E.P. Thompson, Big History, and the Future of Cultural History

In 1963 E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class marked a transformation in historians’ concept of culture, moving away from a high cultural history of letters and ideas to pioneer a popular cultural history.  The scale and vision were large.  Although he clearly drew inspiration from anthropology, Thompson made few explicit claims about cultural history as method.  Still, his corpus remains an inescapable starting point for discussions of the new cultural history.  While some early critics accused Thompson of being too cultural, the majority of historians to seriously engage Thompson from the 1980s onward, have suggested that he was, perhaps, insufficiently cultural, or perhaps, naively so.  A long generation of British and European historians who turned to politics, gender, and empire took Thompson to task for oversimplifications or inattentiveness when it came to language, experience, and nation. 

To revisit Thompson’s text fifty years on, one remains struck by the combination of “human sympathy and scholarly acumen.” (David Erdman, 1964)   Over the last thirty years, cultural historians and theorists have refined their methods, achieving a greater sophistication and nuance, and have managed to rescue a staggeringly broad range of social actors from the dustbin of history.  But a return to Thompson raises the question of what may have been lost in all of the post-Thompsonian turns, whether cultural, linguistic, or imperial. What, in this moment, is the future for cultural history, which began big, under Thompson, but has tended toward a smaller scale in the process of refinement?  Can the not-so-new cultural history avoid the “enormous condescension of posterity” that Thompson sought to stave off?  As it sketches the cultural turns that derived from Thompson’s magisterial work, these are the questions that this paper will seek to address.