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Peter Mandler, Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970. By Michael Bentley., Twentieth Century British History, Volume 18, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 256–258, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwl033
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Although it might be thought we have too many ‘modernisms’ already, Michael Bentley's denomination of another—the mode of history writing that came (very roughly) between ‘whiggism’ and ‘post-modernism’—surely identifies a subject under-studied, very much worth studying, and here studied closely with supple intelligence. Originating in his 2003 Wiles Lectures at Queen's University, Belfast—that enviable occasion where the lecturer is not only well-hosted but also gets to bring along his or her own claque—Bentley's essays do not so much anatomize historiographical modernism (though we do get along the way illuminating passages on anti-whiggism, belief in ‘facts’, commitment to ‘research’, specialization, professionalization, ‘new’ histories, social science and other structuralisms) as illuminate its self-delusions.
Primary among these self-delusions was anti-whiggism. Indeed the first half of the book is devoted to the nearly purposeful persistence of whiggism, particularly up to but also sometimes beyond the Second World War, evident in the ubiquitous urge to tell the whig story of constitutional development, the continued valorization of Protestantism, and the sense of a continuing English mission to spread civilization, including by imperial means. Much of this account is interestingly consistent with other histories that have extended ‘Victorianism’ up to the 1960s—thus we should not be surprised to find a whig story predicated upon liberty, parliamentarism, Protestantism and civilization prevalent in that first half of the twentieth century which we are not any longer so inclined to view as politically polarized, massified, secularized and colonized.
