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Social History and World History: Prospects for Collaboration
PETER N. STEARNS
George Mason University
| Social history and world history constitute two of the most striking developments in reshaping approaches to the past during the recent decades. They are not directly competitive, and we can highlight a few cases of fruitful complementarity. Both social and world history additionally seek to recast traditional narratives away from the standard topics and the conventional cast of leading characters. Yet the two fields have not interacted consistently or fruitfully, and their relationship remains complex. This article seeks briefly to explore the complexity before turning to some recommendations and a case study sketch to indicate further opportunities for interaction.1 |
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The tensions between the two fields derive from several sources, two of which are clearly remediable and indeed are already lessening to some extent. Social history was proudly born as a research field; it has never had a well-defined teaching mission, often to its detriment. World history, in contrast, though boasting strong research precedents has soared as a teaching outlet, only more gradually accumulating further research strengths. Distinctions here will decline, but they still leave a trace. Second, social history has thrived most fully on inquiries devoted to western Europe and the United States, though the range of social history topics emerging from work on Africa and Latin America now expands encouragingly. A practical barrier to social history at the global level emerges from the lack of comparability, in existing monographs, between the West and the rest. Here again is a temporary anomaly, which some world historians as well as area studies specialists have worked to redress, but one impossible for the moment to ignore.2 |
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But the most significant rift involves social historians' predilection for rather narrow geographical bases and world historians' tendency to privilege elites or somewhat faceless material forces, both downplaying the kind of loving attention to the actual experiences and agency of ordinary people that social historians hold dear. |
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On place, social historians have typically opted either for small regions or for national frameworks, partly on grounds of the conceptual and practical demands of very new topics and unconventional sources. Their impulses here have been compounded by the popularity in some quarters of microhistory (though not fully incompatible with a more international framework when treated as local within global, but normally rather discouraging to wider generalization)3 and certainly the dictates of the cultural and linguistic turn, which again tended to privilege the geographically particular. Small wonder that few social historians have dabbled in world history. |
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For their part, world historians operating in the history of civilizations mode have often found it difficult to believe that ordinary people form more than a backdrop for the telling political institutions and great ideas and artistic expressions: aside from noting poverty and exploitation, why bother with social history at least until the modern era, for (in this line of thought) there is neither much variety nor significant change.4 World historians who focus on trade relations come closer to social history of course, but they too have tended to see ordinary people largely in terms of victimhood, their actual experiences not worth much attention and certainly their potential agency limited in the extreme—labor systems perhaps, in this approach, but attention to work experience or work values or workers themselves probably not.5 |
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