Interdisciplinarity and Social History

I thought that the articles about the Annales school/Marxist historians were helpful aids in conceptualizing what is different about historians like Thompson, Bloch, and Braudel.  After reading both the articles about the schools of thought and examples of the schools of thought in action (Bloch’s Feudal Society and Thompson’s two articles), I think the most striking feature that sets the Annales school and Marxist history apart from other types of history we have read is their interdisciplinarity.

Eley and Olwen Hufton, in another article I read about Braudel, describe Braudel’s view of history as histoire globale or “total history.”  This view of history combines a study of the past with sociology, anthropology, and economics, borrowing techniques and areas of research from each.  It is as if these historians are acknowledging that history is so complex, it cannot be sequestered to one area of the mind (or the academy), and must rather be approached holistically, drawing lessons from other disciplines. In many ways, this approach to history enables historians to give voices to people and things that previous historians silenced, such as women and “ordinary,” working class people, both because they didn’t have or didn’t know how to get creative about using sources and because, compared to rulers, it didn’t seem like they influenced history very much.

Thompson’s article “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” is a great example of this approach.  His main argument, that economic growth is always linked to a change of culture, is itself interdisciplinary in that he is linking a tangible economic phenomenon to something less tangible, like culture and a “mentality” of time. Here, Thompson is combining anthropology, psychology, economics, and sociology to explore the history of something that previously probably wouldn’t have been considered a subject for historians.  His use of sources, from literature to tax records listing how many people owned clocks, gives us a view into the interdisciplinarity of his work.  In addition to focusing on common people, he also devotes time to women, discussing the laborer’s wife at length.