Co-operatives provide a different approach to organizing business through their ideals of member ownership and democratic practice. Every co-operative member has an equal vote regardless of his or her own personal capital investment. The contemporary significance of co-operatives was highlighted by the United Nations declaration of 2012 as the International Year of Co-operatives. This book provides an international perspective on the development of co-operatives since the mid-nineteenth century, exploring the economic, political, and social factors that explain their varying fortunes and transformation into different forms. By looking at what co-operatives are; how they have changed; the developments as well as the persecutions of the co-operative movement; and how it is an important force in promoting development and self-sufficiency in non-industrialized areas, this book provides valuable insight not only to academics, but also to practitioners and policy makers.

Historical study of owenite socialism and the cooperative movement in the UK from 1825 to 1845, based on a study of the experiments of three leading communities - includes bibliography pp. 241 to 260, illustrations and references.

A new edition of Barbara Taylor's classic book, with a new introduction. In the early nineteenth century, radicals all over Europe and America began to conceive of a 'New Moral World', and struggled to create their own utopias, with collective family life, communal property, free love and birth control. In Britain, the visionary ideals of the Utopian Socialist, Robert Owen, attracted thousands of followers, who for more than a quarter of a century attempted to put theory into practice in their own local societies, at rousing public meetings, in trade unions and in their new Communities of Mutual Association. Barbara Taylor's brilliant study of this visionary challenge recovers the crucial connections between socialist aims and feminist aspirations. In doing so, it opens the way to an important re-interpretation of the socialist tradition as a whole, and contributes to the reforging of some of those early links between feminism and socialism.

First published in 1979, this book was the first, full-length study of working-class movements in London between 1800 and the beginnings of Chartism in the later 1830s. The leaders and rank and file in these movements were almost invariably artisans, and this book examines the position of the skilled artisan in politics. Starting from the social ideals, outlook and the experience of the London artisan, Dr Prothero describes trade union, political, co-operative, educational and intellectual movements in the first forty years of the century. Setting a scene of alternating growth and contraction in trade, successive hostile governments and the increasing articulation of working-class consciousness the author shows that artisans could be no less militant, radical or anti-capitalist than other groups of working class men.