Cultural history, once a Cinderella among the disciplines, neglected by its more successful sisters, was rediscovered in the 1970s, as the chronological list of publications at the end of the volume suggests. It has been enjoying a revival ever since, at least in the academic world – the history presented on television, at least in Britain, remains predominantly military, political and, to a lesser extent, social. For someone like myself, who has been practising the discipline for some fifty years, this revival of interest is extremely gratifying, but it still requires an explanation.

The purpose of this book is precisely to explain not only the rediscovery but also what cultural history is, or better, what cultural historians do, paying attention to varieties, debates and conflicts but also to shared concerns and traditions. In so doing, it will try to combine two opposite but complementary approaches: an internal approach concerned with the solving of successive problems within the discipline and an approach from outside relating what historians do to the time in which they live.

The internal approach treats the current revival of cultural history as a reaction against earlier approaches to the past which left out something at once elusive and important. According to this view from inside, the cultural historian gets to parts of the past that other historians cannot reach. The emphasis on whole ‘cultures’ offers a remedy for the current fragmentation of the discipline into specialists on the history of population, diplomacy, women, ideas, business, warfare and so on.

The external approach or view from outside also has something to offer. In the first place, it connects the rise of cultural history to a wider ‘cultural turn’ in political science, geography, economics, psychology, anthropology, archaeology and ‘cultural studies’, a point discussed in more detail in chapter 7, ‘Cultural History in the Twenty-First Century’. There has been a shift in these disciplines, at least among a minority of scholars, from the assumption of unchanging rationality (the rational choice theory of voting or consumption, for instance), to an increasing interest in the values held by particular groups in particular places and particular periods.

One sign of the times was the conversion of the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (1927‒2008) to the idea that in the world today, cultural distinctions are more important than political or economic ones, so that since the end of the Cold War what we see is not so much an international conflict of interests as a ‘clash of civilizations’. Another indicator of the intellectual climate is the international success of Cultural Studies. In Russia, in the 1990s, for instance, Kul'turologija (as it is called there) became a compulsory course in higher education, concerned in particular with the Russian identity and often taught by ex-professors of Marx-Leninism who had been converted from an economic interpretation of history to a cultural one.¹

This cultural turn is itself part of the cultural history of the last generation. Outside the academic domain, it is linked to a shift in perception expressed in increasingly common phrases such as ‘the culture of poverty’, ‘culture of fear’, ‘gun culture’, ‘teen culture’ or ‘corporate culture’ as well as in the so-called ‘culture wars’ in the USA and the debate over ‘multiculturalism’ in many countries. Many people today speak of ‘culture’ on everyday occasions on which twenty or thirty years ago they would have spoken of ‘society’.

As the popularity of phrases like these suggest, it is increasingly difficult to say what does not count as ‘culture’. The study of history is no exception to this general trend. What is cultural history? The question was asked in public more than a century ago, in 1897, by a pioneering German histor­ian who was also something of a maverick, Karl Lamprecht. For better or for worse, it still awaits a definitive answer. Readers have been offered cultural histories of longevity, the penis, barbed wire, climate, ghosts and masturbation. The frontiers of the subject have certainly been extended, but it is becoming more and more difficult to say exactly what they enclose.

One solution to the problem of defining cultural history might be to switch attention from the objects to the methods of study. Here too, though, what we find is variety and controversy. Some cultural historians work intuitively, as Jacob Burckhardt said he did. A few attempt to make use of quantitative methods. Some of them describe their work in terms of a search for meaning, others focus on practices and representations. Some see their aim as essentially descriptive, others believe that cultural history, like political history, can and should be presented as a story.

The common ground of cultural historians might be described as a concern with the symbolic and its interpretation. Symbols, conscious or unconscious, can be found everywhere, from art to everyday life, but an approach to the past in terms of symbolism is just one approach among others. A cultural history of trousers, for instance, would differ from an economic history of the same subject, just as a cultural history of Parliament would differ from a political history of the same institution.

In this situation of confusion (according to those who disapprove) or dialogue (for those who find it exciting), the wisest course may well be to adapt Jean-Paul Sartre's epigram on humanity and declare that although cultural history has no essence, it does have a history of its own. The activities of reading and writing about the past are as much time-bound as other activities. Hence this book will comment from time to time on the cultural history of cultural history, treating it as an example of a cultural tradition in perpetual transformation, constantly adapted to new circumstances.

To be a little more precise, the work of individual cultural historians needs to be replaced in one of several different cultural traditions, generally defined on national lines. The importance of the German tradition, from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, will become apparent in the pages that follow, though the relative lack of important German contributions to this kind of history until the twenty-first century is a problem for a future cultural historian to address. The Dutch tradition may be seen as an offshoot of the German, but one that has continued to flourish, thanks to the example of Johan Huizinga. In the English-speaking world there is, or was, a significant contrast between the North American tradition of interest in cultural history and the English tradition of resistance to it. In similar fashion, for a number of years, British anthropologists described themselves as ‘social’, while their American colleagues called themselves ‘cultural’. In the case of cultural history, it is, above all, the North Americans – especially the descendants of German-speaking immigrants, from Peter Gay to Carl Schorske – who have taken up or taken over the German tradition, transforming it as they did so. The link between the American interest in culture and the tradition of immigration appears to be a close one. If this is the case, cultural history in Britain should have a great future.

The French tradition was distinctive, among other things for avoiding the term ‘culture’ – until the late twentieth century, at any rate – and for focusing instead on civilisation (as in the case of the famous Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe depuis la chute de l’empire romain jusqu’à la Révolution française (1828) by the man of letters turned politician François Guizot). French historians later added the concepts of mentalités collectives and imaginaire social. The historians associated with the journal Annales have made a remarkable series of contributions to this field over three or four generations; to the history of mentalities, sensibilities or ‘collective representations’ in the age of Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre; to the history of material culture (civilisation matérielle) in the age of Fernand Braudel; and to the history of mentalities (once again) and the social imagination in the age of Jacques Le Goff, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Alain Corbin. The sustained creativity of a school of historians over three or four generations is so remarkable as to require a historical explanation. My own suggestion, for what it is worth, is that the leaders were charismatic enough to attract gifted followers, but also open enough to let them develop in their own way. This distinctive tradition was associated with what might be called a ‘resistance’ to the German style of cultural history (though Febvre's enthusiasm for the Dutchman Johan Huizinga deserves to be noted). This resistance seems to be breaking down in the twenty-first century, at the moment that this French historiographical tradition is becoming less distinctive. The term histoire culturelle is now frequently used in France.

As in the history of culture more generally, we shall see in the following pages that movements or trends are often brought to an abrupt end not because they have exhausted their potential, but because they are supplanted by competitors. These competitors, the ‘children’ we may call them, regularly exaggerate the difference between their own approach and that of their fathers and mothers, leaving it to the following generation to realize that their intellectual grandparents were, after all, capable of some insights.

As a cultural historian who has practised over the years a number of the different approaches discussed in the following pages, from the social history of high and popular culture and historical anthropology to the history of performance, I should like to say with Edith Piaf that ‘je ne regrette rien’ and that I see all these approaches as valuable. Hence this book will not argue for one kind of cultural history and reject the rest.

The following chapters will deal in chronological order with some of the principal ways in which cultural history used to be written, is written today, and will be written, may be written or should be written in the future. In discussing concrete examples I have tried, so far as my partial knowledge of a fragmented field allows, to strike some sort of balance between different historical periods, different parts of the world, and the productions of different academic departments, including departments of art, architecture, geography, literature, music and science as well as plain ‘history’.

The price of this decision has necessarily been to omit a good deal of exciting work in the early modern field, much of it by friends and colleagues of mine. Let me therefore make the point here, once and for all, that what follows is a survey of trends illustrated by examples, and not an attempt to list or discuss all the best work produced in the last generation. Studies cited in the text use the titles of the English translations, where appropriate, but give the date of original publication. Where a place of publication is not given in a work cited in the notes, it is London. Information about technical terms and about individuals mentioned in the text will be found in the index.