Class in Britain

1. Introduction: The Rise and Fall of Class?

1. P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–1914(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1, 23; J. Alt, ‘Beyond Class: The Decline of Industrial Labor and Leisure’, Teleos, xxviii (1976), pp. 55–80.

2. A. Adonis and S. Pollard, A Class Act: The Myth of Britain's Classless Society (London, 1997), is much the most suggestive recent treatment. For other books explicitly or implicitly concerned with class see: P. Joyce (ed.), Class (Oxford, 1995); R. Marris, How to Save the Underclass (London, 1996); P. Saunders, Unequal but Fair? A Study of Class Barriers in Britain (London, 1996); P. Johnson and H. Reed, Two Nations? The Inheritance of Poverty and Affluence (London, 1996); D.J. Lee and B.S. Turner (eds), Conflicts About Class (London, 1996); Lord Bauer, Class on the Brain: The Cost of a British Obsession (London, 1997); S. Brook, Class: Knowing Your Place in Modern Britain (London, 1997).

3. Quoted in the Independent on Sunday, 4 April 1993. See also P. Junor, The Major Enigma (London, 1993), pp. 202, 253–4. S. Hasler, ‘Britannia rules – but she's still enslaved to class’, Sunday Times, 22 December 1991.

4. Consider, for example, this (surely incontrovertible) remark by Gabrielle Annan, ‘Only the Drop’, London Review of Books, 17 October 1996, p. 16: ‘Not many English writers can manage a novel in which class is not an issue at all.’

5. K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (New York, 1964), p. 2. Quoted in R.J. Morris, Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1850 (London, 1979), p. 10; M. Thatcher, ‘Don't Undo My Work’, Newsweek, 27 April 1992, p. 37.

6. ‘Held sway’, but was never totally dominant. For the survival of an alternative, more conservative tradition, which stressed hierarchy and subordination as the key themes in the British past, rather than class and conflict, see M. Taylor, ‘The Beginnings of Modern British Social History?’, HW, no. 43 (1997), pp.155–76.

7. Marx's thought on these subjects was neither systematic nor consistent, and as one scholar observes, ‘any historian who wishes to come to grips with Marx's concepts of class and class-consciousness in order to refute or substantiate either or both through empirical inquiry must familarise himself with the whole corpus of Marx's writings’. R.S. Neale, Class in English History, 1680–1850 (Oxford, 1981), p. 46. The literature on Marx and class is vast. See especially A. Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (2nd edn, London, 1981); P. Calvert, The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction (London, 1982); F. Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique (New York, 1979).

8. L. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (London, 1972), p. 33.

9. K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1963), p. 124; K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (New York, 1947), pp. 48–9.

10. J.R. Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 27–8.

11. S.R. Szreter, ‘The Genesis of the Registrar-General's Social Classification of Occupations’, British Journal of Sociology, xxxv (1984), pp. 522–46; J.H. Goldthorpe and P. Bevan, ‘The Study of Social Stratification in Great Britain, 1946–76’, Social Science Information, xvi (1977), pp. 279–334; G. Marshall, H. Newby, D. Rose and C. Vogler, Social Class in Modern Britain (London, 1988); W.G. Runciman, ‘How Many Classes Are There in Contemporary British Society?’, Sociology, xxix (1990), pp. 377–96; G. Marshall and J. Goldthorpe, ‘The Promising Future of Class Analysis’, Sociology, xxvi (1992), pp. 381–400; R.E. Pahl, ‘Does Class Analysis Without Class Theory Have a Promising Future?: A Reply to Goldthorpe and Marshall’, Sociology, xxvii (1993), pp. 253–8.

12. For two recent studies along these lines, see A. Walder, ‘The Re-Making of the Chinese Working Class, 1949–1981’, Modern China, x (1984), pp. 3–48; I. Katznelson and A.R. Zolberg (eds), Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986).

13. For two recent discussions (and revivals?) of this term, see P. Anderson, ‘The Notion of Bourgeois Revolution’, in idem, English Questions (London, 1992), pp. 105–18; R. Brenner, ‘Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism’, in A.L. Beier, D. Cannadine and J.M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 271–304.

14. In The Communist Manifesto, p. 41, Marx and Engels predicted that the imminent proletarian revolution would overthrow the ‘old conditions of production’, and would thus ‘have swept away the condition for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

15. This interpretation is most famously associated with the work of two historians: R.H. Tawney, ‘The Rise of the Gentry, 1558–1640’, EcHR, xi (1941), pp. 1–38, and C. Hill, The English Revolution of 1640 (London, 1940); idem, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London, 1961). See also P. Zagorin, ‘The Social Interpretation of the English Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, xix (1959), pp. 376–401; L. Stone, Social Change and Revolution in England, 1540–1640 (London, 1965); idem, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 26–48; R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited (London, 1988), pp. 98–133.

16. J.H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725 (London, 1967); E.P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?’, SH, iii (1978), p. 162.

17. The depiction of the Industrial Revolution as the ‘great transformation’ between the pre-modern and the modern worlds is to be found in: W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1960); P. Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (London, 1969); D.S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969); E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (Harmondsworth, 1969). This phase in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution is discussed in D. Cannadine, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880–1980’, P&P, no. 103 (1984), pp. 149–59.

18. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968); A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (London, 1959); idem, ‘Middle-Class Consciousness in English Politics, 1780–1846’, P&P, no. 9 (1956), pp. 65–74; H.J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969); E.J. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964).

19. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London, 1975). This is, inevitably, a much over-simplified account. Throughout the 1960s, a fierce and acrimonious debate raged among English Marxists as to whether the bourgeoisie was dominant in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, or whether it was not – a debate, incidentally, which reflected Marx's own uncertainty in the matter. See, especially, P. Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review, no. 23 (1964), pp. 26– 51; E.P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds), The Socialist Register, 1965 (London, 1965), pp. 311–62; P. Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism (London, 1980), passim; idem, English Questions, pp. 122–8.

20. A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London, 1958); D. Thompson (ed.), The Early Chartists (London, 1971); J.F.C. Harrison, The Early Victorians, 1832–51 (London, 1971); J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London, 1974); D. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London, 1975).

21. The literature on the labouring aristocracy thesis is vast. See especially E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Labour Aristocracy’, in idem, Labouring Men, pp. 272–315; idem, ‘Artisan or Labour Aristocrat’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xxxvii (1984), pp. 355–72; idem, ‘The Aristocracy of Labour Reconsidered’, in idem, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1984), pp. 227–51; A.E. Musson, ‘Class Struggle and the Labour Aristocracy, 1830–1860’, SH, i (1976), pp. 335–56; H.F. Moorhouse, ‘The Marxist Theory of the Labour Aristocracy’, SH, iii (1978), pp. 61–82; A.J. Reid, ‘Politics and Economics in the Formation of the British Working Class’, SH, iii (1978), pp. 347–56; R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian England (Oxford, 1976); idem, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850–1914 (London, 1981); G.J. Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840–1880 (London, 1978).

22. The pioneering works here, which stressed the deeply rooted social divisions in Britain from the 1880s to 1914, are R.C.K. Ensor, ‘Some Political and Economic Interactions in Later Victorian England’, TRHS, 4th ser., xxxi (1949), pp. 17–28; G. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London, 1935). For more recent work, built around the concept of deepening class divisions, see: P.F. Clarke, ‘Electoral Sociology of Modern Britain’, History, lvii (1972), pp. 31–55; H.J. Perkin, ‘Land Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain’, in idem, The Structured Crowd: Essays in Social History (Brighton, 1981), pp. 100– 135; idem, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London, 1989), pp. 62–115, 171–85; E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Formation of British Working Class Culture’, and ‘The Making of the Working Class, 1870–1914’, both in idem, Worlds of Labour, pp. 176–213; G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relations Between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, 1976); idem, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Re-Making of a Working Class’, in idem, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History, 1832 - 1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 179–238; S. Meacham, A Life Apart: The English Working Class, 1890–1914 (London, 1977). For a useful recent summary of this class-based interpretation, see J. Belchem, Class, Party and the Political System in Britain, 1867–1914 (London, 1990), esp. pp. 1–6.

23. H. Pelling and A.J. Reid, A Short History of the Labour Party (11th edn, London, 1996), pp. 39–40; J. Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, vol. ii, The General Strike, 1925–1926 (London, 1969); M. Morris, The General Strike (Harmondsworth, 1976); J. Skelley (ed.), The General Strike, 1926 (London, 1976); N. Branson, Britain in the Nineteen Twenties (London, 1976); M. Crick, Scargill and the Miners (London, 1985); A. Callinicos and M. Simons, The Great Strike: The Miners’ Strike of 1984–5 and its Lessons (London, 1985); D. Reed and O. Adamson, Miners' Strike, 1984–5: People versus State (London, 1985); M. Adney and J. Lloyd, The Miners' Strike: Loss without Limit (London, 1986).

24. But see the alternative tradition explored in Taylor, ‘Modern British Social History?’, pp. 155–76.

25. Morris, Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution, p. 10: ‘Marx still dominates.’

26. G. Lefebvre, The Coming of the French Revolution, 1789 (Princeton, 1947); idem, The French Revolution (2 vols, New York, 1962–64); A. Soboul, The French Revolution, 1787–1799 (London, 1974); idem, A Short History of the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (London, 1977). For a helpful survey, see G. Ellis, ‘The “Marxist Interpretation” of the French Revolution’, EHR, xciii (1978), pp. 353–76.

27. S.R. Ross, Francisco I. Madero: Apostle of American Democracy (New York, 1955); C.C. Cumberland, The Mexican Revolution: Genesis Under Madero (Austin, 1952); J. Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York, 1968); J.M. Hart, Revolutionary Mexico (Berkeley, 1987); A. Knight, ‘Revisionism and Revolution: Mexico Compared to England and France’, P&P, no. 134 (1992), pp. 158–65.

28. D. Koenker, Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution (Princeton, 1981); S.A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories, 1917–1918 (Cambridge, 1983); D. Raleigh, Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov (Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); R.G. Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918 Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution (Princeton, 1972); idem, ‘Toward a Social History of the October Revolution’, AHR, lxxxviii (1983), pp. 31–52.

29. Interestingly enough, and despite Marx's original insight that it was bourgeois, the American Revolution was explained much more in terms of ideology than of class. See R.B. Morris, ‘Class Struggle and the American Revolution’, WMQ, 3rd ser., xix (1962), pp. 3–29; B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).

30. D. Thompson, ‘Nineteeth-Century Hidden Agendas’, History Today, February 1992, pp. 45–8; B. Palmer, ‘Is There Now, or Has There Ever Been, a Working Class?’, History Today, March 1992, pp. 51–4; R. Price, ‘Historiography, Narrative and the Nineteenth Century’, JBS, xxxv (1996), pp. 220–56; J. Thompson, ‘After the Fall: Class and Political Language in Britain, 1780–1900’, HJ, xxxix (1996), pp. 785–806; C. Kent, ‘Victorian Social History: Post-Thompson, Post-Foucault, Post-Modern’, Victorian Studies, xl (1996), pp. 97–134.

31. This more nuanced interpretation of recent British economic history may be found in such works as: P.L. Payne, British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1978); R. Samuel, ‘The Work-shop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain’, HW, no. 3 (1977), pp. 6–72; A.E. Musson, The Growth of British Industry (London, 1978); R.C. Floud and D.N. McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (2 vols, Cambridge, 1981); M.J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (London, 1981). For a discussion of this ‘limits to growth’ interpretation of British economic history for the period 1750 to 1850, see Cannadine, ‘Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution’, pp. 159–67.

32. For some suggestive ideas, see W.H. Sewell, jr, ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E.P. Thompsons Theory ofWorking-Class Formation, in H.J. Kayeand K. McClelland (eds), E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia, 1990), pp. 50–77.

33. There is an extensive literature on aristocratic involvement in non-agricultural enterprises. See especially J. T. Ward and R.G. Wilson (eds), Land and Industry: The Landed Estate and the Industrial Revolution (Newton Abbot, 1971); D. Cannadine, Lords and Landlords: The Aristocracy and the Towns, 1774–1967 (Leicester, 1980), part i; J.V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986), part ii. The debate on purchases of landed estates by middle-class businessmen and professionals is still running. For the most recent contributions, see W.D. Rubinstein, ‘New Men of Wealth and the Purchase of Land in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, P&P, no. 92 (1981), pp. 125–47; L. Stone and J.C.F. Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984); D. Spring, ‘Social Mobility and the English Landed Elite’, Canadian Journal of History, xxi (1986), pp. 333 – 51; F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Life After Death: How Successful nineteenth-Century Businessmen Disposed of Their Fortunes’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xliii (1990), pp. 40–61; W.D. Rubinstein, ‘Cutting Up Rich: A Reply to F.M.L. Thompson’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xlv (1992), pp. 350–61; F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Stitching It Together Again’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xlv (1992), pp. 362–75.

34. W.D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain Since the Industrial Revolution (London, 1981); G. Ingham, Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in Britain's Social Development (London, 1984); G.R. Searle, Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid Victorian Great Britain (Oxford, 1993), esp. pp. 1–16; E.H.H. Green, ‘Rentiers Versus Producers? The Political Economy of the Bimetallic Controversy, c. 1880–1898’, EHR, ciii (1988), pp. 588–612; R. Harrison and J. Zeitlin (eds), Divisions of Labour: Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1985); A.J. Mayer, ‘The Lower Middle Class as an Historical Problem’, JMH, xlvii (1975), pp. 409–31; G. Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (London, 1977); G. Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982); W.J. Reader, Professional Men: The Rise of the Professional Classes in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1966); H.J. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880 (London, 1989); P. Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (London, 1975); T. McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France, 1820–1920 (London, 1976).

35. L. Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965); J.A. Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984); F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963); A.J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Civil War (London, 1981).

36. R.I. McKibbin, ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’, in idem, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 1–41; A.J. Reid, ‘Class and Organisation’, HJ, xxx (1987), pp. 225–38; idem, Social Classes and Social Relations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1995).

37. P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660– 1730 (London, 1989); R.J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820–50 (Manchester, 1990); M.J. Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981); C. Jones, International Business in the nineteenth Century: The Rise and Fall of a Cosmopolitan Bourgeoisie (London, 1987); D. Gunn, ‘The “Failure” of the Victorian Middle Class: A Critique’, in J. Seed and J. Wolff (eds), The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester, 1988), pp. 17–39. See also J.H. Hexter, ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, in idem, Reappraisals in History (London, 1961), pp. 71–116. For a sympathetic reappraisal of this reappraisal, see J. Barry, ‘Introduction’, in J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (London, 1994), pp. 1–2, 6–11.

38. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 11; idem, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society’, pp. 146–50. The fullest recent treatment of this subject is in P. Joyce (ed.), Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987).

39. R.W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge, 1973); P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Conflict for Control, 1830–1885 (London, 1978); H. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1880 (London, 1980); B. Fine and E. Leopold, ‘Consumption and the Industrial Revolution’, SH, xv (1990), pp. 151–79; L. Tiersten, ‘Redefining Consumer Culture: Recent Literature on Consumption and the Bourgeoisie in Western Europe’, Radical History Review, no. 57 (1993), pp. 116–59; G. Stedman Jones, ‘Class Expression Versus Social Control: A Critique of Recent Trends in the Social History of “Leisure”’, in idem, Languages of Class, pp. 76–89; F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Social Control in Victorian Britain’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xxxi (1981), pp. 189–208; M.A. Simpson and T.H. Lloyd (eds), Middle-Class Housing in Britain (Newton Abbot, 1977); M.J. Daunton, Housing and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing, 1850–1914 (London, 1983); D. Cannadine, ‘Residential Differentiation in Nineteenth-Century Towns: From Shapes on the Ground to Shapes in Society’, in J.H. Johnson and C.G. Pooley (eds), The Structure of Nineteenth-Century Cities (London, 1982), pp. 235–52; R. Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 186–249.

40. Stone, Causes of the English Revolution, pp. 26–43; L.J. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714–1760 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 3–10, 15–16; Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 315–16.

41. Mackenzie and A. Silver, Angels in Marble: Working Class Conservatives in Urban England (London, 1968); E.A. Nordlinger, The Working-Class Tories: Authority, Deference and Stable Democracy (London, 1967); R. Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War, 1899–1902 (London, 1972).

42. J. Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1993), p. 8; D. Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–18 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 10 –16.

43. J.L. Newton et al. (eds), Sex and Class in Women's History (London, 1983); J. Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago, 1984); L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, 1987); J. Lown, Women and Industrialization: Gender at Work in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1990); J. Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880–1914’, EHR, cviii (1993), pp. 629–52; A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995). For critiques of Davidoff and Hall, see A. Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women's History’, HJ, xxxvi (1993), pp. 383–414; D. Wahrman, ‘“Middle Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria’, JBS, xxxii (1993), pp. 396–432.

44. S. Alexander, ‘Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History’, HW, no. 17 (1984), pp. 133–49; J.W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), esp. chs 2, 3 and 4; K. Canning, ‘Gender and the Politics of Class Formation: Rethinking German Labor History’, AHR, xcvii (1992), pp. 736–68.

45. R. Rorty (ed.), The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (London, 1967); Stedman Jones, Languages of Class; R. Porter and P. Burke (eds), The Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1987); P. Schoffler, Historians and Discourse Analysis’, HW, no. 17 (1989), pp. 37–65; P. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991); R. Samuel, ‘Reading the Signs’, HW, no. 32 (1991), pp. 88–109; L. Berlanstein (ed.), Re-Thinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana-Champaign, 1993); Joyce, Visions of the People; idem, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994).

46. Z. Lockman, ‘Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899–1914’, Poetics Today, xv (1994), pp. 157–90.

47. This is an excessively simplified summary of an extremely complex and controversial literature. The debates and disagreements may be followed – though not always clarified – in R. Gray, ‘The Deconstruction of the English Working Class’, SH, xi (1986), pp. 363–73; N. Kirk, ‘In Defence of Class: A Critique of Recent Revisionist Writing Upon the Nineteenth-Century English Working Class’, International Review of Social History, xxxii (1987), pp. 2–47; B.D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990); D. Mayfield and S. Thorne, ‘Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language’, SH, xvii (1992), pp. 165–87; J. Lawrence and M. Taylor, ‘The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of language – A Reply’, SH, xviii (1993), pp. 1–18; P. Joyce, ‘The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne’, SH, xviii (1993), pp. 81– 5; J. Vernon, ‘Who's Afraid of the Linguistic Turn? The Politics of Social History and its Discontents’, SH, xix (1994), pp. 81– 7; P. Joyce, ‘The End of Social History?’, SH, xx (1995), pp. 74–91. See also the debate, initiated by Lawrence Stone, on ‘History and Post-Modernism’, in P&P, no. 131 (1991), pp. 217–18; no. 133 (1991), pp. 204–13; no. 135 (1992), pp. 189–208.

48. G. Eley and K. Nield, ‘Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?’, SH, v (1980), pp. 249–71;. T. Judt, ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, HW, no. 7 (1979), pp. 66–94; S. Hochstadt, ‘Social History and Politics: A Materialist View’, SH, vii (1982), pp. 75–83.

49. See, for instance, M. Sonenscher's review of Katznelson and Zolberg, Working-Class Formation, in SH, xiii (1988), pp. 385–8, where teleology is detected.

50. S. Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London, 1989), p. xvi. For one brave attempt to revive a master narrative of class formation and class conflict, albeit as a local study, see. T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990).

51. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted? (London, 1981); G. Stedman Jones, ‘Why is the Labour Party in a Mess?’, in idem, Languages of Class, pp. 239–56; D. Milband, Reinventing the Left (London, 1995); E. Shaw (ed.), The Labour Party Since 1979: Crisis and Transformation (London, 1995). For a work on the seventeenth century, with obvious contemporary resonances, see C. Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London, 1984).

52. P. Jenkins, ‘Goodbye to All That’, New York Review of Books, 14 May 1992, pp. 16–17; H. Young, ‘Only Blair Dares to Admit the Good Old Days are Gone’, Guardian, 16 June 1994. For Blair's explicit rejection of Marxism, see A. Blair, New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country (London, 1996), pp. 30, 38, 58–9; J. Sopel, Tony Blair: The Moderniser (London, 1995), p. 3; A. Blair, Socialism (Fabian Pamphlet no. 565, London, 1994), pp. 2–3; P. Mandelson and R. Liddle, The Blair Revolution: Can New Labour Deliver? (London, 1996), p. 29.

53. Blair, New Britain, pp. 51–6; T. Rogaly, ‘Blair's Community Spirit’, Financial Times, 18 March 1995; K. Brown, ‘Socialist Leader Woos Middle Classes’, Financial Times, 24 March 1995; G. Kelly, ‘Off the Shelf Sociology’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 24 March 1995, p. 21; A. Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda (New York, 1993); Pelling and Reid, Short History of the Labour Party, pp. 189–92. For a fuller discussion of Blair, see chapter five, section iii.

54. This is discussed more fully below, in chapter five, section ii.

55. S. Collini, ‘Badly Connected: The Passionate Intensity of Cultural Studies’, Victorian Studies, xxxvi (1993), pp. 455–60. I have found the following particularly helpful on the demise of Communism: B. Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York, 1993); D.S. Mason, Revolution in East-Central Europe: The Rise and Fall of Communism and the Cold War (Boulder, 1992); P. Cipkowski, Revolution in Eastern Europe: Understanding the Collapse of Communism in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Soviet Union (New York, 1991); D. Pryce-Jones, The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, 1985–1991 (London, 1995); R. Skidelsky, The World After Communism: A Polemic For Our Times (London, 1995).

56. For the fall of Marxism, see: A. Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, 1993); J.H. Moore (ed.), Legacies of the Collapse of Marxism (Fairfax, Va., 1994); R. Aronson, After Marxism (New York, 1995); A. Callari et al., Marxism in the Post-Modern Age (New York, 1995). See also P. Curry, ‘Towards a Post-Marxist Social History: Thompson, Clark and Beyond’, in A. Wilson (ed.), Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and its Interpretation (Manchester, 1993), p. 171: ‘The whole tradition dominated and inspired by the October Revolution has now come to an end.’

57. Revisionist work on the French Revolution is extensive. Among the most famous and influential books are A. Cobban, The Myth of the French Revolution (London, 1955); idem, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution (London, 1964); W. Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1980); idem, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1989); W.H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labour from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980); F. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (London, 1981); T.C.W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Aristocrats versus Bourgeois? (London, 1987); L. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (London, 1986). For modifications and restatements of the earlier social interpretation, see G.C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution: Marxism and the Revisionist Challenge (London, 1987); E.J. Hobsbawm, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (London, 1990); C. Jones, ‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change’, in C. Lucas (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991), pp. 69 –118. The fullest recent summary of these historiographical developments is in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Rise and Fall of the French Revolution (London, 1996).

58. R. Ruiz, The Great Rebellion: Mexico, 1905–1924 (New York, 1980); P.V.N. Hendersson, Felix Diaz, the Pofirians and the Mexican Revolution (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1981); P. Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police and Mexican Development (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1991); Knight, ‘Revisionism and Revolution’, pp. 165–79; idem, ‘The Mexican Revolution: Bourgeois? Nationalist? Or just a “Great Rebellion”?’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, iv (1985), pp. 1–37.

59. L.H. Haimson, ‘The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth-Century Russia’, Slavic Review, xlvii (1988), pp. 1– 20; E. Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London, 1990); R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1990); R.G. Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Soviet History and its Critics’, Russian Review, liii (1994), pp. 165–82; L.H. Siegelbaum and R.G. Suny, ‘Class Backwards? In Search of the Soviet Working Class’, in L.H. Siegelbaum and R.G. Suny (eds), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, N.Y. 1994), pp. 1–26; O. Figes, A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London, 1997).

60. P.M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London, 1988), esp. pp. xv–xxv.

61. W.G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, vol. ii, Substantive Social Theory (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 47–8, 181, 416; I am much indebted, for this formulation, to an unpublished paper by G. Stedman Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of “Class Struggle”: Middle Class and Bourgeoisie, 1789–1850’. A post-modern, post-socialist, post-communist Marx has yet to emerge. No doubt he will appear before too long.

62. W. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (New York, 1987), pp. 30–31; idem, ‘The Concept of Class’, in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London, 1992), pp. 13–25. For the counter-argument, that ‘talk of its [i.e. class's] death is greatly exaggerated’, see H. Benyon, ‘Class and Historical Explanation’, in Bush, Social Orders and Social Classes, p. 249.

63. This is the general argument advanced in both McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, and Reid, Social Classes and Social Relations in Britain.

64. Jenkins, ‘Goodbye to All That’, pp. 16–17; Curry, ‘Towards a Post-Marxist Social History’, pp. 158–200. For dissenting views, reasserting the continued importance, both historical and contemporary, of class (in a Marxist sense) and the class struggle, see E.M. Wood, The Retreat from Class (London, 1986); N. Geras, ‘Post Marxism?’, New Left Review, no. 163 (1987), pp. 40–82; N. Kirk (ed.), Social Class and Marxism: Defences and Challenges (Aldershot, 1996); E.O. Wright (ed.), Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge, 1997).

65. F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London, 1988); idem (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (3 vols, Cambridge, 1990). See also the following (mildly sceptical) reviews and discussions: D. Cannadine, ‘The Way We Lived Then’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 1990, pp. 934–5; P. Addison, ‘Dismantling the Class War’, London Review of Books, 25 July 1991, pp. 12–13; G. Crossick, ‘Consensus, Order and the Social History of Modern Britain’, HJ, xxxv (1992), pp. 945–51; T. Koditschek, ‘A Tale of Two Thompsons’, Radical History Review, no. 56 (1993), pp. 68–84. See also (and compare with his remarks quoted in note 25) R.J. Morris, ‘Class’, in J. Cannon (ed.), The Oxford Companion to British History (Oxford, 1997), p. 217: ‘Social class has lost its privileged position in the narrative of British social history.’

66. C. Hill, ‘A Bourgeois Revolution?’, in J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions (Princeton, 1980), pp. 109–39; L. Stone, ‘The Bourgeois Revolution of Seventeenth-Century England Revisited’, P&P, no. 109 (1985), pp. 44–54. See also A. McInnes, ‘When Was the English Revolution?’, History, lxvii (1982), pp. 377–92; B. Coward, ‘Was There an English Revolution in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century?’, in C. Jones et al. (eds), Politics and People in Revolutionary England (Oxford, 1986), pp. 9–40; C.S.R. Russell, Unrevolutionary England (London, 1990); J.S. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993). For attempts to modify and rehabilitate the concept, see B. Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (London, 1988); G. Eley and W. Hunt (eds), Reviving the English Revolution (London, 1988); R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, 1993), esp. pp. 638–716.

67. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 2nd edn, 1992); idem, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London, 1994); E.P. Thompson, ‘The Making of a Ruling Class’, Dissent, summer (1993), p. 380. For studies of Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm et al., which implicitly recognise that they are no longer setting the scholarly agenda, see H.J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Oxford, 1984); R. Samuel, British Marxist Historians, 1880–1980’, New Left Review, no. 120 (1980), pp. 42–55. For Hobsbawm's recent reflections on Marxism see On Historians (London, 1997).

68. Some (perhaps most) sociologists are convinced that ‘class still matters’, that it is ‘still the most common source of social identity’, that ‘the class structure itself remains an obvious feature of life in late twentieth-century Britain’, that ‘modern Britain is a society shaped predominantly by class’, and that ‘classes have not withered away, and class identities exert a powerful influence on electoral choice’ (Marshall et al., Social Class in Modern Britain, pp. 137, 143, 147, 183, 248). But the rarified and arcane classes they think still matter bear scarcely any relation to the vernacular categories of social description and social identity which are the subject of this book, and with which, presumably, John Major was concerned. At the same time, they also recognise (p. 155) that ‘this does not mean that Britain is a nation of class warriors, resolutely pursuing a struggle to preserve or usurp power, in order to achieve specifically class objectives’ – i.e. Marx is dead. This does leave matters very uncertain. For some valuable comments (and criticisms) of British sociologists’ continuing (and confused) obsession with class, see S. Ringen, ‘The Open Society and the Closed Mind’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 January 1997, p. 6.

69. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); G. Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984), p. 304. As with many fashionable methodologies, the ‘linguistic turn’ is also a less original approach to the past than some of its proponents claim. Consider these words, written two generations ago, by an historian of nineteenth-century Britain: ‘Language is an inescapable part of the environment. In any situation, we see not the material facts of that situation, but what the particular vocabulary of our time and our group has taught us to look for’ (H.M. Lynd, England in the Eighteen Eighties (London, 1945), p. 61).

70. Runciman, Substantive Social Theory, p. 108.

71. Lindert, ‘English Occupations, 1670–1811’, Journal of Economic History, xl (1980), pp. 685–712; idem, ‘Unequal English Wealth since 1670’, Journal of Political Economy, lciv (1986), pp. 1127–62; P.H. Lindert and J.G. Williamson, ‘Revising England's Social Tables, 1688–1812’, Explorations in Economic History, xix (1982), pp. 385–408; idem, ‘Reinterpreting Britain's Social Tables, 1688–1913’, Explorations in Economic History, xx (1983), pp. 94–109; N.F.R. Crafts, British Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985), pp. 1–8, 48–70; W.G. Runciman, ‘How Many Classes Are There in Contemporary British Society?’, Sociology, xxiv (1990), pp. 377–96; R.V.Jackson, ‘Inequality of Incomes and Lifespans in England Since 1688’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xlvii (1994), pp. 508–24.

72. G. Kitson Clark, An Expanding Society: Britain, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, 1967); J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, JMH, xlvii (1975), pp. 601–28; idem, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Un-known Subject’, AHR, lxxxvii (1982), pp. 311–36.

73. This remains a much neglected subject. For some suggestive hints, see W.H. McNeill, The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times (Princeton, 1983); L. Hartz et al., The Founding of New Societies (New York, 1969); G. Martin, Bunyip Aristocracy: The New South Wales Constitution Debate of 1853 and Hereditary Institutions in the British Colonies (London, 1986); H. Liebersohn, Discovering Indig-nous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso and Romantic Travel Writing’, AHR, xcix (1994), pp. 746–66; I. Copland, The Princes of India and the Endgame of Empire, 1917–1947 (Cambridge, 1997).

74. R. Darnton, ‘A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order’, in idem, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1985), pp. 107–43. For a discussion of this approach, see R. Chartier, ‘Texts, Symbols and Frenchness’, JMH, lvii (1985), pp. 682–95; R. Darnton, ‘The Symbolic Element in History’, JMH, lviii (1986), pp. 218–34.

75. Marshall et al., Social Class in Modern Britain, p. 187. For the distinction between formal and informal languages of social description, see K. Wrightson, ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches’, in L. Bonfield, R. Smith and K. Wrightson (eds), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure: Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on His Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1986), pp. 178–83.

76. G. Watson, The English Ideology (London, 1973), p. 174. In this regard, note these two comments of P.N. Furbank, ‘Sartre's Absent Whippet’, London Review of Books, 24 February 1994, p. 26. Here is the first: IIn reality, everyone in England belonged to a crisscross of hierarchies, occupying a different place in each.’ And here is the second: ‘Many people, at least in Britain, entertain simultaneously in their head a three-class system (“upper class”, “middle class” and “working class”) and a two-class system (“bourgeoisie” and “proletariat”), accommodating or masking the mismatch between the two as best they can.’ The author had previously explored some of the contradictions between these three mental models of British social structure in P.N. Furbank, Unholy Pleasure: The Idea of Social Class (Oxford, 1985). For an earlier attempt to explore the contradictions and discrepancies between the dichotomous and the hierarchical models of society, see D. Lockwood, ‘Sources of Variation in Working Class Images of Society’, The Sociological Review, new ser., xiv (1966), pp. 249–67. For a more recent attempt to deal with all three models, see B. Waites, A Class Society at War: England, 1914–1918 (Leamington Spa, 1987).

77. E. Gellner, ‘Knowledge of Nature and Society’, in M. Teich, R. Porter and B. Gustafsson (eds), Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 9–17.

78. Consider, in this regard, the remarks of F.W. Maitland, Township and Borough (Cambridge, 1898), pp. 22–4: ‘Mere numbers are important…. There are some thoughts which will not come to men who are not tightly packed.’

79. K. Wilson, ‘Whiggery Assailed and Triumphant: Popular Radicalism in Hanoverian England’, JBS, xxxiv (1995), p. 126.

80. M. Thatcher, The Revival of Britain (London, 1989), p. 98.

81. For example, G.D. Squibb, Precedence in England (Oxford, 1981).

82. M. Weber, ‘Class, Status and Party’, in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber (London, 1946), pp. 180–95.

83. L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications (Chicago, 1991); R. Burghart, ‘Hierarchical Models of the Hindu Social System’, Man, xiii (1978), pp. 519–36; A. Appadurai, ‘Is Homo Hierarchicus?’, American Anthropologist, xiii (1986), pp. 754–61. For an attempt to write the history of Britain around the organising principle of hierarchy, see R. Strong, The Story of Britain (London, 1996), esp. pp. 79–83, 205, 210, 259, 333, 335, 431–41, 489, 502–3, 527, 538, 568. Strong, of course, established his academic reputation as an art historian of pageantry and spectacle in early modern England pageantry and spectacle explicitly designed to celebrate, proclaim and reinforce a hierarchical view of the world.

84. M. Kawai, ‘On the System of Social Ranks in a Natural Group of Japanese Monkeys’, Primates, i (1958), pp. 11–48; M.R.A. Chance and C.J. Jolly, Social Groups of Monkeys, Apes and Men (London, 1970), pp. 202–5; F. De Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (London, 1982), pp. 13–14, 86–7, 182–8, 210–13; P.C. Lee and J.A. Johnson, ‘Sex Differences in Alliances, and the Acquisition and Maintenance of Dominance Status among Immature Primates’, in A.H. Harcourt and F. De Waal (eds), Coalitions and Alliances in Humans and other Animals (Oxford, 1992), pp. 445–75; W.G. Runciman, ‘Introduction’, in W.G. Runciman, J. Maynard Smith and R.I.M. Dunbar (eds), Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man, Proceedings of the British Academy, lxxxviii (1996), pp. 1–4.

85. In which regard, it is worth recalling Lord Runciman's observation (London Review of Books, 10 March 1994, p. 5) that ‘in twentieth- as in fifteenth-century England, there are systematically observable inequalities of economic, ideological and political power, to which the contemporary rhetoric relates in all sorts of still understudied ways’. My italics.

2 The Eighteenth Century: Class Without Class Struggle

1. E.P. Thompson, ‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture’, Journal of Social History, vii (1974), pp. 382–405; idem, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?’, SH, iii (1978), pp. 133–65. For a recent re-evaluation, sympathetic yet critical, see P. King, ‘Edward Thompson's Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Studies: The Patrician-Plebeian Model Re-Examined’, SH, xxi (1996), pp. 215–28. For another interpretation, which also sees eighteenth-century society deeply divided, but in an aspirational rather than adversarial way, see D.C. Coleman, ‘Gentlemen and Players’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xxvi (1973), pp. 92–116; N. McKendrick, ‘“Gentleman [sic] and Players” Revisited: The Gentlemanly Ideal, the Business Ideal, and the Professional Ideal in English Literary Culture’, in N. McKendrick and R.B. Outhwaite (eds), Business Life and Public Policy: Essays in Honour of Donald Coleman (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 98–136.

2. P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London (London, 1989); P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit (London, 1967); G. Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London, 1982); J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1988); idem, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997); P. Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford, 1989); P. Langford, A Polite and Commerial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989); idem, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991); L. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London, 1968); J. Barry, ‘Consumers’ Passions: The Middle Class in Eighteenth-Century England’, HJ, xxxiv (1991), pp. 207–16; idem, ‘The State and the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Historical Sociology, iv (1991), p. 85; J. Barry and C. Brooks (eds), The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke, 1994).

3. P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (2nd edn, London, 1971); J.A. Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1984); J.V. Beckett, The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford, 1986); J.C.D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, 1985); L. Stone and J.C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1984). Note also this comment on the Stones’ book by R.A. Houston, ‘British Society in the Eighteenth Century’, JBS, xxv (1986), p.461: ‘Its wider implication is that English society is best understood as a finely graded hierarchy in which snobbery was the most important divisive factor.’

4. The classic articles here are J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, JMH, xlvii (1975), pp. 601–28; idem, ‘The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject’, AHR, lxxxvii (1982), pp. 311–36. See also D. Cannadine, ‘British History as “A New Subject”: Politics, Perspectives and Prospects’, Welsh History Review, xvii (1995), pp. 313–31.

5. For a recent and (inevitably) inconclusive attempt to discuss the relative merits of these three historical interpretations of the Hanoverian social order, see D. Hay and N. Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (Oxford, 1997), pp. 17–36, 188–208. For an even more inconclusive debate on the popularity and appropriateness of the hierarchical and the three-stage models as more ‘accurate’ guides, see the following exchange between J.M. Innes and J.C.D. Clark. Innes: ‘I would happily wager that a thousand contemporary references will be found characterising eighteenth-century England as a ‘commercial society’ to every one characterising it as landed, aristocratic, noble, hierarchical or the like.’ Clark: ‘I happily accept: but, alas, Innes has not yet named the stake.’ J.M. Innes, ‘Jonathan Clark, Social History, and England's “Ancien regime”’, P&P, no. 115 (1987), p. 181; J.C.D. Clark, ‘On Hitting the Buffers: The Historiography of England's Ancien Régime’, P&P, no. 117 (1987), p. 206, n.34. It cannot be said that such exchanges seriously advance the cause of historical understanding. For another display of equally irreconcilable views about the Hanoverian social order, see Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, p. 510, and J.A. Cannon, Samuel Johnson and the Politics of Hanoverian England (Cambridge, 1994), p. 262. I have discussed these historiographical contradictions more fully in D. Cannadine, ‘Beyond Class? Social Structures and Social Perceptions in Modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy, forthcoming (1998).

6. D.A.L. Morgan, ‘The Individual Style of the English Gentleman’, in M. Jones (ed.), Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe (Gloucester, 1986), pp. 15–35; M.H. Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500 (London, 1990), pp. 1–24; D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000 –1300 (London, 1992), pp. 15–38, 41–4, 344–7. See also P. Boyde, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 222–4.

7. E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943); D. Cressy, ‘Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England’, Literature and History, iii (1976), pp. 29–44; G. Aylmer, ‘Caste, Ordre (ou Statut) et Classe dans les Premiers Temps de l'Angleterre moderne’, in R. Mousnier (ed.), Problèmes de Stratification sociale (Paris, 1968), pp. 137–57. A.H. Halsey, Change in British Society (3rd edn, Oxford, 1986), p. 55. For the broader European context see P. Burke, ‘The language of Orders in Early Modern Europe’, and W. Doyle, ‘Myths of Order and Ordering Myths’, both in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London, 1992), pp. 1–12, 218–29.

8. A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); W.F. Bynum, ‘The Great Chain of Being After Forty Years’, History of Science, xiii (1975), pp. 1–28; K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London, 1982), pp. 18–23; idem, ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England’, in P. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford, 1991), pp. 32–5; R.B. Schlatter, The Social Ideas of Religious Leaders, 1660–1688 (Oxford, 1940), pp. 106–23.

9. R.W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700–1780 (London, 1981), pp. 14–17; F.A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell's London Journal, 1762–3 (London, 1950), p. 320; P. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Corfield, Language, History and Class, pp. 103–4; Cannon, Samuel Johnson, pp. 154–70.

10. R. Gough, The History of Myddle (ed. D. Hay, Harmondsworth, 1981); K. Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People” in Tudor and Stuart England’, in Barry and Brooks, The Middling Sort of People, p. 30; N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities: Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1984), p. 279.

11. E. Gellner, ‘Knowledge of Nature and Society’, in M. Teich, R. Porter and B. Gustafsson (eds), Nature and Society in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1997), p.14; Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 102–3.

12. S. Wallech, ‘The Emergence of the Modern Concept of “Class” in the English Language’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1981), pp. 16–66; H.J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), p. 26.

13. G. Watson, The English Ideology (London, 1973), p. 180.

14. For an incisive critique of hierarchy as a way of seeing society, see P.N. Furbank, Unholy Pleasure: The Idea of Social Class (Oxford, 1985), pp. 75–83. See also his remarks in ‘Sartre's Absent Whippet’, London Review of Books, 24 February 1994, p. 26: ‘Social historians tend to misrepresent “hierarchy”, I think, and it is a comedy to see them struggling with the aid of Gregory King's table of 1690 and of much fudging, to demonstrate that there was a single social hierarchy in 17th century England – whereas all that magistrates and divines meant to declare was that there ought to be one (so that everyone should “know their place”).’ (My italics.)

15. B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West (New York, 1986), pp. 83, 147–9.

16. L. Stone, ‘Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700’, P&P, no. 33 (1966), p. 18.

17. J. Thirsk and J.P. Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), pp. 780–81; Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, pp. 11–12; idem, “‘Sorts of People”’, p. 30; Corfield, ‘Class in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, pp. 115–18; P. Mathias, ‘The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century: A Calculation by Joseph Massie’, in idem, The Transformation of England: Essays in the Economic and Social History of England in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1979), pp. 171–85.

18. Aristotle, The Poetics, book iv, ch. ii; G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago, 1980); R.H. Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York, 1933); T.E. Powell, ‘The “Three Orders” of Society in Anglo-Saxon England’, Anglo-Saxon England, xxxiii (1994), pp. 103–32; Furbank, Unholy Pleasure, pp. 8–9; E. Power, ‘What Feudalism Meant in England’, The Listener, 20 October 1938, pp. 817–18.

19. Wrightson, ‘Estates, Degrees and Sorts’, pp. 30–52; idem, ‘“Sorts of People”’, pp. 28–51; idem, ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches’, in L. Bonfield et al. (eds), The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure: Essays Presented to Peter Laslett on His Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1986), pp. 178–84, 196 n. 49; Wallech, ‘Emergence of the Modern Concept of “Class”’, pp. 24–5, 56.

20. E. Royle and J. Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, 1760–1848 (Brighton, 1982), p. 19; Rogers, Whigs and Cities, p. 129.

21. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 107, 113; Furbank, Unholy Pleasure, p. 11; K. Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 352; N. McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), p. 131.

22. For the medieval background, see R.H. Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism: Essays in Medieval Social History (London, 1985), pp. 114–19, 122–3, 152–5, 164, 217–25, 246–52. For the Civil War, see D.E. Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985), p. 40, in which he describes the Civil War as being the result of ‘two quite different constellations of social, political and cultural forces’: ‘on the one side stood those who had put their trust in the traditional conception of the harmonious, vertically-integrated society… On the other stood those… who wished to emphasise the moral and cultural distinctions which marked them off from their poorer, less disciplined neighbours.’ See also Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 117–18; Wrightson, ‘“Sorts of People”’, pp. 34 –40; Wilson, Sense of the People, pp. 231, 354.

23. Rogers, Whigs and Cities, p. 340; Wilson, Sense of the People, p. 287.

24. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, p. 119; Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, pp. 96, 166, 293; Hay and Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society, p. 25.

25. Wilson, Sense of the People, pp. 128, 143.

26. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 117–19; J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), p. 168.

27. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 102, 114.

28. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 101–2.

29. Many Anglican justifications of hierarchy and subordination are quoted in Clark, English Society, pp. 93–118, 216–35; G. Holmes, ‘Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England’, TRHS, 5th ser., xxvii (1977), pp. 41–68; Wallech, ‘Emergence of the Modern Concept of “Class”’, pp. 56–7; M. Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); J. McVeagh, Tradeful Merchants: The Portrayal of the Capitalist in Literature (London, 1981), pp. 53–82; D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 66.

30. The concept of ‘ideologically determined class stereotypes’ is suggestively discussed in R. McKibbin, Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 270–74. See also Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 63–4 and J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The History of Political Thought: A Methodological Enquiry’, in P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman (eds), Philosophy, Politics and Society: Second Series (Oxford, 1962), p. 199.

31. R. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1990 edn), p. 74; L. Sutherland, ‘The City of London in Eighteenth-Century Politics’, in R. Pares and A.J.P. Taylor (eds), Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier (London, 1956), p. 66; Wilson, Sense of the People, p. 199. For another example of this usage, see Horace Walpole: ‘There was nowhere but in England the distinction of the middling people.’ Quoted in Stone and Stone, Open Elite, pp. 408–9.

32. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation,1707–1837 (London, 1992), p. 92; R. Harris, ‘“American Idols”: Empire, War and the Middling Ranks in Mid-eighteenth-Century Britain’, P&P, no. 150(1996), p. 140.

33. G. Newman, The Rise and Fall of English Nationalism: Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London, 1987), pp. 100–102.

34. Wilson, Sense of the People, pp. 18, 19, 231, 235, 265, 267; H.T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1995).

35. R. Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana, Ill 1929); G.C. Brauer, The Education of a Gentleman: Theories of Gentlemanly Education in England, 1660–1775 (New York, 1959).

36. Clark, English Society, p. 105; Shinagel, Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, pp. 82–6.

37. P.J. Corfield, ‘The Rivals: Landed and Other Gentlemen’, in N. Harte and R. Quinault (eds), Land and Society in Britain, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 1–33.

38. Hanoverian historians have also sometimes been inclined to do this: Clark, English Society, pp. 43, 90; King, ‘Edward Thompson's Contribution to Eighteenth-Century Studies’, p. 221.

39. For some suggestive hints, see D. Wahrman, review of Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, in SH, xvii (1992), pp. 500–501; E.H. Gould, ‘American Independence and Britain's Counter Revolution’, P&P, no. 154 (1997), p. 134, n. 92.

40. J.P. Greene, ‘Search for Identity: An Interpretation of the Meaning of Selected Patterns of Social Response in Eighteenth-Century America’, Journal of Social History, iii (1970), pp. 205–19; idem, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, 1988).

41. S. Foster, The Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven, 1971), pp. 14–15; R.L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 1–13, 184, 264, 267–8, 272–3, 279. For an outstanding study of one colony as a functioning hierarchical society, see R. Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982), part i.

42. R.L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, 1985), pp. 3–54; J.T. Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, 1965), pp. 219, 226–7; E.S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York, 1988), pp. 170–73; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, pp. 104–10; N.H. Dawes, ‘Titles as Symbols of Prestige in Seventeenth-Century New England’, WMQ, vi (1949), pp. 69–83.

43. A.M. Schlesinger, ‘The Aristocracy in Colonial America’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, lxxiv (1962), pp. 3–21; T. Woodcock and J.M. Robinson, The Oxford Guide to Heraldry (Oxford, 1989), pp. 156–70; Greene, ‘Search for Identity’, p. 217; B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 278–9; Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1953), pp. 16–18.

44. B. Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1970), pp. 131–2; idem, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, p.275; Main, Social Structure, p. 198.

45. Bushman, King and People, p. 84; C.N. Degler, Out of Our Past (New York, 1959), pp. 49–50. For other comments on colonial America being ‘short in words of dignity and names of honour’ see J.H.St J. de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1971 edn), pp. 39–41.

46. Main, Social Structure, pp. 222–3, 230–34; C. Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York, 1955), p. 79.

47. C. Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (New York 1953) p. 106.

48. Bushman, Puritan to Yankee, p. 13; idem, King and People, p. 203; Main, Social Structure, p. 237.

49. Main, Social Structure, p. 228; Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, pp. 43–4, 131–5; Bushman, King and People, passim; idem, ‘“This New Man”: Dependence and Independence, 1776’, in R. Bushman et al. (eds), Uprooted Americans: Essays in Honour of Oscar Handlin (Boston, 1979), pp. 77–96; M. Zuckerman, ‘Identity in British America: Unease in Eden’, in N. Canny and A. Pagden (eds), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, 1987), p. 143.

50. See, for instance, the arguments put forward by L. Hartz and W.H. McNeill, that the colonial American frontier was a place whose social order could simultaneously be described as hierarchical, bourgeois and egalitarian: W.H. McNeill, The Great Frontier: Freedom and Hierarchy in Modern Times (Princeton, 1983), pp. 3–31; L. Hartz et al., The Founding of New Socies (New York, 1969), pp. 4–10.

51. For colonial America as a hierarchical society, see J.R. Pole, ‘Historians and the Problem of Early American Democracy’, AHR, lxvii (1962), pp. 626–46; G.S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), part i, esp. pp. 11–23; R.L. Beeman, ‘Deference, Republicanism, and the Emergence of Popular Politics in Eighteenth-Century America’, WMQ xlix (1990), pp. 401–30; R. Berthoff and J.M. Murrin, ‘Feudalism, Communalism and the Yeoman Freeholder: The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement’, in S.G. Kurtz (ed.), Essays on the American Revolution (New York, 1973), pp. 256–88; G.J. Kornblith and J.M. Murrin, ‘The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class’, in A.F. Young (ed.), Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (De Kalb, Ill., 1993), pp. 27–79. For colonial America as a triadic, middle-class dominated society, see J. Clive and B. Bailyn, ‘England's Cultural Provinces: Scotland and America’, WMQ, xi (1954), pp. 202–5; B. Bailyn, ‘Politics and Social Structure in Virginia’, in J. Morton Smith (ed.), Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History (Chapel Hill, 1959), pp. 90–115; R. Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (London, 1972), esp. pp. 131–79. For colonial America as a polarised society, see J.A. Henretta, ‘Economic Development and Social Structure in Colonial Boston’, WMQ xxii (1965), pp. 75–92; K. Lockridge, ‘Land, Population and the Evolution of New England Society, 1630–1790’, P&P, no. 39 (1968), pp. 62–80; G.B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979).

52. For discussion of changing standards of gentility see Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, pp. 193–212.

53. In practice, of course, colonial America, like eighteenth-century England, was simultaneously a hierarchical, triadic and polarised society. See McNeill, The Great Frontier, pp. 3–31; Hartz et al., The Founding of New Societies, pp. 4–10.

54. Hofstadter, America at 1750, pp. 143–4; A.H. Smyth (ed.), The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. v (New York, 1906), p. 362; Clive and Bailyn, ‘England's Cultural Provinces’, p. 203; F.A. Pottle (ed.), Boswell on the Grand Tour: Germany and Switzerland, 1764 (New York, 1953), p.259; Cannon, Samuel Johnson, pp. 182–4.

55. N. McLeod, ‘Interpreting Early Irish Law: Status and Currency’, in Zeitschrift furceltische Philologie, xli (1986), pp. 46–65; xlii (1987), pp. 41–115; G.W.S. Barrow, The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History (Oxford, 1980), pp. 120–21; R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 115–22.

56. Jenkins, Literature, Religion and Society in Wales, 1660–1730 (Cardiff, 1978), pp. 18–20, 58, 238–99; idem, The Foundations of Modern Wales: Wales, 1642–1780 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 390–92.

57. A. Houston and I.D. Whyte, ‘Introduction: Scottish Society in Perspective’, in R.A. Houston and I.D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 23.

58. D. Miller, ‘Hume and Progressive Individualism’, History of Political Thought, i (1980), pp. 269–74; idem, Philosophy andIdeology in Hume's Political Thought (Oxford, 1981), pp. 132–7, 193, 196.

59. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 126–7; Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, pp. 183–4; A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767 (ed. D. Forbes, Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 72, 121–35, 174, 188, 249; A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (ed. R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, with W.B. Todd, 2 vols, Oxford, 1976), vol. ii, p. 714.

60. A.P.W. Malcomson, ‘Absenteeism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History, i (1974), pp.15–35.

61. Jenkins, Foundations of Modern Wales, pp.226–7, 235, 261–7, 312–14; S.J. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, The Making of Protestant Ireland, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1992), p. 60; J. Adam Smith, ‘Some eighteenth-Century Ideas of Scotland’, in N.T. Phillipson and R. Mitchison (eds), Scotland in the Age of Improvement (Edinburgh, 1970), p. 110.

62. There was, of course, a considerable amount of absenteeism in England as well, because of government service, multipleestates, and so on. But its nationalistic-cum-political import was much less. See P. Roebuck, ‘Absentee Landownership in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: A Neglected Factor in English Agrarian History’, Agricultural History Review, xxi (1973), pp. 11–14; F.T. Melton, ‘Absentee Land Management in Seventeenth-Century England’, Agricultural History, lii (1978), pp. 147–59; J.V. Beckett, ‘Absentee Landownership in the Later Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries: The Case of Cumbria’, Northern History, xix (1983), pp. 87–107.

63. B. Lenman, The Jacobite Clans of the Great Glen, 1650–1784 (London, 1984), p. 23.

64. D. Forbes, Hume's Philosophical Politics (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 175–9; Miller, ‘Hume and Progressive Individualism’, pp. 270–72; idem, Hume's Political Thought, pp. 124–6; I. Hont and M. Ignatieff, ‘Needs and Justice in The Wealth of Nations: An Introductory Essay’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 1–15. For other examples of tripartite social description in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, see R.A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment: Edinburgh, 1660–1760 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 83, 144, 206.

65. D. Dubisson, ‘L‘Irlande et le théorie médiévale des “trois ordres”’, Revue de l'Histoire des Religions, clxxxviii (1975), pp. 35–63; T.E. Powell, ‘The Idea of the Three Orders of Society and Social Stratification in Early Medieval Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, xxix (1995), pp. 475–89; Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 63, 71; G.E. Mingay (ed.), Arthur Young and His Times (London, 1975), pp. 165–9.

66. This might also be because social description has been less well studied in Scotland, Ireland and Wales than in England or colonial America for the modern period. But it seems unlikely that this is the only (or major) explanation for the relative absence of the three-layer model on the Celtic fringe. See Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’, pp. 126–7, n. 71.

67. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 47, 129, 140–42; P. Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry, 1640–1740 (Cambridge, 1983) p. 178; Jenkins, Foundations of Modern Wales, p. 107.

68. Houston and Whyte, ‘Scottish Society in Perspective’, pp. 23–4; Ferguson, History of Civil Society, p. 249; Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. ii, p. 795; R.H. Campbell, ‘The Enlightenment and the Economy’, in R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner (eds), The Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment, (Edinburgh, 1982) p. 9.

69. Jenkins, Foundations of Modern Wales, pp. ▓221–2, 265–9; Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, p. xix; Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 104, 115, 119, 126; R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London, 1988), pp. 170, 211.

70. For Scotland, Ireland and Wales as hierarchical societies, dominated by the traditional order, see: Connolly, Religion, Law and Power; Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class; L. Timperley, ‘The Pattern of Landholding in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, in M.L. Parry and T.R. Slater (eds), The Making of the Scottish Countryside (Edinburgh, 1980), pp. 137–54. For the tripartite socal division see T.M. Devine, ‘The Social Composition of the Business Class in the Larger Scottish Towns, 1740’, in T.M. Devine and D. Dickson (eds), Ireland and Scotland, 1600–1850 (Edinburgh, 1983), pp. 163–76; S. Nenadic, ‘The Rise of the Urban Middle Class’, in T.M. Devine and R. Mitchison (eds), People and Society in Scotland, vol. i, 1760–1830 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 109–26; idem, ‘Middle-Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720–1840’, P&P, no. 145 (1994), pp. 122–56; M. Wall, ‘The Rise of a Catholic Middle Class in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, xi (1958), pp. 91–115; D. Dickson, ‘Middle-men’, in T. Bartlett and D.W. Hayton (eds), Penal Era and Golden Age: Essays in Irish History, 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp. 162–85; L.M. Cullen, ‘The Dublin Merchant Community in the Eighteenth Century’, in P. Butel and L.M. Cullen (eds), Cities and Merchants: French and Irish Perspectives on Urban Development, 1500–1800 (Dublin, 1986), pp. 195–210; Jenkins, Foundations of Modern Wales, pp. 115–19, 269–74, 285–9, 302, 368, 386. For these societies as polarised societies, see Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 128; Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, pp. 194–6; Houston and Whyte, ‘Scottish Society in Perspective’, p. 17.

71. R.F. Foster, ‘Introduction’, in C.H.E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland (Cambridge, 1987), p. 14.

72. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, p. 48.

73. N.F.R. Crafts, British Economic Growth During the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985), pp. 9–17, 48–69, 115–40; J. Hoppit, ‘Counting the Industrial Revolution’, EcHR, 2nd ser., xliii (1990), pp. 176–85. The once-fashionable idea that pre-industrial England was like an underdeveloped nation of the 1950s or 1960s, with a small, rich élite, but widespread poverty, owed much to the mistaken analysis of Gregory King. But that analysis, and the interpretation based on it, are now largely discredited: see Holmes, ‘Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England’, pp. 54–68.

74. Cannon, Samuel Johnson, p. 252.

75. E.A. Wrigley, ‘A Simple Model of London's Importance in Changing English Society and Economy, 1675–1750’, P&P, no. 37 (1967), pp. 45–70; idem, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xv (1985), pp. 683–728; P.J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982); Houston and Whyte, ‘Scottish Society in Perspective’, p. 6; L.M. Cullen, ‘Scotland and Ireland, 1600–1800: Their Role in the Evolution of British Society’, in Houston and Whyte, Scottish Society, p. 232.

76. J. Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 99–119, 166–205; M.J. Power, ‘The Social Topography of Restoration London’, in A.L. Beier and R.A.P. Finlay (eds), The Making of the Metropolis: London, 1500–1700 (London, 1986), p. 221; Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 104–46.

77. Cannon, Aristocratic Century, pp. 93–125; idem, Samuel Johnson, pp. 248–98.

78. J.A. Phillips, Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton, 1982), pp. 168–211; F. O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate in Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 172–223; I.R. Christie, British ‘Non-Elite’ MPs, 1715–1820 (Oxford, 1995).

79. J.H. Langbein, ‘Albion's Fatal Flaws’, P&P, no. 98 (1983), pp. 96–120; P. King, ‘Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750–1800’, HJ, xxvii (1984), pp. 25–58; J. Innes and J. Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in eighteenth-Century England’, JBS, xxv (1986), pp. 402–9, 420–30.

80. D. Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in D. Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1975), pp. 17–63; idem, ‘Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase’, in ibid., pp. 189–254; idem, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1992), parts i-iii; P.B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981), esp. pp. 76–105, 159–68; D.W. Howell, Patriarchs and Parasites: The Gentry of South-West Wales in the Eighteenth Century (Cardiff, 1986), p. 168; Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 264–313.

81. Houston, ‘The Literacy Myth? Illiteracy in Scotland, 1630–1760’, P&P, no. 96 (1982), pp. 81–102; idem, Scottish Lit-racy and Scottish Identity (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 20–83; idem, ‘British Society in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 446: ‘There was a clear hierarchy of reading and writing abilities that closely followed the divisions of British society.’

82. Cannon, Aristocratic Century, pp. 34–59; Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, pp. 218–26; L. Stone, ‘The Size and Composition of the Oxford Student Body, 1580–1910’, in L. Stone (ed.), The University in Society (2 vols, Princeton, 1974), vol. i, pp. 37–57; V. Neuberg, Popular Education in eighteenth-Century England (London, 1971), p. 2.

83. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 54–67; Q.R.D. Skinner, ‘Language and Social Change’, in J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 132.

84. Bucholz, ‘“Nothing but Ceremony”: Queen Anne and the Limitations of Royal Ritual’, JBS, xxx (1991), pp. 288–323; G.S. Rousseau, ‘“This Grand and Sacred Solemnity”: Of Coronations, Republics and Poetry’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, v (1982), pp. 1–19; Clark, English Society, pp. 166–78; Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 50–53; Wilson, Sense of the People, pp.87–8, 295–6; Bushman, King and People, pp. 14–25.

85. F. O'Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–1860’ P&P, no. 135 (1992), pp. 79–115; J.L. McCracken, ‘The Social Structure and Social Life, 1714–60’, in T.W. Moody and W.E. Vaughan (eds), A New History of Ireland, vol. iv, eighteenth-Century Ireland, 1691–1800 (Oxford, 1986), p. 49; Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 133–6; S. Lukes, ‘Political Ritual and Social Integration’, in idem, Essays in Social Theory (London, 1977), pp. 52–73.

86. C. Phythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry’, in P. Clark and P. Slack (eds), Crisis and Order in English Towns (London, 1972), pp. 57–85; P. Borsay, ‘“All The Town's a Stage”: Urban Ritual and Ceremony, 1660–1800’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600–1800 (London, 1984), pp. 228–58.

87. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 214–23; Cannon, Samuel Johnson, p. 263.

88. E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, P&P, no. 50 (1971), pp. 76–136; Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 290–331.

89. Jenkins, Making of a Ruling Class, pp. 18–19, 96–100; Wilson, Sense of the People, pp. 84–236; Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics, esp. pp. 139–272; Hay and Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society, pp. 63–70, 135–42, 216–17.

90. J. Brewer, ‘Clubs, Commercialisation and Politics’, in McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 197–262; idem, ‘English Radicalism in the Age of George III’, in J.G.A. Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980), p. 332; N. Rogers, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Politics’, in Barry and Brooks, The Middling Sort of People, pp. 159–80. Brewer's efforts to tie the Wilkite agitation specifically to the ‘middling sorts’ have been critcised in O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, pp. 284, 293–5, 301–3; Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 66–7.

91. Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. 203; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: a Study of the Relations between the Civic Humanist and the Civil Jurisprudential Interpretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought’, in Hont and Ignatieff, Wealth and Virtue, p. 237; Colley, Britons, pp. 71, 100.

92. Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, p. 198.

93. J. Ellis, ‘A Dynamic Society: Social Relations in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1660–1760’, in Clark, Transformation of English Provincial Towns, p. 217; Cannon, Aristocratic Century, pp. 148–79; D.W. Howell, ‘Society, 1660–1793’, in B. Howells (ed.), Early Modern Pembrokeshire, 1536–1815 (Haverfordwest, 1987), pp. 256, 298; Connolly, Religion, Law and Power, pp. 198–233; idem, ‘Albion's Fatal Twigs: Justice and the Law in the Eighteenth Century’, in R. Mitchison and P. Roebuck (eds), Economy and Society in Scotland and Ireland, 1500–1939 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 117–25; Houston and Whyte, ‘Scottish Society in Perspective’, pp. 25–8.

94. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 53–4; Wrightson, ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England’, pp. 196–201; R. Pares, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953), p. 3; J.A. Sharpe, Early Modern England: A Social History, 1550–1760 (London, 1987), pp. 120–23. For a recent attempt to rehabilitate the idea that there was a British working class and, before 1776, a transatlantic proletariat, see: P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, ‘The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century’, in D. Segal (ed.), Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization (London, 1992), pp. 105–41.

95. B. Bailyn, ‘1776: A Year of Challenge – A World Transformed’, Journal of Law and Economics, xix (1976), pp. 437–66; J.P. Greene, All Men Are Created Equal: Some Reflections on the Character of the American Revolution (Oxford, 1976).

96. This argument has been most recently, elo-quently and comprehensively made in Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, pp. 229–369. For discussion of these ideas, see J. Appleby, B.C. Smith, M. Zuckerman and G. Wood, ‘Forum: How Revolutionary was the Revolution? A Discussion of Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution’, WMQ, li (1994), pp. 677–716.

97. Berthoff and Murrin, ‘Feudalism, Communalism and the Yeoman Freeholder’, pp. 276–88; Kornblith and Murrin, ‘Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class’, pp. 45–65; Morgan, Inventing the People, pp. 247–52, 263–87, 288–306.

98. B. Bailyn, ‘Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America’, AHR, lxvii (1961–2), pp. 348–51.

99. There is a massive literature on the rise (? ‘making’) of the American working class and middle class. I have found the following especially suggestive: S.V. Salinger, ‘Artists, Journeymen, and the Transformation of Labor in Late Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia’, WMQ, xl (1983), pp. 62–84; D. Montgomery, ‘The Working Classes of the Pre-Industrial American City, 1780–1830’, Labor History, ix (1968), pp. 3–22; S. Wilentz, ‘Artisan Origins of the American Working Class, International Labor and Working Class History, xviii (1981), pp. 122; idem, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984), pp. 419; S. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

100. G.S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969), pp. 483–99, 569– 74; J.L. Huston, ‘The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765–1900’, AHR, xcviii (1993), pp. 1079–105; J.H. Hutson, ‘Country, Court and Constitution: Antifederalism and the Historians’, WMQ, xxxviii (1981), pp. 337– 68; S. Cornell, ‘Aristocracy Assailed: The Ideology of Backcountry Anti-Federalism’, Journal of American History, lxxvi (1990), pp. 1148–72; J. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984), pp. 51–78. For the demise of hierarchy in one colony/state, see Isaac, Transformation of Virginia, pp. 299 –322.

101. Bushman, ‘Dependence and Independence’, pp. 91– 2; idem, King and People, pp. 235–52; M. Ryan, ‘The American Parade: Representations of the Nineteenth-Century Social Order’, in L. Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History (Los Angeles, 1989), pp. 131–53.

102. Nineteenth-century America, though evolving very differently from nineteenth-century England, remained dependent on the English language of class. For a recent symposium which stimulatingly addresses some of these matters, see B.E. Shafer (ed.), Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (Oxford, 1991), especially the essays by S.M. Lipset and D. Bell.

103. Pole, ‘Historians and the Problem of Early American Democracy’, p. 64; Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee, p. 11; Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution, pp. 347–8.

104. For an introduction to American self-mythologising about social structure, see R. Sennett and J. Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1973); P. Fussell, Class: A Guide to the American Status System (New York, 1983). Interestingly enough, Fussell's book was published in Britain as Caste Marks: Style and Status in the U.S.A. (London, 1984).

105. This point is taken up again in chapter five, section iii.

106. For the subsequent history of ideas (and denials) of class in the United States, see M.J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (Chicago, 1995).

107. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. ii, pp. 181–2; N.T. Phillipson, ‘Adam Smith as Civic Moralist’, in Hont and Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue, p. 191.

108. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. i, p. 265; ibid., vol. ii, pp. 423, 714.

109. Houston, Social Change in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 19–20; Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 53–4.

110. Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, p. 26; Wallech, ‘Emergence of the Modern Concept of “Class”, pp. 425–9; D. Winch, Adam Smith's Politics: An Essay in His-toriographic Revision (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 99–102; D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy (London, 1817), pp. 5, 49; M. Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and Individualism’, in Hont and Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue, pp. 322, 342; D. McClellan (ed.), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford, 1977), p. 341.

111. Winch, Adam Smith's Politics, pp. 99–102. Cf. D.A. Reisman, Adam Smith's Sociological Economics (London, 1976), pp. 93, 100, 194–9.

Notes

Abbreviations

Preface

1. Introduction: The Rise and Fall of Class?

2 The Eighteenth Century: Class Without Class Struggle

AHR	American Historical Review
EcHR	Economic History Review
EHR	English Historical Review
HJ	Historical Journal
HW	History Workshop
JBS	Journal of British Studies
JMH	Journal of Modern History
P&P	Past and Present
SH	Social History
TRHS	Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
WMQ	William and Mary Quarterly