google Scholar, he himself had written that ‘the history of eighteenth-century England could be conveniently studied as a series of illustrations of modern economic theory.’ He adds: ‘I know better now’, and he states, page 493, that one cannot have economic laws which describe the action of economic causes at all times and in all places. Part of this article is a criticism of Marshall, and part is a criticism of Thorold Rogers. In ‘A Reply’, Ibid., p. 507, Marshall writes: ‘My chapter on The Growth of Economic Science insists that modern economists are learning from biology that if the subject matter of a science passes through different states of development, the laws of one stage will seldom apply without modification to others’. (Principles, Bk 1, chap, iv, para. 7.)
page 173 note 1 ‘Sir John Clapham, 1873–1946’, Cambridge Historical Journal, viii, pt 3 (1946). The letter is dated 13 Nov. 1897, and is in C.U.L. Add. 6443. I said loc. Cit. that the letters in this box had been bought from Sotheby's, and this was based on the letter of 24 March 1914 in which Sir A.W. Ward recommended their purchase by the Cambridge University Library. There is a catalogue which proves however that the letters were bought at Hodgson's sale 27 March 1914—a point which I owe to the Anderson Room at the C.U.L.Google Scholar
page 173 note 2 Below, G. von, Die deutscke Gesckichtschreibung von den Befreiungskriegenbis zu unsern Tagen, 2nd edn (Munich and Berlin, 1924), pp. 161–178, ‘Die deutsche wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Literatur bis zur Mitte des 19 Jahrhunderts’, especially pp. 173 ff.Google Scholar
page 175 note 1 Schäfer, Dietrich, Das eigentliche Arbeitsgebiet der Geschichte (Jena, 1888)Google Scholar. Gothein, E., Die Aufgaben der Kulturgeschichte (Leipzig, 1889). Dealing with Ranke on pp. 50–52, Gothein mentions his writing on Colbert's administration, the arts under Sixtus V, and literature under Louis XIV, and adds: ‘Vielleicht wird die Zukunft Rankes Geschichtschreibung als das Zwischenglied erfassen zwischen politischer und Kulturhistorie.’Google Scholar
page 176 note 1 Acton, op. cit., p. 391.
page 176 note 2 H. Butterfield, Man on his Past, p. 66.
page 176 note 3 Ashley, ‘On the Study of Economic History’ (written in 1899), Surveys, p. 28.
page 177 note 1 Amongst the mass of controversial literature which appeared on this subject there is therefore a brief English outline of his ideas in his book, What is History? (New York and London, 1905).Google Scholar
page 177 note 2 G. von Below, Die Deutsche Geschichtschreibung, pp. 161 ff. discusses the similarity between Marx's general view and that of Georg Wilhelm von Raumer in 1851, holding that Raumer was independent of Marx. In a further section, ‘Das Verhältnis des Marxismus zur deutschen wirtschaftsgeschichtlichen Literatur bei seinem ersten Auftauchen’, pp. 179–94, he tries to show the dependence of Marxism on the German ‘Romantics’.
page 178 note 1 Pirenne, Henri, Histoire del'europe des invasions au XVI siècle (5 th edn, Brussels, 1936).Google Scholar
page 178 note 2 Wolter, H., Ordericus Vitalis (Wiesbaden, 1955), pp. 149–54.Google Scholar
page 179 note 1 The Historical Association, 1906–1956 (London, 1957), pp. 22–23.Google Scholar
page 179 note 2 Die Kriegsschuldfrage (1923–28), continued as Berliner Monatshefte (1929–39).
page 179 note 3 i (1920), Editorial Foreword, p. xii.
page 180 note 1 Smith, Page, The Historian and History (New York, 1964), p. 198.Google Scholar
page 180 note 2 ‘Professor Temperley on the Origins of the War of 1914’, Cambridge Historical Journal, ix (1948), pp. 251–56Google Scholar. Hinsley, F. H., ‘Reflections on the history of international relations’, A Century of Conflict… Essays for A. J. P. Taylor, ed. Gilbert, Martin (London, 1966), pp. 24–25, calls attention to the difference between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries in the prevailing attitude and sentiment in regard to war; but his idea is capable of further development and has subtle implications for the period between 1914 and 1968.Google Scholar
page 181 note 1 In i and ii they had stated that no objections had been raised to the publication of what the editors judged necessary. From iii, Foreword, p. 8 (dated June 1928) to x part i (1936) the reference to possible resignation occurred. It was omitted from the final publication, x part ii (1938).
page 181 note 2 The documents (at Windsor) had been copied for Spender, J. A., who printed four of the letters in his Life of H. H. Asquith, ii (London, 1932), pp. 79–82.Google Scholar
page 181 note 3 Butterfield, H., ‘George Peabody Gooch’, Contemporary Review, ccxiii (1968), p. 228.Google Scholar
page 182 note 1 Temperley, H., Research and Modern History (London, 1930), p. 11.Google Scholar
page 183 note 1 Butterfield, H., ‘Delays and paradoxes in the development of historiography’, Studies in international history …presented to W. Norton Medlicott, ed. Bourne, K. and Watt, D. C. (London, 1967), pp. 2–3, 12–13Google Scholar; and ‘Narrative history and the spade-work behind it’, History, 1iii (1968), pp. 169–70, 176–78. See also, in n.1, p. 167 above, the views of Romier on the rôle of De Thou, etc., in setting the framework for the French Wars of Religion.Google Scholar