PERIODISATION: THE EFFECTS OF DIVISION

Few people are more isolated from each other than near neighbours, and among the most effective barriers to historical research are those unwritten rules which have grown up to inhibit scholars from questioning the received orthodoxy in adjacent areas. The result has been the survival of some curiously obsolete opinions. Many historians of seventeenth-century England still seem to believe that Sir Lewis Namier or J. H. Plumb legitimately reigns over the succeeding century; eighteenth-century historians still too often assume a model of the preceding century drawn from the Marxist Old Guard, with perhaps a glance at the somewhat muted critique of it offered by the Old Hat liberals. Even the best scholars sometimes seem up to a quarter of a century in arrears in their understanding of the course of scholarship in adjoining periods which have been designated ‘someone else's’.

This does not mean that they are immune from influence, however. Wider movements in opinion show a remarkable ability to produce curiously similar phenomena in apparently unconnected areas of enquiry, and one such coincidence is the occasion of this survey. It took as its starting point the realisation that two debates had been proceeding together, not quite on parallel lines but with strong affinities and similarities, for a decade or more: the reinterpretations of the parliamentary history of the reigns of the first two Stuarts and of the first two Hanoverians.