Peter Linebaugh

Edward Palmer Thompson

Douglas Hay

Calvin Winslow

John Rule

Illuminates the nature and social significance of crime in eighteenth-century England and reveals attitudes toward public hangings in London. Bibliogs

Crime and Society in Eighteenth-century England

Albion's Fatal Tree

Roger A. E. Wells

Southern England has been studied considerably less than the industrialising north and midlands in the debate on the standard of living in the period up to 1850. Yet it is becoming clear that it was in the south and in the countryside that the greatest poverty and deprivation was to be found. In these essays John Rule and Roger Wells, whose work has made them leading authorities in this area, examine responses to the struggle to live. These responses ranged from, at the most extreme, sheepstealing and incendiarism to joining in food riots in an attempt to impose a 'moral economy'. More sustained protest is to be seen in passive and sometimes active resistance to authority, and in particular in the opposition to the introduction of the New Poor Law of 1834. Finally the appeal yet limitations of Chartism in the south is demonstrated.

Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England, 1740-1850

Originally published in 1981, this book, unlike conventional textbooks concerning the Industrial Revolution, stresses the continuity of the labour experience in the 18th Century. Examining the organisation and structure of mining and manufacture in England, the author identifies the main kinds of workers: artisans, miners, journeymen and home-based outworkers. The book goes on to illustrate how the pattern of recrimination and counter-recrimination was a condition of the employer-worker relationship in traditional industries and argues that the values of these workers were the main determinants of the attitudes, expectations, responses and actions that took place in English manufacturing. Covering such important, but frequently neglected, areas of 18th Century industry as health, apprenticeship and industrial crime, this study concludes by questioning whether a distinctive industrial culture existed during the period and how far a class consciousness can be regarded as having emerged.

The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry

Explores the contrasts between the genteel, aristocratic side of 18th century British society and criminal elements characterized by raucous public hangings marked by insubordination and riot.

Long neglected, the Eighteenth Century is now the focus for much of the most exciting work in history today. This new research has so altered and expanded our understanding of the Georgian economy that some historians now question the very idea of an `Industrial Revolution'. John Rule uses the latest scholarship for a comprehensive and magisterial review -- of population, output, agriculture, manufacture, labour, communications, towns, finance and domestic and overseas markets -- through which he reassesses the `vital century' in which the contours of the modern economy first emerge to view. An analytical survey which offers the first comprehensive economic history of the C.18th.

John Rule

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