In this gracefully written book, an expanded version of three lectures delivered in Jerusalem in 2003, Keith Thomas surveys the evolution of related concepts of civility, civilization, and good manners in England from the late Middle Ages to the present.

Deriving ultimately from Greco-Latin sources, a habit of dividing humanity between civil and uncivil or barbarous nations flourished during the early modern period. Although “a slippery and unstable word” (5), civility always had connotations of well-ordered government. By the sixteenth century it also began to denote a “nonbarbarous way of living” (5) and thus, by extension, good manners. In the eighteenth century, civility acquired a more restricted meaning of “good manners and good citizenship” (5), while the newer word, civilization, referred to both “the civilizing process” and the attainments that process produced.

The early modern concept of civil behavior, originally developed in urban environments, gradually coalesced with the chivalric ideal of courtesy and the newer concept of politeness. Although codified in books, rules of civil deportment were ultimately a social rather than a literary phenomenon. Thomas agrees with Norbert Elias that civil manners involved self-control and the restraint of violent impulses, but he disputes Elias's contention that such codes first emerged in sixteenth-century courtly environments. All societies have rules about bodily comportment and social interactions. But in the West those rules did become more elaborate in the early modern period and were also more widely disseminated thanks to the printing press. They served to differentiate the elite from the rest of society, so that “polite” behavior, including such things as the ability to handle dining utensils correctly, became essential to people with social pretentions. Concepts of decorum distinguished proper behavior toward superiors, equals, and inferiors. Although many contemporaries stressed the importance of civility toward inferiors, to blunt resentment of privilege, the poor, along with inhabitants of remote rural areas, were nevertheless stigmatized as rude and uncivil by a growing middle class, as well as by the gentry and aristocracy. Thomas discusses efforts to “civilize” the poor by demanding hard work from them, founding grammar schools, and setting good examples, in which the Established Church played a leading role. Despite these efforts, the common people maintained different attitudes toward the body, valuing strength more than elegance and in some cases positively welcoming dirt in the belief that excess cleanliness was unhealthy. They remained more prone to physical violence, even among women, while displaying more spontaneity in their laughter, conversation, and gestures.

In addition to good manners, civility meant “emancipation from a state of barbarism” (86). Although inherited from the Greeks, the concept of barbarism was redefined through contact with non-European societies. It was also sometimes distinguished from savagery, an even lower condition associated with hunter-gatherer societies. Contemporaries employed the adjective barbarous rhetorically to stigmatize everything from despotic government to tobacco smoking, but they associated it especially with cruelty and mistreatment of strangers. By contrast, polite treatment even of enemies in war and people of different religions came to be regarded as marks of civility.

The opposition between barbarousness and civility implied a model of development, which gave rise to various theories about how societies progressed toward what the eighteenth century called civilization. Contact with the Irish, Scots, and Native Americans encouraged a belief that people existed in different states of savagery, barbarism, or civility and might pass from one to the other. The development of settled agriculture, towns, and trade were all seen as essential to such progress. Eighteenth-century writers, including Adam Smith, formulated a stadial theory that mankind had progressed through several stages, from hunter-gatherer savagery to a barbarous pastoral existence in which property rights were first introduced, and finally settled agriculture and advanced commercial societies. Most people remained mired in a savage or barbarous state, while a few, mainly in Western Europe but arguably also including the Chinese, Persians, and Arabs, had reached civilization. Some nations, including Greece and China, were thought to have regressed or stagnated after becoming civilized.

These views served to justify colonial projects on the grounds that uncivil people needed to be forced to enter into trade and develop their lands under the guidance of civilized nations like the English. Thomas briefly examines how these ideas played out in English efforts to colonize Ireland and North America before exploring the rise of theories, mostly in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, attributing differences between savagery and civility to inherited racial characteristics.

Some thinkers disputed the hierarchical ranking of peoples according to a single scale of civilization, arguing that different nations had their own customs and habits that were ultimately incommensurable. Not everyone agreed, either, that English and Europeans had the right to expropriate the lands and labor of “uncivil” people or force them to engage in trade, and in North America a few English settlers literally “went native” by fleeing to Native settlements and throwing off their European customs. Even within England, polite manners were at times criticized as effeminate because they clashed with older ideas of masculine assertiveness and prowess, and were also perceived as foreign in origin. Thomas concludes his study by examining critiques of the concept of civility and changing codes of manners in more recent times.

A book that covers so much ground in barely 250 pages inevitably leaves some aspects of its subject unexplored. Thomas makes no use of work by architectural historians showing how changes in the structure of large houses led to increased social segregation that in turn affected manners and behavior. He has little to say about material culture and how rising standards of comfort and activities like art collecting and ideas about taste shaped concepts of civility. Although he does briefly examine the role of religion and religious sects like the Quakers on discourses about civility, much more could be done with this topic. But he succeeds in providing a highly erudite and accessible brief introduction to a vast and vastly important subject.