social history

social history. G. M. Trevelyan's often quoted ‘Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out’ is as thought-provoking as it is misleading. The result was a diffuse agenda of great breadth from family and household to furniture, dress, and photography. This was given coherence around the notion of ‘Englishness’. He began in the 14th cent. because this was the period in which ‘the English people first clearly appear as a racial and cultural unit’. He finished with a vision of a society experiencing increasingly rapid change and ‘progress … particularly in education and social services’. In a book written in the shadow of an uncertain war, the last footnote ended, ‘If we win this war, it will have been won in the primary and secondary schools’ (1941). None the less the tradition of social history which dominated the 1950s and 1960s had come out of the side door of the Fabian Society guided by the Hammonds and the Webbs.

Social history inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment a sense of a society progressing by stages to a more civilized condition. There was a keen awareness, derived from Marxism, of the impact of economic structures. The sense of national identity and purpose explicit in Trevelyan was implicit in the development of social history. The Anglocentric British state was the reference point for the bulk of research. The dominant agenda grew from the Fabian perspective. It included work and the impact of economic change, social conditions, especially health and housing, social movements, notably trade unions and organizations campaigning for social change, and social reform based upon legislation and the growth of state intervention. This writing was organized around two key assumptions. The first identified a major and disruptive change in the late 18th and early 19th cents. called the ‘industrial revolution’. The second sought understanding and explanation through the concept of social class. These assumptions were common to the work of authors as different as Asa Briggs, E. P. Thompson, and Harold Perkin. Although Thompson's work initially divided its readers by political persuasion, its long-run importance was to widen the agenda of social history and to bring to the front the tension between human agency and economic determinism as a basis for explanation.

The 1960s and 1970s brought an increasing engagement between social science and the understanding of the past. The initial impact was evident in the study of social class but most notable in demography and family history. The recognition of the distinctive nature of the nuclear family-based household in Britain was one outcome. This engagement brought another tension to social history, that between the social scientist's desire to generalize and the historian's respect for the particularity of time, place, and person. This period saw a dramatic increase in the sources and methods employed by social historians: parish registers, parliamentary poll books, oral history, the early use of computers, and the interpretation of landscape were some of the additions to the repertoire.

The 1970s and 1980s released social history from a variety of self-imposed inhibitions. There was a rapid extension of the range of ‘legitimate’ topics. urban history with its awareness of the complex interactions and variety of the town played a major part. Social theory, much of it from the Chicago school of urban sociology, was important here, but the urban historians also sustained a tradition of social history which sought an elegant account of the texture of the past, a sort of organized poetry of facts. The most crucial impact was probably women's history with its rapid development into gender history. Leading writers displayed a deep dissatisfaction with existing categories and agendas such as the Fabian concern with paid (mainly male) work in the cash economy.

In the past 25 years the British have written more social history than in the rest of their history-writing history. The agenda has extended to an almost unlimited range of topics. Politics, often through studies of the nature of the state, has been reintegrated. Ethnic, racial, religious, and national identities have been added to those of gender and class. The greater understanding of the 17th and 18th cents. has questioned the notion of the ‘industrial revolution’ as a discontinuity.

In the 1990s the British displayed a hunger for their own history, not just as a nation state unit in the manner of Trevelyan, but as a reflection of multiple identities, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, the regionality of the English, in terms of work, gender, religion, ethnicity, leisure interests, social and moral enthusiasms. As a result ‘social history’ has become part of the mainstream of British culture. The political debate of the 1980s and 1990s directly involved interpretations of social history through concepts such as ‘Victorian values’ and ‘middle-class failure’. Leisure and cultural products as varied as tourism, television, and living space involved historical understanding through the notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘restoration’. Social history has become not just an intellectual base for understanding the past but a crucial element in the relationship of past and present and in the multiple identities of the late 20th and early 21st cents.

R. J. Morris