ABSTRACT
It was an Englishman writing in the nineteenth century, Sir Henry Maine, who famously observed that the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism marked ‘a movement from Status to Contract’.2 Inherent in this claim was the notion of mobility, in two senses. First, improving communications meant that it was becoming easier to travel and thus to trade, so that wealth could be accumulated faster than ever before and without the need for bloodshed. Second, since these opportunities were becoming available to ever greater proportions of the population, people could no longer be expected necessarily to remain within the social class into which they had been born. Social status was thus no longer the fixed bedrock of society: generalised commodity exchange, facilitated by the law of contract, enabled everyone to climb the social ladder:
Not many of us are so unobservant as not to perceive that in innumerable cases where old law fixed a man’s social position irreversibly at his birth, modern law allows him to create it for himself . . .3
