Activity

But when we follow through the history of particular industries, and see new skills arise as old ones decline, it is possible to forget that the old skill and the new almost always were the perquisite of different people. Manufacturers in the first half of the nineteenth century pressed forward eac…

It is scarcely possible to write the history of popular agitations in these years unless we make at least the imaginative effort to understand how such a man as the ‘Journeyman Cotton Spinner’ read the evidence. He spoke of the ‘masters’, not as an aggregate of individuals, but as a class. As such,…

It is scarcely possible to write the history of popular agitations in these years unless we make at least the imaginative effort to understand how such a man as the ‘Journeyman Cotton Spinner’ read the evidence. He spoke of the ‘masters’, not as an aggregate of individuals, but as a class. As such,…

If those in employment worked shorter hours, and if child labour were to be restricted, there would be more work for hand-workers and the unemployed could employ themselves and exchange the products of their labour directly – short-circuiting the vagaries of the capitalist market – goods would be c…

It is perfectly true that what the empiricist points to was there. The Orders in Council had in 1811 brought certain trades almost to a standstill; rising timber prices after the Wars inflated the costs of building; a passing change of fashion (lace for ribbon) might silence the looms of Coventry; …