The bourgeois revolution of the mid-17th century is simply written out of history. Davies does not inquire what forces, if not those of class struggle, lay behind the civil war. Similarly, the Reformation carried out by Henry VIII in the mid 1530s owes nothing to class forces or contending economic interests. We are left to imagine that a change in religion, the deaths of hundreds of those proclaimed as heretics, including Sir Thomas More, and the major change in property relations that resulted from the dissolution of the monasteries was merely the result of Henry's inability to produce a male heir. Causes only exist for Davies in the most contingent form.
History becomes a series of accidents.
He believes that what the historian does is record a snapshot of events. History cannot exist as a social science without a concept of causation. The historian follows a complex chain of causation from the present to the past. In a process the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, in his Essay on Man , called palingenesis, the past is recreated as a living organism in which every separate element is connected. These connections are not only within the past but reach into the present, so that their study can give us a deeper understanding of the direction of historical development and of its future prospects.