Students analyse Marxist historiography, its materialist theory of change and class conflict, and the British history from below of Thompson, Hobsbawm and Hill

What this dot point is asking

This dot point asks you to understand Marxist history both as a theory of historical change and as a practice that transformed whose lives historians thought worth recovering. You must be able to explain the materialist conception of history, that economic conditions and class conflict drive change, and then show how the British Marxist historians, above all E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill, turned that theory into the writing of history from below. The deeper point, and the one that answers the key questions, is that a theory about how the past works dictates what the historian explains, what counts as a cause, and whose experience appears in the record at all.

The answer

Marxist history derives from the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century. Its core is the materialist conception of history: that the economic base of a society, the way it produces and who owns the means of production, shapes its politics, law, religion and culture, the superstructure. History moves through conflict between social classes, and major change comes from contradictions in the economic system, as feudalism gave way to capitalism. For Marxist historians the central question is not what a king intended but how class relations and material forces produced an outcome, often regardless of intention.

History from below

The most influential and least dogmatic Marxist history was written by a group of mid-twentieth-century British historians. E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class set out to rescue the poor, the artisan and the weaver from what he called the enormous condescension of posterity, insisting that the working class made itself through its own experience and agency rather than being a mere product of economic forces. This is history from below, the recovery of the experience of ordinary, often illiterate people who left few records, using sources such as court records, pamphlets, songs and trial transcripts. Eric Hobsbawm traced the long arc of capitalism and revolution across his Age of trilogy, while Christopher Hill recovered the radical ideas of ordinary people in the English Revolution.

A theory that selects evidence

What makes Marxist history important for Constructing History is that its theory determines its method. Because it holds that class and material conditions drive change, it looks for evidence of economic structure, labour and popular experience that political historians ignored. Because it values the agency of ordinary people, it treats a weaver's diary or a riot as serious historical evidence. The theory is also a politics, which is both its strength, a clear explanatory framework and a commitment to the marginalised, and its vulnerability, the charge that it forces the evidence to fit a predetermined story of class struggle.

Criticisms and afterlife

Critics argued that economic determinism underrates the independent power of ideas, religion, nationalism and individual choice, and that the collapse of the Soviet bloc discredited the grand narrative. Thompson himself fought economic determinism from within, stressing culture and experience, which is why his work outlasted the politics. The legacy is enormous: social history, labour history, and the whole project of recovering hidden voices owe a debt to the Marxist insistence that ordinary people make history and deserve a place in it.

Using this in an answer

Use Marxist history to show that a theory of change is also a rule for selecting evidence and assigning significance. Set Thompson's history from below against Ranke's history of states to dramatise how the unit of analysis, class rather than the individual statesman, changes everything that follows. Acknowledge the determinism charge, but credit the school with permanently widening the cast of history. That balance of theory, method and critique is what the dot point rewards.