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"Once the heartland of British labour history, trade unionism has been marginalised in much recent scholarship. In a critical survey from the earliest times to the nineteenth century, this book argues for its reinstatement. Trade unionism is shown to be both intrinsically important and to provide a window onto the broader historical landscape; the evolution of trade union principles and practices is traced from the seventeenth century to mid-Victorian times. Underpinning this survey is an explanation of labour organisation that reaches back to the fourteenth century. Throughout, the emphasis is on trade union mentality and ideology, rather than on institutional history. There is a critical focus on the politics of gender, on the demarcation of skill and on the role of the state in labour issues. New insight is provided on the long-debated question of trade unions'; contribution to social and political unrest from the era of the French Revolution through to Chartism."--Provided by publisher.

Chartism, the mass movement for democratic rights, dominated British domestic politics in the late 1830s and 1840s. It mobilised over three million supporters at its height. Few modern European social movements, certainly in Britain, have captured the attention of posterity to quite the extent it has done. Encompassing moments of great drama, it is one of the very rare points in British history where it is legitimate to speculate how close the country came to revolution. It is also pivotal to debates around continuity and change in Victorian Britain, gender, language and identity. Chartism: A

Chartism was in effect Britain's civil rights movement and petitioning was at its heart: it defined who the Chartists were as well as the "other" against which they were implacably opposed. Its history has been effectively narrated around its three national petitions (1839, 1842, and 1848), and its decline almost habitually and directly linked to circumstances surrounding the last of these. More than 3.3 million people signed the 1842 National Petition. Chartism's history after 1842 is partly one of how the State learned to manage the movement in general and petitioning in particular. The question posed by the title is deliberately ambiguous: What did the Chartists petition for and, equally, why did they bother? The first issue will be answered by a close reading of the three texts (surprisingly not undertaken by previous historians of the movement). The second will answered through an analysis of the wider uses of petitioning. The third issue addressed by this article is how petitioning constructed Chartism. In every contributing locality, canvassing was a major intervention in political life. The subscriptional community created by its petitions were "the people," a term that clearly included not only men but also women and children. This was a different and wider meaning of the term "the people" from that used by Chartism's opponents and it was a profound departure. Petitioning shaped, articulated, and mobilized the politics of a nascent working class, "banded together in one solemn and holy league" but excluded from economic and political power.

Provincial perspectives are largely lacking in accounts of the emergence of the Second Reform Act, but a vigorous and innovative popular movement for reform emerged in the mid 1860s. A burgeoning newspaper press both conveyed and itself did much to create a sense of accelerating movement unparalleled since Chartism. Former Chartists, notably Ernest Jones, were significant organisers, but the infusion of this movement into communities hitherto untouched by organised popular politics was widespread. Formal organisations can be identified in at least 282 separate localities outside London. Conservative working men's associations, by contrast, were slow to emerge and ephemeral. A rich material and performative culture bore witness to workers' sense of property in their skill, their education and importance as wealth creators, but also to the popular reform movement's profoundly gendered character. Though committed in principle to manhood suffrage, by the spring of 1867 working‐class reformers were largely reconciled to incremental change and middle‐class opinion about reform similarly softened. This is demonstrated in the history of the Reform League's 'Yorkshire Department' and the success of its president, Robert Meek Carter, at the 1868 parliamentary election in Leeds.

L'importance des histoires de vie des militants pour la compréhension de l'histoire ouvrière n'a commencé à être reconnue qu'à partir des années 1970, en grande partie grâce au Dictionary of Labour Biography , dirigé par John Saville. Le chartisme, en particulier, a fait l'objet de plusieurs travaux biographiques, parmi lesquels ceux de M. Chase, qui ont mis en évidence, par exemple, le rôle important des femmes et des familles dans ce mouvement.