Abstract
In a discussion of Sir John Sinclair’s History of the Public Revenue, the Monthly Review for September 1790 sought to identify some of history’s principal failings as a genre. This type of writing, it was argued:
till of late, was chiefly employed in the recital of warlike transactions. [...] The people were not known; the circumstances that affected their domestic prosperity and happiness were entirely overlooked; and the records of many ages might have been pursued without obtaining the least information concerning any fact that led to a knowledge of the internal economy of the state, or the private situation of individuals.1
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Notes
Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NT: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. xii
Laird Okie, Augustan Historical Writing (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), pp. 10–11
Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture: From Clarendon to Hume (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), pp. 207–8.
Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 65.
Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome, trans. Michael Grant (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 76
For the influence of Tacitus, see Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism, and Reason of State’, in J. H. Burns and \Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 479–98
Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 31–119.
Hugh Trevor-Roper, Queen Elizabeth’s First Historian (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971), pp. 24–5
F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 239.
Wyman H. Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), p. 398.
David Harris Sacks, ‘The Countervailing of Benefits: Monopoly, Liberty, and Benevolence in Elizabethan England’, in Dale Hoak (ed.), Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 272–91.
David Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983).
Nicholas Phillipson, David Hume: The Philosopher as Historian (London: Penguin, 2011)
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© 2014 Ben Dew
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Dew, B. (2014). An Economic Turn?. In: Dew, B., Price, F. (eds) Historical Writing in Britain, 1688–1830. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332646_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137332646_5
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