Study Day, University of Angers, October 10, 2025
« Short-Term Versus Long-Term Historical Developments in the English-Speaking World : between Revolution and Evolution »
Among the events, great and small, that make up the history of men and nations, some are short-term, while others are long-term. This difference in temporality is influenced by the analyses and interpretations of historians. During this one-day conference, we shall examine how they shaped the duration of several historical developments that took place in the English-speaking world. These historians, whether they be contemporaneous with the reported events or not, sometimes prefer to focus on a short-term time-scale. Some of them, for instance, have devoted whole books to providing detailed accounts of a battle, as have Anne Curry, an expert on that of Agincourt (1415) or Murray Pittock, an authority on that of Culloden (1746).
Conversely, the works of eighteenth-century Scottish « philosophical », « sociological » or « conjectural » historians, including Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Kames or John Millar, are concerned with long-term developments, since they are intended to trace the progress of mankind from prehistory to the modern age, or from barbarity to civilisation, the best example of which being, in their eyes, Enlightenment Scotland. According to them, except for a few nuances, that history of the evolution of mankind goes through three or four stages, or types of social organisation, namely hunting, farming, agriculture and commerce. Although they follow a more traditional timeline, their compatriots William Robertson and David Hume incorporate some elements from « philosophical » history into their historical accounts, in particular by putting down some of the facts they relate to long-term socio-economic causes.
To a lesser extent, G. M. Trevelyan’s pioneering work of social history, English Social History : A Survey of Six centuries – Chaucer to Queen Victoria (1944), regularly castigated by academic historians, but always popular with the general public, is also concerned with long-term developments, as is T. C. Smout’s A History of the Scottish people, 1560-1830 (1969), to mention but a few examples. Does it mean that long-term developments only belong to social history ? Not exclusively, if we bear in mind that J. H. Plumb’s classic study, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675-1725 (1967), spans five decades or that Linda Colley’s ground-breaking In Defiance of Oligarchy : The Tory Party, 1714-60 (1982) covers 46 years. But there is no denying the existence of a special connection between social or socio-economic history and the long-term time-scale or « longue durée », to take up the expression coined by the French Annals School.
Some American historians also harness the long-term approach to a social reading of history, as shown by Howard Zinn, who conceives his People’s History of the United States (1980) as a leverage to encourage a pacific but profound revolution in American society. This approach is also used by the American anthropologist David Graeber, who, in his general study of debt, Debt : The First 5,000 Years (2011), writes a long-term history of that concept going back to the very beginnings of human civilisation.
As far as the history of ideas, or intellectual history, is concerned, John Pocock, in The Machiavellian Moment : Florentine Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975), charts the spatio-temporal itinerary – from Greek Antiquity to the American Revolution by way of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Britain – of the republican idea , which spreads across a long-term time-scale as long as it remains an unimplemented idea, but switches to a short-term one as soon as it is brought into effect, for, according to him, the republican type of government is fragile by essence. So is democracy according to Francis Dupuis-Déri, who charts the itinerary of this notion in Démocratie : Histoire politique d’un mot aux États-Unis et en France (2013).
As regards religion or culture, the traditional secularisation thesis championed by sociologists such as Max Weber, Émile Durkheim or Karl Marx, who look upon secularisation as a long process dating back to the nineteenth century, is contested as far as Britain is concerned by the historian Callum G. Brown, who, in The Death of Christian Britain. Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (2001), contends that Britain underwent a sudden and « revolutionary » secularisation in the 1960s.
Thus, the same event can be presented as a short-term or a long-term one according to the profile of the historian who accounts for it. This is true of the origins of the English Civil War (1642-1651), as well as those of the Anglo-Scottish Union (1707) or the American Revolution (1775-1783), which have given rise to fiery historiographical debates between whig, marxist, revisionist and post-revisionist historians. This is equally true of the unfolding of the Industrial Revolution, which has been relegated by some to the status of a mere evolution.
All contributions dealing with the link between short- and long-term historical developments in the English-speaking world, whatever the period or the geographical area, are welcome. Here are some lines of thought which might be explored :
– the part played by the notions of short- and long-term time-scales in the historiography of the English-speaking world ;
– the links between the names attributed to historical events (revolution, rebellion, etc.) and the temporality that seems to be derived from them ;
– the stakes inherent in historical periodisation and, particularly, in the questioning of traditional chronological boundaries by some historians to create new periods. The « long eighteenth century » (1660-1832) and the « long nineteenth century » (1750-1914), associated respectively with Jonathan Clark and Eric Hobsbawm, spontaneously come to mind ;
– the connection between types of history (political, social, economic, diplomatic, intellectual, etc.) and the notions of short- and long-term historical time-scales ;
– the articulation between short- and long-term historical developments and the tensions between historical contingency and determinism, as well as between providentialism and anti-providentialism – the concepts of « End of History » and historical materialism might be mobilised in this respect ;
– the distinction between the transformations sparked by a passive revolution, in the Gramscian acceptation of the term, which alter the structures of power without causing real social changes, and those that result from an overthrow or collapse of the dominant cultural hegemony ;
– the short-term contextual elements which might account for the concentration of Scottish « philosophical » historians on long-term developments and the articulation between short- and long-term events in the historical narratives of William Robertson, David Hume and other historians of the Scottish Enlightenment or belonging to other historical schools in the English-speaking world.
This one-day conference will take place in person on Friday 10 October 2025 at la Maison de la Recherche Germaine Tillion (MRGT) in the University of Angers. We welcome contributions from both young and confirmed scholars.
A selection of papers will be published in la Revue LISA / LISA e-journal.
Will you please send your proposals for contributions (at least 250 words) as well as a short biography to yannick.deschamps@univ-angers.fr and clifford.baverel@univ-angers.fr before 15 July 2025.
