England's Great Transformation ― Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution

Marc Steinberg here rewrites the dominant social science narratives of the English Industrial Revolution. He places the Industrial Revolution at the center of a new way to tell an old story. Karl Polyani’s famous England’s Great Transformation argued that laissez-faire capitalism had a loosening effect on the control of labor in the early 19th century and the freeing-up of markets. Steinberg finds, to the contrary, that labor contracts, centered on master-servant laws, were the primary force that reshaped structures of control and exploitations between property owners and employees. Under mid-Victorian master-servant law, disobeying a master in a contract of service was a criminal offense. Steinberg shows this at the national and local levels, bringing in three local case studies to tell the story: how employers in the pottery, fish-trawling, and needlemaking and agricultural sectors institutionalized reliance on these laws for labor control in the 1860s and 70s. That story is a timely analysis of the nuts and bolts of class-related industrial struggles triggered by opportunities for capitalist profit during this period in England. Steinberg seeks out the linkages between local and national levels and the legal framework guiding strategies of employers and workers; he also follow the sometimes complex pathways made by Marxist, feminist, and Foucauldian scholars as they try to explain these phenomena.

Marc W. Steinberg is professor of sociology at Smith College. He is the author ofFighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England. He lives in Massachusetts.