Historians From The United Kingdom

"Edward III had always greatly overestimated the help that conspirators and malcontents could bring him."

"Edward III’s claim to the crown of France was a bargaining counter, to be surrendered as part of a permanent territorial settlement. Edward always had an exaggerated idea of its value, just as he had an unrealistic view of the strength of his bargaining position generally. He would pass the next decade trying to exploit his victory at Crécy and discovering how much more complicated the world really was."

"In chess, the capture of the king marks the end of the game. In politics, it may be only the beginning."

"Some of the troops had been conscripted, the last occasion when compulsion played a significant part in the recruitment of Edward’s armies. But most of them were volunteers serving for adventure, honour and money. This remarkable reversal of the English nobility’s traditional objection to foreign military service was arguably Edward III’s most significant achievement."

"These are celebrated compositions. They have long been supposed to be the productions of one of the most remarkable men who took part in the foundation of the Christian Church ; and this some 1,800 years ago. I, on the contrary, assert that these long-inherited notions of our education are entirely illusory and false. I maintain that the Pauline Legend and Epistles date from the Revival of Letters in Europe; that the Epistles were in all probability not the composition of one man, but the product of several pens, and that their contents should be used to throw light on that remarkable period when the great Church organisation was breaking asunder, in consequence of internal dissensions."

"Water is the only drink of every Indian respectable enough to be admitted into their assemblies of public worship, as all inebriating liquors are forbore through a principle of religion; not that the soil is wanting in productions proper to compose the most intoxicating, nor themselves in the art of preparing them for the outcasts of their own nation, or others of persuasions different from their own, who chuse to get drunk. They have not equally been able to refrain from the use of spices and these the hottest, without which they never make a meal. Ginger is produced in their gardens as easily as radishes are in ours; and chilli, the highest of all vegetable productions used for food, insomuch that it will blister the skin, grows spontaneously: these, with turmeric, are the principal ingredients of their cookery, and by their plenty are always within the reach of the poorest. A total abstinence from animal food is not so generally observed amongst them as is imagined; even the Bramins will eat fish; but as they never prepare either fish or flesh without mixing them with much greater quantities of spices than Europeans suffer in their ragouts, animal food never makes more than the slightest portion of their meal, and the preference of vegetables, of which they have various kinds in plenty is decisively marked amongst them all. The cow is sacred every where: milk, from a supposed resemblance with the ‘amortam’ or nectar of their gods, is religiously esteemed the purest of foods, and receives the preference to vegetables in their nourishment.If the rice harvest should fail, which sometimes happens in some parts of India, there are many other resources to prevent the inhabitant from perishing: there are grains of a coarser kind and larger volume than rice, which require not the same continuation of heat, and at the same time the same supplies of water, to be brought to perfection: there are roots, such as the Indian potatoe, radish, and others of the turnip kind, which without manure acquire a larger size than the same species of vegetables in Europe, when assisted with all the arts of agriculture, although much inferior to those of Peru, of which Garcilassa della Vega gives so astonishing a description: there are ground fruits of the pumpkin and melon kind, which come to maturity with the same facility, and of which a single one is sufficient to furnish a meal for three persons, who receive sufficient nourishment from this slender diet. The fruit-trees of other countries furnish delicacies to the inhabitant, and scarcely any thing more; in India there are many which furnish at once a delicacy and no contemptible nourishment: the palm and the coco trees give in their large nuts a gelatinous substance, on which men, when forced to the experience by necessity, have subsisted for fifty days: the jack-tree produces a rich, glewy, and nutritive fruit: the papa and the plantain-tree grow to perfection, and give their fruit within the year: the plantain, in some of its kinds, supplies the place of bread, and in all is of excellent nourishment. These are not all the presents which the luxuriant hand of nature gives as food to the inhabitant of India; but as the natural history of this country is reserved for more diligent and able enquirers, this imperfect enumeration is fufficient to prove that the Indian, incapable as he is of hard labour, can rarely run the risk of being famished...The sun forbids the use of fuel in any part of the year, as necessary to procure warmth; and what is necessary to dress their victuals, is chiefly supplied by the dung of their cows."

"The Moors of Indostan may be divided into two kinds of people, differing in every respect, excepting in the profession of the same religion. Under the first are reckoned the descendants of the conquerors; Tartars continually naturalizing themselves in Indostan, through the encouragement which their martial spirit is sure to receive; Arabians and Persians who have quitted their own, to seek their fortunes in this country. The second rank of Moors comprehends all the descendants of converted Gentoos – a miserable race, as none but the most miserable of the Gentoo casts are capable of changing their religion."

"The texture of the human frame in India, seems to bear proportion with the rigidity of the northern monsoon, as that does with the distance from Tartary; but as in the southern monsoon heats are felt at the very foot of Mount Caucasus, intense as in any part of India, very few of the inhabitants of Indostan are endowed with the nervous strength, or athletic size, of the robustest nations of Europe.On the contrary, southward of Lahore we see throughout India a race of men, whose make, physiognomy, and muscular strength, convey ideas of an effeminacy which surprizes when pursued through such numbers of the species, and when compared to the form of the European who is making the observation. The sailor no sooner lands on the coast, than nature dictates to him the full result of this comparison; he brandishes his stick in sport, and puts fifty Indians to flight in a moment: confirmed in his contempt of a pusillanimity and an incapacity of resistance, suggested to him by their physiognomy and form, it is well if he recollects that the poor Indian is still a man.The muscular strength of the Indian is still less than might be expected from the appearance of the texture of his frame. Two English sawyers have performed in one day the work of thirty-two Indians: allowances made for the difference of dexterity, and the advantage of European instruments, the disparity is still very great; and would have been more, had the Indian been obliged to have worked with the instrument of the European, as he would scarcely have been able to have wielded it.As much as the labourer in Indostan is deficient in the capacity of exerting a great deal of strength at an onset, so is he endowed with a certain suppleness throughout all his frame, which enables him to work long in his own degree of labour; and which renders those contortions and postures, which would cramp the inhabitant of northern regions, no constraint to him. There are not more extraordinary tumblers in the world. Their messengers will go fifty miles a day, for twenty or thirty days without intermission. Their infantry march faster, and with less weariness, than Europeans; but could not march at all, if they were to carry the same baggage and accoutrements.Exceptions to this general defect of nervous strength are found in the inhabitants of the mountains which run in ranges of various directions throughout the continent of Indostan. In these, even under the tropic, Europeans have met with a savage whose bow they could scarcely draw to the head of a formidable arrow, tinged with the blood of tigers whose skins he offers to sale. Exceptions to the general placid countenance of the Indians, are found in the inhabitants of the woods, who, living chiefly on their chace, and perpetually alarmed by summons and attacks from the princes of the plains, for tributes withheld, or ravages committed, wear an air of dismay, suspicion, treachery, and wildness, which renders them hideous; and would render them terrible, if their physiognomy carried in it any thing of the fierceness of the mountaineer.The stature of the Indian is various: the northern inhabitant is as tall as the generality of our own nation: more to the south their height diminishes remarkably; and on the coast of Coromandel we meet with many whose stature would appear dwarfish, if this idea was not taken off by the slimness and regularity of their figure. Brought into the world with a facility unknown to the labours of European women; never shackled in their infancy by ligatures; sleeping on their backs without pillows: they are in general very straight; and there are few deformed persons amongst them."

"A few petty Rajahs were lured by better appointments to conversion, but the people clung to their pagodas; some preachers were put to death, which increased the spirit of martyrdom...The religious vexation continued. Labour left the field and industry the loom; until the decrease of the revenues drew representations from the governors of the provinces; which induced Aurengzebe to substitute a capitation tax, as the balance of the account between the two religions."

"We find...amongst the Moors, the ceremonies of outward manners carried to a more refined pitch than in any other part of the world, excepting China. These manners are become a fundamental of their education, as without them a man would, instead of making his fortune, be liable to lose his head.An uncivil thing is never said amongst equals: the most extravagant adulation, both of gesture and words, is lavished upon the superior. The grandee is seated in his Durbar, where all who approach to pay their respects are ranged according to their respective degrees of station or favour. All is attention to his countenance: if he asks a question, it is answered with the turn that will please him: if he asserts, all applaud the truth: does he contradict, all tremble: a multitude of domesticks appear in waiting, as silent and immovable as statues. This is the ceremonial of paying court. I speak not of the Durbar as the tribunal of justice: there injuries must cry aloud, or will not be heard."

"The mechanic or artificer will work only to the measure of his necessities. He dreads to be distinguished. If he becomes too noted for having acquired a little more money than others of his craft, that will be taken from him. If conspicuous for the excellence of his skill, he is seized upon by some person in authority, and obliged to work for him night and day, on much harder terms than his usual labour acquired when at liberty. Hence all emulation is destroyed; and all the luxury of an Asiatick empire has not been able to counteract by its propensity to magnificence and splendour, the dispiriting effects of that fear which reigns throughout, and without which a despotick power would reign no more."

"The Tartars are known amongst themselves to be of honest and simple manners; and if at times fierce and cruel, they cease to be so when they cease to be enemies of war.The conquest of Indostan was made by them with little difficulty, and has since been maintained with less: a distinction of religions (that of Mahomed, and that of the Gentoos) has ensued, whilst the conqueror may without control vaunt his own, and insult that of the subject; the subject, by being more numerous has only become more despicable, from this proof of not daring to exert his strength. Almost the whole wealth of this vast territory is divided amongst the Moors, the effect of their tenaciousness in keeping all offices of the government amongst themselves. The principle of the government has nevertheless reduced all these mighty lords to be as much the slaves to some powers, as others are slaves to theirs. A licentiousness and luxury peculiar to this enervating climate, have spread their corruption, and instead of meeting with obstacles from laws or opinions, is cherished as the supreme good to the utmost excesses.All these will surely be deemed causes sufficient to have changed, in the present Moors of Indostan, the spirit which their ancestors brought with them into it: and from hence many and dreadful vices are now naturalized amongst them.A domineering insolence towards all who are in subjection to them, ungovernable willfulness, inhumanity, cruelty, murders and assassinations, deliberated with the same calmness and subtlety as the rest of their politics, an insensibility to remorse for these crimes, which are scarcely considered otherwise than as necessary accidents in the course of life, sensual excesses which revolt against nature, unbounded thirst of power, and an expaciousness of wealth equal to the extravagance of his propensities and vices – this is the character of an Indian Moor, who is of consequence sufficient to have any character at all."

"One is that, even before the rise of Islamism, there were indications that leftism did not in general fare as well in the Islamic world as it did in other Third World regions. There was a sense at the time that the presence of Islam displaced the political spectrum to the right. One effect of this was a certain opportunistic reticence on the part of leftists in the Islamic world when it came to the manifestation of antireligious sentiments."

"With regard to the formal structure of the tradition, we need not beat about the bush. In obvious ways the Islamic heritage lends itself so easily to fundamentalization that it could almost be said to invite it."

"The situation of the Muslims of China was very different. They were geographically remote from the Muslim heartlands— in contrast to the Muslims of India, whose contacts were so close that to a large extent they transacted their affairs in Persian... The result was the appearance of a Muslim literature in Chinese that pressed the argument that Confucian and Muslim values were fully compatible, if not identical. Thus an inscription purportedly dating from 742, but likely to have been forged by Chinese Muslims in the Ming period, says of Confucius and Muḥammad that “their language differed, yet their principles agreed.”... Nor is Islamic-­Confucian syncretism likely to have cut much ice with the Chinese elite. One prominent Chinese Muslim author was able to persuade some Confucian scholars to write laudatory prefaces for his books, and the title of his heavily Confucianized work on Muslim ritual found a place in an imperial compendium of 1773–­1782. But the work was placed in the company of books that “contained little that was praiseworthy and much that was contemptible,” and an editorial comment, while conceding that the author’s literary style “is actually rather elegant,” maintained that “the clever literary ornamentation does him no good” for the simple reason that “Islam is fundamentally far-­fetched and absurd.”"

"There are several reasons why Muslims make good enemies in the Indian context. One is that Muslims, whether they like it or not, are historically identified with the invaders who did most to destroy Hindu culture. Of course, not all the Muslim elite in India espoused this program assiduously, and many did not pursue it at all or indeed did the opposite. But there was enough rhetoric of destruction, and enough actual destruction, to lend support to a deep sense of Hindu grievance."

"Between the early fifteenth century and the late, the expectation of life of a monk at age 20 fell by eight years, and at age 25 by more than six."

"Much work that is absolutely essential for the continuance and progress of an ordered society has a severely limited attraction for those who perform it. How, nevertheless, men and women were persuaded to work regularly or at all in the Middle Ages has provided one of the central themes in the study of the period, for this is what we study in the institutions of slavery, serfdom and villeinage—all three were ways and means of persuading reluctant workers to work."

"In his Rule, St. Benedict entrusted all the material concerns of the monastery to a single official. The cellarer, as he was called, was to follow the abbot's instructions in all things, but with this proviso it was to give the monks their due allowance of food at the appointed time, take care of the sick, the children who were then part of the monastic community, and the poor, and look after the monster's utensils and property as though these were the sacred vessels of the altar."

"It is now widely agreed that the economy of western Europe contracted in the later Middle Ages, but the causes of this depression and its time-limits are still disputed. Professor Postan argues that the depression was intimately connected with a decline in population beginning early in the fourteenth century and brought about by the operation of Malthusian checks and soil exhaustion."

"It has been traditional in British historiography to trace industrial growth and technological innovation to the sturdy virtues of bourgeois individualism, and especially to the individualism of Protestant-democratic England... [T]he example of Japan in our time refutes the necessity of any such connection, for Japan has demonstrated the possible industrial dynamism of a highly deferential society, indeed a society which has only recently masked the values and practices of a divine-right monarchy. It is perhaps possible in the changed climate of the 1980s to re-emphasise the extent to which England's commercial and industrial achievement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rested not only on success in war, averting revolution and eliminating French competition, but also on the virtues of loyalty, diligence, discipline, subordination and obedience in the work-place, whether factory, mine or office (indeed the British economy was eventually overtaken by others which practised these virtues to a higher degree). But such practices had already been elevated to the status of social ideals within the Anglican-aristocratic nexus; and it was the military elite, not the nation of shopkeepers, which won the wars. The values of nineteenth-century industrial society owed far more to the values of the ancien regime than the Victorians were prepared to admit."

"PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions."

"The love affair of the British with their national institutions is no limp romanticism but an appreciation of the way that institutions embody and perpetuate, as well as symbolise, a certain way of doing things. That is why a predilection for hereditary peers and against high inheritance taxes is an affirmation of family integrity. That is why an established Church is widely endorsed, even by other Christian denominations, as an official acknowledgement that law is more than technical convention. That is why the national history curriculum has become a potent symbol of society's right corporately to affirm a vision of itself."

"The monarchy is not the only target: from right to left, across a spectrum from the police via the church to the BBC, such bodies seem to be valued chiefly as targets. Yet institutions such as these are peculiarly important in the social fabric of unrevolutionised Britain just as they are peculiarly unimportant in societies such as America that have had the slate wiped clean by a great social upheaval... [N]o nation can exist without some modest pride in its institutions and its achievements, and Everyman as well as the Prince has an interest in being free to feel at one with what he coolly and neutrally observes. Political correctness does to our national culture what the architecture of brutalism did to our urban landscape. The Prince was right again."

"Like most things under threat today, our experience of it began with the Reformation. Medieval England was part of European Christendom: it never developed a unitary concept of sovereignty while the papacy effectively claimed jurisdiction over things that were God's. The break with Rome made the difference, and Henry VIII's Act in Restraint of Appeals contained the key phrase "the Realm of England is an empire"—that is, a jurisdiction from which there was no appeal... English lawyers responded to these events by devising a new attitude to the integrity of the state. Sovereignty was not a concept that had emerged in the Roman law tradition of the continent which continued for centuries to include a host of local and corporate privileges, immunities and independent jurisdictions. The English common law swept all these away and created a single, level playing field."

"Like other opponents of patriotism, Price failed to understand it: his critique was, consequently, ineffective. The new secular religion of universal benevolence never took hold in George III's England, and England in consequence never experienced the opposite swing of the pendulum: that flood of anti-Napoleonic romantic nationalism that swept Europe in the 19th-century, with its glorification of the impersonal nation state or the metaphysical race. England persisted with a national consciousness far more akin to its traditional patriotism, focused on institutions such as the monarchy rather than on an abstract nationalism, and upheld by Anglican religion rather than by secular romanticism or racialist theorisings."

"The joys and despairs not of romance but of house ownership are the staples of English conversation... Investment potential alone does not explain the cult status that house ownership occupies in the imaginations of the English: it has much older and more emotional roots. Not only do the English wish to own rather than rent, they own with a peculiar relish, and take a special delight in bricks and mortar which no financial asset of equal value could ever give. "An Englishman's home is his castle." This resounding phrase still echoes in our society."

"In the 19th and 20th centuries, continental Europe was swept by grandiose ideologies and, after their exhaustion, is hurrying towards anti-nationalist federalism. England, by contrast, was largely unmoved by these ideologies, and still retains a stubborn patriotism."

"Indignation is a powerful weapon. With it, the English empiricists saw off the continental system-builders: Comte, Hegel, Marx, Croce, Treitschke, Braudel. The best English historians, by contrast, have been superbly negative and slashingly reductionist, ripping down airy continental nonsense with sharp, scholarly hooks."

"Far from being uplifted by their history, the Scots have over many centuries been strikingly bad at maintaining and developing a useful sense of national identity. Worse, Scotland lost much of the self-image it once possessed. Medieval Scotland was a considerable achievement of dynastic politics over poverty and localism. It boasted four universities to England's two, and into the 16th century, Scottish culture was famous across Europe. This mental world of renaissance latinity sustained a Scots identity built around dynastic history and religion rather than the folk culture of Robert Burns. It was this which went disastrously wrong... The Glorious Revolution, ardently espoused by Scots Presbyterians, began the break-up and suppression of this high culture of latinity, episcopalianism and dynastic legitimacy. With dour thoroughness, episcopalians and nonjurors were expelled from their posts as clergy, schoolmasters and academics, and were subjected to lasting and effective persecution. Presbyterians hailed William III, and later the Hanoverians, as saviours of their religious and civil liberties; but, far more than in England, Scots were divided. Presbyterianism survived at the cost of sacrificing a national identity which had grown up in another mental world."

"The model of the atomised, acquisitive individual, dealing with others only through secularised market relations regulated by self-interest, is disastrously inadequate as an account of how real men behaved in real societies, as real historians ultimately discerned."

"To attempt to write the history of liberalism before the 1820s is thus, in point of method, akin to attempting to write the history of the eighteenth-century motor car. There were, of course, forms of transport which performed many of the functions which the motor car later performed, the sedan chair among them. Yet to explain the sedan chair as if it were an early version of the motor car, and by implication to condemn it for failing so lamentably to evolve into the motor car, is to turn a modern error of scholarly method into a failure of men in a past society. To stretch explanatory categories so far that they lose their specific reference and become mere holdalls for our ahistorical assumptions about the eternal nature of human motivation is to condemn us merely to explore the inner landscape of the assumptions and to deny us any perception of a need to locate those assumptions in time."

"The rebellion of 1688 was not a bid for a weak monarchy, but for a Protestant monarchy. Consequently, the legislative expressions of that attempt which followed had much to do with religion, but little to do with placing limitations on the monarchy's prerogative in other spheres. Discounting the libertarian rhetoric which 1688–9 generated on the part of a small but vocal minority, it is possible to see that the effective powers of the Crown continued to grow."

"The House of Commons under the Georges was far more susceptible to manipulation than it had ever been under Charles I, or even Charles II and James II."

"Far from seizing the initiative for the Commons, early-eighteenth-century Whigs (who comprised the majority of MPs) were more concerned that the chief agent of all initiatives in government, the Crown, should not be seized by the Stuart dynasty. The reinstatement of Jacobitism as a profoundly important issue was a major achievement of recent scholarship in the early-Hanoverian field."

"The rebellions of the 1640s delayed the rise of the English monarchy, but failed to stop it."

"County studies have succeeded in proving that there was no self-sufficient impetus to rebellion (let alone revolution) within the English counties. The English Civil War, we can then see, was the result of a "domino effect" produced by successful rebellions in Scotland and Ireland."

"This perception of a hierarchical order, which was an orthodoxy in England into the early nineteenth century, suddenly seemed far more persuasive once the idea had been abandoned that eighteenth-century England was a peculiarly modern society by European standards, and that it was so not least as a result of the bourgeois revolution of the 1640s."

"Jonathan Clark is the most controversial historian of his generation. In his English Society, 1688–1832, he reopened debate about Hanoverian England, by asserting the centrality of religious belief and ideology. Clark's Revolution and Rebellion sought to link political developments and historical controversies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and, in doing so, took issue with most British scholars of the period."

"The English had a well-developed historiography that traced the deeds and achievements of Englishmen (and some women, notably Boadicea and Queen Elizabeth I) over many centuries. The cult of the English common law was already ancient, and was revitalised by texts like Matthew Hale's The History of the Common Law of England (1713) and William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9). But the biggest body of literature outlining a shared experience concerned the English church. It was here especially that an image of a free, Protestant people was worked out and sustained, whether in best-sellers like John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1559 and many later editions) or in heavyweight theological texts like Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593; first complete edition, 1662). Between them, these texts kept alive the interpretation long ago placed on English history by the Venerable Bede (d.735) in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum that its unifying theme was providential destiny and survival in the face of overwhelming odds."

"J. C. D. Clark has argued that "the radical critique" of the late Hanoverian constitution "had its origins in theology, not economics". In his view, establishment thought was seeped in the doctrines of Filmer and Leslie, that all political and social authority derived from the first two persons of the Trinity, being enshrined in the fatherhood which God bestowed on Adam, and in the Apostolic Church to which Christ gave power of the keys. Consequently, those who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity – heterodox Dissenters such as Deists, Arians, Socinians, and Unitarians – struck right at the political heart of the regime, unlike middle-class Lockean radicals who dealt it merely glancing blows. After about 1800 the old regime began to be undermined, but in Clark's view this was not so much by "the progressive advance of a liberal mood shared by all", as by demographic and social changes. It was eventually destroyed by the legislation of 1828–9, which Clark describes as marking a "final and sudden betrayal"... Clark can claim that the legislation of those years destroyed the unitary state and opened a door to religious pluralism, through which not only orthodox Dissenters but also heterodox Dissenters, and eventually Jews, atheists, and free thinkers, could pass."

"History uncovers the inter-relatendess of problems which practical men seek to isolate: recent crises should remind us how mutually dependent monarchy, church and Parliament still are if each is to survive. And their mutual dependence is a clue to their importance. Republicans disagree, for they see the crown as an anachronistic survival, left perched on top of a society already secular and republican to the core. As so often, this half truth is rather less than half true. Whatever the traumas of the 1640s or 1830s, they hardly ranked with 1776, 1789 or 1917: much survives, in the machinery of government (the Queen's peace, the Queen's ministers, unpoliticised armed forces), in manners (deferential more than egalitarian), values (altruistic more than radical-individualist), even speech (the Queen's English rather than cultural pluralism). Tony Benn is right to see England as essentially unrevolutionised; that indeed is his problem. England's differences from societies republican in their essence are still wide."

"Francis Fukuyama, that emblematic American commentator of the 1980s, gave only the last and most optimistic version of this benign intellectual isolationism. His vision of the irresistible triumph of American liberal capitalism around the world was normally read by Americans as an assurance that their victory would be bloodless. Everyone would soon largely agree with them... The most perceptive alternative analysis was that of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. His new model for international relations predicted a world divided into armed and antagonistic blocs on religious lines. Huntington's was the best argument, but it was Fukuyama who wrote the bestseller."

"In an epoch-making study entitled English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime, published in 1985, he forcefully argued that eighteenth-century England, its policy based on a close alliance between the monarchy, the aristocracy and the church, was an "ancien regime", indistinguishable from contemporary France, for instance, or even Spain. What it was not was some sort of forward-looking experiment in constitutional monarchy and representative government. Thus the final collapse of this ancien regime was heralded not by the parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 but by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1830 [sic], when England ceased to be a confessional state. In the same way he argued for the close identification of political radicalism with religious nonconformity, in contradiction to E. P. Thompson's Tawneyesque The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 and well established as a classic. Clark's theories have provoked a great deal of opposition, not eased by his confrontational technique and acerbity of manner, but he has to be taken seriously, and it must be rare indeed for a scholar of his age (born in 1951) to have two major historical conferences and two issues of different professional journals entirely devoted to a discussion of his theories. We must never forget that his work runs in parallel with the excellent but more conventional work of John Cannon, Ian Christie, Paul Langford and others, but there is no doubt that he has put a new spin on British eighteenth-century studies, and it is safe to say that they will never be the same again."

"In any period, as we now see, we have been asked to believe that the rich are always getting richer, the poor always getting poorer, the middle class always rising, the aristocracy always about to disintegrate. The old scenario no longer convinces: it fails to identify and date the real transformations which did occur. Revisionist historians of the ancien regime in England, 1660–1832, being aware that "class" emerged as a terminology only in the last decade or so of their period, and then only as a minority dialect, looked back with incredulity and amazement on the Old Guard in the early-Stuart period, labouring to explain the English Revolution in terms of class conflict, of rising or declining classes, or the aspirations of a bourgeoisie."

"It seemed, then, that to ask the question, "why was there a revolution in the 1640s?" was first to reify the notion, then to beg the question: we had been drawn to explain not so much what happened, as the reification itself. The idea of the Civil War as a revolution was breaking down."

"Despite its dubious ancestry, the word "revolution" by now has a Pavlovian effect on some historians: applied to any event, it leads at once to eager expectations of radical structural change, profound discontinuity, a sweeping away of the old order. We may indeed wonder whether England has ever experienced a revolution in the extensive terms of the social scientists' definitions in the 1640s, 1688 or 1714, or even under the later impact of "Industry". How much was destroyed in the Civil War? Apart from the large extent to which royalist peers and gentry retained their estates, local studies suggest the widespread and deeply rooted survival of Anglican religious loyalties and practices, even reinvigorated by the experience of persecution."

"Strong leaders, even absolute monarchs, owe their strength to a natural social constituency rather than to an authoritarian personality. For Charles, it was the nexus of squire and parson that fuelled the uncompromising counter-revolution of populist Anglicanism. These were the men, like the Vicar of Bray, for whom Good King Charles's days were golden, at least in retrospect. At the time, they found him often reluctant to go as far as they wished in persecuting Catholics and Dissenters. Only later did Charles's reign assume the golden glow of nostalgia, as unhappy Tories under the first two Georges sought a stylish archetype which would highlight, by contrast, the Hanoverian boorishness. Then, Charles's rule came to seem a symbol of the triumph of indulgence, pleasure and tolerance over rigour, earnestness and bigotry. But at the time, it was a much more ambiguous affair."

"Among British historians there is agreement that the great man of the twentieth century is L. B. Namier (1886–1960), who probably ranks as second only to Maitland among the greatest of British straight-line professionals."

"The Newcastle Papers in the British Museum have been called the rubbish-basket of the eighteenth century. With almost incredible industry and no inconsiderable acumen Mr. Namier has rescued from the dust-heap an immense number of details with regard to parliamentary representation in England in the period when Newcastle was First Lord of the Treasury."