This article explores Hayden White's documentation and interpretation of the processes of disciplinization that occurred in the field of historical studies from the nineteenth century onwards. It identifies two of White's concerns about professionalization in particular: the increasing set of repressions within the study of the past as far as radical or progressive historiographical approaches were concerned and an unhappy divorce between history and philosophy/theory. The article goes on to demonstrate how White's ideas have informed the author's research into: the idea of history in Britain, the politics of historiography and the political uses of history. The central argument pursued is that the impoverished idea and uses of history in Britain today are surely the result of the very concerns White expressed about disciplinization well over thirty years ago.