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Perhaps the least interrogated word in the title of Thompson's classic, The Making of the English Working Class, is "English." Thompson acknowledged that he did not aspire to speak for the Scottish and the Welsh elements among the labouring poor, as their cultural traditions were different enough for him to be "cautious" about "generalizing beyond English experiences." But at the same time his "English experiences" included that of the Irish in England: "I have considered the Irish, not in Ireland, but as immigrants to England."1 The problem of how a national identity writes itself into historical texts remains somewhat buried in this great book by a great historian who remained all his life an engaged and critical student of "the peculiarities of the English." But if Englishness as such was something Thompson took as a given, the differences of all that was not "English" remained an integral, if muted, part of his analytical framework. Otherwise it is hard to explain why this book that inveighed against the use of sociological models in history, became such an inspiring model for others to follow.
The name that Thompson gave in The Making to this opening towards historical difference was "culture." One of the most fervent passages in the book read: "The making of the working class is a fact of political and cultural, as much as of economic, history. It was not the spontaneous generation of the factory system. Nor should we think of an external force - the 'industrial revolution' - working upon some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity and turning it out at the other end as 'fresh race of beings'. The ... Industrial Revolution [was] imposed, not upon a raw material, but upon the free-born Englishman - and the free-born Englishman as Paine had lefthim or as the Methodist had moulded him. The factory hand or stockinger was also the inheritor of Bunyan, of remembered village rights, of notions of equality before the law, of crafttraditions." And then came his pithy and powerful dictum: "The working class made itself as much as it was made." (213)
It was Thompson's insistence on very particular cultural traditions of the English working people - the idea of the "free-born Englishman" or of equality before the law,...