#john brewer

Oklahoma County continues- Luis Ruiz, Carina Saunders, David Prater & the Bethany Officers

The questions seem to me to be located in the actual historical record and not in any variety of historiography. And they continue to perplex historians of many persuasions. Certainly there were many prefigurements of middle-class "emergence" in urban politics. But, as John Brewer argues, middle-class independence was constantly constrained and brought back within the channels of dependency by the powerful controls of clientage: The producers of luxury goods - of furniture, carriages, and clothing - retailers of all sorts, those, from prostitutes to dancing masters, who provided services for the rich, all these people (and they constituted a sizeable proportion of the metropolitan work force) relied for their living on a culture centred upon the Court, Parliament and the London season. This situation need not induce deference: it could generate resentment and hostility. What it could not do, until the arena of the market became more anonymous, was generate independence.

I can agree that my bi-polar model may have more relevance to rural, small town and, especially, manufacturing districts expanding beyond any corporate controls (the locus of "proto-industrialisation") than it does to the larger corporate towns and, certainly, to London. It was not part of my intention to diminish the significance of the growth throughout the century, in numbers, wealth and cultural presence, of the middling orders who came (in the terms of Jürgen Habermas) to create and occupy a "public sphere". These include the groups described by John Brewer: ...lawyers, land agents, apothecaries, and doctors: middlemen in the coal, textile, and grain trades: carters, carriers, and innkeepers: booksellers, printers, schoolteachers, entertainers, and clerks: drapers, grocers, druggists, stationers, ironmongers, shopkeepers of every sort: the small masters in cutlery and toy making, or in all the various luxury trades of the metropolis. The list could be much extended, and should certainly include the comfortable freeholders and substantial tenant farmers. And it is from such middling groups that Eley sees "the emergence and consolidation of a new and self-conscious bourgeois public": Ultimately related to processes of capitalist development and social transformation... processes of urban cultural formation, tendentially supportive of an emergent political identity and eventually linked to regional political networks; a new infra-structure of communications, including the press and other forms of literary production... and a new universe of voluntary association; and finally, a regenerate parliamentarism...

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