ABOUT THIS BOOK
With England’s Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi’s landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.
Building his argument on three case studies—the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers—Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England’s Industrial Revolution.
REVIEWS
“This is a major and extremely valuable work of scholarship. Through rigorous analysis, Steinberg develops a new argument of central importance to sociologists and social scientists. Steinberg argues that a fully modern employment structure did not emerge in England until the beginning of the twentieth century—a finding that has important implications for understanding the formation of the English working class and how this differs from the European Continent.”
— Fred Block, University of California, Davis
“Steinberg’s meticulous study rethinks the relationship between the labor process and the state, between market and society, and between base and superstructure during Britain’s industrial revolution. The law was thoroughly embedded in relations of production, and in ways that varied with local configurations of technology, labor requirements, and political power. That finding leads Steinberg to uncover other surprises: ‘free labor’ came to England later than usually thought, and it came with the backing of organized labor seeking protection, not by, but from the state. The book is compelling reading for students of labor, political economy, and comparative-historical sociology.”
— Jeffrey M. Haydu, University of California, San Diego
“Steinberg returns us to the question of labor control in nineteenth-century England, and in meticulous detail shows how the law becomes an instrument of capitalist exploitation. England’s Great Transformation’s focus on the legal basis of work organization is not only of historical significance—it is as pertinent to today’s on-demand economy as it is to Chinese state capitalism. A thrilling book that plunges into the important debates about the nature of workplace politics.”
— Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley
“An exemplar of comparative/historical sociological work, both theoretically and methodologically, seamlessly blending micro- and macrolevels of analysis empirically and analytically. . .a powerful narrative that should have a big influence on sociological studies of labor and capitalism, both past and present.”
— American Journal of Sociology
“[England's Great Transformation] is in many ways a model of theoretically informed historical analysis: it is intelligently conceived, clearly written, and deeply researched. In that sense, it is a valuable contribution to our understanding of labor relations in nineteenth-century Britain.”
— Victorian Studies
“A fascinating and thought-provoking work of historical sociology.”
— Labour / Le Travail
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Part I
1. Introduction - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0001
[historical materialism, historical institutionalism, capitalist development, labor process, English industrial revolution]
This chapter introduces the main questions and analyses of the study. It introduces the argument for combining historical institutionalism and historical materialism to analyze historical capitalist development and labor control regimes. The chapter provides a brief overview of issues concerning the analysis of the capitalist labor process. It advocates both bottom-up and top-down studies of law and capitalist control of the workplace. The chapter offers a series of questions that motivate both the local and case studies that follow. (pages 3 - 10)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. The Labor Process and Beyond - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0002
[labor process, law, Karl Marx, Richard Price, gender]
This chapter provides and overview and critique of several perspectives on the labor process and workplace control. It starts with a critical engagement with Marx. The chapter then goes beyond Marx by engaging the work of Michael Burawoy, Richard Price and feminist historians. Noting these contributions it makes an argument that the role of law and juridical institutions remains undertheorized and studied. (pages 11 - 25)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Law, Institutions, and Labor Control: Theory and History - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0003
[historical materialism, historical institutionalism, law, master and servant law, English industrial revolution]
This chapter offers a synthesis of historical institutionalism and historical materialism in a top-down approach to analyze the place of the law in labor control regimes. The aim is to develop a macro framework for the analysis of capitalist institutions that fits with the bottom-up perspective of labor process theory. It makes a case for the materiality of the law, and the ways in which institutional inquiry demonstrates how the embedding of labor control in juridical power. The chapter considers how local contexts were consequential in this process. It concludes by providing an historical development of English master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the use of the law in Victorian England. (pages 26 - 46)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part II: Introduction to the Case Studies
4. Hanley and the Pottery Industry - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0004
[Hanley, pottery industry, master and servant law, local magistrates’ courts, labor control]
This chapter is an in-depth study of how employers in Hanley in the Potteries district in Staffordshire became routinely reliant on master and servant laws for labor control. It focuses particularly on the pottery industry. The chapter charts the course of labor relations between manufacturers and workers in the industry from the mid-1830s, noting how increased reliance on master and servant law was partly the result of the suppression of major strikes in this period. It analyzes the organization of the labor process in the manufactories (or ‘potbanks’) and discusses how employers lack direct control over the workplace because of the technical organization of production. It then turns to examine the distribution of power in borough government and the ways in which pottery manufacturers in particular were key actors. They dominated the local borough courts and were influential in having a stipendiary magistrate appointed for the region who was sympathetic to their concerns. It provides data on how pottery manufacturers and other employers came to rely on the law for labor market and workplace control for 1864-75. (pages 51 - 78)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Hull and the Fishing Trade - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0005
[Kingston-upon-Hull, fishing industry, master and servant law, local magistrates’ courts, labor control]
This chapter presents a detailed study of how owners of the burgeoning fish trawling industry in Hull relied on apprentices and prosecutions using master and servant law to discipline them. Fish trawling was an industry with small profit margins and conducted using trawlers worked by crews of five. It was one of the most dangerous jobs in Victorian England, and the last one or two positions largely involved menial labor. Trawler owners increasingly relied on apprentices from Poor Law unions bound for seven years to fill these positions. Often unpaid and severely treated, many apprentices tried to escape. Trawler owners relied on the local stipendiary magistrate’s court to apprehend and convict these apprentices, and at any one point in time 20-30% were imprisoned waiting for their next voyage. (pages 79 - 103)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Redditch, Commercial Agriculture, Needle Manufacturing, and Small-Town Justice - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0006
[Redditch, needlemaking, farming, local magistrates’ courts, labor control]
This chapter presents a detailed study of how employers in Redditch used the local magistrates’ court in both needlemaking and farming for labor control. Redditch was an important market town south of Birmingham and its farmed supplied this city. It was also one of the world’s largest centers for needle manufacture. Needlemaking had a very defined division of labor, but was largely unmechanized. In 1860 the major employers and landowners of the town successfully petitioned the government for a borough court of their own. Court magistrates were local elites sympathetic to employers of all kinds. It rapidly became a court with one of the highest percentages of master and servant prosecutions in the country. The chapter analyzes how major employers added to their authority in the workplace by relying on the court for work discipline. (pages 104 - 136)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Part III
7. Retelling The Great Transformation - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0007
[Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, double movement, embeddedness, market society]
The final look at labor law and control involves a top-down analysis, examining the ways in which embeddedness at the national level became the stage for significant transformation. One of the signal works that raised the question of how economic activity is embedded in societal institutions and has been the touchstone of many subsequent debates is Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Social scientists of disparate intellectual persuasions credit The Great Transformation and Polanyi’s subsequent work with spurring the examination of the economy as an ‘instituted’ process. The ambiguities in Polanyi’s writings have spawned a series of debates over the intellectual lineage of his vision and its affinities with other macro perspectives on capitalist development, as well as over core concepts such as embeddedness. This chapter engages these issues in so far as they facilitate a rethinking of the narrative of the English Industrial Revolution and its consequences depicted in the The Great Transformation. (pages 139 - 159)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
8. Conclusion - Marc W. Steinberg
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226330013.003.0008
[class formation, institutional analysis, historical materialism, historical institutionalism, economic structures, labor control, legal institutions, exploitation, English working class]
The conclusion returns first to the specific questions that motivated this study, then briefly addresses the question of class formation that was not the object of this work, and finally turns to some of larger theoretical issues addressed on law, class and institutional analysis. It is possible that the fusion of historical materialism and historical institutionalism offers a new angle for understanding the institutional dynamics of ‘class making’. In his reflections on the comparative-historical analysis of class formation Aristide Zolberg (1986) notes that that there is a recursive relationship between political organization and economic structures, but that it is difficult to disentangle state versus regime effects. In the analysis of the juridical in labor control regimes, this book demonstrates how legal institutions shaped the course of exploitation in different industries and regimes. In a sense this was part of the larger process of the making of the English working class. (pages 160 - 174)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Notes
Bibliography
Index
