A lot of the work I have been going through about Occultism/Esotericism in Britain has been taking a maximalist position, where Occultism is supposed to be extremely influential in certain periods of time. All of it assumes the historiography before downplayed its significance beyond niche or specialized areas of society and culture, but I am having a hard time finding such older research on the subject. Are there any old works on Occultic/Magic currents in Britain (and the Western world in general) that argue this minimal approach?
There's an entire book, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture by Wouter J Hanegraaff, that summarizes all the works that were published when the "minimal approach" dominated. Jacob Brucker, author of Historia critica philosophiae is given as the paramount thinker of this school.
Also, you may need to look outside occult studies for survivals of this historiography. For instance, Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (1945) draws its naturalist historiography from Brucker's early modern school, a historical view which had by that point become thoroughly outdated in occult/magic studies. Oftentimes when a work in occult studies is talking about a "minimizing" view, that's the sort of bias they are pointing to -- not within their own field, but within related fields. Jason Josephson-Storm's Myth of Disenchantment describes the process by which philosophical works become "exorcised" in order to uphold the minimizing view.