Abstract
The clothiers and clothworkers had been cruelly disappointed by Parliament. The Select Committee’s proud boast that every man had the right to employ his capital as he wished ‘so long as he does not infringe on the rights and property of others’ had a viciously hollow ring to it, because that was precisely what they believed the factory system was doing to them. And now the same had happened in the highest court to which they could appeal: their skills and abilities had been, if not altogether denied, then publicly relegated to a secondary role with a rhetoric which smacked of an unfeeling condescension, and in calling upon the ideals of the traditional moral economy they had found themselves beaten about the head by a new statute book which was being rewritten in the unfamiliar language of political economy. Neither side accepted the notations of the other and it is not difficult, therefore, to see how E. P. Thompson could see Luddism, the machine-breaking riots and guerrilla campaigns which erupted in the northern manufacturing districts in 1811–12, as ‘arising at the imposition of the political economy of laissez-faire upon, and against the will and conscience of, the working people’ and to describe it as ‘a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained capitalism, harking back to an obsolescent paternalist code, and sanctioned by traditions of the working community’.1
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Notes and References
PP 1806, III: Report; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968) 594.
E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50 (1971) 76–136.
C. Emsley, British Society and the French Wars 1793–1815 (London, 1979) 4.
P. Deane, ‘War and Industrialisation’, War and Economic Development: Essays in Memory of David Joslin, ed. J. M. Winter (Cambridge, 1975) 100.
Cited in F. Crouzet, L’Économie britannique et le Blocus continental 1806–1813 (Paris, 1958).
G. Hueckel, ‘War and the British Economy, 1793–1815: A General Equilibrium Analysis’, Expl. Ec. Hist. 10 (1973) 365–96; Figure 4.1 is derived from table 3.
D. Massey, ‘Regionalism: Some Current Issues’, Capital and Class 6 (1978) 107.
J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976) 268–9.
T. Paine, Rights of Man (London, 1792) II;
see A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979).
Cited in J. L. Hammond, B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer (1919: London, 1979 edn) 140–1.
E. Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present 1 (1952) 57–70.
Leeds Mercury, 23 April 1812; these attacks are vividly described in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley (1849: Harmondsworth, 1974 edn) and in Frank Peel’s The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plug-drawers (1895).
E. P. Thompson, ‘Making’, op. cit. 604; see also J. L. Baxter, F. K. Donnelly, ‘The Revolutionary “Underground” in the West Riding: Myth or Reality?’, Past and Present 64 (1974) 124–32; J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘The “Black Lamp” in Yorkshire 1801–2’, Past and Present, loc. cit. 113–23;
J. L. Baxter, F. K. Donnelly, ‘Sheffield and the English Revolutionary Tradition’, International Review Social History 20 (1975) 398–23;
F. K. Donnelly, ‘Ideology and Early English Working-Class History: Edward Thompson and his Critics’, Soc. Hist. 2 (1976) 219–38;
J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘Luddism and Politics in the Northern Counties’, Soc. Hist. 4 (1979) 33–63.
F. O. Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (1934; London, 1969 edn) 340–1.
And Wells’s account is brilliantly successful: R. Wells, ‘The Revolt of the South-West, 1800–1801: A Study in English Popular Protest’, Soc. Hist. 6 (1977) 714.
R. J. Morris, Class and Class Consciousness in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1979).
A. Goodwin, op. cit.; see also H. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977); Parl. Hist, XXIV (1799) 1005–6.
R. Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973).
A. Harvey, Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1978) 95.
E. Hobsbawm, G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London, 1969).
A subsequent essay disputes their description, however, and argues that successful mobilisation of local communities depended on their ‘contacts with the outside world’ so that the main highways provided really vital avenues for the diffusion of a radical politics: A. Charlesworth, ‘Social Protest in a Rural Society’, Historical Geography Research Series 1 (1979) 37–42. While this reinforces the argument about the necessary generalisation of working-class experience and expectation, albeit in different terms, it seems to exaggerate the significance of the metropolitan radical tradition. Goodwin, op. cit. 136–7 represents the 1790s as ‘a transitional stage between the pre-revolutionary age, when most of the extra-parliamentary reform movements were generated in, or focused on, the metropolis, and the nineteenth century, when many of the reform agitations — for the extension of the parliamentary franchise, for the abolition of the Corn Laws, for currency reform or Chartism — were planned, financed and centred in the provinces’. The industrial struggles of the 1830s are discussed in Chapter 5.
Cited in G. Cranfield, The Press and Society (London, 1978) 89.
All these citations are taken from ibid. 25 April 1812; on the development of a radical press, see P. Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford, 1970).
E. P. Thompson is very careful about this in ‘Making’, op. cit. 642; but compare the analysis in M. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, 1970).
J. Belchem, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Soc. Hist. 6 (1981) 1–32.
C. Brontë, Shirley (1849: Harmondsworth, 1974 edn) 62;
for a discussion of the concept of ‘structure of feeling’ see R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1978).
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© 1982 Derek Gregory
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Gregory, D. (1982). The Turning-point: Regional Crisis in the Woollen Industry. In: Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution. Critical Human Geography. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16849-1_4
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