Early Thoughts on Social History
Grad School Essay Draft
“Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten.”[1] With typically ironic humor and keen insight, E.P. Thompson described his motivation for writing social history. Thompson was not the sole creator of social history, which encompasses a wide variety of subjects and techniques. In an article for the premiere issue of the Journal of Social History in 1967, Werner Conze defined the field as “the history of society or, more precisely, of social structures, processes and trends.” Social history involves itself “not only with the field of history, but also with that of sociology,” and one of its main tasks is to “obviate the increasing dangers of individualizing historicism on the one hand and those of a ‘sociologism’ which tends to incorporate and subordinate historical study on the other.” In this sense, social history is part of an evolving discipline, and is as much a response to the growth of sociology and its particular view of the past as it is an answer to idealism and historicism in the work of Leopold von Ranke and his contemporaries. While Conze was quick to qualify this statement, acknowledging “to…a large extent Ranke has included ‘the social world’ in his historiography,” there is clearly a change of both subject and technique involved in the growth of social history.[2]
This “mediatory position” of social history between history and other disciplines seemed to grow as the field developed, until ultimately social history finds itself able to use the techniques and data from not only sociology, but psychology, economics, anthropology, and archaeology, to name just a few. [3] In their attempts to discern the stories of the silent majorities of the past, social historians are freer than members of other sub-disciplines to appropriate methods from another discipline or to weave synthetic stories from a wide range of sources.
Many of the texts that influenced social historians come from outside the discipline or from a period when disciplines weren’t as strictly delimited. Political economists like Karl Marx and sociologists like Max Weber stand beside Whig historian George M. Trevelyan, who published his English Social History in 1942, and Fernand Braudel, whose The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II examined the interactions between three time-scales he called geohistory, structural history, and the history of events. Braudel claimed “if the expression had not been diverted from its full meaning, one could call [The Mediterranean] social history, the history of groups and groupings.”[4] Social historians appreciate Braudel’s challenge to traditional periodizaton and agree with his focus on people and causal factors ignored by historians of nations, politics, and great men.
In a 1967 article that demonstrated the breadth of scholarship that can be brought to bear on social historical subjects, E.P. Thompson explored how the introduction of mechanical clocks and watches affected labor discipline and “the inward apprehension of time of working people.”[5] Thompson’s investigation focused not only on the influence of technological change on workers, but on their internal lives, their mentalities. After framing his study with classic literature, intellectual history, and “a suggestive article in Annales,” Thompson complained that in the “rapidly-growing literature of the sociology of industrialization…one must travel through many tens of thousands of words of parched a-historical abstraction between each oasis of human actuality.” [6] In contrast, the story he told showed a growing “demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life,’” and “reminds us how far we have become habituated” both to these demarcations, and to the “different disciplines” we use to investigate them. “The historical record,” he reminded us, “is not a simple one of neutral and inevitable technological change, but is also one of exploitation and resistance to exploitation.” The reader comes away from the article with a better understanding of the way mechanical timekeepers changed the lives of working people, as well as a realization that “there is no such thing as economic growth which is not, at the same time, growth or change of a culture.”[7]
“Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” runs to forty-one pages and is supported with one hundred thirty-two references. Thompson’s citations suggest the wide range of social history’s sources. In addition to manuscripts and diaries of both elite and working-class writers, pamphlets, government records and reports, newspapers and periodicals, Thompson quoted from oral histories collected personally. He used poetry, songs, and humor from high, middle and some very low sources, to help the reader enter the mental world of his subjects. And he commented on the latest research into not only other cultures’ experiences in the same period, but also the experiences of modern populations approaching industrialization for the first time. He synthesized data, anecdote, and analysis into an easily understood and easily believed story of the past.
Four years later, in “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Thompson once again used a particular event to challenge a faulty historical interpretation. The event was British resistance to grain price increases in the eighteenth century; the interpretation was the “spasmodic view” that food riots were “simple responses to economic stimuli,” in unreflective crowds whose members behaved mechanistically, without the influence of “custom, culture, and reason.”[8]
In addition to correcting an inaccurate traditional account of events, Thompson criticized economic history, which he said had “tended to sophisticate and quantify evidence which is only imperfectly understood.”[9] The story he told helped “illustrate the density and particularity of detail [and] the diversity of local practices” required for complete understanding, and obscured by simplistic quantification.[10] Thompson criticized Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, used to justify the government’s laissez faire approach grain shortages, for its “specious air of empirical validation.”[11] Thompson said the “abbreviated and ‘economistic’” style of thinking embodied in the Wealth of Nations has become both endemic and invisible to us. Modern historical thought is in danger of becoming “itself a product of a political economy which diminished human reciprocities to the wages-nexus.”[12] Historians must transcend this interpretive limitation, he suggested, to understand the past more accurately.
In a cautionary article published in 1989, David Crew identified German Alltagsgeshichte as “a new social history from below,” dedicated to exposing “the forgotten joys and sorrows of ordinary people.”[13] This sentiment seems completely in keeping with social history’s “emphasis on writing history ‘from below’ as well as ‘from above’.”[14] However, Crew suggested that an exclusive focus on the view from below can not only challenge existing beliefs but hide important truths. On the one hand, it allows “historians of working-class ‘everyday life’ [to] claim that the formal, organized politics of the labor movement did not always serve the real day-to-day needs of ordinary workers.”[15] On the other, “misappropriation of the history of ‘popular experience’,” by ideologues intent on rewriting the story of Germany’s Nazi years, “seriously distorts the history of the war.”[16] While the view from below must be framed appropriately, in most cases it doesn’t negate other views but challenges and enhances them. Crew located a potential danger of social history; while his exposure of it suggests that the field has some capacity to police itself and call attention to such errors.
In a 2003 special issue of the Journal of Social History, Mark M. Smith reaffirmed the view that social history is a field “driven not just by the desire to recover the history of daily life but also to connect ‘findings with more conventional topics’…to offer a more complete ‘portrait of a period’.” Social historians see their field as being distinguished by its “explicit concern for the popular resonance of ideas [and] also by its focus on popular belief systems, and by its interest in the interaction of mental attitudes and behavior.” [17] Social historians stop short, however, of embracing the “cultural turn” which treats the mind “as the site where identity is formed and reality linguistically negotiated.”[18] Where cultural historians seem to focus more on the contested nature of meaning, many social historians prefer to see themselves as investigating people, events, change and causality.
The fact that Lorena S. Walsh’s 1999 article about colonial American food sources in Agricultural History is considered social history is a testament to what Peter N. Stearns called the field’s “capacity to generate new topics” and its “openness to the historical construction of various aspects of human experience.[19] Walsh used zooarchaeological evidence (animal bones in the trash-heaps of Williamsburg and Annapolis) as well as household, farm and store account books and probate inventories to explore how and where Chesapeake townspeople acquired their food. Analysis of the bones suggested “as the eighteenth century progressed, the slaughter population became younger.”[20] Cattle do not mature in two to three years without supplemental grain feeding, a practice of commercial rather than subsistence animal husbandry. The number and age of cattle consumed in the two towns allowed Walsh to conclude that colonial meat requirements “could be met only by drawing upon the surplus production of some hundreds of farmers living within a two hundred-mile radius.”[21] Widespread market agriculture began in the Chesapeake area much earlier than previously believed, Walsh concluded. And “when exploring the interrelationships between town and country, we should concentrate our attention not on grain markets but rather on meat supply;” an insight that may change the way historians study early commercial agriculture.[22]
“I am seeking,” Thompson declared in 1964, “to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan… from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Despite suggestions that “all the smart people have moved on” to newer, trendier fields of history, there is still value in an approach that extends historians’ awareness of possible subjects and affords openness to cutting-edge techniques and insights from other social sciences.[23] Early subjects and methods helped define social history as a field open to techniques and insights from other disciplines, and focused on the people left out of traditional political and intellectual histories. Other social historians have extended the range and scope of the field, while maintaining an openness to new methods and an interest in diverse subjects. There is every reason to expect this trend will continue, and will result in more insightful and sometimes surprising history. “After all,” as Thompson explained, “we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves.”[24]
Sources and Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean and the Mediteranean World in the Age of Philip Ii. London: St. James's Place, 1972.
Conze, Werner, and Charles A. Wright. "Social History." Journal of Social History 1, no. 1 (1967): 7-16.
Crew, David F. "Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History "From Below"?" Central European History 22, no. 3/4 (1989): 394-407.
Smith, Mark M. "Making Sense of Social History." Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 165-186.
Stearns, Peter N. "Social History Present and Future." Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 9-19.
Steege, Paul, Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Maureen Healy, and Pamela E. Swett. "The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter." The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 2 (2008): 358-378.
Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Pantheon Books, 1964.
________. "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56-97.
________. "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past & Present, no. 50 (1971): 76-136.
Walsh, Lorena S. "Feeding the Eighteenth-Century Town Folk, or, Whence the Beef?" Agricultural History 73, no. 3 (1999): 267-280.
[1] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964). 14.
[2] Werner Conze and Charles A. Wright, "Social History," Journal of Social History 1, no. 1 (1967). 7.
[3] Ibid., 9.
[4] Italics his. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediteranean World in the Age of Philip Ii (London: St. James's Place, 1972). 20.
[5] E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past & Present 38 (1967). 57.
[6] Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Lewis Mumford’s 1943 Technics and Civilization, and J. le Goff’s 1960 “Au Moyen Age.” Ibid., 56, 94.
[7] Ibid., 97.
[8] E. P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present 50 (1971). 76-8.
[9] Ibid., 77.
[10] Ibid., 87.
[11] Ibid., 91.
[12] Ibid., 136.
[13] David F. Crew, "Alltagsgeschichte: A New Social History "From Below"?," Central European History 22, no. 3/4 (1989). 394.
[14] Mark M. Smith, "Making Sense of Social History," Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003). 171.
[15] Crew., 398.
[16] Ibid., 402-3.
[17] Smith., 168.
[18] quoting Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, Telling the Truth About History. Ibid., 169.
[19] Peter N. Stearns, "Social History Present and Future," Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003). 11.
[20] Lorena S. Walsh, "Feeding the Eighteenth-Century Town Folk, or, Whence the Beef?," Agricultural History 73, no. 3 (1999). 275.
[21] Ibid., 273.
[22] Ibid., 280.
[23] Paul Steege and others, "The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter," The Journal of Modern History 80, no. 2 (2008). 358.
[24] Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 14.
"The Making of the English Working Class" has got to be one of the most influential history texts ever written. It has stayed in my mind since I read it for the first time.