class

class is about power. The history of social class is about the way in which men and women gained and used power over others, in matters of government and the state, in ideas, culture, and education, but above all in the relationships of production and consumption. The concept of social class has been and is used by historians in their struggle to understand the experience, social relationships, and social conflicts of past and present.

By the 1960s, historians had established the major outlines of this story. Sometime in the late 18th–early 19th cent., the way in which the British people began to think about their own society and the way in which the major conflicts and relationships of that society developed began to change. Eighteenth-cent. society was a hierarchy of ranks and orders held together by relationships of deference and patronage, although the sense of a bi-polar division of rich and poor, rulers and ruled, aristocracy and people might inform debates on poverty, consumption, and the nature of the constitution. The new relationships and consciousness of class were associated with economic change, with the dominance of capitalist property relationships, with the intensity of competition in commerce, and, above all, with the reorganization of work through the division of labour and new machine-based, often steam-driven, technologies. Early conflicts were associated with trade unionism and the new technologies. The 1830s and 1840s were decades of intense conflict associated with constitutional change. There were key periods of industrial conflict in the 1880s and the quarter-century before 1926.

Social class was used to explain a wide variety of other changes and relationships. The demographic transition to low birth rates and low death rates was linked to middle-class experience in the second half of the 19th cent. and then filtered down to skilled and then unskilled working-class people. The voting patterns and political behaviour of the 20th cent. and the rise of the modern Labour and Tory Parties were related to middle- and working-class interests. Class was related to privilege in housing and education, to habits of dress, food consumption, and speech.

Behind this interpretation lay a series of assumptions. British writing was dominated by a three-class model, loosely related to the three factors of production identified by Ricardo in 1817. The aristocracy were rent takers, the middle class were profit takers, and the working class wage earners. A rigid Marxist presentation assuming an increasingly divisive conflict between capital and labour was rare, but the notion of a potential conflict derived from relationships to the means of production and the stabilization of this conflict in the 1850s and 1860s was central to the story. Explicit references to the ideas of Max Weber are even rarer, but his assumptions provide valuable guidance. Class was related to market position and hence involved privileges of education as well as property. Class was related to status which involved recognition by others in social status or ‘social honour’.

This story has been questioned. Eighteenth-cent. historians have identified a ‘middling sort’ not least in patterns of consumption. The re-examination of the political events of the 1830s and 1840s, especially the language of those contests, yields little evidence of self-aware conflict groups based upon economic relationships. The closer study of work revealed a lack of homogeneity of experience within the major social classes. Divisions within classes, of gender, party, religion, region, ethnicity, were seen as providing identities more dominant than class itself.

Social class has lost its privileged position in the narrative of British social history, but it remains a crucial means of explaining the conflicts and inequalities that arose and arise from the relationships of production and consumption, not least because, in the last 200 years, the language of class has been used in covert and overt ways by the people of Britain.

See also social history.

R. J. Morris