E. P. Thompson’s Historiographic Agency in Beyond the Frontier

Abstract

This article examines how E. P. Thompson’s Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944 (1997), a hybrid work of affectionate commemoration, historiographic investigation, and political intervention, redefines the practice of historiography. I argue that the book is driven by what I term historiographic agency: a historian’s capacity to mediate between past and present, to resist ideological distortions, and to construct meaning through evaluative and interpretive judgment. For Thompson, such agency entails a dual responsibility: to recover the irreducible complexity of past lives and simultaneously to intervene in the political dilemmas of his own time. By confronting state-sponsored myths in both Britain and Bulgaria, and by resisting the abstraction of lived experience into scholarly categories, Beyond the Frontier amplifies the tension between agency and structure that had long preoccupied Thompson’s political, pedagogical, and historiographic practice. I try to demonstrate that, rather than representing a pessimistic break with Thompson’s romanticism evident in his earlier works, the book reflects a strategic shift: from depicting and celebrating the agency of historical actors themselves, to foregrounding the historian’s own role in negotiating between events, myths, and lived experiences. In this sense, Thompson’s mourning becomes historiography, and his historiography itself a form of political engagement.