Modern British History and the Antipodes

When word got out that that James Vernon had been commissioned to write a new Cambridge textbook on The History of Britain since 1750, some scholars were a little surprised. Vernon’s early work on Politics and the People in the nineteenth century had cast him as the enfant terrible of British history. The determinedly poststructuralist approach of this first monograph – which argued for the cultural constitution of political possibilities – had solicited a startlingly severe backlash from a field still some way off a linguistic turn.1 Vernon’s later work – on the ways that mobilities stretching across national borders helped to forge Britain’s ‘peculiar modernity’ – seems a bit less at odds with contemporary trends, though it is hardly the view of historiographic orthodoxy.2 Cambridge ‘national histories’, on the other hand, have generally stood at (and for) the centre of academic authority. Pundits would have been forgiven for wondering if it was Vernon or Cambridge who had shifted the furthest.