Imagining ‘Social History’

Arup Kumar Sen

The well-known British journal, The Guardian, carried an obituary of Asa Briggs, the eminent British historian, by Nigel Jones (March 15, 2016). The intellectual and political inclinations of Briggs were highlighted in the obituary: “The social historian and educationist Asa Briggs… was one of the last survivors of a wartime generation who not only wrote groundbreaking works but helped to make history themselves… Never a Marxist like his fellow Oxford historians, Christopher Hill and E P Thompson, Briggs retained a sentimental attachment to old Labour ideals throughout his life.”

Asa Briggs’ seminal book, A Social History of England, was published in the early 1980s. (1983: Second edition, Penguin Books, 1987) In the Preface of the book, he stated his understanding of the emerging field of ‘social history’: “Social history has now become a favourite kind of history, and as its range and methods have expanded, it has attracted more and more serious study…Furthermore, the subject has come to attract theoreticians, many of whom use concepts and techniques derived from current sociological analysis. There are dangers in the new approach just as there were weaknesses in the old. In particular, it sometimes concentrates more on abstractions than on people.”

Briggs shared with his readers his imagination of the method of writing ‘social history’: “Although there is an obvious necessity to relate it to economic and demographic history, both of which are concerned with human subsistence, it cannot ignore cultural history, which reveals how a society expresses itself in arts, crafts, folklore and religion. Nor can it ignore geography…As for the political element in social history, which in my view should never be left out, it is important that it should be comprehensive in coverage…”(ibid.) While focusing on his own approach of writing ‘social history’ of England, he stated: “First, I try to focus on experience, the experience of individuals and of groups, shared or contrasting, rather than on concepts, although these must be part of the scaffolding.”

The paradigm of writing ‘social history’ has undergone transformations in the 21st century. However, the insights of ASA Briggs should not be lost sight of in the ‘Historian’s Craft’.

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Vol 57, No. 26, Dec 22 - 28, 2024