| Abstract: | The publication in 1967 of Geoffrey Holmes's masterpiece, British Politics in the Age of Anne , effectively demolished the interpretation of the 'political structure' of early 18th-century England that had been advanced by the American historian R.R. Walcott as a conscious imitation of Sir Lewis Namier. But to understand the significance of Holmes's work solely in an anti-Namierite context is misleading. For one thing, his book only completed a process of reaction against Walcott's work that was already under way in unpublished theses and scholarly articles (some by Holmes himself). Second, Holmes's approach was not simplistically anti-Namierist, as some (though not all) of Namier's followers recognized. Indeed, he was strongly sympathetic to the biographical approach, while acknowledging its limitations. The significance of Holmes's book to the study of the house of commons 1702–14 (and of the unpublished study of 'the Great Ministry' of 1710–14 to which it had originally been intended as a long introduction), was in fact much broader than the restoration of party divisions as central to political conflict. It was the re-creation of a political world, not merely the delineations of political allegiances, that made British Politics in the Age of Anne such a landmark in writing on this period. |
