In this book Peter Burke adopts a socio-cultural approach to examine the changes in the organization of knowledge in Europe from the invention of printing to the publication of the French Encyclopedie. The book opens with an assessment of different sociologies of knowledge from Mannheim to Foucault and beyond, and goes on to discuss intellectuals as a social group and the social institutions (especially universities and academies) which encouraged or discouraged intellectual innovation. Then, in a series of separate chapters, Burke explores the geography, anthropology, politics and economics of knowledge, focusing on the role of cities, academies, states and markets in the process of gathering, classifying, spreading and sometimes concealing information. The final chapters deal with knowledge from the point of view of the individual reader, listener, viewer or consumer, including the problem of the reliability of knowledge discussed so vigorously in the seventeenth century. One of the most original features of this book is its discussion of knowledges in the plural. It centres on printed knowledge, especially academic knowledge, but it treats the history of the knowledge 'explosion' which followed the invention of printing and the discovery of the world beyond Europe as a process of exchange or negotiation between different knowledges, such as male and female, theoretical and practical, high-status and low-status, and European and non-European. Although written primarily as a contribution to social or socio-cultural history, this book will also be of interest to historians of science, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and others in another age of information explosion.

So far histories of historiography have concentrated almost exclusively on the West. This is the first book to offer a history of modern historiography from a global perspective.
Tracing the transformation of historical writings over the past two and half centuries, the book portrays the transformation of historical writings under the affect of professionalization, which served as a model not only for Western but also for much of non-Western historical studies. At the same time it critically examines the reactions in post-modern and post-colonial thought to established conceptions of scientific historiography.
A main theme of the book is how historians in the non-Western world not only adopted or adapted Western ideas, but also explored different approaches rooted in their own cultures.

《历史学与社会理论(第2版)》是英国著名史学家彼得。伯克的经典之作。《历史学与社会理论(第2版)》从各种角度追溯了历史学和社会科学许多领域的兴起过程以及它们之间的相互作用，特别是在近十年中的相互交融，重新梳理了历史学与社会理论之间的关系，对一些重大问题的分析具有深远的启迪作用，扩大了社会理论的概念。作者论述了当代史学领域与社会学理论的研究新成果、新方法、新术语与新概念（包括社会学家研究使用的术语与概念），评述了史学界及其他社会科学领域大师们的富有开创性的观点与理论，对中外史学界与社会学界均有重要影响。