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7 Middle-Class Formation in Eighteenth-Century North America Konstantin Dierks The editorial board of Time Magazine has been selecting a “Man of the Year” since 1927; in 1969 it selected not an emblematic individual but a symbolic social group, whom it called “The Middle Americans.” The choice was an unusual one, yet the editorial board struggled less to justify the aptness of its selection than to describe who comprised this nebulous group. They were “defined as much by what they are not as by what they are.”“Middle Americans” were not “the poor or the rich”; they were “a vast, unorganized fraternity bound together by a roughly similar way of seeing things.” How could such a shapeless social group come to personify an entire year in the cultural life of an imperial nation in the thick of a war in Viet Nam and a civil rights movement at home? “Middle Americans,” the magazine intoned , “physically and ideologically inhabit the battleground of change.” A loose amalgam of racial but especially class identity, they seemed not a force propelling change, so much as one reacting to it—reacting against every perceived manifestation of turbulence in the 1960s, whether black militancy, foreign war, generational tension, rising taxes, or declining “morals.” Largely sympathetic to their plight, the magazine granted “Middle Americans” the victim status for which they hungered.1 However ridiculous this instance of cultural swaddling may now seem, it nevertheless reminds us of a once-powerful analytic move: to conjure up the cultural figure of the middle class and to locate it within a battleground of historical change. No matter how shapeless in reality, the cultural figure of the middle class was nevertheless commonly used for much of the twentieth century to explain the march of history. In the 1930s, for instance, some scholars sought to explain the rise of fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany through the bitter resentments of the middle class.2 In the 1950s, both triumphalist and cautionary scholars attributed the newfound global dominance of the United States to the predominance of its middle class.3 Ironically, Time Magazine in 1969 may have helped usher in a real decline of the middle class in the United States,4 although the concern here is less with the relative standing of the middle class than with the explanatory power it has been, and can be, accorded. Refocusing on the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic World, this chapter seeks not to claim the origins of a middle class for that era, but instead to interrogate contemporary understandings of the process of historical change in relation to the “middling sort.” In eighteenth-century print culture circulating on both sides of the Anglophone Atlantic World, authors of several new genres of technical literature (that is, literature that taught skills) presented the “middling sort” as a cultural figure within an Atlantic economy, an economy growing increasingly commercialized as well as reliant on the practice of letter writing. Like scholars in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, and similar to the editorial board of Time Magazine in 1969, technical authors of the early eighteenth century sought to explain not how change had happened in the past, but how change was happening in the present. The energies of the ever-shapeless middle class served as a means to clarify broader historical transformations, whether the rise of Italian fascism in the 1930s, the rise of global dominance by the United States in the 1950s, the election of President Richard Nixon in 1968, or the commercialization of an Atlantic economy in the early eighteenth century. For watchful authors living in all of these eras, historical change could not be explained without invoking the middle class. Yet this analytic move—explaining an interval of historical change through the energies of the middle class—no longer holds the sway it once had. Since the 1980s, historians concerned with either class or capitalism have encountered vigorous theoretical challenges that question the very concept of class, never mind the existence of a middle class.5 Class identity has been especially charged with being too fissured by competing identities such as gender and race to be of any analytic value in explaining historical change.6 (The fall of class analysis has meant the rise of race as the new central trope of North American history since the 1980s.) One spirited defense of the concept of class among Early Americanists has emanated from Seth Rockman, who argued that it is impossible to explain...

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