(National Portrait Gallery, London. Photograph by APK, CC BY 4.0.)
St Peter’s Field · 16 August 1819
Sixty thousand people were in that field. The print names one.
- What did the other fifty-nine thousand think they were doing that morning?
- If nobody wrote it down, is that a question history is allowed to ask?
- Count the faces. The engraver drew people one at a time — hats, coats, a woman in white with her arms flung out — for a crowd put at sixty thousand. What would you need in front of you to write a history of this field?
- Read the dedication. It names Henry Hunt, the gentleman on the hustings, and thanks “the Female Reformers of Manchester” as a group. One name, one category. Who has to be named before a historian counts them as an actor?
- Read who signed it. Carlile was on the hustings, escaped, and published this in October as their “Fellow Labourer.” The fullest record of the day was made by a participant with a case to make. Is a source made to accuse worse than one made to administer, or wrong differently?
Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 6.1
History From Below
- Background: Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), ch. 1: “The History of Whom?”, 10–44
- E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Preface and ch. 1, 1–25
- Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (1985), ch. 1, 1–13 and 27–31
Page numbers name the author, because all three books are cited by page and their numbering overlaps. Thompson is the Vintage printing, Vansina the Wisconsin edition.
Today in context
What makes history happen?
Week 4 · Ranke, 1824
What the documents say, reported without invention.
Week 5 · Marx and Braudel
Structures. Class conflict over production; sea, soil and climate underneath everything.
Week 6.1 · Thompson, 1963
People — making themselves, out of what they experience and what they do about it.
Week 6.2 · Scott, 1986
Gender, as the system that makes any of those arrangements look natural.
Part one · history from above
For most of history’s history, the actors were the people who decided things
The answer that looked obvious
Rulers, commanders and leaders mattered because their decisions shaped the lives of thousands. Write the ruler and you have written the age (Maza, p. 10).
And it is not simply wrong
Henry VIII’s decision to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn broke the English church from Rome. One man’s choice, generations of consequence (Maza, p. 11).
What the answer settles quietly
Asking “whose history?” is asking which sphere of human activity counts. For centuries the answer was politics, and politics meant public power (Maza, p. 12).
(Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
Part one · the case for the old answer
Take the strongest version of it before taking it apart
Political history should matter above all else, because the state is where humans pursue their highest form of rationality, “reflected in the rational ordering and organization of society by means of laws, constitutions, and political institutions.”
Three assumptions underneath
- The state is the most important arena of human activity.
- Political leaders drive historical change.
- “Politics” is something that happens in public (Maza, p. 13).
Part one · before the 1960s
Social history was already a century old. That was never the problem.
“When they were effective as a crowd … historians celebrated them for advancing the purpose of their forward-looking superiors, while never acknowledging them individually by name.”
The lineage
France from the 1820s: Thiers and Michelet made “the people” the movers of 1789. England: Macaulay (1848), then his great-nephew Trevelyan (Maza, p. 14).
The catch
That tradition was “clearly subordinate and accessory to political history”: the social chapter is scenery, and the action on stage is still the politics (Maza, pp. 14–15).
The same move as the print in the cold open. Hunt is named, the Female Reformers are thanked as a group, and sixty thousand people are a crowd.
Part one · Trevelyan, 1942
The phrase that made the tradition famous names what it left out
Social history is “the history of a people with the politics left out.”
What that book is
Six hundred pages of English life to 1901 — trade routes, population, marriage customs, diets, how damp a peasant home felt in 1750. Written in 1942 to lift wartime morale (Maza, pp. 14–15).
The phrase is disputed
Trevelyan’s biographer says it is quoted out of context: he took it up reluctantly, for a book meant to complement his political history (Maza, p. 15 n. 7).
Disputed or not, it names the assumption. Leave the politics out and the poor stop being able to change anything — pictures rather than an argument (Maza, p. 15).
Part one · the 1960s and 1970s
Then the discipline changed its mind, fast
How fast
In 1948 almost no American dissertations were in social history; by 1978, a quarter. Across Harvard, Yale, Michigan and Wisconsin, courses ran from nought to two a year in the late 1950s, and thirteen to seventeen twenty years later (Maza, p. 17).
Nobody agreed what it was
In the United States “history from below” and “bottom-up” fell out of favour for sounding judgmental or mildly salacious. “Social history” stuck as the name; what it meant in practice never settled (Maza, p. 17).
Part one · quantification
The first answer was to count everybody
The reasoning
If numbers don’t lie and bigger samples are safer, the solid truths are in large numbers. Social history becomes a social science (Maza, p. 17).
Where the numbers are
Authorities kept what they needed: prices, yields, births, marriages, deaths, censuses for taxation. Quantification works best on population, the economy and mass politics (Maza, pp. 17–18).
The archive of the poor is mostly a record of them being counted, taxed, and buried. That shapes which questions are answerable.
Discussion · part one
Counting the poor is not hearing them. Is it a fair substitute?
- A parish register gives you every burial in a village for two centuries. What can you now ask, and what can you still not ask?
Answer · part one
Numbers restore people to the record without restoring them to the story
The gain and the limit
Counting proves the poor were there and how they lived and died. It cannot say what they wanted, because nobody recording them was asking.
A source made to administer people answers administrative questions. To ask a different question you need a different source — or a different way of reading this one.
Part two · 1963
One book reset what the word “class” was allowed to mean
Quantification had made the poor visible in aggregate. The book that mattered most contained not a single numerical table.
The object
The Making of the English Working Class, 1963: eight hundred pages on English working people between roughly 1780 and 1830. Its author has been called the most widely cited historian of the twentieth century (Maza, pp. 23–25).
Part two · the preface
The title is an argument, and he says so in the first paragraph
“Making, because it is a study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.”
What “agency” is doing here
Conditions press on people; people also act. Marx gave the conditions a motor. Thompson insists the people inside it were doing something of their own. Compare 5.1.
Part two · the definition
Class is not a thing you can find. It is something that happens.
“I do not see class as a ‘structure’, nor even as a ‘category’, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.”
The consequence for method
“The finest-meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love” (p. 9). You cannot sample for it.
“Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition” (p. 11).
Part two · what he is writing against
He names the three histories he is arguing with, and concedes each one first
The three
- Fabian — working people as passive victims of laissez faire, with the exception of a handful of far-sighted organisers.
- Empirical economic historians — working people “as a labour force, as migrants, or as the data for statistical series.”
- “Pilgrim’s Progress” — the period ransacked for forerunners of the Welfare State (p. 12).
The quarrel
“Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity. All have added to our knowledge.” His objection to the first two: “they tend to obscure the agency of working people” (p. 12).
(Working Class Movement Library, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
Part two · the famous sentence
The people he wants back are the ones who were wrong
“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.”
Read the adjectives
Obsolete, utopian, deluded — in quotation marks, because they are posterity’s words, not his. Every one is a reason an earlier historian gave for leaving somebody out.
Part two · the standard of judgement
Being wrong about the future is not a reason to be left out of the past
“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.”
His answer
“Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience” — and the test he offers is that “they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not” (p. 13).
Judging the past by what happened next is a method, not neutrality. It writes off everyone who guessed wrong.
Note the books at her elbow.
(Published by John Bell, 2 October 1814. Public domain.)
Discussion · part two
Thompson wants the deluded follower in the history. What is she evidence of?
- Thousands of people believed a sixty-four-year-old woman was about to give birth to a messiah. What would you have to think that belief was to make it a historical fact rather than a curiosity?
Answer · part two
A belief is evidence of the conditions that made it reasonable
What changes when you take it seriously
Southcott’s followers were mostly poor, in a decade of war, hunger and machine-breaking. A prophecy that the world was about to be overturned is a reading of that decade, not an escape from it.
Calling a belief deluded ends the enquiry. Asking what made it credible starts one.
Part three · the problem Thompson leaves
Thompson could do this because England wrote everything down
Thompson closes the argument of his preface looking outward: “Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won” (p. 13).
What that sentence costs him
His method runs on paper — spy reports, trials, petitions, hymns, chapbooks — read against the grain. Where the archive is thin or was never written, reading against the grain has nothing to read.
(Unknown photographer. Public domain.)
- The instrument is the identification. Nobody here is named, but the ngoni marks its holder’s trade: he is kept to hold and perform his community’s past. If the record is a person, what happens to it when he dies?
- Read what the caption calls them. “Groupe Soussous” — a type, not three people. The photographer was selling an ethnic specimen to a market in France. What does a source record when its maker had no reason to learn a name?
- It is evidence anyway. Not of Susu history, which it never set out to record, but of what that market wanted Africa to look like in 1910. Can a source be good evidence for something its maker was not talking about?
Part three · the definition
He draws one hard line, and then refuses to draw any more
Oral traditions are “verbal messages which are reported statements from the past beyond the present generation.”
The line he does draw
Spoken, sung or called out on instruments, so not writing. Beyond the present generation, so not an interview about someone’s own life — that is oral history, a different source (pp. 27–28).
The ones he refuses
Others would require a tradition to be widely known, or told with the conscious intent to testify. “Far too restrictive”: much is learned from sources not concerned with the past, which “testify despite themselves” (p. 28).
Part three · the move
He does not ask you to trust it, but to treat it as a document
“A tradition should be seen as a series of successive historical documents all lost except for the last one and usually interpreted by every link in the chain of transmission.”
Why that reframing does the work
It puts tradition inside source criticism instead of outside it: every link can be questioned, and the last teller is not the author. He warns in the same breath against pushing it — oral messages are not originals and copies (p. 30).
“Evidence at second, third, or nth remove, but it is still evidence unless it be shown that a message does not finally rest on a first statement made by an observer” (p. 29).
Part three · two things he adds
The method is old, and the chain is a simplification
Somebody got there first
Islamic scholars have judged hadith by examining the links in the chain of transmission since the second century after the Hijra — assessing each witness between the Prophet’s Companion and the recorder (p. 30). Compare 3.1.
And the neat chain is wrong
Most tradition is “told by many people to many people.” There are no tidy lines; transmission is communal and continuous (p. 30).
That messiness is not only loss: “Multiple flow does not necessarily imply multiple distortion only, rather perhaps the reverse” (p. 31).
Discussion · part three
Is this a challenge to Week 4’s scientific history, or its standard applied elsewhere?
- Ranke wanted claims that rest on named sources anyone could go and check. Vansina wants a link between record and observation, and every link in the chain criticised. Same demand, or a different one?
Answer · part three
He keeps the standard and refuses the assumption smuggled in with it
The two halves
Kept: evidence must rest on somebody’s observation, and every link is criticised. Refused: that only writing can carry the link — never argued for, just what the archives Ranke worked in happened to contain.
The demand was always for a source you could name and criticise. That the source had to be paper was a fact about European archives, not a rule of evidence.
Thompson and Vansina
Both widen who counts. Only one of them has to build a new kind of source.
Thompson, 1963
The archive exists and is hostile. Spies, magistrates and prosecutors wrote most of it. Read it against the grain and the people it was written to control come through it.
Vansina, 1985
For much of the world the archive was never written. So establish that a spoken tradition is a document, and work out the rules for criticising one.
New topics needed new reading. New parts of the world needed new sources.
The lecture · three parts
Who counts, whether they acted, and what counts as evidence
01 · Maza, ch. 1
Who counts
Ordinary people were in the books for a century, as scenery. The 1960s made them actors; counting them answered only the questions their administrators had asked.
02 · Thompson, 1963
Agency
Class is something people do, not a category you sample for. The losers belong in the history, and hindsight is not a neutral standard.
03 · Vansina, 1985
Evidence
Oral tradition is a document at nth remove. Keep Ranke’s requirement of a link to an observation; drop the assumption that it has to be written.
The take home
Changing who history is about forces a change in what counts as a source
Why it could not stop at topics
Archives were built by institutions with no reason to record workers, women or colonised communities. Deciding to write about them is not enough if the evidence rules stay as they were.
Every rule about what counts as evidence is also a decision about whose past can be known. Those rules were written by people who were not thinking about you.
Next · 6.2
Rowbotham and Scott ask the same question about half of everyone
- Rowbotham’s claim is Thompson’s, applied to women: they were left out because historians did not look.
- Scott goes further — gender is not one more group to add, but a lens on how power works everywhere.
Both readings assume today’s argument. Come having decided whether adding people to the story is enough.