The History of England from the Accession of James II

"Macaulay’s work was extremely important in a number of ways. It was incredibly well researched: He had an army of research assistants and used archival material that had hitherto been unutilised. The case that he made – writing very much in the shadow of the revolutionary events of the 1840s in Europe – was that what happened in England in 1688-9 was completely the opposite of what had happened in France in the 1790s, and was going on on the Continent in the 1840s. That is to say, it was a peaceful, consensual event, in which everybody agreed to get rid of an abusive monarch. Also, one of the central points he makes, in the third chapter of the book, is to dissociate the relationship between social and economic change and political change. He argues that before 1688 England was, by any measure, a backward place. It was the political change [of 1688-9] and the protection of liberty, which paved the way for British industrial development in the later 18th century. He was reversing the line of mid-19th century European radicals who argued that socio-economic change demanded political change, and arguing that it was in fact political change in Britain that gave rise to social and economic modernisation. Without question. Historical writing in the mid-19th century was much more narrative driven. It was expected that people would take a side. The discipline of history hadn’t been consolidated yet, so the tone of objectivity that we’re all supposed to have now was not the standard. That’s something that happens after the writings of Leopold von Ranke in the late 19th century. It does make it quite easy to dismiss Macaulay, simply because of the rhetorical flourishes. Nevertheless, it’s a book that needs to be taken very seriously. Macaulay did an amazing amount of research, and while he’s taking a side and while he’s quite passionate, his arguments are well considered, sophisticated and well thought out. I was always amazed, doing research for my own book on 1688 – I’d think I’d found a manuscript nobody had seen before, and frequently Macaulay had seen it.I did, I hope, find some things that he hadn’t seen, but it was remarkable how thorough his research was. He was and remains controversial. Now scholars criticise him for not discussing the Empire at all in his history, when this was so manifestly important in the 18th century. There’s no question he was a controversial figure. He was simultaneously a publishing historian and quite an active politician. He took positions and he defended them. The book does, as you say, have novelistic tendencies, but it also reads a bit like a lawyer’s brief for a particular point of view. There’s no attempt to be impartial. I think Marx’s quibble with Macaulay was that he got the social and economic history of Britain completely wrong. Marx saw the Revolution of 1688-9 as a bourgeois revolution, a transformative event, so he disagreed interpretively with Macaulay. A lot of what Macaulay said, especially about the socio-economic history, hasn’t stood the test of time. Also, the overall interpretation of some of the things that he described I disagree with, and others disagree with too. That said, it’s a remarkable testament to a historian that we’re talking about his book in a serious way almost two full centuries after it was written. One can only aspire to such longevity! Without question. He’s not only writing in the context of the revolutions on the Continent, he’s also writing in critical dialogue with the Chartists in Britain. He would say that the Chartists had it all wrong, and that their attempts to promote radical changes in the British constitution were wrong-headed. There’s no question he was trying to make a point. That said, as with many other historians, there’s a sense in which the way Macaulay understood the past tended to inform his contemporary political commitments, as much as his contemporary political commitments informed the way he understood the past. I don’t think he’s just trying to impose a particular vision on the past. It’s a dialectical relationship."