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E.P. Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class' pioneered social history by centering working people's experiences, agency, and self-understanding. Thompson argued class is not a structure imposed from above but made through struggle and collective action. His work demonstrated how to recover non-elite voices from fragmented sources and understand subordinated groups on their own terms rather than fitting them into predetermined categories.
Read Thompson's methodology sections explaining his approach to sources, then compare how later historians adopted, adapted, or critiqued his methods.
You already know from your work in Marxist historiography that class analysis focuses on economic position within structures of production. Thompson accepted that foundation but fundamentally reoriented it. His central argument in *The Making of the English Working Class* (1963) is captured in the preface: class is not a structure or a category, but a relationship that happens when people "live their own history." The English working class was not *created* by industrialization—it was *made* by working people themselves through their collective struggles, shared experiences, and developing self-consciousness. The distinction between class as structure and class as agency runs through everything Thompson did.
What does this look like methodologically? Thompson went where the working people were, not where elite documentation assumed they should be found. He read Luddite trial transcripts, trade union rule books, Methodist hymns, radical pamphlets, food riot depositions, and the records of friendly societies—the mutual aid associations that working people built for themselves. These are fragmentary sources: they survive by accident, they are partial, they were often produced by institutions surveilling rather than representing working people. Thompson read them against the grain, using the official record as a window onto the activity it was trying to suppress or control. A magistrate's report about a riot is not just evidence of state anxiety—it is evidence that a crowd existed, had a target, and expressed collective grievances in recognizable form.
The concept that Thompson introduced to do this work is experience: the way people live and interpret their material conditions, which cannot be read off directly from economic position. Two workers in the same factory might have very different political consciousnesses depending on their religious traditions, community histories, and cultural frameworks. Thompson was particularly interested in moral economy—the shared normative expectations about fair prices and proper economic conduct that animated bread riots. When a crowd forced a miller to sell grain at a "just price" rather than the market price during a shortage, they were not acting irrationally; they were enforcing a customary moral framework that predated market capitalism. Understanding this required historians to take popular culture seriously as a site of historical agency, not as backward superstition obstructing progress.
Thompson's influence on social history was enormous and also contested. Feminist historians pointed out that his "working class" was implicitly male—domestic work and women's labor were largely absent from his account. Later historians asked whether his sources, concentrated in England, could support the general theory he drew from them. Poststructuralist critics argued that his emphasis on lived experience underestimated how language and discourse constitute rather than merely describe social reality. But the core move—centering the perspectives of people who left fragmented traces rather than voluminous records, and treating their self-understanding as historically serious rather than as noise to be explained away—became foundational for generations of social and labor historians worldwide. Thompson showed that history from below was not a sentimental rescue operation but a rigorous interpretive project that changed what questions historians could ask and what answers they could find.
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