In his Class in Britain of 1998, Cannadine argued the case for analysing modern British society in terms of complex, 'layered, interlocking' hierarchies rather than by using a simple division between rich and poor or a three-tier class structure. In extending that argument to the empire, he is particularly concerned to reduce the significance of another great binary divide that has, he believes, exercised an undue influence on historians. This is the division between 'us' and 'them'. Cannadine argues that in trying to relate their non-European subjects to themselves, imperially minded British people were not much inclined to indulge in sweeping generalisations about difference. They did not construct generic 'others' by which they defined themselves. In particular, they did not use denigration of 'enervated, hierarchical, corporatist, backward' Africans or Asians to highlight a 'dynamic, individualistic, egalitarian, modernizing' Britain . They did not do such a thing principally because they did not conceive Britain in those terms. They saw it as traditional and hierarchical in its own way. Although he concedes that generalisations based on assumptions of racial superiority and inferiority were widely and stridently used in the late nineteenth century, Cannadine insists that such generalisations did not displace ways of looking at non-European societies that stressed similarities rather than immutable differences. Hierarchies could be detected that seemed to be similar to the structure of British society. The king of Hawaii ranked above the crown prince of imperial Germany. Aristocracies in Africa or Asia should be accorded some of the respect due to the British aristocracy. The great mass of such populations was regarded with disdain, but then so were the urban and rural poor in Britain itself.