| The middle strata in the early phase of British industrialisation have not received the attention that they merit. This dissertation joins a relatively small number of recent studies in beginning to redress this omission. In attempting to build up a holistic picture of a developing, dynamic "bourgeoisie," "local elite" or "urban gentry," it focuses on three of the fastest expanding mill towns--Blackburn, Bolton and Preston--in the Lancashire cotton district. Taking the achievement and maintenance of stability and order during the Age of Revolution as its major problematic--how members of the bourgeoisie were ordered from above, ordered themselves, and ordered others--it concentrates on the traumatic years from 1789 to 1851. It deals in turn with ideologies of nationalism and loyalism; the state-led and local response to lower-order unrest and labour disputes; the politics and sanitary reforms in the milltowns; the multifarious forms of associationism; religious identities, church extension and church paternalism; cults of seriousness and of domesticity; and the patterning of time and space in the building of bourgeois cultures. It seeks to shift attention away from the search for the elusive quarry of bourgeois or middle-class class-consciousness onto how this group of people, the ideological leaders of the milltowns, negotiated their power within the broader context of the creation of hegemonies wrought in the interplay of the forces of capitalism, industrialisation, and state-building. Within this hegemonic formation, fluctuating class identities, and gendered, sexual, national and regional identities, were linguistically constructed, deconstructed and reconstructed in unstable pulsations over the course of the six-decade period. It further argues that at a time of intense labour-capital conflict and enhanced techniques of discipline and domination, it was precisely because of the diversity across a deeply fissured bourgeoisie, and of the many, conflicting attempts to build bridges both to the lower orders and the upper class that the stability of the liberal-capitalist system was maintained. |
