Brown R. Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850
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Neil Smelser challenged the consequences of the factory on the family in his Social Change in the Industrial Revolution,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959. In this influential book he argued, on the basis of the Lancashire cotton industry, that the
separation of working children from their families did not really begin until after 1820 with the introduction of power-
weaving. Technological change between 1820 and 1840 led to a redefinition of the economic functions of the textile family
and sharply differentiated the roles of its members. Early cotton mills, he argued, relied on recruiting either ‘unfree’ pauper
apprentices or ‘free’ families from farming rather than the domestic textile area. Mule-spinning was very much a family
affair, with operative spinners hiring their own relatives as scavengers and piercers. This training relationship was codified in
many early spinners’ trade union rules which attempted to limit recruitment to the kinship unit (children, brothers, nephews
etc.). As a result traditional family values and authority structures were perpetuated. Power-weaving did not reproduce this
structure. It was overwhelmingly an occupation for young women assisted by child dressers recruited directly by factory
masters. It was largely because of this development, which was outside parental instruction and supervision, Smelser argued,
that factory reform became such an emotive issue in the 1830s. State intervention was necessary to safeguard conditions
which had previously been regulated by the family.
Smelser has not been without his critics. First, demographic evidence contradicts his notion of the ‘family in the factory’.
Few mule-spinners would at any time in their working lives have had enough children of sufficient age to pierce for them, so
they needed to employ people from outside the family. In 1816 only 12 per cent of people under eighteen in thirteen Preston
mills and 25 per cent in eleven recorded cotton mills elsewhere were employed by parents, brothers or sisters. The remainder
were often the children of handloom weavers whose wages were needed to supplement the contracting family budget. The
proportion of children working with a parent was not as great as many contemporary polemicists believed. Secondly, the
proportion of relatives working for mule-spinners remained at about 15 per cent between 1810 and 1840 and there was no
significant or sudden change in the nature and extent of family-based employment in the mills between 1825 and 1830.
Thirdly, it is difficult to generalize from the experience of this elite group to that of the proletariat as a whole. Skilled workers
in areas other than cotton spinning—the skilled hewers in the Cornish tin mines for example—could give instruction to their
male children who took not merely their fathers’ workplace but also their fathers’ positions in society. This was not the case with
unskilled workers. The problem for any parent, whether skilled or unskilled, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
was marrying the need simultaneously to bring children up and to exploit them economically. The degree of control which
parents exerted over the latter was far more limited than polemicists would have historians believe.
WOMEN AND WORK
The extent to which the nature of work for labouring women changed has two dimensions which are historically and
ideologically important. First, to what extent were changes in the nature of work, especially the development of the factory
system, of significance in allowing women into the labour market as independent wage-earners? Secondly, how far did this
employment alter women’s role in the ‘domestic sphere’ and what impact did this have on the family?
Opportunities or marginalization?
Ivy Pinchbeck maintained, in her classic study of women workers, first published in 1930, that economic change after 1750
transformed female employment opportunities, increasing the availability of employment outside the home, improving
women’s status and conditions and being of vital importance in the destruction of the notion of the ‘family wage’.
16
Valuable
though Pinchbeck still is, several qualifications can be made to her basic thesis. The notion that the industrial revolution
increased the participation of women in general outside the home is difficult to maintain. Eric Richards has shown that female
participation rates in the productive economy declined after 1820. Female participation in cereal-producing areas probably
declined from the mid-eighteenth century. This was largely the result of the replacement of the sickle by the scythe, never
used by women, for cutting grain and resulted in women being reduced to the lower-status, lower-paid jobs of weeding or
stone-picking—a process exacerbated by the ‘depression’ in cereal production after 1815. Only in East Anglia did the
emergence of the ‘gang’ system reverse this process. By contrast, in pastoral areas women’s participation did not decline and
there may even have been an increase in real wages for women specializing in livestock, dairying and hay-making. On the
north-eastern coalfields women ceased to work underground during the eighteenth century and none had worked below
ground in Staffordshire, Shropshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire for some time before they were forbidden to do so by the
1842 Mines Act. Levels of female participation varied according to area and occupation. The wives and daughters of migrant
Scottish farmers astonished East Anglians in the 1880s by doing work which had been done exclusively by men there since
before 1800. Few women found themselves emancipated by the economic changes in terms of having sufficient income to
make them independent of either parents or husband. Contemporaries may have been impressed by the ‘freedom’ of the lasses
of the mill towns who secured a reputation for flashy dressing and an undeserved one for sexual promiscuity. But they were
not typical. In 1851 domestic service accounted for 37.3 per cent of female occupations (aged 15 and over), textiles 18.5,
186 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850
dressmaking 18 and agriculture 7.7 per cent. Most of these occurred in the home where constraints on emancipation were very
real. Women’s wages were at a level which was assumed to be supplementary.
Male attitudes
Male exclusiveness largely explains why changes in social attitudes to women’s employment remained largely unaltered
between 1700 and 1850. Traditionally, manufacturing skill had been associated with men and this had created a sense of male
solidarity which extended beyond the workplace into community and home. Men’s struggles to maintain their skilled priority
in the workforce against machinery and against the encroachment of unskilled women was an important part of their effort to
maintain their social status in the community and within their families. The sexual division of labour was a familial,
customary and social construct rather than one largely determined by technical considerations. It was part of the social
hierarchy established among activities—in male-dominated societies women’s tasks are considered inferior simply because they
are carried out by women. The division of labour is therefore an effect of the social hierarchy, not its cause.
This patriarchal ideology was used to justify keeping women away from new technology, as in a petition from the potters in
1845: To maidens, mothers, and wives we say machinery is your deadliest enemy…. It will destroy your natural claims to
home and domestic duties…’.
17
It also limited their income, as cotton spinners pleaded in 1824: The women, in nine cases out
of ten, have only themselves to support, while the men, generally, have families…. The women can afford their labour for less
than the men…’.
18
And it kept them in their ‘proper’ place: ‘Keep them at home to look after their families…’.
19
These contemporary criticisms of working women were based on an ideological consideration of a proper women’s sphere,
not on a proper investigation of actual working conditions. With the exception of skilled artisans, whose status generally
ensured an income sufficient to support a wife and family, most women among the labouring population worked not merely to
‘top up’ the family budget but to ensure basic levels of family subsistence.
THE LABOURING POPULATION—A CLASSIFICATION
Henry Mayhew in London Labour and London Poor in 1851 classified the social fabric of mid-nineteenth-century England
into ‘those who will work, those who cannot work, those who will not work and those who need not work’. The first three
comprised the labouring population. It is possible to take this typology further when considering the diversity of labouring
experience in England between 1700 and 1850.
‘Those who will work’
At the top of the hierarchy of ‘those who will work’ were the highly skilled artisans, the so-called ‘aristocracy of labour’, who
were well paid, enjoyed regular employment and superior working conditions. Many of them worked in traditional industries,
had served long apprenticeships and were ‘masters’ of their craft. This ‘aristocracy’ was, however, far from homogeneous and
a distinction was made between ‘society’ and ‘non-society’ men. The former were members of trade societies with
conditions, wages etc. regulated by custom. The latter were less skilled, unorganized and, because of competition, forced to
accept lower wages. In most trades ‘society men’ made up about a tenth of the whole. Among cabinetmakers in London, for
example, there were between 600 and 700 society men producing high-quality work with a further 4,000 to 5,000 ‘non-
society’ men producing cheaper goods for the mass market. Economic changes led to new types of skilled workers emerging:
fine cotton spinners, calico printers and dyers, locomotive engineers. There was no clear line between these skilled workers
and the lower middle class. The economic position of skilled artisans was very similar to independent masters or small
shopkeepers. At the lower level they shaded off into ordinary skilled workers, who may have had the attitudes and habits of
artisans but lacked the same financial security.
Skilled and unskilled—the great divide
The great divide among the labouring population was between the skilled and the unskilled or semi-skilled. The divide was
not merely one of skills and wages but of attitudes, education, life-style and aspirations. In Bradford skilled woolcombers did
not drink in the same pubs as their less-skilled fellow workers. Trade societies maintained the privileged status of their
members against the less skilled. It is difficult to differentiate between those non-artisans whose position changed during this
period. Degrees of skill did not always correspond to earnings. Navvies were less skilled than handloom weavers but certainly
earned more after 1810. Agricultural labourers earned more in northern England than in the south because of alternative
employment in manufacturing. Regional, occupational and ethnic variations modified the general pattern of stratification.
Factory operatives were presented by many contemporaries as the heart of the new industrial civilization living, depending
on the source used, in a state of continual misery or a life of comfort and respectability. Which of these contrasting views
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applied depends on which branch of which industry is being discussed. New technology and processes, the balance between
male, female and child labourers, economic conditions, under- or unemployment all influenced the fortunes of different
groups of workers.
Handloom weavers were one group of workers who were, initially, to benefit from industrial change and were ultimately
destroyed by it.
20
Between 1810 and the 1830s their status was reduced from respectable artisan to workers on the edge of
starvation—this represented perhaps the most important, certainly the most publicized, cultural shift within one of the largest
sections of the labouring population. The handloom weaver was the victim of an outmoded technology but this valid
explanation of their ‘distress’ obscures the impact which industrialization had on an immiserized section of the population.
Until the 1840s handlooms continued to be used in the woollen industry, though less in cotton, taking up the slack in busy
times and bearing the first brunt of depression. Their continued existence also acted as a check on the wages of powerloom
operatives. Caught between the remains of the domestic system and the force of competitive industrial capitalism they could
not, often would not because of their traditional ‘independence’, find other occupations. Trade societies prevented them from
entering skilled handicrafts while they were unprotected by custom or by unions. Conditions and wages deteriorated as a
result and by the 1840s they were amongst the lowest-paid workers in the country.
Other outworkers had similar experiences. Framework knitters also suffered a steady fall in earnings. This was largely the
result of the system of frame letting and the growth of middlemen in the industry. The impact of the variable weekly cost of
renting frames on earnings and the long periods of unemployment experienced by knitters were symptomatic of an industry
overstocked with labour. Only in prosperous times was there sufficient work for everyone. Employers had a vested interest in
renting out as many frames as possible and, with ease of entry into the trade, overcrowding was almost inevitable. The nailers
of Worcestershire and the Black Country ‘stuck to their trade’ long after it ceased to provide a decent living. Andrew Ure in
The Philosophy of Manufactures, 1835, believed that young women were prepared to sacrifice their health and comfort in
lace-embroidery at home rather than enter the factory, which would have implied loss of status.
Until the late nineteenth century outworking still had an important role in the mass production of consumer goods.
21
It may
have disappeared from some sectors where it had traditionally been important but it had taken a firmer root in others. By 1850
outworkers had virtually disappeared from northern England except in the mass-production clothing trade of the great provincial
centres. In the Midlands and the south things were very different. Traditional nail-making and newer chain-making continued
as outwork in the Birmingham area. But the principal provincial centres of outworking were found from Nottingham through
Leicester, Coventry and Northampton down to Luton with footwear, dress-making, hosiery, silk, lace and straw-making
located in and around these centres. London housed the other major concentration of outworkers in 1850. London industries
were largely workshop-based and one of the effects of economic change was to accentuate the pre-industrial characteristics of
the capital. The low pay of all these ‘sweated trades’ and prevailing social attitudes resulted in much of the work being done
by women. Unorganized and incapable of resisting wage reductions, workers in these trades were among the most exploited
in the country.
It is easy to overestimate the amount of work that was done using machines in 1850, and manual work supplied the motive
power for innumerable operations that are today done by machine. Agricultural labourers were still the largest single category
of worker in any industry in 1851, numbering over a million people. There were also 364,000 indoor farm servants and casual
labourers (Irishmen, women and children and textile workers) who were generally called upon at harvest time. There was a
subtle graduated hierarchy of farm workers—for example, ploughmen had higher status than the ordinary manual worker—but
for the most part they were expected to turn their hands to whatever the season of the year required
22
. The navvy
23
was a
product of economic change, digging and blasting the routes of roads and especially canals and railways— developments
which provided employment opportunities for other workers like bricklayers and masons. Mining was still largely
unmechanized by 1850 as was the work of many types of urban labourer: gasworkers, ironworkers, carters, draymen, porters,
coalheavers, dockers, hodmen, sweepers. The army had 41,000 men at home and 90,000 abroad in 1841 and the navy and
mercantile marine numbered over 200,000. All these workers had occupations which could be characterized as casual, were
subject to fluctuations in the weather, their own health and strength and in the prevailing economic conditions.
Domestic service absorbed a large section of the labouring population. In 1851 it totalled more than a million workers.
Though their work was less arduous than that of industrial or outdoor labourers it was often continual, tiring and poorly paid.
The turnover rate among domestic servants was high because the majority were girls and young women who shortly left to
get married. Recruits often came from the surrounding area or were daughters of respectable urban labouring families. The
dramatic growth in domestic service was a nineteenth- rather than an eighteenth-century phenomenon, one of the early signs
of growing middle-class prosperity but also of the growth in public institutions, hotels and eating houses.
Conclusions
It is possible to draw out certain broad conclusions from ‘those who will work’ in this period. First, the labouring population
was subtly graduated with skills, education and training providing status, standing and social aspirations within communities.
188 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850
Secondly, this status can be seen most clearly in the distinction between occupations that were ‘skilled’ and those that were
‘semi-’ or ‘unskilled’. Thirdly, economic changes led both to some employment becoming increasingly obsolete and to the
creation of new opportunities and occupations. Skill remained important and generally led to higher wages, but the respective
wages of handloom weavers and railways navvies in the 1830s illustrate the danger of generalization. Fourthly, gender played
an important part in determining respective wage levels—women and girls were generally paid less than men and boys.
Finally, the gap between relative prosperity and poverty was very narrow. Illness, old age, slump, an additional mouth to feed,
falling real wages could all push members of the labouring population over the edge of subsistence.
‘Those who cannot work’
Mayhew’s second category was the generally involuntary ‘those who cannot work’. Sickness, old age and unemployment
were its major causes. The result in each case was the same: increased pressure on the family income, falling standards of
living and growing poverty. Risks of injury at work were high and employers accepted no industrial liability, though serious
accidents were often accompanied by token payments and rudimentary sickness funds operated in certain occupations. Hatters
were ‘mad’, a paranoia symptomatic of mercury poisoning. Silicosis was an occupational hazard for miners. Grinders suffered
from asthma, house painters and plumbers from lead poisoning, lace-workers from eye-strain and so on. Unfenced machinery
could mutilate factory operatives. Sickness, particularly of the breadwinner, plunged the family into poverty unless other
members of the family could find sufficient employment. Few members of the labouring population could make provision for
their old age. Retirement was not something pleasantly anticipated.
Long-term unemployment was a condition in which many workers found themselves throughout this period. The resulting
indigence was, to some extent, seen as an acceptable part of the lot of the working population and the concept of continuous
employment was alien to contemporaries. How widespread national unemployment was between 1700 and 1850 is difficult to
determine because of the lack of quantifiable evidence. Not until the 1830s did it become sufficiently acute to arouse alarm
and investigation. Before then the ‘laying off of surplus labour during periods of slump, either generally or within specific
trades, was seen as natural. Slumps in the economy in the 1810s and, to a lesser extent, in the 1820s were either short-lived or
a consequence of the dislocation caused by the end of the French Wars. But the depression in the manufacturing economy
from the mid-1830s until 1841–2 was more general and longer lasting and may have affected over a tenth of the total
population.
In the 1850s Mayhew believed that only a third of the labouring population was fully employed, a third partially employed
and the remainder unemployed at any given time. Underemployment was endemic for various reasons. First, poor weather
could deprive bricklayers, painters, street sellers and navvies of wages. Secondly, there were brisk and slack periods of work
in many trades. Agricultural labourers did little work in winter, coalwhippers little in summer. Tailors, shoemakers and
milliners had a brisk period between February and July coinciding with the fashion season.
‘Those who would not work’
The world of ‘those who would not work’ was also consciously hierarchical. Vagrants formed the bottom group, nomadic and
‘rootless’. They were no new problem and estimates of their number in the early nineteenth century varied between 40,000
and 100,000 for England and Wales. Though suspected bv the ‘respectable’ throughout this period, clear explanations for
their vagrancy did not really emerge until after 1780. ‘Love of idleness’ and the ‘non-inculcation of the habit of industry’
were two widely-used contemporary explanations. This was, however, not the only possible reason why people became
vagrants. Some people became vagrants after failing to find work in the communities to which they had ‘tramped’.
Undoubtedly some chose to be beggars and, given the importance of conscience and being seen to be charitable, probably
made quite a good living out of it. London and the larger towns were littered with people with varying degrees of physical and
personal disabilities who solicited alms from passers-by.
Vagrancy was the nursery of crime, and habitual beggers, particularly the younger and more active ones, might well
progress into the lower levels of crime. The criminal fraternity was as status-conscious as the labouring population.
Housebreakers and burglars (‘cracksmen’), highwaymen and high-class pickpockets formed a well-defined ‘aristocracy’.
Below them were the shoplifters, sneak-thieves, horse stealers, embezzlers and forgers. A system of ‘fences’ acted as a link
between the worlds of legality and illegality. Crime, like work, had its own regulations and customs. There was a rough
system of apprenticeship. Hours of work were determined by the nature of the job and criminals tended to congregate in
certain areas of towns. Motivation for criminal actions, as today, varied considerably. In rural areas, for example, poaching
was often as much a social protest against loss of customary rights or falling wages as a consciously criminal act. Growing
towns, the inadequacy of preventive agencies and the possibility of ‘rich pickings’ made crime an attractive alternative to the
workhouse. Top criminals could probably live at a respectable level but prosperity could be short-lived with the likelihood of
prison, transportation or death by hanging. The ‘drop-out’ rate among the criminal population was therefore high.
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Prostitutes were also a group with their own hierarchy of status and earnings, customs and aspirations. They ranged from the
kept mistresses of wealthy businessmen and members of the aristocracy to those who solicited in the streets. High-class
prostitutes, like Grace Dalrymple and Fanny Murray, won fame and respect, becoming high-prized models for leading
painters. During the eighteenth century attitudes to casual sexual relationships were more liberal than in the nineteenth,
though the efforts of the Society for the Reformation of Manners to outlaw prostitution from the streets received little general
backing. Prostitutes did not form the outcast group, the Great Social Evil, that they became after 1850. Until recently
historians, influenced generally by Victorian notions of morality, would have assigned prostitutes to Mayhew’s category of
‘those who would not work’. Some contemporaries did, however, recognize that prostitution was often a temporary
phenomenon. For many young women who came to towns, isolation, low wages and vulnerability to under- and
unemployment easily led to prostitution. It was often a strategy for survival until other work could be found or specific
financial difficulties overcome.
TRADE UNIONISM
The Webbs’ interpretation
Political reform was given high profile by contemporaries and by later historians but combinations of workers in trade unions
to improve their economic conditions was also important, perhaps in retrospect more important.
22
The impression that trade
unionism developed as a consequence of industrialization has, until recently, led to the neglect of the existence of unionism
among many groups of skilled workers in the eighteenth century. This neglect owes much to the treatment which Sidney and
Beatrice Webb adopted in their classic work, The History of Trade Unionism, London, 1920, and to the stark division
historians have made between pre-industrial and industrial Britain.
The Webbs defined a trade union as ‘a continuous association of wage-earners established for the purpose of maintaining
or improving the conditions of their working lives.’ This definition has important limitations and inclined them to belittle the
evidence for early trade unionism, though they traced the movement’s ‘origins’ back to the late seventeenth century. The
emphasis on the idea of continuous existence—by implication they meant formal, institutionalized organizations—led the
Webbs to deny the importance of informal, local combinations. It is, however, clear that men regularly brought together in the
same workforce or area had unofficial leaders and developed their own customs and practices without embodying them in
regular institutions. Formal organizations emerge only in times of particular crisis such as a strike but often, as in the case of
the north-eastern sailors who struck twelve times between 1768 and 1825, there is little evidence for organizing committees.
Informal collective pressures certainly existed, though again there is little specific evidence, and were used to exclude women
and other ‘outsiders’. Most of the disputes in the eighteenth century—C.R.Dobson lists 386 for the period 1715–1800— do
not seem to have involved formal continuous organizations, but there is little doubt that they involved wages, hours of work
and control of the labour supply, which were ‘trade union’ issues. Some fell into the category of ‘bargaining by riot’ when
workers attempted to secure their collective ends by violence and intimidation. The 1765 northern miners’ strike was
accompanied by so much violence and systematic destruction of winding gear that arson was specifically proscribed in an
amended Malicious Injuries to Property Act in 1768. It is valid to see this sort of action as incipient trade unionism, even if not
in the Webbs’ sense.
A second major criticism of the Webbs’ view of the eighteenth century lay in their efforts to prove that trade unionism was
a relatively modern development, a characteristic of an industrialized society. Eighteenth-century Britain, however, was proto-
industrial and was already characterized by significant separation of capital and labour. Workers no longer owned the
materials on which they worked or sold the product to the consumer. Workers sold their ‘labour power’.
Unionism before 1800
It is difficult to get much idea of the scope of trade unionism in the eighteenth century. Certainly by 1800 it involved a very
small proportion of workers and it was still a minority movement in 1850. Trade unions were almost exclusively male. There
were women in the Manchester smallware weavers in 1747 and in 1788 as many as 18,500 females made up the Leicester
Sisterhood of Female Handspinners. But these were exceptions. Despite evidence for the economic marginalizing of women
workers, they had difficulty in organizing and it was not until the 1850s that unionism made much headway among them.
Trade unionism in the eighteenth century was predominantly the preserve of skilled workers who combined to protect their
status and economic standing against attacks from employers who sought to cut wages and change customary ways of
working.
23
They also combined to protect the ‘closed shop’ of their ‘trade’ against incursion from cheap labour and from
women. Collective action was commonplace in eighteenth-century Britain among a wide range of workers and there is clear
190 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850
evidence for some continuity of organization through the workplace or village club. Industrial protest may have been sporadic,
organization was not.
The degree of organization varied among different groups of artisans. London tailors, for example, had first come to the
public’s attention in 1720–1 when their actions led to an Act banning combinations in the tailoring trades of London and
Westminster and fixed wages by statute. Wage disputes were renewed in 1744–5, 1752, 1764, 1768 and 1778. Similar
evidence of what Francis Place called ‘perpetual combination’ existed for journeymen hatters and the effect of the union’s
strength was felt by master hatters in London, the Midlands, Bristol and Lancashire. Weavers and combers in the Devonshire
serge industry developed effective unionism through town clubs from early in the century, culminating in an Act of 1726
prohibiting combinations among woollen workers. Weavers’ combinations in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and parts of Somerset
also dated from the 1720s and in 1757 the employers secured parliamentary approval for ending the principle of wage
regulation in this area of manufacture over fifty years before the general repeal of the wage-regulating clauses of the 1563
Statute of Artificers. Woolcombers’ organizations existed in the south-west, Essex, Leicester and Yorkshire by the 1740s,
among cotton weavers in Lancashire by 1750 and among papermakers, compositors, plumbers, painters, carpenters,
shoemakers, bakers and metal workers by the end of the century.
There is widespread evidence for craft unions but the law was clearly on the employer’s side and Adam Smith was not alone
in dismissing unions’ effectiveness. By 1799 there were already more than forty Acts on the statute book which could be used
against trade unions, though many of these were confined to specific trades like those banning combinations among hatters in
1777 and papermakers in 1794. These Acts were passed by Parliament in response to pressure from employers for more
effective ways of combating trade union organizations of journeymen in their trades. The presumption was that combinations
were illegal. This was grounded in the concept of ‘conspiracy’, under which the fairness of the workers’ case was not the
issue, only the fact of conspiracy against the employers. It was not the refusal to work by an individual that was illegal but the
collective action or conspiracy of the combination. Throughout the eighteenth century there were many occasions when
conspiracy proceedings were taken against trade unions: for example, against seven Liverpool tailors in 1783, against
Leicester hatters in 1777 and 1794. Though local court records have undoubtedly been lost, between 1710 and 1800
conspiracy proceedings as a weapon against trade unions were used in 29 cases. In Scotland, by contrast, judicial intervention
was far more common than recourse to punitive action. Scottish judges regularly set wage rates and regulated hours during the
eighteenth century and it was not until after the weavers’ strike of 1812 that this legal regulation was swept away.
The law was not a particularly effective weapon against combinations in the eighteenth century. Proceedings could be very
slow and costly, employers were disinclined to reopen old conflicts and had to face latent hostilities after their actions were
over. Often the threat of legal action was sufficient to get people back to work. But legal action did not always correspond to
economic advantage and workers who took action during an upturn in the economy often achieved their objectives as
employers did not want to lose the advantages of a rising market. Combinations of employers were as much a part of the
industrial scene as combinations of workers and could be just as secretive. Agreements between employers which resulted in
wages cuts led to major disturbances in Somerset in 1738–9 and in 1764 a strike took place in the serge industry when
weavers learnt that a meeting of masters was about to agree on lower prices. Employers were able to ‘police’ their own area,
through refusing to employ workers who had no ‘discharge certificate’ from previous work, or by getting workers to sign
agreements on wages and, under the threat from combinations, by locking workers out. In these circumstances the use of the
legal process was superfluous.
How effective were workers in pressing their claims through combinations? Choosing the right moment for withdrawing
labour was of central importance. Serge workers chose the spring when demand for lighter cloth was at its height. The death of
Queen Charlotte in 1817 offered the Coventry weavers of black ribbon an ideal opportunity for pressing their wage demands.
Part of the strategy of making strikes effective was building up a support fund and there is evidence for this among book-
binders, printers, calico printers and others. Violence was frequently used as a means of intimidating employers and
‘blackleg’ workers, though many contemporaries saw it as an expression of desperation. It was used by skilled as well as
unskilled workers and ‘collective bargaining by riot’ was as much a part of industrial action as the strike in the eighteenth
century. It is difficult to estimate the effectiveness of trade union action in the eighteenth century. Skilled workers often saw
themselves as protecting the tradition of their trades against interlopers and against their masters whose advantage lay in
deregulation. Their effectiveness depended on local support, a sound financial basis, favourable economic conditions and, on
occasions, the willingness of magistrates to act as arbiters between them and their employers. By 1800 there was a
widespread, vibrant and not ineffective tradition of trade unionism in Britain.
Unionism under the Combination Act, 1799–1824
Trade unionism found itself under concerted attack in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
24
The Combination Acts of
1799 and 1800 introduced legislative repression. The repeal of the apprenticeship clauses of the Statute of Artificers in 1814
threatened the exclusive ‘property of skill’ of the craft unions and the ‘machinery question’ their economic security. War,
WAGES 191
rising prices and the threat from political Jacobinism provided justification, though Ian Christie has recently maintained that
the widespread existence of trade combinations acted as a safety-valve for discontent among the working population,
confining revolutionary activity to a minority of the population.
The first quarter of the nineteenth century saw the Combination Acts in force. Passed in 1799 and modified in 1800, they
have been represented in trade union mythology as the most outstanding example of the repression of the rights of the
working population to combine in their own defence. The Webbs were correct in seeing them as a reflection of government
fears of revolutionary ideas but their limited views of eighteenth-century unionism led them to the incorrect conclusion that
the Acts marked a ‘far reaching change of policy’. It was the general nature of the prohibition of combinations that was new,
not prohibition itself.
The Acts were passed very quickly, with encouragement from both William Wilberforce and William Pitt, and took
workers’ organizations by surprise. They were certainly one-sided and did not treat combinations by employers as harshly as
those by workers. The 1799 Act was intended to prevent dislocation of trade during wartime and was partly inspired by fears
of revolution. It aimed to secure speedy settlement of disputes by summary proceedings before a single magistrate. Following
protests against its unfairness it was modified in 1800 to bring employers’ combinations under the law as well as workers’
(though this proved inoperable), requiring two magistrates, who could not be masters in the trades concerned, and introducing
arbitration clauses (though these never seem to have operated).
The effects of the Acts were exaggerated by contemporaries and subsequently by some historians. They were used
infrequently and when used were often ineffective. Summary jurisdiction, their main intention, was largely defeated by
appeals to the quarter sessions and convictions were frequently thrown out on technical points. The Combination Acts have
been seen as a negligible instrument of oppression and employers continued to rely largely on the older legal controls
provided by common law, existing statutes and the contractual law of master and servant. So why has a mythology been
manufactured round the Combination Acts? M.D.George, as early as 1936, provided a convincing explanation. She argued
that:
these were the only Acts styled Combination Acts and therefore all the opprobrium attached to the mass of legislation
repealed in 1824 was loosely and vaguely attached to the Act of 1800.
25
Witnesses to the 1824 Committee were confused as to whether prosecution had been brought under the 1800 Act, or for
conspiracy, riot, or for breach of contract. Though E.P.Thompson’s statement that it did not matter to workers which law they
were prosecuted under is undoubtedly true, it certainly does make a difference whether or not the Combination Acts marked a
change of policy and whether they made legal repression more severe.
Combinations were certainly subjected to legal repression during this period and many individuals were prosecuted, fined
and imprisoned. This seems to have been more widespread in areas of rapid technological growth and in the politically
conscious textile areas of Lancashire and Nottinghamshire were outworking was widespread. Cotton spinners struck in 1810
and there were four separate strikes among cotton workers in 1818 by jenny spinners and powerloom weavers in Stockport, mule
spinners in Manchester and handloom weavers. The intensity of opposition to the Combination Acts among handloom
weavers and the repressive response from employers in Lancashire was a reflection of the struggle to maintain their
livelihood; the tendency of modern historians to downgrade the effect of the Combination Acts gains little support from there.
Older skilled trade societies, though occasionally prosecuted, seem to have been more readily accepted by employers as
legitimate channels of workers’ grievances. Evidence to the 1824 Committee gives many examples of collective bargaining
where employers did not choose to take legal action. Printing workers did not come into conflict with the law despite their
spreading organization in London and the provinces. London artisans and artisans elsewhere emerged from the French wars
more strongly organized than ever before with a new ‘trade union consciousness’ linking wages to organizational power.
Intra-trade networks developed: in 1800 these existed in seventeen trades and by the mid-1820s in at least twentyeight.
The effectiveness of trade unionism among skilled workers was threatened far more by the repeal, in 1814, of the statutory
requirement that a seven-year apprenticeship should be served before a craft should be exercised than by the Combination
Acts. The apprenticeship clauses of the Statute of Artificers had fallen into disuse in the eighteenth century, so why did this
emerge as an issue in the early nineteenth century? The agitation against repeal was centred in London, but there was
widespread support from the calico workers of Lancashire and in the frame-knitting district of the East Midlands. Skilled
workers in these areas saw their control of work practices threatened by employers’ use of unskilled and untrained labour and
by new technology introduced to break the hold of the trade societies, according to Andrew Ure in The Philosophy of
Manufactures, his defence of the factory system in the mid-1830s. Employers, by contrast, saw the apprenticeship clauses and
the restrictive practices they ensured as a barrier to the further expansion of capitalist practices. In the case of apprenticeship
and new machinery employers were successful in trades which were less protected and less well organized. The result was an
influx of unskilled and cheaper labour into a trade undercutting the privileged status of skilled men. In trades where manual
192 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850
skills remained an essential feature of production and where well organized artisans could co-ordinate collective action
apprenticeship, and with it the closed shop, survived.
By 1824 skilled workers had shown themselves capable of protecting their labour interests against the capitalist interests of
employers as they had done in the eighteenth century. The 1814 appeal was in this respect more important for skilled workers
than the Combination Acts because it legitimized the twin processes of deskilling and the introduction of cheap labour. But
before 1824 there were few signs that unionism had crossed the boundary of skill between artisan and unskilled labour.
The repeal of the Combination Acts was achieved in 1824 as a result of a campaign led by Francis Place and supported by
economists like Joseph Hume and J.R.McCulloch. His campaign, masterly in diplomacy, lobbying and argument, was aimed
at a Parliament which already accepted the ineffectiveness and unfairness of the legislation. The 1824 Act swept away not
only the Combination Acts but also excluded trade unions from prosecution for conspiracy. Many people had been convinced
by Place’s argument that repeal would bring trade unionism and strikes to an end. The events of 1824–5 quickly led them to
rethink their position. Repeal coincided with a boom in trade releasing a flood of union activity with demands for wage increases
accompanied by strikes and violence. Employers demanded the restoration of the Combination Acts and it took all Place’s
diplomacy to prevent this. The 1825 Act, the result of a report from a select committee, recognized the rights of combination
and collective bargaining over wages and hours but restored union subjection to the law of conspiracy. It also made the law on
picketing and intimidation more stringent. The Act was a compromise which gave unions the right to exist but limited their
effectiveness to act with powerful legal sanctions.
A ‘revolutionary decade’ 1825–35
Historians have taken different views of trade union developments in the next ten years.
26
Left-wing historians like the
Webbs, G.D.H.Cole and E.P.Thompson have characterized the period as one of growing political and class consciousness
with the emergence of general unions. Other historians, like A.E.Musson, argue that the ‘revolutionary ‘nature of unionism in
this period has been exaggerated and that much trade unionism remained small, sectional and local. General unions may have
been exciting to both contemporaries and to later historians but the organization, collective bargaining and friendly benefits
for unemployment, sickness and death of the older trade societies and the superficiality of their response to Owenite and anti-
capitalist ideology must be emphasized.
There were, however, two significant developments during these years. The first was organizational: the formation of
district and national unions and attempts at general trades’ unions or federations. The second was ideological: a broadening of
union horizons to include political and social ideas and an anti-capitalist critique. These came together, though far from
successfully, in the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU) of 1834. Owenite ideas had a limited impact on most
workers, though they often expressed sympathy with Owen’s aims and a few started small schemes of co-operative
production. District and national unions in specific trades proved to be more enduring than general unions and, though
weakened by strikes and lock-outs, often survived to be resuscitated in the 1840s.
The movement towards regional and national unionism in specific trades was evident among cotton spinners. In 1824
Manchester spinners were involved in several local disputes and took up the object of forming a county union for Lancashire,
trying to broaden their support by seeking federation with the Glasgow spinners who were also in dispute. Though this proved
unsuccessful further strikes in 1825 and 1828 demonstrated the need for better organization. The result was the establishment
of a Grand General Union of Operative Cotton Spinners (GGU) led by John Doherty in 1829. He wanted a stronger
organization than those which had been attempted in 1810, 1818 and 1824 and, despite regional differences between cotton
spinners, was able to achieve agreement on a national strike pay level of 10 shillings from a central fund and on the need for
consent from other districts before industrial action could be taken. Expectations proved too high and in a series of strikes in
Lancashire in late 1830 and early 1831 the GGU failed to deliver the goods: strike pay was only half that promised and there
was poor support from other areas. The GGU collapsed and further movement towards federation in Lancashire had to wait
until 1842.
John Doherty, a practical trade unionist rather than a Owenite idealist, had already shifted his focus to the National
Association for the Protection of Labour (NAPL). Formed in late 1829, its inaugural meeting was attended by workers from
twenty trades from Lancashire. Although successful in spreading the movement into the Midlands and other northern
industrial centres at its peak in the autumn of 1830 its 60–70,000 members came overwhelmingly from Lancashire and
Cheshire. The NAPL gained support from declining handworkers like weavers and knitters as well as cotton mule-spinners but
also from miners and potters. It lost both strength and momentum after the autumn of 1831, but it persisted in name until
1833. It failed to achieve any of its objectives and never attracted the most highly skilled workers like engineers and printers
who kept to their craft unions, but had been successful in mobilizing much larger occupational groups.
Similar movement towards national unions was evident among building craftsmen. This began among carpenters and
bricklayers in 1827 and soon led towards general unionism. Technology was not the problem in the building trade; innovation
in organization was. The issue was one of ‘general contracting’. The traditional system of architects employing master
WAGES 193
craftsmen in the various branches of the trade was being replaced by a tripartite system of architect, middlemen or employers
of labour in crafts to which they did not belong, and master craftsmen. The claim was that these general contractors forced
down rates and wished to change the working practices of the craftsmen. Demands for an ending of general contracting led to
unsuccessful confrontation between the Builders Union and employers in 1833–4. The building industry, again split into its
separate trades.
Robert Owen’s Grand National Consolidated Trades Union (GNCTU) brought the ferment of trade unionism both to its
zenieth and its end. It was in part a revival of Doherty’s earlier general union and, although it has entered union mythology
especially through the connected Tolpuddle Martyrs, it was even less successful than the NAPL, lasted less than a year and
never became the vast organization into which it was later inflated by the Webbs. The GNCTU was not London’s first
attempt at general unionism: the campaign against repeal in 1814 had gone across trades and in 1818 John Gast, leader of the
shipwrights, had organized London artisans in the ‘Philanthropic Hercules’, a formalization of existing intertrade assistance.
There had already been much interest by London artisans in co-operative production which predated Owen. The GNCTU was
formed in a period of active unionism in London especially among the carpenters, shoemakers and tailors, who wanted to stop
the drift from being skilled artisans towards being ‘sweated’ into a proletariat along with an expanding population of
unskilled.
It is difficult to reconstruct the exact sequencing of events in London in 1833–4 but it is very clear that the formation of the
GNCTU came at a time of existing and continuing union activity. The initiative was taken by the tailors and in mid-February
1831 the GNCTU was born. Its main aims represented artisan concerns: mutual support in strikes, provision of sickness
benefits, employment of members who were on strike and of unemployed members. The Webbs’ estimation of half a million
members has been shown to have been ridiculously high. The total paid-up membership approached only 16,000 but there
were attempts to broaden its appeal and certainly it had tacit support from many more workers. There was some movement
towards the unorganized, including women workers, and it was this broadening of the movement which heightened
government and employer hostility. The GNCTU failed to attract support from the majority of trade societies—London
tailors, silk weavers and shoemakers formed a greater part of it. Though a few labourers, like those at Tolpuddle, briefly
organized, it spread only to a limited extent beyond traditional craft trades. It had no real organization or financial basis and,
when faced with employers’ lock-outs and prosecutions, including that of the six Dorcester labourers for administering an
illegal oath at Tolpuddle, it collapsed.
A.S.Musson has called the GNCTU ‘a fascinating phenomenon, but sadly ephemeral’ and it is true that movements for
general unionism in the case of both the NAPL and GNCTU were very short-lived. Musson argues that historians have given
the GNCTU attention out of all proportion to its significance and that the future lay with district and national federations
within trades not with vast trades federations. Though his conclusion may be valid he has perhaps overstated his case and
historians from different sides of the political divide, like Thompson and E.H. Hunt, agree that unionism between 1829 and
1834 did mark an important move in the direction of working-class consciousness. This was not a permanent, broad-based or
continuous class consciousness out of which a working class was formed but a consciousness among skilled artisans and
handworkers experiencing dilution into the ‘unskilled’. The GNCTU was neither an aberration nor a radical departure for
trade union development.
Developments after 1835
The inflation by the Webbs of both the numerical support for and the collapse of the GNCTU caused them, according to
Musson, to produce a ‘warped’ interpretation of developments after 1834. This has led to two ways of looking at the
subsequent period. For the Webbs there was an emphasis on a decline in confrontation and in overt class consciousness.
Others stress the continuity of activity between the 1820s and the 1840s. Certainly, with the intense depression between 1836
and the early 1840s, trade unionism was under severe strain in the face of a sustained employer offensive. This led certain
workers, like handloom weavers, to seek political rather than economic solutions to their problems. In Scotland the bitterness
and defeat of the Glasgow spinners’ strike in 1837 and the subsequent trial of union leaders set back the development of
Scottish unionism for up to a decade.
How valid is the Webbs’ claim? There is ample evidence that unions renounced the language of the class war, improved
their organization and public image and concentrated on sectional, local and limited objectives. Violence in Glasgow, against
blackleg labour during a cotton spinner strike in 1837, and in Cork and Dublin led to pressure for the government to
reintroduce anti-union legislation. An enquiry in 1838 decided against this but the threat was taken very seriously and led to
united action by London and provincial unions. The language of craft unions was moderated, at least in public, and the
language of accommodation replaced the conflict rhetoric of the early 1830s. The potters displayed an approving interest in
new technology and the printers distanced themselves further from the notion of general unionism for which they had always
had little enthusiasm. Strikes were seen increasingly by craft unions as the final resort, though this did not mark a major alteration
194 SOCIETY AND ECONOMY IN MODERN BRITAIN 1700–1850
in how this strategy was perceived; flint glass workers declared them to have been the bane of the union movement and
abolished strike pay.
Apprenticeship was, however, still a major issue between skilled trade unionists and their employers. It meant the closed
shop crucial to union success was preserved in only two contexts: where a skill remained essential for production and could
only be achieved through long apprenticeship or an effective closing of entry against unskilled men. New technology and the
acceptance by a mass market of ready-made goods of often inferior quality led to changes in some trades but the preservation
and survival of apprenticeship remained a key objective of many trades. The main weapon in the armoury of Sheffield cutlers
and grinders, for example, lay in their restriction of the supply of labour. Tyneside shipwrights in 1841 still held the ratio of
one apprentice to three craftsmen and it was firmly insisted on in the union rulebook in 1850.
There may have been much talk of the need for accommodation with employers and the prospect of achieving more by
negotiation and conciliation than by strike action but the context in which this existed was fundamental. There was often little
reciprocity on the part of employers, who were likely to respond to weakness by increased attempt to break unions. The
Miners’ Association, which was established in late 1842, had 60,000 members at its peak in 1844 from every major coalfield
in the British Isles but was defeated by concerted action by coal-owners.
The Webbs’ notion of accommodation should not be overemphasized. There were certainly continuities within skilled craft
unions throughout the first half of the nineteenth century but what is important, for developments after 1850, was a shift in the
meaning of ‘elite’ unionism. During the 1830s the leading craft unions were from the ‘lower’ trades, among weavers, tailors
and shoemakers, but from the 1840s this primacy moved to the ‘upper’ trades. The ‘aristocracy of labour’ of the 1840s was
fundamentally different from the traditional artisan ‘aristocracy’ of the 1820s. It was grounded in the new technology, new
trades and in industrial change. It was necessary for capitalism to reach accommodation with these groups for its own survival
and expansion. It is, however, important not to see this as a complete accommodation by all trade unions to the values of
liberal capitalism. Struggles for ‘workers’ control’ over the processes of labour and an insistence on apprenticeship remained
points of conflict between capital and labour. Women were entirely excluded from accommodation by men, both employers
and trade unionists. The unskilled, by far the majority of workers, remained outside and had no place in this rapprochement.
In 1850 trade unions accounted for only a small proportion of all workers and many would have agreed with Sir Archibald
Alison who dismissed them all as nothing more than ‘a system of aristocracy of skilled labour against the mass of unskilled
labour’.
27
The interests of trade unions lay in maintaining differentials within the working population, not in promoting the interests of
the unskilled from whom they were separated by a chasm of training, education and attitudes.
CONCLUSIONS
The labouring population was perhaps more diverse than the other sections of society. The reaction of workers to their social,
economic and political environments was also diverse. Income, employment, locality, aspirations, economic changes all
affected their perceptions. The difference between a skilled London craftsman and a Scottish crofter was, in many ways, as
great as that between a member of the aristocracy and a prosperous shopkeeper. That difference was one of experience and
outlook. Yet both could share a common sense of resentment and disillusion at the inequalities within society. Technical
change both threatened and provided opportunities. For the craftsman it could spell insecurity and redundancy. The cropper
threatened by the gig machine, the weaver menaced by the powerloom, the agricultural worker facing competition from
threshing machines saw significant parts of their livelihood being swept away. For workers their capital was their skill which,
unlike the resources of industrialists, could not easily be switched from one form of investment to another. People who live
close to poverty do not have the same flexibility as those who possess regular and reliable incomes.
NOTES
1 W.Cobbett Rural Rides, quoted in T.Blackwell and J.Seabrook A World Still to Win—The Reconstruction of the Post-War Working
Class, Faber, 1985, p. 34.
2 The literature on the working population is voluminous but can be approached in three accessible books: K.D.Brown The English
Labour Movement 1700–1951, Gill & Macmillan, 1982, J.F.C.Harrison The Common People, Fontana, 1984 and J.Rule The
Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England 1750–1850, Longman, 1986. E.Royle Modern Britain, Edward Arnold, 1987
provides a general overview.
3 The best introduction to wage-labour is L.A.Clarkson ‘Wage-labour 1500–1800’, in K.D.Brown op. cit. pp. 1–27.
4 Adam Smith The Wealth of Nations, Everyman edn, 1910, Vol. 1, p. 73.
5 ibid. p. 70.
6 A convenient summary of the ‘state of the art’ on standards of living can be found in J.Rule op. cit. pp. 27–45 and R.Floud ‘A Tall
Story? The Standard of Living Debate’, History Today, May 1983. More detailed discussion can be found in A.J.Taylor (ed.) The
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