What is Political History?

In the continuing series 'What is...history?' eight historians define political history - an area sometimes regarded as 'narrow', 'elitist' or simply 'dull', but now enjoying a recrudescence.

T.P. Wiseman (Professor of Classics at the University of Exeter)

Political history is the history of the polis, the res publica, the citizen body; political events are what was done by it, to it, or in its name......
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G.R. Elton (Professor of English Constitutional History at the University of Cambridge)

The present reaction against political history, though often ill-informed and sometimes silly, has its virtues.....
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Conrad Russell (Astor Professor of British History at University College London)

There is a sense in which political history, social history, economic history, ecclesiastical history, history of ideas and the rest represent no more than a choice of angle from which to view a common body of evidence.....
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Ronald Hutton (Lecturer in history at the University of Bristol)

Political history is the study of the organisation and operation of power in past societies. It is the exhilarating business of observing men and women engaged in what has proved to be the most complex and difficult of human activities, upon which turned not only their own future but the destinies of nations, economies, societies, cultures and faiths.....
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Roy Foster (Reader in Modern History at Birkbeck College, University of London)

In the 1960s, when the world seemed young, one used to hear that ‘everything is politics’.....
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John Turner (Lecturer in History at Royal Hollloway & Bedford Colleges)

Arthur Balfour, asked in December 1917 what Britain's war aims should be, replied that this was 'a problem in which I take no very great interest because, as it seems to me, there is not the slightest difficulty in defining what ends we want to achieve.... The real difficulty is to find out how far we shall be able to attain them...'.....
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Kenneth O. Morgan (Fellow and Praelector, The Queen’s College, Oxford)

'Where does power lie and how can it be acquired by the workers?' Thus Aneurin Bevan's definition of the purpose of the politician.....
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Peter Clarke (Fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge)

I don't want to claim that what I pass off as political history is what all political historians ought to be doing.....
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