Category Archives: Theory and methods

Samantha Shave, ‘History for below’

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[This is the ninth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Samantha Shave is a research associate at the University of Cambridge, working on the project ‘Inheritance, Families and the Market in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Britain’. She has recently published on paupers’ lives and poor law reform in the early nineteenth century.]

Historians of welfare and poverty have seemingly now found the sources which, in the words of Tim Hitchcock, provide a more ‘democratic’ history from below (Down and Out, p. 239). The voices of the poor are being found in court records, ballads, threatening letters and petitions for poor relief, to name just a few sources, and we are putting them at the centre of our analyses. The word ‘democratic’ here has always struck me though; it makes me wonder whether, whilst we have been busying ourselves with this task, history itself has – as a discipline – become less democratic? I asked the workshop at Birkbeck to think about whether there is a ‘history for below’. Indeed, the central contradiction here is that we produce histories of those who have either been silenced or marginalised or ignored, that we strive to re-create social worlds from, ‘enforced narratives’ (Carolyn Steedman, Feminism and Autobiography, p. 25), but those people in similar positions today are being increasingly denied the opportunity to study and write history at university.

We need to consider how people decide to study history, and how recent changes to the curriculum could leave a generation uninspired to take the subject further. Those who are not put off by ‘fact and date’ history may attempt to study the subject at university. That’s if they want to get into a phenomenal amount of debt. There are small reductions to fees for those with household incomes below £25,000 per annum, and a few charity-like pockets of money issued by universities, but the overall debt for any student who started university in 2012 from a working household will be huge. With fees at an average of £8,770 a year, the average student could graduate with over £50,000 of debt over the course of their degree. The immediate consequences of the fee rise can be seen in application figures. UK applicants to university were down 8.7% in 2012, and a further 6.5% for admission this year. Worryingly, last year applications from people aged over 19 years old declined by 11.8%. Continue reading →

Simon Sandall, ‘History lessons from below?’

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[This is the eighth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Simon Sandall is a lecturer at the University of Winchester whose recent publications focus on custom, law, community and popular politics and popular protest in early modern England. His forthcoming book will be titled ‘Custom and Popular Memory in the Forest of Dean, c. 1550-1832’.]

Now, as much as at any time in the recent past, the study of labouring people and non-elites is crucial, not only in rescuing them from the ‘condescension of posterity’, but in forging a broader understanding of the historical context in which we enter the twenty-first century. As social services are being slashed, the terms of unemployment and disability benefits rendered untenable, sections of poorer communities pejoratively stereotyped in the name of austerity, the culpability of the super rich whitewashed, and Michael Gove’s attempts to hide any historical evidence to the contrary, this context is sorely needed.

Add to this the fact that a significant proportion of the British public draw their knowledge of the past from centre-right newspapers and other media, nuanced and critical histories ‘from below’ are clearly needed to restore balance to some of the more heated debates that pervade the current political climate. While the criteria of the Research Excellence Framework look to be developing an increased focus on wider dissemination of funded research, we should be thinking carefully about the nature of these studies and their impact. Gove’s current drive emphasises a simplified, top-down, political narrative which nods towards the benefits of British influence in the world, the development of stock trading, the banking industry, together with the associated rise of capitalism and industrialisation. As historians, our duty is surely to complicate these teleologies and work to emphasise the reality of contingency and agency, to advance our understanding of those in the lower echelons of societies past. At almost every one of these historical junctures, there have been passionately defended alternatives. A closer focus on the experiences of particular communities and broader histories from below reveals, also, that at each of these key transitional moments it has generally been the poor that have suffered to advance the interests of the rich and powerful. Continue reading →

David Hitchcock, ‘Why history from below matters more than ever’

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[This is the seventh piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). David Hitchcock is an IAS Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick and will be taking up a post at Canterbury Christ Church University in October. He has published on vagrancy in early modern England and blogs at Post.Hoc.]

As I write these words, Sohel Rana, the owner of an illegally constructed clothing factory and living complex in Bangladesh called the ‘Rana Plaza’, is probably sitting in a Dhaka jail. I have not the slightest clue what he’s thinking. But I hope he has time for a few regrets. Rana will be now be immortalised as the man who stood in front of a building that was literally cracking down its seams, and assured tenants and workers that it was perfectly safe to stay inside. Factory line managers in Rana’s clothing manufacturing operations on the top floors insisted that their workers continue their shifts, and clothing workers make up the bulk of the over 1,100 dead people in this particular tragedy.

As I write these words, Governor Rick Perry, the architect of modern Texas’ stunningly under-regulated industrial landscape, lambasts anyone but himself for the shameful practices at the West Texas fertilizer plant which recently exploded, levelling a town (which it was conveniently located right next to) and causing a 2.1 scale earthquake. The plant had not been inspected in twenty years. Fifteen people died, most were fire-fighters or first responders trying to control the blaze and to save others.

I’m choosing to begin this post on ‘History from Below’  with recent news stories about factory disasters on opposite ends of the world for one reason: to separate wheat from chaff. These kinds of stories should make you angry, they should make you think about why those factory workers felt they had to obey, and stayed at their posts in a factory that was literally crumbling around them, they should invite you to explore the sad history of industrial production, of ‘developing nation’ factory workers, and of brutal, naked economic exploitation in places like Bangladesh. I hope you want to understand why a place like Rana Plaza was openly permitted to exist. I hope you want to know what life was like for the approximately 1,150 people who died because they were not permitted to escape from an imploding building. Continue reading →

Mark Hailwood, ‘Who is below?’

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[This is the sixth piece in ‘’The Future of History from Below’’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Mark Hailwood is a historian of early modern England and one of the founders of the many-headed monster.]

The posts that have appeared so far in this symposium have suggested a number of interesting directions for the future of ‘history from below’: a future that opens up new avenues for research through explorations of material culture, of the landscape, and of global connections and comparisons, with a critical but ultimately optimistic disposition regarding the possibilities of drawing together fragmentary evidence, potentially through the use of digital databases. All of this excites and encourages me. And yet, there is one particular problem that I think we all need to address if ‘history from below’ is to have a coherent future: how to define its subjects.

I’m not so much concerned here with who should ‘qualify’ as an appropriate subject for ‘history from below’ – I’m not sure prescriptive precision here is possible or helpful, but maybe someone would like to take this up in the comments section – so much as with the labels we use to refer to those that are generally accepted to fall within its remit. Let’s start with that classic statement of the ‘history from below’ agenda found in Thompson’s preface to The Making… ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “Utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ Continue reading →

Matthew Jackson, ‘Relocating history from below: places, spaces and databases’

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[This is the fifth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Matthew Jackson is a doctoral student at the University of Warwick undertaking a comparative study of drinking culture in early modern Bristol and Bordeaux. He recently published an article on the contested character of female publicans.]

Three interrelated issues arose at the recent workshop at Birkbeck that stood out for me as central to the current condition and future directions of the field of ‘history from below’: studying dispersed geographical places, investigating specific physical spaces, and using large-scale online databases.

Let’s begin with the debates about comparative, transnational and global approaches to ‘history from below’, spurred by remarks at the workshop from William Farrell and Tawny Paul. The idea that global history – typically vast geographical transactions of people and commodities – can combine with social history – prioritising analytical depth over geographical breadth – poses methodological challenges for historians, and the issue was the focus of some provocative debate at the workshop. How, though, might social historians ‘from below’ consider larger comparative examinations without diluting the detail and depth of their own approaches to the subject? Continue reading →

William Farrell, ‘Global history from below?’

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[This is the fourth piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). William Farrell is a doctoral candidate at Birkbeck, University of London, exploring silk and globalization in eighteenth century London, which has resulted in several working papers.]

Could there be a meeting of global history and history from below?1 The participants at the Birkbeck workshop seemed sceptical I have to admit. The key works in global history have been Big History syntheses. The key works in history from below, on the other hand, have deliberately used a smaller scale.

Despite these signs of a dialogue of the deaf, I still think the potential for a ‘global history from below’ is there. We shouldn’t forget that micro-history is supposed to be a rich, empirical testing ground for arguments about wider social change. Equally, many of the articles in the Journal of Global History or Journal of World History do actually use a case study method. There should, therefore, be many places were these apparently contrasting traditions meet. Continue reading →

Nicola Whyte, ‘Landscape history from below’

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[This is the third piece in the ‘Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Nicola Whyte is a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter whose research focuses on the interface of early modern social history and post medieval landscape studies. Her publications include Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500-1800 (Oxford, 2009), and she is currently part of an interdisciplinary team studying ‘The Past in its Place’.]

The field of landscape history and archaeology in Britain is a divided one. Fault lines separate proponents of the traditional, ‘empirical school’ from those who advocate more theoretically informed landscape research. I want to argue that this division is unhelpful for not only does it reduce interpretation to a set of binaries (objective/subjective, physical/cognitive, economic/symbolic), it also detracts from the importance of landscape research in addressing current concerns about environmental change and sustainability, and how research can engage people outside the university. In this brief piece I want to advocate an interdisciplinary approach to ‘history from below’ from a landscape perspective, which takes on board recent theoretical scholarship but retains empirical research at its core. Continue reading →

Ruth Mather, ‘The Home-Making of the English Working Class’

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[This is the second piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’ online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Ruth Mather is a doctoral candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, studying the links between working-class political identities and the home in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She also blogs about her adventures in research.]

I became interested in ‘history from below’ as an undergraduate through the encouragement of Professor Robert Poole, who introduced me to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson’s book, which reaches its half-century this year, showed me a new way of doing history, one which didn’t patronise working people, or subsume them in a narrative of progress, but instead constructed a story about thinking, feeling people with their own ideas about their lives and their own strategies for living them. It’s important that our histories show the humanity of our subjects  – in my case the English labouring classes in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. This is not about glorifying poverty or writing hero narratives, but simply attempting to understand the messy, complicated details of the real lives of ordinary people.

I’m not alone in thinking this is particularly crucial at the moment, when a new history curriculum threatens to take us back to stories of great men and Whiggish progress and welfare recipients are demonised for political gain. However, other participants in this symposium will be discussing the continued relevance of ‘history from (and for) below’ in much more detail over the coming weeks, and it is not difficult to find excellent explanations of why ‘history matters’ more generally. So, having outlined why ‘history from below’ is important to me, I’d like to focus on the question of how we can find sources that can help to uncover the domestic lives of ordinary people as part of this wider project of uncovering voices that have been underprivileged in the historical record. Continue reading →

Richard Blakemore, ‘Finding fragments – the past and the future’

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[This is the first piece in ‘The Future of History from Below’  online symposium (#historyfrombelow). Richard Blakemore is an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter working on the ‘Sailing into modernity’ research project. His doctoral work and recent publications focus on early modern seafarers, especially those based in London during the civil wars. He also blogs at historywomble.]

If we want to get at history from below, where do we start looking? Traditionally social historians, at least of medieval and early modern Europe, have relied upon two kinds of records to recover the ‘voices’ of those people who did not deliberately create a lot of records themselves. The first kind is court records and other legal documents such as wills and inventories, contracts, and so on. Because many people encountered the legal machinery of the state in which they lived (which included, for much of European history, the church as well), and because states have tended to hold onto these documents, this is one place where we can catch traces and glimpses of our elusive subjects. The second is printed material, especially the printed material which circulated amongst the people ‘below’, such as pamphlets, newspapers, or ballads. Of course, neither of these sources offers a perspective that is uncomplicatedly ‘from below’. Law courts are usually dominated and directed by elites. Publications were often censored and may have repeated official as well as popular attitudes. We have to take account of these issues – but I have never really liked the simple above/below distinction too much anyway, and I think it is entirely possible that, in these sources, if we use them carefully, we can find the ‘voices’ of people from all directions. Continue reading →

The future of ‘history from below’: an online symposium

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Brodie Waddell

Those of us who think that historical research ought to consist of more than the study of kings, ministers and generals owe a great debt to the pioneers of ‘history from below’ . Foremost amongst them must be E.P. Thompson, who published his epic The Making of the English Working Class exactly half a century ago. The impressive wave of work that followed will be well-known to many of you and, if nothing else, I think most historians would agree that historical scholarship would be poorer if not for the intervention of these spirited men and women.

But what about the next fifty years? Has ‘history from below’, and perhaps social history more generally, outlived its usefulness? What, if anything, can it contribute to contemporary scholarship and the wider world? How should it be adapted or reoriented in the coming years? What new tools or techniques could strengthen it? Where will it fit in the wider academic and social landscape?

On 16 April 2013, eighteen of us gathered for a workshop at Birkbeck to try to figure out some answers to these questions. As is usually the case with these events, the discussion carried on in the pub afterwards and, although we certainly didn’t come up with any conclusive answers, we all agreed this was a conversation that needed to continue.

To that end, Mark and I invited the participants to contribute to an online symposium on the future of ‘history from below’. So, over the next few weeks we will be posting a series of short pieces by historians early in their academic careers that attempt to offer some possible answers to these questions. We hope that this will spur further discussion and open up the conversation to the rest of the world. Please leap in with your comments, suggestions and critiques. We welcome comments not only from ‘fellow travellers’ but also – perhaps especially – from sceptics and critics of ‘history from below’.

The first post will be published here on Monday, July 8th, with further posts following every two or three days. Links to each piece will be added here and join the conversation on twitter via #historyfrombelow.

Programme