topics

Mapping the field 6 9

previous work he had focused on the structure of Nazi power

in German society. But he came to realize that a structural

approach required ‘increased reflection on the man who was

the indispensable fulcrum and inspiration of what took place,

Hitler himself’.8

Second, at the other extreme, biographies of

people who were in no way outstanding can sometimes, if the

documentation is rich enough, illuminate an otherwise obscure

aspect of the past. Linda Colley has written the life of an

obscure eighteenth-century woman called Elizabeth March.

Because her experiences included capture in Morocco and marriage in India, as well as visits to many far-flung ports, the

narrative sheds light on a global maritime world that featured

trade, migration, and slavery; the book is ‘a biography that

crosses boundaries’.9

Lastly, and perhaps most important of all, biography is indispensable to the understanding of motive and intention. There is

much dispute among historians as to how prominently matters

of motive – as distinct from economic and social forces – should

feature in historical explanation, and they certainly receive less

emphasis now than they did in the nineteenth century; but plainly

the motives of individuals have some part to play in explaining

historical events. Once this much is conceded, the relevance of

biography is obvious. The actions of an individual can be fully

understood only in the light of his or her emotional make-up, temperament and prejudices. Of course in even the best documented

lives a great deal remains a matter of conjecture: the writings of

public figures especially are often coloured by self-deception as

well as deliberate calculation. But the biographer who has studied

the development of his or her subject from childhood to maturity

is much more likely to make the right inferences. It is for this

reason that during the present century biographers have increasingly stressed the private or inner lives of their subjects as well

as their public careers. From this perspective the personal development of important individuals in the past is a valid subject of

historical enquiry in its own right.

7 0 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

What is social history?

No branch of history proclaims its indifference to the individual

more clearly than social history. That label always indicates a

focus on society as a whole – even if only a small fragment has

actually been investigated. In fact the full ambition of social

history was not immediately apparent. There was, first, the

history of social problems such as poverty, ignorance, insanity

and disease. Historians focused less on the experience of people

afflicted by these conditions than on the ‘problem’ that they posed

to society as a whole; they studied the reforming efforts of private

philanthropy, as seen in charitable institutions such as schools,

orphanages and hospitals, and the increasingly effective intervention of the state in the social field from the mid-nineteenth century

onwards. The limitations of this genre of social history can be

illustrated in the case of Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt’s

two-volume study, Children in English Society (1969, 1973); they

documented in detail the achievements of organized charity and

government concern over a period of four hundred years, but

the recipients of all this care and attention are only occasionally

heard, while children who were not in need are entirely absent

from their account.

Social history meant, second, the history of everyday life in

the home, the workplace and the community. As G.M. Trevelyan

put it, ‘Social history might be defined negatively as the history

of a people with the politics left out’.10 His English Social History

(1944), for long a standard work, took little account of economics

either, and much of it reads like a catch-all for the miscellaneous

topics that did not fit into his earlier (and largely political) History

of England (1926); there is a great deal of descriptive detail, but

little coherence of theme. Much of this kind of writing has an

elegiac tone: a regret for the passing of the pre-industrial order

when everyday life was on a human scale and geared to natural

rhythms, and a revulsion from the anomie and ugliness of modern

urban living.

Labour history and history from below

Lastly, there was the history of the common people, or working

classes, who were almost entirely absent from political history.

philanthropy

Charitable work.

G.M. Trevelyan

(1876–1962)

George Macaulay

Trevelyan, British historian

and great-nephew of

the celebrated historian

Thomas Babington

Macaulay. A prolific writer,

he is best known for his

popular English Social

History, which reflected

a wartime regret for the

passing of a more stable

society.

elegiac

Lyrical, poetic evocation of

times past.

Mapping the field 7 1

In Britain this kind of social history was from the end of

the nineteenth century dominated by historians sympathetic to

the labour movement. Although often passionately committed

to the workers’ cause, their writings were at this stage hardly

affected by Marxist influence. Their main concern was to furnish

the British labour movement with a collective historical identity,

and they sought it not through a new theoretical framework (for

which Marxism was of course well suited), but in the historical

experience of the working class itself during the preceding century

– the material and social deprivation, the tradition of self-help,

and the struggles for improved wages and conditions of employment. For G.D.H. Cole, the leading British labour historian during

the 1930s and 1940s, nothing seemed more important than that

‘as the working class grows towards the full exercise of power, it

should look back as well as forward, and shape its policy in the

light of its own historic experience’.11 Labour history tended to

live in a world of its own, with only a limited impact on those not

involved in the labour movement.

This tradition of social history was revived and expanded

during the 1960s under the banner of history from below. But

whereas labour history was characterized by a strong institutional bias, history from below concentrates on the unorganized

and the marginal who have been least visible in the historical

record. Seeing history from the bottom up does not just mean

recreating the rhythms of everyday life. It means seeing the past

from the point of view of ordinary people and identifying with

their politics. Above all, history from below contests the passivity to which ordinary people have been consigned by so many

historians. Popular agency and resistance are its hallmarks. An

early exponent of this approach was George Rudé, who studied

the urban crowd in both eighteenth-century London and revolutionary Paris; he rejected the use of the word ‘mob’, and instead

reconstructed the motives and methods of those who took to the

streets to voice their grievances. His study of the Gordon Riots of

1780, when the government lost control of the streets of London

for an entire week, is a classic of its kind.12 Rudé’s agenda was

broadened still further in the 1970s by the History Workshop

movement. Though based at Ruskin, the trade-union-sponsored

college at Oxford, History Workshop quickly extended its range

from organized workers to encompass all groups in society

that stood outside – or ‘below’ – the elites on which traditional

7 2 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

histories had focused. Women’s history and the history of

immigrant communities soon made their appearance.13 History

Workshop has been particularly notable in drawing in amateur

and community historians, alongside the left-wing academics who

form its core.

History and social structure

But none of the approaches mentioned so far entirely explains

why social history, for so long the poor relation, now enjoys such

prominence. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s was that its

subject matter was redefined in a much more ambitious manner.

Social history now aspires to offer nothing less than the history of

social structure. The notion of ‘social structure’ is a sociological

abstraction of a conveniently indeterminate kind, which can be –

and has been – clothed in any number of theoretical garbs. But

what it essentially means is the sum of the social relationships

between the many different groups in society. Under the influence

of Marxist thought, class has had the lion’s share of attention, but

it is by no means the only kind of group to be considered: there are

also the cross-cutting ties of age, gender, race and occupation.

Social structure may seem to be a static, timeless concept,

partly because it has been treated in this way in the writings of

many sociologists. But it need not be so, and historians tend naturally to adopt a more dynamic approach. As Keith Wrightson, a

leading social historian of early modern England, puts it:

Society is a process. It is never static. Even its most apparently stable

structures are the expression of an equilibrium between dynamic

forces. For the social historian the most challenging of tasks is that of

recapturing that process, while at the same time discerning long-term

shifts in social organization, in social relations and in the meanings

and evaluations with which social relationships are infused.14

Against the background of a durable social structure, those individuals or groups who move up or down are often particularly

significant, and social mobility has been much studied by historians. Beyond a certain point, social mobility is incompatible

with the maintenance of the existing structure, and a new form

of society may emerge, as happened most fundamentally during

the Industrial Revolution. Urbanization, in particular, needs

to be studied not just in its economic aspects, but as a process

of social change, including the assimilation of immigrants, the

Mapping the field 7 3

emergence of new forms of social stratification, the hardening

distinction between work and leisure, and so on; important

work along these lines has been pioneered in America, and urban

history is a significant specialism in Britain too.15 The analysis of

social structure and social change can have major implications

for economic and political history, and social historians in recent

years have staked out large claims in these areas. The long drawn

out ‘gentry controversy’ was mainly a dispute about the connection between changing social structure and political conflict in

England during the hundred years before the Civil War.16 The

origins of the Industrial Revolution are now sought not only in

economic and geographical factors, but in the social structure of

eighteenth-century England – especially the ‘open aristocracy’,

with a two-way flow of men and wealth into and out of its

ranks.17 At this point, social history begins to approximate to the

‘history of society’ in its broadest sense which, it has been argued,

is its proper domain.18

Much of the earlier, less ambitious social history is relevant to

this new concern, provided its terms of reference are revised. The

new social historians include many who started within the more

limited horizons of one or other of the established categories.

E.P. Thompson, the best-known social historian during the 1960s

and 1970s, had his roots deep in the labour history tradition, but

in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) he stepped

outside it; the growth of a working-class awareness during the

Industrial Revolution is placed in the widest possible context,

including religion, leisure and popular culture, as well as the

factory system and the origins of trade unionism; and, so far from

politics being ‘left out’, the presence of the state is both constant

and menacing, as an instrument of class control.

As well as being formative in the social history of Britain,

the period covered by Thompson was rich in distinguished individuals. Thompson’s own last published work was a study of the

visionary painter and poet, William Blake.19 Historians do not

divide neatly between students of the mass and students of the

individual. Biography and social history may represent sharply

divergent perspectives, but both are needed, and both feature

prominently in contemporary historical practice.

gentry controversy

A long-running argument

in academic circles about

the development of

social change in early

seventeenth-century

England and its bearing on

the origins of the English

Civil War. The argument

was over whether the

lesser landowning class

(the gentry) was ‘rising’ in

social and economic status

at the expense of the

older landed aristocracy,

or whether the opposite

was true. The argument

raged for many years and

was a staple feature of

undergraduate essays;

however, since it is not

easy to come up with a

clear-cut definition of

‘gentry’ and ‘aristocracy’,

or exactly what is meant

by a class ‘rising’, no

clear conclusion was ever

reached.

E.P. Thompson

(1924–93)

British Marxist historian.

Thompson was also active

in socialist politics. His

Making of the English

Working Class was the first

attempt to tell the story

of the development of a

distinctive working-class

culture and identity in the

late eighteenth and early

nineteenth century.

7 4 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

Economic history

My second pairing contrasts the material and mental worlds. The

one deals with the external requirements of life; the other probes

the internal world of thought and emotion. Both must feature in

a comprehensive recovery of the past. Economic history focuses

on ‘earthly necessities’ – the title of an outstanding economic

history of early modern England.20 It seeks to reconstruct production, exchange and consumption. Such activities are for the most

part a matter of external observation, and in many cases they

can be measured. This approach can be contrasted with one that

seeks to reconstruct mental processes, including formal thought,

religious belief and emotional states. These cannot be measured

or observed, and they call for a considerable degree of empathy

and an ability to tease out the possible meanings of texts and

images.

Economic history was the first specialism to gain recognition

outside political history. By 1914 it had emerged as a sharply

defined area of study in several countries, including Britain. The

relevance of economic history to contemporary problems largely

explains its head-start over other contenders; indeed, in many

universities, especially in America, economic history was studied

not as part of general history, but in conjunction with economics,

a discipline whose own claims to academic respectability had only

just won general recognition by the end of the nineteenth century.

Both in Britain and in the rest of Europe, much of the pioneer

work concerned the economic policies of the state – an approach

that required the minimum adaptation on the part of historians

schooled in political history. But this was clearly an inadequate

base on which to come to grips with the historical phenomenon

of industrialization, which from the start loomed large on the

agenda of economic historians. It resulted in a special emphasis

on Britain, the first country to experience an industrial revolution,

and attracted continental as much as British historians. Their work

was particularly strong on local studies of particular industries,

such as Lancashire cotton textiles or Yorkshire woollens, and it

highlighted individual initiative and technical innovation. A pale

reflection of this approach is still to be seen in those old-fashioned

textbooks which chronicle Britain’s Industrial Revolution as a

sequence of inventions made in the late eighteenth century.

Mapping the field 7 5

The difficult interplay of economic and political

history

In many ways economic history offers about the biggest contrast

to political history that can be imagined. Its chronology is quite

different. It often makes light of differences of political culture

and national tradition, particularly in studies of the modern

global economy. And it gives minimal scope to personality and

motive, the classic preoccupations of historians; instead ‘impersonal’ forces such as inflation or investment tend to hold the

centre of the stage. Furthermore, economic historians delight

in undermining the bedrock assumptions of their non-specialist

colleagues – most provocatively in several works that deny that

Britain experienced an industrial revolution at all.21 For all these

reasons many political historians would prefer to hold economic

history at arm’s length. But in practice their own agenda has been

influenced by the findings of economic history in very positive

ways. For example, the financial predicament of Tudor governments – and the political difficulties with Parliament that this

brought in its train – cannot be grasped without an understanding

of the great inflation of the sixteenth century.22 Similarly, interpretations of the origins of the Boer War, which broke out in 1899

between Britain and the gold-rich Transvaal, have been modified

in the light of precise information about the vicissitudes of the

international gold standard at that time.23

Enterprise and economic growth

Two trends stand out in current writing on modern economic

history, though they do not define its entire scope. The first one is

business history – the systematic study of individual firms on the

basis of their business records. The source materials are usually

manageable, and firms that allow access to them sometimes foot

the bill for research as well. Whether or not the historian identifies with the values of capitalist entrepreneurship, what comes out

best from these studies is a keener understanding of the mechanisms of economic expansion, often at a critical juncture in the

history of an industry. The implications of research in business

history can be wider still. How far the beginning of Britain’s economic decline in the period 1870–1914 was caused by a failure

of entrepreneurship is a major issue on which business historians

have much to contribute.

7 6 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

Business history may be regarded as economic history on the

ground. The second approach, by contrast, seeks to explain the

dynamics of growth or decline for an entire economy. This is quite

simply the biggest issue in economics today, both for professional

economists and for the lay public; and since it has been present in

a recognizably modern form since the onset of industrialization

200 years ago, it is hardly surprising that historians should be

interested too. But in seeking to contribute to a wider debate they

have been compelled to sharpen their analytical tools. The older

economic histories such as J.H. Clapham’s Economic History

of Modern Britain (1926–38) were essentially descriptive: they

reconstructed the economic life of a particular period, sometimes

in vivid detail, but in explaining how one phase gave way to the

next they showed little interest in the actual mechanisms of economic change. The current debates are very largely about those

mechanisms, and they are conducted in the context of the highly

sophisticated theoretical work on growth that economists have

been carrying out since the 1950s. If historians are to do justice to

their material in this area, they have to be much more versed in the

competing theoretical explanations than they used to be; and since

the testing of these theories depends on the accurate measurement

of indices of growth, historians must also become quantifiers. In

this field the breaking down of those inter-disciplinary barriers

which the Annales school called for half a century ago has been

more complete than in any other.

Getting into the mind of the past

Economic history, with its emphasis on externally observed

behaviour, can be contrasted with the study of intellectual,

emotional and psychological states. It is one thing to categorize

people according to their place in a given structure by indicating

their occupation, status and wealth. It is quite another to enter

into their assumptions and attitudes, to see them as ‘sentient

reflecting beings’.24 This approach includes themes as varied as

political thought, religion and mass psychology. They have never

been brought together under a single label, but what they have

in common is a concern with mental process. Individual and

collective behaviour still count, but as a basis for making

inferences about mentality or belief.

Mapping the field 7 7

Given the political orientation of historical scholarship as it

matured during the nineteenth century, it comes as no surprise

that the history of political thought has the longest pedigree.

The works of writers like Plato, Machiavelli and Hobbes were

seen as building blocks in a single Western tradition. Today,

however, scholars place much more emphasis on understanding

these thinkers in their historical context – forming their ideas in

response to the events unfolding around them, restricted by the

cultural resources available to them. A much keener awareness is

also shown of the fact that the intellectual landscape of a period

is not primarily composed of the handful of great works that have

inspired posterity; almost by definition, these were inaccessible

to all but a few. The common wisdom of the day against which

the great names were judged (and in many instances condemned)

was what contemporaries had retained, often selectively and

incoherently, from earlier traditions of thought. For the political

historian especially, what counts is the set of ideas within which

people with no claims to intellectual originality operated, and

from this perspective the diffusion of new ideas through derivative and ephemeral literature is as important as their genesis in

the mind of a great thinker. The intellectual context of periods

of revolutionary change when ideas are often particularly potent

can be properly understood in no other way. In The Intellectual

Origins of the American Revolution (1967), for example, Bernard

Bailyn reconstructed the political culture of ordinary Americans

from 400 or so pamphlets bearing on the Anglo-American conflict

which were published in the thirteen colonies between 1750 and

1776. His research revealed the influence of not only the New

England Puritan tradition and the thought of the Enlightenment,

which had long been taken for granted, but also the antiauthoritarian political thought of the Civil War period in England,

kept alive by English radical pamphleteers of the early eighteenth

century and transmitted across the Atlantic. At this point the

history of ideas enters the market-place, as it were, and becomes

part of the common culture of the day.

The history of religion

Comparable issues are raised by the history of religion. At one

level, this is about the life and writings of great religious leaders

like Martin Luther or Ignatius Loyola. There is also a strong

Martin Luther

(1483–1546)

One of the most influential

figures in the history of

Christianity. His protest

against the authority

of the Pope in 1517

began the Protestant

Reformation and the split

in the Western Church. His

ideas rapidly spread under

the patronage of rulers in

Germany and elsewhere.

Ignatius Loyola

(1491–1556)

Founder of the Jesuit

order, based on

spiritual discipline and

missionary work. His

life and achievements

symbolized the resolve

of the Catholic Church to

reinvigorate itself against

the Protestant challenge

(known as the CounterReformation).

7 8 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

tradition of studying the history of religious institutions, given

the immense power of the Christian Churches throughout most

of their history. But increasingly historians have turned to the

study of popular religion: what did people believe, and how did

their beliefs affect their lives? Conversion is a promising place

to start. In Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down (2001) Pamela

Walker examines the Salvation Army in late Victorian Britain.

At the heart of her account is the conversion experiences of

early Salvationists recruited from the poorest neighbourhoods of

London, based on their published biographies and on the War

Cry (the Army’s journal). At the same time, organized religion

has often had to co-exist with unofficial belief systems. In Religion

and the Decline of Magic (1971) Keith Thomas assessed the ebb

and flow of witchcraft, prophecy and astrology during the era

of the Reformation and the English Revolution. ‘I hope’, says

Thomas, ‘to have contributed to our knowledge of the mental

climate of early modern England.’25

Some works of history can be clearly allocated to either the

‘material’ or the ‘mental’ camp. An economic study based on

statistics is clearly in a different category from an investigation

of popular magic based on the close reading of court depositions.

But it is important to stress that the material and the mental are

not irreconcilable opposites. They are better regarded as compass

points, around which we can take our bearings when placing a

work of history. In fact some of the most illuminating work places

the material and the mental on a continuum and brings them

together in an integrated analysis. For example, in the case of the

rise of secular thought during the nineteenth century, it is not easy

to distinguish the Churches’ defence of the faith from the securing

of their corporate power. One of the most buoyant strands of

recent economic history is the history of consumption. Modern

historians see shopping as more than the satisfaction of material

wants; by the late nineteenth century middle-class women in the

major cities could experience shopping as romance and glamour,

promoted by the new department stores: Shopping For Pleasure,

as the title of one study aptly puts it.26

Mapping the field 7 9

VII

World history

Finally, historians deploy a variety of spatial perspectives, ranging

from the local at one extreme to the global at the other. Once

again, the two ends of the spectrum may seem to have little in

common, but both are a reaction against the traditional assumption that history is about the nation-state and nothing else. Both

local history and world history question the nation-state as the

default framework for historical enquiry – the first on the grounds

that it fails to engage with the communities in which ordinary

people lived; the second because it ignores the global networks

that have explained – and constrained – many aspects of the

nation’s development.

At first glance world history sounds like an impossibility.

How could anyone ‘know everything’ about what has happened

on the planet? But world history is not about piling up detail.

More than any other branch of history, it depends on selection,

and the principle of selection is dictated by themes and developments which have occurred in different parts of the world, and

in some cases all over the world. Examples include the spread of

world religions like Christianity and Islam; the diffusion of New

World food crops; and the rise and fall of global commercial

systems. Two important general points can be made here. First,

world history breaks the identification of academic history with

the history of the West; to employ a global perspective means

taking seriously the history of Third World societies – recognizing

indeed that prior to the late eighteenth century regions like India

and China were at least as powerful and as sophisticated as their

Western counterparts (see Chapter 10). Second, because world

history involves juxtaposing societies and cultures that are usually

studied in separate compartments, it makes considerable use of

the comparative method (discussed more fully in Chapter 6). For

example, to ask why Christianity expanded more rapidly than

Islam in the second half of the nineteenth century (or why the

balance between them was reversed in the second half of the twentieth century) requires a highly demanding comparative approach,

encompassing not just the distinctive features of each faith but the

society in which believers lived.

8 0 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

Globalization

Further precision is added to world history when its subject

matter is defined as the origins of today’s increasingly globalized

world. Globalization refers to the processes whereby our world

has become more integrated and uniform, shrinking both time

and distance, and absorbing production and trade into a single

international capitalist system. National histories can cast only a

fitful light on this theme. Global history signifies an effort to make

sense of our globalizing world (though it can also mean world

history in a broader sense). This is all the more necessary as a

topic for historians because contemporary comment often overplays the novelty of globalization, with its single market, rapid

communications and homogenized culture. Like nearly everything

else in the modern world, globalization has evolved over a considerable period. Critical features can be traced back to the period

of British ascendancy in the nineteenth century, to the earlier

maritime empires of the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Spanish,

and even to the ‘world economy’ linking all the lands between

China and Western Europe in the thirteenth century.27 It is seldom

Mercator’s map of

the world, 1587. The

circumnavigation of the

globe enabled European

map-makers to represent

the world as a whole.

But there were still limits

to their knowledge, as

the depiction here of

Antarctica shows. The

eighteenth century was

the watershed in accurate

map-making.

(Bridgeman Art Library/

Private collection)

Mapping the field 8 1

recognized that in some ways global integration is less complete

now than in the past. Historians refer to the late nineteenth

century as the period of ‘high globalization’, when the telegraph

and the steamship had transformed communications, when all the

major currencies were convertible at a fixed rate, and when – a

significant variation from today – there was little impediment to

the free movement of labour across the oceans.28

One of the most impressive works of global history to date

is C.A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2004). His

declared aim is to rescue history from the nation and to bring to

light the multi-centred character of modernity. This means seeing

the world beyond the West not as passive recipients of European

expansion, but as dynamic societies which made their own

adjustments to changing global conditions. Before the nineteenth

century Europe was just one region, along with Japan, China,

Mughal India, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, whose worldwide

links Bayly calls ‘archaic globalization’.29 Europe’s lead over the

rest of the world became clear in the course of the nineteenth

century, especially in the spheres of technology and production.

But today’s world is also to be explained by creative reactions in

the Third World: in religion, and also (more surprisingly perhaps)

in national identity and social organization. Modernity, in short,

was a truly global phenomenon, requiring a global reach of scholarship such as Bayly possesses in full measure.

VIII

Local history

Like world history, local history has until relatively recently been

disdained by the academic profession, but for different reasons.

The greatest interest in a specific locality is felt by those who

live there. Hence, especially in England, local history used to be

dominated by local amateurs who were prepared to work at the

sources without necessarily being able to recognize their wider

significance. Typically they were preoccupied by the doings of the

squire and the parson, to the exclusion of the rest of the population. Their publications were dismissed as being of antiquarian

rather than academic interest.

The past fifty years have seen a complete reversal of this

outlook. Local history in England has become a kind of in-depth

8 2 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

microcosmic social history. During the 1950s the ‘Leicester

school’ of historians, led by W.G. Hoskins, reinterpreted English

local history as the reconstruction of historic communities.

Hoskins laid special emphasis on visual evidence, such as field

patterns, abandoned settlement sites and vernacular architecture.

Other historians pursued every scrap of evidence in order to

follow the fortunes of individual households over a century or

more. Intensive study of this kind assumed a small unit with a

maximum population of 2,000, in other words a village. But

in the best-documented cases the outcome was a study that

brought together every dimension of community life: land use,

economy, social structure and religion. Hoskins was drawn

to pre-industrial villages, which approximated to his nostalgic

pastoralism. But the method is equally valuable as a means of

investigating the human realities of social change. The Making

of an Industrial Society by David Levine and Keith Wrightson

shows how the Tyneside village of Whickham adapted to the

requirements of coal-mining during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.30

Microhistory and total history

In community studies knowing the names does not necessarily

mean knowing the people: family size, occupation and church

membership often do little more than enable us to categorize the

inhabitants of a village. But in exceptional cases the surviving

sources bring individuals to life, allowing us the illusion of a

direct encounter, like in a novel. Work of this kind is usually

known as microhistory – a term coined by the Italian scholars

who pioneered it in the 1970s.31 The most celebrated example is

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s account of life in fourteenth-century

Montaillou. Drawing mainly from the records of the Inquisition,

Ladurie was able to reconstruct the everyday life of the peasants

of Montaillou – their social relationships, their religious and

magical observances, and not just their attitudes to sex but much

of their actual sex life. We are able to follow individuals through

the book, notably the parish priest, Pierre Clergue, whose ready

access to people’s homes enabled him to engage in many extramarital liaisons. This is a ‘microhistory’ in the sense that it fills out

in small-scale and human detail some of the social and cultural

features that are otherwise known only as generalizations.32

Mapping the field 8 3

Local history not only breathes life into abstractions; it can also

bring together on a single canvas the varied themes that are usually

treated separately by specialists. The proliferation of approaches

described in this chapter presents a major problem of integration:

how can we see a society in the round if historians give us only

partial perspectives on economy or religion? Focusing on a single

community of a few hundred people enables the researcher not

only to investigate every dimension of life, but to see how they

were linked together as a whole experience. The many local histories that have travelled some way along this road have acted as a

powerful solvent of the rigidities to which conventional specialists

working on a larger canvas are so prone. For political historians

particularly, local history serves as a reminder that their subject

is about not only the central institutions of the state, but also the

assertion of authority over ordinary people. As W.G. Hoskins put

it, ‘The local historian is in a way like the old-fashioned G.P. of

English medical history, now a fading memory confined to the

more elderly among us, who treated Man as a whole’.33 This has

important implications for the goal of historians to integrate their

specialist studies into a fully integrated picture of the past. On a

grand scale it is an impossible task. But it is possible within the

confines of town or village. Paradoxically, ‘total history’ turns out

to mean local history. That explains its high academic standing

today.

In many ways the local historian and the global historian stand

further away from each other than any of the other specialists discussed in this chapter; but even here there are illuminating links to

be made. It is a mistake to suppose that the village community was

ever completely isolated. Economic and cultural influences always

impinged from the outside. Perhaps the most striking demonstration of the links between the local and global is Donald Wright’s

book, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (2004). The

subject is the tiny West African kingdom of Niumi at the mouth of

the Gambia river. Wright analyses the impact of its global links from

the trans-Saharan trade of the late medieval era up to the drive for

development in independent Gambia. His study demonstrates that

it makes little sense for historians or anthropologists to study small

communities as if they were cut off from the outside world.

8 4 THE P U R SUI T OF H I S T O R Y

Every work of history strikes some kind of balance between

the individual and society, between the material and the mental,

and between the local and the global. Where that balance is struck

is the choice of the researcher. Academic fashion often influences

the outcome since historians are keen to ride the crest of a wave,

or better still to anticipate it. It is also more common today for

researchers to be recruited into teams with a collective brief and

research funding to match. Even so, the range of options is still

extraordinarily wide, reflecting the fact that history knows no

disciplinary bounds. More than ever before, the generic occupational label gives little clue as to what an individual historian

actually does. The range of possibilities is sometimes experienced

as overwhelming. It is also what makes the study of history such a

stimulating pursuit.

Hegelian dialectic

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was the leading

German philosopher of the early nineteenth century. He argued

that human events in history were determined by the operation

of dialectic – the clash of opposing forces or ideas out of which

emerged a synthesis, which would in its turn be challenged by an

opposing antithesis. Hegel believed that this process would lead

eventually to a state of harmony based upon Christian ethics and

morality. Karl Marx, who was much influenced by Hegel, ‘turned

him on his head’ by divorcing Hegel’s ideas from their Christian

framework and applying the dialectic model to the clash of class

interests throughout history, leading ultimately to the control of

economy and society by the working class.

Tudor inflation

Across sixteenth-century Europe there developed a steady and

alarming rise in prices which caused considerable hardship. The

reasons for the inflation were not clear to contemporaries, who

blamed anything from human greed to the enclosure of common

land to graze sheep. The English government of Edward VI

responded by debasing the coinage in order to put more money

into circulation, but this simply led people to put their prices

up still higher. Historians long thought the inflation was caused

by the influx of gold and silver bullion from the Americas,

but nowadays it is thought to be a result of the huge rise in

population during the period.

Mapping the field 8 5

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