This is a study of industrial unrest in the cotton industry at a time when the economy was on the threshold of mid-Victorian prosperity, and when Chartism was still much more than a memory. The town of Preston was the crucial battlefield, and here the masters and men fought out a bitter trial of strength. The strike of 1853-54 closed the Preston cotton industry for seven months, and disrupted production in many other towns in Lancashire. Against the implacable opposition of the masters, the strikers toured the country to organize support, and raised £100,000 in subscriptions from their fellow operatives. The dispute featured prominently in the national and provincial press, and the weavers' delegates, notably George Cowell and Mortimer Grimshaw, became celebrities overnight. After five months, the employers brought in blackleg labour, and when the detested `knobsticks' failed to break the strike they had the operatives' leaders arrested. These moves did not deter the cotton workers, who were forced back to work only when their financial reserves were exhausted. Their campaign ended defiantly, as it had begun, with cries of `Ten Per Cent still, and no surrender'. This book is their story.

Examining the experiences of women workers in the cotton and small metals industries and the discourses surrounding their labour, this book demonstrates how ideas of womanhood often clashed with the harsh realities of working-class life.

Britain and America were the first two countries with mechanised cotton manufacturing industries, the first major factory systems of production and the first major employers of women outside of the domestic environment. The combination of being new wage earners in the first trans-national industry and their public prominence as workers makes these women's role as employees significant; they set the early standard for women as waged labour, to which later female workers were compared. This book analyses how women workers influenced patterns of industrial organization and offers a new perspective on relationships between gender and work and on industrial development. The primary theme of the study is the attempt to control the work process through co-operation, coercion and conflict between women workers, their male counterparts and manufacturers. Drawing upon examples of women's subversive activities and attitudes toward the discourses of labour, the book emphasizes the variety of women's work experiences. By using this diversity of experience in a comparative way, the book reaches conclusions that challenge a variety of historical concepts, including separate spheres of influence for men and women and related economic theories, for example that women were passive players in the workplace, evolutionary theories with respect to industrial development, and business culture within and between the two industries. Overall it provides the fresh approach that highlights and explains women's agency as operatives and paid workers during industrialization.

This monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

First published in 1988. This collection of essays examines aspects of labour and industrial relations history in the textiles sector of Northern England during the mature phase of industrialisation before World War One and the period of retrenchment during the interwar economic recession. There are chapters on wool, worsted, silk, cotton spinning and weaving, and cotton finishing. The volume includes contributions by historians interested in employers’ organisations and management strategies, labour, trade union and women’s history. As such it provides a broader framework in which relationships between capital and labour are analysed. The book also incorporates some of the recent research on particularly neglected areas of social history, most notably on women workers and on the industrial relations policies of employers in textiles.