1 The contents of the volume are as follows: Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Introduction: historians and language’; Keith Wrightson, ‘Estates, degrees, and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and Stuart England’; I.A.A. Thompson, ’Hidalgo and pechero: the language of “estates” and “classes” in early-modern Castile’; R. Mettam, ‘Definitions of nobility in eighteenth century France’; Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Class by name and number in eighteenth century Britain’; James Van Horn Melton, ‘The emergence of “society” in eighteenth and nineteenth century Germany’; Geoffrey Crossick, ‘From gentlemen to the residuum: language of social description in Victorian Britain’; David Washbrook, ‘To each a language of his own: language, culture and society in colonial India’; Farzana Shaikh, ‘The language of representation: towards a Muslim political order in nineteenth-century India’; Philip A. Kuhn, ‘Chinese views of social stratification’; Daniel T. Rodgers and Sean Wilentz, ‘Languages of power in the United States’; William Downes, ‘Language and interpretation: Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities’.

2 See James van Horn Melton, p. 138, and see my article ‘Autocracy and Sovereignty’, Canadian American Slavic Studies, XVI, 3–4, Fall/Winter 1982, pp. 369–87.

3 Schmidt, Christoph, ‘über die Bezeichnung der Stände (sostojanie-soslovie) in Russland seit dem 18, Jahrhundert’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 38, 1990, pp. 199–211 Google Scholar.

4 See David Washbrook.

5 See Roger Mettam.

6 See Farzana Shaikh, and at p. 266.