It was the experience of India that inspired Macaulay to write his Lays of Ancient Rome, with their apotheosis of Horatius — his Roman role model for the English schoolboy. Macaulay's greatest monument is his History of England from the Reign of James II, in which he demonstrated to a vast and admiring public his guiding principle: "The history of England is emphatically the history of progress." No other intellectual pursuit could compare with history as a vehicle for inculcating the virtues of the English gentleman. Hence the teaching of British history was imperative.

Macaulay had set out his manifesto already in 1824, in his maiden speech on behalf of the Anti-Slavery Society, founded by his father, the leading abolitionist Zachary Macaulay. "[Britain's] mightiest empire," he declared, "is that of her manners, her language and her laws; her proudest victories, those which she has achieved over ignorance and ferocity; her most durable trophies, those which she has erected in the hearts of civilised and liberated nations." The relationship between Zachary's abolitionism and Tom's imperialism is the theme of another fine recent work, Catherine Hall's Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain (Yale, £35.99). But it is striking that, whereas the Indian Zareer Masani is unequivocal in his approval of Macaulay's imperial mission, his British counterpart Catherine Hall is eager to apologise for his typically Victorian racism and elitism.  

Victorians incorporated history into every branch of education, public life and the arts, but not everybody shared Macaulay's optimistic view of history as progress. One rival school was that of Thomas Carlyle, who replaced emancipation and enlightenment with hero-worship of the great man. His leading disciple was James Anthony Froude, whose magisterial History of England did much to establish the dynastic primacy of the Tudors in the popular imagination. His life has only just received the attention it deserves from Ciaran Brady, whose superb biography James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet (OUP, £45) traces the serpentine twists and turns of Froude's life, from his abusive childhood through his abortive careers as a clergyman and a novelist, to his triumph as a historian, editor and man of letters. Only in old age did he re-enter the academic world, as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and his inaugural lecture of 1892 may be taken as a valedictory reflection on the Victorian love affair with history. Froude rejected the contemporary pieties: history was not a science, it did not move from the particular to the general, it was not a record of human progress or freedom, it was inseparable from prejudice, it had no pattern or meaning. Instead, history was a drama, an art, an attempt to understand humanity but not to explain it. Thus, in the high noon of the nation state, with the newly discovered past annexed by the triumphantly liberal present in the service of future progress, voices were raised against the hegemony of history. It was not in the Anglosphere, however, but in continental Europe, and Germany in particular, that the backlash against history began.

In 1874, the young Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. This "untimely" or "unfashionable" essay might have been directed at the propaganda of the Prussian school of historians, which presented the German Empire, newly unified by Bismarck, as inevitable. But Nietzsche's notion of the "abuse of history" had a very different target. What troubled him was the burden of living in a culture so saturated in the knowledge of the past, so paralysed by its "ironical self-consciousness", that it seemed to him to have been born "grey-haired". Around him he saw the human consequences of the explosion of historical knowledge and education since the Enlightenment. He could not stomach the liberal religion of progress, which had recently enlisted the support of Darwinian evolution: "Never has the view of history soared so high, not even in its own dreams, for now the history of humanity is merely the continuation of the history of animals and plants. Indeed, even in the depths of the ocean the historical universalist discovers the traces of himself in living slime." Nietzsche cannot contain his contempt for the overconfident complacency of his contemporaries. "Overproud European of the nineteenth century, you are stark raving mad! Your [historical] knowledge does not perfect nature, but only kills your own nature. Just measure the wealth of your knowledge against the poverty of your abilities."