[3] Thompson's work is considered by some to have been among the most important contributions to social history in the latter twentieth-century, with a global impact, including on scholarship in Asia and Africa.

His older brother was William Frank Thompson (1920–1944), a British officer in the Second World War, who was captured and shot aiding the Bulgarian anti-fascist partisans.

In 1946, Thompson formed the Communist Party Historians Group with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr, and others.

[citation needed] Thompson's first major work of scholarship was his biography of William Morris, written while he was a member of the Communist Party.

By exploring the ordinary cultures of working people through their previously ignored documentary remains, Thompson told the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries.

Reflecting on the importance of the book for its 50th anniversary, Emma Griffin explained that Thompson "uncovered details about workshop customs and rituals, failed conspiracies, threatening letters, popular songs, and union club cards.

[16] The Making of the English Working Class had a profound effect on the shape of British historiography, and still endures as a staple on university reading lists more than 50 years after its first publication in 1963.

Writing for the Times Higher Education in 2013, Robert Colls recalled the power of Thompson's book for his generation of young British leftists: I bought my first copy in 1968 – a small, fat bundle of Pelican with a picture of a Yorkshire miner on the front – and I still have it, bandaged up and exhausted by the years of labour.

Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below, "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.

He opened the gates for a generation of labour historians, such as David Montgomery and Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes.

A major work of research and synthesis, the book was also important in historiographical terms: with it, Thompson demonstrated the power of a historical Marxism rooted in the experience of real flesh-and-blood workers.

In later essays, Thompson has emphasized that crime and disorder were characteristic responses of the working and lower classes to the oppressions imposed upon them.

England's lower classes were kept under control by large-scale execution, transportation to the colonies, and imprisonment in horrible hulks of old warships.

In 1978, he published The Poverty of Theory which attacked the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and his followers in Britain on New Left Review (saying: "...all of them are Geschichtenscheissenschlopff, unhistorical shit"[22]).

[citation needed] Thompson played a key role in both END and CND throughout the 1980s, speaking at many public meetings, corresponding with hundreds of fellow activists and sympathetic intellectuals, and doing committee work.

He had a particularly important part in opening a dialogue between the west European peace movement and dissidents in Soviet-dominated eastern Europe, particularly in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for which he was denounced as a tool of American imperialism by the Soviet authorities.

[citation needed] He wrote dozens of polemical articles and essays during this period, which are collected in the books Zero Option (1982) and The Heavy Dancers (1985).

The product of years of research and published shortly after his death, it shows how far Blake was inspired by dissident religious ideas rooted in the thinking of the most radical opponents of the monarchy during the English civil war.

Although he left the party in 1956 due to its suppression of open debate over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he continued to refer to himself as a "historian in the Marxist tradition", calling for a rebellion against Stalinism as a prerequisite for the restoration of communists' "confidence in our own revolutionary perspectives".

[1][35] As Marxist history became less fashionable in the face of the adaptation of discourse-focused approaches inspired by the linguistic turn and post-structuralism in the 1980s, Thompson's work was subjected to critique by fellow historians.

and Dorothy Thompson, has argued that Scott's critique was ahistorical, given that the book was published in 1963, before the second-wave feminist movement had fully developed a theoretical gender perspective.

Rowbotham did acknowledge that whilst they supported the emancipation of women, the Thompsons had mixed feelings about the contemporary second-wave feminist movement, regarding it as too middle class.

[37] Gareth Stedman Jones claimed that the conception of the role of experience in The Making of the English Working Class embodied the idea of a direct link between social being and social consciousness, ignoring the importance of discourse as a means of mediating between the two, enabling people to develop a political understanding of the world and orientating them to political action.

[40] A fellow left-wing historian, she wrote studies on women in the Chartist movement, and the biography Queen Victoria: Gender and Power; she was Professor of History at the University of Birmingham.