UC Berkeley

The explosive growth of British clubs over the 18th Century has been understood to have major implications for the histories of sociability, the public sphere, civil society, and masculinity. This dissertation looks at the history of clubs from another perspective, that of the history of organizations. To capture a robust narrative of club growth over the long term, a Digital Census of club activities was produced drawing from archive catalogues, contemporary newspapers, and secondary sources. Displaying these enumerations in data visualizations shows the steady growth in the per capita density of clubs over the long 18th Century. Clubs developed from marginal urban pastimes to inescapable cornerstones of everyday life. Clubs used minutes, democratic deliberation, and elected officers to maintain themselves: practices that were borrowed from the wider corporate world. This dissertation reframes the growth of civil society organizations like clubs as the spread of procedural, formal administration into everyday life. Corporate paperwork was used not only to make a rational organization but also to develop interested, embedded, local ties. The expansion of these corporate tools led to the development of a pluralistic civil society that included a huge range of increasingly specialized activities. A case study of change ringing, a form of English church bell ringing, shows how the pastime developed into a conspicuously complex amusement in order appeal to a niche of accurate middle-class men. But this civil society became specialized, fractured, and at times obscure. The fracturing of civil society came to a political crisis in the 1790s, with the French Revolution and the domestic British radical project for political reform. We have missed how this conflict was not just about reform against reaction, but also about the proper uses of civil society organizations. What resulted from the conflict was a conception of civil society as ‘neutral’, acting outside of the state or the market and limited self-interest.