Historians have approached Jacobitism in many different ways, and here they are divided up into three groups: the optimists, who assume that the Jacobites were an important political movement that could have succeeded; the pessimists, who accept they were important but doubt they could have succeeded; and the rejectionists, who regard time spent studying Jacobitism as time wasted. The chapter then outlines the historiography of the subject and describes new developments in the field, most notably the explosion of work on Irish Jacobitism, the role of women in the movement and Jacobitism in America and the empire.