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[...] From the late 1820s, the weavers brought forward three consistent proposals.

First, they proposed a tax on power-looms, to equalize conditions of competition, some part of which might be allocated towards the weavers’ relief. We should not forget that the hand-loom weaver was not only hims…

When asked whether wages ought not to be left to find their own ‘level’, a Manchester silk-weaver replied that there was no similarity between ‘what is called capital and labour’:

Capital, I can make out to be nothing else but an accumulation of the products of labour…. Labour is always carrie…

In some cases the loom itself was hired by the weaver, in other cases he owned the loom, but had to hire the gearing or slays for pattern-weaving from the employer. Many weavers were in a perpetual state of indebtedness to the ‘putter-out’, working off their debts by instalments upon their work, an…

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,…