Notes Introduction We thank Dan Richter, Greg Nobles, and an anonymous referee for their very useful comments on this essay. 1. On these academic and structural developments, see Greg Nobles, “Class,” in A Companion to Colonial America, ed. Daniel Vickers (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers , 2003), 259–88; Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), introduction ; Patrick Joyce, ed., Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–16; and Chris Weedon, Feminism, Theory, and the Politics of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), especially chapter 6. 2. Among recent publications that accord class a prominent role in their analysis of early America and the Atlantic World are Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000); Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005); Nobles, “Class,” 259–88; Billy G. Smith, ed., Down and Out in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); and Keith Wrightson,“Class,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 133–53. See also three special journal issues: “Class and Early America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 63 (April 2006); “Deference in Early North America,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3, no. 2 (fall 2005); and“Class Analysis in Early America and the Atlantic World: Foundations and Future,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 1, no. 4 (winter 2004). 3. This paragraph draws on Peter Calvert, The Concept of Class: An Historical Introduction (London: Fontana, 1983), 11–93; Andrew Milner, Class (London: Sage Publications , 1999), 1–52; and Gary Day, Class (London: Routledge, 2001), introduction. 4. For the development of a language of “sorts” that simplified the previously more precise and elaborate notions of estate and degree, see Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (1982; reprint, London: Routledge, 1993), chapter 1; Wrightson,“Estates , Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England ,” in Language, History, and Class, ed. Penelope Corfield (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 32–44; Wrightson, “‘Sorts of People’ in Tudor and Stuart England,” in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society, and Politics in England, 1550–1800, ed. Jonathon Barry and Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 28–51; and Wright, “Class,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 133–54. On the colonial American side of the Atlantic, see Billy G. Smith, The “Lower Sort”: Philadelphia’s Laboring People , 1750–1800 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 5. For accessible statements of these core principles, see Marx’s introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, both in Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, trans., Karl Marx: Early Writings (1975; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1992), 243–59, 424–29. 6. Among the most important books about early America by American Progressive historians are Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York, 1913; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1986); Carl L. Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1765–1776 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1909); and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (1918; reprint, New York: F. Unger, 1957). 7. Raphael Samuel, “The British Marxist Historians I,” New Left Review 120 (March-April 1980): 21–96; Eric Hobsbawm, “The Historians’ Group of the Communist Party,” in Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton, ed. M. Cornforth (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), 21–47; Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–23, 221–50; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957); and Raymond Williams, “Culture Is Ordinary,” in Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader, ed. Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (London: Arnold, 1997), 5–14. 8. E. P. Thompson, as quoted in Kaye, British Marxist Historians, 172. Also see Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961). 9. Classic British studies include Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963); Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement...