Historisk Tidskrift. Utgiven av Svenska historiska föreningen
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Historisk tidskrift 123:2 • 2003

Innehåll (Contents) 2003:2

Uppsatser (Articles)

Går det att skriva arbetarhistoriska synteser?

Lars Berggren

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

Is it Possible to Write Syntheses of Labour History?

This article discusses the possibilities of writing a new synthesis in the field of labour history. As a point of departure, I refer to Eric Hobsbawm’s article from 1970, From Social History to the History of the Society, in which he asserts that history of societies should require the researcher to apply an assumption about the central nexus of the subject under study. A generation of Swedish labour historians starting their research in the 1970s and 1980s did have the ambition to write the history of society. This generation was inspired by Eric Hobsbawm and E P Thompson.

The labour historians in Sweden produced several dissertations on local workplaces and trade unions. Theoretically many of them positioned themselves as historical materialists, sometimes with reference to Harry Braverman’s studies of labour processes. Though quite a lot of results were produced, there were some shortcomings and there were no real efforts to systematise the results.

With reference to Jürgen Kocka, I discuss the importance of the challenge represented by gender history, the linguistic turn and historians advocating putting politics back in. By constructively meeting those challenges, a new synthesis could be built using the different results presented within the field of labour history since the 1960s. However, it is necessary to do this from a theoretical perspective. As we lack research on important issues, this is not an easy task. However, the need for further research within fields identified in the synthesis- writing process will become evident.

One conclusion is that a synthesis systematically should involve the concepts of class, gender, ethnicity and generation.