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Reviewed by:
  • Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World
  • Eric Kimball
Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World. Edited by Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 328 pp.).

Those who would deny the presence of class in the Anglo-American Atlantic world will have a lot of explaining to do after reading this bold and ambitious collection. Indeed, it's destined to become a standard text in classes on Atlantic history, offering a wide variety of approaches to class analysis, geographically [End Page 627] ranging from Scotland to the West Indies, with stops in Africa and Native America, besides port cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Perhaps the best one can hope for in a volume like this, originally drawn from conference presentations, is that they will have a collective power and unity which summarizes recent scholarship, raises new questions, and suggests fresh research agendas. Impressively, the offerings inside provide all this - and even more.

The joint-authored introduction by the book's two editors, Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith, is among many of the intellectual riches offered. They provide a judicious overview of the rise and fall, and rise again, of class analysis within Anglo-American historiography. They see, and hope, the book serving as a clarion call to others: class lives! They note that class has fallen to the wayside against the wave of cultural history, and the ascent of race and gender as the dominant analytical frameworks.

However, and the book itself is another example, a rising tide of class studies varied in time, space, subject and approach have appeared in recent years. The editors warn against "devising a single conception of class analysis with universal appeal"(9) and suggest that variety, and intellectual collaboration are more important. Additionally, they stress that class alone, however, is not enough. One must combine it with approaches cognizant of, and integrated with, race, gender, and transnational approaches. As much as the individual authors provide new examples of class analysis on varied subject matter, the editor's introduction serves notice on those holdouts still trapped within the old paradigm that the working class only exists in factories. Instead, they offer the book as an inspiration to continue exploring new subjects - a worthy goal indeed.

There is a kind of intellectual excitement bursting from a book like this, which showcases both different approaches and subjects of class analysis. The chapters range from a study of a single person to individual port cities, urban locales to the New York backcountry. A few chapters stretch the chronological boundaries but most are framed in the late eighteenth century. Happily, there are chapters on the working, middle, and upper-classes; often in relation to each other.

Obviously this review cannot discuss all the chapters equally but will instead highlight a few of the many standouts. Indians are the focus of two separate chapters by Daniel Richter and Daniel R. Mandell, a welcome feature since this vast, diverse group is rarely featured in the Atlantic history paradigm. Moreover, as Richter notes, "the words class and seventeenth century Native North America have perhaps never been uttered in the same sentence." (34) His chapter, which challenges many of the continuing mis-conceptions about Native societies, offers some notable candor regarding "inequality, hierarchy, and stratification" found among the people of eastern North America.(35)

Taking a similar revisionist tack, Mandell links class and race in his chapter on Indians connected to the British Atlantic in North America. He provides examples of how various Indians both integrated and resisted the Atlantic world market economy through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while highlighting that over two centuries they became further marginalized in colonized areas and in some cases re-racialized as black. Provocatively, he also suggests that Indian societies provided the first "counterculture" to the emerging Atlantic world and its core of unrestricted commercialism. [End Page 628]

Class and race intersect as well in Natalie Zacek's investigation of "class dimensions of the white population" (63), in the tension between poor and wealthy whites on St. Kitts. In particular, she notes that the poor whites were seen as the "other" by...

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