Reliving the Past

The Worlds of Social History

Olivier Zunz, Charles Tilly, David William Cohen, William B. Taylor, William T. Rowe

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780807841372, 9780807816585
• eBook ISBN: 9781469611235
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Five historians uncover the ties between people's daily routines and the all-encompassing framework of their lives. They trace the processes of social construction in Western Europe, the United States, Latin America, Africa, and China, discussing both the historical similarities and the ways in which individual history has shaped each area's development. They stress the need for a social history that connects individuals to major ideological, political, and economic transformations.

CHAPTER 1
RETRIEVING EUROPEAN LIVES

BY CHARLES TILLY

Why Go Back?

How did Europeans live the big changes? In different European regions and eras, what were the connections—cause, effect, or correlation—between very large structural changes such as the growth of national states and the development of capitalism, on the one hand, and the changing experiences of ordinary people, on the other? The complex second question merely amplifies the first. In its muted or its amplified form, this question defines the central mission of European social history.

Many experts think otherwise. Despite appearances, in the first place, my definition is rather modest. For social historians incline to imperial definitions of their field. In the preface to his enormously popular English Social History, G. M. Trevelyan offered one of the best-remembered definitions. “Social history,” he declared, “might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.” Trevelyan argued for a three-layered analysis: Economic conditions underlie the social scene, which in turn provides the foundation for political events. “Without social history,” he continued, “economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible.”¹

Perhaps because Trevelyan defined his social history negatively, latter-day practitioners of the art have commonly announced more positive programs. But those programs have been equally massive. Social history “might be defined,” comments Peter Burke, “as the history of social relationships; the history of the social structure; the history of everyday life; the history of private life; the history of social solidarities and social conflicts; the history of social classes; the history of social groups ’seen both as separate and as mutually dependent units.’ These definitions are very far from being synonymous; each corresponds to a different approach, with its advantages and disadvantages.”² Some group of scholars has opted for each of these approaches, and others still.

I am grateful to audiences at Keene State College and at the University of Virginia for raising questions concerning oral presentations of parts of this text and to the contributors to this volume for their vigorous criticism.

Yet most of these definitions of social history make hopelessly ambitious claims. The “history of social relationships,” for example, encompasses almost any subject any ordinary historian might claim to study, plus a great deal more. After all, politics, diplomacy, war, economics, and important parts of cultural production consist of social relationships. What is more, social relationships extend throughout the domains of the social sciences and into the study of other animals than homo sapiens.

To the extent that people who define social history as the history of social relationships mean what they say, they are claiming an empire. In the Netherlands today, a number of social historians attach themselves to a discipline called Maatschappijgeschiedenis: the history of society. Dutch imperialism is apparently alive after all; the very name declares an exceedingly ambitious program. (Dutch historians have not gone to sea alone, however; some German historians similarly aim to build a Gesellschaftsgeschichte, while their French neighbors escalate with a claim to histoire totale.) Taken seriously, an effort to construct a full history of “society” will surely destroy itself.

To be sure, two competing meanings of the word “history” confuse the issue. On the one hand, we have history as the connection of experiences in time; on the other, history as the analysis of that connection. In the first sense, social relationships certainly have a history; they have connections over time. In the second sense, however, it is not humanly possible to construct a coherent analysis of the history of all social relationships; the object of study is simply too complex, diverse, and big.

Social history has other less ambitious versions as well. Some social historians try to supply deeper explanations of major political events, institutions, movements, or changes than straightforward political history ordinarily provides. They want to place politics in its social context. Others hope to recapture an ethos, an outlook, a rhythm of everyday life in much the manner that a professional traveler portrays exotic climes and peoples. They give us sketches of an age, of a city, of a social class. Still others rake the coals of the past for evidence bearing on present-oriented theories: theories of fertility decline, of capital accumulation, of authoritarianism. They then produce studies that differ little in texture from contemporary analyses of the same phenomena.

All of these efforts qualify as social history. All of them, at times, produce outstanding work: Richard Trexler’s fresh interpretation of public life in Renaissance Florence uses social history deftly to give meaning to well-known political events.³ Our understanding of European social life would be the poorer without Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, an essentially ethnographic account of a fourteenthcentury Pyrenean village.⁴ Ron J. Lesthaeghe’s analysis of fertility decline in nineteenth-century Belgium provides a telling empirical critique of standard notions about the transition from high to low fertility.⁵ Social historians can claim these accomplishments proudly. Nevertheless, a social history composed entirely of studies like those of Trexler, Le Roy Ladurie, and Lesthaeghe, for all its scintillation, would lack a common core. What makes social history a coherent field of inquiry?

As a distinct enterprise, social history grew up in opposition to political history, defined in terms of statecraft and national politics. In France, for example, the Annales of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre (inspired to some extent by Emile Durkheim’s program for a regal sociology and François Simiand’s search for suprahistorical rhythms to account for the ebb and flow of historical experience) called for a global history that would surpass and explain mere events.⁶

In England, likewise, Marxists and other materialists sought to construct histories resting firmly on changing modes of production and corresponding shifts in popular life; well before World War II, the works of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, of J. L. and Barbara Hammond, and of R. H. Tawney exemplified the contributions of English radicals to social history.⁷ In Germany, Max Weber and his followers typified the effort to place the history of European states in a broad context of social experience.⁸

Although all these enterprises (not to mention their counterparts elsewhere in Europe) formed in opposition to narrow political history, each of them implies a somewhat different alternative: global history, the history of material life, the comparative study of societies, and so on. What is more, social history branches into a set of specialties, each typically concerned with a particular social structure or process: family history, urban history, agricultural history, demographic history, the history of crime and punishment, the history of social movements, and many more. The field as a whole also overlaps with other long-established specialties, such as labor history and economic history.

Finally, the negation of existing political histories frequently engages social historians of a given country in the acceptance of the prevailing questions concerning that country, and in battling on behalf of a competitor to the prevailing answers. Thus, as Jürgen Kocka points out, German social historians find it difficult to escape a compelling pair of questions: Why did the Social Democrats fail? Why did the Nazis come to power?⁹ Similarly, social historians of Russia, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, have invested a large share of their effort in studying the background of 1917’s revolution. Ronald Suny reported that at a meeting of American specialists in Russian labor history:

Some dissatisfaction was expressed by those who remained convinced that “real” social history was not well served by the concern with politics and consciousness. Indeed Russian labor history has not had many practitioners interested exclusively in issues such as family patterns, fertility, and daily life; rather the brevity of the period 1870-1917 in which the Russian working class emerged and the volatility of its engagement in political life have encouraged its historians to deal with the points of contact between workers, intellectuals, managers, capitalists, and state officials.¹⁰

In Germany, Russia, and other countries the hope of explaining major political events, movements, or transformations animates a significant part of social historians’ work. As a result, to some extent each country has its own branch and brand of social history.

A Program for European Social History

As actually practiced, then, European social history includes a wide range of enterprises, not all of them consistent with each other. Its boundaries are unclear. European social history resembles a strongpoled magnetic field: Most of the work that has a clear rationale pivots around a single core. European social history’s central activity, as I see it, concerns reconstructing ordinary people’s experience of large structural changes.

The statement has a descriptive side and a normative side. As a matter of description, the search for links between small-scale experience and large-scale processes informs a large share of all the work European social historians actually do. As a matter of prescription, that linkage identifies the one enterprise to which all the others connect, the one enterprise to which social historians have the greatest opportunity to enrich our understanding of social life. Neither the effort to construct “social” explanations of major political events, the attempt to portray a full round of life, nor the search for past evidence bearing on present-day social-scientific theories— for all their obvious value—motivate the sustained, cumulative, and partly autonomous inquiry entailed by asking how people lived the big changes. That inquiry, the central quest of European social history, will occupy most of this essay.

Need I say that this program is controversial? Readers of David Cohen’s splendid chapter on African social history, elsewhere in this very book, will find him skeptical of proposals to organize studies of that continent’s past around large structural changes, for fear of imposing simple, alien categories on a complex experience. Among European historians, a vocal minority reject the entire program as not merely useless, but dangerous. The English historian of France, Tony Judt, for example, has called the sort of social history I am advocating a repellent imposter, a “clown in regal purple.”¹¹ Others tolerate the clown’s existence, but prefer more modest attempts to reconstruct one corner or another of social life. The proposal to organize social history around big changes and their correlates in routine social life (even if it does, as I claim, describe what the majority of European social historians are already doing) will certainly stir up dissent among the professionals.

Which big changes deserve attention? Taken back to the ages we can reach only through archeology and extended to the continent’s outermost limits, European social history’s “big changes” include the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the creation of a vast Christian church, the growth of Islamic empires around the Mediterranean, the seafaring of the Normans, the repeated armed invasions from Central Asia, the shift of trade and civilization from the Mediterranean toward the Atlantic, and much more. These changes will figure little, or not at all, in my survey, and I will concentrate on Western, Central, and Northern Europe since about 1500.

Two great circumstances distinguish that block of European life from life anywhere at any other time: (1) the exceptional power of the distinctive organizations we call national states and (2) the prevalence of work for wages under conditions of expropriation. Throughout the world, principalities and empires have risen and fallen throughout the world for seven millennia. But national states—large, specialized, centralized organizations exercising monopolistic control over the principal concentrated means of coercion within sharply bounded territories—only became the dominant European structures after 1500. Again, many forms of forced labor on means of production not belonging to workers have arisen through the same seven millennia, but the combination of formally free wage labor and concentrated, expropriated means of production marks off from all others the capitalist era since 1500 or so.

To be sure, a number of other characteristics also distinguish our era from all others: the complexity of technology, the wide use of inanimate sources of energy, the threat of nuclear war, the proliferation and power of huge organizations, the speed of communication, the prevalence of high life expectancy and still other markers of modern times. Statemaking and the development of capitalism count as more profound changes than the emergence of these other conditions on two grounds:

1. To the extent that we can distinguish them, the formation of national states and the development of capitalism touched the lives of ordinary people more directly and deeply than the other changes on the list. In terms of the allocation of activities among hours in the day, for example, the expansion of salaried, scheduled work in factories and offices far from home—a direct consequence of the development of capitalism—made more difference than any other change. Via conscription, taxation, registration, surveillance, the institution of elections, and the organization of social services, similarly, national states reached directly into the daily lives of ordinary people.

2. Broadly speaking, the development of capitalism and the formation of national states underlay all the other changes. The makers of states, for example, created the largest, most powerful organizations of all, and determinedly pushed toward more and more deadly means of destruction. Although all such influences are mutual, the development of capitalism likewise promoted high-energy production and large organizations rather more strongly and directly than those two phenomena promoted capitalism.

Modern European social history has no reason to neglect complex technologies, the shift to inanimate sources of energy, and other great changes. But capitalism and statemaking provide its largest frame. The unifying, motivating task of European social history since about 1500 is this: connecting the changing experiences of ordinary people to the development of capitalism and the for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Reliving the Past
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 RETRIEVING EUROPEAN LIVES
• CHAPTER 2 THE SYNTHESIS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
• CHAPTER 3 BETWEEN GLOBAL PROCESS AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
• CHAPTER 4 DOING SOCIAL HISTORY FROM PIM’S DOORWAY
• CHAPTER 5 APPROACHES TO MODERN CHINESE SOCIAL HISTORY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX