The global crisis of 1914–1945 occurred at the intersection of class and nation. The competition between these two forms of collectivity drove the state system into its devastating thirty years’ crisis.Footnote ¹ And while World War II seemed to settle these questions, they reemerged immediately in the postwar world, organized along new, broader geographical dimensions.Footnote ² The double division between East and West and North and South – socialist against capitalist and metropole against colony – set in motion new contests between competing forms of collective social organization. Who were “the people”? The national citizenry? The peasantry? The proletariat? How did race and gender shape or alter these categories?Footnote ³

Within this matrix of competing collectivities, a global postwar historiography took shape; an uneven and intertwined field, decisively shaped by particular histories and divergent societies with distinct positions within the global economy. Like the world system itself, this historiography was divided over the question of which agglomerations of human experience added up to a proper subject of history. In some parts of the world, triumphant national narratives were in ruins with the demise of nationalist regimes of Germany and Japan, while they reached a zenith in others, such as with the rise of the “consensus school” in the United States, marking the opening of the American century.Footnote ⁴ Historians in the defeated fascist countries sought a break with the idea of national heritage, while those in the triumphant capitalist and socialist powers tried to carve theirs in stone.Footnote ⁵ In the colonial world, the question instead regarded the invention of the nation: where did its roots lie? To whom did the postcolonial nation belong?Footnote ⁶ Social struggles in the Global South contested this question along lines of race and class, inventing national histories in the process. These struggles gave shape to the question of collective life in the Global North as well. Historians have demonstrated, for example, that it was only within the context of the double struggles of Cold War and decolonization that the postwar African-American insurgency took wing; this insurgency, a decolonization movement within the metropole, in turn opened the first cracks in the scholarly edifice of the American consensus historiography.Footnote ⁷ Almost everywhere, the traditional focus of historical investigations on elites weakened.

Figure 1 E.P. Thompson.

Photograph: John Hodder. Used by permission.

The articles in this Special Theme contribute to understanding the development of global historical scholarship engaged with these issues by following the impact of the single most influential historian of social class in the twentieth century, Edward Palmer Thompson (1924–1993). They were initially drafted as contributions to a conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of Thompson’s landmark 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class. We organized the “Global E.P. Thompson Conference” at Harvard in October, 2013 to interrogate Thompson’s legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. We hoped an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson’s work and impact might help us focus on key questions in the contemporary moment, recasting class, nation, and “the people” as subjects of historical inquiry.Footnote ⁸ Scholars from most corners of the world responded to our call for papers, interested in assessing the way Thompson’s work was understood, appropriated, given meaning, or in some cases ignored or critiqued in particular national contexts.

Figure 2 Participants in “The Global E.P. Thompson” conference hosted by the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History and the Program on the Study of Capitalism, Harvard University, October, 2013.

The conference papers, in particular those presented in revised form here, taught us important things about the way Thompson, a dissident communist in a declining imperial power, opened wide the question of class not only in his own national historiography. His work also, and not necessarily by his intention or direct subsequent actions, came to provoke the possibility of such rethinking in countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain and on both sides of the equator. Thompson’s work was favorably situated to affect historical discussion in diverse cells of the global historiographical matrix: as the product of an English-speaking historian of the first Industrial Revolution, he had access to the scholarly communities of Britain and the United States; as the cri de cœur of an (ex-)communist, to dissenting communities around the world; and through Britain’s imperial connections, to several regions of the Global South. The similarly impressive – and it seems from the articles in this Special Theme, the somewhat earlier – appropriation of the work of Eric Hobsbawm is a clear illustration of the global high ground held by historians who previously had been associated with the British Communist Party Historians Group (1946–1956), especially in the English-speaking world.Footnote ⁹

But, the metaphor of high ground is imperfect. Thompson’s work did not simply flow downhill to the rest of the world. The five articles to follow make clear that local historians appropriated it as needed, and adapted its ideas and concepts to the context of national controversies and debates.Footnote ¹⁰ Much of the form of local historiographies was determined by the local state of play around the question of “the people”, as shaped by the national position within the global state system and the shifting trajectories of social struggles.

American historians, in many ways the closest to the British, were the first importers of Thompson, seeking to reopen questions of historical agency in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, which had been shut down by the consensus historiography.Footnote ¹¹ A fundamentally different process led to the development of a Thompsonian New Left historiography in the countries newly allied to the United States. As Thomas Lindenberger and Hideo Ichihashi show in their articles about Thompson’s reception in West Germany and Japan, the crushing of working-class radicalism and the experience of postwar incorporation into the American sphere of influence at once limited the range of ideological expression and encouraged historians to seek local roots for radical traditions. At the same time, and somewhat contradictorily, it resulted in a wariness of a belief in the “people” – a “people” who had been associated with the rise of fascist politics. Like American historians, historians of Japan and West Germany embraced Thompson as a way to defy liberal pieties; unlike American historians (but like Thompson himself), Japanese historians did so under the shadow of a Stalinist orthodoxy, while in West Germany the predominance of a more structuralist social history (the Bielefeld School) had hampered the development of alternative radical historiographies. In West Germany, the discovery of Thompson opened onto Alltagsgeschichte – the history of everyday life; Japanese historians particularly drew on Thompson’s later work on moral economy and rural agitation. In both cases, it was less the New Left-inflected concerns of the 1960s and early 1970s, but rather the 1970s and early 1980s and the political and intellectual issues after the New Left’s demise that drove historians, through Thompson, down into the hidden world that James C. Scott later called the “infrapolitical”.Footnote ¹²

Historians in the Global South deployed Thompson strategically as well. In his article on Argentinian labor history, Lucas Poy situates the importation of Thompson’s work in the political context of the end of the military junta and the return to democracy in Argentina in 1983. In this setting, with a generation of killed and exiled leftists already behind them, historians sought to demonstrate less the country’s traditions in radical contentiousness, but its “nests of democracy”. In doing this, they sought out more generic social categories to replace social class, settling on “popular sectors”, and remaking the Marxist Thompson as a populist democrat. Yet, since the popular mobilization of the 2001 crisis, a repoliticized appropriation of Thompson has been at the center of a flourishing labor history in Argentina.

Similarly, the process of the creation of social history in South Africa was caught up with the question of democratization. South African society straddled the lines dividing the world: the white ruling elite had close ties to the West and aspired to membership in the capitalist First World; the subjugated black majority gave the country features in common with the colonized Global South. And the political leadership of the anti-apartheid movement hewed to a highly orthodox leftist line. As a result, South Africa’s social history tradition displayed some characteristics similar to those of all the countries discussed in these articles. In his contribution, Jonathan Hyslop shows how the Johannesburg History Workshop became a site of direct influence by Thompsonian social history. These historians, with links to British universities, were inspired by large-scale black uprisings in the 1970s, and wary of the orthodoxies of the African National Congress and the Communist Party. Navigating between a repressive regime, a domestic grassroots insurgency, and a theoretically rigid resistance leadership, South African social history became one of the richest of the Thompsonian traditions anywhere in the world.

While Thompson resonated most loudly within the First World and its most proximate clients, the Second World was no stranger to labor history; indeed, the orthodox Marxist history of the working class that Thompson opposed was central to the historiographies of the socialist states. In his article, Rudolf Kučera shows how Thompson’s work remained largely ignored by the historians of the Polish and Czechoslovak working classes. While Czechoslovakia’s historians retained more connection to British scholars than their counterparts in other Eastern Bloc countries, they developed these relationships before Thompson’s prominence, and so drew on the somewhat older historians, Eric Hobsbawm and Maurice Dobb in particular. As Kučera explains, when they were displaced by a younger, reform-oriented generation in the years of the Prague Spring, their connections were lost – ironically leaving these younger Czech historians in search of intellectual reconceptualization bereft of the most significant British New Left historian. The subsequent repression of the 1968 uprising forced historians to a renewed orthodoxy with connections to debates in the West only surviving in niches. In Poland, in contrast, such connections remained more open, but Thompson did not resonate in the same way in a society whose industrialization was associated with Prussian dominance: the narratives of nation-state formation thus focused more on rural areas and the role of the peasantry than on the making of a working class.

Each of the five articles is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have themselves been products of state and class formation. They show the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to find new lives in new national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state. At the same time, a rupture between this tradition and the newer historiography of gender is visible throughout these articles.Footnote ¹³ Feminist thought has drawn on a different set of traditions for reimagining “the people”. A global comparison of the emergence of women’s and gender history would be an instructive companion to these articles.

The end of the Cold War has opened space for the appearance of new social movements, as well as a global flourishing of loosely intersecting protests against inequality and political corruption. They are forcing historians once again to reconsider the relevant forms of collective social organization – in both past and present. These articles illustrate the inextricable links between writing history, our own particular histories, and the balance of social power within which research, scholarship, and cultural production unfold. They remind us, too, that the making of history and the writing of history are entangled, and these entanglements inevitably reflect relations of power on a global scale.