Rethinking the Industrial Revolution
Historical
Materialism
Book Series
Editorial Board
Sébastien Budgen, Paris – Steve Edwards, London
Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam – Peter Thomas, London
VOLUME 49
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hm
Rethinking the Industrial Revolution
Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian
to Industrial Capitalism in England
By
Michael Andrew Žmolek
Leiden • boston
2013
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zmolek, Michael Andrew.
Rethinking the industrial revolution : five centuries of transition from agrarian to industrial
capitalism in England / by Michael Andrew Zmolek.
pages cm. — (Historical materialism book series ; volume 49)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-21987-8 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25179-3 (e-book) 1. Industrial
revolution—England. 2. Great Britain—Economic conditions. I. Title.
HC254.5.Z56 2013
330.942’07—dc23
2013011334
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For Mary Louise
who I knew as Mom
Contents
List of Tables and Diagrams .....................................................................................
Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................
Foreword ........................................................................................................................
xiii
xv
xvii
Introduction
Why the Industrial Revolution began in England .......................................
The transition debate ...........................................................................................
Marx on property relations: Brenner’s point of departure .......................
The specificity of capitalism and agrarian capitalism ................................
Market dependency ..............................................................................................
The elusive origins of capitalism and industrialisation .............................
Conclusion ...............................................................................................................
3
8
17
23
28
32
40
Part One: England Transformed
Manufacturing and Agrarian Capitalism, 1348–1783
1. The Pre-History of Industry ................................................................................ 47
Wage labour and the guilds .......................................................................... 49
The evolution of the guild system in England ........................................ 57
Queen Betty’s law ............................................................................................ 66
The economic context in Tudor and Stuart Times ............................... 70
Nef’s ‘early industrial revolution’ ................................................................ 74
‘Capitalism’ in medieval and early modern mining .............................. 81
Mining and agrarian capitalism: the instructive case of
Whickham .................................................................................................... 86
The so-called phase of proto-industrialisation ....................................... 91
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 101
2. Parliament and Revolution ................................................................................. 105
The crisis of the early seventeenth century ............................................. 107
viii • Contents
Parliament’s civil war ......................................................................................
Restoration to Glorious Revolution ............................................................
The post-revolution settlement ...................................................................
The glorious financial revolution ................................................................
‘Free trade’ ..........................................................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
116
136
146
148
156
162
3. Agrarian Capitalism: The Key to Britain’s Rise to Power ..........................
Views on the relationship between agriculture and
manufacturing .............................................................................................
War, debt and the land tax ...........................................................................
The storm before the calm ............................................................................
Stability and ‘old corruption’ ........................................................................
The so-called agrarian depression: 1730–50 .............................................
The return to war and the ’45 ......................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
165
166
171
174
182
192
206
212
4. An Empire in Crisis ................................................................................................
Pitt and empire .................................................................................................
The emergence of popular politics: Wilkes and George III ................
Rebellion at home and abroad ....................................................................
The survival of empire ....................................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
215
218
223
235
244
248
5. Harvesting the Agrarian Revolution .................................................................
The end of the demographic pause ............................................................
Internal and external expansion .................................................................
Parliamentary enclosures and the consequences of increasing
agrarian productivity .................................................................................
The great enclosure debate ...........................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
253
256
259
265
270
279
Part Two: ‘Such Machines . . . As Cannot Err’
Capital and Technology in the Making of Industrial England, 1700–1800
6. Technology and History .......................................................................................
The ahistoricism of technological determinism .....................................
The technology of Antiquity .........................................................................
Medieval to early modern technology .......................................................
283
288
301
307
Contents • ix
The technology of the Industrial Revolution .......................................... 322
Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 338
7. The Social Origins of the Factory ....................................................................
‘Plen-ty of time’: The multifarious conditions of labour, 1700–60 ....
Wages and the emerging labour market ..................................................
Concentration and regional specialisation ..............................................
Solutions for poverty .......................................................................................
The first factory ................................................................................................
‘A gymcrak of some consequence’ ..............................................................
The turning point .............................................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
343
348
355
359
368
379
384
393
396
8. Factories and Machinery ....................................................................................
Wedgwood .........................................................................................................
The specific role of machinery ....................................................................
Manufacture versus machinofacture .........................................................
‘King Cotton’ and the cotton king: from factory to factory system .....
Technological versus organisational innovation ....................................
Discipline and control ....................................................................................
The arrival of the power-loom .....................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
401
403
415
420
428
444
451
455
457
9. Capital and Industry ............................................................................................
Woollens and worsted ....................................................................................
Linen: the second-class textile .....................................................................
Iron and steam ..................................................................................................
Mining .................................................................................................................
Beer, paper and chemicals ............................................................................
The capitalist .....................................................................................................
Origins and definitions of capital ...............................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
461
462
467
469
479
483
490
495
500
Part Three: Custom’s Last Stand
The Rise and Fall of Artisan-Led Resistance to Capitalism
in England, 1783–1848
10. Custom and Law ................................................................................................... 509
The paradox of custom .................................................................................. 511
x • Contents
‘A Whig state of mind’: political economy, the bloody code and the
decline of paternalism .........................................................................
‘Is there any principle in these things?’: the return of radicalism ....
‘You offer no motives’: outdoor relief and the problem of the poor .. Conclusion .........................................................................................................
521
532
548
555
11. Rebellion and Reaction .......................................................................................
‘A tribute to Welsh pluck’: invasion, rebellion and mutiny ................
‘The Radicals are drinking Pitt’s health’: the Combination Acts
in context .................................................................................................
The tension within radicalism .....................................................................
‘So simple is the plan, so faithful are the men’ ......................................
The second generation of industrialists in charge .................................
War, commerce and British Capitalism ....................................................
Luddism and the repeal of Queen Betty’s law ........................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
557
558
12. Class and the State ...............................................................................................
The postwar crisis ............................................................................................
The ‘Malthusian moment’ .............................................................................
‘Bread or blood’ .................................................................................................
The makings of a working class ...................................................................
‘A land of Roast Beef and Plum-Pudding’ ................................................
‘A ramshackle and cumbersome machinery of government’ .............
‘A prey to be plundered’: the reversal of the combination laws .......
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
609
614
618
624
633
643
646
656
673
13. Reform and the Oligarchy ..................................................................................
High politics .......................................................................................................
Swing ....................................................................................................................
‘No kings, No lords, No inequalities’ ..........................................................
Free labour .........................................................................................................
Grand Union ......................................................................................................
The New Poor Law ..........................................................................................
Capital formation and the railway boom .................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
677
678
688
697
709
716
727
738
744
562
572
577
583
585
592
603
14. Chartists and Liberals .......................................................................................... 749
The People’s Charter and the National Petition .................................... 750
The age of petitioning .................................................................................... 761
Contents • xi
The strike of 1842 .............................................................................................
Reform and disorder under Peel .................................................................
Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Irish Potato Famine ........................
‘All men are brethren’ .....................................................................................
‘A paddock and a pigsty’ ................................................................................
Conclusion .........................................................................................................
765
768
773
778
785
790
Conclusion .....................................................................................................................
The crisis of feudalism and the origin of agrarian capitalism ...........
The sixteenth century .....................................................................................
The seventeenth century ...............................................................................
The eighteenth century ..................................................................................
Technology and the labour process ...........................................................
Capital, custom and the law .........................................................................
The early nineteenth century .......................................................................
Summary .............................................................................................................
793
796
800
803
806
812
817
822
837
Epilogue .......................................................................................................................... 841
References ...................................................................................................................... 845
Index ................................................................................................................................ 869
List of Tables and Diagrams
List of Tables
Table 0.1: Rates of growth, Britain 1700–1831 .................................................... Table 3.1: Rising wages in Lancashire 1700–90 ................................................. Table 5.1: Corn output in England and Wales .................................................. Table 5.2: Growth of British imports and exports: 1720–90 .......................... Table 5.3: Enclosure bills in Parliament, 1740–1829 ........................................ Table 7.1:Legislation against combination and property
damage: 1718–26 ...................................................................................... Table 7.2: Regional specialisation in manufactures 1600–1750 .................... Table 7.3: English patents sealed: 1660–1759 ..................................................... Table 8.1: Arkwright Factories built 1769–84 .................................................... Table 9.1: Brewers in England and Wales in the eighteenth century ....... Table 13.1: The decline of hand-loom weaving: 1788–1860 ............................. 32
193
257
258
266
350
362
394
436
485
738
List of Diagrams
Diagram 5.1: The pattern of causal relations in the economic context
of the Industrial Revolution ........................................................... 254
Acknowledgments
The central thread of this work was inspired during valuable exchanges with
Professors Ellen Meiksins Wood and George Comninel, whose own work has
informed and inspired much of the present material. I am grateful for the exceptional care which both of these scholars took in reviewing drafts of my doctoral
dissertation, completed in 2008, from which this book originates. I also wish to
thank the third member of my dissertation committee, David McNally, for being
ever-ready to answer questions and offer assistance as needed. Other professors
at York University I wish to thank and acknowledge are: Robert Albritton, for
providing me with the opportunity to test some of my ideas in debate, and John
Saul, for his inspirational teaching during my graduate course-work. Florence
Booth at the University of Iowa and Robert Reid at the University of Dubuque
provided valuable assistance in helping me revise the outline. Appreciation is
due to the staffs at the libraries of York University, the University of Toronto, the
University of Iowa, the University of Dubuque, the University of Maryland and at
the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A very special thanks goes to Dave Kelly at the
Library of Congress for his invaluable assistance.
During the long writing and preparation of this work, I have been blessed by
the support and encouragement of friends and colleagues in Toronto, Washington DC, Iowa City, Dubuque and elsewhere. Rather than list dozens of names, I
simply wish to say thank you all for being there during what has at times been
a difficult journey.
Finally, I wish to thank my family: to my sister Pauli for support and patience
during the years we shared a house in Takoma Park, Maryland, where during
many long hours of study I enjoyed the companionship of her late dog Zoe; to
my brother Tom and his family: his wife Mary and my nieces Kate and Laura,
whose spiritual journeys have encouraged me to ‘rethink’ more than just the
Industrial Revolution; and to my brother Stuart, whose playful sense of humour
always gives me hope. And there are simply not enough words to thank my
father, Lee Zmolek, for his unfailing support. This book is dedicated to memory
of my mother. Without the love and support of my parents, this work would
never have been completed.
Foreword
Words of warning
There is something of a tradition where books on the Industrial Revolution are
concerned. It seems almost obligatory to begin with some words of caution
about the scope of the subject – what it is, and what it is not. Writing in 1917,
the Hammonds caution us that:
there is a sense in which it is impossible to explain anything without explaining everything. It is true, again, that there is an element of risk in any general
statement about the Industrial Revolution.1
Eleven years later, Paul Mantoux cautioned that not only did the causes of the
Industrial Revolution remain a mystery, but also that:
in spite of the apparent rapidity of its development, the industrial revolution
sprang from far-distant causes, and was destined to produce consequences
whose process of development, after more than a century, is still incomplete.
The distinctive characteristics of the factory system did not reveal themselves
all at once.2
Twenty years later still, T.S. Ashton published his 1948 classic The Industrial
Revolution 1760–1830, a concise account which remains among the most widely
read texts on the subject. Ashton begins by cautioning us about using the term
‘capitalism’, but asks us to accede to the common understanding and usage of
the term ‘Industrial Revolution’:
The system of human relationships that is sometimes called capitalism had
its origins long before 1760, and attained its full development long after 1830:
there is a danger of overlooking the essential fact of continuity. But the phrase
‘Industrial Revolution’ has been used by a long line of historians and has
become so firmly embedded in common speech that it would be pedantic to
offer a substitute.3
1. Hammond and Hammond 1995, p. 3.
2. Mantoux 1961, p. 25.
3. Ashton 1969a, p. 4.
xviii • Foreword
Writing eighteen years after this, Michael Flinn, also justifies this usage:
Disaggregated, the individual elements in the industrial revolution look gradual and undramatic enough; viewed as a whole, the process amounts to a sufficiently drastic upheaval to justify, in spite of the historians of the interwar
years, the expression ‘Industrial Revolution’.4
Yet Flinn qualifies this by stating that:
The process of growth is complex, and any attempt to explain an industrial
revolution in terms of a single prime mover is bound to be misleading. Inevitably a wide range of factors is involved, and each of these factors has its own
chronology. Thus, the chronology of an industrial revolution is the sum of a
large number of contributory chronologies.5
The present study will challenge such a view by suggesting that while we must
understand that there were multiple processes at work, it may be possible to place
those processes in a larger framework to gain a more coherent ­understanding.
Three years after Flinn wrote this, Peter Mathias’s The First Industrial Nation6
was published. Mathias and many other authors of the succeeding period
would appear to have heeded Flinn’s advice, for his was one of a great many
books that undertook a sector-by-sector analysis of the Industrial Revolution,
one chapter per sector. Peter Mathias begins his 1969 work with his own words
of caution:
The term industrial revolution . . . should not be used just to denote industrial
or mechanical innovation, an advance in a technique of production or the
mechanization of a process in a single industry, or even the conversion of a
single industry into a mass-production basis with large plants driven by more
than human power. If the concept is to mean only this, then the search for its
origin would be lost in the remote past.7
Here, we have a repetition of the theme that the Industrial Revolution involved
multiple, complex and interwoven complexes. But in what way could we employ
the term with precision?
Let us attempt to answer that question by breaking the term into its component parts. There is little ambiguity about the fact that this event was characterised by rapid change within, and rapid growth of, industry. The problem would
seem to lie with the word ‘revolution’. Writing a decade after Mathias, the master of the longue durée himself, Fernand Braudel, concludes his magnum opus
4. Flinn 1966, p. 103.
5. Flinn 1966, p. 93.
6. Mathias 1983.
7. Mathias 1983, p. 1.
Foreword • xix
­ ivilization and Capitalism8 with a chapter on the Industrial Revolution. There,
C
not surprisingly, he, too, offers words of caution, but here specifically about the
term ‘revolution’:
Historians are often criticized for misusing the word revolution which, it is
argued, ought to be used in the original sense, to refer only to violent and
rapid change. But when one is talking about social phenomena, rapid and
slow change are inseparable. For no society exists which is not constantly torn
between the forces working to preserve it and the subversive forces – whether
perceived as such or not – ­working to undermine it. Revolutionary explosions
are but the sudden and short-lived volcanic eruptions of this latent and longterm conflict. In any attempt to analyse the revolutionary process, the most
difficult part is their relationship and the links between them. The industrial
revolution in England at the end of the eighteenth century is no exception. It
consisted both of a rapid sequence of events and of what was clearly a very
long-term process: two different rhythms were beating ­simultaneously.9
This passage is not entirely helpful. On the one hand, Braudel appears to recognise the importance of identifying the complex linkages between different historical events in order for any complex overall patterns (or their absence) to be
revealed. Yet Braudel gives us little clue as to the nature of the long-term process
tied to the Industrial Revolution. Even if we are able to hold it in our heads that
this event simultaneously involved both short-term and long-term processes, we
are still faced once more with the problem of the term as a referent attached to
no specific object or event. So what was or is the industrial revolution?
Eric Hobsbawm tells us that the term ‘revolution’ was borrowed from the
experience of the French Revolution of 1789 and applied to the English experience sometime thereafter, gaining popular usage only by around the 1820s.10 The
Industrial Revolution is, for Hobsbawm, part of a ‘dual revolution’ – industrial
in England, political in France. Certainly, such upheavals as Luddism, Peterloo,
the Swing Riots and other social dislocations generated by the economic transformations associated with the Industrial Revolution compelled contemporaries,
after 1789, to compare these events with the more purely political dislocations
8. Braudel 1981 and 1988.
9. Braudel 1988, pp. 537–8 goes on to cite Phyllis Deane for her reminder that the
discontinuities in the English economy of the late eighteenth century were contained
within a historical continuum in which ‘ “breaks and discontinuities lose their identities
as unique or decisive events” ’ (quoting Deane 1987). Additionally, Braudel warns that
David Landes’s description of the Industrial Revolution ‘as the formation of a critical
mass which eventually produced a revolutionary explosion’ is appropriate, but ‘the mass
can only have been formed by the slow accumulation of all manner of necessary elements. Argue as we may, the long-term will always claim its due’.
10. Hobsbawm 1994, p. 43.
xx • Foreword
associated with the French Revolution. As such, the term picked up the word
‘revolution’ through an analogy. Is this inaccurate? Turning to the dictionary is
not helpful. On the one hand, a revolution is ‘an overthrow or repudiation and
the thorough replacement of an established government or political system by
the people governed’, a definition clearly based on the American and French
revolutions of the late eighteenth century (and others which followed, such as
the Russian Revolution of 1917). On the other hand, revolution is ‘a radical and
pervasive change in society and the social structure, esp. one made suddenly
and often accompanied by violence’, and it also ‘a sudden, complete or marked
change in something: the present revolution in church architecture’,11 a definition
which suggests something more along the lines of the English experience, in
other words a revolution in the mode of social relations of production. It would
appear that these two dictionary definitions simply mirror the two very different
experiences of political and Industrial Revolution, the latter still borrowing the
term from the former.
While the consequences of the industrial revolution were clearly profound,
even if these results emerged somewhat gradually by comparison with the
sweeping ramifications of the great political revolutions, it appears to be generally accepted that problem with applying the term ‘revolution’ to this historical
event or period is that it is widely viewed as something which traces its origins
and antecedents well into the past. Thus, taken as a subject, the Industrial Revolution presents any author with an immediate problem: its origins, causes and
antecedents lay outside and prior to the historical period to which it belongs.
Therefore, any effort to explain why the Industrial Revolution happened must
account for the period in which these dramatic and revolutionary events took
place, but also a long period of events stretching back into the distant past. The
demands which this places on the author are immense.
It is a fair question to ask, however: to what precise ‘historical continuum’
does the Industrial Revolution in Britain belong? It will be a central contention
of this work that the causes of the Industrial Revolution do indeed belong to a
long historical evolution; but contrary to the predominant view of Braudel and
others, who take this historical continuum to be common to Western Europe in
general, this evolution can be traced to transformations in the agrarian social
and class relations of early modern England.
11. There is, of course, the third sense of the term, which means quite the opposite
of something ‘radically new’; this is the sense of a revolution as something revolving, ‘a
procedure or course, as if in a circuit, back to a starting point’, as in an orbit, ‘a cycle of
events in time or a recurring period of time’ (Merriam-Webster 1993). The understanding
of the term ‘revolution’ has always been controversial within Marxist theory; see Kiernan
1983, pp. 425–8.
Introduction
Who would not be bewildered by the hundredth
debate on this topic?
Fernand Braudel1
The significance of the Industrial Revolution as a critical period of transition in human history can hardly
be overstated. Yet there remains little scholarly agreement on even the most basic issues. Should we speak
of only one industrial revolution, or several? Was the
Industrial Revolution the dawning of the capitalist era,
or merely its high noon? What were the basic causal
factors leading to industrialization? Why was England
(Britain after 1707) the first nation to undergo an industrial revolution? These questions have found disparate
answers from a wide variety of approaches.
The dynamic expansion of industry and technology
from the latter half of the eighteenth century is generally understood across theoretical fences as the logical
fulfilment of prior developments in trade and economic growth. Many scholars view industrialization
as something forever prefigured in the prior development of markets and manufacturing. Indeed, industrialization is treated as a more or less direct response to
new opportunities afforded by the dramatic expansion
of commerce and the rise in population across Western Europe during the early modern period. It has
become virtually axiomatic to assume that these opportunities were always already present in pre-capitalist
forms of trade and manufacture. Industrialisation thus
1. Braudel 1988, Vol. 3, p. 556.
2 • Introduction
comes about simply through the application of scientific advancements to precapitalist methods of manufacturing, combined with the growth of trade and
population. Theories which operate based upon such assumptions provide us
with only a partial and distorted view of history. Such economistic approaches to
the Industrial Revolution have generally ignored the role of class and social property relations in shaping and conditioning the process of industrialization. As a
result, they are unable to explain why industrialization occurred when it did, and
not in some previous period of commercial and demographic expansion, such as
in ancient Rome or China. They are also unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of the relationship between capitalism and industrialization.
The definition of ‘capitalism’ remains subject to widespread ambiguity and
sharp divergences of opinion. Yet the prevailing view continues to be that capitalism developed across Europe in general, whilst industrialization – oddly –
began in only one country: England. This has led to the general tendency to treat
industrialization in relative isolation from considerations of capitalism. In turn,
industrialization is often understood as a process driven more by technological
advance than by economic considerations, while capitalism itself plays a subordinate role by promoting ‘economic rationality’, thereby facilitating industrialization. This downplays the historical specificity of capitalism as an economic
system operating in real societies in favour of a view of capitalism as an eternal
and natural system in continuous development bound up with the advance of
science and technology.
The pioneering work of Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood and George
Comninel has offered a new approach to questions arising out of the debate
on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. In considering the divergences
between the French and English paths out of feudalism, this approach argues
that while absolutism was developing in France, the transformation of agrarian social relations in England gave rise to a unique form of social relations, an
‘agrarian capitalism’, understood as a period of transition to industrial capitalism. There is now a significant corpus of work elaborating the theory of English
agrarian capitalism. What nevertheless remains to be explained is how agrarian
capitalism generated a set of conditions that allowed for incipient industrialization in England. Ellen Meiksins Wood has argued that we cannot take for
granted that the development of agrarian capitalism made the industrial revolution necessary. This is in keeping with her insistence that it is necessary to explicate historical developments, rather than take their causality for granted.
Whether agrarian capitalism made industrial capitalism not only possible but
necessary or inevitable is another question . . . the conclusion we can draw
from the history of agrarian capitalism is that a capitalist dynamic rooted in a
new form of social property relations preceded industrialization, both chrono-
Introduction • 3
logically and causally. In fact, a kind of ‘market society’ – in which producers were dependent on the market for access to the means of life, labor, and
self-reproduction, and subject to market imperatives – was not the result of
industrialization but its primary cause.2
To date, there has been no work focused on demonstrating direct causal linkages between agrarian capitalism and the First Industrial Revolution. This is the
lacuna which the present study is meant to address. By advancing an account
of the Industrial Revolution and its origins which pays close attention to the
importance on the role of class relations, class struggle and the development of
the state in shaping economic outcomes, this study seeks to follow through on
radical implications of the challenge to the predominant theories accounting
for the origins of capitalism and industrialization posed by Brenner, Wood and
Comninel. In so doing, the stage is set for future work which could provide a
new, alternative account of the Industrial Revolution and how it began.
Why the Industrial Revolution began in England
The capitalist system in England was brought into being through a transformation in social property relations in which the appropriation of peasant surplus
by feudal lords was gradually superseded by a new system of surplus-­appropriation
involving a nexus of powerful landlords renting land to tenant-farmers, who in
turn hired agrarian wage labourers from a growing pool of cottagers and rural
poor. Where peasants had once enjoyed direct possession of the land, a growing
number of these direct producers were losing their direct access to the means of
subsistence and therefore becoming dependent upon markets for their access to
subsistence goods. Simultaneously, their employers also became dependent on
markets in land, labour and money for access to the necessary components of
the production process, over which they enjoyed unprecedented control as owners of the means of production. This control gave them exclusive rights to the
surplus accruing from that ownership – rooted in a novel and specifically capitalist system of property relations – in the form of profits. In pursuing the extension
of this new system of surplus-appropriation to its logical ends, landlords and
tenant-farmers were facilitating the expansion of the scope of market regulation
of social relations and production decisions. A key aspect of this market
regulation was the increasing pressure of market-based competition, which
increasingly made the transformation of production an imperative. The expansion
of agrarian capitalism was a long and protracted process, however, and landlords
2. Wood 2002a, p. 143.
4 • Introduction
and their tenant-farmers faced widespread resistance against the loss of access to
the means of subsistence, including the wastes and commons. In order for agrarian capitalism to continue to develop, this resistance had to be suppressed.
Struggles to resist the imposition of such a system were led principally by
direct producers. These struggles were not highly organised, as a rule. They were
generally sporadic and episodic. They rarely rose to the level of a compact set
of ideas forming a coherent ideological position. They were borne directly out
of the economic and social pressures – often intense but equally as often protracted – to which direct producers threatened with loss of access to the means
of subsistence were subject. Where resistance was organised, it often involved
violence against property and occasionally involved violence against persons.
Yet such struggles were generally localised. Capitalism was not born in a vacuum
any more than it arose out of a democratic form of society. It was the successor
to an exploitative manorial system under which freedom was the preserve of
the lords and also of freeholders, while the majority of persons remained both
the political and economic subjects of their local lords. From the sixteenth century onward, as agrarian capitalism developed, tenants rose in protest against
enclosures. In the seventeenth century, aspirations for greater freedom and
equality were voiced by the Levellers, who promoted the idea of universal manhood suffrage, and the Diggers, a smaller and more radical group who called
themselves the ‘true Levellers’, as they advocated the abolition of private property and anticipated theories of communism.3 During the eighteenth century,
freedom of the press expanded enormously, but Britain was still a society in
which relations of mastery and servitude remained widespread. It is, therefore,
impossible to know for certain how broad the level of popular support was for
machine-breakers and other protestors. By the third and fourth decades of the
nineteenth century, just as trade unions were growing in strength and number, we witness the expression of mass opposition in the form of the Chartists’
presentation of millions of signatures on petitions to Parliament, requesting
3. Thus a Digger manifesto reads: ‘. . . so long as we or any other doth own the earth
to be the peculiar interest of the lords and landlords, and not common to others as well
as them, we own the curse, and holds the creation under bondage; and so long as we or
any other doth own landlords and tenants, for one to call the land his or another to hire
it of him, or for one to give hire and for another to work for hire; this is to dishonour
the work of creation; as if the righteous creator should have respect to persons, and
therefore made the earth for some and not for all . . . And that this civil property is the
curse is manifest thus: those that buy and sell land, and are landlords, have got it either
by oppression or murder or theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the seventh
and eighth commandments, Thou shalt not steal nor kill’ (Everard et al. 1973, pp. 84–5).
Note, here, both the rudiments of an economic analysis of agrarian capitalism, as well as
the careful reference to both lords (of manorial estates with open fields) and landlords
(leasing out to tenant-farmers on enclosed lands).