Resumen de Individuals, Parties and the Parliamentary Record in the 1690s
In this article Colin Brooks reviews the historical writing of the last thirty years on British history between 1688 and 1714. This has offered a variety of interpretations which give priority to a number of different factors. The problem now facing historians is how to synthesize these interpretations into a coherent account. The article suggests that while it is possible to reconstruct from the surviving source materials what happened in the House of Commons, the incompleteness and the ambiguities of the evidence make it much more difficult to determine why it happened, or what were the motives of the individuals taking part. The nature of the source materials requires that they be interpreted with more caution than they have often received: they have as much to tell about individual perceptions as about what actually happened.
