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E. P. Thompson's work on the making of the English working class is recalled in this paper for its continued relevance to historical materialist perspectives on global movements and class formations. Much commentary on Thompson's work confirms divisions between a first and second British New Left and largely confines the working class to an insular, English phenomenon, one which may present significant insight to a particular account of historical movement and change, but lacks wider spatial and conceptual resonance. This paper questions this view, and its wider implications for the writing of contemporary British history, while pointing towards the greater significance and application of Thompson's work on the making of the English working class than previously acknowledged. This has further implications for recent expressions of ‘global class formation’ as seen in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines a case of social conflict in an overlooked corner of England (Lincolnshire) in the late 1980s when self-described 'local' people opposed private housing developments and the migration of 'southerners', 'townies' and 'commuters' into their towns and villages. Protestors lamented change and disliked newcomers. This was a reaction to the arrival of affluent, 'post-industrial' workers on the back of a booming service sector. They personified a series of complex, interconnected socioeconomic and cultural changes which disrupted patterns of life rooted in disappearing productive industries and destabilised communities amidst factory closures, agricultural mechanisation, job losses and now suburbanisation. This affected meanings ascribed to places and introduced hierarchies and conflicts structured around Britain's transition towards a service economy. Opposition was expressed through nostalgia, conservationism, inverse snobbery, anti-metropolitanism, attachment to 'local' identities, and concerns about declining independence, community and power. This paper argues that these protests demonstrate the emergence of new ideas about social relations, difference and distinction in post-industrial England. The findings also highlight feelings which would slowly seep into a new, reactionary politics foreshadowing the way that many towns and rural areas (including Lincolnshire) embraced a new political right in the first decades of the next millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates E. P. Thompson and the attraction and influence of his major study,The Making of the English Working Class(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), within his insistence on constructing history as argument. Often polemical, Thompson's approach to history also appreciated paradox. In writing as he always did, against the grain of conventional wisdoms, be they of the right or the left, Thompson understood that he would always be situated awkwardly in terms of how his interpretation challenged established orthodoxies. This awkwardness, and its rootedness in refusal to accommodate too easily to established analysis, has proven Thompson's lasting contribution. It nurtured unique historical sensibilities, creative and rigorous use of source materials, and writing marked by panache and passion. The result is thatThe Making of the English Working Classremains as relevant today as it was 50 years ago, a landmark study whose arguments and their implications are with us yet, and whose suggestions have spawned countless fresh studies and endless research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article demonstrates how food contributed to the Europeanisation of British culture between 1960 and 1975, the period leading up to the 1975 Referendum on membership of the European Community. The analysis identifies the meanings and values associated with Europe in cooking columns in two British broadsheet newspapers, TheTimes and the Observer, and examines how people were encouraged to make identifications with Europe. However, the article demonstrates how the meanings associated with Europe were not monolithic and were inflected by class and gender. In particular, continental culinary practices were associated with the tastes and dispositions of emergent new middle-class formations. More generally, the analysis demonstrates how these representations of European food offered middle-class people ways to experiment with feeling European in their everyday lives. In a Brexit context in which much research has asked why British people rejected Europe, the article seeks to contribute to a parallel history of how so many other British people came to identify as European through engagements with popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Whitehall studies of British civil servants, running from 1968 until the present day, are some of the most influential in twentieth century public health. Believing that the stratification that they observed among civil servants was replicated in wider society through the class system, the Whitehall researchers argued that inequality was a powerful force in society, literally embodied by incidence of disease. But as politicians and sociologists questioned the continuing relevance of class, this article explores how these studies reflected and were in conversation with prevailing social attitudes about inequality in end-of-century Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edward Thompson'sThe Making of the English Working Class(London: Gollancz, 1963) was a creative work in both substance and methodology. The insistence on recovering the neglected experience of a class through history from below was complemented by a methodological commitment. The latter agenda was elaborated briefly and assertively in the Preface and subsequently practised throughout the richly detailed text. Actors must be understood in context as acting creatively within constraints. Their assessments of shared experience provide a basis for shared consciousness, organisation and collective action. This methodological agenda is critically assessed through an examination of the propositions within the Preface. The analysis is linked to a consideration of the agenda's previous employment in Thompson's essay ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’ (InEssays in Labour History, edited by Asa Briggs, and John Saville. London: Macmillan, 1960). Thompson's creativity is itself located within the constraints within which he worked. These were intellectual and political Marxism and a-historical sociology, earlier experiences in the Communist Party and the hopes and frustrations of the New Left. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As well as a work of history, E. P. Thompson'sThe Making of the English Class(London: Gollancz, 1963) was written as a strategic intervention in wider political debates of the late 1950s about working class consciousness, identity, agency and organisation, and as a sustained expression and application of ‘socialist humanism’ to historical subjects. This essay situates the book within these debates, moving betweenThe Makingand Thompson's writings within the New Left, to show how the characteristic themes of his work—moral choice and agency, the complexities of working-class consciousness and culture, the role of intellectuals and of an ‘organised minority’—were developed through both. This provides us with a richer context for understanding both the moral sensibility that animates the book and key elements of its historiographical standpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]