by John Shaw
The reasons why historians disagree are many and varied, but the following represent some of them:
• Questions of the selection and relevance of evidence
• The method and the techniques of history
• Ideology and political predisposition
• The purpose for which history is studied in the first place
• More recently, arguments about the validity of historical method
Selection and interpretation of evidence
At the level of primary research and evidence, historians often find different evidence on the same subject. In some areas of historical inquiry new information causes new conclusions to be drawn and that evidence as well as those conclusions is then contested. One example is the debate over the extent and rate of economic growth in England during the industrial revolution. Here are four stages of this complex argument.
1. Up until the 1970s and 1980s interpretations of the industrial revolution suggested a period of dramatic economic growth in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - in part based on data relating to the wages of craftsmen compiled during the 1950s and 1960s by Phelps-Brown and Hopkins.
2. The estimates of growth rates were revised downwards by Deane and Cole, largely on the basis of alternative data based on new research into Gross Domestic Product as well as wages.
3. In the mid-1980s a further and more radical downward estimate of growth figures that appeared to undermine the veracity of the term ‘industrial revolution’ was proposed by Crafts and Harley; a tendency pushed even further by Feinstein.
4. This revision was soon challenged by historians like Berg and Hudson who questioned the data but also contested the approach to the data that Crafts and Harley had adopted. They argued that, amongst other things, the industrial revolution was a phenomenon of regional development, therefore hard to study through the national aggregate statistics used by earlier historians.
There are a number of different sources of disagreement involved here. It is not simply that evidence based on new research superseded evidence based on old research. At any given point in the debate, new data redefines the issue (such as putting the focus on the region) and this often opens the possibility of re-interpreting the existing as well as the new data.
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