HISTORY AS A SCIENCE: Bury

Abstract

[John Bagnell Bury (1861–1927) was a classical philologist before he became a historian, and his works on the late Roman period and the Byzantine Empire were characterized by high competence in both fields. At the age of 28 he wrote A History of the Later Roman Empire from Arcadius to Irene 395 a.d. to 800 a.d. (2 vols. 1889), which was generally regarded as a remarkably mature contribution to the literature. Given his own interests and inclinations, Bury was ideally fitted to undertake the definitive edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (7 vols. 1896–1900). He also served as editor of the Cambridge Ancient History. In his early years he was concerned with philosophy, especially with Hegel, and he developed a lasting interest in the philosophical problems of historical study; in 1902, when he succeeded Lord Acton as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, he delivered an Inaugural Lecture on “The Science of History,” reprinted below, which epitomized the historicist tradition in England. Bury’s strong rationalistic beliefs, akin in some ways to Gibbon’s, inspired his two short works on The History of Freedom of Thought (1913) and The Idea of Progress (1920). During and after the First World War he grew skeptical about the possibility of establishing historical causality and in his last writings stressed the role of contingency, of mere chance, in history.]