The New Social History Historiography appeared in the late
1960s into the early 1970s. According to some, it was perhaps the last significant
historiography of the 20th century to try and explain the complex historical
phenomenon known as the English revolution. Before the 1970s, most social histories
had been limited to a study of everyday life.
During the last thirty-odd years,
the subject has come to prominence despite the genre being a bête noir of some
revisionist historians. The most positive side of the new history is that it
brought into the public domain the lives of working people or the poor who had been
mainly ignored by historians. On the downside this, new history was divorced
from any form of economic or materialist explanation of the revolution.
The new social history is not fundamentally different from
its predecessor“old social history, which was described as a "hodgepodge" of
disciplines, unlike any other historiography. The English historian G. M.
Trevelyan saw it as the link between economic and political history, stating,
"Without social history, economic history is barren and political history
unintelligible."
It was G.M. Trevelyan who gave us the most famous definition
when he said that social history was 'the history of the people with the
politics left out.' Historians have interpreted this statement in many
different ways.
E. H Carr position was “ to analyse the past in the light of
the present and the future which is growing out of it, and to cast the beam of
the past over the issues which dominate current and future.' It is, he said,
the function of the historian not only to analyse what he or she finds
significant in the past but also 'to isolate and illuminate the fundamental
changes at work in the society in which we live', which will entail a view 'of
the processes by which the problems set to the present generation by these
changes can be resolved'. People are a product of history, their judgements and
actions conditioned by the past, and the historian should work to make them
aware of this, but also to make them aware of the issues and problems of their
own time; to break the chain that binds them to the past and present, and so
enable them to influence the future.”
While English historians were in the forefront of promoting
the new social history it would be wrong to classify this movement as an
English movement , it had international adherents. Paul E. Johnson described
how the movement took place in America in the late 1960s: “The New Social
History reached UCLA at about that time, and I was trained as a quantitative
social science historian. I learned that "literary" evidence and the
kinds of history that could be written from it were inherently elitist and
untrustworthy. Our cousins, the Annalistes, talked of ignoring heroes and
events and reconstructing the more constitutive and enduring
"background" of history. Such history could be made only with
quantifiable sources. The result would be a "History from the Bottom
Up" that ultimately engulfed traditional history and, somehow, helped to
make a Better World. Much of this was acted out with mad-scientist bravado. One
well-known quantifier said that anyone who did not know statistics at least
through multiple regression should not hold a job in a history department. My
own advisor told us that he wanted history to become "a predictive social
science." I never went that far. I was drawn to the new social history by
its democratic inclusiveness as much as by its system and precision. I wanted
to write the history of ordinary people—to historicize them, put them into the
social structures and long-term trends that shaped their lives, and at the same
time resurrect what they said and did. In the late 1960s, quantitative social
history looked like the best way to do that”.
Social History in Britain was hugely influenced by the
French Annales School of historical study. Keith Wrightson in his book English
Society that the social changes that took place were not revolutionary but were
rather evolutionary. Wrightson does pose some interesting questions. At the
beginning of his book, he asks to what extent was English society polarised
enough to cause a civil war, revolution and finally to cut a Kings head off. He
also asks to what extent was the growing social inequality a factor in how
social, economic and political events shaped up.
It is clear that if you took a straw poll of people's view
at the beginning of the 17th that within 40 years there would be a massive
civil war, revolution and regicide then they would have said you were mad. In
many ways, there was no precedent for what took place in 1640. The leaders of
the English revolution had no previous revolution to study to guide them. The
1640s Revolution was unlike any other. Subsequent leaders of the revolutions
such as the French and Russian had the luxury of learning from previous
revolutions.
The new social history's brand of historiography was challenged by a growing number of historians. Ann Hughes highlighted this
changing historical fashion by citing the different titles of books produced
during this time.
In 1965 Lawrence Stone published Social Change and
Revolution in England 1540-1640, whereas the late Barry Coward produced Social
Change and Continuity in Early Modern England1550-1750. The coupling of
continuity rather than revolution with social changes in the recent work
reveals a more qualified assessment of the extent of transformation in early
modern England.
G E Aylmer posed the question of Rebellion or Revolution. Did
he wonder how much difference did the events of 1640-60 make to people's lives?
The casualties, damage and other losses arising directly from the fighting,
together with the generally disruptive of war on agriculture, industry, trade,
transport all seem apparent on the debit side, he, on the other hand, he says
the war gave people more social and political mobility, and they were able to
achieve more than in any other time.
He makes the point that he believes that a few tens of
thousands lost their lives and certainly no more than the worst epidemic of the
time. In his chapter on the Quality of Life, he states there was no shift in
the economy or radical alteration of the social structure. While he concedes
that England after the 1640s and 1650s was more conducive for business
development, he says that this would have been the case if Charles 1st Personal
rule had continued indefinitely, or if the royalists had won the civil war.
Aylmer steered a middle course between rebellion and
revolution the same could be said of a heterogeneous group of historians that included
Conrad Russell, Kevin Sharpe, Mark Kishlansky, Anthony Fisher who called into
question both Whig and Marxist interpretations of the Civil War. They rejected
the idea that the war was the product of deep-rooted social changes instead of emphasised
short-term factors and political infighting. Mark Kishlansky believed there was
a "fallacy of social determinism".
Many historians who have contributed books and articles
which have been in favour of the new social history have been mistakenly
labelled Marxists. The majority of these historians would not in the slightest
call themselves Marxist or be in favour of Marxist historiography.
They
certainly would not be in favour of Marx's theory of the individuals' place in
history as written in his Critique of Political Economy (1859): he explains"In
the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite
relations, who are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of
production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material
forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal
and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of
consciousness.
"The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with
the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing
in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they
have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces,
these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the
economic foundation lead, sooner or later, to the transformation of the whole,
immense, superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always
necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic
conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural
science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic — in
short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about
himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its
consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from
the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the
social forces of production and the relations of production".
While it is generally accepted that there was not a massive
amount of unrest and protest during the civil war. John Morrill has made the
point that changes in social and economic policy were mostly controlled by the
middling sort and large-scale outbreaks were prevented by this class. However,
there was a real fear amongst sections of the middle class who feared the
possibility of riots by the poor.
Lucy Hutchinson describes this attitude so well "almost all
the Parliament garrisons were infested and disturbed with like factious little
people, in so much that many worthy gentlemen were wearied out of their
command, some oppressed by a certain sort of people in the House whom, to
distinguish from the most honourable gentlemen, they called worsted stocking
men”.
Hutchinson is probably referring to the people that were
increasingly being influenced by the Levellers who expressed an awareness,
particularly amongst the lower sections that to have a say in these changes
they must organise through some kind of political organisation.
John Morrill was clearly influenced by the New Social
History historiography in an interview he describes his attitude towards those
historians who were in the for the front of the group "So there came along the new
social history which opened up a whole range of types of evidence, and so one
of the most important things to happen for my period was the work which is most
obviously associated with Keith Wrightson (who trained in Cambridge, spent many
years in St Andrews returned to Cambridge and then moved to Yale). And the
Wrightson revolution indeed, in the way in which social history is made, had an
enormous impact on those of us who were more interested in high politics. I
mean popular politics, constructed high politics. Wrightson’s importance for my
work is again something that people might be a bit surprised to hear about, but
I personally, in my mid-career, saw it as absolutely fundamental.
While the debate over the impact is important, it is an
expression of a much more fundamental debate over whether the war was
linked to social and economic changes in England and Europe at the time.
G M.
Trevelyan states that the Cromwellian revolution was not caused by social and
economic forces but its causes and motives were a result of the development of
political and religious thought and aspiration among men who had no desire to
recast society or distribute wealth.
The examination of localised politics as opposed to national
politics by the new social history historians fitted in nicely with Morrill's
work The Revolt of the Provinces. As Mario Caricchio states “the new social
history has demonstrated the parish in England was a political forum. A
continuing negotiation of authority and subordination featured within it:
gossip, rough music, libel, legal disputes, rioting, petitioning, voting and
rebellion represented the diverse forms of conducting and solving the conflict.
They constituted elements of “popular political culture”. These were also the
means by which the “ordinary people” shaped modern Europe on the continent.”
A historian that has played an important part in the
deleopment of the new social history project is Joan Thirsk's who along with
Alan Everitt, so much so that they became to known as the Leicester School of
Local History. Beginning first with a county study, then through a series of
regional and national studies, Thirsk concentrated on producing a regional
framework for understanding the early modern agrarian economy and economic
change in that period. How much this approach deepened, our understanding of
the compound nature of the English Revolution is open to debate. Perhaps the
narrowness of their remits has led to accusations that this type of
historiography has not had the significant impact its historians had hoped for.
The real Marxist historians had a lot of time for the new
social history. Christopher Hill asserted that profound economic and social
changes took place during the English revolution so much that “historians are
coming more and more to recognise the decisive significance of these decades in
the economic history of England. To back this assertion up saying "After the civil wars,, successive governments from the Rump onwards,
whatever their political complexion, gave much more attention to the interests
of trade and colonial development in their foreign policies”. Restrictions
which had hampered the growth of capitalist economic activity were removed,
never to the restored. “The first condition of healthy industrial growth,”
wrote Professor Hughes apropos the salt industry, “was the exclusion of the
parasitic entourage of the court”.
Right up until his death Christopher Hill had been the
leading proponent of the opinion that the social, economic, and political
changes that took place in the civil war were the product of a bourgeois
revolution. Hill argued that the seventieth century saw a turning point in
English and world history. This view of trying to understand the social
processes at work in the English revolution has been fiercely attacked by
numerous historians yet none so that by P Lassett who said “The English
Revolution ought to be entombed. It is a term made out of our own social and
political discourse…. It gets in the way of enquiry and understanding, if only
because it requires that change of all these different types go forward at the
same pace, the political pace… There never was such a set of events as the
English Revolution”.
Hill never put forward that the events that characterised
the English Civil War proceeded at the same pace. His point is that it helps to
understand very complex developments if they are firstly set to the social and
economic framework. What conclusions can be drawn? Through the sheer weight of
empirical evidence, it is clear that the war had a significant impact on the
social and political fabric of England.
