Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World

Front Cover
Simon Middleton, Billy G. Smith
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 M06 3 - 344 pages

As a category of historical analysis, class is dead—or so it has been reported over the past two decades. The contributors to Class Matters contest this demise. Although differing in their approaches, they all agree that socioeconomic inequality remains indispensable to a true understanding of the transition from the early modern to modern era in North America and the rest of the Atlantic world. As a whole, they chart the emergence of class as a concept and its subsequent loss of analytic purchase in Anglo-American historiography.

The opening section considers the dynamics of class relations in the Atlantic world across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—from Iroquoian and Algonquian communities in North America to tobacco lords in Glasgow. Subsequent chapters examine the cultural development of a new and aspirational middle class and its relationship to changing economic conditions and the articulation of corporate and industrial ideologies in the era of the American Revolution and beyond.

A final section shifts the focus to the poor and vulnerable—tenant farmers, infant paupers, and the victims of capital punishment. In each case the authors describe how elite Americans exercised their political and social power to structure the lives and deaths of weaker members of their communities. An impassioned afterword urges class historians to take up the legacies of historical materialism. Engaging the difficulties and range of meanings of class, the essays in Class Matters seek to energize the study of social relations in the Atlantic world.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Class Discc urse and Industrialization in
10
Theorizing Class in Glasgow and the Atlantic World
16
Stratification and Class in Eastern Native America
35
Subaltern Indians Race and Class in Early America
49
Class Struggle in a West Indian Plantation Society
62
Class at an African Commercial Enclave
76
MiddleClass Formation in EighteenthCentury
99
Corporations and the Coalescence of an Elite Class
123
Sex and Other MiddleClass Pastimes in
156
Class and Capital Punishment in Early Urban
185
Class Stratiication and Childrens Work
198
Constellations of Class in Early North America
213
Notes
235
List of Con ributors
315
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World
Simon Middleton,Billy G. Smith
Limited preview - 2011
Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World
Simon Middleton,Simon David Middleton,Billy Smith
Limited preview - 2008
Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World
Simon David Middleton,Billy Gordon Smith
No preview available - 2008

Common terms and phrases

African American Revolution Anglo-American Ann Carson artisans Atlantic World authority Bank Boston boys British canoemen Cape Coast capital Carson chapter Charleston chiefdoms city's class identity class struggle CMTA coastal colonial commercial company slaves corporate cultural decades E. P. Thompson Early America early eighteenth early modern economic eighteenth century elite England English European example farmers gender Glasgow Governor groups historians History Ibid indentured Indians inequality Island John Kitts labor landlords leases Leisler's Rebellion letters lived Livingston Livingston Manor London Manor manufacturing Mashpee Massachusetts mechanics mercantile merchants middle class Montaukett Native Native American nineteenth nineteenth-century nomic North America NYSL Pennsylvania percent Philadelphia plantation planters political poor privileges production protect relationships Rensselaer Rensselaerswyck rent Revolutionary scholars Smith social Society South Carolina status tenants tion tobacco lords trade traditional transformation urban wages wealth West William women workers York young

About the author (2011)

Simon Middleton is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Sheffield and author of From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Billy G. Smith is Professor of History at Montana State University and author of The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750-1800.

Bibliographic information

TitleClass Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World
Early American Studies
EditorsSimon Middleton, Billy G. Smith
Editionreprint
PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, 2011
ISBN0812205561, 9780812205565
Length344 pages
  
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