Peter Stearns | Part I: Social History and Spatial Scope | Journal of Social History, 39.3

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Peter Stearns | Part I: Social History and Spatial Scope | Journal of Social History, 39.3 | The History Cooperative

PART I: SOCIAL HISTORY AND SPATIAL SCOPE

By Peter Stearns George Mason University

Social historians' decisions about geographic framework, or regionalization, are rarely as explicit as those involving chronological framework, or periodization. This is particularly true in the common tendency to choose national units for topics ranging from family to patterns of work—whether national political factors enter in strongly or not. Subnational selections—for example, the many regional studies in France characteristic of the Annales school—may be more carefully justified in terms of internal coherence and demonstrable distinctiveness, though even here a certain amount of routine may prevail. But the possibility of supranational regionalization, in preference to national choices, is rarely considered. Not only routine-mindedness around the sanctity of the nation state, but also a frequently erroneous assumption that cosmopolitan connections are for the upper classes and the powerful, not ordinary folks, tends to obscure the consideration of larger spatial contexts. This is not for want of inspiration in theory—one needs only think of the international perspectives of Marxism. In point of fact, however, it has been the rare social historian who has even tried to probe capitalist structures beyond the national level. The whole subject, as many scholars have noted particularly in the aftermath of the "cultural turn", has been undertheorized and undervalued.

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