Casualties of History: Preface

Welcome to Casualties of History, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. We’ll be working our way through EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. In this first episode, Alex and Gabe introduce themselves and cover the book’s preface, as well as outline the context in which it was written. Who was Thompson, and what was he aiming to do in writing this book? Who was he arguing with, and why?

Reference is made to secondary literature:

Perry Anderson, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” New Left Review 1, no. 23 (Jan-Feb 1964).

EP Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” Socialist Register (1965).

Thompson, “Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present no. 38 (Dec 1967).

Frederick Cooper, “Work, class and empire: An African historian's retrospective on E. P. Thompson,” Social History 20, no. 2 (1995).

Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line(University of Michigan, 2006).

Madeleine Davis, “Reappraising British socialist humanism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 18, no. 1 (2013).

Davis, “Edward Thompson's Ethics and Activism 1956–1963: Reflections on the Political Formation of The Making of the English Working Class,” Contemporary British History 28, no. 4 (2014).