The Making of the English Working Class

Chapter 7 highlights the exploitative relationship between landowners and agricultural laborers. Thompson dismisses economic empiricist Sir John Clapham’s idea of an agricultural average. Statistics, for instance, do not tell the stories of the agricultural laborers adversely affected by the enclosure movement. Nor do statistics account for the enclosers’ motives: the monopolization of land and the reduction of its human inhabitants to a state of dependency. To these were added the surplus-population arguments of Malthusianism and the draconian Poor Law of 1834. The result was “a countryside governed with counter-revolutionary license” (222).

An agricultural revolt began in 1830. Its primary feature was the physical destruction of labor-saving technology, but it had political consequences as well. For one thing, it helped produce the political environment that led to the 1832 Reform Act. More important, like most rural uprisings, the 1830 revolt sprang from grievances related to the monopolization of land—and land “always carries associations—of status, security, rights—more profound than the value of its crop” (230). Agricultural laborers developed a sense that their status, their security, and their rights had been destroyed by the new exploitative relationship represented by the enclosure movement; this shared sense of loss helped form a class consciousness.

Chapter 8 describes the plight of workers in various urban industries. Here the concept of an “average” deduced from economic data is as inadequate as it was for the agricultural laborers analyzed in the previous chapter. Evidence for artisans—shoemakers, tailors, printers, and a host of other tradesmen—conveys a sense of the era’s “general insecurity” (248). At best, work was available on a semi-regular basis. The 1814 repeal of centuries-old apprenticeship laws exposed the trades to competition from all directions, from monopolists above and from unskilled aspirants below.

As was the case for the agricultural laborer, new technologies alone cannot account for the artisan’s decline. Thompson views the “conflict between the artisans and the large employers” as “part of a more general, exploitive pattern” (258). Artisans felt the loss of their independence with the same acute resentment and despair as the agricultural laborers. Many fell into extreme poverty. Their government responded with the Poor Law of 1834, based on the theory that poor people needed a spur to labor. This law transformed workhouses into effective prisons.

Chapter 9 describes the decline of weavers, those who worked in textiles such as wool and cotton. As was the case for agricultural laborers and urban artisans, the weavers’ full experience of industrialization defies raw economic data. Surviving evidence shows that early-19th-century weavers lamented their lost independence and regarded the 18th century as a “golden age” (269). Furthermore, new technology alone cannot account for the weavers’ plight; their decline began long before the mechanized power-loom replaced the traditional handloom. Employers maximized profits by requiring their employees to work long hours—a deliberate system of exploitation that produced an industry-wide “pool of surplus labour, semi-employed, defenceless, and undercutting each other’s wages” (280).

By the 1830s, when the power-loom supplanted the handloom as the textile industry’s primary tool of production, the weavers’ decline into a degraded state of dependence had already occurred. None of this was inevitable. The government, for instance, aided the employers’ cause by smashing trade unions, leaving skilled workers vulnerable to unskilled competition. Advocates for the weavers sought legislative redress, including a tax on power looms, a reduction in working hours, and a restriction of employment to adult-male weavers only. All of these, however, amounted to little more than rear-guard actions, for the larger “conflict” involved “two cultural modes or ways of life” (305): on one hand, a traditional mode that preserved weaver independence, and on the other hand, a newer mode of exploitation that reduced the weaver to a state of dependence.