ABSTRACT
My title echoes the historian J.H.Plumb’s The Death of the Past (1969). Plumb assailed coercive precedent-the power of the past embedded in property, place and privilege. For centuries if not millennia this malign influence had ‘seeped through the interstices of society, staining all thought, creating veneration for customs, traditions and inherited wisdom’, and acting as a ‘bulwark against innovation and change’.
