National society, communal culture: an argument about the recent historiography of eighteenth-century Britain.

Based on a survey of recent historical writing, this article points to a profound divide within British propertied classes in the eighteenth century, and in particular within the ‘middling sorts’, along cultural lines, between an aristocratically oriented, London-based ‘national society’, and an alternative communal-provincial culture, reasserting local values and loyalties. Many studies have in fact depicted cultural clashes along those lines, though often trying unsuccessfully to fit them into other social schemes. The various political divisions of the second half of the century can be seen as manifestations of this basic cultural divide. Finally, the article suggests a different approach to the ‘emergence’ of a ‘middle class’ at the turn of the century — appearing as an assertive and politically charged self-definition of one side within the ‘middling sorts’ — now realigned according to positions regarding Pitt's war policies of the 1790S — rather than as a coherent socio-economic formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]