“Any reader of history born after 1955 is likely to have comparatively little knowledge of the constitutional history of England” (19)—so Michael Bentley observes early in his study of English historiography. As someone born on the cusp of this period, I have to confess to acquiring limited knowledge of such a history, except via the large and uninviting tomes found in secondhand bookshops. But in charting historiography in England between the period of Whig ascendancy in the later nineteenth century and the challenge of what has been termed postmodernism in the later twentieth, Bentley has opened up an important domain of study. His book follows on from Reba Soffer's study of the period between 1870 and 1914 (Discipline and Power: The University, History and the Making of an English Elite, 1870 [Stanford, CA, 1994]) by bringing the twentieth century more largely into view, and it fills the gaps left by the spate of recent biographies of prominent figures such as Lewis Namier and Eileen Power.

In illuminating the history of English historiography over the century that precedes our own intellectual “age,” Bentley's study has two main aims. The first is to question the conventional view that Whig historiography came to an end with the First World War and the emergence of a more scientific and critical form of historical investigation pioneered by the F. W. Maitland, the constitutional historian, and A. F. Pollard, founder of the Institute of Historical Research (1921). According to Bentley, the spirit of the Whigs lived on throughout the twentieth century in the progressivism of a figure like R. H. Tawney and continued into the twenty-first in the populist appeal of the “tele-dons.” Second, the purpose of the study is to define and describe the historiographical creed that rivaled and to some extent succeeded the Whig tradition as the orthodoxy of the profession, which Bentley terms “modernism.” Historical modernism represented a set of assumptions that could only become visible when its status as a “higher common sense” (3) had been brought into question by the corrosive tenets of postmodernism. It insisted on a scientific concentration on facts, on the capacity of the past (often seen as synonymous with history) to be reconstructed through systematic analysis of archival sources (often confused with “evidence”), and on the maintenance of professional standards of research through the introduction of critical mechanisms such as the learned journal and the historical seminar. Adherence to this creed was shared by across the political spectrum, across historical periods, and across disciplinary subfields. As Bentley wryly comments, “To suggest to an Albert Pollard or Ernest Neale or Geoffrey Elton that they had mistaken the nature of the sixteenth century became a comment on their eyesight. They had been there and seen it. It was in the Public Record Office” (13).

Much of this intellectual framework is familiar, of course, not least because it continues to infuse historical scholarship, whatever the impact of postmodernism; Bentley is right to refute its simple reduction to “empiricism” or “positivism.” “Modernism” had a complex and varied formation in England, taking in the economic history of Munia Postan at the London School of Economics and the agrarian history of Joan Thirsk at Leicester as well as the stringent parliamentary history of Lewis Namier at Manchester. But the intellectual culture of history revealed through this study is on the whole a narrow one. English historiography in the phase of modernism was marked by an antipathy to “theory” and was hostile to anything that smacked of the literary. It was likewise resistant to ideas from other disciplinary areas, an insularity that revealed itself also in a relative indifference to historical practice outside Britain, with the sporadic exception of the Annales school. The picture that Bentley paints of English history as an institution is one dominated by Oxford and Cambridge. It is unsurprising therefore that the prime concerns of English historiography remained largely unchanged before the 1950s, consisting of histories of the English constitution, nation and empire, parliament, and church. The prevalence of historians’ affiliations to Oxbridge and the Church of England in particular, evident in the potted biographies provided, is striking, reminding us (if it were needed) how strongly the discipline has been tied to the institutions of the British state. English history in Bentley's account frequently appears as a conservative discipline, male-dominated, complacent, and parochial, though there were always exceptions to the rule like the medievalist Helen Cam and the polymath Eric Hobsbawm.

In certain respects Bentley's study replicates its object. Thus in defining historigraphical modernism Bentley shows little awareness of other cultural dimensions of modernism or of scholarly debate about it; the same applies to the concept of “structuralism,” which seems to refer here crudely to the idea of social structure rather than to a distinctive current of Europeanlitical history in its various guises. In these regards Modernizing England's Past cannot match the breadth or sophistication of Peter Novick's study of American historiography, That Noble Dream (Cambridge, 1988). For all that, the book provides a wealth of insights into what might be termed the canon and culture of English history. It should be required reading for any student contemplating research or a career in the field, especially those from outside the cloistered walls inhabited by the generations of historians that Bentley so sympathetically describes.