Charting the Past provides a serviceable introduction to the profusion of historically inflected writing in eighteenth-century England. Here, Jeremy Black performs a curious double act by combing two of his scholarly personas: the period-focused specialist and the pedagogically minded generalist. Coincidently, the hybridity does not stop there: the book is something of an outgrowth from chapter 3 of Black's Clio's Battles (2015), and it includes two chapters initially drafted by William Gibson. The result is a work—best suited to nonspecialists—that is accessible, vibrant, and driven by an impressive quantity and range of primary sources. An accumulation of quick-fire claims and observations coalesce to form a preface, two contextual chapters, seven thematically orientated but chronologically sequenced chapters, and a conclusion. Endnotes point the way to some relevant secondary sources, and instead of a bibliography there is a list of selected further reading. The overarching argument further complicates the stereotypical idea that the “Enlightenment” constituted a profound break with its past by drawing attention to the varied ways in which eighteenth-century engagements with history served as a formative medium for change. And, for Black, this phenomenon was an expression of “present-centered” historical writing (xi).

In transcending the contrast between great writers and hacks, Charting the Past sets the historical writing of some well-known figures within a discursive context concerning those debates about science, religion, politics, and society that were formulated through the dynamic print culture of the eighteenth century. Here, ascendant discourses may have decried the “baroque sensibilities” of previous generations to embrace “history as argument, and not as chronicle,” but there remained a palpable sense in which the past “reached to the present and referred to it” (34, 35, 23). History—as principle and practice—was a discerning feature of learning about the world, its people, and oneself. Studies of the past were increasingly shaped by “the stronger emphasis on the reality, verification, and importance of facts” (55). However, diverse forms of individual and collective identity were also constructed and contested by appropriating history. The interplay between “history, news, and fiction” made for complex projections of authority, morality, and knowledge in literature and the political economy (71). “Newspapers presented themselves as the interpreters of the past,” and history “provided the central source of evidence for political and religious polemics” (18, 33). And, yet, historical texts were also invariably commercial products written for a market and to some extent shaped by that market.

Within such entanglements, select historical writings served to pass comment on the burning issues of the eighteenth century. Mary Astell's An Impartial Enquiry of the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in the Kingdom (1705) imbued the course of history with a sense of Christian stoicism from a nonjuring perspective to cast Charles I as a martyr, with marked allusions to the fate of James II. The last of Gilbert Burnet's three-volume History of the Reformation Church of England (1679–1715) saw the 1688–89 revolution as a providential affirmation of not just the triumph of Protestant reformation but also the imperative that civil government should be beholden to the pious consciousness of the people. With the past so contestable and unstable, “historians could represent Dissenters as an enemy within or could vindicate them in similarly extreme ways” (132). In intervening in debates to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts, Daniel Neil's History of the Puritans (4 vols., 1732–38) pressed the notion that intolerance toward Dissenters was symptomatic of a failure to understand the historical virtues of Puritanism. The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the Seven Years’ War gave critics further cause to understand such crises through history so that “national renewal became necessary, and with eventual success, almost self-fulfilling” (166). David Hume may have ushered in a new philosophy of history, but John Wesley's Concise History of England (1776) offered an idiosyncratic, but popular, historical synthesis that reaffirmed a sense of Christian history as a “virtuous struggle”—in an idiom readymade for the “re-creation of Toryism as a politics of patriotism and nationalism” (178, 186). In contrast, Edward Gibbon worked the rich traditions of classical history against the backdrop of the American Revolution to critique the ill effects of “immoderate greatness,” providing “historical resonance for a Whig world that was domestic as well as international” (210, 205). In the shadow of these developments, Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) cast the French Revolution as illegitimate, and wholly unlike the revolution of 1688–89 in Britain, because it did not seek to correct the deficiencies of the past by recourse to historical virtues, and was thus without “any historical consciousness” (224).

Notwithstanding this constructive discussion, Charting the Past seems strangely unwilling to advance a critical contribution to the bourgeoning study of the history of history. It is a moot point as to whether such an impulse absolves Black's offering from being critiqued with respect to this challenging field of enquiry. Specialists familiar with the protean development of historiography and historical culture from the ars historica onwards may find Charting the Past to be awkwardly naïve, at best. Black's characterization of eighteenth-century historical writing as “present-centered” (xi) is a troublesome oversimplification and one that invokes a not unproblematic evaluative anachronism. In addition, a desire to let the primary sources do the talking leaves Black exposed to the charge that he lacks a historiographically astute method for the contextualization, organization, exposition, and analysis of his sources. Black's engagement with the secondary literature is patchy. All this said, going too far down the road of unfavorably contrasting either period-focused studies with thematically orientated enquiry or generalist ambition with specialist insight might be a tad unfair.

There are, however, other things to worry about. Charting the Past presents a rather cossetting vision of eighteenth-century England as the cradle of modernity. Black evidently has few qualms about referring to the 1688–89 revolution as the Glorious Revolution without qualifying scare quotation marks on approximately forty occasions. Even generalist historians must appreciate the unhelpful implications of perpetuating this kind of uncritical or programmatic perception of the eighteenth century, which is still all too prevalent in undergraduate essays and public histories.

Taken in the round, Charting the Past is an enjoyable and informative read that enriches an understanding of eighteenth-century England and serves as a useful primer for further study and research.