Suchergebnisse

Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution - largely revising the thesis of Karl Polanyi's landmark 'The Great Transformation'. The conventional wisdom has been that in the 19th century, England quickly moved toward a modern labour 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 labour contracts, centred on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.

Important recent research highlights the role of forced labor in the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the global South. In this article I make the case that coerced labor was central to the first industrial revolution, the classical case of Great Britain. I demonstrate that in an area known as the Black Country for its coal, steel, and related industries, master and servant laws allowed criminal prosecution of workers deemed problematic, to insure labor control in the workplace. Employers relied on these laws when they were unable to use machinery to embed control in the labor process, and when they had recourse to reliable local courts (or petty sessions), in which many were magistrates, so they could rely on convictions under summary jurisdictions for fines, damage payment, and incarceration. I conclude by suggesting that this particular historical case can reorient our perspective on labor coercion and the law across the long arc of modern capitalism.

AbstractThis paper is a critique and partial reconfiguration of the Foucauldian genealogy of sovereignty. Sovereignty is largely conceptualized as the antithesis of governmentality and disciplinary power in the modern age; presented as a negative case as a juridical and centralized power of interdiction and containment in the classical age. I argue that we can genealogically examine how sovereignty in the modern age underwent transformation and dispersion. My empirical focus is on how master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the development and transformations of local courts, led to the increasingly dispersal of sovereign power as it as practiced in specific industrial sites and regions.

Within the last decade there has been considerable renewed attention on the importance of British master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a means of labor discipline and control. This article argues for further analyses of how the law was used within local contexts and specific industries and calls for increased focus on the role of the local state in labor relations. It argues that unfree labor played an important role in the development of some industries, and challenges claims of the demise of apprenticeship in later nineteenth-century England. Through an analysis of the Hull fish trawling industry in 1864–1875 it demonstrates that the exploitation of apprentice labor, and the control of fishing apprentices through punitive master–servant prosecutions were vital to the expansion of the trade.

Arguing that the frame analysis typical to the political process & resource mobilization perspectives on social movements has limited understanding of the cultures of such movements, an alternative dialogic perspective is proposed. It is suggested that discourse among & by activists in social movement organizations is, in part, shaped by the cultural practices available for them to make meaning. Focusing on discourse as a relational process, it is shown how ongoing dialogic processes both shape & are shaped by social movement culture. A case study of 19th-century silk weavers in the Spitalfields district of London, England, demonstrates the dialogic repertoires used to make claims, articulate sense of justice, & express identities. It is demonstrated how the weavers opposed domination by their employers by borrowing from the employers' own discourses of power to create their own oppositional discourses. Ways that these discursive repertoires both channeled & limited weavers' options in their struggles against the "dominant genres of political economy, Christian piety, & nationalism" are explored. K. Hyatt Stewart