Some historians write about social capital

...and most completely ignore the subject or else don't understand what it's about. Well, at least some of them in Patterns of Social Capital (ed Robert Rotberg), which claims to "advance the study of social capital across chronological and geographical space".

Some of them either just write standard articles about their own subject with some random references to social capital or Putnam throw in without bothering to say what they mean by social capital (or as the intro says, "Brucher, Muir, Grew and Rosenband test generalizations, as most historians do, against empirical details over longer or shorter episodes of time").

Others just regard social capital as pretty well the same thing as civil society/civic engagement/public sphere without really bothering to define them (see Mary Ryan's Civil Society as Democratic Practice: North American Cities During the Nineteenth Century), or else decide that social capital is basically cultural capital so let's just talk about cultural capital instead (see Raymond Grew's Finding Social Capital: The French Revolution in Italy) - though Jack Greene does more usefully discuss how social capital needs to be located within cultural capital to look at how others can inherit advantages associated with this (in his article relating it to colonial British America).

Generally, there seems a deep suspicion of the concept of social capital among some of the historians writing in the collection:

Some of the essays attack Putnam's description of Italian history, particularly his description of the origins of higher social capital in Northern Italy resulting from republican guild associations, and therefore are suspicious of whether a theoretical concept can be built around this mistaken analysis (and also of guild based association in other countries - see Rosenband's Social Capital and the Early Industrial Revolution)

There is also suspicion about a concept used by political scientists and economists, eg:
* Greene says that historians are "far less concerned with how to attain the specific goals that modern society deems desirable" and that social scientists' definition of social capital is "too narrow, too instrumental, too Whiggish, and too Western". It needs to be applicable across a wide variety of times and spaces (I would have it was but nevermind) and that it must be "redefined and expanded to include not just traditions of civil interaction but the entire range of institutions, practices, devices, and learned behaviours that enable collectivities and individuals to render physical spaces productive and social and cultural spaces agreeable".
* For Mary Ryan, "'social capital' might ring pleasantly in the ears of social scientists, but to some humanists it emits a discordant economistic sound"
* Elisabeth Clemens regards it as a metaphor, using financial imagery, but that metaphors can be dangerous because they can "assert multiple dimensions of similarity" which may be misleading. In social capital's case, she argues that it can lead to seeing social capital as as portable or fungible as financial capital, whereas it is much more firmly rooted and embedded in networks.

However, there are also a number of very useful analyses of social capital in different contexts, and also how using social capital as an analytical concept in historical studies needs to address a number of important issues. More on these in a bit...