Tensions of Social History: Sources, Data, Actors and Models in Global Perspective

249 Pages·2023·25.549 MB·English

by  Alessandro Stanziani

Tensions of Social History
Global History: European Perspectives and Approaches
In Association with the European Network in Universal and
Global History (ENIUGH)
Series editors: Matthias Middell (Leipzig University) and Katja Castryck-Naumann
(Centre for the Study of University of Leipzig, Germany)
Global history has become an increasingly common and successful way to study
history over the last three decades. As this method increases in use, more attention
has been paid to the historiography, theory and skills associated with doing global
history. To date, research in global history is primarily visible when coming from the
Anglo-American world. This series seeks to contribute also many other European
perspectives in order to highlight the diversity of global histories and its historiography.
Published in association with the European Network in Universal and Global History,
this series provides an overview of current trends in global history research from
across the European continent. Taking a non-Eurocentric approach and anchored in
the variety of area and transregional studies, it publishes research on developments in
and outside of Europe along with innovative historiographical studies critiquing the
value and uses of global history and histories of globalization. Exploring ‘globalization-
critical movements’, it will question who is doing what kind of globalization, and with
what interests and goals? In doing so it seeks to demonstrate that there are many types
of globalization being done in different ways. Contributing to the critical reflection
of Eurocentrism in global history, it positions Europe within global processes, and
critically assesses European approaches to extra-European developments.
Founded in 2002, the European Network in Universal and Global History brings
together more than 600 European global historians and organizes a major conference
every three years. With a steering committee of around twenty elected representatives from
various European countries, it represents the best research in Europe on Global History.
Tensions of Social History
Sources, Data, Actors and Models in
Global Perspective
Alessandro Stanziani
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2023
Copyright © Alessandro Stanziani, 2023
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Part 1 What is a source? Archives, memory and contested contextualities
1 Revolutionary archives 21
Where multiple worlds meet: revolution, theatre and cosmographies 23
Archives and the French Revolution 27
2 Archives in the twentieth century: from communism to the decolonization 33
Totalitarian archives? 33
Written sources against oral documents: the invention of the source and
people with no history 42
Locating the archives 45
Conclusion: Part 1 54
Part 2 The social life of data
Introduction: archives, data and models 58
3 When one person eats two chickens and another none, on average they
eat one chicken each. The invention of social statistics under capitalism 63
The social construction of an artefact: questionnaires, expeditions, texts
and data 67
Back to the future. From Russian statistics to Piketty 70
4 Environment and social inequalities: how are data made and by whom? 73
Weather forecasting: science, divination or both? 76
Predicting future harvests 79
Cyclones: from travel narratives to forecasting 85
Cyclones in the archives 92
Conclusion: Part 2 97
vi Contents
Part 3 Fragments of social worlds
Introduction 102
How can this discussion be developed in transregional and global
perspective? 103
5 What is a worker, what is a slave? 107
Who is the ‘real’ slave? 112
6 What is a peasant? The global history of ‘immobile people’ 123
Fighting for or against ideal types. Peasant studies in the Cold War 126
Peasants in history? Pluri-activity and multiple identities 130
7 What is a consumer? Identities and alterities in the stomach 141
Quantifying consumption and its roots: famines or speculation? 144
Quality in consumption: Who defines it? 148
Standardization and mass consumption 155
Conclusion: Part 3 159
Part 4 The quest of universality: values, theories and the European model
8 Societies and their evolution: from the Enlightenments to Marxisms 163
Marx’s social actors in global context 166
Neo-Marxism and the ‘social turn’ 171
9 Weberian worlds 175
The great divergence: Weber on his head? 181
Durkheim and the Annales School 184
Social structures and the longue durée 186
Back to anthropology? 189
Conclusion: Part 4 193
General conclusion 195
References 202
Index 236
Acknowledgements
This book is the final product of about thirty years of discussion with colleagues,
friends and students. As it would be impossible to remind all of them, Iwill do my best
and Iapologize for those whom Ido not mention. Discussions on the tensions between
data and sources took place during my staying at the Wissenschafts Kolleg, the Wiko,
Berlin, in 2011–12. Discussions with historians, biologists, artists, philosophers and
legal scholars provided an incredible arena for such a complicated topic. Among those
who took part in the weekly seminar I organized were Claudio Lomnitz, Monique
Borgerhoff Mulder, Samantha Besson, Bénédicte Zimmermann, Edhem Eldem,
Susannah Heschel, Clemens Leonhard, Jim Hunt, Ji-Hyung, Stephen Stearn, Israel
Yuval and Franz Alto Bauer. Their suggestions were incredibly useful.
Ialso acknowledge my intellectual debt to the Eniugh and the great opportunity
of discussing several papers in its several workshops and conferences, not forgetting
friends and members of the steering committees over the years, among them Gareth
Austin, Matthias Middell, Marcel Van der Linden and Eric Vanhaute. Friends of
the Global History Collaborative I co-managed between 2014 and 2022 (EHESS,
Princeton, Tokyo Universities, Humboldt and Freie University) also helped my
reflections: Jeremy Adelman, Sebastian Conrad, Andreas Eckert, Masashi Haneda, not
forgetting the French ‘crew’: Marc Elie, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, Emmanuel
Szurek, Xavier Paulès, Corinne Lefèvre, Pablo Blitstein. Among the specialists of the
history of quantification and measure with whom Ihad the pleasure to discuss these
subjects in depth, Iwould like to thank Morgane Labbé, Alain Blum, Andrea Bréard,
YanniKotsonis, Eric Brian, my first master Jean-Claude Perrot, Jean-Yves Grenier, not
forgetting the very young Adam Tooze whom Ihad the pleasure to invite to speak in
Budapest in 1993. Iam specially thankful to the members of the editorial and reading
boards of Histoire et Mesure, a wonderful journal Ihave contributed to for over twenty
years and which Icurrently edit. Other friends oriented valuable discussions on the
relationships between social sciences, history and quantification: Jerome Bourdieu,
Gisèle Sapiro, Georg Steinmetz, Thomas Piketty, Gilles Postel-Vinay, Maurice
Aymard, Robert Salais, Christian Topalov and Paul-André Rosental. Jane Burbank
and Fred Cooper read and commented on the very first version of this manuscript;
five anonymous referees provided amazing, decisive suggestions to improve this
work. Aspecial thank to my students, many of them under the burden of complicated
discussions on sources, data and social actors. With their questions and patience, they
helped me to better formulate my own reflections.
viii
Introduction
Public debates and anxieties about illegal migrants to Europe (and the US border,
between India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, etc.) focus not just on abstract considerations
about the ‘others’ but also on empirical evidence: how many migrants are really
coming? What is their social status on departure and their political status on arrival?
Observers inevitably compare current trends with historical ones.1
The same is true for debates about social inequalities on global scale, at the very
core of social studies since the beginning of the millennium and peaking with Piketty’s
bestseller, Capital in the 21st Century.2 His book’s success is closely related to the
quantification in its main argument. Or consider evaluations of the social impact of
global warming and environmental change: any suggestions or timetabling about the
future require the measurement of multiple variables and their past trends. Attempts
to put global warming into a ‘natural’ very long term have been made by economic and
political lobbies hostile to any restriction of current lifestyles and economies.3
Sometimes, public debates start from attempts to quantify the past; in the United
States, in recent years, historians and media have debated the proposition made by
representatives of the so-called New History of Capitalism, arguing that early US
economic growth relied on slavery.4 Here, too, statistical data, social categories (slaves,
free people) and explanations are extremely controversial.
These kinds of questions – who are the slaves? who are the refugees? – enter a
broader questioning about the classification of social actors in contemporary societies
and the past. The identification of slaves and trafficked people cannot occur without
1 It seems useless just to provide an introductory bibliography on this topic. Among the others, see:
Alexander Betts, ed., Global Migration Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Anna
Maria Mayda, ‘International Migration: A Panel Data Analysis of the Determinants of Bilateral
Flows’, Journal of Population Economics 23 (2010): 1249–74; Lauren Mc Laren, Anja Neundorf
and Ian Paterson, ‘Diversity and Perceptions of Immigration: How the Past Influences the Present’,
Political Studies 1 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0032321720922774. See also The International
Migration Review.
2 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3 Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (London: Verso,
2017).
4 Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New
York: Basic Books, 1986); Sven Beckert, ‘Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide
Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War’, American Historical Review 109,
no. 5 (2004): 1405–38; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton (New York: Kopf, 2014).