The Origins of Middle-Class Culture : : Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780 / / John Smail.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Archive Pre-2000
• VerfasserIn: Smail, John,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2019]; ©1995
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (296 p.) :; 9 b&w illustrations, 1 map, 1 chart, 7 tables

In this book John Smail focuses on the economic and social life in one of the most important Northern textile centers as he explores themes fundamental to the history of eighteenth-century England. By developing a cultural theory of class formation, he offers a solution to a question that has provoked spirited discussion in recent years: what were the origins of middle-class English culture? Smail argues that a group's class identity is a culture that its members share, one that encompasses economic, social, and political factors in a common worldview. He traces the emergence of an increasingly prosperous manufacturing and middle class elite in Halifax when large-scale and capitalistic textile operations began to undercut the small-scale, independent clothiers and yeomen. The new manufacturers and the elite professionals associated with them, he shows, became involved in different economic forms and relationships of capitalistic production. They developed their own attitudes toward credit, investment, and money, with a different consumer orientation toward a whole range of luxury items and fashionable goods. By examining the range of voluntary associations and official institutions in the public sphere and the new expectations of the family and forms of sociability in the private sphere, he shows how this new elite built its middle-class consciousness in opposition to other social groups. While Smail concentrates on a particular community, he continually explores the impact of the wider world on these families and the implications of their experiences.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS, MAP, FIGURE -- TABLES -- PREFACE -- ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS -- INTRODUCTION -- 1. Theory and Methods -- 2. The Middling Sort and Their World -- Part I. Process: The Making of a Middle-Class Experience -- Introduction -- 3. Economic and Cultural Change in Halifax’s Textile Industry -- 4. Loans and Luxuries: Setting the Textile Industry in Context -- Part II. Crystallization: The Making of a Middle-Class Consciousness -- Introduction -- 5. Constructing the Public Sphere: Associations, Disputes, and Parliamentary Politics -- 6. Constructing the Private Sphere: The Family and Sociability -- Conclusion -- 7. The Middle Class and Their World -- 8. Implications and Speculations -- INDEX