THE STATE AND SOCIAL HISTORY

As has been noted by many observers, social history emerged in the 1950s and 1960s out of two potentially contradictory impulses. On the one hand, so? cial historians sought to recapture the lives and experiences ofthe working class and other dispossessed groups. Of course, this list was soon expanded to include women, with the rise of feminism, and later minority groups. This impulse has led to a vast and rich literature on many facets of life for laborers, women, mi? norities, and the poor, especially in modern Europe and North America. And from this understanding larger social processes were illuminated, including de? mographic change, social protest and social movements. A glance at the Journal of Social History gives some sense ofthe enormous territory that has been covered over the last several decades. Much of this makes for fascinating reading and is very often ingenious history as it is based upon painstaking reconstructions from the fragments that are often all that remain in the historical record about these groups. At the same time, social history was connected by a number of its early practi? tioners with major political projects. It was very self-consciously part ofa larger analysis of a capitalist system, but the final aim was not simply understanding but rather the transcendence of that set of economic, political and social rela? tions and the establishment of socialism. As Jim Cronin has shown in a recent essay, the historical work of Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, was deeply informed by his political passions and his long connection to the Communist Party of Great Britain. For many early social historians, there was simply no disputing that politics, by which is meant the exercise of state power and the political or? ganization of workers and others in order to capture the levers of the state, was crucial to their historical studies. This political agenda is evident in The Making of the English Working Class, with its problematic of class consciousness as a prelude to political action. This theme was no less evident in the writings of Hobsbawm and other pioneers of so? cial history, in whose work the state loomed large. In the case of Thompson, this became even more explicit from the late 1960s and his work at Warwick Uni? versity, and the series of studies that analyzed the British state in the eighteenth century and used the vantage point oi crime and law to rethink the contours of political authority. The tension between a social history that sought to reconstruct the lives and experiences of the dispossessed and one that was politically engaged, and there? fore undertook a serious analysis ofthe state, came to be resolved from the 1970s increasingly in favor of the former. This is clearly evident in historical scholar? ship on the Indian subcontinent, where from the early 1980s Subaltern Studies