Introduction
This site has been set up to distribute a pamphlet by the title of ‘All Knees and elbows of susceptibility and refusal’, a collection of extracts and commentaries on the making of ‘history from below’. The pamphlet was put together by Anthony Iles and Tom Roberts, and has been handed out at events organised at the Serpentine Gallery in June, and Kennington Park in July 2007.
Please feel free to download a copy of the pamphlet (PDF) here
The phrase ‘history from below’ is the product of a group of French historians known as the Annales school. It is their description of an approach to subjects and areas previously considered historically unimportant. In England this approach was taken up by a group of Marxist historians who developed a set of methodologies and a world view at odds with existing Marxist and historiographical orthodoxies. In 1946 a group consisting of E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and Dona Torr among others formed the Communist Party Historians Group. Their aim was to draw out forms of agency that had been hidden by traditional approaches to history. Along with Raphael Samuel, C.L.R. James and Peter Linebaugh we take this loose grouping as the starting point for the making and study of history as a contested field in which ‘the below’ plays an active role.
The pamphlet looks at the methodologies of the historians from below as they worked to change their own contemporary system of knowledge production in relation to the self-produced, self-distributed knowledge of their subjects.
For further information and material on ‘history from below’, please use our resources page. Details of previous events and a subscription form for updates can be found in the menu to the right.
