Satia-History From Below-2023

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.
1093/jsh/shad056/7469056 by Birmingham-Southern College user on 13 February 2024

Special Section: “On Agency” at Twenty
PRIYA SATIA
The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below

Abstract
In his 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way scholars’ focus
on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and present,” treating
“history writing as a mode of redress.” It marginalized “human-ness lived outside
the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” Restoring agency to the
enslaved made the scholar feel better about themselves without making the world
any better: “therapy rather than politics.” Looking back on this pivotal assessment
of social history from the vantage of twenty years, its criticisms seem relevant to
the use of agency in its time (and ours) more than to the concept’s original inven-
tion in the era of decolonization after World War II. In that time, drawing on
anticolonial thought, history-from-below emerged precisely to contest liberal
notions of selfhood and reform the existing, whiggish two-way trade between past
and present. Revisiting that turn reminds us that questions raised by the category
of “agency” were present at its making and that it is unlikely that academic schol-
arship can fulfill more than a therapeutic function without affiliated struggles to
remake the academy and popular politics. Reminding us of history-from-below’s
foundational commitment to building up “the present-life of the past” and chal-
lenging the individuated ideal of selfhood, this essay notes the continued urgency
of recovering alternative subjectivities as we face the planetary crisis created by
dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. Though scholarship
in the academy may not be capable of the political impact Johnson imagined, it
nevertheless furthers history’s actual end of internal transformation.
In his now classic 2003 essay, “On Agency,” Walter Johnson faulted the way
scholars’ focus on agency presumed a “unidirectional trade between past and pre-
sent,” treating “history writing as a mode of redress.” It also marginalized
“human-ness lived outside the conventions” of a “liberal notion of selfhood.” As
a scholarly goal for those working on histories of enslaved people, restoring
agency to the enslaved ultimately made the scholar feel better about themselves
without making the world any better: “therapy rather than politics.”1 Looking
back on this pivotal assessment of social history from the vantage of twenty
years, its criticisms seem relevant to the use of agency in its time (and still per-
haps ours) more than to the concept’s original invention in the more dimly lit
era before 2003. As it turns out, the original turn to agency in the 1950s and
Journal of Social History (2023), 1–11

https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shad056
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jsh/shad056/7469056 by Birmingham-Southern College user on 13 February 2024
2 Journal of Social History Spring 2024
1960s contested liberal notions of selfhood and explicitly sought to forge a two-
way trade between past and present. Revisiting the motivations behind that
turn reminds us that questions raised by the category of “agency” were present at
its making, illuminating what we can expect from academic scholarship on the
dispossessed.
In the 1950s, scholars like E. P. Thompson strove to rescue the dispossessed

“from the enormous condescension of posterity” in the very particular context of
(seeming) imperial twilight.2 In questioning the judgment of history, Thompson
challenged the longstanding whiggish presumption that failure represented his-
tory’s verdict on a struggle. He redeemed “lost causes” to illuminate the histori-
cal agency of those that liberal narratives took as history’s objects rather than
subjects, and to open up new possibilities for exercising political agency in his
own time.3 He rummaged in the past for democratic forms of revolutionary
agency that might empower twentieth-century people caught between the chill-
ing conformism of the Communist Party and the oppressions of the Cold War
British state.4 History writing was a mode of redress for the past and source of
resistance in the present: therapy and politics.
This bid at a two-way trade between past and present was grounded in an
awareness of how whiggish understandings of history had long been shaping
political action in morally and politically pernicious ways. As I explain in
Time’s Monster (2020), Enlightenment theorizations of history offered an alter-
native ethical compass to everyday, religiously-derived morality, promising
future vindication of “necessary evils” committed in the name of progress, espe-
cially by great men willing to risk moral penury for history’s sake.5 For the phi-
losopher Joseph Priestley, Providence assured that “all evils lead to, and
terminate in, a greater good.”6 Progressive events were often “brought about
contrary to the intention of the persons who were the chief instruments of
them, and by the very means which were intended to produce a contrary effect.”
Immanuel Kant likewise theorized that we exercise free will and yet, unwit-
tingly, act “as if following some guiding thread,” furthering progress towards
human perfection.7 Without this assurance, Kant worried, life would appear
meaningless, and we would turn from it in disgust and hope for meaning only in
another world. This providential understanding of history furnished an alibi for
participation in war, exploitative trades, and other activities offensive to ordi-
nary morality in the name of spreading “civilization”: therapy for politics. (Later,
Marx too assembled a theory of history that sought to produce historical change.
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world,” he wrote in 1845. “The point,
however, is to change it.”8)
The period’s revolutionary struggles fueled ideas of great-man historical
agency. The abolition movement and the Romantics elaborated a particularly
British mode of guilty heroic agency as part of a narrative of redemption: heroic
self-sacrifice in the name of freeing a people in bondage. This script infused the
narrative of “civilizing mission” with pathos. Many of the British empire’s princi-
pal architects, such as Thomas Macaulay and John Stuart Mill, directed its
affairs as historians with an eye to future vindication of what they wrought in
the name of progress, conceiving historical agency as a masculine capacity
unavailable to colonized subjects styled as effeminate. In this mindset, colonial
On Agency: History-from-Below 3
rebellions, including slave rebellions, were not evidence of history-making

power but of irrationality, fanaticism, a diabolical refusal of progress.
This liberal understanding of history depended on and helped to produce a
particular notion of British selfhood, evident in a cultural preoccupation with
cultivating moral sentiments. The novel was the exemplary genre for showcasing
an individual’s journey of self-discovery, for “charting the career of the conscien-
ce,” writes Amitav Ghosh.9 Historical study was essential to cultivating liberal
selfhood: According to thinkers like Kant, Priestley, and Adam Smith, the past
example of “the great” nurtured present-day elites’ awareness of history’s pro-
spective judgment of themselves.10 Notions of highly individualized selfhood
rooted in a “deep inner core” replaced more fluid and corporate understandings
of (especially gender, race, and species) identity as mutable, divisible, or
“otherwise fuzzy around the edges.”11 Radical libertarian traditions yielded to
the practices and institutions of formal democracy, based on an expanding fran-
chise. Legislation “encouraged the private, individual, and masculine uses of pol-
itics at the expense of more threatening, subversive, and popular public and
collective uses,” explains James Vernon.12
How humans act in the world depends on what they believe about their
agency, which is shaped by culture and technology.13 The infrastructure of the
liberal city (lighting, sewage, roads, and so on), for instance, promised to illumi-
nate illiberal behaviors, and awareness of this purpose shaped how people acted
in such cities. Likewise, as part of the furniture of the mind, the liberal concept
of history was critical to the nineteenth-century “discursive struggle to empower
people by imagining them as legitimately acting subjects around specific fixed
identities.”14 Like other print media facilitating “rational debate between
enlightened individuals,” history writing undermined the emotive, melodra-
matic, and collective uses of non-print media.15 Those conditioned by
Macaulay’s whiggish depiction of change had a different sense of their agency
from those conditioned by ideas of radical libertarianism. Historians’ own preoc-
cupation with print sources (which Vernon, like Thompson, sought to over-
come) was part of the restricting of political subjectivity. The British political
subject didn’t actually become “the autonomous, rational, centred individual,”
writes Vernon, “but . . . pretended it had.”16
The apocalyptic destruction of World War I cast serious doubt on liberal-

ism’s instrumental logic of necessary evil and great men at the helm of the state.
Britain’s new mass democracy struggled to assert control of foreign policy, while
social investigation humanized the masses and imagined their history-making
capacity. Intellectuals nevertheless drew from the Romantic well in conceiving
for themselves a central role in mass liberation.17
They included E. P. Thompson’s father, Edward John Thompson, who quit
his role as a missionary in India to write the history of British India from
below—from the Indian point of view. He was influenced by friendships with
anticolonial thinkers who long questioned the liberal historical narrative justify-
ing British rule and its end of producing liberal subjects. Gandhian nonviolence
called on its adherents to abandon the calculus of future effect—the instrumen-
tality of liberalism that “sacrificed the present for the future.”18 Against liberal-
ism’s separation of ends and means, anticolonial thinkers argued that freedom
was achieved in the course of collective struggle for it.19 The poet-philosopher
Muhammad Iqbal explained that man partners with the divine in acting in the
world, not to remake the world but to make himself—an internal transforma-
tion. Acting in history—understood as the unending flux of life—a person
strives to redemptively transcend their humanity, and love is critical to over-
coming a finite sense of self.
Such ideas found even greater purchase when World War II further
diminished faith in liberal visions of progress. Anticolonial thinkers
announced the bankruptcy of European humanism. “[T]hey were never done
talking of Man,” Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961, and “today we know with what
sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.”
Cautioning against imitation of Europe, Fanon declared that “the European
game has finally ended.”20 It was in this atmosphere that E. P. Thompson,
too, questioned the shibboleth of progress, affirming in The Making of the
English Working Class that “our only criterion for judgment should not be
whether or not a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent
evolution.”21 Fanon’s critique weighed on him as he strove to recover alterna-
tive European traditions of thought. “For us,” he explained to his colleagues
on his resignation from the New Left Review in 1963, “the ‘European game’
can never be finished . . . .If ‘our’ tradition has failed . . ., then it is for us to
put it in repair.”22 A new two-way trade between past and present had to be
found; rather than embolden great-man imperial agency, might the European
past offer other values, based on different kinds of selfhood, to embolden the
masses in the present? Thompson turned to collective consciousness and the
collective action that formed it and was formed by it. Political novelists
helped drive this exploration. George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) offered a bleak
view of intellectually driven revolutionary action, looking instead to the
redemptive decency of ordinary people.23 It and Animal Farm (1945),
Thompson explained in his 1959 essay introducing the concept of a “New
Left” in Britain, nourished a generation preferring “amateur organization
and . . . amateurish platforms . . . to the method and manner of the left wing
professional.”24 In redeeming forgotten causes and voices, Thompson sought
to recover forgotten ways of being. (Though, as Robert Gregg and Madhavi
Kale have pointed out, in positioning himself as an outsider—to the
Communist Party, and then the New Left that he helped create—Thompson
himself took the role of the exemplary reasoning subject opposing the irra-
tional party line.25)
The gendered limits of his analysis were soon made clear.26 So, too, were its
national and racial limits. Thompson constructed a pure opposition between
working-class agency and capitalism, but if we account for other, racialized
laborers in England and the colonies, the picture grows complicated: as Gregg
and Kale asked, “Was the category of ‘free-born Englishman’ meaningful outside
of a context of the empire in which slave labour was the assumed norm for
Africans, and once this was ended categories of indentured labour were estab-
lished for Indians and Chinese?”27 In positing England’s poor as subjects in their
own right, Thompson did not rid history writing of its foundational opposition
of male European agency and effeminate colonized others. As Gregg and Kale
discern from this “historical genealogy of the idea of agency,” “its use in the past
has often obscured as much as it revealed, granting to some while denying to

others.”28
Application of the concept of “agency” was thus faulty from the start. In
the way Thompson applied it to Englishmen, as if their island experiences were
not shaped by the turmoil British imperialism was unleashing abroad, history-
from-below therapeutically warded off his despair at Western cultural failure.
But in another sense, the category of “agency” was more robust in Thompson’s
hands than scholars have since allowed it to be, because it was part of a chal-
lenge to the academy itself.
Anticolonial movements had long perceived the central role of educational
institutions in creating and sustaining the colonial order, experimenting with
new kinds of higher education.29 Thompson, too, understood the academy’s
essentially conservative nature. He wrote The Making at the University of
Leeds—not in the history department, but as a tutor in evening adult workers’
education who was not bound by the university syllabus. For him, the intellec-
tual’s position was “outside the whale,” not cozily ensconced in an ivory tower.30
He situated his scholarly work not in the academy but in grassroots organizing
work (such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).
The possibility for radical change in the production of knowledge seemed
real as a wind of change blew through British higher education in the 1960s.
Thompson’s attention to culture was part of a wider turn towards “cultural stud-
ies” led by figures (e.g. Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall)
involved in adult education, finding institutional acceptance with Hoggart’s
founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of
Birmingham in 1964. New universities opened the academy up to new segments
of society. New disciplines promised to value the voices and experiences of those
long marginalized by the social sciences and humanities. Scholars began to
reckon with their disciplines’ historical entanglement with colonialism.
Women’s history took off after the 1970 National Women’s Liberation
Conference at Ruskin College.
But, while many of his New Left comrades retreated into this changing
academy, Thompson remained an outsider and critic, perceiving the powerful
forces still dominating it. In 1965 while teaching at the University of
Warwick, he supported student protests against political surveillance, finally
resigning in 1971 and exposing the university’s business priorities with the
edited volume Warwick University Ltd.31 He continued to teach as a visiting
professor, often in the United States, but was increasingly a freelance scholar
and writer.
Meanwhile, the intellectual project centered on historical agency became
entrenched in, and contained by, the academy. The 1990s also saw renewed
faith in liberalism in both the academy and the world. With Project Minerva,
the new millennium’s “war on terror” once again coopted the Western academy
into colonial projects.32 Even as awareness of the academy’s historic complicity
in the oppressive projects of the modern era intensified and universities investi-
gated their historic ties to slavery and colonialism, (partly as backlash against
such “wokery”) they became more corporatized, slashing budgets for humanistic
learning.
This setting helps explain how by the time of Johnson’s critique in 2003,
scholarship that diligently invoked “agency” wound up reinforcing “the univer-
sality of a liberal notion of selfhood” even in conversations about slavery.33 The
“we” in Johnson’s worry that “we are practicing therapy rather than politics” ges-
tured to a majority-white academic establishment; but history-from-below had
been part of a challenge to this academy devoted to cultivating liberal selfhood
and liberal empire. Those writing history-from-below from within the halls of a
neoliberal academy are trying to make something of the bathwater without the
baby. Hence the inability to go beyond reestablishing, ad nauseum, that mem-
bers of every demographic are as “human” as the male white subject that was lib-
eralism’s initial default human being. In the establishment academy, history-
from-below was shorn of its original purpose of reimagining how humans act
through culture and illuminating alternative selfhoods for our present.
Historians obscured how enslaved people “theorized their own actions and the
practical process through which those actions provided the predicate for new
ways of thinking about slavery and resistance.”34
To help undo the isomorphism between “humanity,” “agency,” and
“resistance,” Johnson recommended attention to forms of agency like
“collaboration and betrayal.”35 But the distorting effects of liberal notions of
selfhood in discussions of agency are perhaps clearest in discussions of collabora-
tion. Johnson here failed to grasp the complexity, the incoherence, of the
agency exercised by subjects who are always more decentered than the myth of
liberal selfhood would have us believe. In my field of imperial history, the illu-
sion of liberal selfhood stokes distracting controversy over the role of colonized
people in their own subjugation: were they passive victims of British oppression
or the cause of their own colonization?36 This artificial binary obscures the ago-
nistic quality of colonized agency and conceptions of agency: complying while
hating, resisting while collaborating, embracing liberal selfhood while challeng-
ing it.37
Johnson didn’t see that his call to restoring agency to “the historical circum-
stances and ideological idioms” in which Marx knew it to be embedded was also
a methodological cul-de-sac.38 While assigning material factors historical force,
Marx did not dislodge the providential eschaton of the Enlightenment idea of
history. As much as Marxism vaunted collective agency, its teleology con-
demned a priori the failures of real dispossessed people to fulfill the roles it envi-
sioned for them. Thompson’s work also responded to theory-devoted Leftists
like Perry Anderson, who faulted English culture for the failure of England’s
working classes and intelligentsia to fulfill their revolutionary historical destiny.
As Johnson observes, Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll (1973) similarly saw
“African” forms of resistance as “roadblocks” to properly revolutionary slave
rebellion.39 This was not exceptional. Dipesh Chakrabarty explained three years
before Johnson’s essay that Western historical models, in all their whiggish,
Marxist, or post-Marxist variants, cannot but see the history of most of the world
in terms of “lack”—the lack of the right social classes to fulfill the right political
roles to make the appropriate historical transitions to lead to the correct telos.40
Chakrabarty’s remedy was to prioritize alternative narratives of connection
based on “dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither
by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’

creates”—in short, to overcome liberalism’s restriction of political subjectivity
and its assumptions about the universal telos of history.41 Such an approach
allows us to see a divinely inspired nineteenth-century Indian rebel, for instance,
“as a figure illuminating a life possibility for the present” and acknowledge “the
plural ways of being that make up our own present.”42
In asking us to think of agency in relation to culture, understood as some-
thing always in the process of becoming, as an “ongoing argument,” Johnson
echoed Chakrabarty’s reminder that past people “are always in some sense our
contemporaries: that would have to be the condition under which we can even
begin to treat them as intelligible to us.”43 Re-immersing ourselves in the
“nightmare of History,” as Johnson asked, depends on this sense of contempora-
neity.44 Is it possible to write histories that see modes of slave resistance as possi-
ble ways of being today? Ways of being involving more porous forms of
selfhood?
Recovery of other ways of being requires destabilizing the idea of the partic-
ular political role of the academic historian. Johnson’s closing reminder of his-
torians’ (great-man?) political obligations traps his provocative essay in the old
Kantian hope that history’s progress might be continual “when the soothsayer
himself causes and contrives the events that he proclaims in advance.”45
Privileging the political consequence of scholarly historical work today reinfor-
ces the privileging of print communication that helped restrict political subjec-
tivities from the nineteenth century.46
Those of us who pin our hopes on scholarly history remain legatees of the
Enlightenment’s and the Romantics’ elevation of the historian and poet-heroes
as makers of history. Amnesia about earlier efforts to decolonize education and
to puncture the myth of writers’ special agency enables this sticky faith. Even
while reminding us that “discourse without action has its limits,” the literary
scholar Michaela Bronstein affirms, through her reading of novels of politics,
the need, at times, for radical individual action, even if it entails estrangement
from the very community it seeks to support (interestingly, she doesn’t address
1984, arguably the ultimate novel of politics). Activism does not have to mimic
the utopian future it aims for, she assures, for “democracy has not always sufficed
to attain” democracy.47 But anticolonial thinkers addressed this fallacy long ago.
Fanon explained that meaningful “independence” depends on the right tactics—
on recovery of the notions of kinship and coexistence triggered by collective
struggle, a recovery of our essentially intersubjective nature and exposure of the
“falseness” of “the idea of a society of individuals . . . each [shut] up in his own
subjectivity.”48 For Gandhi, freedom lay precisely in the capacity for moral
accountability in the present, regardless of consequences.49 The use of undemo-
cratic tactics to attain democracy can only fail if we understand that, contrary to
Enlightenment thinkers’ presumptions, democracy and liberty are not endpoints
of some historical process, but things achieved and experienced in collective
struggle toward them.
However pessimistically or optimistically novels may portray individual
political agency, they cannot, as a genre anchored in individuated selfhood, offer
visions of democratic action by porous and multitudinous selves.50 The world,
however, offers plentiful such examples. The farmers who protested in India
from 2020 to 2021, likely the largest protest in history, sacrificed their everyday
life for a year, but remained embedded in the communal life they created while
protesting. Regardless of what the protest achieved, it “worked,” in that it cre-
ated the very democratic society that was its goal. Internally and collectively
diverse subjects can exercise agency, even without a unifying identity.51 Faisal
Devji describes the Indian rebels of 1857 as inhabiting a world in which differ-
ences made “morality possible in the form of obligation towards others”; they
defended the moral compact forged through coexistence with the alien.52
Johnson rightly called out the inadequacy of academics’ invocations of

agency, given the vast and persistent racial inequities he observed in 2003.53
But it isn’t clear that scholarly work ever can fulfill more than a therapeutic
function without affiliated struggles to remake the academy and popular politics.
This essay attempts to rescue history-from-below from the enormous condescen-
sion of academic historical scholarship, which lost track of the approach’s funda-
mental commitment to building up “the present-life of the past.”54 It was never
about recognizing the miniature great-man history-making power of every ordi-
nary individual but about challenging the individuated ideal of selfhood.
Recovering lost subjectivities is urgent as we confront the planetary crisis
created by dominance of Enlightenment notions of history and selfhood. The
Anthropocene has imparted an awareness of species-level human agency that
tramples the distinction between (coherently individualized) man and (docile)
nature on which Enlightenment aspirations for history rested. If the novel, and
other kinds of printed discourse, helped narrow political subjectivities, today’s
storytellers bear the “great burden . . . of imaginatively restoring agency and
voice to nonhumans,” according to Ghosh. This incantation of the special role
of writers and artists may be different, calling on them to wield the outsize power
that the modern era has given them to shape our sense of agency, in order to
now unlock the doors limiting our subjectivities and remind us of the interde-
pendence of all beings.55 Storytelling, and thus history-making, may then once
again seem a collective enterprise, rather than the special work of a few—a
“folk” culture that transcends print. Scholarship in the academy may not be
capable of the political impact Johnson hoped for, but, like political struggle, it
has its own value, regardless of consequences. Writing facilitates rational debate
between individuated selves but also furthers history’s end of internal transfor-
mation. As the psychiatrist Fanon showed us, therapy, of various kinds, is essen-
tial to new politics.
Endnotes
Address correspondence to Priya Satia, Department of History, Stanford University, 450
Jane Stanford Way, Building 200, Room 113, Stanford, CA 94305-2024. Email: psatia@
stanford.edu.
1. Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113–124,
115, 119, 121.
2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (orig. 1963; repr., New York,
1966), 12.
3. Thompson, The Making, 13.
4. Priya Satia, “History from Below,” Aeon, December 18, 2020, https://aeon.co/essays/
what-shaped-e-p-thompson-historian-and-champion-of-working-people.
5. Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Cambridge, MA, 2020),
chapt. 1.
6. Joseph Priestley, Lectures on History and General Policy, To Which is Prefixed, An Essay
on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life, 2 vols. (orig. 1788; repr. London,
1793), 1:80, 83.
7. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Point of View,”
1784, trans. Lewis White Beck, from Kant, On History (Indianapolis, IN, 1963),
Introduction, transcribed by Rob Lucas, Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.
org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm.
8. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (orig. 1845; trans. from 1888 German edition), in
Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Peking,
1976), Eleventh thesis, 65.
9. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago,
2016), 127–128.
10. Satia, Time’s Monster, chapt. 1. A century later, J. R. Seeley dubbed history “the
school of statesmanship.” Lectures and Essays (London, 1870), 296.
11. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-
Century England (New Haven, CT, 2004), xi, 198.
12. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, 1815-1867
(orig. 1993; Cambridge, 2009), 9.
13. On these technologies of liberalism, see for instance Patrick Joyce, Rule of Freedom:
Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political
History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800-1910 (Chicago, 2008). Bruno Latour explains
how objects create new kinds of human agency; as we make them, they make us: “You are
different with a gun in your hand; the gun is different with you holding it.” Pandora’s
Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 178–180.
14. Vernon, Politics and the People, 5.
17. Priya Satia, “Byron, Gandhi and the Thompsons: The Making of British Social
History and Unmaking of Indian History,” History Workshop Journal 81 (2016): 135–170.
18. Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Cambridge,
MA, 2012), 115.
19. Satia, Time’s Monster, chapt. 5.
20. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (orig. 1961; trans. New York, 1963), 312.
21. Thompson, The Making, 13. European skeptics of the progress narrative included
Herbert Butterfield, Reinhart Koselleck, and others. See Satia, Time’s Monster, chapt. 6.
22. E. P. Thompson, “Where Are We Now?” (1963), in E. P. Thompson and the Making
of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, ed. Cal Winslow (New York, 2014), 242–243.
23. Winston Smith, moving from words to action, dooms himself when he agrees to
engage in all manner of sin as a member of the “Brotherhood,” a body that does not act
collectively but spreads revolutionary knowledge from individual to individual.
Fascinatingly, the book of the Brotherhood explains that history had always been cyclical
until modern people determined to set it on a particular path, using print to manipulate
public opinion, especially by controlling the written records on which knowledge of the
past would be based.
24. E. P. Thompson, “The New Left,” The New Reasoner, May 1959. https://www.marx-
ists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1959/newleft.htm.
25. Robert Gregg and Madhavi Kale, “The Empire and Mr. Thompson: Making of Indian
Princes and English Working Class,” Economic and Political Weekly, September 16, 1997,
2275.
26. Joan Scott, “Women in The Making of the English Working Class,” in Gender and the
Politics of History (orig. 1988; repr. New York, 1999).
27. Gregg and Kale, “The Empire and Mr. Thompson,” 2281, 2283. See also Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890-1940 (Delhi, 1989), 221–
223.
28. Gregg and Kale, “The Empire and Mr. Thompson,” 2286.
29. Priya Satia, “In Trying to Defy Colonialism, Draft NEP Walks the Path of the
Colonisers,” The Wire.in, July 20, 2019, https://thewire.in/education/in-trying-to-defy-col-
onialism-draft-nep-walks-the-path-of-the-colonisers.
30. E. P. Thompson, “Outside the Whale,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays
(London, 1978).
31. E. P. Thompson, ed., Warwick University Ltd: Industry, Management and the
Universities (Harmondsworth, UK, 1970).
32. Priya Satia, “The Forgotten History of Knowledge and Power in British Iraq, or Why
Minerva’s Owl Cannot Fly,” October 17, 2008, SSRC Forum on the Minerva
Controversy, https://items.ssrc.org/the-minerva-controversy/the-forgotten-history-of-
knowledge-and-power-in-british-iraq-or-why-minervas-owl-cannot-fly/.
33. Johnson, “On Agency,” 115.
36. On this debate, see Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of
Modern India (Princeton, NJ, 2001), Coda.
37. See more on this in Satia, Time’s Monster, 234. Orwell’s description of his subjectivity
in his boarding school (the youthful experience of oppression that echoed through his
writing on colonialism and totalitarianism) captures this agon: “whether one laughed or
snivelled or went into frenzies of gratitude for small favours—one’s only true feeling was
hatred.” “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Partisan Review, [composed 1939-48] 1952, section
III, https://orwell.ru/library/essays/joys/english/e_joys.
40. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton, NJ, 2000), 8-9.
41. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 46.
42. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 108.
43. Johnson, “On Agency,” 119; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 109, 112.
45. Kant, quoted in Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century
British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999), 210.
46. The AHA has lately moved away from defining historical work in such terms: https://
www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/statements-standards-and-guide-
lines-of-the-discipline/tenure-promotion-and-the-publicly-engaged-academic-historian.
Vernon hopes that the “melodramatic nature” of his own narrative might revive such
modes of political communication, “just as. . ..by reclaiming the struggles of the English
‘common people’ E. P. Thompson’s radical populist narrative was itself part of the very
tradition he sought to describe.” Politics and the People, 339.
47. Michaela Bronstein, “Novel Theory Beyond Democracy,” American Literary History
35, no. 1 (2023): 143-157, 155. Bronstein points to the anti-apartheid struggle by way of
example, but it relied on a mix of tactics, and inequalities persist in South Africa. She
describes Time’s Monster as expressing “our suspicion of justifying unsavory means by
attractively idealized. . .ends” (154), but in fact the book describes our longstanding lack
of suspicion of liberalism’s reliance on such logic and seeks to remind us of anticolonial
thinkers’ questioning of it.
48. Fanon, The Wretched, 47.
49. Winston Smith’s fragile grip on the idea that freedom lies in preserving one’s ethical
being is precisely the source of his undoing. On the idea of freedom as the awareness of
moral agency regardless of material constraints, see also Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a
Country at the End of History (New York, 2022). To be sure, Gandhi felt the need to “walk
alone” (expressed in his favorite song by Tagore, “Ekla Cholo Re”) at times, but as a first
step aimed at inspiring followers, in answer to one’s conscience, rather than as a sacrifice
of social bonds or conscience.
50. New formats may change this, with different forms of narration, plot structure, and
so on.
51. As against Vernon’s view (Politics and the People, 335) that popular politics will always
seek to “transcend differences both within and between decentred individual and collec-
tive actors with some kind of unifying identity” that ultimately disables as much as it ena-
bles political subjects.
52. Devji, Impossible Indian, 20-21.
55. Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Gurugram, 2021),
204.

Satia-History From Below-2023

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Satia-History From Below-2023

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jsh/advance-article/doi/10.

1093/jsh/shad056/7469056 by Birmingham-Southern College user on 13 February 2024

The Forgotten Dreams of History-from-Below

Journal of Social History (2023), 1–11

In the 1950s, scholars like E. P. Thompson strove to rescue the dispossessed

rebellions, including slave rebellions, were not evidence of history-making

The apocalyptic destruction of World War I cast serious doubt on liberal-

has often obscured as much as it revealed, granting to some while denying to

by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’

Johnson rightly called out the inadequacy of academics’ invocations of

You might also like