In a moving obituary in New Left Review, the great sociologist Stuart Hall noted Raphael Samuel’s talent for ‘quarrying’ lives and historical themes. Inadvertently or not, in employing this verb – it recurs three times in the relatively short text – Hall evokes one of his friend, comrade and colleague’s short studies, ‘Headington Quarry: Recording a Labouring Community’, which features in Workshop of the World: Essays in People’s History, a timely collection of Samuel’s writings edited by John Merrick and published by Verso last January. In many ways, that text encapsulates the qualities that make Samuel, one of the New Left’s lesser-known historians, so worth reading. Chief among them was a commitment to representing history as faithfully as possible, not as we might wish it had been. Hence his focus on those marginalised or on society’s periphery, not out of some wilful esotericism or eccentricity – though his unconventional methods and notorious indifference to deadlines were apt to encourage such an impression – but because an account of the past excluding these people, whom his friend EP Thompson called ‘the casualties of history’, was partial, even deceptive.
As Samuel notes, Headington Quarry in the nineteenth century bore little resemblance to the ideal English hamlet, with, in Ronald Blythe’s words, its ‘tall church on the hillside, a pub selling the local brew, a pretty stream, a football pitch, a handsome square vicarage with a cedar of Lebanon shading it, a school with a jar of tadpoles in the window, three shops with doorbells, a Tudor mansion, half a dozen farms and a lot of quaint cottages’. In fact, the ‘open village’ that emerged there was, as Samuel puts it, ‘make-shift and extemporary’, the product of irregular, piecemeal patterns of development unguided by top-down planning and congruent with the uneven topology of the landscape in which it was set. Essentially a squatters’ settlement, the social character of Headington Quarry was similarly untypical, its population drawn mostly from the ‘migrating classes’ – Gypsies and travellers, itinerant labourers, hop-pickers, sailors, urban craftsmen, circus performers – whose lives and cultures were of abiding interest to Samuel.
Subject to much prejudice, this was a social fraction which, as Merrick reminds us in his stimulating introduction, necessarily ‘left few traces in the historical record’. As such, its study demanded a degree of scholarly innovation, a not uncontroversial example of which was a growing enthusiasm about oral testimony. Samuel concludes the Headington Quarry essay with a qualified endorsement of what would come to be known as ‘oral history’, writing that the ‘bias it introduces […] is wholly welcome [emphasis added] since it will necessarily direct the historian’s attention to the fundamental common things of life: the elements of individual and social experience rather than on administrative and political chronologies’. Such an emphasis, he goes on, allows the historian ‘to recapture, in some detail, the humdrum circumstances in which economic action, political belief, and cultural expression were shaped’.
By this, Samuel did not mean that oral history should supplant other, more conventional modes of historical enquiry. Rather he was advocating for its judicious deployment where appropriate. Besides, oral testimony was most useful, he suggests, when considered alongside, or in addition to, ‘the restraint, encouragement, and provocation of manuscript and printed resources’. Such was Samuel’s wont: to be ecumenical and incorporative, traits befitting a historian whose foremost goal, Merrick emphasises, was to democratise the study of history. ‘[Samuel’s] vast erudition and the depth of his historical understanding,’ he writes, ‘was not used to build new professionalised historical structures, but to tear them down.’ And not in a recklessly anarchic or destructive manner, but in a productive one: ‘I absolutely refuse the idea,’ he quotes Samuel saying, ‘that the Treaty of Utrecht, interesting though it is […] represents as it were the high point of national drama.’ Hence Merrick’s conclusion that ‘if there was an animating spirit of [Samuel’s] work, it was a deep faith in the ability of ordinary people to become the custodians of their own history’.
This approach, and specifically its openness to oral accounts of the past, which it took to be a welcome source of enrichment, not a potential analytical contaminant, has long been a hallmark of the ‘history from below’ of which Samuel was one of several Marxist pioneers. The relationship between history from below and Marxism specifically has nevertheless been fraught, especially when the Marxism in question is of a more theoretical or ‘scientific’ flavour. Many such Marxists attributed an inherent populist and nostalgic bias to history from below, viewing as suspect and credulous the primacy it was willing to grant to individual and collective experience. Moreover, as Samuel himself demonstrates in his wide-ranging appraisal of the subject included in Workshop of the World, an examination of the history of history from below, as it were, reveals that conservatives and reactionaries as much as left-wing radicals have found its spirit congenial. Indeed famous works of ‘people’s history’ cited by Samuel include George Trevelyan’s English Social History (1942) GK Chesterton’s A Short History of England (1917), both of which idealise an agrarian past prior to the advent of malign forces like ‘individualism’, ‘mass society’ and ‘industrialism’.
How, then, did Samuel reconcile his commitment to history from below with his own Marxism, which, some hold, should concern itself only with ‘totality of social experience’, not the partial perspective of specific groups, proletarian or not? In his typically diplomatic way, he suggests that such an opposition is misleading, even ahistorical, and that any attempt to hypostasise some pure version of Marx is fundamentally misguided. Lenin himself, he points out, embraced rather than disclaimed the Bolshevik Revolution’s ‘populist’ heritage; and Marx’s Capital, for that matter, could be considered, ‘under one optic’ at least, a kind of history from below. None of this is to insist, of course, that no tension existed between Marxism and the kind of history that he and his peers championed, but it is to suggest that this tension could be generative, especially to a Marxism that he warned was at risk of hardening into abstraction and dogma.
In any case, the most illustrious practitioners of history from below were in fact Marxists, a number of whom formed the core of the Communist Party Historians Group, with which Samuel had first become involved while still a schoolboy. This was one of several such collectives to whose founding and flourishing he was central, having helped to establish Universities and Left Review, the organ from which New Left Review subsequently emerged, and the History Workshop movement, whose affiliated journal still runs today. Among his contemporaries in this remarkable milieu were Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Dona Torr, Isaac Deutscher, Raymond Williams and EP Thompson, the latter a totemic figure in the emergence of the New Left, and a fellow advocate for an approach to history that foregrounds experience and the concrete over abstract, system-level analysis.
Like Samuel, Thompson pursued most of his research extramurally, or at least away from the bastions of British academia. Nevertheless, he produced one of the masterpieces of history from below, the monumental – and monumentally influential – The Making of the English Working Classes (1963). In that book’s now celebrated preface, Thompson famously declared: ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.’ This sentence, whose flourish was later adopted as a de facto mission statement by exponents of history from below, was one whose sentiment no doubt appealed to the younger Samuel, a kindred spirit. His and Thompson’s resemblances were multiple. As historians, both endeavoured to represent the working classes as historical agents in their own right, and as literary stylists, both wrote dense, layered, reference-filled prose; Robin Blackburn likened Samuel’s, aptly, to ‘a species of historiographic pointillism’. At an even deeper attitudinal or ethical level, both were cut of a similar neo-Romantic, somewhat populist cloth. Where Thompson sought to rescue the poor Stockinger and the ‘utopian’ artisan, Samuel gave voice to the toiling ‘comers and goers’: gypsies, rough sleepers, travelling showmen, itinerant labourers, sailors and street traders.
For all its charms, this sensibility was far from hegemonic on Britain’s mid-century left, not least because it jarred with the more theoretical persuasions of a new generation of Marxist intellectuals. Among these was Perry Anderson, who took over as editor of New Left Review in 1963. Shortly after, he published ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, the opening salvo in what would evolve into a protracted and bruising polemic with Thompson.
Though he was at pains to downplay his intentions – the essay’s provisos are hardly ambiguous, announcing a ‘crude scheme’, ‘preliminary attempt’ and set of ‘extremely simplified and approximate notations’ – Anderson’s ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’ is a text of remarkable ambition, attempting to offer no less than ‘a coherent historical account of British society’, in his antagonist’s words. It argues that Britain’s chronic political, cultural and social stasis could be explained by the country’s unique – among major European powers, at least – historical development and related class structure. Roughly: in contrast to its European neighbours, most of which had undergone so-called ‘bourgeois revolutions’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain’s earlier upheaval, culminating in 1688’s Glorious Revolution, saw the aristocracy simply merge with the rising mercantile class. Such a process precluded the emergence of a powerful urban industrial bourgeoisie – the period’s revolutionary class par excellence – and therefore a concomitant proletariat. Moreover, the pre-Enlightenment character of Britain’s revolution meant its ideological character was comparatively ‘primitive’, predating as it did the emergence of the socialist tradition proper, never mind the works of Marx. As such, Britain lacked both a revolutionary culture and a revolutionary theory. Its revolution had, in a sense, occurred too early.
To all this, what Anderson framed as an ‘invitation to correction and discussion’, Thompson retaliated furiously, penning a sprawling 25,000-word response, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in the pages of The Socialist Register. While acknowledging that ‘Origins’ is a ‘tour de force’ when read as a provocation, he conceded little else to Anderson and his allies when it came to historiographical substance, taxing New Left Review with providing little but theoretical pyrotechnics unmoored from historical reality. Anderson responded in kind, returning Thompson’s volley with a blistering assault of his own, ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’, an essay whose structure mirrored its target: brief niceties (‘this essay represents the most considerable intellectual effort Thompson has so far made to think the English experience as a whole, and contains passages of great eloquence […]’) followed by high-octane polemic (‘[i]n a calamitous moment, [Thompson] has blundered into a discussion of Gramsci. It is a painfully embarrassing performance. He reveals an astronomic ignorance of the work he is declaiming about.’). In a later appraisal of his relationship with Thompson, published in the London Review of Books, Anderson regretted the extraordinarily charged quality of this confrontation. At the same time, one detects, in the sheer no-holds-barred zeal of the exchange, a certain relish on both belligerents’ parts. Anderson recalls encountering Thompson in a London pub only a few months later, and that he had been ‘good nature itself’.
Whatever other attributes he shared with Thompson, Samuel was not by temperament a polemicist. With Anderson though his intellectual common ground, save for a shared Marxism, was close to zero. As a historian, he remained methodologically committed to the worm’s-eye view, at least insofar as what the History Workshop Journal called ‘working-class experience’ was understood as the indispensable point of departure for any subsequent theoretical reflection. This general orientation is evident in some of Workshop of the World’s richest inclusions, such as ‘Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain’ and ‘The Roman Catholic Church and the Irish Poor’. Tentative overtures to theory that he made elsewhere notwithstanding, these essays are largely free of theoretical padding and are no less perceptive for its absence.
Like ‘Headington Quarry: Recording a Labouring Community’, the latter piece, focused on nineteenth century Britain’s Irish Catholic population, is a particularly brilliant example of Samuel’s approach, drawing heavily on source material gathered years earlier, the author tells us, ‘travelling the parishes and record offices of Northern England’. In a tone that in parts echoes Engels’s warts-and-all portrait of the immigrant Irish in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Samuel describes a population brutalised and besieged, and estranged from the Church of the well-heeled, many of whom, as Merrick observes, had been converted via that gateway drug to Rome, Pusey’s Oxford movement. As in much of his other writings, Samuel devotes particular attention to discontinuity; the essay revolves around the tense relationship between this unruly population, whose customs, behaviours and devotional practices were at odds even with those of their clerical superintendents, and the ideals of sobriety and respectability dear to Catholicism’s better-off Victorian converts.
A similar attention to what troubles conventional historical narratives is evident in the collection’s bulky eponymous essay on the machinery question in industrial Britain. Whereas economic historians (at least when Samuel was writing in 1977) tended to hold that the industrial revolution had a predominantly ameliorative impact on the labour process – ‘labour was made enormously more productive at the same time as the physical burden of toil was eased’ – Samuel argues that this was far from the case, and that something closer to the opposite was true. ‘The industrial revolution,’ he writes, ‘so far from abridging human labour, created a whole new world of labour-intensive jobs’, from railway navvying to brick-making, as well as a ‘whole spectrum of occupations in what the Factory legislation of the 1890s was belatedly to recognise as “dangerous trades”’. Slower, seemingly less efficient methods of production gave way to ‘overwork and sweating’, a qualitative transformation largely ignored by historians in favour of quantitative surveys lauding Britain’s industrial ‘take-off’. Samuel’s essay is the beginning of such an account, one which refuses to ignore the reality of the labour process, the increasingly gruelling nature of which provoked much struggle and opposition. At a more theoretical level, and following Eric Hobsbawm, he argues that the actions of machine-breakers like the Luddites should be understood as a form of industrial strike, even contending that the machinery question ‘is in some sense coterminous with capitalism itself [emphasis added]’. In other words, struggle over mechanisation, or what we would now call ‘automation’, is endemic to the capitalist mode of production, not an anomalous or local feature of discrete moments in the industrial past.
Such an argument is worth taking seriously, as politicians in Europe and elsewhere – in a recent speech, British prime minister Keir Starmer called AI ‘a force for change that will transform the lives of working people for the better’ – turn to AI as a potential means of delivering the productivity growth that has eluded their economies for decades. AI is unlikely to do anything like what Starmer imagines, if only because such a world is anathema to the technology’s most powerful champions: Altman, Bezos, Musk, Thiel etc. A more plausible trajectory is something like that sketched by Samuel in his appraisal of Britain’s industrial revolution: one marked by friction, discontinuity and deteriorating, not improving, working conditions. Of course, such friction was only produced because individuals and groups refused to submit to changes in whose implementation they had no say. The question today, as the political left’s influence reaches perhaps its lowest ebb in a decade, is whether such movements even exist, and if so, whether they have the structural power to resist and shape what is coming. Towards the end of his life, Samuel’s writings, and in particular the essays that made up The Lost World of British Communism, published posthumously in 2006, took on a more elegiac tone, as he reckoned with the failure of the ideology and culture to which he had so long devoted himself, and with the triumph of Thatcherism. If anything, our contemporary context is bleaker, as right-wing authoritarianism sweeps the US and potentially Europe. While this force is likely to produce plenty more casualties, as historians like Samuel have shown, the will of individuals acting collectively is not easily extinguished, however dire their circumstances.
1/2/2025
Luke Warde is a writer based in London. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times and the Sunday Independent. He holds a PhD in French from the University of Cambridge.
