ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF THE (CAMBRIDGE) HISTORICAL JOURNAL
The Cambridge Historical Journal was established in 1923 as the flagship academic journal of the
Cambridge History Faculty. Serving on its earliest editorial committee under Harold Temperley
were the Regius Professor of Modern History and the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and
Naval History of the day. They were, respectively, the classicist and historian of medieval Rome,
John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927), and the political historian and renowned biographer of William Pitt
the Younger, John Holland Rose (1855-1942). These two professorial posts continue to exist un-
changed in name today, a hundred years later. But the Cambridge Historical Journal underwent a
quiet name-change in 1958, dropping Cambridge from its title to embrace an agenda of ambitious—
perhaps hubristic—generality. In renaming itself simply as The Historical Journal, it signalled a new
intention to open itself up beyond Cambridge, and to embrace every aspect of history and every
type of historian. Yet from 1958 until 2008, fully 76% of the Historical Journal's articles were in
British history, and most of the remaining 24% were in French and German history.
1
In a book re-
view published in 1956, the former Editor, Herbert Butterfield (ed. 1936, 1938-1952), wrote reveal-
ingly of his position on this matter:
From the time when the project of a 'general history' was being developed in the academic
world two hundred years ago, the great desire was to make it truly universal... The field of
survey came to be constricted, first, because the general historian ceased to have the delu-
sion that he could be an 'orientalist' too. Secondly, it was too difficult to bring world-history
to an organic whole—to achieve something more than the mere addition of the separate
histories of India, China, etc. Thirdly, even those who tried to take the whole globe into
their survey came to the conclusion that from the fifteenth century the European states
were in the lead, and were, so to speak, the 'carriers' of universal history.
It is only a thin knowledge that we can have of a history embracing all the continents. We
can have a thicker layer for our own, and, in fact, for the majority of us, there is bound to be
a greater depth again when we come to western Europe. Until we reach the scale of the na-
tion, our knowledge will naturally become more intensified as it comes nearer home.
2
On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of its publication, we have collated below a full run
of the Cambridge Historical Journal and its successor, The Historical Journal, and invite you to consid-
er its path from left to right, through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. How far has it
come in its bid to open up to diverse historical topics, authors, and editors? It's a fascinating exer-
cise to browse through its collected pages over the last century, noting the shifts in historiography,
contributors, and topics, and the way in which it produced scholarship continuously throughout
the most placid and the most turbulent times—often, seemingly, in total isolation from them. On
the eve of the Japanese invasion of China and the German invasion of Poland, topics covered in the
journal included erudite meditations on English constitutional history, Florentine Jews in the fif-
teenth century, and vassalage in the age of Charlemagne. In the year of Stalingrad, the tumultuous
events of Britain's contemporary present found expression in a single article on Germany's Drang
Nach Osten, 'the idea of expansion towards the East'; it was accompanied by two other articles on
evangelicalism and English medieval monasticism. Little can be found in the research articles pub-
lished throughout the 1950s and 60s that registers more than a glimpse of the momentous transfor-
mations taking place in Britain's own empire in those decades—though some of the exchanges in
the reviews, notes and communications do offer more contemporary reflections. Histories of the
world beyond Europe have been, for most of the hundred years of the HJ, filtered through the pre-
rogatives of political and diplomatic relations with Britain and the western world.
Things are changing. If slowly. We invite you to peruse the shelves from right to left, and judge for
yourselves. As the first woman of colour to edit this journal in its hundred year history, I note that
the editorial board of the HJ contained no women until 2001, that the first non-white editor took
post only in 2016, and that 83% of its articles between 1958 to 2008 were authored by men.
3
Yet no
matter one's race, gender or creed, to reflect so tangibly on a hundred years of this journal is also to
meditate soberly on the scale of human accomplishment and mortality in the onward march of his-
tory—an exercise in which we can surely all find common ground. Contained in this compact col-
lection of bound paper you see before you, filling just over one medium bookcase, are the multi-
plicity of academic lives of the last hundred years: the intellectual causes, scholarly obsessions and
research energies to which the authors were devoted; the mantle of editorship passing from one
Editor to the next, and the event horizon of their passing into history themselves; the multitudes of
undergraduates and graduates who have moved through the History Faculty in this time, hover-
ing like unwritten ghosts in the shadows of each printed page; all the events of history through
which they toiled, thought and wrote, conversed and squabbled, lived and died. To survey this
bookshelf is to survey the HJ as history. In scanning the accumulation of volumes to the left, we
may take stock of where it has been; in contemplating the volumes that have yet to be added to the
empty shelves to the right, where it might yet go in the future.
RACHEL LEOW
30 June 2023
on behalf of current Editors of the Historical Journal:
4
Rachel Leow
John Gallagher
Bronwen Everill (reviews)
Editors of the (Cambridge) Historical Journal, 1923-2023
compiled with thanks to Bruce Bruschi and Mark Goldie
1923 - 1937 Harold Temperley
1938 - 1852 Herbert Butterfield (+ 1936)
1953 - 1960 Patrick Bury
1960 - 1970 Harry Hinsley (+ 1976)
1971 - 1975 Derek Beales
1976 - 1986 Vic Gatrell
1977 - 1985 Christopher Andrew
1986 - 1990 Tim Blanning
1987 - 1996 John Morrill
1991 - 2000 Jonathan Steinberg
1997 - 2001 Mark Goldie
2001 - 2003 Naomi Tadmor (reviews)
2001 - 2008 Robert Tombs
2002 - 2006 Peter Mandler
2004 - 2006 Clare Jackson (reviews)
2007 - 2011 Clare Jackson
2007 - 2009 William O'Reilly (reviews)
2009 - 2012 Julian Hoppit
2009 - 2016 Michael Ledger-Lomas (reviews)
2013 - 2017 Phil Withington
2012 - 2015 Andrew Preston
2016 - 2019 Sujit Sivasundaram
2016 - 2021 Andrew Arsan (reviews)
2018 - 2022 Emma Griffin
2020 - 2021 Sarah Pearsall
2021 - Rachel Leow
2022 - Bronwen Everill (reviews)
2023 - John Gallagher
1. Mark Goldie, "Fifty years of the Historical Journal", Historical Journal, vol. 51, no. 4 (Dec. 2008), pp. 821-855.
2. Herbert Butterfield, review of History in a Changing World by Geoffrey Barraclough, Cambridge Historical Journal vol.
12, no. 2 (1956), pp. 189-191.
3. Goldie, "Fifty years", p. 822.
4. Current Editorial Board: Peter Mandler (Chair), Andrew Arsan, Gareth Austin, Annabel Brett, Paul Cavill, Clare
Jackson, Pedro Ramos Pinto, Andrew Preston, Ulinka Rublack, Sujit Sivasundaram, Mark Smith, Emma Spary.
