The travails of social history

‘Social history is at present in fashion’, Eric Hobsbawm observed in 1971, when the popularity of the subject was also becoming allied to grand intellectual ambitions. This was reflected five years later with the arrival of a new journal: Social History. In the first issue its editors announced confidently, and with a certain degree of belligerence, that social history was ‘not a new branch of historical scholarship’ but rather ‘a new kind of history’ whose mission was ‘to make incursions into all fields of historical analysis’. Social history was to transform historical practice by generating a new, more holistic understanding of past societies – a ‘total’ history. The same editorial recognised the significance of precursors such as the Annales School in France and British Marxist historiography, but declared, ‘social history has no orthodox repertoire, no dominant central “core” around which revolve a score of minor interests and enthusiasms’. Not even class. And this despite the fact that the journal rapidly became known for publishing a series of important interventions that dealt centrally with class formation, class-consciousness and class struggle in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Despite its centrality to the debates of the 1980s and early 1990s that would signal the retreat of social history as a ‘totalising’ project, in the 1960s, and for much of the 1970s, class occupied a contested place in modern British social history. It was present only unevenly. It did figure, for example, in histories of social movements and popular politics.