[This is the fifteenth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Selina Todd is a Lecturer in Modern British History and Fellow of St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. Her research and publications focus on working-class and women’s history in modern Britain. Here she brings our conversation about ‘history from below’ through to the twentieth century, providing a survey of the recent historiography on modern Britain, and identifying some of the major challenges and future directions for ‘history from below’ in that field.]

Fifty years on from E.P. Thompson’s call to rescue working people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, and myriad ‘turns’ later, history from below is flourishing in modern British scholarship. An emphasis on ‘ordinary people’ has replaced an earlier stress on the working class, and studies of collective protest are less numerous than those on everyday life. [1] But there is no sign that scholars consider Thompson’s original project ‘cliched’ or ‘tired’.

This post reflects on how history ‘from below’ has developed, the state it is in, and suggests some possible future directions. As the first section will show, we have reasons to be hopeful. But in the second section I argue that we need to historicise the material circumstances in which our scholarship is produced in order to fight for our future. In the final section I propose that we could use more studies of class, which might help us to restate the centrality of history ‘from below’ to understandings of modern Britain. Continue reading →

[This is the thirteenth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Andy Wood is Professor of Social History at Durham University. His research and publications focus on popular protest, customary rights and social memory in early modern England. Here he takes us through the relationship between ‘history from below’ and early modern social history, and outlines a number of key principles and approaches that might inform that relationship going forward.]

History-from-below poses a question. Like Bertoldt Brecht’s Questions from a worker who reads and Virginia Woolf’s A room of one’s own, history-from-below asks us to describe the lives, ideas and experiences of those who lay ‘below’ dominant historical narratives. Like Subaltern Studies (developing at the same time, from the early 1970s) history-from-below focused on a disparate range of groups, spanning time and distance: workers, peasants, slaves, women, the marginalized, oppressed ethnic, religious and sexual minorities.

The history-from-below tradition grew out of the English Marxism of the CPHG (Communist Party Historians’ Group). It was the badly-behaved adolescent offspring of the CPHG, loosely grouped around History Workshop Journal and its attendant movement rather than around the journal Past and Present, which by the 1970s had lost its explicit political focus. Like the CPHG, history-from-below valorized resistance and largely ignored questions of subordination, social integration and hegemony. But unlike the CPHG generation, it was explicitly open to histories of women, gender, race and sexuality. It represented the historiographical expression of a broader shift at work within the British Left in the 1970s and 1980s, the urge – in the face of deindustrialization and the late-recognized halt in the forward march of labour – to create new alliances beyond the traditional labour movement. That political project achieved its clearest expression in Livingstone’s GLC (Greater London Council), in a resurgent CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) with its connection (via Greenham) to second-wave feminism and in the diverse range of groups attracted to the Miners’ Support Groups during the 1984-5 strike. Although this ‘rainbow alliance’ (the term originated with Jesse Jackson and was anglicised by the International Marxist Group as an ‘alliance of the oppressed’) was to be defeated, its historiographical expression in the fuzzy History Workshop tradition had its successes – as this symposium shows, nowadays it is hard to write social and cultural history without reference to some of the concerns of History Workshop, most of all the legacy of feminism and the lesbian and gay liberation movement. Histories of class, marginalized by the cultural turn of the last 20 years, are starting to reassert themselves too. I’ll come back to this resurgence towards the end.

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[This is the twelfth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). John Arnold is Professor of Medieval History at Birkbeck. His research and publications focus in particular on medieval ‘belief’. Here he takes us through some of the ways ‘history from below’ approaches have played an important role in medieval scholarship on both England and France.]

“And so our interpretation of history will be both materialist with Marx and mystical with Michelet. It was economic life that was the basis and the mechanism of human history, but across the succession of social forms man, a thinking force, aspired to the full life of thought, the ardent community of the unquiet intelligence, avid for unity and the mysterious universe.”

[Jean Jaurès, Histoire Socialiste de la Révolution Française, Paris, 1911. Introduction. See http://www.marxists.org/archive/jaures/1901/history/introduction.htm]

‘History from below’ has tended predominantly to be an early modernists’ term; [1] and it is a very baggy term. Is it simply the same as ‘social history’; is it related to Alltagsgeschichte; does it make a particular claim about collective historical agency from ‘below’; or is it more concerned with the experience of ordinary people at the sharp end of historical change? The term’s capacious vagueness is perhaps the main point – and an indication of its anglophone origin, freed from the strictures of theoretical precision. But when one starts to think about its connotations for different period specialisms, issues of purpose and project become naggingly apparent. Medievalists and early modernists tend to share some sense that making ordinary (/subaltern/plebeian/lower sort/peuple menu/popolani …. etc etc, pick one’s own inevitably problematic term) people visible and audible is in itself an historiographical success worth pursuing, because the weight of the evidence – so we tend to say, though this bears further discussion in itself – submerges the majority of humanity in favour of the visible, powerful elite. That shared project immediately requires some further nuance however.

Continue reading →