Pg. 99: Daniel R. Smith's "The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class: Houses, Kinship and Capital since 1945 by Daniel R. Smith.

About the book, from the publisher:

The fall and rise of the English upper class explores the role traditionalist worldviews, articulated by members of the historic upper-class, have played in British society in the shadow of her imperial and economic decline in the twentieth century. Situating these traditionalist visions alongside Britain’s post-Brexit fantasies of global economic resurgence and a socio-cultural return to a green and pleasant land, Smith examines Britain’s Establishment institutions, the estates of her landed gentry and aristocracy, through to an appetite for nostalgic products represented with pastoral or pre-modern symbolism. It is demonstrated that these institutions and pursuits play a central role in situating social, cultural and political belonging. Crucially these institutions and pursuits rely upon a form of membership which is grounded in a kinship idiom centred upon inheritance and descent: who inherits the houses of privilege, inherits England.

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The Page 99 Test: The Fall and Rise of the English Upper Class.

--Marshal Zeringue