I am delighted to announce that Philip Corrigan’s and my book The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, first published by Basil Blackwell in 1985, has just been republished in the Historical Materialism series by Brill. The e-book version was made available on October 27. A hardback edition will follow on November 5.
As with other volumes in this series, whose aim is to “publish important theoretical contributions as the basis for vigorous intellectual debate and exchange on the left,” a much more affordable paperback edition will be issued in the fall of 2027 from Haymarket Books.
This volume is a reprint of the Blackwell 1991 edition (which contained a new preface, postscript, and bibliographic supplement), plus Philip’s “State Formation (entry for a dictionary)” and nine further essays on state formation and cultural revolution written by me and/or Philip. All but one of these date from 1987-1994 and variously extend or clarify our arguments in The Great Arch. I have also provided a new introduction. This edition of The Great Arch is dedicated to Philip’s memory.
I am reproducing the Table of Contents and Introduction to the Historical Materialism Series Edition below. The entire post–peer review manuscript is available (with permission of the publisher) here.
In the United Kingdom November 5 is Guy Fawkes Night. When we were kids we used to collect wood for the bonfire for weeks beforehand—it was my favorite day of the year. Guy Fawkes was popularly reputed to be the only man ever to enter the English parliament with honest intentions. It seems an appropriate anniversary on which to reissue the hard copy of our book.
Remember, remember, the 5th of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason
Why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution
And Further Essays on State Formation
Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Historical Materialism Series Edition
Part 1 The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer
Foreword by G. E. Aylmer
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 ‘A Remarkably Centralized Country’: State Formation in Medieval England
2 ‘This Realm of England Is an Empire’: The Revolution of the 1530s
3 An Elect Nation: The Elizabethan Consolidation
4 Mortall God Enthroned: One Bourgeois Revolution (Of Many)
5 From Theatre to Machine: ‘Old Corruption’
6 ‘The Working Class Question’: ‘Society’ and society
7 Epilogue: ‘There Is, Above All, an Agency’
Afterthoughts
Bibliography
Additions to 1991 edition
Preface to 1991 edition
Postscript
Bibliographical Supplement
Part 2 Organising the Subject: Further Essays on State Formation
1 State Formation (entry for a dictionary) Philip Corrigan
2 From ‘The Body Politic’ to ‘The National Interest’: English State Formation in Comparative and Historical Perspective (An Argument Concerning ‘Politically Organized Subjection’) Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer
3 Introduction to ‘The Making of the Boy’ Paul Corrigan
4 The Making of the Boy: Meditations on What Grammar School Did with, to, and for My Body Philip Corrigan
5 Untying the Knots: TheTexts of the State (From the Battle of the Books to the Books of the Battle). Remarks for Ludwig and Michel Philip Corrigan
6 British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919-1920 Derek Sayer
7 A Notable Administration: English State Formation and the Rise of Capitalism Derek Sayer
8 Bread and Knowledge Politics: E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) Philip Corrigan
9 Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on Hegemony Derek Sayer
10 Undoing the Overdone State Philip Corrigan
11 Great Arches Viewed from the Coasts of Bohemia: Reflections Inspired by Tables of Kings Derek Sayer
References for Part 2: Organizing the Subject
Index
Introduction to the Historical Materialism Series Edition
Derek Sayer
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! O times…
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights
When most intent on making of herself
A prime enchanter to assist the work
Which then was going forwards in her name.
William Wordsworth, The Prelude
The Great Arch has had a checkered history. It was first handsomely published by Basil Blackwell, at an affordable price and with J. M. W. Turner’s splendid Burning of the Houses of Parliament on the cover, in simultaneous hardback and paperback editions in 1985. Aside from a brace of deplorables who tried to strangle the book at birth,[2] the initial response was everything we could have hoped for. The Great Arch was widely, and for the most part very favorably, reviewed in history, sociology, anthropology, and political science journals internationally.[3] It was commended by scholars as diverse as the anthropologist Eric Wolf (‘The processes of English state formation are not usually on the docket of anthropological research priorities, but this book carries several important messages for anthropologists’), the Anglo-Saxon historian James Campbell (who chided his colleagues for leaving ‘the largest issues and the most arresting questions… to foreigners and to sociologists’), and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (who saw The Great Arch as a ‘quite exemplary’ attempt to theorize ‘the genesis of the state’ and devoted an entire lecture to it in his 1990-1991 course on the state at the Collège de France)’.[4] Three months after Bourdieu’s lecture, participants in a major international conference on state formation and popular culture in modern Mexico at the University of California at San Diego were encouraged to engage with the theoretical frameworks offered in two influential recent publications. One was James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak. The other was The Great Arch.[5] Ironically, it was around this time that the first edition of The Great Arch went out of print.
When we reminded Blackwell of an undertaking to reprint given by our editor Sean Magee, who had by then left the firm, we were offered the option of a paperback ‘reprint with revisions’ in the Ideas series in 1991. For the cover we replaced Turner’s Burning of the Houses of Parliament with a photograph of the Soviet avant-garde artist Liubov Popova’s set for The Earth in Turmoil (1923), which seemed to us to be equally apt. We left the main text of the 1985 edition unchanged but added a postscript in which we discussed reviewers’ criticisms of the first edition, some of which we took on board, as well as updating the bibliography with an extensive supplement. Blackwell did little to publicize this 1991 reprint and we discovered much later that it had a miniscule print-run, so that most readers had no opportunity to see the new material. The Great Arch was not reprinted again and has never been published in an electronic format. Philip and I only recovered publication rights years later. Dismayed at the prices being asked for secondhand copies, I made the text available on academia.edu, where it garnered thousands of views. The Great Arch remains the most frequently cited work either of us has written, and citations have increased rather than decreased over the years.[6] So when Steve Edwards wrote me a month or so after Philip’s death on 24 April 2021, inquiring about the possibility of reissuing The Great Arch, I was delighted. The Historical Materialism series, with its aim to ‘publish important theoretical contributions as the basis for vigorous intellectual debate and exchange on the left’, was an ideal venue that promised to give our book a new lease of life (and a venue of which I am sure Philip would have approved).
But the passage of time since The Great Arch was published makes introducing the present edition difficult. Though Philip and I worked closely together for nearly two decades, we ceased to collaborate after 1992, when Philip retired from formal academic life following a series of breakdowns.[7] I was then on research leave in Prague, embarking on a new project whose starting-point was a suspicion that the Czech capital’s remarkable range of modern experiences – Bohemia was part of the Austrian Empire up to 1918, an independent bourgeois-democratic republic from 1918-1938, a Nazi-occupied protectorate from 1939-1945, a people’s democracy from 1945-1948, and a communist state from 1948-1989 – might make Prague a better vantage point from which to observe the diverse modalities of twentieth-century modernity than London, Paris, or New York. This was the start of an intellectual journey that would detain me for the next thirty years and radically shake up my ideas on just about everything in the process. It led to a trilogy of books with Princeton University Press in which I endeavored to treat twentieth-century Prague as Walter Benjamin had nineteenth-century Paris, as a site in which to excavate the dreamworlds of the era.[8] Living on different continents, Philip and I meantime drifted apart. At the time of his death, we had not spoken or corresponded in twenty years. Though there are many connections between my post-1990 work and my earlier writings, the gulf between where I stood then and where I stand now is immense.
Since I have not kept up with the scholarly literature on Marxist theory, state formation, or English history in any systematic way during the last thirty years, it would be laughable for me to try to situate the book or evaluate its arguments in relation to current academic debates in these fields, as might normally be expected in such a reissue. What I have attempted is more modest: a reprint of The Great Arch (including the new materials added in the 1991 edition), supplemented by a selection of essays by Philip and/or myself that variously amplify, qualify, or in some cases go beyond its arguments. Most of these texts date from the period in which we were still working together and planned to go on doing so.
In the 1991 edition of The Great Arch, we announced that ‘Over the next few years we will be working on a larger project: Capitalism’s Cultural Revolution. Volume 1 will be a second edition of The Great Arch, extensively revised and enlarged by some 100 pages. Volume 2, Organizing the Subject, will address the cultural and moral logics, practices, productions and uses without which we cannot make sense of ‘the state’ as both totalizing and individualizing, the collective misrepresentation of an illusory community which claims all of us (albeit differently) yet belongs to none of us’.[9] That project (which we already envisaged some version of when we were writing The Great Arch) [10] was never realized. But Part 2 of this book, which I have followed our 1991 plan in titling ‘Organizing the Subject’, gives an indication, as a preliminary sketch for a painting might, of some of what Capitalism’s Cultural Revolution might have contained.
Part 1 of the present edition is a straightforward reprint of the 1985 text of The Great Arch, together with the material added in the 1991 reprint. The text itself is unaltered except for correction of a handful of errors. There is no need to say any more here by way of introduction, since that is done in the introduction to the book itself. The essays in Part 2 are presented chronologically. In all but one case the texts are also exactly as they were originally published except for correction of typographical or minor factual errors. To avoid undue duplication and (we hope) make for greater ease of reading, however, in both Part 1 and Part 2 we have shifted all in–text references to the notes. While we have left the original bibliography and the 1991 bibliographical supplement to The Great Arch as they stood, we have provided a single consolidated bibliography for Part 2 rather than separate references for each essay. We have replaced the original index to The Great Arch with a composite index for the present book.
Part 2 begins with Philip’s brief article ‘State Formation’, which he originally wrote as an entry for a dictionary in 1986 and updated for Everyday Forms of State Formation, the book Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent edited from the papers at the 1991 conference on state formation and popular culture in Mexico mentioned above. In my view, this is the clearest and most concise summary of the paradigm shift we were attempting to inaugurate with The Great Arch that either of us ever managed. We wrote ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’ for the second Mellon Symposium on Historical Anthropology, which Bernard S. Cohn and Nicholas Dirks organized at California Institute of Technology in May 1987. The symposium theme was ‘Culture and Colonialism: Deployments of Power and Resistance’.[11] Though there is undoubted overlap between this essay and The Great Arch, the arguments in ‘Body Politic’ are organized thematically rather than chronologically, and we extend our discussions of routines and rituals of rule and regulated representation and address the intrinsically gendered character of English state formation and state forms more comprehensively than in the book. As it turned out, ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’ would be our last jointly authored text on state formation (or anything else). I first published it in the Journal of Historical Sociology in January 2022, as a tribute to Philip’s memory.
My own articles ‘A Notable Administration’, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre’, and ‘Great Arches Viewed from the Coasts of Bohemia’ also extend or complement specific areas of argument in The Great Arch. Conceived as an intervention in historical sociological debates over ‘the rise of the West’, ‘A Notable Administration’ was our fullest statement of the case for seeing the ‘peculiarities’ of English state formation as an important part of why England became Marx and Weber’s ‘classic ground’ of capitalism in the first place, despite the course of English history strikingly deviating from Marxist and Weberian expectations. ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre’ is a case study of one of the bloodiest episodes in Britain’s imperial history, which, I argued, needs to be understood not as an aberration but in terms of the moral conceptions that legitimated General Dyer’s punitive action. Gruesomely exemplifying our wider thesis on moral relations, this essay goes some way (albeit not far enough) toward redressing what Philip and I both later recognized as a major failing of The Great Arch, our inadequate attention to the constitutive role of centuries of empire in English/British state (and subject) formation. It speaks volumes that despite my public school education and my A grade History A Level, I first learned of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre from Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi (1982). [12] I return to this lacuna in ‘Great Arches Viewed from the Coasts of Bohemia’, which is the only text in which I have ever explicitly revisited The Great Arch in light of my subsequent work on Czech history. This started out as a presentation for an invited panel on the state at the 2003 American Anthropology Association meetings in Chicago[13] and went through several iterations before I finally published a first version of it in 2016. I have made some further changes here.
‘Everyday Forms of State Formation’ began life as a verbal response to the papers delivered at the 1991 UCSD conference on Mexican state formation, on which I had been asked to comment. Resisting attempts by some participants to counterpose The Great Arch and Weapons of the Weak as ‘history from above’ vs. ‘history from below’, I used Václav Havel’s famous parable of the Prague greengrocer, who obediently hangs the slogan ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ in the window of his store, to upset the dichotomy.[14] Havel’s analysis, I argued, rested ‘less on the greengrocer’s being fooled than on his, and everyone else’s, knowing complicity. It is cynicism, not ideological conformity, that makes this system work’. This was ‘the exact opposite of ‘mystification’ or ‘false consciousness’. This power works through the way it forcibly organizes, and divides, subjectivities, and thereby produces and reproduces quite material forms of sociality’. I was trying simultaneously to draw attention to the irreducible agency of the subject – people are not mere animals, machines, or ‘hands’ – and to the fact that this agency is always confined, limited, and more or less crippled by the social forms through which subjects are permitted/forced, enabled/constrained to act. Such agency, I went on, comes ‘at the cost of a corrosive derangement of ‘private’ and ‘public’ selves’. This social schizophrenia, as we called it in ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’, is a central motif in Philip’s essays ‘Untying the Knots: TheTexts [sic] of the State’, which focuses on schooling as a state form, and ‘Undoing the Overdone State’, which like my ‘Everyday Forms’ paper questions conventional uses of Gramscian notions of hegemony. The ‘identifications on offer within repertoires of state forms’, Philip argues in the latter, ‘are violently contradictory. The much desired and much worked for ‘Individual’ is a situation of tormented and twisted loyalties, performances, positions, and regulated persona’.
In a rather different – autoethnographic – vein, Philip’s 1988 essay ‘The Making of the Boy’ blew me away when I first read it and reads equally powerfully today. Here, Philip documents the ‘bodily terror’, as well as the psychological brutality, of the education he received at a South London grammar school in the 1950s, recalling ‘the random violence of the cuff against the ear, the slap around the face, the book thrown hard into the face, the twisting of the arm, the enforced placing of a growing, gangly body into a desk far too small, the slipper/plimsoll applied to the bum, multiply; and there, at the end of the chamber of horrors, the cane’. ‘All I am trying to say’, he concluded (in a Coda annotated: ‘for Derek Sayer who shares ‘it” – which I did),[15] ‘is that bodies matter… They/we are the subjects who are taught, disciplined, measured, evaluated, examined, passed (or not), assessed, graded, hurt, harmed, twisted, re-worked, applauded, praised, encouraged, enforced, coerced, condensed… To have around volumes of educational theory (however radical) that never mentions bodies, and their differentiation, seems to me now, slightly stupid… bodies may be what (who) is being schooled because by now – I hope – we cannot so easily separate minds, psyches, emotions off from bodies’. I am grateful to Paul Corrigan for his introduction to this most angry and insightful of his brother’s writings, which Paul wrote for this volume.
‘Intellectuals… seem to lack that starting point from which their scriptures come: where are our bodies? This is the simple question I wish to register’, Philip wrote elsewhere, adding ‘but it is noticeable how amongst male intellectuals this is the most remarkable yet unremarked absence: a silence, which is, of course, thunderously, necessarily there’.[16] The body was largely absent from The Great Arch, too, except as a perennial object of whipping, branding, mutilation, and sundry theatrical modes of execution at the hands of The Law. It is here, I think, that Organizing the Subject would have made its greatest advances. The Great Arch was already unorthodox in the range of theoretical resources on which it drew; our Marxism, inflected (infected?) by the culturalist heresies of Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, was abundantly leavened with Weber and Durkheim as well as with Elias and Foucault. During his time at the Ontario Institute of Education (OISE) in Toronto from 1993-98, Philip deepened his intellectual engagement not only with poststructuralist theory, to which he became more receptive while continuing to adamantly reject the reduction of everything to an idealist conception of discourse, but also – and above all – with feminist scholarship. My own dalliance with Barthes, Lacan, and Derrida came later.[17] In his 1988 article ‘Social Forms/Human Capacities: Further Remarks on Authority and Difference’, Philip characterized social forms as ‘a cartography, a dictionary, a repertoire, whose central social organization entails a social grammar organized around a Figure in Dominance: that of the white, heterosexual, male ‘possessed’ of the dominant features of the division of labour’.[18] I suspect that had Philip and I gone on to write Organizing the Subject, we might have ended up placing less emphasis than The Great Arch on capitalism as Marx’s ‘general illumination’ and paying more attention to other features of that enduringly dominant figure. For me, this would require cracking the Marxist mold. For Philip, I can’t say.
The last of Philip’s texts I have chosen to reproduce here is ‘Bread and Knowledge Politics’ (1993). ‘On the news of Edward Thompson’s death Philip Corrigan scrapped the article he was working on for left history and sent us this immediate tribute’, the editors of left history explain. I have included this piece less for what it says about state formation than what it says about where we came from. I first met Philip in my first year as a graduate student at Durham University, back in the heady days between the miners’ strikes of 1972 (best remembered for Arthur Scargill’s flying pickets and the Battle of Saltley Gate) and 1974 (which brought down Edward Heath’s government after he called an election on the issue of ‘Who governs Britain?’). I was twenty-one. Eight years older, Philip was in his final year as an undergraduate in the same department. He entered the Durham PhD program that fall. ‘Perhaps because I came ‘late’ to university life… and certainly because the earlier years were spent working as a librarian (together with my own writing of poetry, stories, and – voluminously – letters)’, Philip once explained, ‘I have never been properly ‘disciplined’’.[19] The years spent in the stacks left their stamp on his footnotes and bibliographies, which (as readers of this book will discover) were no less voluminous. Lovingly compiled with the purest of intentions, they overwhelmed – much like the man himself. A voracious and catholic reader, Philip was a firm believer in liberating knowledge from the disciplinary walls that fence it in and making it accessible to the multitudes outside the ivory towers.[20] Sometimes he put me in mind of Haňt’a, the hero of Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, suffocating under the weight of the books he has saved from being pulped.[21]
Bliss it might have been in that dawn to be alive, but the world has changed mightily in the half-century since Philip and I embarked on our collaboration. Gerald Aylmer asked in his foreword how far it is possible to be persuaded of the historical case put forward in The Great Arch without accepting the political conclusions drawn from it. I remain generally persuaded of the historical case, though I might now demur on many points of detail. The political conclusions are another matter. The miners’ strike with which we began The Great Arch, that of 1984-85, ended very differently than those of the seventies, in a bitter defeat for the labor movement that put the seal on more than just the destruction of Britain’s mining communities. In retrospect, it was a turning point in the long march of capitalist triumph that began with Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang in 1986, swept all before it as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and has led us to the brink of the abyss into which the world is staring today.
We ended The Great Arch with an injunction to imagine. If I allow myself to imagine the future today, what I see is not Marx’s ‘resumption by the people for the people of its own social life’, but a burning and drowning planet ravaged by famine, pestilence, and wars, in which pitiful authoritarian remnants of ‘the West’ cower behind Trumpian walls built to keep out never-ending hordes of refugees. Such a nightmare scenario could, perhaps, be averted, though I am not hopeful. We are at another historical turning-point: one in which, this time around, the very existence of sustainable human life on earth is in jeopardy. It may be that humanity’s long-term future, if it is to have one, can only be secured within some kind of socialist framework. Our present capitalist path is a certain road to ruin. But the immediate task of the day, it seems to me, must be to defend whatever is left of bourgeois democracy, Enlightenment thought and values, civil and human rights, and the rule of law, against the onslaughts of a new global fascism – without losing sight of the enduringly raced, classed, and gendered features of all these social forms, just in case we survive. Nothing in The Great Arch leads me to think otherwise.
Calgary, April 2026
References
Bourdieu, Pierre 2014, On the State: Lectures at the College de France, 1989-1992, trans. David Fernbach, London: Polity.
Campbell, James 1989, ‘Stubbs and the English State’, Stenton Lecture, University of Reading, 1989.
Corrigan, Philip 1975, ‘On the Politics of Bibliography’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 5, 1.
Corrigan, Philip 1990, ‘The Body of Intellectuals/The Intellectuals’ Body’, in Social Forms/Human Capacities: Essays in Authority and Difference, London: Routledge.
Elkins, Caroline 2002, Legacy of Violence: A History of Empire, New York: Knopf.
Gilbert, Joseph M. and Daniel Nugent (eds) 1994, Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.
Havel, Václav 1987, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, in his Living in Truth, Boston and London: Faber and Faber.
Hrabal, Bohumil 1990, Too Loud a Solitude, trans. Michael Henry Heim, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Sayer, Derek 1989, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sayer, Derek 2002, ‘Gerald Aylmer and DGOS: In Memoriam’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 15, No. 1, 60-62
Sayer, Derek 2004a, Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press.
Sayer, Derek 2004b, ‘Incognito Ergo Sum: Language, Memory and the Subject’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21, 5.
Sayer, Derek 2013, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sayer, Derek 2022a, ‘Prefatory Note: On ‘From the Body Politic to the National Interest’’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 107-8.
Sayer, Derek 2022b, Postcards from Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wolf, Eric 1987, review of The Great Arch in American Ethnologist, 14, 2.
Notes
[1] Translated in Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, New York: Da Capo, 1997, pp. 622-3.
[2] Mark Kishlansky ridiculed our endeavors in the Times Higher Education Supplement as ‘A-level history’ (12 September 1986), while J. G. A. Pocock penned a nasty little limerick that began: ‘There was a professor from OISE’ and ended ‘His reading of history/While laudably herstory/Was less for the men than the boys’ (Albion, Vol. 18, No. 2, 1986, pp. 294-96). The cadences of white, entitled masculine privilege to which we had drawn attention were evidently alive and well in Johns Hopkins University as well as the University of Chicago, where Professor Kishlansky plied his pugnacious trade before moving on to Harvard in 1991.
[3] Publication details of all reviews of The Great Arch known to us at the time, including those quoted here, are given in the Bibliographical Supplement to the 1991 edition of The Great Arch (see below, p. 000).
[4] Wolf 1987; Campbell 1989; Bourdieu 2014, pp. 374-5
[5] See Joseph and Nugent (eds) 1994, p. 4. ‘The volume’s purposefully ironic title’, wrote the editors, ‘juxtaposes ‘everyday forms’ from James Scott’s penetrating analysis of peasant resistance in rural Southeast Asia and ‘state formation’ from Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer’s study of the formation of the bourgeois state in England as a cultural revolution’.
[6] The Great Arch had 7,546 views on academia.edu as of 12 April 2026. On the same date, Google Scholar recorded 2726 lifetime citations (plus 317 of the partial Spanish translation). Though the book was published in 1985, it continues to be widely cited, averaging over 60 citations per year since 2020.
[7] Our writings together and with Harvie Ramsay up to 1985 are listed in the bibliography to The Great Arch, below, pp. 000-000. I would also mention our foundation with Gerald Aylmer of the Discussion Group on the State (DGOS), which met annually at St Peter’s College, Oxford, from 1982-2001 (see Sayer 2002, 60-62), and the Journal of Historical Sociology, which was published quarterly from 1988-2022.
[8] Sayer 1989; 2013; 2022b
[9] See below, p. 00
[10] A work called Capitalism’s Cultural Revolution: Organizing the Subject is listed under both our names in the bibliography as forthcoming (with Macmillan) in 1986. See below, p. 000
[11] For more details on the background to this essay, see Sayer 2022a, pp. 107-8
[12] The massacre remains disturbingly peripheral to both British historiography and popular conceptions of empire, but Jallianwala Bagh has more recently been given its appropriate place as a paradigm of the ‘legalized lawlessness’ fundamental to ‘liberal imperialism’ in Elkins’s superb Legacy of Violence: A History of Empire (Elkins 2022, pp. 129-44).
[13] The other panelists were Saskia Sassen, Jane Schneider, and James C. Scott.
[14] See Havel 1987.
[15] The cane was the fetish (I use the term advisedly) that ruled over us at King’s School, Rochester, the minor English public school I attended as a scholarship boy from 1959-1968, too; I have explored its lasting imprint on my psyche in Sayer 2004a.
[16] Corrigan 1990, p. 186. This is one of three incandescent essays Philip wrote while at OISE in 1986-88 (the others being ‘Social Forms/Human Capacities’ and ‘Masculinity as Right’) that I would have liked to include here had I more space. They are all reproduced in Social Forms/Human Capacities, which is still in print in paperback and electronic forms.
[17] See the long theoretical essay with which I concluded Going Down for Air, a modified version of which was published as Sayer 2004b, and more generally my Undisciplined: Essays in History and Theory, forthcoming in the Historical Materialism series.
[18] Corrigan 1990, p. 199
[19] Corrigan 1990, p. xi.
[20] ‘Footnotes should be provided in double or treble profusion in a socialist periodical’, Philip once wrote, ‘which should aim before all else to establish the class configurations of the recorded knowledge which we have. Socialist periodicals should give much space to facts, to review essays, to bibliographical listing, since they must be keys, leads, linkages and powers encouraging any reader to follow up their interest in this or that facet’ (Corrigan 1975).
[21] Hrabal 1990.
[In the published version these are footnotes, not endnotes.]
