Ihite nof 3rd edn lass fistory and 41, pp. save been ecessary 1 The empiricists Empiricism is both a theory of knowledge, an epistemology, and a method of historical enquiry.’ There are few historians who dissent from the use of empiricism as a research method, and most routinely employ the analytical tools and protocols developed over the past 150 years. But as a theory of knowledge empiricism has come under attack, most recently by postmodernism. Since the turn of the century philosophers have grappled with the epistemological difficulties of empiricism, and historians have been content to let them do so. Empiricist historians often prefer to describe their work as a ‘craft’, with all the connotations of hands-on knowledge and skill, and to emphasize the importance of methodology over theory. Yet all” historical writing is constructed upon a theory of knowledge, and we cannot and should not leave these matters entirely to others. Let us begin with the origins of empiricism, which is, without doubt, the most influential school of historical thought over the course of this century. The empirical approach to historical research has its origins in the ‘scientific revolution’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Central to the natural philosophy of the period, originating with Francis-Bacon, was the belief that knowledge should be derived from observation of the material world. This, of course, challenged the ‘control exercised by the Church and its clerics over the generation and dissemination of learning. The new ideas of scientific enquiry were carried forward by the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and applied to the study of human society. Many of the university disciplines with which we are now familiar, history, sociology and anthropology, emerged during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. Intrinsic to this new, university-led professionalism for historical study came an emphasis upon systematic archival research into material documents.2__tThe houses of history Leopold von Ranke was instrumental in establishing professional standards for historical training at the University of Berlin between 1824 and 1871, Rejecting many of the sources previously used by historians — particularly personal memoirs, or accounts written after the event — Ranke argued that historians should only use ‘primary’ or original sources, those which were generated at the time of the event under consideration. These should be subjected to the closest scrutiny, and only then ‘by gathering, criticizing and verifying all the available sources, could [historians] put themselves in a position to reconstruct the past accurately’.’ In its most extreme form, scientific history led to positivism. The nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, with whom the term positivism originated in the 1830s, endeavoured to show that history could be understood like the natural world, in terms of general laws. Comte sought to move from the detailed examination of all phenomena to the formulation of broad laws which governed historical development. These ideas profoundly influenced many of the leading thinkers of the nineteenth century, including Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. ; In.a well-known phrase, Ranke also argued that historians should refrain from judging the past, and simply write what actually happened, ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’.* Richard Evans, a British historian of Germany, has suggested that this phrase has been ‘widely misunderstood’, and that Ranke sought to ‘understand the inner being of the past.’* He intended that each historical period should be understood on its own terms. In other words it should not be judged by the historian’s own criteria. Nonetheless, Ranke perceived human history as the working out of God's will, and in consequence Georg 'ggers concluded that ‘[tJhe impartial approach to the past... . for Ranke revealed the existing order as God had willed it... One cannot understand the new science of history as it was understood by Ranke without taking into account the political and religious context in which it emerged’.‘ That context was the nineteenth-century ferment arising from nationalism and the growth of European states. A Prolific historian, Ranke wrote over sixty volumes of chronological harrative focusing upon the political and diplomatic history of Europe. Ranke's influence was widespread; his pupils were appointed in the new universities being established throughout Europe and North ‘America, The following exhortation by a French historian at the first International Congress of Historians in 1900 illustrates the preoccur historical We wa useless moral: their p The core the centr © the tig verifiec © impart * and ar genere Implicit knowled mind, ar adheren« represen of an his These pr dream’ ¢ ‘Americar These cc among | Reflectio regius pi these pr in 1902 writing « analysin, Believing subjectit students time anc since thi was to Sixty-fiv of the st remaine Elton beonal ween ed by n after the y' or the event it scrutiny, available construct ory led to ste Comte, eavoured veld, in iled aws which luenced iding Karl ould h historian ner be judged human Georg for te cannot ay Ranke tin "ferment A gical fi in the orth che first The empiricists__3 preoccupation with factual evidence which had become the core of historical practice: We want nothing more to do with the approximations of hypotheses, useless systems, theories as brilliant as they are deceptive, superfluous moralities. Facts, facts, facts ~ which carry within themselves their lesson and their philosophy. The truth, all the truth, nothing but the truth.” The core tenets of scientific, empirical history as it stood at the turn of the century might be codified as follows: © the rigorous examination and knowledge of historical evidence, verified by references; © impartial research, devoid of a priori beliefs and prejudices; © and an inductive method of reasoning, from the particular to the general. Implicit within these research principles is a specific theory of knowledge. First of all, the past exists indépendently of the individual’s mind, and is both observable and verifiable. Secondly, through adherence to the research principles above, the historian is able to represent the past objectively and accurately. In other words, the truth of an historical account rests upon its correspondence to the facts.* These principles represent the search for objective truth, ‘the noble dream’ of the historical profession, to use a phrase recurrent in American historiography. These core tenets of empirical history remained deeply influential among the historical profession throughout the twentieth century. Reflections on the practice of history written many years apart by two regius professors of history at Cambridge University both focus upon these principles. The first, J. B. Bury, declared in his inaugural address in 1902 that ‘history is a science, no less and no more’. For Bury, the waiting of history was a science because of its ‘minute method of analysing . .. sources’ and ‘scrupulously exact conformity to facts’. Believing that ‘science cannot be safely controlled or guided by subjective interest’, he stated that it was the role of universities to train students in objective analysis, setting aside the influence of their own time and place. ‘There was indeed’, Bury commented, ‘no historian since the beginning of things who did not profess that his sole aim ‘was to present to his readers untainted and unpainted truth’? Sixty-five years later G. R. Elton took up the same cudgels in defence of the scientific method in history, and his book, The Practice of History, remained continuously in print in Britain for thirty years. Bury and Elton believed that the correct historical method was the key to4__The houses of history revealing the truth about the past. Both men compared the creation of historical knowledge to building with bricks and mortar. Each published piece of research represented a brick and the work of the historian was therefore analogous to that of a skilled craftsman. The analogy is revealing, for neither Bury nor Elton expected, or desired, the labourer to have knowledge of the larger edifice. Bury visualized historians as labourers painstakingly adding bricks to a grand building, the design of which was unknown to them.” Elton defended the work of the student ‘journeyman’ who might never raise his eyes beyond the detail of his own minute area of study.”’ The material foundations of this edifice, the labours of countless scholars, had to be sound and both men placed a great deal of importance upon the correct historical method for the evaluation and use of historical evidence, With irrefutable, factual information located at the heart of historical enquiry, the method of establishing the veracity and adequacy of the evidence became paramount, and this feads us to the first principle of ‘empirical history. The careful evaluation and authentication of primary source material is one of Ranke's most significant legacies. in a widely- read textbook on the study of history Arthur Marwick lists seven criteria which should be applied to historical documents. The first four steps involve the basic verification of authenticity.” One of the most famous forged documents in history, the Donation of Constantine, purported to show that the Emperor Constantine gave his crown and empire to Pope Sylvester | after the latter cured him of leprosy. The document was exposed as a forgery seven hundred years later by Renaissance writer Lorenzo Valla."* But forgeries are not confined to the medieval world; the comparatively recent revelation that the ‘Hitler Diaries’ were fraudulent suggests that authentication of sources remains an essential part of the historian’s work.'* Marwick’s three final criteria relate more to interpretation than verification. The aspiring historian is advised to ask, for example, ‘what Person, or group of persons, created the source [and] how exactly was the document understood by contemporaries?’ Taking this process a significant step further, one of the foremost historians in the field of intellectual history, Quentin Skinner, transformed the study of major political texts. First he insisted that the works of political thinkers be understood within the ‘more general social and intellectual matrix out of which their works arose’."® While social context could help explain a text, however, this alone was not enough. The intellectual historian also nee: intentior texts she The limit become beyond that sun Conclusi reflect a docume society, | down th | techniqt Ethnohis contact, of the c how to | content, Second: impossit material enduran survivine exhausti historiar | archives source f archive records, clearly it find the place, t advance Let us ti which a beliets ¢ argued upon th ‘out of t has poit‘creation Each tk of the jan. The desired, risualized d building, id the eyes aterial , had to be ‘on the orical historical acy of the srinciple of of primary na widely- even re first four the most cantine, srown and osy. The iter by fined to it the ‘Hitler rees van nple, ‘what exactly was 5 process a 2 field of of major nkers be matrix out Ip explain a vistorian The empiricists__s also needed to consider the intentions of the author, and how those intentions were to be achieved. In other words, Skinner argued that texts should be understood as acts of rhetorical communication.'” The limitations of the traditional criteria for documentary evaluation become apparent, however, when historians expand their focus beyond that of the literate elite. First of all, the records or artefacts, that survive into the present are always incomplete and partial Conclusions have to be based upon the extant records and these may reflect a very narrow range of experiences or perspectives. Most documentary material is created and/or preserved by the elite of @ society, and to reconstruct the lives and perspectives of those further down the hierarchy the historian must find other sources and techniques beyond the limited range proposed by Marwick. Ethnohistorians, in particular those working in the area of culture contact, frequently work with evidence reflecting only the perspectives of the colonizer. They have leamed from the discipline of anthropology how to read such evidence against the grain, and for its symbolic content, in order to reveal the subjugated peoples. Secondly, even though much evidence is destroyed, it remains virtually impossible for any modern historian to read all existing archival source material bearing upon their research, for the time-scale (and endurance) is beyond any one individual. When the quantity of surviving documents exceeds human capacity Elton recommended the exhaustive study of one set of ‘master’ documents to guide the historian in his or her subsequent selective use of the remaining archives."® These strictures concerning selection may be applicable to source material consisting of a reasonably comprehensive documentary archive deriving from a known source, for example government records, preserved in only one or two depositories. They are, however, clearly inadequate when the research subject requires the historian to find the evidence in a wide range of sources, scattered all over the place, the quantity and relevance of which may not be known in advance. Let us turn now to the second and third tenets of empirical history, which are closely linked: that of impartial research, devoid of a priori beliefs and prejudices, and the inductive method of reasoning. Elton argued that the historian should not impose his or her own questions upon the evidence; rather, the questions should arise spontaneously out of the material itself.” This is a useful warming, as Quentin Skinner has pointed out, to avoid ‘the premature consignment of unfamiliar6__The houses of history evidence to familiar categories’. But Skinner illustrates, through the hypothetical analysis of a material object (in this case a house), how ‘we are already caught up in the process of interpretation as soon as we begin to describe any aspect of our evidence in words’.”® This too is the basis for Abrams’ opening comments on Elton’s study of Reformation Europe where the title of the work, without further elaboration, prefigures the field of enquiry.” Abrams continues his critique by examining what he calls the ‘Elton dilemma’, the problem of narrative as an explanatory historical device. Rejecting the notion that facts speak for themselves, Abrams argues that every narrative contains implicit analysis because the historian must decide how to arrange the evidence. The device of telling a story allows the historian to evade critical scrutiny of the theorizing underpinning its structure.” Furthermore, judgements concerning causation or motivation are often ‘the product of the historian’s inferences, and are impossible to prove.” Let us take the example of the deciine in fertility in Britain, the United States and Australasia between 1870 and 1920. Based upon quantitative analysis of the census data, historians accept that there ‘was a significant decline in the average number of live births per martied woman during this period. In this case the overall trend appears to be clear, But the reasons for the fertility decline are less so; there are at least half a dozen explanations which range from the economic (fertility behaviour determined by inter-generational wealth flows) to the social (the increased authority of women within the home).* While the fertility decline was undoubtedly the consequence of a complex set of factors, historians continue to search for the principal causes.”* In a world facing rapid population increase, understanding human motivation for fertility control in the past acquires particular contemporary salience. But agreement among historians is remarkably difficult to achieve, and |, historical events are open to a multiplicity of interpretations, The same evidence can generate two quite different stories about the past, and problems arise when these are incompatible. For a striking example of this in practice, see the comparison by environmental historian William Cronon of two histories of the long drought which struck the Great Plains of North America in the 1930s.”* The first study describes the drought as a natural disaster over which the people of the Dust Bow! triumphed; the second focuses upon the failure of human beings to understand the cyclical climate of this semi-arid environment leading to ecological collapse. Cronon ultimately concludes that ‘to try to escape the point of his are all final interpretati is unattaine relative to 1 American F critique of author of £ that histori ‘We do nv do so. Re patterns selection are doint interpret and prac bring the and mea dream o extinguis In Britain & EH. Carr perspective contempoi fisherman, use. All his histotian: In the fir ot and mind of first con historian The sign gained rei postmode preoccupa there is nc always cor world, fro: invariablyugh the se), how 's soon as ® This too rof her ues his e problem 1e notion rarrative how to ve historian structure.” on are often 2 to prove.” the United a vat there 1s per trend are less so; om the mal wealth tin the imsequence w the ae, past ichieve, and s. The same * 2 past, and example of vrian William che Great stibes the Dust Bow! beings to nit leading > try to The empiricists__7 escape the value judgments that accompany storytelling is to miss the point of history itself, for the stories we tel, like the questions we ask, are all finally about value’.”” Are we then to accept that all interpretations are relative? Relativism is the belief that absolute truth is unattainable, and that all statements about history are connected or relative to the position of those who make them. in the 1930s the ‘American historical profession was convulsed by Charles A. Beard’s critique of objectivity.* Beard, the brilliant revisionist historian and author of An Economic Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, argued that historians could never be ‘neutral mirror(s)’ to the past: ‘We do not acquire the colorless, neutral mind by declaring our intention to do so. Rather do we clarify the mind by admitting its cultural interests and patterns — interests and patterns that will control, or intrude upon, the selection and organization-of historical materials... . What do we think we are doing when we are writing history? What kinds of philosophies or interpretations are open to us? Which interpretations are actually chosen and practiced? And why? By what methods or processes can we hope to bring the multitudinous and bewildering facts of history into any coherent ‘and meaningful whole? Through the discussion of such questions the noble ‘dream of the search for truth may be brought nearer to realization, not extinguished.” In Britain a similar relativist critique came from the British historian E. H. Carr in What is History?, published in 1961. Carr shared Beard's perspective that historians wrote about the past in the context of contemporary concerns and perspectives. For Carr, the historian was a fisherman, choosing which pond in which to fish, and what tackle to use. All history writing, he insisted, was ultimately the product of the historian: In the first place, the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, since they do ot and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up @ work of history, our first concem should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it? The significance of individual subjectivity in the writing of history has gained reinforcement in recent years from the influence of postmodernism. From this perspective, the orthodox historical preoccupation with facts about the past becomes redundant, because there is no independent reality outside language. The historian is always constrained by the limitations of his or her own intellectual world, from which the concepts and categories of thought are invariably drawn. Postmodernists argue that while language shapes our&__The houses of history reality, it does not necessarily reflect it. Further elaboration of this perspective will be found in chapter 12, but the major challenge to empiricism lies in the rejection of any correspondence between reality or experience, and the language employed to describe it. One difficulty with subjectivism is that it leaves the door open to the unacceptable face of moral relativism. Is one interpretation of the past 8S good as any other? Should we not, for example, challenge those historians who attempt to refute the historical fact of the holocaust? An interpretation based upon such a travesty of the documentary and oral record indicates the moral deficiency of an unqualified subjectivist stance. All this leaves empirical historians in a very unsatisfactory position, and as Dominick LaCapra has suggested, ‘extreme documentary objectivism and relativistic subjectivism do not constitute genuine alternatives’: One way of addressing this unsatisfactory dichotomy between objectivism and subjectivism was developed by the philosopher of science Karl Popper, whose writings span a large part of the century. Persecuted by the Nazis in the 1930s, Popper retained his faith in science as a rational tool despite the destruction wrought by totalitarian regimes in Europe. Indeed, he agreed with Bertrand Russell's statement that epistemological relativism held a close relationship with authoritarian and totalitarian beliefs: the belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of equal justice, of fundamental Tights, and a free society ~ can easily survive the recognition that judges are Not omniscient and may make mistakes about facts and that, in practice, absolute justice is never fully realized in any particular legal case. But the belief in the possibility of a rule of law, of justice, and of freedom, can hardly survive the acceptance of an epistemology which teaches that there are no objective facts.™? in Popper’s method, the historian begins with an hypothesis or ‘conjecture’, which he or she must then seek to disprove through examination of the evidence. The concept of refutation is central to Popper's goal of achieving objective knowledge. Such knowledge, he believed, could never be more than provisional, but ‘those among our theories which turn out to be highly resistant to criticism, and which appear to us at a certain moment of time to be better approximations to truth than other known theories, may be described... as “the science” of that time’.¥* All theories should, in principle, be able to be efuted; for this reason Popper dismissed psychoanalysis, which he Perceived as able to explain ‘practically everything that happened’,*® In the chalien argued rarely ¢ of thee more fi contrac sufficie isasm rationa describ history decade of Pop, does st and ev historia formul: aresea eviden that th Let us: Geofire publist Univer: on Tud work fe one of The ex disting the tat this pe What! title su history his pat of unp which Elton goverrris ie to reality ‘0 the he past hose aust? ry and jectivist ay nstitute of tury. in mental Ages are tice, tthe an t there yh alto ye, he ng our vhich nations te to be he ad’3s The empiricists_9 in the 1960s Popper's method for the rigorous testing of theories was challenged by the revelations of a physicist, Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn argued that the actual research practice of the scientific community rarely correlated with Popper's ideals concerning the rigorous testing of theories for falsification. Scientific research, Kuhn suggested, was more likely to seek to validate existing paradigms. Eventually the contradictions between the paradigm and the research data become sufficiently intense to cause a paradigmatic revolution, a process which is as much determined by culture and language, as it is by scientific rationality.>° Berkhofer might have this process in mind when he describes the principles of objective empirical history as the ‘normal history paradigm’ prior to the poststructural challenge of the last decade.*” While philosophers of science continue to debate the merits of Popper’s method of establishing objective knowledge, his approach does suggest a more explicit and fruitful relationship between theory and evidence from which empirical historians can learn. Should the historians’ method of research commence with the conscious formulation of an hypothesis, grounded in theory? Should we employ a research method which is more objective because it actively seeks evidence to disprove, as well as prove, a hypothesis while accepting that the final interpretation will always be subject to revision? Let us turn now to an example of empiricist history, taken from one of Geoffrey Elton’s most influential works, England under the Tudors, first published in 1955. Born in Germany in 1921, Elton studied at the University of Prague before completing a doctoral thesis at Cambridge on Tudor government which ‘made his reputation’.** His corpus of work focuses primarily upon administrative history, and he also became one of the leading defenders of empiricism as a theory of knowledge. The extract from his work which follows contains many of the distinguishing features of empiricist history. To begin with, examine the table of contents. What does it suggest about Elton’s approach to this period of English history, both in terms of focus and organization? What historical factors appear to be missing from his account? The title suggests the study is about England, but in this case, is dynastic history equated with national history? It is interesting that Elton wrote his path-breaking study of the Tudor government in the 1950s, a time of unprecedented state expansion in Western Europe, the debate over which may well have influenced the focus of his work Elton was adamant that his own interpretation of the Tudor government ‘came to my mind not (as some of my critics would have10___The houses of history it) because mine was a naturally authoritarian mind looking for virtue rulers, but because the evidence called them forth’. This is an appeal to the orthodox inductive method. Throughout the chapter Elton identifies strongly with the interests of Henry Vil, and nothing is more apparent than the dismissive treatment meted out to luckless pretenders. What other examples can you find in the reading which indicate Elton’s implicit theory of the importance of strong leadership? One of the criticisms Abrams made of narrative history is the ‘luring of the reader into accepting the author's preferred interpretation simply as a happening’."° Does Elton, as the omniscient narrator, allow the flow of the story to obscure the degree to which he is making judgements on the basis of undeclared criteria? Notes 1 E. P, Thompson makes a clear distinction between empiricism as an ‘ideological formation’, and the empirical techniques of historical investigation in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York, 1978), p. 6. 2 Dorinda Outram makes the point that the terms science and scientist were not invented until the early nineteenth century, and the more common contemporary term would have been ‘natural philosophy’, see The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 48-9, 3 See Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), p. 18. 4 Cited in Emst Breisach, Historiography, Ancient, Medieval and Modem (2nd edn, Chicago, 1994), p. 233. 5 Evans, In Delence of History, pp. 17-18. 6 Georg G. lagers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Hanover, 1997), p. 26. 7 Cited in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), p. 26. 8 See Jonathan Dancy, introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford, 1985), pp. 115-16 for further discussion of correspondence theory. 9 J. B. Bury, ‘The Science of History, in Selected Essays of J.B. Bury, ed. Harold Temperley (Cambridge, 1930), pp. 4-6. 10 ibid, p. 17. 11 G.R Elton, The Practice of History (Sydney, 1967), pp. 34-5. 12 Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History Grd edn, London, 1989), pp. 220-4 13 Norman F. Cantor (ed), The Medieval World, 300-1300 (London, 1968), pp. 131-2. 14 Robert Harris, Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries (London, 1986). 15 Marwick, The Nature of History, p. 223. 16 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1978), px. 17 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8, 1 (1969), pp. 48-9. 1am grateful to Lyndan Wamer for drawing my attention to this point. 18 Elton, The Practice of History, pp. 92-3. 19 ibid, p. 83. 20 Quentin Skinner, ‘Sir Geoffey Elton and the Practice of History’, Transactions ofthe Royal Historical Society, 6th ser, 7 (1997), pp. 307-8. 21 Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Shepton Mallet, 1982), p. 307. 22 Ibi 23 Se: of 24 Se: 25S. ca 28 26 Se: An 27 Wi BN 29h a 31 De w 32 Bc 33 Se. «& 34 Ibi 35 Pe 36 Th 37 Ro «€ 38 Jol 39 Elt 4 Ab Addi Actor Apple (New Carr, Elton, Elton, Evans Kenyt Marw Novic Histor Powic Russe Tosh, edn,virtue iter ting is ess hich arship? ring of mply the ty of ‘any term 5), pp Pp. mperley ©, 1978), and f the The empiricists__11 22 Ibid, pp. 310, 307. 23 See John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (London, 1984), ch. 7, for an excellent discussion of these issues, 24 See Simon Szreter, Fertily, Class and Gender in Britain 1860-1940 (Cambridge, 1996). 25 S. H. Righy discusses the philosophical problems inherent in the search for principal ‘causes in ‘Historical Causation: Is One Thing more Important than Another’, History, 80, 259 (june 1995), pp. 227-42. 26 See William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative’, journal of “American History, 78 (March 1992), pp. 1347-76. 27 bid, p. 1376. 28 Novick, That Noble Dreom, p. 259. 29 Charles A. Beard, ‘That Noble Oreamn’ (1935), in Fritz Stern (ed.), The Varieties of History Qnd edn, London, 1970), p. 328. 30 E. H. Cart, What is History (2nd edn, London, 1987), p. 22. 31 Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York, 1994) 32 Dominick LaCapra, History and Critisn (Ithaca, 1985), p. 137. 33 See Kari R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientitic Knowiedge (London, 1963), p. 5. 34 Ibid, p. vt. 35 Peter Gay, Freud for Historians (Oxford, 1985), p. 63. 36 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962) 37 Robert F. Berkhofer, jt, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 28-31 38 John Cannon, et a. (eds), The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (Oxtord, 1988), p. 122. 39 Elton, The Practice of History, p. 121 40 Abrams, Historical Sociology, p. 307. Additional reading ‘Acton, |. E. (ed.), The Cambridge Modern History (Cambridge, 1902-12). ‘Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling The Truth About History (New York, 1994). Cart, E. H., What is History? (2nd edn, London, [1961] 1988). Elton, G. R., The Practice of History (London, [1967] 1987). Elton, G. R., England under the Tudors (3rd edn, London, 1991). Evans, Richard J., In Defence of History (London, 1997). Kenyon, J. P,, Stuart England (2nd edn, Harmondsworth, 1985). Manwick, Arthur, The Nature of History (London, [1970] 1989), Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988). Powicke, Maurice, The Thirteenth Century, 1216-1307 (Oxtord, 1962). Russell, Conrad, Parliaments and English Politics 1621-1629 (Oxford, 1979). Tosh, John, ‘The Limits of Historical Knowledge’, in The Pursuit of History (2nd edn, London, [1984] 1991).ENGLAND UNDER THE TUDORS G. R. Elton Contents Proface I THE TUDOR PROBLEM a vl Tl HENRY VIL: SECURING THE DYNASTY 1, Henry's Claim to the Crown U 2. Conspiracies 3. Ireland and Scotland 4, The Dynasty Secured HENRY VII: RESTORATION OF GOVERNMENT 1. Henry VIl’s Kingship 2, Revenue 3. Financial Administration 4, Law and Order 5. Parliament and the Church IV THE GREAT CARDINAL 1. The Early Years of Henry Vill 2, Wolsey’s Rule in England ; 3. Wolsey and the Church 4. Wolsey’s Foreign Policy V_ THE KING'S GREAT MATTER 1. The Origins of the Divorce 2. State and Church in England 3. The Progress of the Divorce to Wolsey’s Fall 4. Years without a Policy, 1529-32 VI_ THOMAS CROMWELL AND THE BREAK WITH ROME 1, The New Minister 2. The Royal Supremacy 3. The Opposition 4, The Dissolution of the Monasteries 5. Foreign Policy and Religion, 1536-40 XI VIL_ THE TUDOR REVOLUTION: EMPIRE AND COMMONWEALTH 1, Sovereignty 2. Church of England 12RS vit Ix xl Xu xi The empiricists__13 3. Parliament 4, Consolidation of Territory 5. Administrative Reforms 6. Paternalism THE CRISIS OF THE TUDORS, 1540-58 1. The Last Years of Henry VIII 2. Edward VI and the Revival of Faction 3. Mary and the Failure of Reaction ENGLAND DURING THE PRICE REVOLUTION 1. The Inflation 2. ‘The Land 3. Industry and Trade 4, Social Changes ‘THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT, 1558-68 . The Situation in 1558 . The Church of England Restored . The Reformation in Scotland . Marriage and Succession . The Settlement Secured . The Fall of Mary Queen of Scots AARwNe THE GROWING CONFLICT, 1568-85 1. The End of the Spanish Amity 2. The Catholic Threat 3. The Great Age of Elizabethan Puritanism 4, The Constitutional Question 5. Alencon and the Netherlands SEAPOWER 1. The Road to Asia: from Cabot to Fitch 2. The Caribbean: Hawkins and Drake . Propaganda and Colonisation 4, The Navy WaR, 1585~1603 1. England at War 2. The Beginning of the War and the End of Mary Stuart 3. The Enterprise of England 4, The War with Spain, 1589-1603 5. The Conquest of Ireland