4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST the kind that developer imder the banner, 'New Economic History'. All the technical sophistication of the Cliometricians-—which was, of course, useful in the quantification of long-term trends and in the organisation and reconstruction of voluminous data—did not yield any new approach to history. The 'New' economic history, one may say, turned out to be a silicon-chip of the same old block. Moreover, it tended to push historians towards a "history without people", in Le Roy Ladurie's telling phrase.6 Behind the initiative for 'history from below' there is an effort to bring the people in, to humanise history. There is, however, more to it than that. Inputting the 'history-less', the oppressed, high up on the agenda of historians in the Third World countries (from which, I shall argue, we have much more to learn, despite the widely shared and justified admiration for the Western academic exemplars), an ideological point was being made. It is not just a question of enlarging the scope of history. It is not merely the addition of a few more 'topics' to the historians' repertoire. Consider, for example, the impact of Frantz Fanon. Sartre might have been over-selling his wares a bit when he wrote, "Fanon is the first since Engels to bring the processes of history into the clear light of day."7 But Fanon's anguished defence of 'the oppressed'of the Third World cast a spell on a number of historians, particularly in Africa as we shall see later. "The militant who faces the colonialist war machine with the bare minimum of arms realises that while he is breaking down colonial oppression he is building up automatically yet another system of exploitation. This discovery is unpleasant, bitter and sickening: and yet everything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side, and the good on the other."8 Even if one disagreed with Frantz Fanon (e g, his characterisation of the working class) his rhetoric created a resonance in the Third World, far beyond Algeria. This was not merely because of the ideological predilections of some Third World intellectuals in their occasional 'political activist' moments. This was also because a major paradigm change was on the way in the wake of political decolonisation, a reassessment of the 'nationalist' interpretative framework in history and other social sciences. However, 'history from below' reached the shores of this country not from a Third World source but, judging by the citations and so forth, from England. In that country the practitioners of 'history from below' derived their inspiration from diverse sources, but chiefly from a Marxist orientation. Hobsbawm has recently told us how a new approach to history developed in the intellectual interactions of a group of Marxist historians who first got together in 1946 to re-edit the celebrated People's History of England (1938) by A L Morton: "There is little doubt that the rise of 'social history' in Britain as a field of study, and especially of 'history from below' or 'history of the common people', owes a great deal to the work of the