ON HISTORY

the lookout for proof of the eighteenth-century German poet's 'See,

we savages are better human beings after aU' ('Seht wir Wilden sind
doch bess're Menschen').
CHAPTER 16
It is a great pleasure [wrote an ex-missionary] to see a people who are
so content with their fate. They enjoy the fruits of their labour and are
unacquaint~d with the poison of hatred. On History from Below
Welt things were more complicated than that, but after making the
acquaintance, through Alabi's World, of these independent, self­ This was originally written as a contribution to the 1985 Festschrift
confident, relaxed and proud men and women at ease with the world. honouring my friend. comrade and collaborator. the late George Rude. It was
one can see what he meant. published in Frederick Krantz (ed.). History from Below: Studies in Popular
Let us, however, spare a final thought for those whose strange Protest and Popular Ideology (Oxford, 1988). pp. 13-28. The text was
'lived reality' is evoked successfully by Price's technique: the Mora­ first given as a lecture at Concordia University. Montreal, where Rude
vians. They came to the benighted heathen in conditions which often taught.
seemed 'a foretaste of what heU must be like'. Unprepared for the
forest, inexperienced, they suffered and died like flies - honest,
uncomprehending German tailors, shoemakers or linen weavers in Grassroots history. history seen from below or the history of the
unsuitable European costumes. who could be expected to last a few common people. of which George Rude was a distinguished pioneer.
months or weeks, preaching Jesus the Crucified with Blood and no longer needs commercials. However. it may still benefit from some
Wounds, among the scorpions and jaguars, before contentedly going reflections on its technical problems. which are both difficult and
home to Him. They were entirely dependent on the maroons. who interesting. probably more so than those of traditional acadanic
did not like them as whites, made fun of them and occasionally history. To reflect on some of them is the purpose of this paper.
persecuted them. They played music, and were uncomfortable when But before turning to my main subject let me ask why grassroots
the blacks danced to it. They failed in all their endeavours except the history is so recent a fashion that is why most of the history written
heroic task of compiling Brother Schumann's Saramaka-German by contemporary chroniclers and subsequent scholars from the begin­
dictionary in nine pain-wracked months. Their successors are still ning of literacy until, say, the end of the nineteenth century, teUs us
there and still the Saramakas' only road to reading and writing. so little about the great majority of the inhabitants of the countries
They remain as hard for us to understand as they were for the or states it was recording. why Brecht's question 'Who built Thebes
forest maroons. But let us not withhold admiration for men and of the Seven Gates' is a typically twentieth-century question. The
women who. in their own way. knew what their lives were for. answer takes us into both the nature of politics which was until
recently the characteristic subject of history and the motivations of
historians.
Most history in the past was written for the glorification of. and
perhaps for the practical use of. rulers. Indeed certain kinds of it still
have this function. Those fat neo-Victorian biographies of politicians
which have recently become the fashion again are certainly not read
by the masses. Who reads them. apart from a handful of prol(~ssional
historians and a sprinkling of students who have to look into them
for essays. is not clear. I have been gravely pU?3.lcd by those alleged
hest-seller lists whit'll always seem to contain the lalest hlockbllSlt'r
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 ON HISTORY ON HISTORY FROM BELOW

of this type. But certainly politicians gobble them up like popcorn, at but at all or most times. By and large this did not begin to happen
least if they are literate. This is natural enough. Not only are they until the era of the great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth
about people like themselves, and activities like the ones they are century. But in practice of course it did not become significant until
engaged in, but they are about eminent practitioners of their own much later. Outside the USA even the typical institutions of bourgeois
trade, from which - if the books are good they can learn something. democracy - that is elections by general male suffrage (the women's
Roy Jenkins still sees himself living in the same universe as Asquith, vote is an even later development) were exceptional until the late
just as Harold Macmillan certainly saw people like Salisbury or nineteenth century. The economy of mass consumption is. in Europe
Melbourne as in some sense contemporaries. at least. a phenomenon of this century. And the two characteristic
Now the practical business of ruling-class politics could, for most techniques for discovering people's opinions - market research by
of history until the latter part of the nineteenth century and in most sampling, and its offspring, the public opinion poll - are quite
places, normally be carried on without more than an occasional implausibly young by historical standards. In effect they were products
reference to the mass of the subject population. They could be taken of the 1930s.
for granted, except in very exceptional circumstances such as great The history of the common people as a special field of study
social revolutions or insurrections. This does not mean either that therefore begins with the history of mass movements in the eighteenth
they were contented or that they didn't have to be taken into account. century. I suppose Michelet is the first great practitioner of grassroots
It merely means that the terms of the relationship were arranged in history: the Great French Revolution is at the core of his writing.
such a way as to keep discontent within acceptable bounds, that is And ever since, the history of the French Revolution. especially since
in such a way that the activities of the poor did not normally threaten Jacobinism was revitalized by socialism and the Enlightenment by
the social order. Furthermore, mostly they were fixed at a level below Marxism, has been the proving-ground of this kind of history. If
that on which the top people's politics operated - for instance. locally there is a single historian who anticipates most of the themes of
and not nationally. Conversely, the ordinary people accepted their contemporary work, it is Georges Lefebvre, whose Great Fear, trans­
subalternity most of this time, and mostly confined their struggles. lated into English after forty years, is still remarkably up to date. To
such as they were, to fighting those oppressors with whom they had put it more generally: it was the French tradition of historiography
immediate contact. If there is one safe generalization about the as a whole. steeped in the history not of the French ruling class but
normal relation between peasants and kings or emperors in the period of the French people, which established most of the themes and e,en
before the nineteenth century. it is that they regarded the king or the methods of grassroots history, Marc Bloch as well as Georges
emperor as by definition just. If he only knew what the landowning Lefebvre. But the field really began to flourish in other countries only
gentry were up to or more likely a particular named nobleman ­ after the Second World War. In fact its real advance only began in
he would stop them or him oppressing the peasants. So in a sense he the middle 1950s, when it became possible for Marxism to make its
was outside their world of politics and they were outside his. full contribution to it.
There are naturally exceptions to this generalization. I am inclined For the Marxist. or more generally the socialist, interest in
to believe that China is the main one, for that is a country in which, grassroots history developed with the growth of the labour movement.
even in the days of the Celestial Empire, peasant risings were not And though this provided a very powerful incentive to study the
occasional freak phenomena like earthquakes or pestilences, but history of the common man - especially the working class - it also
phenomena which could be, were and were expected to be capable imposed some quite effective blinkers on the socialist historians. They
of overthrowing dynasties. But by and large they were not. Grassroots were naturally tempted to study not just any common people. but
history therefore becomes relevant to, or part of. the sort of history the common people who could be regarded as ancestors o!' the
that was written traditionally the history of major political decisions movement: not workers as such so much as Chartists. trade union isIs.
and events - only from the moment when the ordinary people become Labour militants. And they were also tempted equally nalurally
a constant factor in the making of such decisions and events. Not to suppose t hal I he history of the movements and orgallizat ions
only at times of exceptional popular mobilization. such as rcvollil ions. which led IIH' wllrkers' struggle. and thcrdiliT ill a real sellse

2112 .' () ~

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 ON HISTORY ON HISTOR Y PROM BELOW

'represented' the workers, could replace the history of the common second place it documented them by means of a vast and laborious
people themselves. But this is not so. The history ofthe Irish revolution bureaucracy. classifying and filing them for the benefit of the historian
of 1916-21 is not identical with the history of the IRA, the Citizen in the national and departmental archives of France. The historians
Army, the Irish Transport Workers Union or the Sinn Fein. You have of the French Revolution. from Georges Lefebvre to Richard Cobb,
only to read Sean O'Casey's great plays about Dublin slum life during have ViVidly described the pleasures and troubles of travelling through
this period to see how much else there was at the grassroots. Not the French countryside in search of the Frenchmen of the 1790s _
until the 19 50s did the left begin to emancipate itself from the narrow but chiefly the pleasures, for once the scholar arrived at Angouleme
approach. or Montpellier, and got the right archival series. practically every
Whatever 'its origins and initial difficulties, grassroots history has dusty packet of ancient paper beautifully legible. unlike the crabbed
now taken off. And in looking back upon the history of ordinary hands of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries - contained nuggets
people, we are not merely trying to give it a retrospective political of gold. Historians of the French Revolution happen to be lucky _
significance which it did not always have. we are trying more luckier than British ones. for instance. ­
generally to explore an unknown dimension of the past. And this In most cases the grassroots historian finds only what he is looking
brings me to the technical problems of doing so. for, not what is already waiting for him. Most sources for grassroots
Every kind of history has its technical problems, but most of these history have only been recognized as sources because someone hus
assume that there is a body of ready-made source-material whose asked a question and then prospected desperately around for some
interpretation raises these problems. The classical discipline of his­ way any way of answering it. We cannot be positivists. believing
torical scholarship, as developed in the nineteenth century by German that the questions and the answers arise naturally out of the study
and other professors, made this assumption which, as it happens, of the materiaL There is generally no material until our questions
fitted in very conveniently with the prevailing fashion of scientific have revealed it. Take the now flourishing discipline of historical
positivism. This sort of scholarly problem is still dominant in a few demography, which rests on the fact that the births. marriages and
very old-fashioned branches of learning such as literary history. To deaths of people were recorded in parish registers from, more or less.
study Dante. one has to become very sophisticated in interpreting the sixteenth century. This was long known, and many of these
manuscripts and in working out what can go wrong when manu­ registers were actually reprinted for the convenience of the gen­
scripts are copied from each other, because the text of Dante depends ealogists, who were the only people to take much of an interest in
on the collation of medieval manuscripts. To study Shakespeare, who them. But once the social historians got going On them. and tech­
left no manuscripts but a lot of corrupt printed editions. means niques for analysing them were developed, it turned out that tremen­
becoming a sort of Sherlock Holmes of the early seventeenth-century dous discoveries could be made. We Can now discover how far people
printing trade. But in neither case is there much doubt about the in the seventeenth century practised birth control, how far they
main body of the subject we are studying, namely the works of Dante suffered famine or other catastrophes. what their life expectancy was
or Shakespeare. at various periods, how likely men and women were to remarry, how
Now grassroots history differs from such subjects, and indeed from early or late they married and so on all questions about which,
most of traditional history. inasmuch as there simply is not a ready­ until the 19 50s, we could only speculate for the pre-census periods.
made body of material about it. It is true that sometimes we are It is true that, once our questions have revealed new sources of
lucky. One of the reasons why so much modern grassroots history material, these themselves raise considerable technical problems:
has emerged from the study of the French Revolution is that this sometimes too much so, sometimes not enough. Much of the lime of
great event in history combines two characteristics which rarely historical demographers has been taken up simply with the increas­
occur together before that date. In the first place. being a major ingly complex technicalities of their analysis, which is why much of
revolution, it suddenly brought into activity and public notice enor­ what they publish is at present interesting only for other historical
mous numbers of the sort of people who previously attracted very demographers. The tinw-Iag between research and result is ullusualiv
little attention outside their family and neighbours. And in the long. We llIllsl 1(';1111 111;11 ;1 lot or grassroots history docs\l't produc(.

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 ON HISTORY ON HISTOR Y PROM BELOW

quick results, but requires elaborate, time-consuming and expensive betters think they should remember, or what historians can establish
processing. It is not like picking up diamonds in a river-bed, more as having happened; and insofar as they turn memory into myth.
like modern diamond or gold-mining which requires heavy capital how such myths are formed. What did the British people actually feel
investment and high technology. in the summer of 1940? The records of the Ministry of Information
On the other hand some kinds of grassroots material have not yet present a somewhat different picture from what most of us now
stimulated enough methodological thinking. Oral history is a good believe. How can we reconstruct either the original feelings or the
example. Thanks to the tape-recorder a lot of this is now practised. formation of the myth? Can we separate them? These are not
And most taped memories seem sufficiently interesting, or have insignificant questions. My own view is that they require not merely
sufficient sentimental appeal. to be their own reward. But in my the collection and interpretation of tapes of retrospective ques­
opinion we shall never make adequate use of oral history until we tionnaires, but experiments if necessary in conjunction with psy­
work out what can go wrong in memory with as much care as we chologists. There is plenty of the methodological, hypothetical and
now know what can go wrong in transmitting manuscripts by what is more arbitrary involved here. The curve of support for the
manual copying. The anthropologists and African historians have Liberal-Social Democratic Alliance, indicted by monthly questions
begun to do so for the inter-generational transmission of facts by about how people would vote if a general election were held tomorrow.
word of mouth. For instance we know over what number of gen­ indicates nothing about their political behaviour except how they
erations certain kinds of information can be transmitted more or less answer this particular question and the assumption that voting
accurately (for example genealogies) and that the transmission of intention is the crucial variable in politics. It is not based on any
historical events is always likely to lead to chronological telescoping. model of how people actually make up their minds about politics,
To quote a personal example, the memory of the Labourers' Rising and it does not investigate their political behaviour. but their present
of 1830. as preserved in and around Tisbury, Wiltshire. today, view about one particular political act in hypothetical circumstances.
remembers as contemporary things which happened in 1817 and in But if we discover the equivalent of retrospective opinion polls. we
1830. are investigating what people actually thought or actually did.
But most oral history today is personal memory, which is a Sometimes this can be done by actually discovering their opinions.
remarkably slippery medium for preserving facts. The point is that For instance Hanak analysed opinions about the First World War in
memory is not so much a recording as a selective mechanism, and the dill'erent nationalities of the Habsburg Empire by working through
the selection is, within limits. constantly changing. What I remember the censored letters from and to soldiers at the front, and Kula in
of my life as a Cambridge undergraduate is different today from what Poland has published a collection of letters from emigrant relatives
it was when I was thirty or forty-five. And unless I have worked it to Polish peasants in the late nineteenth century intercepted by the
up into conventional form for the purpose of boring people (we are Tsarist police. But this is rare, because for most of the past people
all familiar with those who do this with their wartime experiences). were generally illiterate anyway. Much more commonly we infer
it is likely to be different tomorrow or next year. At the moment our their thoughts from their actions. In other words we base our
criteria for judging oral sources are almost entirely instinctive or non­ historical work on Lenin's realistic discovery that voting with one's
existent. It either sounds right or it doesn't. Of course we can also feet can be as effective a way of expressing one's opinion as voting
check it against some verifiable independent source and approve it in the ballot box. Sometimes, of course, we are halfway between
because it can be confirmed by such a source. But this doesn't get us opinion and action. Thus Marc Ferro investigated the attitude of
nearer the crucial problem, which is to know what we can believe different groups to war and revolution in Russia by analysing the
when there is nothing to check it against. telegrams and resolutions sent to Petrograd in the first weeks or the
The methodology of oral history is not simply important for February Revolution - that is before public meetings, workers'.
checking the reliability of the tapes of old ladies' and gentlemen's peasants' or soldiers' councils or whatever had acquired party labels
reminiscences. One significant aspect of grassroots history is what or character. To send a resolution to the capital is political action
ordinary people remember of big events as distinct from what their though al the hl'j.!.illlling of a great revolution it is likely to occur

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more frequently than at other times. But the content of the telegram something about the evangelization or re-evangelization of the
is opinion, and the differences between say workers', peasants' and common people in the period of Reform and Counter-Reform. But
soldiers' opinions is significant. Thus peasants 'demanded' much more purely secular names become common in some parts in the nineteenth
often than they petitioned. They were more opposed to the war than century, and sometimes deliberately non-Christian, or even anti­
workers, who were also less self-confident. Soldiers were not at this Christian, names.
point opposing the war at all, but complaining about officers. And A Florentine colleague got his children to do a small bit of research
so on. on Tuscan telephone directories to check up on the frequency of first
But the prettiest sources are the ones which simply record actions names taken either from deliberately secular sources - say Italian
which must imply certain opinions. They are almost always the result opera and literature (for instance, Spartaco). It turns out that this
of searching for some way - any way - of asking a question already correlates particularly well with the areas of former anarchist influ­
in the historian's mind. Also, they are generally quite conclusive. ence - more so than with those of socialist influence. So we can
Suppose, for instance, you want to discover what difference the infer - what is also probable on other grounds - that anarchism was
French Revolution made to monarchist sentiment in France. Marc more than a mere political movement, and tended to have some of
Bloch, investigating the belief that the kings of France and England the characteristics of an active conversion, a change in the entire
could work miracles, which was widespread for many centuries, way of life of its militants. It is possible that the social and ideological
points out that at the coronation of Louis XVI in 17742,400 sufferers history of personal names has been investigated in England (other
from scrofula came forward to be cured of the 'king's evil' by the than by that gentleman who annually keeps track of the names in
royal touch. But when Charles X revived the ancient ceremonial of the Times announcements), but if so I have not come across these
coronation at Rheims in 1825, and was reluctantly persuaded to studies. I suspect there aren't any, at least by historians.
revive the ceremony of royal healing also, a mere 120 people So, with more or less ingenuity, what the poet called the simple
turned up. Between the last pre-revolutionary king and 1825 the annals of the poor - the bare records of, or connected with, birth,
Shakespearean belief that 'there's some divinity doth hedge a king' marriage and death - can yield surprising quantities of information.
had virtually disappeared in France. There is no arguing with such And everyone can try his or her own hand at the historian's game
a finding. of discovering ways of not merely speculating about what songs the
The decline of traditional religious beliefs and the rise of secular sirens sang (Sir Thomas Browne), but actually finding some indirect
ones has similarly been investigated by analysing wills and funeral records of those songs. A lot of grassroots history is like the trace of
inscriptions. For though Dr Johnson said that in writing lapidary the ancient plough. It might seem gone for good with the men who
inscriptions a man is not on oath, it is even more true that he or she ploughed the field many centuries ago. But every aerial photographer
is more likely to express their real religious views in such a context knows that, in a certain light, and seen at a certain angle, the
than at other times. And not only these. Vovelle has illustrated very shadows of long-forgotten ridge and furrow can still be seen.
prettily the decline in eighteenth-century Provence of the belief in Nevertheless, mere ingenuity doesn't take us far enough. What we
a stratified hierarchical society by counting the frequency of the need, both to make sense of what the inarticulate thought and to
testamentary formula 'to be buried according to his or her rank and verify or falsify our hypotheses about it, is a coherent picture, or. if
condition'. It declines steadily and quite markedly throughout the you prefer the term, a model. For our problem is not so much to
century. But - interestingly enough - not more steeply than, say, the discover one good source. Even the best of such sources - let's say
invocation of the Virgin Mary in Provenr;al wills. the demographic ones about births, marriages and deaths - onlv
Suppose we look for other ways of discovering changes in attitude illuminate certain areas of what people did, felt and thought. What
towards traditional religion, and decide to turn from burial to baptism. we must normally do is to put together a wide variety of often
In Catholic countries the saints provide the main body of given fragmentary information: and to do that we must, if you'll excuse
names. Actually, they only do so overwhelmingly from the time of lhe phrase, construct the jigsaw puzzle ourselves, that is work out
the Counter-Reformation on, so that this index can also tell us how such inforrJl;11 ion 0111/111 to lit together. This is another way of

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repeating what I've already stressed. namely that the grassroots preferably a consistent, system of behaviour or thought - and one
historian cannot be an old-fashioned positivist. He must in a way which can be, in some senses, inferred once we know the basic social
know what he is looking for and, only if he does, can he recognize assumptions, parameters and tasks of the situation, but before we
whether what he finds fits in with his hypothesis or not: and if it know very much about that situation, Let me give you an example.
doesn't, try to think of another model. When communities of Indian peasants in Peru occupied the land to
How do we construct our models? Of course, there is an element­ . which they felt they were entitled. notably in the early 1960s, they
a rather strong element of knowledge, of experience, of simply almost invariably proceeded in a highly standardized manner: the
having a sufficiently wide and concrete acquaintance with the actual whole community would assemble, with wives, children, cattle and
subject. This enables us to eliminate obviously useless hypotheses. To implements to the accompaniment of drums. horns and other musical
quote an absurd illustration. An African candidate in the London instruments. At a certain time generally at dawn they would all
external BA once answered a question about the industrial revolution cross the line, tear down the fences. advance to the limit of the
in Lancashire by saying the cotton industry developed there because territory they claimed, immediately start building little huts as near
Lancashire is so suitable for growing cotton. We happen to know the new line as possible, and begin to pasture the cattle and dig
that it isn't. and therefore think the answer absurd. though it might the land, Curiously enough, other land-occupations by peasants in
not seem so in Calabar, But there are plenty of answers which different times and places for instance in southern Italy took
are equally absurd. and could be avoided by equally elementary exactly the same form. Why? In other words. on what assumptions
information. For instance, if we do not happen to know that in the does this highly standardized. and obViously not culturally deter­
nineteenth century the term 'artisan' in Britain was used almost mined, behaviour make sense?
exclusively to describe a skilled wage-worker. and the term 'peasant' Suppose we say: first the occupation has to be collective. (a) because
generally meant a farm-labourer. we might make some substantial the land belongs to the community and (b) because all members of
howlers about nineteenth-century British social structure. Such the community must be involved to minimize victimization and to
howlers have been made continental translators persistently trans­ prevent the community being disrupted by arguments between those
late the term 'journeyman' as 'day-labourer' and who knows how who stuck out their necks and those who didn't. For, after all. they
many discussions about seventeenth-century society are hamstrung are breaking the law and unless there is a successful revolution they
by our ignorance of what exactly the common meaning or meanings will certainly be punished even if their demands are actually
of the term 'servant' or 'yeoman' was. There simply are things one conceded. Can we verify this? Well. there is considerable supporting
has to know ahout the past. which is why most sociologists make evidence about the importance of minimizing victimization. Thus in
bad historians: they don't want to take the time to lind out. Japanese peasant risings before the Meiji restoration. a lot of villages
We also need imagination preferably in conjunction with infor­ were conventionally 'coerced' into joining the rising. meaning that
mation - in order to avoid the greatest danger of the historian, their village authorities were provided with an official cover for
anachronism. Practically all popular treatments of Victorian sexuality participation. Lefebvre made similar points about French villages ill
sutTer from a failure to understand that our own sexual attitudes are 1789. If everybody can say 'I'm sorry, but I had no option but to
simply not the same as those of other periods. It is plain wrong to join,' it is likely that the authorities in turn will have an o flici a I
assume that the Victorians - all except a small and rather atypical excuse for limiting the punishment which they feel obliged to mete
minority had the same attitudes to sex as we have, only they out for rebellion. For of course they have to live with the peasants
suppressed it or concealed it. But it is fairly hard to make the just as the peasants have to live with them. The fact that one lot
imaginative effort to understand this, all the more so since sex seems rules and the other is subaltern doesn't mean that the rulers need
to be something fairly unchanging and we all think we are expert lake no account of the ruled.
on it. Very well. Now what is the most familiar way of mohilizing the
But knowledge and imagination alone are not enough. V\'h,tI we ('lItirc COllllllllllitv: It is the village fiesta or its equivalent the
need to construct. or to reconstruct. is ideally speaking a coherelll, ('(lI11billalioll of ((llll'din' ritual and collective enlcrlaillrlH'llt, /\nd or

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 ON HISTORY ON HISTORY FROM BELOW

course a land-occupation is both: it is bound to be a very serious and I could give you other examples. Indeed I've tried this sort 01
ceremonial affair, reclaiming land which belongs to the village, but construction - which, I confess, I think I learned from the sod,,1
it is also probably the most exciting thing that has happened to the anthropologists - on other problems: for instance, on the problem or
village in a long time. So it is natural that there should be an element social banditry, another phenomenon which lends itself to this type
of the village fair about the rising. Hence the music - which also of analysis, because it is highly standardized.
serves to mobilize and rally the people. Can we verify this? Well, time . It implies three analytical steps: first. we have to identify what the
and again we have evidence in such peasant mobilizations of the doctors would call the syndrome namely all the 'symptoms' or bits
people especially the young people putting on their Sunday best: of the jigsaw puzzle which have to be fitted together, or at least
and we certainly have evidence in regions of heavy drinking, that a enough of them to go on with. Second, we have to construct a model
certain number of pints are being sunk. which makes sense of all these forms of behaviour, that is to discover
Why do they invade at dawn? Presumably for sound military a set of assumptions which would make the combination of these
reasons to catch the other side napping and to give themselves different kinds of behaviour consistent with one another according
at least some daylight by which to settle in. Eut why do they to some scheme of rationality. Third, we must then discover whether
settle in with huts, animals and implements, instead of just waiting there is independent evidence to confirm these guesses.
to repel the landlords or the police? Actually, they hardly ever try Now the trickiest part of this is the first, since it rests on a
seriously to repel the police or the army, for the good reason that mixture of the historian's prior knowledge, his theories about society,
they know very well they can't, being too weak. Peasants are sometimes his hunch, instinct or introspection, and he is generally
more realistic than many of the ultra-left insurrectionaries. They not really clear in his own mind about how he makes his initial
know perfectly well who is going to kill whom if it comes to a selection. At least I've not been, even though I try hard to be
confrontation. And what is more important, they know who can't conscious of what I'm doing. For instance, on what grounds does
run away. They know that revolutions can happen, but they also one pick out a variety of disparate social phenomena, generally
know that their success doesn't depend on them in their specific treated as curious footnotes to history, and classify them together as
village. So mass land-occupations are normally by way of being a members of a family of 'primitive rebellion' - of what you might call
try-on. Generally there is something in the political situation which pre-political politics: banditry, urban riots, certain kinds of secret
has percolated to the villages and convinced them that times are societies, certain kinds of millennial and other sects and so on? When
a-changing: the normal strategy of passivity can perhaps be I first did so I did not really know. Why do I notice, among the
replaced by activity. If they are right, nobody will come to throw numerous other things I could notice (some of which I obviously
them off the land. If they are wrong, the sensible thing is to don't), the significance of clothes in peasant movements: clothes as a
retreat and wait for the next suitable moment. But they must symbol of the class struggle, as in the Sicilian hostility between the
nevertheless not only lay claim to the land but actually live on it 'caps' and the 'hats', or in the Bolivian peasant risings in which the
and labour it, because their right to it is not like bourgeois property Indians occupying the cities force the city people to take off their
right, but more like Lockean property right in the state of nature: trousers and wear peasant (that is Indian) costume? Clothes as
it depends on mixing one's own labour with the resources of symbols of rebellion itself, as when the farm-labourers of 1830 put
nature. Can we verify this? Well yes, we know quite a Jot from on Sunday best to march to the gentry with their demands, thlls
nineteenth-century Russia about peasants' belief in the so-called indicating that they are not in the normal state of oppression which
'labour principle'. And we can actually see the argument in action: equals labour but in the state of freedom which equals holiday and
in the Cilento, south of Naples, before the 1848 revolution 'every play? (Remember that even in the early labour movement the concept
Christmas Day the peasants went out onto the lands to which of the strike and the holiday are not clearly separated: miners 'play'
they laid claim in order to carry out agricultural labours, thilS when they arc on strike, and the Chartist plans for a general strike
seeking to maintain the ideal principle of possession of their rights', of I X39 "'\ll'n' pl,II18 for a 'National Holiday.') I don't know. and this
If you don't work the land, you cannot justly own it. igllor,lIHT is dOlrl)'.ITOI18. for it may make me unaware of introdlldllg

'I.' .' 1 \
 ON HISTORY ON HISTORY FROM BELOW

my own contemporary assumptions into the model. or of omitting more unknown women - of the past. I don't wish to discourage this.
something important. But curiosity, sentiment and the pleasures of antiquarianism are not
The second phase of the analysis is also tricky, since we may simply enough. The best of such grassroots history makes wonderful reading,
be placing an arbitrary construction on the facts. Still, insofar as the but that is all. What we want to know is why, as well as what. To
model is capable of testing unlike many beautiful models, such as, discover that in seventeenth-century Puritan villages in Somerset, or
say, a lot of structuralist ones this is not too troublesome. More . in Victorian Poor Law Unions in Wiltshire, girls with illegitimate
troublesome is a certain vagueness about what one is trying to prove. children were not treated as sinners or as 'unrespectable' if they
For to assume that a certain kind of behaviour makes sense on genuinely had reason to believe that the father of the child had
certain assumptions is not to claim that it is sensible, that is rationally intended to marry them, is interesting, and provides food for reflection.
justifiable. The great danger of this procedure - and the one to which But what we really want to know is why such beliefs were held, how
a lot of field anthropologists have succumbed - is to equate all they fitted in with the rest of the value-system of those communities
behaviour as equally 'rational'. Now some of it is. For instance, the (or of the larger society of which these formed a part), and why they
behaviour of the good Soldier Schweik, who, of course, had been changed or didn't change.
certified as a bonafide halfwit by the military authorities, was anything The link with the present is also obvious, for the process of
but halfwitted. It was undoubtedly the most effective form of self­ understanding it has much in common with the process of under­
defence for someone in his position. Time and again, in studying the standing the past, quite apart from the fact that understanding how
political behaviour of peasants in a state of oppression, we discover the past has turned into the present helps us understand the present.
the practical value of stupidity and a refusal to accept any innovation: and presumably something of the future. Much about the behaviour
the great asset of peasants is that there are many things you simply of people of all classes today is, in fact, as unknown and undocumented
can't make them do, and by and large no change is what suits a as was much of the lives of the common people in the past. Sociologists
traditional peasantry best. (But, of course, let us not forget that many and others who monitor developments in everyday life are constantly
of these peasants don't just play at being dense, they really are dense.) trailing behind their quarry. And even when we are aware of what
Sometimes the behaviour was rational under some circumstances, we are doing as members of our society and age, we may not be
but is no longer rational under changed circumstances. But there are conscious of the role which our acts and beliefs play in creating the
also plenty of kinds of behaviour which are not rational at alL in the image of what we would all wish to regard as an orderly social
sense that they are effective means of achieving definable practical cosmos - even those who regard themselves as being outside of it ­
ends, but are merely comprehensible. ThiS is obViously the case with or in expressing our attempt to come to terms with its changes. Much
the revival of beliefs in astrology, Witchcraft, various fringe religions of what is written, said and acted out today about family relationships
and irrational beliefs in the West today, or with certain forms of clearly belongs to the realm of symptoms rather than diagnosis.
violent behaviour, such as - to take the most common example - the And as in the past one of our tasks is to uncover the lives
madness which seizes so many people once they get into a car. The and thoughts of common people and to rescue them from Edward
grassroots historian does not, or at least he ought not to, abdicate Thompson's 'enormous condescension of posterity', so our problem
his judgment. at present is also to strip away the equally presumptuous assumptions
What is the object of all these exercises? It is not simply to discover of those who think they know both what the facts and what the
the past but to explain it, and in doing so to provide a link with the solutions are, and who seek to impose them on the people. We must
present. There is an enormous temptation in history simply to uncover discover what people really want of a good or even a tolerable sociel y.
what has hitherto been unknown, and to enjoy what we lind. And and, what is by no means the same because they may not actuallv
since so much of the lives, and even more of the thoughts. of Ihe know what they need from such a society. That is not easy. parlly
common people have been quite unknown, this temptation is all Ihe because it is difficult 10 get rid of prevailing assumptions about how
greater in grassroots history, all the more so since many of us idelll il'v society should work. some of which (such as mosl Iilwral Olll'S) arl'
ourselves with the unknown common men and women Ihe CVCIl \('ry ullhelpful guides, dlHI pdrtlv because we do 1101 kllow dclll;dlv

2 Ii .' I '}
 ON HISTORY

what makes a society work in real life: even a bad and unjust society.
So far in the twentieth century all countries I know have failed to
solve by deliberate planning a problem which, for many centuries,
appeared to pose no great difficulties for humanity, namely how to CHAPTER 17
construct a working city which should also be a human community.
That should give us pause.
Grassroots historians spend much of their time finding out how The Curious History of Europe
societies work and when they do not work, as well as how they
change. They cannot help doing this, since their subject, ordinary
people, make up the bulk of any society. They start out with the This is the English version of a lecture on Europe and its llistory given in
enormous advantage of knowing that they are largely ignorant of German. under the auspices of the Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. which
either the facts or the answers to their problems, They also have the launched its new series EUfopaische Geschichte on the occasion of the
substantial advantage of historians over social scientists who turn to annual congress of German historians (Munich. 1996). A version of the
history, of knowing how little we know of the past, how important German lecture was published by Die Zeit on 4 October 1996. The (longer)
it is to find out, and what hard work in a specialized discipline is English version is published here for the first time,
needed for the purpose, They also have a third advantage. They know
that what people wanted and needed was not always what their
betters, or those who were cleverer and more influential, thought Can continents have a history as continents? Let us not confuse
they ought to have. These are modest enough claims for our trade. politics, history and geography, especially not in the case of these
But modesty is not a negligible virtue, It is important to remind shapes on the page of atlases, which are not natural geographical
ourselves from time to time that we don't know all the answers about units, but merely human names for parts of the global land-mass,
society and that the process of discovering them is not simple. Those Moreover, it has been clear from the beginning, that is to say ever
who plan and manage society now are perhaps unlikely to listen. since antiquity when the continents of the Old World were first
Those who want to change society and eventually to plan its baptized. that these names were intended to have more than a mere
development ought also to listen. If some of them will, it will be due geographical significance.
partly to the work of historians like George Rude. Consider Asia, Since 1980, if I am not mistaken, the census of the
USA has granted its inhabitants the option of describing themselves
as 'Asian-Americans', a classification presumably by analogy with
'African-Americans', the term by which black Americans currentlv
prefer to be described. Presumably an Asian-American is an America~l
born in Asia or descended from Asians, But what is the sense in
classifying immigrants from Turkey under the same heading as those
Irom Cambodia, Korea, the Philippines or Pakistan, not to mention
the unquestionably Asian territory of Israel, though its inhabitants
do not like to be reminded of this geographical fact? In practice these
~roups have nothing in common.
11' we look more closely at the category 'Asian', it tells us Illore
about us than about maps. For instance, it throws some light Oil the
Amcrican, or more generally 'Western', attitudes towards those parts
01 humanity originating in the regions ollee knoWIl as the 'I':as[' or
IIH' 'Oricnt', VV('slcrt] observers, (Inti later COI1<11I1'rors. rulers, sdtlers