History in Person: Enduring Struggles, Contentious Practice, Intimate Identities

9 Getting to Be British

281 The port wine trade includes firms bearing names such as Cockburn, Croft, Dow, Graham, Warre, and—all in one firm—Taylor, Fladgate, and Yeatman. These firms make port wines with names like “Queen’s Ruby,” “Club Port,” “Captain’s,” and “Imperial”; the port served at in-house luncheons is often labeled “Founder’s Reserve.” British merchants and their descendants have been a presence in Porto, Portugal (a city of two names, called Oporto by the British), overseeing family firms for more than a century—some claim as many as 300 years. Today, the privileged position of the old port families in the British enclave in Porto is in question. The contribution of the port trade to the Portuguese economy has declined sharply since 1974,1 when the Portuguese Revolution opened the country to a vast influx of European Union funds and multinational corporations. The latter bought most of the port firms, turning the port trade into a tiny submarket of the worldwide “alcoholic beverages industry.” The social production of port families’ lives in the British enclave in Porto is undergoing transformation as well. Deep struggle marks divisions over whether the community should continue to be acclaimed 9 Getting to Be British Jean Lave In short, what individuals and groups invest in the particular meaning they give to common classificatory systems by the use they make of them is infinitely more than their “interest” in the usual sense of the term; it is their whole social being, everything which defines their own idea of themselves. —Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 478. (from within and without) as a “300-year-old port wine trading enclave” or instead take on the character of an extranational base for multinational corporate managers. Changes are taking place in the specifics of old conflicts in which national and class identities were made and by which they were lived. Participants in the enclave, acting in the name of conflicting ways of being British, battle each other over the future trajectory of changes in the enclave that each needs in order to produce, confirm, and sustain comparative power and privilege. The British port gentry families have become less able to sustain the little-challenged cultural-political supremacy to which they have been accustomed and the old community institutions that they nonetheless are still able to control. This has led them to engage in practices of concession to other social groups in the enclave and to modify practices of social exclusion focused on relations of class, nationality, and gender. Port gentry families are now fashioning and living distinctively different anticipations of future resolutions of these tensions as they try to provide for the next generations. Thus, local contentious practices are both shaped by and implicated in the question of how, after many generations of residence in Porto, families continue to get to be British—a lifelong, highly engaging problem for those who aspire to it. In this chapter I address some of the complexities of local practices of struggle, and I examine the making of identities that have kept the British port families in Porto and that give urgency to their efforts to keep on being British.2 BACKGROUND The first British buyers seeking wine in Portugal in the midseventeenth century were a motley assortment of travelers, interested in wines of the Alto Douro region east of Porto (figs. 9.1, 9.2), who ventured over from England and Scotland to trade in whatever was available . Later, merchants “came out” to live in Portugal, the better to acquire sufficient quantities of good port year after year from wealthy Portuguese proprietors or small vineyard keepers in the Alto Douro. They bought and sold other things besides port wine: coal, salt cod, beaver hats.3 Still later (1790–1880), in a lengthy but dizzying spate of shifting partnerships, the British established the port houses that later yet (about 1950 [see Robertson 1987]) wrested control of the fermenJEAN LAVE 282 GETTING TO BE BRITISH 283 tation and blending of the wine from the many small Alto Douro wine producers. Their more recent involvement in the trade, unlike their mixed commerce in earlier times, has provided the British port families 0 0 60 KM 40 Miles N G u a d i a n a Sôr Te j o M ondego Santarém Guarda Viseu Aveiro Coimbra Figueira da Foz Évora Porto Lisboa Bragança...