This chapter starts by accounting for the early beginnings of social, economic and labour history in different parts of the world at different times. It then analyses the crisis of social history during the 1970s and 1980s. Challenged both by history from below and by political history as well as poststructuralist theories, social, economic and labour history began to decline. However, over recent decades we have also witnessed a renaissance of a ‘new’ social, economic and labour history. The main bulk of the chapter analyses this renewal, discussing sublaltern studies, the cultural turn, the move to global histories of work, the emphasis on practices as well as discourses and the proliferation of new sub-fields. Overall, many of these recent developments have led to a greater self-reflexivity about the writing of history and its links to collective identity formation.

This chapter starts off by discussing the roots of historical anthropology in ‘people’s history’ before the linguistic turn. It then traces the journey from the history workshop movements of the 1960s and 1970s to historical anthropology, focusing on European and Indian groups (the Subaltern Studies Group). It highlights the work of Ann Laura Stoler as an example of how historical anthropology led to new and exciting perspectives in historical writing with deep implications for the deconstruction of historical identities. Historical anthropologists brought with them a concern for the everyday, diversity, performance and resistance and they raised an awareness of the undeterminedness of the past. They also emphasised how collective identities were rooted in constructions of culture. Relating cultural values to practices, diverse theories of the everday examined different structures of power and the agency of ordinary people in resisting and re-appropriating these structures of power. Treating culture as fluid, plural and changing, it also contributed to the de-essentialisation of human identities. Emphasising mimetic processes and the interrelationship of diverse mimetically produced images, historical anthropology also contributed to the decentring of Western perspectives.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

I focus on the traffic in ideas between India and the rest of the world, covering religion, science and political ideas. India’s contribution to the global religious field was significant. While attempts at making Hinduism a ‘world religion’ were not uniformly successful, the circulation of the Hindu scriptures did impact the intellectual history of Europe and North America, contributing to a critique of the Enlightenment. Indian Islam was a major contributor to Islamic reformism, modernist as well as fundamentalist, and some major transnational Islamic movements had their origins in India. Indian Christianity recently acquired a significant global dimension, while India again became part of the world of Buddhism. I evoke India’s contribution to science through the scientists of world stature it produced. I also deal with how global ideologies such as liberalism, communism and fascism were appropriated in India in ways that were often profoundly original. I draw attention to the long-term success of the Indian version of fascism represented by the RSS and the BJP and present a study of Gandhi’s global impact. Finally, I look at the globally influential Subaltern Studies collective.

The chapter returns to travelling theory on the one hand and stretching Marxism on the other, unpacking them and connecting them to threads and concepts in Gramsci and Fanon’s work. The main focus of the chapter is on debates around hegemony by producing a genealogy of the concept both in Marxism and as in debates on its application to the postcolonial world. On the one hand, I engage with the Subaltern School and Frantz Fanon and the ways in which they articulate the question of hegemony and colonial rule. Following the Subaltern School and Fanon, I show why hegemony in postcolonial contexts, in contrast to Western contexts, is dependent on the transnational and why an international lens is thus central to understanding political change in countries such as Egypt. It is for this reason that a change in Egypt’s – and other postcolonial nations’ – positions vis-à-vis the international and capitalist development is necessary for meaningful independence. To contextualize this debate, I look specifically at the founding of Bank Misr in the 1920s, revisiting a debate about foreign capital and national capitalists in Egypt.