No description available.

Few historians have written in any detailed form about the widespread development of employers' organisations which took place from the later decades of the nineteenth century, and formed the basis of those which exist in all British industries today. The work which has been done on them has largely focused upon industrial or governmental relations. None of the studies has addressed the phenomenon of employer organisation itself, or explored the more general question of what precisely it is that employers' organisations do. Nevertheless, some far-reaching conclusions have been made about them. This thesis seeks to clarify the purpose and circumstances of employer organisation growth, function, and mode of operation. It assesses how employers responded in an organised manner to quite radical changes in the world market and the nature of British society c.1914-1945. It provides a base of information which covers the range of activities which employers' organisations (broadly conceived) concerned themselves, using the archives of wool textile organisations in Bradford. Lastly, it assesses the significance of employers' organisation in view of some of the claims which have been made about them, and offers some observations on its political and sociological implications. The phenomenon of employer organisation was not simply a 'response' to the greater organisation of labour or government encouragement. Organisation (evident in other industrialised countries also) articulated a transformation in business strategies, away from traditional laissez-faire notions of individual enterprise towards an increasingly centralised, collective strategy. This functioned on many different levels - local, national, international, political, intellectual etc, and by the nineteen thirties marked a maturity in collective action which contrasts sharply with the individualism of just forty years earlier. The broad range of employers' policies extended far beyond the workplace, and expressed a distinct politics. This had implications for the nature and conduct of trade, the form and quality of life, and understanding of the way in which British society was governed.

The long-standing controversy over working class standards of living during the early nineteenth century is demonstraably one of the most intractable in our historiography. To a large extent the controversy exists because much of the statistical evidence used to measure changes in the standard of living is of dubious value and is open to wide interpretation. In view of the paucity of a reliable body of statistical evidence one of the main tasks of this thesis has been to meet this deficiency by providing a substantial quantity of new statistical evidence on agricultural labourers' wages and the cost of living in seven English counties; Kent, Essex, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Dorset, and Hampshire. A further important aim has been to utilise this evidence to test the generalisation put forward by J. H. Clapham that the English agricultural labourer experienced an improvement in his material standard of living between 1190 and 1840. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part I is primarily concerned with providing the necessary background material to the subject. The first chapter begins by surveying the history of the standard of living controversy and the various approaches economic historians have adopted in seeking a solution to the problem. In reviewing the different methods used to measure the standard of living particular attention is focussed upon the usefulness of existing statistical series and the kinds of hazards which are involved in using macro-economic techniques to measure changes in living standards. Chapters 2 and 3 examine in some detail the main strengths and weaknesses of the empirical evidence used in this study and the kinds of practical and methodological problems that were encountered in processing the raw data into final index numbers. The approach adopted in Part II, which constitutes the major part of the original research, is primarily one of a series of exercises in quantitative data processing. Two chapters are devoted to each of the seven counties and these are basically concerned with the construction and analysis of two statistical variables - the wage earnings of male agricultural labourers and the cost of living - in order to determine the long-run trend of real wages. In view of the local nature of the evidence, and in the interests of avoiding unnecessary confusion and maintaining a consistent approach to the standard of living question, all the counties have been investigated independently of one another. In Part III, the final section, the conclusions obtained on the standard of living in each county are assembled together and considered on a comparative basis. It has also been the policy of this thesis to relate the variations in the purchasing power of wages to the economic and social background of each county. In particular, attention has been paid to the role of short-run exigencies, such as a run of abundant or deficient harvests, the outbreak of the Napoleonic war or the post-war economic depression, in order to assess their influence upon the economic welfare of the rural labouring classes. Although the main emphasis has been placed upon statistical material, this material has been generously supplemented by a large quantity of qualitative literary evidence. The main importance of this evidence, which covers such topics as unemployment and the practical operation of the Poor Law, dietary standards and household expenditure patterns, and the incidence of social disorder, is that it gives a vital insight into some of the more obscure aspects of early nineteenth century rural life as well as serving to confirm the conclusions indicated by the statistical evidence. Finally, it is hoped that this thesis will provide a model for future research into the standard of living controversy. The methodological approach used in this study could, if the evidence were found, be readily applied to agricultural labourers in other counties as well as to other industries and occupational groups. Until this labour intensive exercise is carried out on a large enough scale the standard of living controversy is doomed to remain an unresolved issue.

This thesis attempts to give substance to research in an oft-neglected area of Britain's economy by studying, in depth, one of the numerous rural industries which existed in England as it passed through its industrial revolution, and beyond. The pictorial map drawn by Augustus Petermann to accompany the 1851 Census of Population gives a vivid indication of the preponderance of rural industries in the middle of the century. The pillow lace industry was one of the oldest of these, having been born late in the sixteenth century, and in the event it was one of the last to survive, for it was not until the twentieth century that it finally succumbed to the rigours of competition with machinery, and disappeared. The machine industry had been in existence since the end of the eighteenth century and from the mid 1840s had been producing an enormous output of almost perfect imitations of hand-made lace, yet at a much lower price. How had the pillow lace industry survived for so long? The problem is compounded by the added competition of hand-made laces produced overseas, most notably in France and Belgium, where the industry was not only organized on a larger scale than its English counterpart, but was probably more skilled and more flexible in its response to machine competition. Imports of hand-made lace into England reached a peak during the 1850s and 60s, precisely at the time that the machine industry was reaching new heights of technical and organizational perfection. An examination of the pillow lace industry's response to these pressures, the najor theme of this thesis, falls readily into a number of sections. By the nineteenth century the industry had existed for approximately 200 years and had a well-established structure and organization on which its responses, by and large, were based. The thesis therefore begins by placing the industry in its historical context, tracing the industry's history from its origins to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before a consideration of the industry's response to its competitors can be undertaken the nature of these competitors must first be defined. What were the strengths and weaknesses of rival hand and machine producers? How were they organized and on what scale? What kinds of fabric did they produce and how and where were they marketed? And how did the growth of the machine industry affect the production of hand-made lace overseas and this, in its turn, the hand producers of England? The pillow lace industry's structure and organization were the bases on which its competitive ability ultimately rested. The quality, variety and price of the industry's output, its ability to reach a variety of market outlets, not only at home but also overseas, were among the major determinants of its competitive capacity. Who ran the pillow lace industry and who were its workers? What, if any, were the organizational problems in bringing the various components of the industry's structure together in a putting out system? How was the lace made and how was it channelled to its market outlets, and how prompt was delivery? The answers to these questions, when viewed in the industry's competitive, and historical context, go a good way towards explaining the industry's survival into the nineteenth century. Part IV draws the various elements together and attempts such an explanation. To discover the human aspects of how workers and employers felt and behaved is essential if the true perspective of industrial history is to be obtained. This is the thesis' final task. Workers and employers in this kind of industry are notorious for not leaving private records. For this reason, as elsewhere, the thesis rests on parliamentary records and contemporary histories and to a lesser degree on accounts in contemporary newspapers and periodicals. Yet these provide a wealth of material, enabling the writer to draw up a picture of the workers' health and working conditions and of how the industry's workers said they felt about their existence and the effects which the industry's problems was having upon it. The thesis concludes with an examination of the industry's final thirty years, during which its organization fell substantially into the hands of philanthropic bodies. Partly as a result, the industry did not disappear until the 1930s, over 120 years after the advent of John Heathcoat's lace machine.

By interpreting marriage as a life-cycle phenomenon with procreative sex as its ultimate aim, historians have given primacy - whether wittingly or unwittingly - to the act of intercourse between man and a woman, and relegated a range of other sexual activities to a position of lower value. In contrast, this chapter argues not only for the presence of other forms of sexual gratification within Tudor and Stuart society, but suggests in addition that rather than view them as the precursor to full penetrative intercourse, they should be understood as satisfactory and fulfilling expressions of sexuality in their own right. The final chapter examines the role of the marriage discourse in directing the employment opportunities, social status and cultural identity of single people in seventeenth century England. Here the effects of the discourse, which sought to promote the inevitability of entry into marriage as a general truth, are revealed in a gendered approach to training and employment, differential levels of access of men and women to land and property, and a concept of personal and social identity that for women was linked almost exclusively to marriage as a lifecycle phenomenon. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extensive social and cultural ramifications of a rise in the proportion of lifelong celibate females, a situation that, regardless of its causes, required single women to reassess the image of themselves as wives and mothers and construct an alternative personal and social identity outside the standard marital paradigm.

No description available.

No description available.

The principal aim of this thesis is to examine the ideas that were held on the subject of landed property in England between approximately 1790 and 1850. In the opening chapters the debate about landed property in the 1790s is considered. Under the impact of the French Revolution and because of the disturbed economic situation, differing attitudes towards land became sharply defined. The ideas of the main protagonists, William Godwin, Arthur Young and T.R. Malthus are examined as well as those of other writers. Eventually, Malthus's opinions proved strongest and became the basis of a socio-economic orthodoxy that was strengthened and elaborated by Ricardian economics and Benthamite philosophy. According to the majority of political economists and social philosophers, it was desirable that land should be held privately, although this meant that the great majority were excluded from ownership. It was also regarded as necessary for agriculture, if it was to operate efficiently, to be organised on the tripartite system of large landlord, tenant farmer and landless labourer. However, this conventional view had its critics, and the thesis discusses some of the theories that were advanced against it. While conservatives opposed even moderate reforms, radicals were responsible for a number of proposals. Some, like the Owenites, believed in communities; others favoured land nationalisation, while there was support also for the almost-vanished yeoman, as idealised by Cobbett. These groups, together with the views of orthodox economists, represent part of the background against which J.S. Mill's ideas emerged. The second part of the thesis attempts to trace the way in which Mill's attitudes towards landed property developed up to the publication of his Principles of Political Economy in 1848. By that date he had abandoned much of the conventional thought on the subject, and the reasons for this are suggested.

No description available.

The folk music movement was an important influence on English cultural life in the years immediately before the First World War. From remote origins in the 1830s and 1840s and small beginnings in the 1880s and 1890s, it suddenly caught the public mood between 1904 and 1914 and for a brief moment it seemed as though a genuinely indigenous and unifying cultural force might have been found. This proved to be a false hope, but nevertheless the movement has survived and has a continuing place in English cultural historiography. This movement, however, has never been provided with a general history, still less one which has tried to analyse what actually happened. Instead, over the past thirty years since 1970 an interpretation has developed based on Marxist political thought and cultural theory. Coming as it does from a political position based on class conflict and hostility towards nationalism, this interpretation is profoundly antipathetic to the phenomenon it has sought to analyse and has been more concerned to condemn than to understand. It has seen folk song and dance in terms of material expropriated from the working class, misrepresented and transformed in order to reflect 'bourgeois' ideology, and then fed back to the working class via their children in the state education system. Its weakness is that it has never been able to prove these propositions. This thesis attempts to undermine the Marxist interpretation and to provide a firm foundation of research for future analysis. Chapter One is a historiographical survey of the literature showing how it has developed and exposing its lack of a research base. Chapter Two is a narrative intended to provide a connecting thread for the analytical material which follows. Chapter Three examines the folk music organisations. Chapters Four and Five challenge the central assumptions of the Marxist interpretation by showing that the material was not exclusively 'working class', that folk music collection and publication was careful and scrupulous, and that the movement never succeeded in penetrating the state education system to any significant extent before 1914.