Tripos problems seem to come to the surface late at night when all one’s ideas have a false brightness.
Jean McLachlanFootnote 1
Any colleague in the Cambridge History Faculty will see at once that I am profoundly unqualified to celebrate this important anniversary. Your kind invitation therefore leaves me both grateful and discomfited.Footnote 2 I never sat the Tripos. I was never a member of the Faculty. I therefore played no part in discussions about the Tripos and could not even consult the archive about them, for Data Protection reasons, relating to any years after 1992. Many historians sitting in front of me or reading this text have their own memories and perceptions of Cambridge History over the last half century and could speak about the Tripos with infinitely more authority and knowledge than can I. But the Invitation Committee consoled me with the hope that this lecture should not be an inward-looking account of the curriculum but rather an outward-looking perspective on this place and the distinctiveness of the Tripos when set in a wider context. So if the mention of locations other than Cambridge occurs too often here and stretches patience, then that at least is not my fault. All I can do is to apologize for inevitable errors of perception and a congenital edginess – what David Cannadine recalled as my turn towards the ‘bracing’.
This published recension of the original lecture is to some extent decaffeinated but I do wonder also whether I should not have decaffeinated my title. It was intended as a riff, as Europeanists may have sensed, on a well-known book published in 1984 called The peculiarities of German history.Footnote 3 It was meant to evoke a pleasing echo. Since suggesting it, I now note that the thinking of those authors emerged from a publication in German with the more disturbing title, Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung, Myths of German Historical Writing, which reminded me, too late, that Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn had resolved rather to extinguish peculiarity than propose it.Footnote 4 Maybe Cambridge History does not have any peculiarities? And then there is that phrase, ‘Cambridge History’. Is there such a thing? There is much history taught in Cambridge; there are many historians. But do they inhabit the same carapace, some invisible tent marked by collective personality? Should we not be speaking of the peculiarities of Cambridge historians of which material abounds? I see the argument but choose to go in a different direction. I want to contend that it is not meaningless to speak of ‘Cambridge History’ understood, less as a series of prescriptions or protocols, than as a social memory and acknowledgement of legacy, the one now stretching back over a hundred and fifty years. And I want further to contend that the theatre of memory and legacy, the place of its enactment, operation, and frontier, has been nothing other than the Tripos itself. Curricula do not normally do this. But the Tripos has been, since at least the 1920s, ‘always already’: the only phrase of Heidegger’s I have ever understood. The syllabus and examining arrangements encased in the word ‘Tripos’ – reflected after 1897 and until recently in a preliminary year, Part One and Part Two – has been for a hundred years a matter of heritage and custom as much as conscious contrivance. Cambridge historians, critics, and reformers always come to something already made, already organic, already infused with time-depth. The tabula seems never rasa.
Its historiography, as opposed to its operation, began in 1947 with a good piece written by Jean Olivia McLachlan, friend and confidante of Herbert Butterfield, and published in the then Cambridge Historical Journal.Footnote 5 Her investigation of the origins of the Tripos noticeably informed the 100th anniversary of the Tripos in 1973 celebrated in a lecture by ‘Kitson’ whom many here will remember.Footnote 6 He dwelled on significant shifts in the organization and teaching of the Tripos – not least its division into two Parts in 1897 – but shied away from the miasma of reform discussions and controversies, ‘unlovely detritus of obsolete curricula, superannuated regulations and unmemorable debates’.Footnote 7 He also left beyond focus the non-Cambridge world apart from identifying the example of William Stubbs as a significant Oxford force in stimulating the creation of the Tripos. Stubbs had brought to the Regius Chair of Modern History at Oxford between 1866 and 1884 a sense of ‘scientific’ history with a German flavour in his monumental three volumes on English constitutional history which became a landmark for the ancient universities wishing to introduce history as a serious subject in the study of modernity rather than ancient history studied through Greek and Roman authors.Footnote 8 Stubbs reflected throughout on the philosophical basis, which for him meant the Christian basis, of historical work. Kitson did not. And because he had little interest in the theory or philosophy of history, he omitted, too, any sense of the epistemology on which the subject ultimately rests. By doing so, moreover, he occluded an important peculiarity in what Cambridge History was about. In the other ancient universities, one detects a strong streak of epistemological positivism – the doctrine that it is a necessary and sufficient definition of historical investigation to see it as seeking ‘knowledge of the past’ where the past has a reliable fixity and the ‘knowledge’ appears sieved and granular, the bringing to mind of memorized ‘facts’. It is important that Cambridge began elsewhere, with different questions and assumptions. Adolphus Ward (1837–1924), Master of Peterhouse and stained with Manchester positivism, had insisted on ‘historical power’ and not capacious memory in his students. John Robert Seeley (1834–95) also began elsewhere in his call for ‘larger considerations’ in thinking about the past. That call turned to a degree on empire and the need to understand its significance; but it also heralded a swing away from historian as litérateur and leaned towards a new scientism. It leaned, too, towards the German school: he had written a life of Baron vom Stein, inspirator of Berlin’s new university in 1810.Footnote 9 Seeley’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History in Cambridge came as a shock for an audience more tuned to Charles Kingsley, his predecessor. An overheard remark at the end of the lecture – ‘I did not believe we should be regretting Kingsley so soon’ – spoke to more than bafflement. It spoke equally to religion since Seeley had followed Tübingen’s David Strauss (1808–74), whose Leben Jesu (1835) had scandalized the German lands, in writing his own life of Christ from a humanistic standpoint despite his evangelical upbringing. Turning the title into Latin did not conceal its attack on pre-modernity and Ecce Homo (1867) caused a similar stir in Britain.Footnote 10 Oddly, William Gladstone, prime minister from 1868, liked the book despite his daily eucharist, and appointed Seeley to the Cambridge Chair in the following year. That pervasive Christian and Cambridge tradition continued to make itself felt in Lord Acton’s well-known remark, recycled by Butterfield, that the subject must never be a burden on the memory but rather an illumination of the soul. Butterfield himself deployed a different noun, ‘electricity’, in his requirement of both students and colleagues but its impact on Cambridge History was similar. The Tripos should test something other than the reproduction of memorized material.
Conceiving the Tripos as a coded narrative of intentionality strikes through the extensive files relating to syllabus discussions in the Faculty archive.Footnote 11 One feels in reading through them the degree to which discussions often take a wide view of pedagogical objectives rather than the small-mindedness which academics tend to display when their interests seem under threat by change. Some imperatives remain consistent: the determination to maximize choice within a coherent whole and the clear perception of progression as an intellectual requirement within the Tripos from the Preliminary Examination to Part Two. In addition, discussion often centred on another Cambridge peculiarity: the commitment to maintaining traffic between this Tripos and others to allow a flow between an external Part One followed by a Part Two in the Historical Tripos. This meant that a student might wish to take a subject housed outside the Faculty, pursue it to the end of the second year and then switch into the Historical Tripos for Part Two, a device regularly followed and perhaps especially by entrants into Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic – another unique constituent of Cambridge History – which has its home in the Faculty of English.
How to achieve those objectives naturally caused conflict and controversy down the years but the commitment to keeping sight of the cumulative point of the Tripos is never far away. One suggestive strand of the argument was voiced by Walter Ullmann (1910–83) who came to the Tripos as an outsider in a double sense. He was not British and he had read Law, not History, in Vienna. An austere medievalist who taught, among others in Cambridge, Janet ‘Jinty’ Nelson and Rosamund McKitterick, he brought not only the study of law to the Tripos but also the papacy and medieval political thought.Footnote 12 He is reported as maintaining the view, moreover, that the Tripos should be seen as a concealed history of ideas, not in the form of courses in intellectual history championed with such distinction by Quentin Skinner and John Dunn, but rather as a facility that allowed students to form and follow their own ideas across space and time. The Tripos allowed, and must continue to allow, candidates to pick up an idea – feudalism, disease, sovereignty, women, class, law, nationalism, war, empire, race, whatever interested them – and run with it across space and time through their courses. In that sense, students could make their own Tripos unfettered by rubric.Footnote 13
For all that, by 1973 Kitson had become disturbed by the direction in which he took the Tripos to be going. He himself had not opposed reform; he had chaired committees considering it and had endorsed certain kinds of change so long as it did not lead to fragmentation of the subject and its teaching, especially in the presentation of English history to which he brought unique passion. He took to heart a stipulation announced in the formation of a Historical Tripos in 1874 – ‘an adequate knowledge of the whole of English History has been made essential’Footnote 14 – and enshrined in Cambridge as elsewhere in the British university system in three compulsory and sequential papers in English (not British) history. Yet it was Kitson himself who proposed a wide-ranging discussion of the Tripos in 1961, one that attempted to promote some of the more radical shifts of our period. And because that discussion prefigured so many of the Tripos conversations over the next sixty years and down to the ‘new’ Tripos of 2022, it merits a pause. A group of Cambridge dons, among whom Peter Laslett was a leading voice, had proposed to the Faculty Board the need for a reform of the Tripos in view of a rapidly changing post-war world. Kitson suggested in November 1961 that a committee be established to reconsider the entire structure and content of the Tripos and bring proposals back to the Board. Eight men (always men in this period) constituted the committee and in their interests and experience they comprised a serious slice of Faculty opinion in their chosen periods and specialisms.Footnote 15 They met a dozen times and in their report repeated the underlying ethos implied in the Cambridge syllabus which meant that the Tripos should ‘in some degree match the intellectual development which a man [sic] might be expected to reach’ while simultaneously offering ‘a progressive broadening of choice’.Footnote 16 So the first year would be given over to three ‘outline’ papers in English, European, and economic history, taught through lectures at an introductory level. Part One would see a reduction in English history to one period rather than the traditional three and prosecute it in two more-advanced papers, one in the familiar constitutional history, the second in economic and social history, following an avowed ‘trend of modern research, with its emphasis on the social relations of both constitutional and economic institutions’.Footnote 17 A wider group of options would then follow, including a controversial ‘Expansion of Europe’ course which Jack Gallagher wanted to incorporate at this stage to prepare the ground for more demanding elements later. Part Two would introduce a ‘1500 rule’, as it came to be known, ensuring that candidates must offer at least one paper across that divide, mainly to protect medieval studies. ‘Theories of the Modern State’ would stay: everybody wanted it. But there would now be an ‘Area Studies’ element, significantly widening the geography of the Tripos beyond Britain and Europe. The long essay, a feature of the Tripos for many years, would go and be replaced with ‘General Historical Questions’, a provision that would have a sad fate. In addition, there would be the possibility of submitting an optional dissertation in addition to other courses but not replacing any of them: first glance of a spectre that would hover for the next sixty years. The Board hated all of it and most of these provisions never happened in the short term apart from the short-lived 1500 rule. Even so, the tenor of future conversations altered in the face of this rethinking.
Perhaps that failure played into Kitson’s concerns. He believed that the peculiarity of the Tripos, its central virtue, resided in its comprehensiveness. Whatever courses of study the curriculum required, they should present a view of development and continuity: this was a string never to be untuned. Through the 1960s, however, discordant sounds had emerged from Tripos reform. Ancient History had gone as a Tripos component, except as an option, in 1954. In 1961, one period of English history became, as we have seen, sufficient in Part One. Then came the 1966 revisions breaking down still further continuities and raising the threat of salami-slicing the expansive periods sometimes referred to within the Faculty as ‘envelope courses’ and ‘baggy courses’. For Kitson, who did not include them in his review of a hundred years’ teaching, the proposals envisaged in 1966 exploded a bomb that blew the Tripos into the air (his phrase).Footnote 18 On the verge of retirement in 1973 he sensed from this cumulative radiation that the future promised only ‘fragments’ as the shrapnel returned to earth. That was certainly not a Cambridge peculiarity. By the end of the 1990s Oxford had also undergone a similar process and produced from medievalist John Maddicott a lament for lost coherence far more pessimistic than anything voiced by Kitson.Footnote 19 He had been right, on the other hand, to imply that continuous English history had not (yet) been abolished elsewhere and he saw no need to change it.
I
Kitson passed too readily over the resilience of legacy; and the legacies ran deep. Consider a few of them. In its origin, the Tripos had forged a close connection with Law, an important point because the thrust of Cambridge History carried its imprimatur long after the Law and History Tripos divorced in 1874. Again, one senses a German comparator because in the German universities the presence of law as a foundation for historical thought became ubiquitous in the generation of Friedrich von Savigny and its ‘historical school of jurisprudence’ and especially of two later scholars, Georg Waitz, known to Stubbs in Oxford, and Otto von Gierke, known to Maitland in Cambridge: authors very different in their legal theory but united in their demand for an historical sensibility.Footnote 20 But the attempted fusion of History and Law in Cambridge went wrong very quickly, once ‘that arrangement ha[d] not been found in all respects satisfactory’, not least because the historians wanted to ask their own, rather different questions, and accelerated the provision of an independent History curriculum;Footnote 21 yet, even then, the continuing presence of Law, not least in the Downing professor who had and has claims to have been the greatest legal historian in the land, firmed the grip of constitutional history, on which Frederic William Maitland had written as well as ‘Pollock and Maitland’, their monumental history of Law.Footnote 22 That tradition of teaching the history of the English constitution persisted long after it had suffered suffocation elsewhere outside Oxford.
A second thread accompanied it. Economic history in Cambridge had achieved distinction since its founding, principally by Revd William Cunningham.Footnote 23 Developed as a major Cambridge presence through its first Chair-holder, J. H. Clapham (1928) and persisting in Eileen Power and Munia Postan, it acquired further weight through the research and writing of Charles Wilson, Donald Coleman, Brian Outhwaite, and others. Like the medievalists, on the other hand, economic historians felt fragile and demanded some reassurance that they would not be assimilated into general history. They wanted to be both separate and compulsory. For many years, they achieved precisely that, from the decision to continue the desired separation in 1954 through to the attenuation of economic history in most syllabi as social history burgeoned and cliometrics did not. For just as constitutional history became dominated by lawyers rather than historians, perhaps especially in the United States, so economic history retreated into Departments of Economics as number-crunching and theoretical modelling came to dominate. There was a period of optimism. ‘For the economic and social historian, what cannot be quantified is not worth knowing.’Footnote 24 In Cambridge, as elsewhere, economic history retained its strength but relocated in ‘Centres’ which offered cross-pollination with the new social history. Where one might have expected to see a Department of Economic History thrive, only a Department of Economics tended now to do so: UCL, Essex, Kent, Lancaster among many. Even in the northern powerhouses of economic growth – Manchester, Leeds – the same story ensued.Footnote 25 Economic history remained in its social embrace as ‘Principles of Economics’ wandered towards ‘Economics for Historians’. A rearguard action later inserted the subject into the English history component of the Tripos in which a chosen period of history would require two papers: one of them ‘constitutional and political’, the other ‘social and economic’, a distinctive feature when elsewhere the descriptors had tended to fade into a generalized ‘History’ without prefix or suffix. Neither constitutional history nor economic history represented a peculiarity in themselves: both appeared almost everywhere. Cambridge History became peculiar not through their presence but through their twinning.
A second strand turned on the empire as it did in so many English universities in the interwar period. In Cambridge, it perhaps lacked the weight given in Oxford and parts of the London system. True, the Cambridge history of the British empire implied a serious participation, and two of the three editors were Cambridge dons.Footnote 26 One of them, E. A. Benians,Footnote 27 proved important in the longer term for a related but different reason. His imperial interests took his mind towards the United States and its development. Towards the end of the Second World War when American matters bulked large in European consciousness, Benians gave a course in Cambridge on the history of the United States. His secondary enthusiasm overcame his first as it did in the Faculty as a whole; and the post-war period, heralded by the Pitt Chair in 1944, would make Cambridge a crucible for the teaching of and research in American history. Canada did not figure: this was no longer an imperial démarche. Spanish America had no legs until decades later. Latin America would have its moment but not yet. This constituted a post-imperial movement avant la lettre, pushed forward by a Glaswegian Wunderkind who knew everything and (notoriously) forgot nothing. The impetus had wider force than that contained in Denis Brogan (1900–74) of Peterhouse but unquestionably his energy and power of intellect attracted students to this new area, one now even regarded as appropriate for the better class of student. (Apparently, when the future early modernist, Harry Porter, turned up at Corpus at the end of the war and asked to study American history, he was refused on the grounds of its unsuitability for a gentleman.Footnote 28) To cope with demand, sacrifices ensued. William Brock of Selwyn, who made his name in a well-known study of Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism in the 1820s, was ‘encouraged’ by the Faculty to retrain as an Americanist and sent over the Atlantic to do so.Footnote 29 With the new Mellon Chair after 1980, following Jack Pole’s removal to Oxford, and then the drive and imagination of Tony Badger in the direction of research into US history, one emphatic peculiarity had entered Cambridge teaching in the luminosity of American studies there. J. R. Pole (1922–2010) (always ‘Jack’) had arrived in Cambridge from University College, London, and wrote an immense amount about American society and culture. More specifically, he wrote in the Cambridge tradition about law, culminating in his last book, Contract and consent (1966) though his teaching across the spectrum of US history produced a series of works ranging from the foundation of the Republic to the idea of equality as a continuo playing beneath so much else in American life. A. J. Badger (b. 1947) (always ‘Tony’) occupied the Mellon Chair from 1992 to 2014 where he specialized in the New Deal years of the 1930s but greatly enhanced the power of the Cambridge graduate school in American history generally and played a considerable role in navigating Tripos revisions of that sector as new forces came into play, as we shall see, from the mid-eighties. Contrast Oxford. It could boast the first Chair, the Harmsworth, as early as 1922 but the subject never took off there and when demand for teaching gathered strength, historians who were expert in English history such as John Walsh and Lawrence Goldman found themselves taking the strain. Only with the establishment of the Rhodes Chair (with Cambridge’s Jack Pole occupying it) and the excellent Rothermere Centre and Library after the turn of century did the situation improve to contest Cambridge peculiarity.
Other legacies related to course content and delivery. One of the older ingredients in the Tripos took the form of a General Essay: one question answered in a three-hour unseen paper. It fed from the doctrine that ‘one’s men’ – a trope persisting until at least the 1980s – should prove capable of discussing a very general problem (‘The Causes of the French Revolution’) for a sustained stretch of composition. It would separate the sheep from the goats. For both generational and contextual reasons, this optimistic view weakened in the post-war period and by the 1960s arguments had become current that the thing should either be abolished or amended. It in fact morphed into those ‘General Historical Questions’ placarded in 1961 which clearly bewildered the setters as well as the sitters. No peculiarity, this: everywhere confusion and embarrassment attended General Papers and what to do with them. If they remained untaught except for the odd ‘conversation class’, no one knew what the students could be expected to know; and in an untheoretical world, no one felt quite certain of what to include. Sometimes, the mélange turned to blancmange. A specimen paper, never sat, intended for 1965 caught the mood of unease in the Tripos. One question – ‘Assess the effects of sociological thought on the study of history in the 20th century’ – clearly rejoiced in sounding formidable and required high-level knowledge and reading. Another in the same paper – ‘Which period of English history would you prefer to have lived in?' – felt unhappy to be there at all.Footnote 30 Yet the legacy persisted – despite voices repeatedly raised to get rid of it – and the idea of some kind of General Paper confined discussion of alternatives until it received a boost as ‘General Historical Problems’ which opened the possibility of including theoretical issues of greater depth and aspects of contemporary historiography. So by the 1980s, students might be asked to discuss whether the methods of the Annales School could only succeed in the study of rural societies or whether professional history had become too professional for its own good.Footnote 31 This move signalled the paper’s later shift to ‘Historical Argument and Practice’ which voiced further intellectual ambitions and discipline.
Lecturing followed a similar curve of persistence and development but, unlike general history, did present a peculiarity. For if Oxford placed its weight firmly on the side of ‘tutorials’ (‘supervisions’ in Cambridge) with a stress on personal and often one-to-one teaching, Cambridge retained until the mid-1980s its preference for lecture-series and a reliance on the impressive Lecture List which would allow students to widen their understanding by going to hear a range of performances, often outside their immediate studies. This shift attracted the notice of Oxford undergraduates moving to Cambridge for further work: the importance attached to lectures caught the eye.Footnote 32 It impressed itself at once on one moving in the opposite direction as James RavenFootnote 33 did in his travels between Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Mansfield College, Oxford. An Oxford lecture list did exist but there the stress fell on guiding one’s own pupils over where to go and whom to hear.Footnote 34 This could happen in Cambridge and especially in Peterhouse in the years when Maurice Cowling directed studies.Footnote 35 But then, Peterhouse was not quite Cambridge and Cowling not quite anyone else. Audiences wilted, however, even in Cambridge and the 1980s saw change towards greater use of classes and greater personal contact between teachers and taught. The change reflected a recommendation made in 1937 which warns against too accelerated a sense of Tripos revision.
Responsibility for making the recommendation had lain with another legacy from a different world: an organization of undoubted peculiarity. Nowhere else (to my knowledge) possessed a phenomenon comparable to the Cambridge Junior Historians. They had legacies of their own since they came into existence, remarkably, as early as 1911. But the Society and its committee reached an apogee in the 1930s under the leadership of Herbert Butterfield and, for a time, Michael Oakeshott. The list of its committee members by the late 1930s sparkles with future glitterati: most of them would go on to dominate areas of historical teaching and research for the next thirty years. Yet their function, rather than their personnel, made them distinctive. They did not act as representatives in the way that undergraduate and graduate students do today on Governing Bodies and Departmental Meetings. They were not students at all. Instead the Junior Historians comprised young researchers, teachers, and dons in their twenties and thirties who could act as an intermediate body between the Faculty Board and the undergraduate community, propose policies to Tripos reform committees, and float papers up to the Board recommending courses of action. As with all collections of young turks, their recommendations got nowhere; they received polite but firm rejections though Kitson on one occasion privately urged throwing their communication away.Footnote 36 And yet, when one looks back through the files, it becomes clear that so many of the initiatives actually adopted had their origin, sometimes decades earlier, in papers from the Junior Historians. Thus it was in 1937. Their proposal of fewer lectures and more classes, together with their request for more social and economic history and less constitutional, brought no result apart from a blundering bull in their china shop roaring ‘spoon feeding!’. (Harold Temperley had just come back from the United States where, presumably, he had been made to conduct classes which did not impress him.Footnote 37) The future belonged nevertheless to juniority.
II
If these various legacies ran into turbulence in the 1960s, then so did every sector of Western intellectual life. Context matters, as David Cannadine taught us in the previous lecture in this series. Outside Britain, the Parisian événements of 1968 and the American involvement in Vietnam heralded one kind of instability. The onset of postmodern attacks on fixity and stability made a second cut. Within the British Isles, university expansion signposted in but not caused by the Robbins Report in 1963 produced a landscape that contrasted sharply not only with the ancient sites of learning (Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London, Durham, Queen’s Belfast) but also with the more established provincial universities that had blossomed after 1890 in the midlands and the north (Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle). The latter might find themselves viewed de haut en bas but they did not present a threat since they often modelled themselves on practices familiar to Oxford and Cambridge who furnished most of their faculty. New foundations behaved differently and invented their own modus vivendi. Their presence and occasional exporting of novel practices constituted a challenge, all the same, to traditional institutions. By going their own way, universities such as Sussex, UEA, Kent, Essex, Warwick, Keele, Lancaster, York, and Stirling established distinctive traditions and by doing so asked penetrating questions of older centres of learning.Footnote 38 If much of Cambridge History derived its nature from internal legacies after 1960, then it also needed to respond to challenges from without or at least to have been seen to show willing in the face of adversity.
One instalment of adversity descended from the atmosphere rather than emerging at ground level. Two years after the foundation of The Historical Journal, another periodical appeared from Middletown, Connecticut, calling itself History and Theory. Driven by Louis Mink, who wrote a powerful book on Collingwood, and a young Hayden White, energized by literary theory with his own peculiar blend of Marxism, anarchism, and utopianism, the journal made little initial impact on historical approaches but signalled by its existence the coming of a new mood.Footnote 39 Over the next quarter century, its discussions and proposals moved towards a more central position within the discourse and made a major impact on Western historiography especially in The Netherlands, France, and America itself. Its impact on the Tripos and Cambridge History generally remained minimal, though it is worth recalling that Geoffrey Elton, not the first name in historical theory, wrote for the journal and indeed conducted what he thought was a theoretical debate – it wasn’t – with Robert Fogel of Chicago on historical method.Footnote 40 Theory travelled in the air, infected the journals, entered conversation, for all its ethereality. In 1984, it also found a Cambridge voice when Quentin Skinner negotiated with the BBC a series of broadcasts on this seeming recurrence to styles of theoretical argument long neglected in England and which Skinner edited as The return of grand theory in the human sciences in 1985. (Hold the date: I shall be going there later.) In the same year of broadcasting, 1984, I began teaching historical theory at Sheffield as a precursor to delivering a related course on modern historiography, a date that feels more significant now than then. There followed a spurt of introductory courses through Britain of a ‘History 101’ kind comprising ‘concepts’ or ‘method’ but never moving beyond the presuppositions of What is history? that had appeared in 1961.Footnote 41 They married a sense of duty in the current atmosphere to a theoretical vacuity which made the resulting offerings boring or pleonastic. Yet they reflected a changed sensibility which found its ultimate reflection in a reductive account in 1991 which further triggered a new journal.Footnote 42 Neither became part of Cambridge History in the short term. Only with the Western shift towards cultural history from the 1990s did an undercurrent appear in the Tripos in the form of gender history, the history of race, a greater focus on historiography, and a turn to ‘the global’ in forms of representation. Even then, however, a legacy and instinct in favour of sophisticated empirical study, as opposed to metahistorical pronouncement, separated the Faculty’s productions from the more outré polemics sometimes found elsewhere.
Closer to home came rumours of a transformation of curricular practice among the newer universities. In a bastion of the three-hour unseen examination paper, some of the rumours fluttered more than the dovecots in Cambridge villas. One phrase sounded especially threatening. It appeared that provincial universities had embraced something called ‘continuous assessment’ which Cambridge would need at some point to address. It did so in a major initiative in 1968–9 which tasked a Tripos revision committee to write, heroically, to every university in Britain and, through a conceptual error, also to Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, to find out what they thought they were doing and whether it was working. Results began to dribble in and did not encourage. Gerald Aylmer reported that York had instituted a ‘Discipline of History’ module which they examined through a two-week ‘take home’ paper. Austin Woolrych at Lancaster said that 20 per cent of their degree now rested on continuous assessment. Worse, Robert Ashton at UEA reported that the regulations there stipulated that at least one third of the History degree had to be continuously assessed. It then turned out the new University of Ulster went the further mile in 1972 with 40 per cent of the assessment based on non-traditional modes.Footnote 43 The only encouraging note came from Stirling, likewise afflicted. R. H. Campbell wrote consolingly: ‘I find the absence of the big bang examination has not removed the neurotic obsession of some students with the written examinations.’Footnote 44 And since that was supposed to be the point of doing it in the first place, Cambridge took heart and decided to leave things alone, a decision reinforced in 1986 when a survey of teaching Fellows and Directors of Studies confirmed that they did not want it. Their resistance did not turn on negativity but on legacy. The Tripos held at its heart the three-hour, four-question, unseen examination paper.Footnote 45 To disturb that essential condition would upset more than it might in a new university.
This sounded reasonable in the case of assessed seminars and take-home papers. But another word came from the same direction and this proved harder to assimilate even though Cambridge History hardly needed to voice its opposition which had been clear from the outset. ‘Dissertation’: a provocation and a thorn. Other centres through the 1980s and 1990s, even Oxford, had succumbed to the compulsory dissertation as part of their History curriculum, normally one replacing a course such as the second Special Subject paper. At Sheffield, where we introduced this provision without much trouble in the mid-eighties, the sole dissenting voice came from our modern Germanist, William Carr. He warned in his northern frankness, ‘Well, you’re making a rod for your own backs!’ Funnily enough, this was precisely the initial argument deployed by the Cambridge Faculty. If we have a prescribed dissertation, they reasoned, everyone will want to do it. If everyone does it, then we do not have the resources to supervise and examine it: the numbers are too great. As the arguments progressed, this blanket refusal softened into discriminating between three claims: that a dissertation would need to be compulsory; that it would need to replace an existing course; and that it should count as a full-weight paper in degree classification. Course-replacement caused immediate crisis: the Europeanists, starved, as they believed, of courses through the predominance of English history in the Tripos, went after it like a dog down a rabbit hole. Full-weight, meanwhile, seemed disproportionate. Perhaps an optional dissertation could be allowed merely not to bring a candidate down? In fact, the possibility of writing a 10,000 word dissertation had been there all along since the 1966 reforms: it appeared as the final Ordinance attached each year to the Historical Tripos.Footnote 46 But it could only be offered on a topic ‘associated with any paper, other than General Historical Essays, in Part One’; and the examiners could only promise that it would be ‘taken into account’.Footnote 47
But the largesse stopped there. Compulsion: that remained (and remains) the issue. Reinforced by a survey of second- and third-year undergraduates by a Working Party in 1988 – do you want a compulsory dissertation? Yes, 3; No, 94 – the Faculty moved far slower than elsewhere to countenancing the dissertation as practised in other universities and that reticence still marks the ‘new’ Tripos of 2022 which we shall consider later in more detail.Footnote 48 Again, however, note the power of legacy. The Tripos came into being to test mental agility and strength, not to provide research training, a thought lost on Charles Harding Firth at Oxford in the early twentieth century who, despite the initial failure of his ideas, inaugurated a legacy of his own in that university to the extent that John Maddicott, in his excoriation of the Oxford History syllabus in 1998, approved at least of the dissertation for its provision of training in research method.Footnote 49
On top of these disturbances, the Faculty also felt a presence over its shoulder in the schools with their language, desperately under-theorized, of ‘sources’ as though texts became sources through their mere existence rather than through the questions posed retroactively; and an often accompanying descant about ‘themes’. These found some favour in Cambridge History, partly, one suspects, in an attempt to keep in touch with what candidates for the Tripos had studied before – a working party in 1988 noted that ‘sources’ now comprised part of schools’ curricula so the Tripos should reflect their presenceFootnote 50 – partly because the theme idea might offer a way of packaging the English history papers in ways that undergraduates might find more accessible, especially those entering the Tripos for the first time. We are conscious today – I am writing in 2024 – of a public concern over schoolchildren and their ability to deal with demanding courses requiring intensive study. It has become commonplace to fret about attention-span and the horror voiced by the young in being made to read an entire book. In the 1960s and 1970s, the concern had less airtime yet, even so, ‘period study’ had come under a cloud, the same one that by then hovered over lectures. Envelopes and bags looked formidable to a new generation required to fill them when they had not been taught how. Taking a knife to the periods had helped by reducing coverage. Perhaps giving them ‘themes’ would further concentrate the mind by limiting the subject? Umbrage swelled this time from the medievalists, already smarting over losing the 1500-rule; they sensed that the chosen ‘themes’ might not fit their subject matter and even produce a certain dumbing-down. Their resistance soon produced billets-doux in the archive:
I cannot see how the proposals for the ‘thematic’ treatment of English History in the reformed Tripos Part One could be put into effect without lowering standards. I am therefore opposed to it.
Yours,
Jonathan Riley-SmithFootnote 51
Ullmann meanwhile decided that the proposal was so risible that it could be destroyed in two pellucid and, as he believed, deadly sentences. (‘They tried it at Leeds. Need I say more?Footnote 52) Both resistors failed and this peculiar twinning emerged as a Tripos staple with its distinctive mood that persisted for the next thirty years and found a place in the new syllabus launched in 2022.
Atmospheric, or subterranean, pressures of this kind made themselves felt and played some role in guiding successive Tripos reform committees in their deliberations. They did not lend Cambridge History a special identity because internal rumblings of this kind lacked the power to do that. Legacies come from a discerned past. Reforms emerge, often, from inner conversation. But identities come into focus from without. We need to shift the focus for a while, therefore, in seeking a Cambridge identity and reflect for a moment on how Cambridge came to be viewed from outside itself in the half century after 1960. Through this optic we might discern, not one, but two Cambridge ‘Schools’ and one distinctive ‘Group’. Each played a significant role in promoting to an external world the peculiarities of Cambridge History. Naturally, other aspects claimed attention too but these attract my attention in the present project for contributing to the distinctiveness of the Faculty and its teaching.
III
The two Schools arose in reaction against current dispositions in the universities. The first of them, the one referred to pejoratively by Richard Crossman as ‘the Peterhouse School’, presented an opposing force to the ‘history from below’ that had come to characterize the historiography of British politics. Pitted against the Marxist cohort that had attracted such influence in the years of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Raphael Samuel, a collection of historians gathered around the supremely divisive figure of Maurice Cowling, Fellow of Peterhouse from 1963 to 1993. His trilogy on the nature of English high politics from 1867 to 1940, aided by John Vincent’s brilliant if wayward contributions, provided the inspiration of this tendency which was reinforced in a younger generation of authors who carried the flag into the 1980s.Footnote 53 The alternative Cambridge School of political thought, triggered by a methodological study from John Pocock in 1962 and then championed by Quentin Skinner and John Dunn from the late sixties, also directed itself at a target: the presentation of texts and ideas as though they functioned as hermetic entities drifting around the universe like balloons without reference to their context and the language(s) that informed their character. Just as the Peterhouse School wanted to portray British politics in a different frame by situating its operation within a contrasting milieu, the Cambridge School sought to historicize political understanding and strip away lazy pointers to ‘concepts’ or ‘traditions’ as free-standing, trans-temporal presences. These Schools eventually stimulated sophisticated criticism and commentary at a length and width too broad to be encompassed here. More immediate is a sense, available in the spacious perspective of retrospect, that their common context produced a commonalty not obvious at the time. There were significant differences of course; some turned on ideology, some on personalities. The Peterhouse School had the shorter life: powerful between 1965 and 1980, weakening in the following decade outside Oxford where it remained a cynosure of all things nasty in Cambridge History. Political thought fared better in building strength and reputation, attracting the accolade of a doctoral thesis devoted to it by my former pupil, Samuel James, in 2012.Footnote 54 It persists not only in a Centre for Political Thought but also as a distinctive legacy that John Robertson still detected during his period as Professor of the History of Political Thought from 2010 to 2018.Footnote 55 Yet the differences can conceal a common trajectory. Both Schools fed from a Cambridge peculiarity: its concern with teaching and writing about politics and its environments, not simply as an empirical account of happenings or lists of texts, but in response to the higher question, what is it to be a polity?, a question that could be chased back to Aristotle. In this sense, both Schools were serious about political life demanding critique beyond rapportage. Both, too, drew on the University Press as their medium and collaborator. No account of these years should exclude the major contribution of Commissioning Editors in History at the Press: William Davies in the early years or Richard Fisher in the later whose probing and sophisticated mind raised the level of contributions rather than merely managing them. Without that in-house publicity, one respected across the globe, the impact of both Schools would have been less striking.
Equally serious and innovative was the Cambridge Group. By the late 1960s, everyone knew that the phrase referred to the Cambridge Group for the Study of the History of Population and Social Structure, founded in 1964 at exactly the moment when the two Schools suffered their birth pangs. Its original impressarios, Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley, generated a new excitement in English historiography by introducing a style of social science history unfamiliar outside Paris. Away from the Cam, the Group sometimes represented all that was forward-looking in quantitative methodology and raising searching questions in historical demography that would eventually give rise to the Group’s most famous study, Wrigley and Schofield on the population history of England.Footnote 56 At some moment, perhaps in the late 1970s, I made that point in conversation with Geoffrey Elton. He grunted. ‘They have not made much impact on the Faculty’, he said.Footnote 57 Had I known then what I know now after reading the Faculty file, I would have had my answer. The Group had made little impact on the Faculty because the Faculty had consciously arranged that result. Repeated attempts by Group representatives – they were led by Roger Schofield from 1974 – to build a closer relationship with the Tripos and Cambridge History generally did not prosper despite the Faculty’s claim that the Group had ‘begun to affect’ the teaching of social and economic history first through a Part Two option on the comparative history of populations and the family and later in a course on historical demography that did indeed invite candidates for the Tripos to consider (say) ‘how has the registration and enumeration of populations affected their demographic history?’, a valuable and demanding issue.Footnote 58 Long before then, however, the Group had begun to look beyond Mill Lane and West Road to the boulevard Raspail, above the Seine’s Left Bank, for testimony to its significance from the then Sixième Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, even if the response came larded with patronage. ‘Ils n’étaient pas seulement capable’, one wonderful sentence begins, ‘d’adopter et de populariser les méthodes françaises…’ (they were not only equipped to adopt and popularize French methods). A scrawled signature beneath unravels as ‘E. Leroy Ladurie’, of whom Cambridge had certainly heard.Footnote 59 The appointment of Simon Szreter to a lectureship in historical demography in 1984 promised closer contact but difficulties continued into the 1990s.Footnote 60 A Report from 1991/2 complains pretty bluntly that the Group had ‘suffered from the inability of the Faculty to devise an adequate teaching programme’.Footnote 61 With the help of Szreter, Richard Smith, and Amy Erickson, those difficulties were overcome though at the expense of a perhaps belated relationship within Cambridge History as a whole.
IV
Turning the camera back on itself, we may wish also to ask whether Cambridge looked outwards to the wider world and whether places far away from England or Europe found their way into the Tripos. The end of the Second World War had left an impression that the post-war world would be different and larger and the Tripos would need to keep up with that development. Inevitably, the discussion originally turned on what became called ‘The Expansion of Europe’ and related to worldwide developments in aspects more familiar in anglophone and Eurocentric historiography.Footnote 62 But long before Robinson and Gallagher had highlighted Africa from an imperial point of view in 1961, new thinking in ‘Area Studies’ had gained ground and implied that Europe’s expansion was not the point: there ought to be courses dealing with parts of the world that had no decisive relation to Europe and to be studied in their own right and amid their own contexts and connections. Here, Cambridge acted early and decisively. Indeed, in contradistinction to the reticence over social science history, Cambridge established a further peculiarity in the determination with which it originated and developed courses in what would later become ‘global history’. That trajectory did not emerge directly or without opposition. The Tripos Report in 1961 that we have already considered wanted the Faculty to establish courses on Africa, India, China, and Latin America; and, for all the suspicions of some conservatives in the Faculty, ‘The Expansion of Europe’ and ‘The West and the Rest’, as it was known in Cambridge argot, incubated an interest that persisted.Footnote 63 The Part Two paper on the history of Africa now has the distinction of having become the longest running paper in this part of the Tripos. Global history not only figures strongly in the Tripos but also has a distinguished occupant of a related Chair in Sujit Sivasundaram. That presence in the contemporary academy is not peculiar: global history now appears in most curricula. Its distinctive Cambridge property consists in its precocity and nurture.Footnote 64
Not everyone agreed with the direction of curricular reform. Some wanted a speedier outcome or a different one. Every Faculty has team-players; each will produce someone who wants to take his or her ball home. Curricula such as the Tripos offer freedoms and opportunities; but they are also rule-bound and rule-governed; they make and police boundaries in space and time. Rules become crystallized, moreover, in those who challenge them. Exceptions prove rules.
Let me anchor that portentous thought in two brief cameos which will take us to a place beyond themselves. One Cambridge, one Oxford. One preoccupied by space and the need to expand it, one obsessed by temporality and the need to revisit it. One resisting the Tripos, one fretting over the Oxford Honours School. Both seeking their models outside Britain. Both ready to leave Britain if necessary. My Cambridge thought is John Elliott (1930–2022). My Oxford exemplar is Peter Brown (b. 1935). Elliott’s love affair with the Catalonia of Jaume Vicens Vives (1910–60) took his mind away towards the Caribbean past and the place of Spain and France in controlling its future. It also made him bitter about the predominance of English history in the Tripos. Undermining it remained a lifelong objective which made enemies, none more implacable than Geoffrey Elton, both in Cambridge and Oxford when he moved there in later life as Regius Professor. Brown turned away from Oxford in its seeming indifference to anything between the second and fifth century and towards his own hero-figure in Henri-Irénée Marrou (1904–77) who had hinted at an age of ‘Late Antiquity’, a concept that Brown assimilated and inserted permanently into historical discourse. Neither made headway in their alma mater. Elliott left for King’s College, London, in 1968. Brown left for Royal Holloway in 1975. Seven years after arriving, Elliott left for the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. Five years after arriving, Brown left for Berkeley and then Princeton’s History Department. Their journeys resonate because they point towards shifting energy-centres of historiography after 1950. From then until the late 1960s, that hub was England; from the late 1960s to the early 1980s it relocated to Paris. But by the mid-1980s, the vortex of energy and initiative had left Europe altogether and migrated to the United States. It represents arguably the greatest seismic upheaval in Western historiography of the entire post-war period and we need to think about its impact on Cambridge and how the Tripos was envisaged.
Initial tremors in the West made themselves felt in the first half of the decade with Ginzburg’s The cheese and the worms (1980), Zemon Davis’s The return of Martin Guerre (1982), Anderson’s Imagined communities (1983), Darnton’s Great cat massacre (1984), and in Britain the radio broadcasts reviving Grand theory (1984).Footnote 65 They zig-zagged across the United States and reached the West Coast in the second half of the decade. Two seminars considering the nature of contemporary historical perceptions, one in Berkeley, one in Los Angeles, came together in texts collated and edited by Lynn Hunt at the University of Pennsylvania. They emerged in a slim paperback called The new cultural history (1989). It was not new; it was new to California. But its message had a viral quality and more than any other single publication it came to symbolize a ‘cultural turn’ which over the next twenty years would produce something close to a bouleversement in historical studies. No matter that Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) had said at Leiden before the war much of what supposedly was ‘new’ in his amazing study of play and seriousness in European culture.Footnote 66 Hunt’s authors wrote and thought in an anglophone register tweaked by annalisme that kept Huizinga out of their index. Making the world new took priority and the excitement sparked by the prospect of an approach to history centring on race, gender, identity, mentalité, and the imaginaire became palpable and quickly global. The question before us is whether this transformation in the United States affected Cambridge History when two of the sea-changes became especially relevant from the 1990s: the aspiration of cultural history to become hegemonic; and the more literal sea-change in the development, within Western historiography, of a conceptualized ‘Atlantic World’ and the waves of revision that it generated.
The success and near-ubiquity of ‘new cultural history’ as an historiographical form in the millennium brooks no denial. Its contribution to the history of gender has been overwhelming and found a ready reception in Cambridge History. Its reception was ubiquitous rather than distinctive so for present purposes I choose to stress instead the more general impact of the cultural on historical method. Already a growing force through the 1990s, it came to dominate much historical writing in the first decade of the new century. I asked the Oxford bibliographical database to count and list book-titles published between 2000 and 2010 which contained the words ‘A Cultural History of’. It spewed forth 1,466 titles. Among the first fifty entries one finds a cultural history of animals, childhood, climate, ventriloquism, threadwork, conjuring, intoxication, magic mushrooms, obesity, masturbation, longevity, and tattoos. I then asked the same question of the period after 2010 and received over three thousand hits. Feel, however, not the width but the quality and the sense of centrality among the studies now presented: education, marriage, disability, empires, women, work, money, race, medicine, genocide, memory, ideas, law, democracy … One wonders, and perhaps we are meant to wonder, whether anything is not cultural history. As a comparator, consider the United States. I contributed recently (January 2024) at the AHA annual meeting at San Francisco. The hundred-page programme startled by its confinements. Virtually every session reduced to one or a combination of four variables: race, gender, identity, and postcolonialism. It became clear that cultural history in America is now itself a cultural identity. To criticize it is to question a fundamental value rather than an historical method. Is that happening also to Cambridge History? Do Tripos examination questions reflect its presence? As early as 1986, at the very beginning of this mood, a question of astonishing acuity and prescience appeared on the General Historical Problems paper: ‘Why do twentieth-century historians write like nineteenth-century novelists?’Footnote 67 In catching the sense that historical writing might be drifting away from the analytical and explanatory towards the representational and pictorial, the question announces a profound shift that has altered the orientation of the subject ever since. And what was once prescient is now actual. ‘Historical Argument and Practice’, 2009, first question: ‘Is all history cultural history?’ Same paper, 2019, same question with partial row-back: ‘Is all history potentially cultural history?’ There is nothing wrong with the questions, obviously, unless an affirmative answer is the only one expected or permissible. The Cambridge legacy of critical analysis supplies its own reassurance.
Riding on the back of the ‘cultural turn’, a number of more specific ‘turns’ have appeared. But do you know how many? Since 1990, we have had (apparently), an interpretative turn, a performative turn, a reflexive turn, a spatial turn, a material turn, an affective turn, a social turn, a digital turn, an environmental turn …Footnote 68 Some of these, too, have twirled their way into the Tripos. We have a Spatial History of the Ottoman Empire (spatial turn); a Culture of the Miraculous in Renaissance Italy (cultural turn); Material Culture in the Early Modern period (material turn); World Population Development and Environment (environmental turn); the Pacific and Indian Oceans in the long Nineteenth Century, which reflects a turn that even the previous list failed to include, the oceanic turn. All of these raise no intellectual problem: indeed, it would be peculiar in the bad sense if such ingredients did not exist. The Tripos will presumably absorb such elements while also containing its present balanced raft of choices in subjects such as revolution, war, social and political structures, and the history of ideas. The retention of that balance constitutes its true and valued peculiarity.
Turning to the oceanic turn, we should comment on a Western variant: not the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, crucial arenas though they represent, but rather the Atlantic as a no less crucial barrier and connector between 1500 and 1800. Of course, the mind returns at once to Fernand Braudel and La Méditerranée of 1949.Footnote 69 Or in Cambridge think of David Abulafia’s wonderful book on the Mediterranean’s ‘human history’.Footnote 70 Yet when Bernard Bailyn created his seminar on the Atlantic World in (again) the mid-1980s, he believed himself to be doing something different. He explicitly rejected the Braudelian comparison, unsurprisingly, since he had a curious hang-up about the French pioneer: he had reviewed the book severely, though not entirely unfairly, as a poetic description without a question and one that missed connectivities.Footnote 71 Bailyn himself bounced off his recent monograph on Voyagers to the West (1986) and constructed a course of study that would challenge assumptions about the Atlantic as frontier and turn it into one of the great highways that showed the path not only to the settlements on the eastern seaboard of the United States but to every society affected by transatlantic possibility.Footnote 72 The idea took off, sustained no doubt by the 350 students estimated to have taken the seminar, and a later Harvard figure, David Armitage, but also by Jack Greene in the Mellon Chair at Johns Hopkins, who collaborated with Bailyn, and by the two Philips occupying the Harry C. Black Chair there: Philip Curtin arriving from Wisconsin and the Cambridge graduate, Philip D. Morgan, from London.Footnote 73 ‘Atlanticism’ was born. This is not the place to discuss its merits or very real confusions,Footnote 74 but rather to ask whether its impetus has disturbed Cambridge History. Mostly it has not. It has made an impact in other English and Scottish universities (Hull, where there is a Chair in it; Dundee; Liverpool) and a lesser one in Brittany where Guy Saupin of Nantes has proved influential.Footnote 75 It has excited Africanists as the theatre of operations has moved south down the West African coast.Footnote 76 But at the time of writing, this seems to be an aspect of the avant-garde awaiting reinforcements on the Cam. The proposition is manifestly not that Cambridge historians never write about the Atlantic: they do and must. What is at stake, rather, is the degree to which Atlanticism as an explanatory structure governing the way in which transatlantic communication, and the slavery that rested on it are brought into focus, has established the dominance in Cambridge that it has achieved in other universities. My instinct is that it has not.
V
And what of the future? It would be impertinent of me to comment extensively on the remodelled Tripos of 2022. I could not see any of the documents related to its preparation and think the best that can be done is to wish it well. When Kitson delivered his lecture at the 100th anniversary in 1973 he already had cut an elderly figure moving towards retirement and a certain nostalgia inevitably followed. Rich of me, then, to deem Kitson elderly since I am considerably older than was he in 1973 and have lived a professional life through most of the eruptions discussed in this lecture. I, too, find my instincts moving backwards towards heritage more naturally than forwards to charting a future. But the format of the new Tripos raises a question often raised in the archive and well-articulated by John Morrill in the 1988 discussions. Essentially he said this. There is little point trying to direct the future Tripos until the Faculty knows better than it does what is happening in the schools.Footnote 77 The new Tripos poses that important issue. Do you do better by reflecting the concerns of sixth forms, their teachers and curricula, thereby giving candidates some continuity of expectation? Or should one go for disjunction and separation to instil some freshness? Geoffrey Elton, surprisingly perhaps, believed that the Tudors and Stuarts should be kept out of the Cambridge Preliminary Examination; he wanted to send the Freshers off to do the Aztec empire in order to drop a cleaver through their experience and make them start again.Footnote 78 The 2022 thinking sounds to my ear closer to the school-continuity model in some ways while in others recalling discussions running back into the 1960s. And since it plainly is intended to put down a marker for the future development of the Tripos, we should not conclude before at least inspecting it.Footnote 79
Before turning to what is ‘new’, it may help understanding to recall what isn’t. First, there is a continuity in ambition about the two key features noted earlier: progression and choice. The progression has a new envelope with its division into three components: knowledge, craft, and thinking in each year with a movement from introductory to advanced in each. But the decision to abandon the preliminary year and make Part One fill the first two years (1A and 1B) comments on a conversation many decades deep. Time and time again, the Faculty and its Tripos committees had worried over whether to keep Part Two in the third year or make it cover two years; or whether to keep Part One in the second year but extend it backwards to the students’ point of entry until the end of the second year. This ‘new’ Tripos resolves that extended debate but in doing so it puts a new crust on a familiar pie. Continuous assessment, an ingredient treated with some scepticism as we have seen, gets a lift this time in a ‘research project’ in the second year. The third year remains mostly unchanged and the optional dissertation, which does now replace one paper, persists despite the thesis having become compulsory in most universities. The language overall remains one of ‘taking papers’ and settles (possibly) a long-standing discussion about the role of examinations in the Tripos. Under the rubric of ‘choice’, a blend of avant-garde and well-trodden paths – the significant and welcome peculiarity of the Tripos – continues and rescues the package from any accusation of uncritical modishness. The ‘new’ Tripos contains novelty; it also displays legacy.
Not that the Cambridge of 2022 entirely escapes from History à la mode. Seen entire, the reformed syllabus presents a pitch to the young by representing contemporary interests and priorities as integral to the Tripos. The framers were right to do that – it is the young who must be made to feel that Cambridge is the place for them – but the not-so-young may feel a frisson. So in the Introduction to Historical Thinking (1A) the examples given of books the students should think about tells its own story. We have a single example of traditional social history published sixty years ago (point made!) and then the list goes: Masculinity, class and same-sex desire (2015), Slavery and the culture of taste (2011), Dear China (2018), and A new history of the Aztecs (2019), which would at least have cheered up Geoffrey Elton.Footnote 80 Where the school-continuity aspect appears is obviously not in the content of the Tripos but instead in its framing language with the incantation of ‘topics’, ‘skills’, ‘crafts’, ‘sources’, ‘projects’: the vocabulary through which sixth-form teaching tends to be performed and examined. The three ‘vertical’ components chopping the syllabus into sections – knowledge, craft, thinking – raise the level impressively but also imply a theorized model that seems pretty much untheorized. ‘Knowledge’ is presented, for example, as a transparency that will seem curious to theorists of historical epistemology who find the idea more elusive.
Time tells. The first cohort of the ‘new’ Tripos have yet to complete their studies. How long it will survive in its proposed shape must be left for 2074. What we can say with certainty is that the Tripos by then will look very different from the present one as context, culture, and economic stringencies make themselves felt. What we cannot say with certainty is whether the Tripos will even exist. Structures resting on intensive study tested by examination may not survive an environment in which its methods and assumptions no longer hold. At the time of writing, and on the very same day, the national press carried two jeremiads: one from a Cambridge don (not in the History Faculty) resigning his post out of a perceived collapse of standards, another proclaiming that AI portends the end of all learning.Footnote 81 These are difficult days for Higher Education. Our vaunted ‘turns’ will turn and turn again in and out of the Tripos and perhaps not to its benefit. Predictions are always wrong, of course, but I offer two saucy ones anyway. The first is that the Tripos, if it indeed does survive in its familiar forms, will curve an arc over the next fifty years away from peculiarity and towards unpeculiarity. The second is that its creators and clientele will move increasingly outside the University into a social and cultural space occupied by public intellectuals and their wider audience, following Tripos products such as Simon Schama, Andrew Roberts, and Sathnam Sanghera, or enthusiasts from the graduate school such as Dominic Sandbrook.Footnote 82 Commentators of this kind replicate a drift towards the wider sort of ‘public history’ instanced at the present time in Lucy Worsley (Oxford and Sussex) or David Olusoga (Liverpool).Footnote 83 It is hard to envisage this drift reversing itself.
Be that as it may and in the protracted meantime … Whether you are Cambridge, Oxford, or none of the above, postmodernist or structuralist, Marxist or conservative, postcolonial or imperial; whether you are culturally turned, spatially turned, materially turned, oceanically turned, or just not for turning, let me thank everyone present at this lecture and those reading it for sharing with me this commemoration, and as I hope celebration, not just of the Historical Tripos, but of a Faculty, community, history, and, above all, a legacy which, for all my years and senescence, I continue to hold close to my heart.
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