History from Below

Definition

History from below is the historiographical orientation, associated above all with E. P. Thompson and the British Marxist historians, that writes history from the perspective of ordinary, subordinate and "loser" groups rather than elites, institutions and states. In the source volume it is the first of alltagsgeschichte's commitments: "Alltagsgeschichte begins with the call for history from below, the fundamental orientation alltagsgeschichte shares with cognate tendencies in Anglo-American social history" (Eley, p. ix). Medick names its stake in "historical 'losers'" and "nonestablishment views of the processes of change" (p. vii), and links it to the anthropological turn: "Shifting perspective onto the 'internal costs' of social transformations … brings the casualties of progress more to the forefront of historical inquiry, as Edward Thompson and others … had so eloquently argued" (p. ix). It is not, however, identical with alltagsgeschichte: Lüdtke insists that from below "the big questions of process and structure" must still be posed, and that alltagsgeschichte "cannot be isolated from the relations of production, appropriation, and exchange" (p. x).

Key Thinkers

• E. P. Thompson — the movement's central figure: The Making of the English Working Class, the "field-of-force," the moral economy.
• Alf Lüdtke — the German exponent of history from below.
• Hans Medick, Geoff Eley — the volume's framing of the British connection.
• Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel, Christopher Hill — the British Marxist-historian milieu.
• Sven Lindqvist — "Grabe, wo du stehst!" ("Dig where you're standing!"), cited by Lüdtke as "necessary but … not sufficient."

Related Concepts

• Alltagsgeschichte — history from below's German counterpart.
• Historical Experience — what history from below recovers.
• Moral Economy — Thompson's concept of plebeian rationality.
• Popular Culture — the culture history from below studies.
• Everyday Life — the sphere it privileges.
• Historical Social Science — the structural history it dissents from.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — Eley's foreword (pp. vii–x) on the British connection; Lüdtke's Introduction and the discussion of Thompson, Lindqvist, and the "history of historical 'losers'"; Medick's "social history turns toward cultural and social anthropology" (pp. 47–48).

Open Questions

• Is history from below a perspective (a standpoint) or a method? The volume treats it as both, and the slippage is instructive.
• Can a history "from below" avoid idealizing its subjects, given the volume's own finding that "the many" were also perpetrators?