British Society, 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (review)

British Society, 1680-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change. By Richard Price (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 349 pp. $59.95 cloth $22.95 paper.

This is a distinctly interesting work--"not a textbook," but "a general history"--in which Price advances "an argument about a particular phase of a society's history" (ix). Specifically, he attempts to rethink the conventional periodization of modern British history. Rather than detecting a vital point of transition at the turn of the nineteenth century, he regards the period from 1680 to 1880 as possessing an essential unity as "a distinct stage in the history of modern Britain" (ix). He is reluctant to label that stage, but sees it as characterized by an "architecture of society," which had emerged by the close of the seventeenth century and which was not fundamentally altered until the last decades of the Victorian era (11).

At his most emphatic, Price writes of the need "to collapse the nineteenth century into a wider period," as a preliminary to achieving a new understanding of both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries "once the chronologies are flattened out" (2). But while he most certainly shifts the contours of the familiar historiographical terrain, he is also careful to avoid leveling them. He is much concerned with the dynamics of his period. His point is that for much of the period, a balance obtained between its creative energies and forces of containment. The "configurations and dynamics that had shaped society from the late seventeenth century" were only gradually eroded and displaced, reaching "terminal exhaustion" only late in the nineteenth century (13, 338). Only then is it possible to speak of truly "disjunctive transformations" (12).

These themes are developed in nine substantive chapters on economic structures, policy, and ideology; the characteristics of the British state; the boundaries between the institutional state and the public and private spheres; patterns of political participation and exclusion; and the dynamics of social relations. Individually, they are impressive essays of synthesis and interpretive argument--lucid, thoughtful, nuanced, anchored in detailed discussions of central issues, and highlighted with acute insights and formulations. Collectively, they constitute an intellectually coherent whole, sustaining the intensity of a carefully structured argument that is sometimes provocative, never less than stimulating, and frequently persuasive.

A nineteenth-century specialist might object that the book is also less novel than it claims, and that Price is engaged in an exercise in selective re-emphasis for which there are well-established precedents. Perhaps so. But one of Price's principal virtues is that he is not crudely iconoclastic. If much of the terrain he surveys is familiar, he nonetheless offers a novel and distinctive perspective on its major landmarks by placing them in a deeper chronological context. He provokes thought about both the subtleties of the processes of long-term historical change and about the points at which the cumulative weight of those processes can be said to have introduced fundamental difference. Yet, there is also a great silence in this book. As Price acknowledges, his perspective is essentially anglocentric. Britain as an entity did not exist in 1680. By 1880 it did. How can that story be incorporated?

Keith Wrightson
Yale University

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