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Les âges de Britannia

 | 
Jean-François Dunyach
, 
Aude Mairey

Deuxième partie. Modernités

On Periodizing Early-modern times

Frank O’Gorman

Texte intégral

Retrospect

1The idea of periodizing history is as old as the study of History itself. Indeed, attempts to divide up the past into intelligible parts has fascinated historians and philosophers for centuries. Virgil articulated the division of History into golden ages and recurrent cycles, a concept that continues to influence us down to the present time. St. Paul preferred a chronological division, and one that dominated the teaching and determines the administration of the History department at the University of Manchester where I taught for thirty six years, a division into Ancient, Medieval and Modern. Even during the Enlightenment, writers were accustomed to speculate about the past and its divisions. Vico, Herder and later Comte were employing speculative concepts that may appear fanciful and contingent today such as the age of the divine, the age of the heroic and the age of human achievement. Of these types of periodization. perhaps Herder’s idea of the coherence and similarity of the thought and feeling of the age perhaps means most to us now. Even more useful to us today was Miller’s View of English Government, a highly structured work which divided up past societies on the basis of property ownership. So we had the age of “feudal aristocracy”, the “age of feudal monarchy” and the “age of commercial government”. And even today historians are liable to slice up the past into sections which suit them and provide an effective and convincing context for their researches.

Preconditions

2Most of these periodization are of little use to us now. Most of them arose from religious, philosophical or personal considerations. Very few of them were based on extensive research. Yet the factual details of past societies do not obligingly assemble themselves into convenient, chronological sections which satisfy every writer and reader of History. And there is nothing deplorable in historians attempting to understand their own study of the past by imposing some sort of general statement upon it. There must be a place for periodization. Yet periodization may be regarded as a legitimate historical activity only if certain conditions are observed. A period may be identified if a certain unity is observed, when events are placed in common context, when values and attitudes conform to a common pattern and share common features. Such a period may display certain similar social features, such as the dominance or rise or fall of a particular group, not necessarily the universal middle class.

3Such a period may also be characterised by a chronological sense of period, with agreed perceptions of a beginning, middle and end. Such periodizations may sometimes require considerable explanation and justification. Some of them are positively misleading. For example, casual references to “the Age of Reason” or “the Age of Reform” may justly be accused of prioritising certain features of the period and ignoring others. Yet such distortions do not entail the repudiation of all such attempts. Chronological accounts of history require some signposting, some sort of periodization. Surely we can do better than simply recite the details of one government after another, one reign after another, one war after another.

The Long Eighteenth Century Thesis

4To chastise the periodizations of other writers is easy. It is much more demanding to exemplify and to analyse a specific and well known such periodization. For the area of study in which I am interested, namely British History between around 1660-1840, I have found the idea of a “Long Eighteenth Century” a particularly useful one. It is based on the following ideas:

  • The years between 1688-1689 and the 1830s saw the establishment of a particular regime in Britain. These years constitute a definable period in that there is a continuous and coherent unity in politics and political awareness, in religion and religious practice, in the experiences of a “Fiscal Military State” and in its relations with Europe. During the eighteenth century contemporaries were in no doubt that the political structures and the religious order with which they were familiar had their origins in the Glorious Revolution. Even more tellingly, after 1707 there is scarcely any legislative change to the regime. Arguably, the Act of Union with Ireland in 1800-1801 merely extended to Ireland features of the regime which were already common in England.
  • Directly or indirectly, the effect of the Glorious Revolution on Great Britain was enormous and acted as a watershed in the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland. The period after it was remarkable for the assertion of Parliament’s supremacy, for the emergence of regular general elections, for the development of a wealthy middle class, many of whom invested in British government debt (in the wake of the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694) and for emergence of an urban culture of refinement and invention.
  • Over and above these involvements, in this period there is a discernible consistency and cohesion in basic concepts and concerns, shaping a distinctive narrative of British history in which people looked back to the Glorious Revolution in 1688-1689. That narrative concerned the acquisition and protection of popular rights, of religious toleration and parliamentary government. It highlighted the survival of a Protestant state in a dangerous, hostile and revolutionary Catholic —dominated Europe. At the other end of the period, although the significance of the 1832 Reform Act can be exaggerated, and while it is perfectly true that those who framed it were intent on conserving as much of the old order as they could, the Reform Act was a clear indication that he old order was coming to a close. Indeed, towards the end of the period people were becoming aware that a particular era in British history was coming to an end. (See the debates on the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, on Catholic Emancipation and on the Reform Act of 1831-1832). Indeed, many of its structures, political, religious, social, were indeed by then undergoing rapid and decisive transformation.

What is the alternative to “The Long Eighteenth Century”?

5Most of the alternative dates, such as 1700 and 1714 at the beginning of the century, and 1783, 1800 and 1815 at the end of it, are less defensible than the dates implied in the idea of a “Long eighteenth Century” New centuries rarely mark really new beginnings and 1714 establishes a new dynasty, not a new order. The year 1815 marks the apogee of a great era, not the dawn of a new historical era. Do we adopt a “reign by reign”? tactic or do we concoct an umbrella term like “the Hanoverian monarchy” or “the Georgian era”. Even worse, do we use phrases like “the Age of Reform” or “the Age of Improvement” which, from the outset, clearly appear to be prejudicing the attitude to be taken towards the period as a whole. The great advantage of “the Long Eighteenth Century” is that it highlights the survival long into the nineteenth century of many aspects of the British ancien regime of the eighteenth century.

Modification

6The idea of a “Long Eighteenth Century” is over twenty years old and while I embraced it with some enthusiasm I would be the first to recognize that in the light of historiographical developments since that time I would be anxious to modify and develop it in the following respects.

  • I would emphasise more strongly that the old dynastic and corporate state of the seventeenth century had become a more ordered, coherent and rich and powerful capitalist state in and by the mid eighteenth century. This revealed a society in which the old trappings of monarchy, parliament and peers together with an Established church and a propertied electoral system coexisted with massive social and economic collaboration between the aristocracy and gentry elite, on the one hand, and the middle classes, on the other.
  • Emphasise more the extra-English parts of Britain. In particular, I would single out the sense in which the decline of Jacobitism in Scotland marked a specific and identifiable period in the histories of England and Scotland. A contrary process is evident in the case of Ireland.
  • I would seek to integrate the function and impact of the Seven Years War into the idea of a “Long Eighteenth Century”.
  • I would include the relatively free action and interaction of complex patterns of Ritual which marked the models of activity for popular support and protest. This would include the use of formal ritual by those who might repudiate it.

7Consequently, although the idea of a “Long Eighteenth Century” is by no means without its disadvantages —any such description would possess some such deficiencies— for the period concerned it appears to me to deserve its current status as the essential descriptor.

Auteur

Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester.

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