URBAN IDENTITY AND THE MIDDLING SORT IN EARLY-MODERN ENGLAND

This essay challenges the historiographical assumptions which have promoted a neglect of the closely related thems or urban identity and class identity in early modern England. It seeks to identify in bourgeois association a set of values and practices Which were of crucial importance in defining the nature both of urban life and of the middling sort. Faced with the instabilities and pluralism of urban life and commercial society, class formation was a continuous process, determined less by relations with the social groups above and below the bourgeoisie, as normally assumed, but by the managment of urban living and relationships within the bourgeoisie. Through studying the nature of associations, and especially the dialectic they involve between equality and inequality, dependence and independence, we can begin to understand the collective character of bourgeois experience.