New Directions in British Historiography: the Emergence of Cultural History?

Abstract

The idea of a ‘cultural turn’ in the philosophy and subject matter of British academic historians is much discussed but difficult to substantiate. This article investigates the emergence of ‘cultural history’ as a category used by and about British historians of Britain, establishing the context of changes in the agenda of ‘social history’, the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1980s and 1990s, and changing relationships between ‘the social’ and ‘the cultural’. It examines teaching and postgraduate research as well as academic outputs, concluding that the impact of cultural history, in various guises, can best be described as additive rather than substitutive.