Christopher Hill (historian) - Later Academic Career and Politics

Later Academic Career and Politics

Hill returned to Oxford University after the war to continue his academic work. In 1946, Hill and many other Marxist historians formed the Communist Party Historians Group. In 1949, he applied to be the Chair of History at the newly created Keele University, but was turned down because of his Communist Party affiliations. He helped create the journal Past and Present in 1952, that focused on Social history.

Hill was becoming discontented with the lack of democracy in the Communist Party. However, he stayed in the party, unlike many other intellectuals, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. He finally left the party in the spring of 1957 when one of his reports to the party congress was rejected.

After 1956, Hill's career ascended to new heights. His studies on 17th century English history were widely acknowledged and recognised. It was also the year of the publication of his first academic book; Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament. These were based on the study of printed sources accessible in the Bodleian Library and on the secondary works produced by other academic historians rather than on research in the surviving archives. In 1965, Hill was elected the Master of Balliol College. He held the post from 1965 to 1978, when he retired (he was replaced by Anthony Kenny). Among those of his students at Balliol was Brian Manning, who went on to develop our understanding of the English Revolution.

Many of Hill's most notable studies focused on 17th century English history. His books include Puritanism and Revolution (1958), Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965 and revised in 1996), The Century of Revolution (1961), AntiChrist in 17th-century England (1971), The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and many others.

However, the intellectual tide later turned in favour of the so-called revisionism, which rejected the analyses of Marxist and socialist historians of Hill's generation and advocated, as an alternative to them, more detailed study of the constitutional and political, cultural and intellectual history of the early to mid-17th centuries. Hill's later works showed that he continued to work within the parameters of his earlier preoccupations and consequently lost influence upon younger historians. Even so, he was prolific in his publications until the mid-1990s even if he no longer occupied the intellectual centre-stage.

He retired from full-time academia and Balliol college in 1978. He continued to lecture, however, through The Open University for two more years.

In Hill's later years, he lived with Alzheimer's disease and required constant care. He died on 23 February 2003 of cerebral atrophy in a nursing home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.