POCOCK AND THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF THE NEW BRITISH HISTORY

This article recovers the rationale behind the project to found a ‘new’ British history undertaken by J. G. A. Pocock in the early 1970s, and contrasts this with the approach adopted in the subsequent historiography. The article argues that British history as conceived by Pocock was intended to transcend the parochialism of national history whilst also rehabilitating the writing of imperial history without succumbing to the temptations of metropolitan whiggism. Pocock’s perspective was constructed against the backdrop of a British withdrawal from empire and led him to a neo-Seeleyan interest in the dynamics of imperial expansion and retrenchment. While this process is best understood through the comparative study of empires, any such undertaking raises complex questions about the ultimate subject of historical inquiry and the nature of historical explanation. In addressing these questions, this article distinguishes the ambition to write the history of a polity from the aim of writing histories of ‘ party ’ as originally formulated by the historians of the Scottish enlightenment whose work has been among Pocock’s abiding subjects of investigation.