Part One: History from Below: Reflexions on a Global Phenomenon

1 The Upside-Down World Turned Upside Down Again?

Much of the historiography of the second half of the 20th century believed itself to be following the determined advances of processes of democratisation that began after the Second World War. Historians sought to embrace the lives, experiences, and subjectivities of people who were not priests, princes, lords, kings, dictators, capitalists, or statesmen, seeking out instead the worlds of slaves, vassals, women, peasants, and workers. The experiences of the latter groups, usually silenced in what was then the 'mainstream' which came to be somewhat disparagingly called 'history from above', were increasingly seen as the true, worthwhile histories to write; but what was 'below' depended very strongly on what was 'above', as a result of which the 'aboves' could often be preserved, reified, and potentially re-empowered by the focus on the 'belows' to which they were still the 'aboves'.

This volume attempts to follow a democratisation process that simultaneously, implicitly, and/or potentially, contained within it the seeds of a populism that drew its legitimation from the automatic and a priori importance of the people whose story it was telling. It maps many of the moves, in and across different parts of the world, of a loosely-coordinated trend that became a movement, and evolved into an academically self-evident practice, even as it insisted on its importance beyond the ivory tower.

1.1 The Making of a Movement

A shortened history of a radical movement that is now a form of academic legitimation might be useful in order to position this set of problems. History from below, Geschichte von unten, Storia del basso, histoire d'en bas, historia a ras del suelo - these and other terms represent a reorientation of historiography that began in the 1960s and 1970s. Sometimes also referred to earlier as "people's history" or "radical history", history from below is, as institutionalised in the definition of the Institute of Historical Research, a historiography that "seeks to take as its subjects ordinary people, and concentrates on their experiences and perspectives, contrasting itself with the stereotype of traditional political history and its focus on the actions of 'great men'. It also differed from traditional labour history in that its exponents were more interested in popular protest and culture than in the organisations of the working class."1 It is, therefore, and definitionally, by indirections that we directions find: nothing is but what is not.

Although one could potentially trace the prerequisites for this form of thinking back into the 19th century, one can claim that serious attempts to put the project into historiographical practice have only been formulated since the 1960s. In his programmatic essay "History from below", which appeared in a special issue of the Times Literary Supplement on "New Ways in History" in 1966, the British historian and former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) "Historians' Group",2 E.P. Thompson, made the case for a liberation of history. This new way would, he said, not only leave behind outdated political history, but also free itself from the shackles of a workers' history that was fixated on parties and institutions. Instead, it should turn to topics of "popular culture" and the "common people", and take the latter seriously as producers of history. Thompson emphasised the need to understand people in the past as far as possible in the light of their own experiences - and of their own interpretation of those experiences. Simultaneously, Thompson also called for a democratisation of history that actively opposed tendencies toward specialisation. He concluded his essay with the warning words: "Perhaps it will prove most healthy for [history from below] if it remains somewhat disestablished, with an extra-mural audience still partly in mind. Otherwise it may become successful: grow fat and adopt Norman habits in its turn."3 ("Norman habits", perhaps, was an allusion to the work of his fellow-member of the CPGB Historians' Group, on the "English Revolution" of 1640, in which he pointed out the importance of the themes and counterposition of the "Norman yoke" and the "free-born yeoman" in the ideology of a revolution that had previously been called a Civil War.4)

This "new way of history" quickly aroused great interest among historians who wanted to expand the boundaries of their subject, open up new areas of research and, above all, explore the historical experiences of those people whose existence was so often ignored or only mentioned in passing in what was then innocently seen as "general history". The rise of perspectives from below can also be explained by the fact that demands for a history from below or a history from the bottom up were prominent in the New Left, whose catalysing can be dated to Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation speech and its fallout, shortly to be followed by the Soviet Hungarian invasion in 1956; or perhaps, for those within Communist or fellow-traveller circles who were slower on the uptake, to the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia that brutally ended the Prague Spring.5

These demands were raised with a similar thrust worldwide and not just in the academic field. For example, a collective of writers from Puerto Rico stated in a 1971 manifesto: "We face the problem, that the history presented as ours is only part of our history. What of the history of the 'historyless', the anonymous people who, in their collective acts, their work, their daily lives, and fellowships, have forged our society through many centuries?"6 The oral history movement also belonged to the same community as History from Below, interested as it was in culture passed down orally and the perspectives contained in song lyrics and anecdotes that were at odds with established history. The investigations into factory life in France and Italy, the trade unionist "Dig where you stand" movement in Sweden, and a variety of cultural initiatives that made it their mission to make dissident voices heard - from Augusto Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed" in Brazil, to the films of the British filmmaker Ken Loach, to the global folk revival, and the practices of various and variously-defined self-awareness groups.7 In all of these fields, participants were also interested in the collective experience of subordinate classes and marginalised groups because they were seen as pioneers of a politics of liberation that they wanted to build on in the present; and the point was to reduce the distance between the leaders and the led. The constellation of the "red decade" after 1968 opened up an international space of resonance that encompassed British history from below, Italian microstoria, West German Alltagsgeschichte, an epistemologically-oriented feminism, and (a belated entrant about a decade and a half later) Indian 'subaltern studies'. In the 1970s and 1980s, similar movements emerged in Western and Eastern Europe: in Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, France, Switzerland, Sweden, Yugoslavia; and also in the USA, South Africa, and India, though its extra-academic reach was in each case different.

Conceived in this way, history from below was closely linked to the emergence of the New Left and the social movements of the 1970s. It saw itself as a social-emancipatory project, seeking to transform not only academic debates, but also the social practice of historiography, and to reach an audience beyond the walls of the academy. An example of this are the "History Workshops", which emerged from the worker training courses that Raphael Samuel held from 1966 onwards at Ruskin College, the trade union workers' training institute at the University of Oxford. They, programmatically, were to encourage laypeople to research the history of their village, family or workplace. History should not be delegated to academic experts, but should be practiced and re-appropriated by those affected themselves.8 "History is too important to be left just to the professional historians", we read in the founding manifesto of the History Workshop Journal in 1976, which Raphael Samuel edited together with Sally Alexander, Anna Davin and Gareth Stedman Jones.9 The journal, now very much a part of the landscape of elite academic journals, initially served as a platform for the various local and national associations that had formed in England, Scotland and Wales based on the workshop model.10 It quickly became an international hub. The History Workshop Movement was connected to related projects in South Africa, the USA, Sweden as well as in the Federal Republic of Germany, where history workshops...