The context in which evidence is interpreted
These disagreements do not happen in a refined atmosphere of pure debate, far removed from the influences of the contemporary world. In a suggestive article entitled ‘The present and the past in the English industrial revolution’ published in the journal Past and Present (1984) David Cannadine demonstrated how historical accounts of the industrial revolution have been influenced by the political, social and economic climate of the time in which the historian was writing rather than that of the time being studied.
In most cases this involves a relationship between the way in which research interests and questions are formulated and the kinds of issues active in the surrounding environment. Crafts and Harley formulated their revision of rapid, large-scale industrial growth in the late eighteenth century against a backdrop of debates about de-industrialisation in the early to mid-1980s, for example.
The role of ideology and politics
Disagreements can also be more overtly ideological in character. They can be articulated as conscious or thinly-veiled political disagreements, or, as the unacknowledged (and sometimes consciously denied) manifestation of ideological predispositions. At one level, political historians have political views as well an enduring interest in the intricacies of political history and it is hard to believe that there is no relationship between the two.
This does not make them incapable of making independent judgements, or in any way oblige them to subordinate their scholarly integrity to party or political interest. But it might influence the kinds of questions they ask, the themes and subjects which hold their attention and the philosophical and political modes of analysis they bring to bear on the problems they study.
The historian of nineteenth-century Tory politics Norman Gash displays brilliant and exhaustive empirical research, but throughout his work we catch repeated glimpses of sympathy for Robert Peel, the views he espoused, and his formative place in the history of Conservatism.
The great fault-line that defines many disagreements in modern historical writing runs along the division between the political right and left. In the period since the Second World War, fundamental and often irreconcilable disagreements persisted between historians who accepted one or more of the many variants on Marxist historicism and those who rejected this whole understanding of the nature of history.
To simplify hugely, the disputes were not simply local political disagreements but ran to the heart of the question of whether history was a process or not. Very crudely, classical Marxism carries within it a view that history has a particular trajectory or direction and will end at a finite point, even if we cannot have advance knowledge of when and precisely how this will come about. Many left wing historians of, for example, working-class political activity carried this assumption into the archive and interpreted evidence on this basis whilst others rejected it on principle. Given this, disagreement was inevitable.
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