Race, Culture, and Class

This chapter takes a broader perspective, demonstrating that the middle class in every society has been both “middle” in terms of status, and “middle” in terms of its capacity for engagement with social groups above or below. The history of the global middle class is in essence the history of global processes of mediation. The post-1500 early modern forms of globalization had three key effects. First, the moment of European hegemony in the period from circa 1750 to 1950 was correlated with the internal integration of Western Christendom and its diasporas on the basis of ideas of “civilization” and “whiteness” and with an ever-expanding external regime of links between Western European and non-European social formations. Second, connected to these processes of integration and external linkages was the production, and growth in importance, of mediating groups in every corner of the globe, of which the European bourgeois was a local and privileged expression. Third, linked to this violent integration of international society, and the associated primacy of mediation and mediators, was a process of standardization of social imaginaries, manners, and customs, a pressure toward the reduction of specific complexity into general categories, toward uniformity.