Abstract
Previously Marxist historians had been neither academics nor professional historians; they were revolutionaries with a range of interests which included history. After the Second World War, this was to change. In this period a generation of academic Marxists emerged and matured. Their research was, as a result, more systematically and exclusively oriented towards historical questions. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 provoked the departure of several historians from the Communist Party who had thrived despite the generally stultifying influence of Stalinism. As a consequence, they attempted to shake off the mechanical materialism of Cominform orthodoxy. They squinted at Marx and history with rejuvenated eyes. The result, history from below, ennobled the resistance and non-conformity of bandits, peasants, artisans, industrial workers, poachers, religious millenarians and transportees. E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) acted as a manifesto for this perspective. But the groundwork had been prepared well before this in the Historians’ Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
‘The revolt is the only successful slave revolt in history, and the odds it had to overcome is evidence of the magnitude of the interests that were involved. The transformation of the slaves, trembling in their hundreds before a single white man, into a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day, is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement.’
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 19381
‘But since the Fathers of the City have thought good in one part of their show to call attention to an episode the London history, the murder of Wat Tyler, it may be worth while for the sake of practical moral to recall to our readers the story of which that murder was the climax; all the more as it has become a sort of nursery tale in which the figures of the wise and kingly youth, the sturdy loyal citizen, and the ruffian agitator have been made to stand out against the dark background of foolish and ignorant armed peasants, not knowing what they asked for.’
William Morris, ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show’, Justice, November 18842
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Notes
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (1980; 1st edn 1938) p. ix.
W. Morris, ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show’, first appearing in Justice, 1 (44) (15 November 1884); reprinted in William Morris, Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal (Bristol, 1994 ), p. 66.
E. Hobsbawm, ‘Communist Party Historians’ Group 1946–56’, in M. Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A.L. Morton (1978), p. 26.
H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931);
L. Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929).
A school of economic history named after Sir J.H. Clapham, the British economic historian (1873–1946). See J. Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain from the Earliest Times to 1760 (Cambridge, 1949);
J. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1930 ).
P. Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy, (1956);
P. Fryer, Staying Power: Black People in Britain since 1504 (New Jersey, 1984);
P. Fryer, Black People and the British Empire (1988).
J. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (1993), p. 273.
C. Hill, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume 3: People and Ideas in 17th-Century England (Brighton, 1986 ) p. 97.
C. Hill, England’s Turning Point: Essays on Seventeenth-Century English History (1998), pp. 294–5.
C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (1972), pp. 292–3.
C. Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the Revolution (Oxford, 1965). This proved to be a controversial work which prompted a debate over the relationship between Puritanism and science.
See C. Webster (ed.), The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (1974).
C. Hill, The Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution (Wisconsin, 1980 ), p. 60.
C. Hill, The English Revolution 1640 (1979; 1st edn 1940), p. 62.
J.H. Hexter, On Historians (1979), pp. 227–54.
C. Hill, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill. Volume 2: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, MA, 1986), p. 51; England’s Turning Point, p. 294.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968; 1st edn 1963), p. 13.
H. Kaye, Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History? And Other Questions (London, 1997; 1st edn 1995), p. 205.
Though he would object to much of the poststructuralist content of J.W. Scott, ‘Women and the Making of the English Working Class’, in J.W. Scott (ed.), Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)
for a critique of Scott’s views see B.D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, PA, 1990), pp. 78–86 and 172–86.
E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1990; 1st edn 1975), p. 262. Thompson (and Linebaugh) underscored the importance of capital punishment through the term ‘thanatocracy’, meaning a government that relies heavily for its power on the use of the death penalty.
E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (1993; 1st edn 1991), p. 7.
P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1985), p. xvii.
H. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750–1925 (Oxford, 1976), pp. 3–4.
E. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1975 ), pp. 25–6.
D. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 ( Princeton, NJ, 1989 ), p. 69.
E. Said, Orientalism (1985);
S. Sarkar, ‘Orientalism revisited: Saidian frameworks and the writing of modern Indian history’, Oxford Literary Review, 16 (1–2) (1994).
Though others have also taken the Thompsonian route to postmodernism as well see M. Steinberg, ‘Culturally speaking: finding a commons between post-structuralism and the Thompsonian perspective’, Social History, 21 (2) (1996).
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© 2002 Matt Perry
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Perry, M. (2002). ‘Rescuing the Poor Stockinger’: History from Below. In: Marxism and History. Theory and History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1379-1_6
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