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

In the discipline of social history, periodization is an interpretive act. Richard Price’s book, British Society, 1680–1880, highlights the power of periodization in a particularly stark fashion, for he proposes a relatively radical rethinking of the conventional boundaries of British history. His argument is that historians of the ‘long eighteenth century,’ and those of the Victorian era, have over emphasized the extent of change—political, economic, social—which divides the eighteenth from the nineteenth century. He suggests that more profound changes occurred, on one hand, in the late seventeenth century when Britain left its early modern past and, on the other hand, in the late nineteenth century when Britain became a truly modern society. Price proposes this new periodization to emphasize the economic, political, social, and cultural coherence of these two centuries and argues that it solves a number of historiographical problems created by the conventional boundaries.

It is important to stress that Price’s vision of the period from 1680 to 1880 explicitly acknowledges its contradictory characteristics. On one hand, he recognizes the many dynamic features of British society in these centuries; this is not an argument for Britain as an unchanging ancien regime. On the other hand, he stresses elements of continuity; this is not a grand metanarrative of teleological development. What holds the period together in Price’s view is that the apparently contradictory currents of dynamism and continuity operated in essentially the same historical terrain and under a common set of conventions.

Price’s argument encompasses the broad array of topics included within social history. Acknowledging an attachment to “the material categories of economics, politics, social relations, and the state,” (p. 15) he begins by examining the economic unity of the period, a unity found in a shared manufacturing (not industrial) base and the dominance of commercial interests and free trade doctrines. He then examines the state, arguing that until the late nineteenth century, it fundamentally lacked power except in the area of taxation. The limits of state power are particularly evident in the dominance of local over national authority and the sharp boundary between public and private spheres. (The family’s autonomy vis à vis the state, he notes, also gave gender relations a particular character across the Georgian and Victorian periods.) Turning to politics, Price argues that despite the apparent caesura of the first reform bill, politics during these two centuries revolved around the inherent instability created by conflicting ideals of political inclusion and exclusion. This conflict had been established in 1688 when the source of authority was wrested from the hands of the monarch, and it was not finally resolved until a more fully democratic system was established by towards the end of the nineteenth century. The final chapter examines the thorny issue of class. Here Price suggests that current debates on class do not acknowledge that throughout this period social relations were characterized by a tension between a still vibrant and meaningful paternalism and obviously unequal distributions of wealth and power.

Price’s radical reinterpretation of the period is driven largely by his dissatisfaction with the historiography of his own century, the nineteenth. It was inconsistencies in standard accounts of the nineteenth century as the birthplace of modern society that prompted him to link the nineteenth century more firmly with the eighteenth century. For this reason, I suspect, scholars of the nineteenth century will find Price’s argument more challenging. He questions the whiggish account of Victorian modernity which in subtle and less subtle forms dominates our thinking, and, more fundamentally, he questions the meaning of standard categories of analysis such as class, the state, and industrial capitalism. In contrast, historians of the eighteenth century, among whose number I should identify myself, will recognize quite clearly in Price’s account the complex interplay of continuity and change which makes the century so interesting. Prices challenge to this historiographical tradition is thus limited to downplaying the significance of the economic, political, and social ‘revolutions’ of industrialization...