Trajectories of social history: a report

Abstract

72society as totalities and, finally, with keeping an open mind towards the social sciences which, according to Hobsbawm, were at that same time taking their own historical turn. Social history never represented a unified field since it encompassed differing research agendas and priorities, most particularly Marxism and the Annales school. But there was much common ground. As William Sewell suggests, in contrast to mainstream political history, social history combined the study of people ignored until then by historical scholarship, like the labouring poor and the working classes, with the effort to study and integrate all social experience into a totality or structure.3 New questions and new categories of documents rapidly broadened the fields of social history and spread its influence and attraction. Of course, the arrival of social history to this level of sophistication was not sudden but, to a large extent, the outcome of overlapping influences, both internal and external to the practice of history.Although, as I have suggested, the practice of social history followed different paths, social historians agreed that their work had much to do with the study of structures, most notably economic structures. In the 70s the concept of structure was already available and used in various professional and nonprofessional historical networks. Although with different twists, structural approaches were most common among Marxist and neo-Marxist social scientists, Annalistes historians and anthropologists and linguists of different sorts, particularly in France, Britain and the US. Of course these different networks were not identical and one would have all the good reason to argue that British Marxists and Annalist historians for example should not be lumped together. One could also add that none of these networks were internally unified and coherent. This I concede. It is not my intention to proclaim the unity of these networks nor underestimate their methodological and epistemological differences and their different intellectual traditions. It is hard to miss the point, for example, that most Annalistes historians focused on structures and the longue durée whereas Marxists studied social transitions, most notably the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Nor, on the other hand, do I wish to disregard the reciprocal influences existing among these networks which shaped much common ground. 4 All these apart, it is not unreasonable to suggest that structure as a fundamental category of historical analysis became acceptable to all historians who styled themselves social historians. This choice is understood by the fact that structures could accommodate and relate different elements or series of elements of an economic, demographic, environmental and even cultural nature into a whole. In other words, this new social history was founded on the belief that structure and structuration provided the intellectual and methodological means for adequate answers to complex questions, explaining composite phenomena in the long run...

The Constantinopolitan Greeks in an era of secular nationalism mid-19th century to 1930

“… Rodrigue 1994: 447-9; Rodrigue 1995: 249; Rozen 2005: 74. 194 Anagnostopoulou 1997: 295.195 Kitromilides 1990: 51-3;Exertzoglou 1996: 92. 196 Anagnostopoulou 1997: 296-7.…”