British Marxist Historians, The by Harvey J. Kaye;

Author:Harvey J. Kaye;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: National Book Network
Published: 2022-07-22T00:00:00+00:00

Hobsbawm’s historical studies of class experience have not been limited to the British working class in the Industrial Revolution. He has also done much work of importance on pre-industrial urban and (especially) rural labouring classes’ experiences. It is in this area that we really encounter Hobsbawm’s international scholarship, for his writings on peasant and agrarian studies include British, European (especially Mediterranean) and Latin American studies. In fact, it might be said that a new subject in social history was actually opened up and given its name by Hobsbawm: the study of ‘primitive rebellions’. It should also be noted that Hobsbawm was a founding member not only of the Society for the Study of Labour History but also, along with Rodney Hilton, of the editorial board of the Journal of Peasant Studies, providing the lead article, ‘Peasants and Politics’, for its opening issue.42

Hobsbawm’s first work in this area, published in 1959, was the now-classic Primitive Rebels (1963).43 Interestingly enough, his original scholarly interest was the agrarian problem in North Africa, but in the immediate post-war period he found it necessary to pursue labour history instead. During the 1950s, however, several things happened to renew his interest in peasant studies. He was making frequent trips to Mediterranean countries in this period and meeting and talking to a number of intellectuals in the Italian Communist Party, who knew a great deal about southern Italy. He was also reading the work of Antonio Gramsci, who has a lot to say about ‘non-political protest movements’ (what Hobsbawm was to call ‘primitive rebellions’). At about the same time, he became involved in discussions with the social anthropologists Myer Fortes and Max Gluckman. They were studying the Mau Mau movement and were anxious to know if similar movements had occurred in Europe in earlier periods. It was these anthropologists who asked him to give a lecture ‘out of which Primitive Rebels grew’.44 (Thus, as in labour history studies, where Hobsbawm made links with sociology, in peasant studies he established links between history and anthropology, two decades before the ‘interdisciplinary history’ vogue.)

Yet another influence in the years during which Hobsbawm was writing Primitive Rebels was the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, and the process of de-Stalinization. He even refers to the work as a ‘political as well as a historical one.’45 He recalls that it had become necessary to reconsider the models of revolutionary activity which ‘militant communists had accepted in the past’. In effect, he says, PrimitiveRebels can be viewed as an ‘attempt to see whether we were right in believing in a strongly organized party’. Concerning this question he contends that the ‘answer is yes’. He adds, however, that the book shows that such a path was not the only way forward.46

In Primitive Rebels Hobsbawm examines what he terms ‘archaic’ forms of social movements. Specifically, his studies are of: ‘banditry of the Robin Hood type, rural secret societies, various peasant revolutionary movements of the millenarian sort, pre-industrial urban “mobs”

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