ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the development, primarily in Anglophone and Western European historical scholarship, and aims to explain both the current interest and the distinctive approach which became established in many national historiographies at that time and continues until the present day. A connection between contemporary developments and scholarly fashion was evident. The continental European nobility lost much of its political and social power, together with a large part of its extensive landholding, between, very approximately, the 1880s and 1945. An identical development occurred a generation later in England, where the final demise of the landed classes only took place after the Second World War. Indeed, before the 1960s, if there was a field of European history where the social elite was both subjected to intensive study and integrated into an overall explanation of political change, it was Ancient History. On the European continent abundant research has been and continues to be published.
