Introduction: The geography of late twentieth-century class formation

Britain in the late twentieth century is a more difficult form of capitalist society to describe and analyse than the Britain of the mid-nineteenth century (see Chapter 2). British society is larger (with a population that has more than doubled since 1851) and institutionally far more complex. The lines of determination between relations of production and class formation are accordingly more likely to be indirect. Certainly the heroic age of class struggle has been replaced by a more prosaic age of class dealignment.