The Face of Power

My copy ofThe Making of the English Working Class looked old-fashioned when I bought it in 1984. There was something about the narrow margins, crammed type, and lack of any illustrations to leaven its 950+ pages that marked it as a serious book. Now, nearly thirty years later, it still strikes me that way, not least because I found it covered in a thin layer of dust when I went looking for it to write this.

But what is old can be new again. Not being an early adopter, I find myself turning to some of the book’s ideas now. Being late to the party is better than missing it all together. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Although I was an outsider to history, I shared my classmates’ relief and delight in discovering that this fat book was actually interesting. It was less the details of working-class life and more its arguments that captured me: class was a matter of culture and not just economics, and ordinary people made their own history. Heady stuff. Before encountering Thompson I thought “agency” referred to a business.

But what was particularly exciting about The Making was its ability to convey why history mattered beyond the classroom. The fact there was a larger purpose and politics to Thompson’s writing made history seem somehow more practical. Whether we agreed with those politics or even understood them, we certainly came away from the book feeling that historians like Thompson were doing important work in the world.

By the time I read the book, its international impact was already well-established: it had animated research on different aspects of working-class experience in Canada, from the waterfront to the baseball diamond. Historians of gender and race complicated the idea that productive relations were central to forging experience and identity in fundamental ways. Pigs, cows, and boarders as well as crimps, navvies, and Knights populated the world of the working class. Despite the diversity of their subjects, as a group these historians all shared Thompson’s desire to “rescue” the working class and the disenfranchised more broadly from the “enormous condescension of posterity,” demonstrating how ordinary Canadians made history in conditions not of their own making.¹

Labour history was at the forefront of social history in Canada. As “history from the bottom up,” social history remade the discipline, fundamentally disrupting the narrative of nation building that had given Canadian history its coherence. Until the 1960s, Canadian historians had been few and their work told the story of the country’s transformation “from colony to nation,” focusing on the traditional centres of power and politics conventionally defined.

Social history put an end to all this in the 1970s and 80s by revealing the limitations of Canadian history’s dominant narrative. What kind of national history left out the experiences of most people? Incorrectly labelled “history without the politics,” social history was in fact centrally concerned with questions of power; that is, with politics of a different kind. Annales-inspired work revealed how demography, geography, economy, and mentalité structured lives and choices, while that prompted by Thompson showed how ordinary Canadians – workers, women, indigenous people, and immigrants among others – experienced and resisted oppression, shaping their own lives even as they were being shaped by larger forces. Canadian history was part of the story of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and racism. These narratives might have been less familiar than the story of nation-building, but they were no less political or grand for being so.

Such politics were invisible (or at least distasteful) to some like Michael Bliss and Jack Granatstein, who worried about the “sundering” of Canadian history and wondered aloud if the profession or the public who funded it needed yet another study of “housemaid’s knee in Belleville in the 1890s.”² To social history’s critics, E.P. Thompson’s rescue mission had taken a dangerous toll, one that continued to rise in the 1990s as historians (like me) followed the cultural and linguistic turns that The Making of the English Working Class had helped prepare the ground for...