Encyclopedia of Social History

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1993
• eBook ISBN: 9781135583460
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A reference surveying the major concerns, findings, and terms of social history. The coverage includes major categories within social history (family, demographic transition, multiculturalism, industrialization, nationalism); major aspects of life for which social history has provided a crucial per

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Capitalism

The study of the social history of capitalism has produced an uneven, often wildly clashing scholarship rooted in theoretical disagreement over what capitalism is. Following Werner Sombart and sociologist Max Weber, two seminal German scholars of the late 19th century, one school has traced the growth of the capitalist “spirit” of economic rationality, enterprise, and profit seeking. A second group has shifted emphasis from business attitudes to commercial organization, identifying capitalism as a process of money-based trade for the purpose of profit. A third camp, working in the tradition of Karl Marx, focuses upon social relations of production as defining or specifically viewing capitalism as a mode of production in which labor power itself becomes a commodity, purchased for the purpose of creating surplus value.

The distinctive features of these three definitions—profit-mindedness, markets, or exploitation—tailor the time span and geographic range historians of capitalism might examine in sharply contrasting forms. Ultimately, too, Weberian analysts have tended to subsume the study of capitalism under the rubric of intellectual and cultural history, while the market approach claims the subject for economic history. Although most closely boundaried in terms of time and space, the Marxist perspective has understood capitalism most clearly as social history. In practice, however, these sharp distinctions have blurred considerably. Variant political agendas and moral assumptions have added complexity and confusion. In recent decades, also, scholars have often blithely mixed and matched elements of these warring perspectives, often in the name of progressive “synthesis,” with widely variant individual results. Collectively, the upshot has been either the generation of a rich variety of innovative studies, or, depending on one’s perspective, a mongrelized muddle.

Certainly nothing like a broad interpretation of capitalism’s social history has gained wide acceptance. Scholars have even failed to agree on the proper focus for study: individual, household, community, class, nation, or world—sys-tem. Since the 1940s, however, historians have concentrated attention on several broad questions concerning capitalism: its social origins, its effects upon material well-being and consciousness, its relations with other modes of production within a social formation, and the response of communities and classes to its rise and triumph.

Until the mid-1970s, the basic features of capitalism’s emergence, describing an “industrial revolution” that grew up first in England and France, then swept across North America and western Europe, gained general assent. The material changes that the coming of this factory system wrought focused debate. On one hand, Eric Hobsbawm and others suggested that Marx and Friedrich Engels had been correct to denounce a falling standard of living among British laboring families. Marshaling variant statistics, the economic historian T.S.Ashton led the charge to refute these claims, without great success. This standoff among British historians was replicated in the work of Americanist Stephan Thernstrom, whose pioneering quantitative study of a late 19th-century Massachusetts town found native-born workers achieving tangible material progress, especially home ownership, while immigrants seemed stuck in poverty after years of labor. A host of ethnicity-oriented case studies has refined but essentially confirmed this native/ immigrant split, though antebellum studies, led by Edward Pessen, have tended to paint a darker picture of capitalism’s benefits to American workers. With publication of Edward Thompson’s seminal The Making of the English Working Class in 1963, emphasis among British and North American scholars shifted toward understanding workers not as passive objects—beneficiaries or victims of capitalism—but as actors exerting some control over their own collective destiny, theoretically shielded from the empiricist assumptions of this tendency, Continental European historians have been slower to adopt its voluntarist perspective.

Beginning in the early 1960s, a pair of debates over capitalism’s origins diverted attention from the increasingly technical wrangling over its material effects. In contrast to industrial revolution analysis, these debates focused on earlier periods of capitalism. In a mostly intramural con test among Marxists aligned with Maurice Dobb (1947) and Paul Sweezy, respectively, historians and political economists argued past each other for more than two decades over whether shifts in productive relations or in exchange—particularly long-distance trade—played the dominant role in unleashing capitalism. The outcome was both pregnant and exhausting. A theoretically broader argument over the causes and character of the so-called crisis of the 17th century, which Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, and others claimed laid the foundations for capitalist expansion, replicated the older claims of the causal power of profit-mindedness, market expansion, and exploitative production. Most recently, Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (1983), and Robert Brenner have attempted to redress the balance between these tendencies, deepening analysis of the peculiar nature and power of merchant capital, at which Marx and Dobb had only hinted. Several detailed studies on the origins of 18th-and 19th-century industrial capitalists in England contribute some specifics on the emergence of capitalism—its leaders and its culture—from a social history standpoint.

In his stimulating 1944 study Capitalism and Slavery, Caribbeanist Eric Williams opened the door to these widening arguments, claiming that New World slavery had provided the financial and productive basis for Old World capitalism. Eurocentric scholars battered Williams’s sometimes reckless assertions, but in broad outline a toned-down version of his thesis has survived. Bolstered by the impressive quantitative research of Jacob Price, Jan de Vries, and Philip Curtin, among others, an “Atlantic perspective” on capitalist growth gained strength in the 1970s. Just how best to examine this expanding capitalist sphere, however, remained in doubt. Fernand Braudel’s celebrated Civilization and Capitalism ranged even beyond the Atlantic, delineating the structure of capitalism’s rise and early development in pointilliste fashion across three centuries; his perspective virtually annihilated the concept of social class, however, and tended to obscure whatever the general dynamic of expansion might have been. Viewing this world from the other end of the telescope, Pierre and Huguette Chaunu’s daunting multi-volume study of Seville and the Atlantic achieved surprisingly similar results. Emphasizing exchange over production relations, sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein’s “world-systems” approach (1980) has found capitalists and proletarians in the most far-flung corners of the globe, tied into an increasingly integrated web of trade. Case studies by Philip McMichael, among others, have edged this perspective back toward more traditionally Marxist ground. Most successful, perhaps, has been anthropologist Eric Wolf s Europe and the People Without History, a synthetic, elliptical vindication of the Marxian approach, without its Eurocentric emphasis.

At the same time that British, French, and American scholars were widening the scope of study, however, central European historians tightened the focus in their search of capitalism’s origins. Concentrating on demographic and capital shifts, technological changes, and alterations in productive relations at the state, community, and even household level, Hans Medick, Franklin Mendels, and others (1981) described a complex process called “protoindustrialization.” Capitalism’s growth, it turned out, was not a progressive, linear tale of industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of a waged working class. As research charting regional depopulation, deindustrialization, and more complicated transition to proletarian status has piled up, the classic English model of capitalist growth has come to seem increasingly atypical, if not downright mistaken. Among North American scholars, the protoindustrialist argument has had little impact, though Joan Jensen, Christopher Clark, and others have sketched case studies congenial to this viewpoint, minus the theory and most of the quantitative research.

The problem of social and economic linkage or “articulation” between capitalist and noncapitalist modes of production had also generated considerable controversy. Although scholars such as Wallerstein and André Gunder Frank have tended to collapse these distinctions at the point of exchange, anthropological studies like Pierre-Phillipe Rey’s Les alliances de classes have sketched out dynamics and structural permutations in ways social historians are only beginning to explore, a host of young Latin Americanists leading the way. Perhaps the most vigorous recent debate over the question of linkage, however, has centered on the slave economy of the antebellum American South. Focusing on productive relations and cultural achievements, by 1918 Ulrich Phillips analyzed a noncapitalist South bound to clash with the capitalist North sooner or later; agricultural historian Lewis Gray countered with a portrait of a rationalized, profitminded plantation society essentially at peace with the rest of the nation and the industrializing world. By the mid-1970s, the cliometricians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman had taken Gray’s argument seemingly as far as it could go, even describing slaves as imbued with a close-calculating Protestant work ethic. Steven Hahn and others, however, countered just as oddly, asserting that antebellum southern small farmers were actually market-fearing noncapitalist yeomen. Amid a growing body of local case studies with surprising claims, the central question of articulation has become virtually lost, except in the work of Genovese and Fox-Genovese. Similar difficulties have arisen in other areas of American, Canadian, and European social history examining agricultural change and its implications for rural capitalist practices and attitudes at the community level. Greater attention to the debates between such rural sociologists as Weberian Patrick Mooney and Marxists Susan Mann and James Dickinson, or among agricultural economists weighing A.V.Chayanov’s ideas against those of V.I.Lenin on the character of peasant economy may help resolve these problems.

All of these important issues, however, have been largely neglected by social historians over the past two decades—even and especially those of a leftist persuasion. Overwhelmingly, scholarship has focused on rewriting the history of those who lived under capitalism, recapturing individual and community experience, restoring human agency, celebrating the worlds working people made for themselves within industrial society. Building upon the work of Thompson in England and Herbert Gutman (1976) in the United States, “radical” historians have redrawn Marx’s concept of class along subjectivist lines, discovering a proud heritage of struggle in virtually all corners of culture and community. By 1976, Fox-Genovese and Genovese had pro-nounced this literature a “bourgeois swindle” and denounced it for creating a “political crisis of social history.” This scholarship, they charged, routinely sidestepped or shortchanged what they saw as the central question of social history: “who rides who and how.” Their critique availed little, however, and the flood of case studies has continued unabated. While social historians of capitalism have guided their readers through every imaginable aspect of working-and middle-class culture and community from sports to foodways to fashion to shoplifting, even the minority who have focused on social relations at the point of production have tended to deflect attention from capitalism’s great punch line, that the working classes have always made their own lives within parameters capital’s overwhelming power has self-servingly permitted, and that their puny wriggling has done little to reshape those parameters objectively or extricate them from its grip. Patrick Joyce, Bryan Palmer, David Montgomery, and Walter Rodney are among labor historians who have intermittently resisted this tendency. The recent success of the American Social History Project’s textbook and video series Who Built America? suggests that the celebration of culture and community will remain in vogue, if toned down, for the foreseeable future.

Despite its misplaced emphasis, this new literature has undeniably added a wealth of information—some trivial, some vital—to our understanding of what shaped capitalism and what capitalism shaped. Recent work on demography, fertility, and social relations of reproduction by David Levine and others (1989) seems especially valuable. Yet combining these disparate shards of experience into a synthetic history of capitalism remains difficult. We know now, for example, far less about bosses than about workers, far more about those who defended community than those who sold it out for individual benefits. Not only are Anglo-American, French, and central European scholars addressing different questions, using different methods, under different assumptions, but most are proceeding cross-culturally blinkered and with outmoded interdisciplinary techniques. As we grope forward, questions become smaller, methods become “softer.” Greater attention needs to be paid to the stimulating literature focusing on capitalism in Third World countries, especially India, southern Africa, Oceana, and Latin America, which has profitably transcended internecine squabbles over imperialism, underdevelopment, and dependency theory. Increased dialogue across the social sciences may also provide greater theoretical clarity and rigor. Like capitalism itself, such developments will be painful, crisis ridden, but highly productive. (See also Protoindustrialization; Slavery; Standard of Living)

Lawrence T.McDonnell

REFERENCES

Dobb, Maurice. Studies in the Development of Capitalism. New York: International Publishers, 1947.

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene D.Genovese. Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Gutman, Herbert G. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.

Kriedte, Peter, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbohm. Industrialization Before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, 2 vols. New York: Academic Press, 1974, 1980.

Caste System

In general usage, caste system refers to a rigid social hierarchy in which members of a caste are born by birth and from which individuals and families cannot move up because of tight legal and social restrictions. It can be compared with other systems of social inequality, particularly those marked by legal barriers among social groups. A number of social systems have approximated the characteristics of caste, in several periods and areas. The system is most clearly applied to the social history of India, however, where social history and anthropology have revealed a number of complications in any overrigid definition.

“Caste” is the word (derived from the Portuguese casta) used in Western writing to describe several kinds of social categories in Hindu South Asia. The term sometimes appears as a transla tion of varna. The earliest Indian religious texts, composed approximately 1000 BC, spoke of four varnas, that is, four categories of people generated from the sacrifice of Purusa, the primal man. Brahmins, generated from the mouth of Purusa, are the highest varna, whose dharma, or inborn moral code, is to teach the religious texts (the Vedas) and to perform sacrifices for and receive gifts from the two varnas ranking just below them. Kshatriyas were said to be born from the arms of Purusa. As warriors and kings, possessors of royal power, their dharma is to protect the kingdom and the people within it, and to give gifts to Brahmins. Vaishyas, born from the thighs of Purusa and ranking below the Kshatriya, were enjoined to produce wealth for their own enjoyment and for that of the kingdom as a whole. The lowest varna in this textual formulation was the Shudra, whose dharma is to serve the three highest varnas. These varnas are ranked, with Brahmins at the apex of the hierarchy, yet the ritual and political centrality of the royal caste, at the level of the kingdom in pre-British India, or the dominant landholding Kshatriya castes at the level of the village, is an equally significant aspect of southern Asian social thought and social practices. As givers of ritual gifts and sponsors of ritual events, king and dominant caste jajmans (sacrificers) are seen as protectors of the well-being and prosperity of the kingdom or village. Both the hierarchical superiority of the Brahman priest and the ritual role of the king or village jajman are important aspects of the indigenous conceptualization of caste society; historians and anthropologists are currently debating the relative significance of hierarchy and royal power in caste systems.

While this varna classification continued to provide a fundamental template for thinking about the social and moral bases of society, social categories termed jatis (for which the term “caste...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• List of Entries
• Topical Contents
• Contributors
• A: Abolition of Slavery
• B: Baby Boom
• C: Capitalism
• D: Death
• E: Economic Development
• F: Family
• G: Games
• H: Haciendas/Encomiendas
• I: Illegitimacy
• J: Jacqueries
• K: Kievan Rus’ Period
• L: Land Tenure and Reform
• M: Machismo
• N: Naming Practices
• O: Old Age
• P: Parish Records
• Q: Quantification
• R: Racial Segregation
• S: Saloons
• T: Taoism
• U: Ulama
• V: Vaudeville
• W: Waqf Charitable Foundations
• Y: Youth/Adolescence