History from below is the practice of writing history that focuses on the experiences, agency, and perspectives of ordinary people rather than rulers, elites, and institutions. It emerged as a deliberate challenge to the dominant tradition of political and diplomatic history, which focused on the decisions of great men and the actions of states.

Origins

The phrase comes from the English radical tradition but was most powerfully expressed by E.P. Thompson, whose The Making of the English Working Class (1963) placed workers’ own experiences, culture, and consciousness at the centre of historical analysis. Thompson wanted to rescue ordinary people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’ — the tendency to treat working-class people as passive objects of historical forces rather than active makers of history.

The approach was associated with the Annales school in France (Braudel, Le Roy Ladurie), the British Marxist historians (Thompson, Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill), and later with social history, women’s history, and postcolonial history. Each broadened the scope of historical enquiry by asking: whose history is being told, and whose has been left out?

How to use it in an answer

History from below is directly relevant to debates about historical method and to OCR’s AO3 requirement to show awareness of why interpretations changed. The social history turn of the 1960s–70s fundamentally changed what historians studied and how they studied it. Demonstrating awareness of this methodological shift — and what it meant for specific debates — shows genuine historiographical understanding.

Further reading: E.P. Thompson · Eric Hobsbawm · Class
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