Historical demography, virtually created in the postwar period, was the armature around which much of modern social history was wound. Although the first theorist of population was the English economist Thomas Malthus, modern population studies developed mainly in France, the first country on the continent of Europe to experience declining population in the late 19th century. For the French, the main issue in population study was the cause of their population decline and how it might be reversed; for the English, the issue was why population had exploded from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century. Historical demography has many ramifications beyond the question of population size: migration, social mobility, household size and composition, and marriage patterns. The conventional wisdom in 1945 was that peasants in traditional European societies rarely moved from the parish of their birth; they lived in large multigenerational households and married young. Two generations of research proved that these views were either wholly false or true only of other parts of the world.
While some demographic historical techniques were developed by Louis Henry of the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (National Institute of Demographic Studies) in Paris, the Cambridge-based Group for the History of Population and Social Structure was responsible for helping to extend demographic studies to Japan, China, and most parts of Europe and North America. It served as a clearinghouse for researchers on three continents and directed attention to types of evidence that were previously unknown. The picture of population that emerged from these researches was complex. A northwestern European pattern was visible in which until 1750 first marriages on average were late—mid-20s for women, late 20s for men. Households were small, and three-generation households were uncommon. One surprise was that the custom of kinfolk’s living together was more common in industrialized than in agrarian areas. Another was the discovery that in England the main reason for the large population increase after 1750 was increased fertility, achieved through earlier marriages. On the other hand, south and west of a line from Trieste to St. Petersburg, people married much younger, and celibacy was rare. Households also tended to be larger, reaching remarkable sizes in the zadrugas (corporate family groups) of Yugoslavia and the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire.
Such findings may seem only of specialized interest, but their ramifications are broad. Studies of family structure in colonial Massachusetts revealed that fathers were reluctant to agree to opening new lands for settlement, wishing to keep their sons within the household. Resentment of this by the sons may have played some role in the mind-set that led to the American Revolution. Migration too is a key to understanding not only the way that industrialization occurred (where did the new workers come from?) but also the settlement patterns of North America (the much higher propensity in the British than in the French or Spanish to leave their native parishes created an overwhelming British North American population). Migration is also a factor in social mobility; a 1964 study of Newburyport, Massachusetts, by Stephan Thernstrom (Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City) tested the reality of the American dream of rising to wealth. It was followed by others proclaiming a new urban history.
Quite different data helped create a history of sexuality. Extramarital or premarital sexual activity was indicated in figures on prenuptial or bridal pregnancy and birth of children to unmarried parents. Here again a surprise was that these seemed to be higher in 18th-century England—especially after 1750—than in France. Considering that in northwestern Europe people reached sexual maturity almost 10 years before they married, the relatively low level of illicit sexual activity suggests a general acquiescence to a repressive sexual morality. Although homosexual relations do not appear directly in these data, it may be significant that homosexual roles appear to have become available in the late 18th century just as the insistence on chastity began to weigh less heavily on heterosexuals. The history of sexuality was treated in depth by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his final work, the multivolume Histoire de la sexualité (1976–84).
Foucault wrote important works in other areas of social history in which quantitative methods were relatively unimportant. Particularly significant was his treatment of "the great sequestration." In his Surveillir et punir: naissance de la prison (1975; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), Foucault argued that prisons and hospitals (and by implication schools) developed as means of social control, and the oppressiveness of these institutions was only enhanced by high-minded rhetoric that declared them to be entirely devoted to their inmates’ good. The image of the panopticon—a prison design by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham that allowed for constant surveillance of the inmates—represented for Foucault the intimate link between power and knowledge and raised disturbing questions about who benefited from the activities of (for example) historians.
Protest and social control had long been a staple of social history. The former was the theme of the most-admired work of the period, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), by E.P. Thompson. Thompson defined the working class not as a statistical aggregate of people who had only their labour power to sell but as a group who between 1790 and 1840 came to consciousness of themselves as “working class.” As the prospect of social revolution faded after 1968, however, historians, especially in the United States, began to investigate the absence of effective working-class protest in previous centuries. Although there was clear evidence of multiple acts of resistance by African American slaves, organized revolts were rare, especially after 1832. Eugene Genovese looked for an explanation in the work of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), who responded to the defeat of communist movements in Europe (except for Russia) after World War I by stressing the “hegemony” exercised by the ruling class through its control of education and other institutions that mold public opinion so that their rule appears natural and inevitable.
Historians are promiscuous borrowers from other disciplines, and in the late 20th century most borrowed techniques and concepts came from anthropology—especially the symbolic anthropology espoused by Pierre Bourdieu and Clifford Geertz. Rather than seeking laws that govern social behaviour (the ambition of early sociology) or compiling quantitative data, symbolic anthropologists conceived human social relations as “texts” to be interpreted. The texts were exhibited as language, of course, but also as rituals of various sorts, and they had to be approached without any theoretical preconceptions. In “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” for example, Geertz claimed to “read” the event he witnessed. His method, which he called “thick description,” was not far removed from traditional ethnography. It was also congenial, in its aversion to theory, to traditional historical practice, which was never comfortable with the attempt to explain historical events by subsuming them under laws.
Like much social history, cultural history could claim an ancestry from early works by Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) and Marc Bloch (1866–1944), who were early contributors to the social-science journal Revue de Synthèse Historique. In Les Rois Thaumaturges: étude sur le caractère surnaturel attribué à la puissance royale, particulièrement en France et en Angleterre (1924; The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France), Bloch investigated the belief that the kings of France and England possessed the quasi-magical power of curing scrofula (a disease affecting the bones and lymphatic glands) by touching sufferers; in La Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: la religion de Rabelais (1942; The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais), Febvre showed that the French writer and priest Francois Rabelais lived in a mental world in which atheism was not yet possible. These were studies of mentalités, which naturally often lay at the intersection between superstition and religion. Although the field was pioneered by French historians, Anglo-American scholars also studied mentalités; their works were concerned with the history of witchcraft and witch persecutions as well as with the decline in belief in magic.