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 History Essays
Early on in the establishment of history as a profession, which is the point of departure for this book, it clearly exhibited both these characteristics to a high degree. Professionalisation entailed the creation of hierarchies, qualifications and bureaucratic mechanisms of control. Each successive generation of historians will appear to build on the work of its predecessor, so that layers of historical knowledge accumulate on top of each other and the discipline makes steady progress through a phase in which 'normal science' predominates.
Throughout the era of professionalization, historians intent on staking out a distinctive intellectual territory which they could call their own had been wary of neighbouring disciplines. The closer to history the latter might seem, the greater the likelihood that they would be treated as rivals. This was especially true of newly emerging disciplines, like sociology, from the late nineteenth century onward. They were feared not only because they might draw resources, students and readers away from history, but also because they dealt in the coin of theory and generalization where history was empiricist and dedicated to the particular. Yet, if the intellectual economy of history was at first autarchic, with borders closely patrolled to stop anyone smuggling in cultural imports from other disciplines, it became far more open in the course of the next century.
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