Page 7 - (SSF1033) INTRODUCTION TO MALAYSIAN SOCIAL HISTORY

SOCIAL HISTORY

John Breuilly
Social history is more difficult to define

than political or economic or military
history. Whereas those terms apply to the

history of distinct kinds of activity, the
term social covers virtually everything. In

fact there have been three very different
views about the nature of social history.

The oldest view of social history was that
it was the history of manners, of leisure,

of a whole range of social activities which
were conducted outside political,

economic, military and any other
institutions which were the concern of

specific kinds of history. One problem
with this rather residual view of social

history was that its domain shrank as
historians of women, the family, leisure,
education, etc., developed their own

fields as distinct disciplines.