 S H O RT E R N OT I C E S

rapid influx of European settlers, meant that the dispossession of Māori from
their land, and their subsequent marginalization from settler society, became
more complete than elsewhere in the country. Nevertheless, there was a strong
history of interaction between Ngāi Tahu and Pākehā, and it is important that
further historical work is done on the relationship between the two groups. It
should be noted that there are some important themes that unify these
otherwise disparate essays. One is the idea of a sense of ‘Englishness’ that, while
felt by some New Zealanders across the country until the s, was peculiarly
strong in the case of Christchurch. As the collection suggests, this was in part a
figment of local imagination, indicative of how people saw themselves rather
than how they actually were. However, Englishness also shaped the city’s high
culture, the architecture of the urban core and perhaps most importantly the
structure of local society. Christchurch is often characterized as a peculiarly
hierarchical and class-ridden society compared with other Australasian settle-
ments. To some extent the essays in Southern Capital support this view. It
certainly seems to have been the intention of the city’s founders to recreate the
layered social hierarchy of an English county town, and the local elite
subsequently did all it could to preserve this ideal. Most of the contributors to
Southern Capital are keen to stress, however, that such efforts met with little
success in a fluid, constantly changing colonial settlement. An excellent chapter
by Trevor Burnard convincingly establishes Christchurch as an ‘artisanal town’.
Artisans and white-collar workers used their relatively high wages to develop
dispersed settlement patterns and a relatively egalitarian society. Unsurprisingly,
Christchurch political life was characterized by reasonably moderate left-wing
activity. Although members of the Christchurch elite could rely on recognizably
British status symbols such as exclusive educational establishments, gentle-
manly clubs, and amateur sports to protect their social dominance, they had
little real political power. Despite its obvious weaknesses, Southern Capital
helps to explain the development of a New World city that was always keen to
stress its links with the Old Country. If only for the purpose of comparison,
some essays in the collection should attract a wider scholarly audience. It is a
pity, however, that, in many cases, the authors and editors have not capitalized
on this potential by drawing out the broader relevance of what otherwise can
only be viewed as local history.

National University of Ireland, Galway SIMON J. POT TER

What Happened to History?, by Willie Thompson (London: Pluto P., ;

pp. . £; pb. £.).

The old adage – ‘you can’t tell a book from its cover’ – was never more
appropriate than for this book by Willie Thompson. According to the blurb,
Thompson explores the development of the postmodern turn in history and
evaluates its strengths and weaknesses, concluding that its extravagant claims
cannot be sustained: nothing much has happened to history – it soldiers on.
One might have expected, given that the above is the raison d’être for the book,
a straightforward critique of postmodernist claims (extravagant and not so
extravagant) along traditional modernist lines, such as the careful laying-out of
the alleged postmodernist claims vis à vis the nature and status of history, a clear
EHR, cxvii. (Feb. )
 S H O RT E R N OT I C E S 
identification of, especially, their extreme aspects, a close, analytical critique of
all the positions identified, and a ‘fair’ evaluation of them such that, with regard
to the title of the book, some kind of answer to its question would be provided.
But this is not what we find. The first four chapters of the book – the first 
pages of a  page excursion rather than a sustained argument – offer a potted
‘history of history’ as an academic discipline in Britain and America especially,
the continued importance of yet another revised Marxism (and especially the
sometime contribution of E. P. Thompson to it) and pages on ‘Institutions and
Personnel’ covering teaching postgraduates, employment, archives, journals,
publishers and ‘other institutional frameworks’. In Chapters Five (Reality,
Representation, Truth and Narrative), Six (Grand Narratives) and Seven
(Identity and Morality), the ‘postmodern challenge’ is picked up inter alia, but
to little effect. For in the end – and end he soon reaches – Thompson is more
concerned to justify the correctness of his own Marxist approach (though by
little more than assertion and as a reiterated act of faith) and thus to pin his
colours to a mast now surely taken down and packed away. It is this nostalgia
that makes Thompson’s book belong, I think, to an interesting anti-
postmodern sub-genre which is developing – sensibly and moderately, of
course – within that much larger discourse which concerns itself with the
philosophy of history/historiography/methodology. It is a type of book that is
not overtly theoretical or philosophical (unlike C. B. McCullagh’s The Truth of
History or Mark Bevir’s The Logic of the History of Ideas) nor gung-ho slapstick
as is Arthur Marwick’s The New Nature of History, but is in the business of
recuperating for traditional historiography those moderate aspects of post-
modernism (its arguments about language, discourse, tropology, etc.) which
might prove usefully sustaining, whilst exercising its ‘irresponsible extremes’;
one thinks here of books like Richard Evans’s In Defence of History, John Tosh’s
The Pursuit of History, Ludmilla Jordanova’s History in Practice and Appleby,
Jacob and Hunt’s Telling the Truth About History. And of course they all miss
the point. Which is that postmodernism is not simply a more reflexive
modernism which, shorn precisely of its irrecuperable bits, is compatible with,
say, liberal pluralism, but is precisely its ‘extremes’, an extremism which, because
it really is past modernity has nothing to say to it: modernist histories really are
passé with regard to these ‘happenings’ and Thompson’s book does little to
challenge or change this ‘historical moment’.

University College, Chichester KEITH JENKINS

Les espaces de l’historien: Études d’historiographie, ed. Jean-Claude Waquet,

Odile Goerg and Rebecca Rogers (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de
Strasbourg, ; pp. . F ).

Over the last thirty years the expanded French universities have developed a
unique research institution, the Groupe de recherche. Each GDR has one or
two senior staff who ‘animate’ a group of up to thirty postgraduates, career
researchers, project researchers, and foreign visitors. Each member is expected
to read the occasional research paper, and outsiders can be invited to read papers
or to comment. The theme of the GDR is mainly determined by the animators,
but the members are often able to influence it in due course. A cynic might say
EHR, cxvii. (Feb. )