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15. Afterword: Constellations of Class in Early North America and the Atlantic World
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15 Afterword: Constellations of Class in Early North America and the Atlantic World Christopher Tomlins Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” no. 14 Does class matter? Legions of professional peers tell us that class— like God—is dead.1 So why insist that concepts of class and class struggle retain explanatory salience? Is it to advertise a commitment to writing the history “from below” of ordinary people, their quotidian adversities and occasional triumphs? That of itself requires no embrace of class concepts. The possibility that class is a generalizable social phenomenon may be a conclusion to be drawn from such history, but class is no essence immanent within it.2 Does it convey, then, a sharpened, more compassionate commitment, to retrieve those people (in Thompson’s romantic words) from “the enormous condescension of posterity” by underscoring the moral validity and historical significance of their collective agency at moments of “acute social disturbance”?3 Such an objective is emotionally satisfying, to be sure, but these days at least falsely premised. For posterity no longer condescends. Mostly it does not bother to recall at all; particularly in the United States, its face turns always to the future. But when posterity does glance pastward, it is less with condescension than with a tourist’s enthusiastic naïveté. Posterity consumes the mnemonic commodities sold in historical areas, cheers their skirmishing reenactors, sheds a tear over the bathetic scripts that chart our heritage. “History comes alive at Charles Towne Landing, where Native Americans, English, Africans and Barbadians came together to create the first successful English colony in Carolina in 1670. Interacting with each other and the land, these groups each made important contributions and shaped the history of the region.”4 Perhaps the objective is not sentiment but science. By categorizing behavior , organization, and action might we not uncover a shared impulse to stratify that convinces us our subjects, no matter how diverse, are in some human essential all alike? Our empiricism, however, reconstitutes history as sociology. So to sociologize our history lends it a positivism of our own invention , which discounts that which is not social.5 In their introduction to this collection, Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith traverse the half-century thicket of historiographical and epistemological debates that have rendered the class concept both attractive and problematic. They also identify a tendency on display in a number of the chapters in this book6—conceiving class in terms of its effects—which, they argue, may provide a fruitful point of conjunction for hitherto conflicting interpretive positions. What is the promise of this discourse of effects? Theoretical innovation. Class, one may propose, is a “place”(a position, a locale) correspondent with a mode of production; as such it is a structural condition of social relations.7 But it is unobservable as such, hence unknowable except in theory. Empirically, we encounter class only as effects—fragmented , particularized, fluid, evanescent—manifest on the occasions when class butts into our plural worlds of experience (economic, political, cultural, linguistic).8 We discover that in the heads of flesh-and-blood people , class is not an experience in common; it may not even be a common experience.9 The chapters presented here, in their different ways, do much to demonstrate how and why a theory of class as effects might be found useful and productive by other scholars who also think class matters. So judged, the project has served an important purpose. We can be pleased with what we have achieved. But before we pack up and turn for home let us pause a moment to consider again what we have achieved, this time from a distinct standpoint . Let us examine what we have produced in relation to its mode of production —professional history. Tourism is a mode of production that creates one set of historical products. Professional history is another. Each imposes certain epistemological conditions on its subjects. The dominant métier of professional history is the placement of subjects in relation to each other within a continuum we call historical time.10 When historians say that a subject has been “historicized,” they mean...