Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces 1660-1780.

Levine, David

Urbane and Rustic England. Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces 1660-1780. By Cart B. Estabrook (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xiv 317pp.).

Bristol was a key nexus in the expansion of English hegemony which turned the global map into the pinkish hues of imperial domination. Bristol was also a place where some men got fabulously rich--"In the 1740s, at a time when almost fifty slave ships sailed out of Bristol every year, slave traders made [pound]8,000 profit for each shipment of African slaves." Eight thousand pounds was a lot of money in those days when labourers, the largest group in the English population, earned Is. 4d. per day. Four hundred thousand pounds a year (divided among the community of merchants who took shares in these ship in order to split up their involvement so as to control their risks) was a spectacular fortune at a time, as Peter Mathias has estimated, that the GNP was on the order of [pound]120 million. Thus, the Bristol trade in human cargoes accounted for one-third of one per cent of the whole English national income. This was a truly massive influx of capital into a city of 50,000. It could hardly have avoided creating radically new modes of spending. Here, Estabrook virtually ignores the implications of Eric Williams' arguments concerning Capitalism and Slavery; this avoidance is really surprising in view of the fact that so few of Williams' critics have ever taken the time to look at how the influx of capital from the slave trade changed English society.

In fact, this truly massive influx of capital did just that. Perhaps the most interesting part of Estabrook's story is his short discussion (260 ff.) of Caleb Dickinson's activities in laundering his ill-gotten gains from the slave trade into real estate speculation and suburban development. Buying up farms and manors, putting the screws on tenants who owed him back rents and then dispossessing them for non-payment, amalgamating parcels into house lots, developing turnpikes, investing in spas, and generally irritating his new neighbours by ignoring the cultural codes that had held their rural communities together, Mr Caleb Dickinson is an all-too-familiar modern capitalist shark. In this regard, Estabrook's point that "The contentious aspects of suburban development may have had less to do with nascent class antagonism than with collective identities and social divisions based on setting" (265) seemed to me to be bizarre. What could have been a more virulent expression of "nascent class antagonism" than Dick inson's program to turn all social relations into the cash nexus?

I wanted to know more about Caleb Dickinson beyond the antiquarian fact that he had started his commercial life as a soapmaker. Where was he born? Who were his parents? Who were his partners? What were his religious and philanthropical activities? and so on. Furthermore, why was Mr Caleb Dickinson attracted to this particular form of money laundering--was it even more profitable than the slave trade? Why were his merchant-contemporaries so eager to leave Bristol in the 1740s when, for several generations, they had so resolutely turned their back on the suburbs and countryside. Indeed, the separation of town and country in the 1690-1740 period is one of the points that Estabrook makes with great force in the main body of his book. But, that said, why did this separation lose its urgency in the middle decades of the eighteenth century? Was the Bristol of 1740 a less-liveable place that it had been a generation earlier? Estabrook gives us hints about the estrangement of the big bourgeoisie from their cramped qu arters in the alleys and warrens of this port city but he never provides a thoroughgoing analysis of the emergence of the new sensibility.

What, then, does the main body of Urbane and Rustic England set out to do? The work gets its inspiration from Peter Borsay's The Urban Reniassance (1989) against whose arguments about the English cities' growth and influence, Estabrook poses a close analysis of Bristol's experience. His book's first two sections are concerned with "Settings and Topographical Divide" and "Cultural Forms and Affinities". In these eight chapters we are shown that Bristol and its hinterland existed as two solitudes--wary of one another and keeping each other at arm's length. The city's walls may have become useless as a defensive shield, but they symbolized a deep-seated difference that characterized institutions, spaces, resources, personal culture, the possession of material artifacts, and print culture. In all these ways, Estabrook describes "collective identities and social divisions based on setting" that distinguished Bristolians from the villagers surrounding them. The very nature of the urban renaissance in Bristol was t o exclude rustics from participation rather than to transform them into citified wannabes. This argument is developed at length and with a painstaking attention to its detailed manifestations.

Estabrook provides a highly nuanced image of urban/rural difference but he does nothing to dispute Borsay's claim that city life was undergoing a 'renaissance'. Rather, Estabrook argues that the urban renaissance was a wholly-urban phenomena. Obviously, this is an important corrective and its implications are very interesting with regard to ancillary arguments about consumerism and the possession of goods. Estabrook's chronology concerning the so-called "consumer revolution" accords better with older claims than with more recent ones and, in so doing, gives one a renewed sense that social change in the period of the classic Industrial Revolution was both a continuation of previous developments and revolutionary, in the sense that it broke free of older boundaries. Furthermore, his discussion of the expansive cultural horizons of the elite members of the Brisrolian population, that connected them to other urban centers and overseas colonies of their commercial grasp, is very good. The contrast with the narrow , parochialism of the villagers is very well-taken. Similarly, the discussion of what used to be called mentalites is excellent.

So, much of the argument in the main body of the text is well-conceived and well-executed, but Estabrook's discussion of the "urban renaissance" seemed to me to be too concerned with scoring points rather than providing his own imprint. This approach seriously vitiates his work. He spends so much time debunking the notion of an "urban renaissance" and its purported linkages with the countryside that Estabrook provides no explanation as to why and how and when the city colonized the countryside. His account is, in fact, too stuck in the early modem period and therefore does not come to grips with the embryonic forms of modernization that emerged within the shell of an older social formation in mid-eighteenth century Bristol and its environs. To my way of thinking, this is a good book that could have been much better. It bears too much of the imprint of an earlier research project while displaying too little of the imaginative argument that flowed from his research findings.