The Life and Work of Christopher Hill

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30-05-2025

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The Life and Work of Christopher Hill
Rudrangshu Mukherjee
38 minutes ago
No other historian mined the printed sources of the 17th century and wrote about all its aspects in the way Hill did.
Christopher Hill. Photo: x/@radicaldaily
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Christopher Hill (1912-2003) belonged to Balliol, and the 17th century belonged to Christopher Hill. No other historian mined the printed sources of that century and wrote about all its aspects – politics, economics, society and literature – in the way Hill did. He opened up the field and taught us to look at it afresh. His writing was informed by a staggering erudition and a rare passion.
E.P. Thompson, dedicating a book to Hill, captured his loyalty to Balliol and his supreme control over the century that he made his own: 'Master of more than an old Oxford college'.
In spite of this pre-eminent position, till Michael Braddick wrote this book, no one has attempted to write a biography of Hill. Many of his contemporaries – E.H. Carr, A.J.P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm to name a few – have had biographers. Braddick's book thus fills a major gap.
Michael Braddick,
Christopher Hill: The Life of a Radical Historian, Verso (2025)
In a sense, it comes too late because very few historians and students of history are any longer interested in what Hill wrote and what he stood for. This indifference and neglect notwithstanding, it is good to have Hill's life and work retrieved from the condescension of the present.
Christopher was born in York. His father was an affluent solicitor and his parents were Methodists. It was this ambience of dissenting Protestantism, Hill was fond of saying, that predisposed him to lifelong political apostasy.
He went to St Peter's School, York, and came to Balliol as a scholar in 1931. It is said that the two History dons at Balliol, Vivian Galbraith and Kenneth Bell, were so impressed by his entrance papers that they not only awarded him 100% but also drove to York to ensure that Hill came to Balliol and did not get lured to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Thus began Christopher's 43-year-long association with Balliol, of which he was to become Master in 1965. He took the top first in History in his year and won the distinguished Lothian Prize and the Goldsmith's Senior Studentship.
He went on to be elected a Fellow by examination of All Souls. He came back to Balliol in 1938 as fellow and tutor in Modern History. His bonding with Balliol is best illustrated by an anecdote (not mentioned by Braddick).
After his retirement, his successor as Master, Anthony Kenny, reintroduced formal Hall (formal dining in the College Hall). On the first occasion when formal Hall was reinstituted, a masked figure appeared beneath the organ loft and shouted, 'Long live the spirit of Christopher Hill.' The incident alludes to the loyalty that Hill commanded and also to his position against some traditional Oxford customs and practices.
Hill was Oxford's most famous Marxist who had been a member of the British Communist Party from the mid-Thirties till the Soviet invasion of Hungary. His conversion to communism occurred while he was still an undergraduate. The impact of the Depression and the rise of fascism forced him to question the premises of the society in which he lived. Such queries led, as it did for many others in the Thirties, to Marxism and communism.
Braddick dwells at length on Hill's activities and ideas when he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). I thought that devoting so many pages to Hill's party activism was unnecessary, since such activities, and the beliefs they were based on, would become irrelevant to Hill's work as a historian post 1956. Presumably, Braddick thought that such a detailed account was important to establish Hill's radical credentials.
The period when Hill was a party member – roughly mid-1930s to mid-1950s – is the most problematic phase of Hill's professional life. During these years, he remained an unalloyed and unreconstructed Stalinist. He spent time in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, when the terror of Stalinist collectivisation and the purges had begun. He did not take note of these developments.
This is like someone visiting Berlin/Germany during the same period and failing to note what was being done to the Jews. Braddick writes of Hill's 'partisan defence of Stalinism'. A few pages before the use of this euphemistic phrase, Braddick notes Hill's paean to Stalin: 'He was a great and penetrating thinker … he was a highly responsible leader.' (Hill's words)
As a practising historian, Hill endorsed Stalin the historian. No wonder during these years, he wrote a book on the Russian Revolution which had little or no mention of Trotsky. Hill swallowed the party line to risible and absurd limits. Braddick evades the critical issues involved here by remarking 'It is hard to know what to make of this paean to Stalin.'
There is an enormous amount to be made from this. Hill was a victim and product of the greatest radical illusion of the 20th century. He was not alone: many others of equal eminence and erudition had willingly yielded to the predicament of sacrificing their reason to the altar of the party and the Soviet Union. It was a bizarre and self-inflicted blindness.
Thompson, a member of the CPGB and Hill's comrade, was to write with more than a hint of regret that he began reasoning only at the age of 33 i.e. after he had left the party in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Hill began reasoning when he was 45, after he resigned from the CPGB. It was only in 1981, in far away New Zealand and to a non-British audience, as Braddick notes, that Hill could confess, 'I was a sucker for Stalinism until I found out a lot more about it. I thought that the Communist Party held out an alternative. I was wrong.'
Hill's scholarly output was enormous. He wrote 21 books and innumerable essays. The first book came out in 1940 and the last in 1996. That first book, The English Revolution 1640, despite its many drawbacks and its schematicism, has become a minor classic.
Looking back at the book, Hill once said it was written by an angry young man in a hurry because he knew he was going to die. It was written up self-consciously as a last will and testament. It broke from prevailing historiography which saw the events of the 1640s either in constitutional terms or as a religious conflict. Hill tried to show that it was a more comprehensive social and economic transformation, the first significant moment in the birth of English capitalism and the bourgeoisie.
From that first book to 1956, Hill did not publish any books on the 17th century. Post 1956 was a remarkably productive phase. It coincided significantly with his marriage to Bridget Sutton and his exit from the communist party.
He wrote on a range of subjects concerning the 17th century – on puritanism, on the economic problems of the church, on the intellectual origins of the English Revolution and on the literature and political ideas of the 17th century.
Looking back at the corpus of Christopher's writings, it is clear that all his books and articles were connected by a running theme. He wanted to understand the place of the English Revolution in history and to document and analyze the mental and cultural transformations that accompanied and facilitated the rise of capitalism. He looked at Puritanism and its relationship with capitalism and the political upheavals of the 1640s; he drew out the links of Puritanism with an intellectual and political radicalism which challenged the very premises of the new socio-economic formation even as it was being born. This is how he made the 17th century his own. He set the agenda for research on the period.
It is difficult to even list, let alone summarise, all that Hill wrote. I will take the liberty of presenting here my own personal favourite and I dare say Hill's too. This is The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972), conceived and written in the period of student radicalism and the flowering of counter culture. Here he drew out the revolution within the revolution, ideas and movements that aimed to overthrow what the English Revolution was trying to institute at every level of English life and society. Men and women, seldom written about, came alive in the book as did ideas and movements long relegated to the loony fringe of the 17th century. Hill brought to his archive a historical imagination that lit up a utopian and inevitably passing moment of teeming freedom.
This book and, in fact, everything else that Hill wrote, is invariably marked by a sensitive use of literature as a source for history writing. He had the rare ability – most tellingly revealed in his great book, Milton and the English Revolution – of setting his reading of literary texts within a general view of the processes of historical continuity and change. His essays on Marvell, on Clarissa Harlowe, on Vaughan, not to mention his book on Bunyan, are rich in literary and historical understanding.
Hill believed that the study of history humanises us. History can never be only the recounting of a success story. He quoted Nietzsche approvingly, 'History keeps alive the memory of great fighters against history.' Hill was only too aware that persons of his ideological persuasion would have to live with 'the experience of defeat' (the title of one of his books). History is a tragedy, Hill wrote, although not a meaningless one.
Braddick, as I pointed out, avoids the more problematic aspects of Hill's communist past. Similarly, he doesn't discuss some very critical issues embedded in Hill's formidable academic output. What Hill described as 'The English Revolution'' in 1940 became in his more mature writings the' bourgeois revolution''. But Hill did not quite explain this term and what justified it.
Did the bourgeoisie lead the revolution in the 1640s? Did that revolution, if it was one, lead to the formation of a bourgeois society? The only time Hill came to address such questions was in an essay titled 'A Bourgeois Revolution?' – an essay that Braddick does not discuss. (J.G.A. Pocock (ed.) Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776, Princeton University Press, 1980). I think the question mark in the title is significant.
Hill argued in this essay that the English Revolution 'was brought about neither by the wishes of the bourgeoisie, nor by the leaders of the Long Parliament. But its outcome was the establishment of conditions far more favourable to the development of capitalism than those that prevailed before 1640.' The English-Bourgeois Revolution was the product, Hill argued, of unintended consequences. This is a puzzling argument. What would happen to this argument if the Russian Revolution of 1917 was seen in terms of its outcomes – a violent totalitarian regime intended by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin to suppress the working class and butcher the common people? It seems to me that Hill had not thought through the implications of his argument. Hence, perhaps the question mark in the title of the essay.
There are questions also about Hill's method and reading of sources. Braddick quotes Keith Thomas, who is by no reckoning a denigrator of Hill, 'whatever Christopher Hill reads seems to provide him with additional support for views he already holds'' This is quite damning and very close to what J.H. Hexter in his critique of Hill called 'lumping'. Hill himself once admitted that he had a thesis to argue and he brought together evidence to buttress that thesis. It needs to be asked if this is a valid method and does it live up to what Thompson called the 'historian's discourse of proof'.
Moving to his work as Master of Balliol, Braddick's account would suggest that he was a very popular Master. This may not always have been the case. There were Fellows of Balliol who believed that Hill formed cabals, worked on the principle 'if you are not with me, you are against him' and was not always very kind to those who differed with him.
In spite of what I have written above, it would be wrong on my part not to note that Hill commanded respect from even people who did not agree with him or liked him. Richard Cobb, who always called Hill quasi mockingly, 'super God', wrote in Hill's support in the Times Literary Supplement during the (in)famous Hill-Hexter spat. In his letter, Cobb invited Hexter to visit Oxford and listen to a sermon delivered on the Sunday of seventh week of Michaelmas Term titled 'On the Sin of Pride'.
Tariq Ali recalls Hill telling him that in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, when Thompson had resigned from the CPGB and Hill still hadn't, the former wrote to Hill a letter which Hill described as 'the rudest and the most obnoxious letter I have ever received in my life'. Braddick does not mention this letter. What was in that letter? Why was Hill delaying his resignation? How did a reconciliation between Hill and Thompson take place?
Braddick's biography is good if a trifle adulatory and justificatory. Hill would have wanted us to go a little beyond. 'What canst thou say?' he would have asked us as he indeed did in the unforgettable last line of The World Turned Upside Down.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee is chancellor and professor of history at Ashoka University. Views expressed are the author's own.
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