Wednesday 14 December 2011

The New Social History and the 17th Century English Revolution


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."[1]

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.”[2]

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”.[3]

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.[4]

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”. [5]

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.[6]

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.”[7]

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”.[8]

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.






[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history
[2] E H Carr, The New Society, op cit, chapter 1.
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_history
[4] Rebellion or Revolution-G E Aylmer
[5]Order and Disorder-Lucy Hutchinson
[6] https://archives.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Morrill_John.html
[7] Radicalism and the English Revolution Mario Caricchio Università di Firenze
[8] In the Century of Revolution

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