History from Below

History from below is the methodological commitment to recover the experience of populations that official histories systematically exclude — peasants, women, enslaved people, indigenous populations, workers, the colonized. Developed in parallel by the Annales School (which recovered the structural conditions of daily life) and British Marxist historians (Thompson, Hobsbawm, Rudé, who recovered worker and peasant agency), the approach treats as historically central exactly what official narratives treat as peripheral. Applied to AI, the commitment requires writing the transition from the perspective of the content moderators, the data annotators, the displaced professionals, the students navigating credentials that may not hold, and the populations who do not appear in the press release — the vast majority of people whose lives the technology is reshaping.