In societies inspired by the classical world, this binary view of the human race lingered on. Beneath Thomas Jefferson’s elegant neoclassical mansion of Monticello in rural Virginia, with its advanced systems of central heating and self-opening doors, runs a low tunnel along which the slaves who served the founding father of American democracy might stoopingly make their way: the barbarians (so it might seem) of this otherwise free new world.

In Pursuit of Civility, Keith Thomas’s latest magisterial exploration of the habits and beliefs of the early modern world, is released in Australia, as luck would have it, at a timely moment, when the merits of ‘Western civilisation’ as a subject of monitored university study has been a topic of widespread and at times acrimonious dispute. Whether or not the Ramsay Centre for the Study of Western Civilisation is ultimately ever established at any Australian university, Thomas’s highly readable, deeply learned, and historically illuminating account deserves to be studied with close attention both by supporters and opponents of that venture – and, should that project succeed, to become a foundational text for the new Centre.

Thomas’s book traces in remarkable detail the emergence in the English-speaking world of a concern with decorous public and domestic behaviour, and with conduct variously described by such words as ‘politeness’, ‘polish’, ‘manners’, ‘refinement’, ‘urbanity’, and – most tellingly in this account – ‘civility’, and ‘civilization’. In early modern England, as Thomas readily concedes, there was no agreed understanding of the precise meaning of many of these words, or of the desirability of the qualities they appeared to denote. Some commentators, then as now, suspected they had no significant meaning at all. In 1780 the Scottish philosopher James Dunbar curtly suggested that ‘barbarous’ and ‘civilized’ were words which might be dropped altogether, without loss, from the English language and replaced by ‘expressions of more definite censure and approbation’. While it’s easy to see how the popular usage of such words might have provoked the ire of a watchful philosopher, it may in fact be their very looseness and volatility that gives Thomas’s study its peculiar fascination. For as William Empson dazzlingly showed in The Structure of Complex Words (1951), such seemingly straightforward words may often serve to mark crucial moments of social hesitation, ambiguity, and change, and have a consequent richness – a complexity, a structure, a history – all of their own. For Thomas, the arrival of terms such as these signals the gradual transformation of late-medieval English society, and the emergence of new sensibilities and modes of behaviour in the early modern period, some of which are still to be found in the present-day Western world.

Thomas has little to say about the major cultural and constitutional achievements that might serve in a more conventional account as the principal markers of the progress of ‘civilisation’ in early modern England: the founding of the universities and the grammar schools; the rise of the theatre and of the book trade; the Westminster system of government. He focuses instead on a seemingly modest array of social customs and conventions that (under his gaze) testify in subtler ways to the growing refinement and sophistication of early English society. Scanning a huge range of historical sources – diaries, memoirs, letters, treatises, courtesy books, manuals of etiquette and instruction, covering several centuries and reflecting social behaviour at different class levels in various parts of the nation – Thomas constructs a complex but vivid account of domestic and social behaviour in the early modern period. He looks at contemporary advice on table manners: how to handle your knife, your napkin, the shared drinking vessel, and – on its amusing arrival from Italy – the fork. He reminds us how often and to whom one should bow, kneel, and doff one’s hat; whose hand to shake and with what degree of firmness; how to avoid loud laughter, excessive gestures, and running in public places; how to dress with flair and decorum, how to walk with assurance, how to adopt a gracious stance, the hand resting quietly at the hip; how to determine which topics of conversation to avoid and which to initiate; how decorously to manage, in an age before the advent of public toilets, matters of personal hygiene. (During the Civil War, the reclusive don Anthony à Wood was shocked to find members of Charles I’s court freely relieving themselves in the capacious marble fireplaces of his beloved college: the newly invented water-flushing jakes of Sir John Harington not yet having arrived in Oxford.)

Non-observance of these social codes could bring bring temporary embarrassment but seldom incurred any formal penalty. For forgetfully wearing his bonnet in Queen Mary’s presence, the Tudor poet John Heywood (so Ben Jonson reports) was affectionately teased but suffered no graver penalty. For disdaining all forms of social deference – bowing, doffing of hats, compliments, salutations, farewells, all distinction in forms of address (even in ‘you’ and ‘thou’ pronouns) – Quakers were often regarded as odd customers but were seen nonetheless as generally worthy of trust.

Yet such tolerance had its limits. Even milder deviations from an expected norm – wearing jewellery in the nose and lips, as Indians did, rather than in ‘the fit and natural place of the ears’ (Sir Philip Sidney’s words), or riding sidesaddle ‘on the wrong side of the horse’, facing right instead of left, as Irish women did (as Edmund Spenser noted) – could disturb highly tuned English sensitivities. More extreme departures from ‘civilised’ practice might lead to a heightened sense of cultural supremacy on the part of observers: to the massacres by Cromwell’s army of the seemingly barbarous Irish citizens, to the distribution, by the British, to American Indians of blankets infected by smallpox, to the poisoned flour given by English settlers to Indigenous Australians and the casual appropriation of their land. Montaigne’s enlightened vision of a plurality of civilisations, each worthy of toleration, respect, and admiration, was a rarity in the early modern world. With some warrant, Marx and Engels were to regard ‘civilisation’ as a fiction cynically invented by marauding nations of the west as a justification for their seizure of lands, lives, and natural resources to which they had no legal or ethical claim.

Keith Thomas (photograph by the National Liberal Club for the British Academy)How then does Keith Thomas himself finally assess Western civilisation: is he really in favour of it, as an ardent admirer of its values may feel obliged to ask? Not the least remarkable feature of this scholarly and wide-ranging study is its patient and steady tone. Its principal focus is not, in fact, on the Western world, or even always on Britain as a whole, but (as its subtitle suggests) on England, the country in which Thomas himself has spent most of his professional life. It is here, though, as a native-born Welshman, he continues also to feel, even in the familiar cloisters and libraries of Oxford, ‘something of an outsider’. Here too, as an historian, he is sharply aware of the cruelties inflicted over the centuries by the English on their seemingly barbarous Celtic neighbours, which are described unwaveringly in this account. These tensions within his own personal and professional experience (it may be thought) affect and moderate his approach to this notoriously divisive subject. ‘I have tried to study the English people in the way an anthropologist approaches the inhabitants of an unfamiliar society,’ he writes, ‘seeking to establish their categories of thought and behaviour and the principles that governed their lives. My aim is to bring out the distinctive texture and complexity of past experience in one particular milieu.’ Balance, erudition, and the ethnographic spirit aren’t bad qualities to bring to this peculiarly vexed debate at the present moment, and may collectively constitute a decent working definition of that evasive quality the book sets out to pursue: civility.

Contributor's note: Since the publication of this review, news of the University of Wollongong's acceptance of the Ramsay Centre offer has been announced.