This short book is a much-expanded version of my Inaugural Lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge, delivered on 18 May 2009. By custom, an Inaugural Lecture by the holder of this position has sought to say something about the nature and study of history itself, and its place in the wider community, as well as speaking to the newly appointed incumbent's own particular field. I have tried to combine all these various features of the Inaugural Lecture in the present work. It addresses, and indeed celebrates, the long tradition of British scholarship on the history of the European Continent, a tradition of which I am myself a part, and it asks how this tradition has developed, why it has now reached its apogee, and what measures government bodies, schools and universities will need to take if it is going to continue. It cannot hope to match the impact of my predecessor's Inaugural Lecture, Quentin Skinner's Liberty Before Liberalism, any more than I can hope to attain in my field the distinction he has achieved in his own, but it does aim to make a modest contribution to the growing literature on the history of History-writing in Britain and, more generally, to the ongoing national conversation about multiculturalism, Europeanism, and British – more specifically English – national identity.

Many previous Regius Professors of Modern History have made their own, often very significant contributions to the history of the European Continent, from William Smyth, who wrote extensively on the French Revolution, through Sir John Seeley, whose first major historical publication was a large-scale biography of the Prussian reformer Baron vom Stein, and the cosmopolitan Lord Acton, who taught a Special Subject in the History Faculty on the French Revolution and whose lectures on the subject were published after his death.