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Class After Industry
A Complex Realist
Approach

David Byrne
Class After Industry
 David Byrne

Class After Industry

A Complex Realist Approach
David Byrne
School of Applied Social Sciences
Durham University
Durham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-02643-1 ISBN 978-3-030-02644-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02644-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958602

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
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To My Partner—Kate Calder
 Preface

This is a book that tries to do what it says on the tin—write about class
as class is lived in societies which were absolutely industrial but are now
post-industrial—and do so using the complexity theory frame of refer-
ence. What that implies is the content of the text but my motive is worth
remarking on here. I am an academic but all my adult life I have been an
engaged participant in class politics. So I wrote this book both as some-
body who felt he had something to say about how social scientists can
understand class in what used to be advanced industrial societies and as a
politically active citizen who is firmly working class by class identity and
wants social science to be useful in informing politics directed towards
the interest of that class—towards, to use a current framing, the ­interests
of the 99% against the interests of the 1%. I have no time for the notion
that social scientists can ever really be disinterested purely objective
investigators. What they need to do is speak as they find and at the same
time make it absolutely plain where they are standing when they speak.
That is what I have tried to do in this book.

Durham, UK David Byrne

vii
 Acknowledgements

This book is explicitly a work of synthesis. It draws on a lot of empir-

ical and conceptual work, most of it done by other people, in order
to use a ‘whole tangle of evidence’—a phrase of my colleague Nancy
Cartwright—to explore and understand class in post-industrial socie-
ties. In particular, I have drawn on work done by Ph.D. students I have
supervised or examined including Maura Banim, Gill Callaghan, Jon
Warren, Aidan Doyle, Andreas Giatziagolou, and David Smith. I men-
tion this not just because I use their work to illustrate argument but
because my way of thinking has developed from discussions with them
during supervision and, particularly in the case of Gill Callaghan and Jon
Warren, through an ongoing subsequent intellectual engagement. Some
years ago there was a session on ‘Class and Culture’ held as a workshop
in Durham and the participants in that event stimulated a good deal of
thought on my part and one result of that is this book. Finally, there
are the women with whom I have lived and with them lived class. They
and my daughters—more women—have shaped a great deal of my think-
ing. I am sure that we need a book which addresses explicitly the inter-
sectionality of gender and class in post-industrial capitalism. I have tried
to at least notice the importance of that here. Perhaps one of them will
write it?

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 A Complex Realist Take on Theorizing Class 17

3 After Industry and After the Welfare State 35

4 Class and Culture: The Dynamics of Cultural Change 53

5 How Class Is Lived: The Dynamics of Lives and the

Dynamic of Society 71

6 Class in Space 85

7 Understanding How Class Is Lived and Acted

in Post-industrial Capitalism 103

8 Conclusion: What Can Be Done 119

Bibliography 127

Index 133

xi
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 The extent of deindustrialization % of labour force

employed in industry 39
Table 3.2 Changes in tenure patterns, Great Britain
1981–2011—decennial censuses 42
Table 6.1 Ingleby Barwick and Thorntree profiles, 2011 census
data (Thorntree %’s in italics) 94

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract Here the rationale and organization of the book are explained.
The book was written to address the author’s dissatisfaction with both
academic and journalistic approaches to class, and in particular with the
identification of the working class with only the poorest and most dis-
possessed sections of it. There was minimal attention to the dynamics
of class at every level, including that of ‘the great if partial’ transforma-
tion of industrial into post-industrial societies—great because it has been
immense in scale and implications, partial because these remain capital-
ist social orders. The implications of ‘absences’ in the class literature are
outlined. Chapter descriptions are presented to explain how the book
attempts to address these absences.

Keywords Post-industrial transformation · Dynamics of class

Complex realism · Class as lived

I decided to write this book because I was dissatisfied with the charac-
ter of both academic and journalistic writing on class in post-industrial
societies at the beginning of the twenty first century. The Academic
writing was (mostly) embedded in an internal debate within Sociology.
Even those contributions which drew on the insights of Marx and Weber
had lost sight of the relationship between the transformed character of
the whole social order and the way in which class is lived by people. In
failing to understand class not only in terms of identities engendered by

© The Author(s) 2019 1

D. Byrne, Class After Industry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02644-8_1
2 D. BYRNE

lived experience but also as something lived in an active sense: that is as

a source of potential association and action towards transformation, the
debate was generally passive and disempowering. Journalistic writing was
at best naïve. The term working class was disassociated from reference to
the wage labour relationship and used merely as a label for the poorest
and most dispossessed part of that class. The reality of exploitation as
a basis for the determination of class status did not appear in often self
pitying or voyeuristic othering descriptions. Even when written against
attacks on those “others”—for example Jones Chavs (2011)—whose
subtitle was ‘the demonization of the working class’, by equating the
working class only with its poorest and most dispossessed fraction, the
argument lost sight of the complex and dynamic relationships among
individual lives, the class structure, and the contemporary form of the
capitalist mode of production. These approaches miss the significance of
class as a source for action in the world in which we live and will live.
Contemporary debates are unsatisfactory because they do not take
proper account of the dynamic nature of class. This dynamism exists at
the level of individual lives, at the level of households, a key social for-
mation in which lives are lived, at the level of places in the sense both
of neighbourhoods and even more importantly localities which provide
the spatial frame for social existence, and at the level of the whole cap-
italist social order itself. To take these in reverse order, we need to rec-
ognize the enormous significance of what I am going to call the second
‘great if partial’ transformation. The Great Transformation was the title
of Polanyi’s (1944) account of the relationship between the develop-
ment of the modern state and the creation of a society dominated by
the market form of social relations. What Polanyi paid less attention to
was the simultaneous development of industrial capitalism, of the impli-
cations of the new technologies of energy production, and particu-
larly of coal based energy, for the production of material commodities
through a factory system. What emerged from his great transformation
was not just market capitalism but industrial market capitalism. The for-
merly ‘Advanced Industrial Countries’—that is the industrial capitalisms
of Europe and North America1—now have economic systems which are
post-industrial in that both the proportion of economically active people
engaged in any form of industrial production is now a fraction of what it
was and the value of industrial product in those countries is much lower
as a proportion of overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP), although still
higher proportionately than is the case for the industrial component of
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

the labour force. We do not live in a post-industrial world. Rather indus-

trial production has shifted its location from the global North to the
global East and South, particularly to China but also to countries like
Egypt, Bangladesh, Vietnam etc.2 There is a world of industrial capital-
ism, much of it under the political control of the Chinese Communist
Party, but it is not where it was.
I use the term ‘great if partial’ transformation to describe what has
happened to ‘formerly Advanced Industrial Countries’ in my adult life
time because whilst they have certainly become post-industrial they are
still dominated by market relations, to a degree even more than in the
industrial era. That is a consequence of the recommodification and mar-
ketization of public services through privatization. They remain capitalist
in that the means of production are overwhelmingly owned by capital-
ists and the great majority of working adults obtain their living by selling
their labour. So we have a post-industrial capitalism and the first level of
dynamic change which we have to engage with is precisely that ‘great if
partial’ transformation.
This is evident at the level of place. The great powerhouses of the
former industrial world are now either rustbelts or have been expropri-
ated by new forms of capital accumulation based on the secondary and
quaternary modes of accumulation—on speculation in the value of real
property and speculation in financial instruments, as opposed to the pri-
mary mode of accumulation, the production of real commodities. World
Cities—New York and London for example—were major zones of indus-
trial production fifty years ago. Changes in places have had enormous
consequences for the lives of the people who live in them BUT these
consequences are not uniform. The interwoven dynamics of individ-
ual lives and the households in which the domestic parts of those lives
are lived are shaped by place but shaped in very different ways depend-
ing on other causal factors at the level both of the individual and the
household. Every post-industrial city region has its prosperous neigh-
bourhoods. Nunthorpe in Middlesbrough on Teesside, one of the most
severely deindustrialized having been one of the most industrialized city
regions in the world, is in the least deprived 10% of English Wards by
the 2015 Index of Multiple Deprivation. Yet Middlesbrough has the
highest proportion of its neighbourhoods of any English municipality—
nearly 50%—in the most deprived 10% in England. Ingleby Barwick in
Stockton, another borough in deindustrialized Teesside, is often claimed
to be the largest owner occupied housing development in Europe.
4 D. BYRNE

It is very much a location of the ‘missing middle’ (Byrne 2005) so often

ignored in class analyses. The two wards which make it up are both in
the least deprived quartile in England. We find the same in the Cleveland
Ohio City region where suburbs like Shaker Heights, a multi racial
inner ring suburb, are radically different in terms of income and educa-
tion levels from Cleveland itself and the Gross Pointe suburbs adjacent
to Detroit—the paradigm of urban deindustrialization—are among the
most prosperous areas in the USA.3 The dynamics or urban change are
both inter-urban and intra-urban.
The class debate literature in Sociology usually fails to consider how
the lives of individual people AND of the households in which they live
are also dynamic. People move through their lives. They move spatially,
both within city regions and across city regions, and even to deep rural
areas on retirement. As Callaghan (1998) has shown, they have a vision
of their future life based on movement up4 and a very clear sense of class
character as expressed through neighbourhood of residence. They move
through households from their families of origin—childhood and adoles-
cence may be lived in more than one household—mine was—and often
through multiple households in adult life—I have. They move through
educational systems and in income levels where the composition of their
households in adult life in terms of numbers of earners can be crucial.
They move in terms of cultural identity, although this can be very ‘sticky’
and in political orientation, which again can be very ‘sticky’. Social
Policy studies have appreciated the significance of the dynamism of lives.
Sociology really has not.
Much of the literature is siloed in introverted disciplinary debates.
There is little discussion in the Sociological literature on class of the
way in which Social Policy has deployed the notion of social exclusion
and related this to the rights and status of citizenship. Social Policy pays
insufficient attention to the structural determinants of the inequalities it
examines. One symptom of this siloing is the virtual absence in the soci-
ological literature of consideration of the way in which states in various
ways and at every level—supra-national, national, regional and local—
play a constitutive role in the construction of class positions. This is most
evident in relation to the role of the state in the delivery of incomes in
cash and in kind, and in the role of taxation in reducing incomes avail-
able for consumption. Other than a social mobility driven concern with
education systems and class, and the literature on health inequalities by
class, there is little sociological engagement with the state as a crucial
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

agent in the formation of classes and class identities. Those literatures,

although of course useful in giving us an empirical account of the effects
of class structure, engage only partially with the generative mechanisms
of class formation.
As for the significance of place in the causal processes which consti-
tute class structures, there is less relationship between the sociological
consideration of class and social geography’s interest in spatial inequal-
ities, particularly inequalities at the intra urban regional level, than one
might expect from the long established intersection of interests of urban
geographers and urban sociologists. Much of the geographical literature
is descriptive but we can relate spatial evidence on intra and inter urban
regional inequalities to the generative processes which have transformed
an industrial into a post-industrial social structure.
The emphasis on dynamism is a lead in for me to explain the sub-
title of this book: A Complex Realist Approach to Understanding the
Dynamics of Class and Class Identities. Complex realism is a synthesis
developed by Reed and Harvey (1992) of Bhaskar’s philosophical ontol-
ogy of critical realism (1979) and the scientific ontology of complexity.
Complex systems5 cannot be understood by a reductionist analytical pro-
gramme which seeks to explain the nature of the system in terms of the
causal properties of its components. Rather their character is an emer-
gent product of complex interactions among their components, which
may themselves be complex, of the components with the system as a
whole and of the system with other systems at multiple levels which have
significant relationships with it. Complex systems have dynamic trajecto-
ries. Significant change in their character is qualitative rather than incre-
mental. For much of the time they may remain much the same but when
they change the change is a change in the kind of thing they are. We can
use the complexity frame of reference language of trajectory, possibility
space and attractor to describe all this. Systems have trajectories through
time and those trajectories happen in the possibility space—a multi-di-
mensional space whose axes are values of components of the state of
the system and time. There is a multiple but not infinite set of possible
future states of the system and/or ensembles of systems. There is a one
way character to this—an arrow of time: the expression path dependency
conveys this well.
Although a possibility space might seem hugely extensive only a lim-
ited, albeit large, set of possible locations are available to any system
at any time point. We can use the mathematical term ‘attractor’ as a
6 D. BYRNE

metaphor here—remembering that as China Mieville (2011) has told us,

metaphors are lies that tell the truth. Movement in the possibility space
is a movement to a different attractor, a shift to being a different kind of
thing. The causes of relative stasis or radical transformation for a system
can be any of a function of the causal powers of the internal sub-compo-
nents of the system and interactions among them, of the causal powers of
factor or factors extraneous to the system including a transformation in
the state of a system or systems relevant for the system being considered,
or of any degree of interaction among all of these.
For individuals—and individuals are certainly complex systems them-
selves—we must consider two related but different things—class as
position in the class structure and class identity as the personal system
of beliefs and motivations to action which result from their position in
the class structure as they understand it themselves. Neither of these are
class in the sense of class as collective actor—that emergent described by
Thompson (1978: 85) which we can only see when expressed in action,
but both, and particularly the second, are vital precursors for emer-
gence of classes as collective social actors. Class as an attribute can be
understood as a multi-dimensional measurement which not only social
scientists but people themselves make as an assessment of relative—and
the relative aspect of this locating is very important—position in rela-
tion to any of the things which might determine class location and of
the ways in which these interact with each other. So we all take account
of income, of wealth—material possessions, of cultural tastes and pref-
erences, of education, of our own and family histories (something often
ignored in class measurement by social scientists) and place ourselves and
our households relative to others in a way which takes account of hierar-
chical inequalities along any or all of these dimensions.
Class identity is not just what we think we are on the basis of our
self attributed class, but is also our understanding, however implicit,
of the generative mechanisms which have made us what we are, and of
our predispositions and intentions in relation to doing something about
it. So class identity, first at the level of the individual and then at any
other social level as an emergent, is primarily a cultural identity. This is
not just about distinctions of taste, as argued by Bourdieu and his fol-
lowers. It is about how we will act and who we will act with. It may be
that for much of the time this can properly be understood by Bourdieu’s
term ‘habitus’. We don’t think about it, we just do it. But in times of
change when class identities are in some way challenged then it always
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

moves to the level of consciousness. Although Bourdieu has interest-

ing things to say, the notion of cultural capital which has some useful
explanatory force, has far too often displaced proper attention to what
Raymond Williams identified as culture as ‘a way of life’ and these are
not the same thing. Culture as a way of life is not the property of an
individual and it is inappropriate to construct classes by the mere aggre-
gation of cases based in large part on some sort of measure of ‘cultural
capital’ assets of those individuals.6 Cultures are emergents, which have a
force and a persistence. I find the remarks on the nature of culture made
by Maxwell (2012) and especially his assertion of its inherent fuzziness
extremely helpful. As he says culture is not necessarily shared, rather it
is participated in to varying degrees by different people and by the same
people at different times. What people think and what people will do
are complex in themselves and complex in their mutual and reflexive
inter-relationship.
Pakulski and Waters in their argument for The Death of Class asserted
that:

The original class communities have been absorbed into a national state
(a societal quasi continuity) in which citizenship is the central mode of par-
ticipation. With subsequent globalization, these national communities are
giving way to wider but ephemeral configurations in which identity focuses
on lifestyle or value commitments. (1996: 6)

The notion that identities are constituted through lifestyles is a merely

culturalist position. I agree with the cultural turn but want to challenge
the simplistic and analytical distinction of lifestyle from class. I radically
disagree with Pakulski and Waters when they assert that:

Classes are socially distant from one another and social relationships tend
to be exclusive. (1996: 10)

No evidence is adduced for this assertion and the overwhelming bur-

den of historical and ethnographic work shows that class as lived is fuzzy
both in terms of immediate experience but even more through the
course of life trajectories. Consideration of the ways in which couples
form and reform demonstrates this let alone any consideration of pat-
terns of kin relationships. Of course there is some boundary setting but
there is also a great deal of boundary crossing.
8 D. BYRNE

Williams was unequivocal about what he regarded as the essence of

working class culture:

We may now see what is properly meant by working class culture. It not
proletarian art or council houses or a particular use of language; it is,
rather, the basic collective idea and the institutions, manners, habits of
thought, and intentions which proceed from this. (1958: 325)

I agree but with the proviso that this is not an empirical description
of any instantiation of working class culture in a momentary sense but
rather an account of the motivating force behind what Williams called
‘the long revolution’. When Pakulski and Waters asserted that class was
dead they were saying that this project was done and discarded. To go
further with Williams (1977) his typification which draws attention to
residual AND emergent cultures is of particular value since the both are
so significant for class identities in post-industrial capitalism and will be
important focuses of attention in this book.
The implication of understanding class as dynamic is that both
class as position and class as identity can change through a life-course.
When the basic social structure is transforming, then the potential for
changes engendered by the interaction of both with structural change
is very great indeed. We can map changes in class as position through
time by tracing the trajectories of individuals and sometimes even house-
holds through time using data from cohort based longitudinal surveys.
We can even sometimes begin to get a take in that way on class identity
changes although we are more likely to achieve this through the colla-
tion of narrative life histories. The crucial thing to recognize is that both
social structures and people change, that these changes are inter-related,
and that whilst the determinant causal forces generally operate from the
dynamics of structure,7 emergent class has the potential to force change
on structures themselves.
It is not just our own life courses which shape our class identities.
We all have family histories and the character of those histories, of the
lives of our parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and keep adding
greats for younger generations, has a shaping influence on class identity
which is more significant than can be understood by putting an occupa-
tionally defined definition of parental and/or grandparental class into a
regression equation. This is about living circumstances, political activi-
ties, trade unionism, the impact of two world wars, health histories—the
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

whole shebang. I know that my own class identity has of course been
constructed during my own life, much influenced by the women with
whom I have lived and their class identities8 but it also reflects the ele-
ments of the past—the deaths from TB in young adult life of siblings of
all of my mother, father and stepfather, the impact of the Second World
War on my mother (which was in many ways massively positive for her),
my uncle’s practical trade unionism, my family connections and those of
my ex-wife with the Durham miners. All this has a shaping effect. It is
not solely determinant. The mother of the next King of England but two
(unless we have a republic by then) has just as many coalminer grandfa-
thers as I do—one—my other grandfather was a seaman. I am no Irish
Nationalist but I am well away that I am in large part a descendent of
very poor post famine immigrants from Ireland to Britain and know
what the impact of that famine was on my own family. As an exercise
I suggest to readers of this book that they look back across the gener-
ations of their own family as far back as they can and think, reflexively,
about the influence this has on their own class identity. After all the for-
midable Clare in the Community from the Guardian strip, cast on the
radio with a cut class accent, lost her temper severely with an adolescent
client not over bad language abuse which was like water of a duck’s back
but when she was called middle class. As she asserted very forcefully one
of her grandfathers was a Geordie coal miner—properly she should have
said Pitman—but although this is a good joke, it is not just a joke.9
The book is organized as follows. Chapter 2 develops a complex real-
ist way of understanding the multiple levels of the dynamics of class. It
will outline the key issues in understanding class at multiple levels and
address the ways in which these have been conventionally handled before
proposing a complex realist alternative. Here I will engage with the argu-
ments and analysis advanced by Savage et al. (2015), Pakulski and Waters
(1996), and Olin Wright (2015) but will also address Social Policy lit-
erature on ‘Inequality’ and in particular the dynamic turn in that litera-
ture. I will also have something to say in a preliminary fashion about the
rather restricted modes of empirical investigation which have informed
the class debate. A critical consideration of the empirical foundations of
theoretical assertions about class will be a theme in most of the chapters
in this book.
Chapter 3 will outline the character of the changes which have
resulted in a transition from industrial/welfare capitalism—what is some-
times called either or both of the Fordist era or the era of Keynesian
10 D. BYRNE

regulation—to contemporary post-industrial/post-welfare capitalism. It

will pay particular attention not only to the state at the macro level in
relation to finance and fiscal/welfare policies in the regimes of ‘Austerity’
but also to how the state functions at the meso level of governance in
localities in relation to urban and social provision planning and govern-
ance, and to how the state is experience at the micro level by individuals
and households. The role of the state at all these levels as causal to life
courses and hence to class identities has not been adequately addressed
in the existing literature and an important objective of this chapter is
to redress this absence. The transformation in the nature of employ-
ment—casualization, the increasing significance of part time work,
and the changing gender composition of the workforce are all impor-
tant aspects of the post-industrial transformation and will be considered
here. In relation to the role of the state the development of privatization
across service provision, a development of particular significance for tra-
ditionally female employment in care and related areas, is of particular
significance and has transformative consequences for economic situation
in households.
Chapter 4 will review the relationship between class and culture with
a particular focus on the dynamics of cultural change. In general in the
sociological and related literature on class the domain of culture has
entered through engagement with the work of Bourdieu. This operates
not only at the level of theorization in relation to discussion of habitus
and field. The themes Bourdieu raised in Distinction (1984) have shaped
both qualitative studies and quantitative exploration in recent survey
based work. In contrast the work of Raymond Williams has been much
less influential in contemporary consideration of how class is shaped
by culture. Williams framing of residual, dominant and emergent cul-
tural forms both resonates with a complexity based understanding of
culture as a ‘transforming and transformative’ crucial sub system of the
wider social system and is sensitive to the character of British working
class culture as an actual political driver of social change. Bourdieu has
interesting things to say, and the idea of habitus (so long as the ability
of individuals, especially in times of crisis, to reflect on and transcend
habitus is allowed) has value but there is more to culture than taste.
Cultures—again a very deliberate plural in any society—are emergent
forms with transformative potential. This chapter will examine culture
and class through a synthesis of the complexity frame of reference with
Williams’ approach to culture in general and do so in relation to available
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

literature from social science based studies, historical work at the local
and regional level, and popular cultural expressions including TV, radio
and popular fiction. These provide an important entry into understand-
ing how class, gender and ethnicity interact in everyday life. A key word
in the processes of understanding deployed here and elsewhere through-
out this text is synthesis. We need to know not from single studies or
single methods of inquiry but through putting together as much evi-
dence as possible from as wide a range of available sources we can find
and with that evidence generated by any and all (with the exception of
controlled experiments) of the techniques of investigation of the social
sciences. In this chapter an important source of evidence will be a set of
Ph.D. theses which I have engaged with either as supervisor or examiner.
It is in Ph.D. students’ work that we find real ethnographies of how class
is being lived today and of the socio-spatial structures in which lives are
located.
Chapter 5 deals with how class is lived, with the dynamics of lived
experience in and through the post-industrial transformation. This
chapter will develop the implications of the dynamic component of
the complex realist approach to class for the ways in which we meas-
ure and describe class situation and class identities. A particular empha-
sis will be on the role of the household as a significant ‘unit’ for class
analysis. Households are the crucial economic unit in relation to material
life chances. They are themselves emergent and changing—household
composition and decomposition is crucial and, particularly for women,
household decomposition can have very negative income consequences.
At the same time households through their adult members are the node
of connection to families, connections not only important for material
resources but also of massive cultural/roots significance. We should not
distinguish between quantitative and qualitative narratives but rather
deploy both as means for understanding the trajectories of individual
lives and other levels of social reality.
Chapter 6 will address the significance of place in understanding class
in the context of social transformation. There is an interesting and valu-
able literature on ‘place’ written at the intersection of social geography,
urban studies and local ethnography. Much of this is concerned with the
local character and impact of the post-industrial transformation. This
chapter will continue the emphasis on narrative as a mode for under-
standing at the level of localities and regions. A key focus here will be on
how the dynamics of urban spaces are affected by the secondary circuit
12 D. BYRNE

of accumulation, the making of profits not from new construction but

from changes in the value of real property already in existence. There
will also be consideration of issues derived from the ownership of hous-
ing and the problem of transmission of advantage—the generalization of
some wealth and the implications for this in relation to housing markets.
An important theme here will be the distinction between places with
an apparently (in other words perhaps not really) secure location in the
post-industrial world system of city regions and others in relation to life
chances, service provision and social differentiation.
Chapter 7 will consider the issues that arise in researching Class and
argue for modes of investigation based on narratives. It will develop the
discussion of the appropriate methods of investigation for understand-
ing class in a complex realist frame and in relation to the post-industrial
transformation which will have been suggested in the previous sections
of the book. The chapter will include both methodological discussion
and suggestions as to actual techniques of investigation in a mixed meth-
ods style of social science inquiry. Here I will call for a revival of proper
locality/community studies whilst recognizing that in the doing of
Ph.D. research they have never really gone away. There has been far too
much reliance in social scientific discussion of class on empirical evidence
derived from single studies. The Great British Class Survey in particular
made extensive claims on the basis of one survey and statistical methods
which to a considerable degree generate accounts very much dependent
on the choice of variable inputs into the analyses. My approach here is
different and explicitly synthetic. Although the fundamental genera-
tive mechanism of class in a capitalist society is always the nature of the
mode of production and the consequent wage labour relation, how that
generative mechanism is actualized at varying levels from the individual
upwards and in differing contexts in time and space is highly variable,
within limits set by the character of the possibility space. I will draw on
some individual studies of my own here but mostly my arguments will
be sustained by a meta interpretation of a wide range of relevant liter-
ature based on studies conducted in both quantitative and qualitative
mode. My task is synthesis—of putting together accounts to provide
both a coherent overall picture and to specify the range of variation in
how things work in relation to class as it is lived and as it is expressed.
There will be a lot of references and quite a lot of quotations in this text.
I make no apology for that.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

In the Conclusion to the book the focus will be on the political impli-
cations at both the meso and macro levels of politics of the complex
realist framing of class and class trajectories in the contemporary post-in-
dustrial/post-welfare capitalist social order. Social science should have a
constitutive role in informing the politics of class, as well as being the
means through which class is understood at the level of class action. As
Gouldner (1971) said we need not take too much notice of that old
Minotaur Max (Weber) and his insistence on the separation of science
and political engagement. Indeed one of the best writers on complex sys-
tems, Paul Cilliers asserted that the only ethical way to engage in the
transformation of complex systems was from within them. Knowledge is
never enough for power on its own: it is never a sufficient cause, but it is
always a necessary one.
The great bulk of the empirical work deployed in developing the
account presented here is based on studies conducted in the United
Kingdom. Many but not all relate to the North East of England—one of
the world’s oldest industrial regions where carboniferous capitalism was
put together. I make no apology for this. The UK is the oldest industrial
society in the world and now one of the most acutely post-industrialized—
and that expression: post-industrialized is meant as an active verb with the
UK as the object since actors have played a major part in making this hap-
pen. The North East of England stands almost as a limiting case. Studies
of other places are necessary and are being done. Context does matter but
the UK illustrates general tendencies as they work out in a particular soci-
ety. That is worth noticing in some detail.
I will return in detail to a discussion of the appropriate methods and
methodology for social scientific inquiry into issues of class in Chapter 6
but here I am going to make it plain that I regard my own lived expe-
rience as a legitimate source of evidence and analysis. I am no outside
‘objective’ observer but rather will engage as a certainly reflexive but
also as an embedded and engaged participant in the living of class. And
if anybody does not like that, then they will just have to do the other
thing.

Notes
1. By the 1960s although the Soviet style countries of Central Europe and
the USSR itself, were often not counted as advanced industrial, in general
they were.
14 D. BYRNE

2. In the key seduction scene in David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) Vic, the
male engineering manager, illustrates the collapse of the British industrial
base by getting Robyn—the female academic—to look at the labels in her
clothes as she takes them off. Only her knickers, coming from Marks and
Spencers, are British made. This is an unusual approach to erotic arousal
but as Lodge wrote it, it worked for them. Since then Marks and Spencers
have abandoned their supply commitment to UK sources and this would
no longer be necessarily true. My Marks and Spencers underpants were
made in China.
3. Unlike Shaker Heights they are overwhelmingly white.
4. People were usually optimistic about their futures but that is changing.
5. For a fuller account see Byrne (1998) and/or Byrne and Callaghan
(2015).
6. A major fault of ‘the great British Class Survey’.
7. It is strange to talk about the dynamics of structure since the point of struc-
tures is that they are static. The term is fixed in the social science vocabulary
but we need to think about structure as a set of emergent social forces with
dynamic potential. As Westergaard put it: ‘… “structure” is only a meta-
phor, but useful to denote persistence and causal force’ (2003: 2).
8. All of them have had backgrounds rather similar to mine.
9. Evans and Tilley (2017: 47) note the remarkable continuity across the
50 years from 1964 to 2014 that twice as many middle class people with a
working class father see themselves as working class as is the case for mid-
dle class people with a middle class father.

References
Bhaskar, R. (1979). A Realist Theory of Science. Brighton: Harvester.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. London: Routledge.
Byrne, D. S. (1998). Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences. London:
Routledge.
Byrne, D. S. (2005). A Reflection on Absences Against Presences. Sociology,
39(5), 807–816.
Byrne, D. S., & Callaghan, G. (2015). Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences:
The State of the Art. London: Routledge.
Callaghan, G. (1998). The Interaction of Gender, Class and Place in Women’s
Experience: A Discussion Based in Focus Group Research. Sociological
Research Online, 3(3). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/3/3/8.html.
Evans, G., & Tilley, J. (2017). The New Politics of Class. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Gouldner, A. (1971). The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. London:
Heinmann.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Jones, O. (2011). Chavs. London: Verso.

Lodge, D. (1988). Nice Work. London: Secker and Warburg.
Maxwell, J. A. (2012). A Realist Approach to Qualitative Research. London:
Sage.
Mieville, C. (2011). Embassytown. London: Pan Macmillan.
Olin Wright, E. (2015). Understanding Class. London: Verso.
Pakulski, J., & Waters, M. (1996). The Death of Class. London: Sage.
Polanyi, K. (1944). Origins of Our Time: The Great Transformation. New York:
Farrar and Rinehart.
Reed, M., & Harvey, D. L. (1992). The New Science and the Old: Complexity
and Realism in the Social Sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour,
22, 356–79.
Savage, M., Cunningham, N., Devine, F., Friedman, S., Laurison, D., McKenzie, L.,
et al. (2015). Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Penguin.
Thompson, E. P. (1978). The Poverty of Theory. London: Merlin.
Westergaard, J. (2003). Interview with John Westergaard. Network, 85, 1–2.
Williams, R. (1958). Culture and Society. London: Penguin.
Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 CHAPTER 2

A Complex Realist Take on Theorizing Class

Abstract This chapter reviews the current dominant trends in the

sociological theorizing of class through the frame of a complex realist
take on the ways in which class emerges at the levels of the social order
and individual lives. It reasserts the centrality of relations in the mode
of production and develops a critique of contemporary theorizing and
in particular the work of those influenced by Bourdieu. The concept of
intersectionality is recognized as very much congruent with complexity
framed approaches to social causality in relation to personal position and
identity. The way in which intersectionality works in terms of identifica-
tion by others is illustrated by the author’s reflections on living in Belfast
in the 1970s.

Keywords Intersectionality · Habitus · Consumption versus

production relation · Determination as the setting of limits of possibility

The arguments presented in this book are framed within the critical
realist tradition. That means that they are constructed on the basis of a
layered ontology in which the domain of the real is composed of gener-
ative mechanisms which express their effects in the domain of the actual
and which become the objects of science through our construction of
them—construction from something not from nothing—in the domain
of the empirical. The generative mechanism which engenders class rela-
tions is the mode of production. Mode of production is often considered

© The Author(s) 2019 17

D. Byrne, Class After Industry,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02644-8_2
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
that we were now at sea[125] and out of the mountains. We came to
stay Saturday and Sunday, which was the last day of September, at
a small village of Our Lady, very poor and ill kept, close to which
church towards the east commence most wild mountains and deep
fosses descending to the greatest abysses men ever saw; nor could
their depth be believed, like as the mountains where the Israelites
live are scarped from the top, so are these. Below they are of great
width, in some places of four leagues, in others five, in others about
three. (This in our opinion.) They say that these dykes run to the
Nile, which is very far from here, and higher up we know well that
they reach the country of the Moors; they say that in the parts of the
Moors they are not so precipitous. At the bottom of these dykes
there are many dwellings and an infinite number of apes, hairy like
lions from the breast upwards.

Cap. lxv.—How we came to some gates and deep passes difficult to

travel, and we went up to the gates, at which the kingdom begins
which is named Xoa.
On Monday the 1st of October 1520, we travelled on our road
through level country of lakes and large pastures for a distance of
three or four leagues, all along these dykes, and we went to sleep
near them where we had to cross these depths. Tuesday morning
we began to travel for half a league, and we arrived at some gates
on a rock which divided two valleys,[126] one to the right, the other to
the left hand, and so narrow near the gates that they might hold one
cart and no more; with small buttresses, between which the gates
shut and close from slope to slope. Going through this gate one
enters at once as into a deep valley, with shale[127] on either side
raised more than the height of a lance, as if the edge of the sword
had made this, these slopes, and this valley. The height of these
walls has a length of two games of quoits[128] of such narrowness
that a man cannot go on horseback, and the mules go scraping the
stirrups on both sides, and so steep that a man descends with his
hands and feet, and this seems to be made artificially. Coming out of
this narrow pass one travels through a loophole[129] which is about
four spans wide, and from one end to the other these clefts are all
shale; it is not to be believed, and I would not have believed it, if I
had not seen it: and if I had not seen our mules and people pass, I
would affirm that goats could not pass there in security. So we set
our mules going there as if one was sending them to destruction,
and we after them with hands and feet down the rock, without there
being any other road. This great roughness lasts for a crossbow
shot, and they call these here aqui afagi, which means death of the
asses. (Here they pay dues.) We passed these gates many times,
and we never passed them without finding beasts and oxen dead,
which had come from below upwards and had not been able to get
up the ascent. Leaving this pass, there still remains quite two
leagues of road sufficiently steep and rocky, and difficult to travel
over. In the middle of this descent there is a rock hollowed out at the
bottom, and water falls from the top of it (there are always many
beggars in this cave). Thus we descended fully two leagues until
reaching a great river which is named Anecheta, which contains
many fish and very large ones. From here we travelled, ascending
for quite a league, until reaching a passage which sights another
river, at which are other gates which now are not used; and yet the
gates are there still. Those who pass these dykes and clefts come to
sleep here, because they cannot go in one day from one end to the
other. At this halting place[130] the friar who conducted us committed
a great cruelty, as though he were not a Christian, or had done it to
Moors. Because a Xuum or captain of some villages which are on a
hill above the place where we were resting, did not come up so
quickly with the people who lived there, he sent some men of his,
and those who carried our baggage, to go and destroy for them
some great bean fields which they had by the side of their houses.
These men who went there brought to where we were more than a
moio[131] of beans, which were their provisions in this country,
because in these valleys they have nothing except millet and beans.
It was a pity to see such destruction; and because we opposed him,
he said that such was the justice of the country, and also each day
he ordered many of those who carried our baggage to be flogged,
and he took from them mules, cows, and stuffs, saying that so
should be treated whoever served ill.
On Tuesday the 2nd of October we took our road through many
steep rocks (as before) between which we passed very narrow and
bad paths, and dangerous passes; both on one side and on the
other scarped rock, a thing not to be credited. We reached the other
river, a good league from where we slept; this river is great, and is
named Gemaa; it also contains much fish. They say that both these
rivers join together and go to the river Nile. We began to travel and
ascend as great cliffs as we had descended the day before. In this
ascent there will be two leagues; at the end of it are other gates, and
another pass such as from aqui afagi. These gates are always shut,
and all who pass through them pay dues. Neither above nor below is
there any other way or passage. Outside of these gates we went to
sleep at a plain which is about half a league from the gates. Already
when there, nothing showed of the dykes, clefts, and cliffs which we
had traversed; on the contrary, all appeared to be a plain on this side
and on the further side, without there being anything in the middle,
and there were five long leagues from one set of gates to the other.
The kingdoms of Amara and Shoa are divided by these gates and
ravines. These gates are called Badabaxa, which means new land.
In these ravines and cliffs there are numerous tribes of birds, and we
could not determine where they breed, nor how they could bring up
their young without their fulling down from the rocks: because
whoever saw it would not judge otherwise than that it was an
impossible thing, according to its greatness.

Cap. lxvi.—How the Prester John went to the burial of Janes Ichee of
the monastery of Brilibanos, and of the election of another Ichee,
who was a Moor.
On Wednesday, the 3rd of October, we travelled through plains
not very far removed from the edge of the rocks and ravines, and we
went to sleep on the rock itself opposite the monastery which is
named Brilibanos.[132] I saw the Prester John go to this monastery
three times. The first was to the burial of the head[133] of the
monastery, who was named Janes, in our language Joannes, and
the title of his prelacy was Ichee.[134] This Ichee of this monastery is
the greatest prelate there is in these kingdoms, exclusive of the
Abima Marcos, who is over all. And the Prester also went in the
month in which they hold the funereal memorial which they call
tescar.[135] He also went there at the end of forty days after the
death of the said Ichee to choose and appoint another. They said
that the deceased was a holy man, and that in life he had worked
miracles, and therefore the Prester went to his burial and funereal
memorial. There was among us a Portuguese, a native of Lisbon, by
name Lazaro d’Andrade, who was a painter, and he lost his sight;
the Prester sent to tell him to go to the tomb of this deceased man,
and to wash with good faith, and that he would receive health: he
went there and returned as he went. He whom they made Ichee was
also held to be a man of holy life, and he had been a Moor. As he
was much my friend, he related to me all his life, and told me that
when he was in his sect he heard a revelation, which said to him:
You are not following the path; go to the Abima Marcos, who is head
of the priests of Ethiopia, and he will teach you another path. Then
he came to the Abima Marcos, and related to him what he had
heard, and the Abima Marcos had made him a Christian, and had
taught him, and held him as a son: and therefore the Prester took
this friar who had been a Moor for governor of this monastery, and
he bears the name of Jacob. This Jacob also acquired the
Portuguese language, and we both understood one another very
well, and he wrote in his own handwriting the Gloria of the Mass, and
the Creed, and Paternoster, and Ave Maria, and Apostles’ Creed,
and the Salve Regina, and he knew it in Latin as well as I did. He
also wrote out the Gospel of St. John, and all very well ornamented.
This Jacob now remained Ichee in this monastery. Ichee means prior
or abbot, and in the Tigray language, which is in the kingdoms of the
Barnagais and of Tigrimahom, they say Abba for the principal father;
and for the prior of the cloister who is below him, they say that there
was (as I have before written) in this language a prior of the cloister
who is called Gabez.[136] In the time when this happened, it was not
when we were travelling, but another time when the court came here
and stayed at a distance of a league and a half from the said
monastery in a very large plain, because the monastery lies in the
very deep ravine where we passed through the gates.
Returning to our journey; Thursday and Friday, we also travelled
through plains, and not at any distance from those ravines; and we
came to stop at some small houses almost under the ground. They
make them in that way on account of the winds; because it is all a
plain without any shelter, they also make the cattle folds
underground, that the cows may be sheltered from the wind. Here
there live dirty and ill clad people, they breed numerous cows,
mares, mules, and fowls. Around these hamlets were the strongest
and best crops of barley that we had yet seen, but there were few of
them. In the tilled fields, in many places they sow three or four
bushels[137] of seed in a tillage, and at the distance of a crossbow
shot from there a similar quantity, and so the land is divided,[138] and
all the villages had their sowed land scattered. There were not as
much as six alqueires of sowing for any one cultivator or inhabitant,
though the land is the best that could be mentioned, because there
is no one to put it to profit. There are many birds in these plains,
such as storks, wild ducks, water fowl, and birds of many kinds,
because there are many lagoons, and no one knows how to catch
them. This mountain is named Huaguida.

Cap. lxvii.—How we travelled for three days through plains, and of the
curing of infirmities and of the sight of the people.
Monday, the 9th of October, we travelled through plains like the
preceding ones, both of grass and tilled land, and we went to sleep
at a place named Anda. Here we ate barley bread very badly made.
So also we travelled on Tuesday through plains like those of the
days before, and we slept close to some small villages. On
Wednesday we now fell in with better land and tillage of wheat and
barley, that is, crops all the year round, one gathered and another
sown. This country is called Tabaguy; it is a very populous country,
with large towns and great breeding of all sorts of animals. There
were in this country many sick people, as of fevers, and all is left to
nature, for they do not apply any other remedy, only if they have a
headache they bleed the head itself: and if they have a stomach
ache or pain in the back or shoulders, they apply fire, as to the
beasts. For fevers they do not apply any remedy. On this
Wednesday we had sight of the tents and camp of the Prester John,
and we went to sleep off the road, as we were accustomed. On
Thursday we travelled a short distance, and also we travelled little on
Friday, and went to stay Saturday and Sunday at a small town which
has a new church not yet painted, because all are painted, but not
with good work. This church is named Auriata,[139] which means of
the apostles, and they said that it was a king’s church. The tents are
about three or four leagues from here, and from this town it is little
more than half a league to the church where the Abima Marcos was
lodged. On this Saturday and Sunday that we remained here there
came to us three mariners, who had fled from our fleet in the port of
Masua, and the friar who conducted us learning that the mariners
had come to see us, was in great ill humour at it, saying, that it was
not the usage of the country, when strange people came, for them to
have conversation with any one before speaking to the King; and
with this ill humour he returned to his tent and to his lodging. This
same Saturday the friar went to see the Abigima Marcos, and
brought to us from there a tray of raisins and a jar of very good grape
wine. On the following Sunday one of the said mariners came again
to see us, and because the friar had complained the day before of
his coming, the ambassador told the mariner to go first and speak to
the friar, and to tell him that he did not come for any bad purpose,
but only from the great friendship that he had always had with us.
The friar when he saw him ordered him to be seized and arrested,
and they wanted to put him in irons if the ambassador and we had
not gone to take him out of their hands, and with rough words, and
above all the said friar said very complainingly that we were not to
speak to any one until we had spoken to the Prester John, because
such is their custom when new people arrived.
 Cap. lxviii.—How a great lord of title was given to us as a guard, and
of the tent which he sent us.
On Monday, the 17th of October, we set out, thinking that we
should this day reach the court and camp, because we had gone to
halt at a league from it. Then it seemed to us that they intended to
take us there next day very early. While we were in this hope, there
came to us a great lord, who is called by title Adugraz, which means
chief major domo, he said that he was come to protect us and give
us what we had need of. This gentleman told us to mount at once
and come with him. We got ready, as it appeared that he was going
to take us to the court: he took a turn backwards, not by the road we
had come by, but he turned with us round some hills and we
returned back more than a league, he telling us not to be in any ill
humour, as the Prester was coming in that direction where we were
going, and indeed six or seven horsemen were going in front of us
on very good horses, skirmishing and amusing themselves, and a
great many mules. They conducted us behind some hills, and the
gentleman lodged himself in his tent, and ordered us to be lodged
near him in our poor tent, such as we had brought for the journey,
and ordered us to be provided with all that was necessary, and we
were much put out of the way;[140] and the Prester was coming to
halt near where we were. On Wednesday in the morning they
brought us a large round tent, saying that the Prester John sent us
that tent, and that nobody had a tent such as that except him, and
the churches, and that his tent belonged to him when he was on a
journey. So we remained till Friday without knowing what we were to
do. The captain who guarded us and the friar warned us to look well
after our goods, as there were many thieves in the country, and the
Franks[141] who were in the country also told us so: they further told
us that there were agents and captains of thieves, and that they paid
dues of what they stole.
 Cap. lxix.—How the ambassador, and we with him, were summoned
by order of the Prester, and of the order in which we went, and of
his state.
On Friday, the 20th of October, at the hour of tierce, the friar
came to us in great haste, for the Prester John had sent to call us,
and that we should bring what we had brought for him, and also all
our baggage, as he wished to see it. The ambassador ordered all
that to be loaded which the captain-major had sent for him, and no
more. We dressed ourselves and arranged ourselves very well, God
be praised; and many people came to accompany us. So we went in
order from the place we started from as far as a great entrance,
where we saw the tents pitched in a great plain, that is, certain white
tents, and, in front of the white ones, one very large red tent pitched,
which they say is set up for great feasts or receptions. In front of
these pitched tents were set up two rows of arches covered with
white and red cotton cloths, that is, an arch covered with red and the
next with white: not covered but rolled round the arch, like a stole on
the pole of a cross, and so these arches were continued to the end;
there may have been quite twenty arches in each row, and in width
and height they were like the small arches of a cloister. One row may
have been apart from the other about the distance of a game of
quoits.[142] There were many people collected together; so many
that they would exceed twenty thousand persons. All these people
were in a semicircle, and removed a good way off on each side; the
smartest people were standing much nearer to the arches. Among
these smarter people were many canons and church people with
caps like mitres, but with points upwards of coloured silk stuffs, and
some of them of scarlet cloth: and there were other people very well
dressed. In front of these well-dressed people were four horses, that
is, two on one side and two on the other, saddled and caparisoned
with rich brocade coverings; what armour-plating or arms were
underneath I do not know. These horses had diadems high above
their ears, they came down to the bits[143] of the bridle, with large
plumes on them. Below these were many other good horses saddled
but not arrayed like these four, and all the heads of all of them were
on a level, making a line like the people. Then, in a line behind these
horses (because the crowd was much and thick), there were
honourable men, who were not clothed except from the waist
downwards, with many thin white cotton cloths, and crowded,
standing one before the other.[144] It is the custom, before the King
and before the great lords who rule, to have men who carry whips of
a short stick and a long thong, and when they strike in the air they
make a great noise, and make the people stand off. Of these a
hundred walked before us, and with their noise a man could not be
heard. The people riding horses and mules, who came with us,
dismounted a long way off, and we still rode on a good distance, and
then dismounted at about a crossbow-shot from the tent, or the
distance of a game of mancal. Those who conducted us did us a
courtesy and we to them, for we had been already taught, and this
courtesy is to lower the right hand to the ground. In this space of a
crossbow-shot there came to us fully sixty men like courtiers or
mace-bearers, and they came half-running, because they are
accustomed so to run with all the messages of the Prester. These
came dressed in shirts and good silk cloths, and over their shoulders
or shoulder, and below, they were covered with grey skins with much
hair on them; it was said they were lion skins. These men wore
above the skins collars of gold badly wrought, and other jewels and
false stones, and rich pieces round their necks. They also wore
girdles of silk coloured ribands, in width and weaving like horse-
girths, except that they were long and had long fringes reaching to
the ground. These men came as many on one side as on the other,
and accompanied us as far as the first row of arches, for we did not
pass these. Before we arrived at these arches, there were four
captive lions where we had to pass, and in fact passed. These lions
were bound with great chains. In the middle of the field, in the shade
of these first arches, stood four honourable men, among whom was
one of the two greatest lords that are in the court of the Prester, and
who is called by title Betudete.[145] Of these there are two, one
serves on the right hand, the other on the left hand. They said that
he of the right hand was at war with the Moors, and he of the left
hand was this one here. The other three who stood here were great
men. Before these four we did as did those who conducted us. On
reaching them we remained a good while without speaking to them,
nor they to us. On this there came an old priest, who they say is a
relation and the confessor of the Prester, with a cloak of white Indian
cloth[146] of the fashion of a burnoose, and a cap like those of the
others who stood apart. The title of this man is Cabeata, and he is
the second person in these kingdoms. This priest came out of the
said tent which would yet be two casts of quoits from the arches. Of
the four men who were with us at the arches, three went half way to
receive him, and the Betudete, who was the greatest lord of them,
remained with us; and when the others came up he also advanced
three or four steps, and so all five came to us. On reaching him, the
Cabeata asked the ambassador what he wanted and where he came
from. The ambassador answered that he came from India, and was
bringing an embassage to the Prester John, from the captain-major
and governor of the Indies for the King of Portugal. With this he
returned to the Prester, and with these questions, and ceremonious
courtesies, he came three times. Twice the ambassador answered
him in the same manner, and the third time he said, I do not know
what to say of it. The Cabeata said: Say what you want and I will tell
it to the King. The ambassador replied that he would not give his
embassage except to his Highness, and that he would not send to
say anything except that he and his company sent to kiss his hands,
and that they gave great thanks to God for having fulfilled their
desires and having brought Christians together with Christians, and
for their being the first. With this answer the Cabeata returned and
came back directly with another message, when the above-
mentioned persons went to receive him as before: and on reaching
us he said that Prester John sent to say that we should deliver to him
what the great captain had sent him. Then the ambassador asked us
what he ought to do, and that each of us should say whatever he
thought of it. We all said that we thought that he should give him
what was sent. Then the ambassador delivered it to him piece by
piece, and, besides, four bales of pepper which were for our own
expenses. When it was received it was all carried to the tents, and all
afterwards brought back to the arches where we were. And they
came and stretched the tent cloths which we had given on the
arches, and so with the other stuffs. Having set everything in sight of
the people, they caused silence to be made, and the chief justice of
the court made a speech in a very loud voice, declaring, piece by
piece, all the things which the captain-major had sent to the Prester
John, and that all were to give thanks to the Lord because Christians
had come together with Christians, and that if there were here any
whom it grieved, that they might weep, and any that rejoiced at it,
that they might sing. And the great crowd of people who were near
by gave a great shout as in praise of God, and it lasted a good while;
and with that they dismissed us. We went to lodge at the distance of
a long gunshot from the tents of the Prester, where they had already
pitched the tent which they had sent us, and there we remained and
also the goods which remained to us.

Cap. lxx.—Of the theft which was done to us when the baggage was
moved, and of the provisions which the Prester sent us, and of
the conversation the friar had with us.
When our baggage came and was brought we began to see by
experience the warning which was given us of thieves, because on
the road they had taken by force from a servant who attended us,
four tinned copper vessels, and other four of porcelain, and also
other small kitchen articles, and because the servant had attempted
to defend himself they had given him a great wound in one leg. The
ambassador ordered him to be taken care of (of these pieces none
appeared again). As soon as we were lodged the Prester John sent
us three great white loaves, and many jars of mead and a cow. The
messengers who brought this said that Prester John sent it, and that
they would give us immediately fifty cows and as many jars of wine.
The following Saturday, the 21st day, he sent us an infinite quantity
of bread and wine, and many dainties of meat of various kinds, and
very well arranged: and the same happened on Sunday, when,
among many other dainties, he sent us a calf whole in bread, that is
to say in a pie, so well dressed that we could not get tired of it. On
Monday the friar came to us to say that if the ambassador would give
all the pepper to the Prester John, that he would order food to be
given to him and to his company, as far as Masua. And they ceased
giving us food, neither did the fifty cows nor the jars of wine come. In
the meantime they prohibited all the Franks who were in this country
from speaking to any of us: and also they told us not to go out of our
tent, that such was the custom of all those who come to this court,
until they had had speech with the king not to go forth from their
tents. We well knew later that such was their custom, and on
account of this prohibition they kept prisoner a Portuguese,
nicknamed the Sheep, who came to speak to us on the road, and
one of the Franks, saying, that they came to tell us the things of the
court. This Sheep ran away one night with his chains from the
custody of a eunuch who guarded him, and came to our tent. Next
morning they came to fetch him, but the ambassador would not give
him up, but sent the factor and the interpreter to go and ask the
Betudete from him, why he ordered Portuguese to be put in irons,
and had them so ill-treated by slave eunuchs. The Betudete
answered, saying: who had bid us come here, that Matheus had not
been to Portugal by order of the Prester John, nor of Queen Helena;
and that if the slave had cast irons on the Portuguese, that the
Portuguese should in turn cast them on the slave, and that this was
the justice of the country.

Cap. lxxi.—How the Prester moved away with his court, and how the
friar told the ambassador to trade if he wished; and how the
ambassador went to the court.
On Tuesday, 24th of October, while we were hoping that they
would send to call us to speak to the Prester, he set out on a journey
with his court to the place he had come from, which might be a
distance of two leagues. The friar came, saying on his own part, that
if he wished to go to where the King had changed his quarters, that
we should buy mules on which to carry our goods; also telling the
ambassador that if he wished to buy and sell that he might do so.
The ambassador replied to him that they had not come to be
merchants, but they came to serve God and the Kings, and to bring
Christians together. Up to this time they had said that buying and
selling was a very bad thing, and this they were doing to prove the
intentions of our people. On the following Thursday the ambassador
ordered me and Joam Gonzalvez, the interpreter, to go to the court
and to speak to the Betudete and the Cabeata. We went and we told
him those things which had been said by the friar to the ambassador,
and the said friar went with us. We did not speak to the Cabeata,
and we spoke to the Betudete in this manner. First we said that the
friar had come to tell the ambassador to buy and sell, and that they
gave him licence for that, and that the ambassador was much
amazed at this, because neither he nor his father, nor his mother, nor
ancestors bought or sold, nor had such a business; and the same
was the case with the gentlemen and persons who came with him,
and who had never been so accustomed: and that the ambassador
and those that came with him were servants in the house and court
of the King of Portugal, and that they served the Kings in honourable
services and in wars, and not in merchandise; and besides the friar
had told him to give all the pepper that remained to the Prester John,
and that he would order food to be given him as long as we
remained and until we reached the port of Masua, from which we
had set out. And to this the ambassador said that it was not the
custom of the Portuguese to eat and drink at the cost of the feeble
and poor people, but to eat and drink, and pay with gold and silver:
and because money was not current in these kingdoms, on that
account the captain-major of the King of Portugal had given him,
besides much gold and silver, much pepper and stuffs for their
expenses, that of this pepper which he had brought for his
expenditure he had already given four bales to the Prester, and the
rest he kept for what has been said: and, besides, that the friar had
told him that if he wished to come to the court he should buy mules
for his baggage. With regard to this he sent to say that for the
present he did not require mules, nor to move from where he now
was, and that when he had to depart he would buy mules. To this the
Betudete answered that the Prester had already ordered ten mules
to be given, and had they not given them? We replied that we had
not seen any such mules, only that this friar had given in the journey
three tired mules to three men that came on foot. To the other
matters he gave us no answer, but spoke of things that were
irrelevant, as, for instance, whether the King of Portugal was
married, and how many wives he had, and how many fortresses he
had in India, with many other questions beside the purpose. We also
told the Betudete, on the part of the ambassador, that if the Prester
wished to listen to his embassage, that he should say so, and if he
did not choose that to no other person would he give it; and that if he
wished to have it in writing, that he would send it. To this he
answered, that we should wait, and that we should soon have an
answer. So we returned without any conclusion. Up to this time they
had always forbidden the Franks who were about the court to speak
to us, or to come to our tent; and if they came to see us, it was very
secretly, and the friar was always by with us as a guard.

Cap. lxxii.—Of the Franks who are in the country of the Prester, and
how they arrived here, and how they advised us to give the
pepper and goods which we brought.
Because many times I mention Franks, I wish to say that when
Lopo Soarez, captain-major and governor, went from India and came
to Jiddah with a large fleet, in which I also was, there were in the
said place of Jiddah sixty Christian men captives of the Turks. These
Christians were of many nations. These who are at the court say that
they were all waiting for the favour of God and the entry of the
Portuguese into Jiddah to join with them; and, because the fleet of
Lopo Soarez did not make the land, they remained there. A few days
after that, sixteen of these white men, with as many other
Abyssinians of this country of the Prester, who were also there
prisoners, stole two brigantines, and fled to go in search of the said
fleet. Not being able to fetch Camaran, they made Masua, which is
close to Arquico, the country of the Prester. They landed at the said
port and abandoned the brigantines, and went to the court of the
Prester, where they were doing them great honour, more than to us
up to the present time, and they had given them lands, and vassals
who provide them with food. These are the Franks, and most men of
these nationalities are Genoese, two Catalans, one of Scios,[147]
another a Basque, another a German; all these say that they have
already been in Portugal, and they speak Portuguese and Castilian
very well. They call us also Franks, and all other white people, that is
to say, Syrians, which is Chaldea and Jerusalem; and the people of
Cairo they call Gabetes.[148] On Sunday, the 29th of October, there
came to us two of the said Franks, saying that they came in
consequence of an agreement amongst themselves with respect to
what they had heard say about us, namely, that the people of the
court said that the pepper and all the goods that we brought
belonged to the Prester John, and that the captain-major had sent it
to him, and that since we would not give it him, so we should not find
favour with him: and they were of opinion that it would be well to give
this pepper that we had brought and all the other goods, because
otherwise we should not have leave to return, because this was their
custom, never to allow any one to return who came to their
kingdoms: and that they would sooner have pieces and stuffs than
cities or kingdoms: and that this was their opinion. Upon this we held
council, and, with the opinion of the ambassador and of ourselves,
we all agreed to give to the Prester four out of the five bales of
pepper that we still had, and to keep one for our expenses. We also
decided to send him four chests covered with hide,[149] which were
among the company, in which came clothes, and this because we
thought that he would be pleased with them, and that we should
obtain favour. Then, on Monday, the 30th of October, the Franks
came to us very early with many mules and men-servants of theirs to
carry our baggage. The ambassador, with all of us, determined to
send the said present of pepper and chests, and that I, with the clerk
and factor, should convey it, and that the ambassador, with the other
people, should go later in the afternoon. We set out with the said
pepper and chests, and going along the road we met a messenger,
who said he was bringing us the words of the Prester; and he
dismounted to give them to us, and we dismounted to receive them,
because such is their custom to give the King’s words on foot, and
for them to be heard on foot. He told us that the Prester John
ordered that we should come at once to the camp. We said that the
ambassador was coming presently after us, and that he should
return with us in order to give us the means of being able to present
a service which we were conveying to his highness. He said he
would do so, and moreover asked what we would give him for
himself; because this is their custom always to beg. We contented
him with words, with the intention of giving him nothing. He
conducted us before a great enclosure of a high hedge, within which
were many tents pitched, and a large long house of one storey
thatched with straw, in which they said the Prester sometimes
remained, and this man said that he was there. Before the entrance
of this hedge there were a very great many people, and these
likewise said that the Prester was there. We dismounted a space
further off (according to their custom) and thence we sent to say that
we wished to present a service to his highness. There came to us an
honourable man saying, almost with ill-humour, how was it the
ambassador had not come. We answered him that it was because
he had not got mules or people to carry his goods, and that now he
would come because the Franks had gone for him. We asked this
man to tell us how we could present this pepper and chests to his
highness; he told us not to take care for anything, that anyhow the
ambassador should come, and when he had come and when he was
summoned he would take the present. This man then ordered us to
be shown where our tent should be pitched when he came, and the
ambassador delayed very little.

Cap. lxxiii.—How they told the ambassador that the grandees of the
court were counselling the Prester not to let him return, and how
he ordered him to change his tent, and asked for a cross, and
how he sent to summon the ambassador.
This day we learned that the Prester was not within this hedge
enclosure, and that he was not in the tents nor in the houses that
were there, and that he was higher up in other tents which could be
seen from there on a hill, and which was about half a league from
these tents. We did not see or hear anything more this day; we only
pitched our tent in the place which they had assigned to us, which
was not very far from the hedge enclosure on the right hand side.
The Franks who were at the court came to our tent, and they told us
that the grandees of the court were opposed to us, and that the friar
was putting it into their heads to counsel the Prester not to allow us
to return, nor to go out of his kingdoms, because we spoke ill of the
country, and that we should speak more evil of it if we went out of it:
and that it had always been the custom of this kingdom not to allow
foreigners who came to it to go away. We had suspicions of this from
what we had heard, and what these had told us; and from what we
knew already of Joam Gomez and Joane, a Portuguese priest, who
had come here, sent by Tristan de Acunha, in the company of a
Moor, who is still alive, and dwells in Manadeley. And they did not
suffer these Portuguese to depart, because they said it would cause
their death if they went away. And so one Pero de Covilhan, also a
Portuguese, who went away from Portugal forty years ago, by order
of the King, Don Joam, may he be in holy glory, and he has been in
this country for thirty and odd years. There is also a Venetian whom
they call Macoreo in this country, and who says his name is Nicolas
Brancaliam; it is thirty-three years since he came to this country. Also
one Thomas Gradani, who has been here fifteen years, without any
of them being allowed to go away. These go about the court, and
there were others who died, without being allowed to depart. They
say, for their excuse, that whoever comes to seek us, has need of
us, and it is not in reason that they should go away, nor that we
should let them go. We did not now find this Pero de Covilham at
court, and they tell us that he is in his house close to the rocky gates
which we passed. On Tuesday, the last day of October, the Prester
John came from the tents above, where he was staying, to the
enclosure tents and house where we were. When he passed he saw
our tent standing not very far from his, and he at once sent a man to
the ambassador to tell him to order his tent to be moved, as the
place where it was sickly. We were on the spot which they had
assigned to us the day before. The ambassador said in answer, that
he had not got anyone to shift his tent or his baggage, and that
people should come to shift it to wherever his highness commanded.
This day, in the evening, there came a message from the Prester
asking whether the ambassador had, or whether any of his suite
had, a gold or silver cross, to send it to him to see it. The
ambassador said that he had not got one, neither was there one in
his company, and that one he wore he had given to the Barnegais;
and with this the page went away. He returned immediately saying
that we should send any we had got. We sent one of mine of wood,
with a crucifix painted on it,(or perhaps, “a painted crucifix on it”)
which I always carried in my hand on the road, after the custom of
the country. He sent it back at once saying that he rejoiced much
that we were Christians. The ambassador then ordered word to be
sent to Prester John by the page who brought back the cross, that
he still had for the expenses of himself and his company a little
pepper, and that he wished to give it to his highness, and also four
chests for keeping clothes, and that when he sent they could take to
him this pepper and the chests. Then the page went with this
message, and returned at once, saying that the King did not want the
pepper nor the chests, and that he had already given the cloths
which they had presented to him to the churches, and most of the
pepper to the poor, and also that he had been told that the captain-
major of India had given to the churches all the stuffs which the King
of Portugal had sent for him. The ambassador answered that
whoever had told him such a tale had not told him the truth, that all
the things were still together, and that the servants of Matheus must
have told that story that the cloths were given to the churches. And
because I knew all that had happened with regard to the cloths
which the King of Portugal sent to his highness, I answered: That it
was true that in order that these cloths which the King had sent
should not be damaged, and also to serve God and honour the
churches, I had assisted to hang them up in the principal church of
Cochym, which is that of Holy Cross, on the principal feast days; and
that when the feasts were ended, I had helped to take them down,
fold them and put them by, and this had been done to serve God and
honour the feasts, and also that the cloths might not be injured and
eaten by moths: and on this account they might have told him that
they had been given away to the churches, but such was not the
truth. When this answer had gone, another messenger arrived to say
that the Prester ordered that the ambassador should come there at
once with all his company and people (this might be about three
hours after sunset). We all began quickly to dress ourselves in our
good clothes to go whither we were summoned. When we were
dressed, another message came that we were not to go: so we all
remained like the peacock when he makes a wheel and is gay, and
when he looks at his feet[150] becomes sad: as pleased as we were
at going, so sad were we at remaining.

Cap. lxxiv.—How the ambassador having been summoned by the

Prester, he did not hear him in person.
On Wednesday, the 1st day of November, about one or two hours
after nightfall, the Prester sent to call us by a page. We got ready
and went. On reaching the door or entrance of the first enclosure of
the hedge, we found there porters who made us wait more than an
hour in great cold, with the sharp wind that was blowing. Where we
stood we saw in front of the other hedge enclosure many lighted
candles, and men held them in their hands. And as we stood thus at
this entrance, because they did not allow us to pass, our men fired
off two firelocks. There came at once a message from the Prester
asking why we had not brought from the sea many firelocks. The
ambassador answered that we had not come for war, and on that
account we had not brought arms, only three or four firelocks, which
the men carried for their amusement. Meantime there came five of
the principal men, among whom was an Adrugaz, to whom we were
consigned when we arrived, and he made us turn back. When he
came up to us with a message from the Prester, they made their
accustomed courtesy, and we did so with them, and we began to
advance; and we might have walked five or six paces, and we stood
still, we and they. These five men were in front of us in order, as in a
row, and at the end of them were two men with lighted candles in
their hands on both sides. These messengers, who thus guided us,
commenced to say, each one separately: Hunca hiale huchia
abeton, which means: What you commanded, sire, here I bring it.
And each one said these words quite ten times, one ending another
began, and so they all went on. They continued saying this until we
heard a cry from within, said by a company, and they said thus, in a
very loud voice—louder than those outside whom we were following:
Cafacinha, which means, Come inside; and we walked a little farther
on. They again stood still, and we with them, and they again said the
same words as before, until from within they answered like the first
time. Of these pauses they made quite ten from the first entrance to
the second, and each time that from within they said: Cafacinha
(because it was the word or permission of the Prester), those who
conducted us, and we with them, bowed our heads, and put our
hands to the ground. Passing the second entrance those who guided
us began to say another chaunt, it was this: Capham hia cainha
afranguey abeto, which means, The Franks whom you commanded
here, I bring them, sire. And this they said as many times as the
former words; and they waited for an answer from within, which was
the first, namely: Cafazinha; and so with many pauses we reached a
dais, and before it were many lighted candles which we had seen
from the first entrance, and they counted them, and there were
eighty of a side, in very good order, and that those who held them
might not get out of line they held in their hands before them some
very long canes, across them breast high, and so the candles were
all in order. The said dais was in front of the long one-storied house,
which was mentioned before. This house is set up on thick piles of
cypress wood, and the beams,[151] which are above the piles, are
painted with poor colours, and on them are planks which descend
from the top to the bottom. With regard to level it is not all well-
constructed, and above it is covered with a thatch of this country
which they say lasts a man’s life. At the entrance of this house,
which is at the upper end of the house, four curtains were
suspended, and one of these which was in the middle was of
brocade, and the others of fine silk. In front of these curtains on the
ground was a large and rich carpet, and there were two large cotton
cloths, hairy like carpets, which they call basutos[152] (this is their
word), and the rest full of coloured mats, for no part of the floor
appeared; and also it was from one end to the other full of lighted
candles, like the others we had seen outside. While we were quiet,
from within the curtains there came a message from the Prester
John, saying, without any other preliminary, that he had not sent
Matheus to Portugal, and although he had gone without his
permission, and the King of Portugal had sent by him many things