Language, History and Class

This book is an investigation of how societies have understood and described themselves. It is concerned both with the history of language and the language of history. The chapters include studies of societies in Germany, China, USA and India, pre-revolutionary France and 19th-century Britain and America. The author examines how political declarations and manifestos relate to the societies from which they emanated and for which they aimed to legislate. Words such as "liberty" and "equality" have to be understood in a limited sense in the French and American revolutions, but it would be impossible to understand these events without recourse to these resonant concepts. The essays in this book explore the difficulties and the possibilities in understanding language as historical evidence Introduction: historians and language / P.J. Corfield

Estates, degrees, and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and Stuart England / K. Wrightson

Hidalgo and pechero: the language of 'estates' and 'classes' in early-modern Castile / I.A.A. Thompson

Definitions of nobility in seventeenth-century France / R. Mettam

Class by name and number in eithteenth-century Britain / P.J. Corfeild

The emergence of 'society' in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany / J.V. Melton

From gentlemen to the residuum: languages of social description in Victorian Britain / G. Crossick

'To each a language of his own': language, culture, and society in colonial India / D. Washbrook

The language of representation: towards a Muslim political order in nineteenth-century India / F. Shaikh

Chinese views of social classification / P.A. Kuhn

Languages of power in the United States / D.T. Rodgers and S. Wilentz

Language and interpretation: Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities / W. Downes