I’m not sure that I subscribe to Marxian Historiography,
however I must state that I admire the way Marxian historians and those who
wrote for the Annales take the
mundane and discuss it as an important historical detail. While I don’t
necessarily buy into the authors’ premises, I do think that it is fascinating
to study the simple things and how they affected society.
For example, Thompson states in “The Moral Economy of the
English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” that in the eighteenth century corn
and wheat often drove the economy. He even goes so far as to say that “feelings
of status” were directly correlated with the available bread and that a change
in bread could render workers useless if they could not stomach it. My
additional article, written by Labrousse (full citation below), also discusses
wheat in terms of price and region. He argued that the price of wheat affected
salaries which in turn affected life-cycles and whole societies. These claims are ambitious, if not entirely
believable.
In his article “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial
Capitalism”, Thompson writes about what could be argued as the most mundane
topics of all: time and work. Pulling from various 17th through 18th
century sources, Thompson argues that time’s effect on work was a catalyst for
the move toward more industrial societies.
I think that these details are not drivers of historical
change in themselves, but definitely play a part. I don’t think that events
which drive historical change can be broken down into a single catalysts or a
single moment. I do, however, think they can help us understand the bigger
picture.
Labrousse C.-E. Les prix. Prix et structure régionale : le
prix du froment, 1782-1790. In: Annales d'histoire sociale. 1ᵉ année, N. 4,
1939. pp. 382-400. DOI : 10.3406/ahess.1939.3007. Retrieved from
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