Politics & Power Quote by G. M. Trevelyan

A provocation disguised as a definition: Trevelyan frames "social history" not by what it adds, but by what it withholds. "Negatively" is doing the heavy lifting. It signals both modesty (no grand theory here) and a quiet polemic against the prestige of high politics. By describing social history as "the history of a people with the politics left out", he flips the conventional hierarchy: the real subject is "a people", while politics becomes an optional garnish - sometimes distorting, often overrepresented, and frequently mistaken for the whole meal.

The subtext is also an institutional jab. In early 20th-century Britain, history meant parliaments, cabinets, and imperial statecraft: a gentlemanly narrative of leaders and laws. Trevelyan, a liberal humanist historian with a gift for narrative, is insisting that the rhythms of ordinary life - work, family, religion, leisure, class habits - deserve center stage. The line markets social history as more intimate and democratic, a corrective to the "great men" tradition that can reduce entire populations to background scenery.

Yet the definition is slyly self-undermining. "Politics left out" is impossible in any strict sense; power leaks into everything from housing to schooling to who gets to be counted as "a people". Trevelyan's phrasing works because it admits, without laboring the point, that disciplines are made by exclusions. Social history isn't politics-free; it's a shift in camera angle, from the dais to the crowd, with the implicit claim that the crowd is where history actually happens.