Social History

The label 'social history' indicates a focus on society. The term refers to a sub-discipline of history which concerned with the “history of society”. Social history as a discipline emerged at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries and became a prominent field of historical study in a later period. Two schools of historical writing: English Social History and the French Annales School together contributed to the development of social history. G M Trevelyan, who wrote English Social History defined social history as “the history of a people with the politics left out”.  English social history sought to examine the “manners, morals and customs” of the English people. The Annales School founded in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre and named after the journal Annales of Economic and Social History intended a new “science of society” that would incorporate all domains of the human and social sciences.

The Annales School influenced the Communist Party Historian’s Group in Britain. Its prominent members included E. P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. They mainly concentrated on the tension between the two classes of society. They wrote about the social transformation from feudalism to capitalism,  and the manners, morals, and customs of the lower classes. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the field of social history found the intervention of feminism and gender studies, which carried social history in further areas of research.

Social history distinguished itself from political history, which had been dominant during most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The important fields in social history consist of:

• Structures of societies and social change
• Social movements, groups, and classes
• Social conditions of work and ways of life
• Families, households, local communities
• Urbanization, mobility, ethnic groups, etc.
• Social problems such as poverty, ignorance, insanity, diseases, etc.
• Everyday life in the home, workplace, and the community
• History from below 

Social history challenged the dominant historical narratives which were constructed around the history of politics and the state. The practice of social history involves a shift of interest from political events to socio-economic structures. It also brought a change in historical methods from narrative to quantitative techniques and interdisciplinary models of interpretation.