Interdisciplinary History: A Historiographical Review

FROM THE STANDPOINT of the 1980s it appears that one of the most noteworthy things about professional historical studies in the twentieth century has been their gradual tendency to become increasingly comprehensive in scope and more experimental and eclectic in conception and method. The changes which have already occurred, and seem likely to continue to occur, have been based largely on historians' use of concepts and techniques developed by scholars in other disciplines. In general, the trend has been to look primarily to the "social sciences"-sociology, economics, political science, psychology, and anthropology-for new ideas, and lately to statistics and mathematics; to a lesser degree, historians have turned to "humanistic" disciplines such as language studies, poetics, literary criticism, and philosophy. In this paper we shall discuss some aspects of the origins, growth, and present status of this movement. At the outset, however, it must be admitted that these changes in orientation, while crucially significant from the overall point of view of history's development as a branch of scholarship, have thus far deeply affected the thinking and scholarly output of only a minority of historians. The British historian Geoffrey Barraclough is correct in stating that "At the moment resistance to change is at least as strong as, in all probability stronger than, the forces making for change.... At least 90 per cent of historical work published today is resolutely