E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class

1. E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class http://johncmullen.blogspot.com

2. What period is shown in the picture? Look at the choices made in the title: Class or classes ? The making or the rise ? English or British ?

3. - The Agricultural revolution • The transport revolution • The communications revolution • The revolution in the state and the role of government • The continual transformation of social classes The industrial revolution

4. Banks and canals 1760- 1830

5. Hogarth 1747 : Industry and Idleness

6. Luddism 1811- 12

8. 1799: Combination Acts 1911-1816 Luddism 1815 Waterloo 1819 Peterloo 1824 Repeal of Combination Acts 1829 National Association for the protection of Labour 70 000 members 1832 Great Reform Act 1834 Grand National Consolidated Trade Union 1835 Association of All Classes and All Nations

11. E P Thompson 1924-93

12. 1955 1993

13. There is the orthodoxy of the empirical economic historians, in which working people are seen as a labour force, as migrants, or as the data for statistical series. There is· the "Pilgrim's Progress" orthodoxy, in which the period is ransacked for forerunners-pioneers of the Welfare State, progenitors of a Socialist Commonwealth, or (more recently) early exemplars of rational industrial relations. Each of these orthodoxies has a certain validity. All have added to our knowledge. My quarrel with the first and second is that they tend to obscure the agency of working people, the degree to which they contributed, by conscious efforts, to the making of history.

14. My quarrel with the third is that it reads history in the light of subsequent preoccupations, and not as in fact it occurred. Only the successful (in the sense of those whose aspirations anticipated subsequent evolution) are remembered. The blind alleys, the lost causes, and the losers themselves are forgotten. I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. (From the preface)

15. Southcott was a visionary and prophetess,who believed herself to be the fulfilment of the prophecy in the Book of Revelation concerning a woman clothed with the sun.  In 1814 she announced that she was to give birth (at the age of 64) to Shiloh – or the Messiah.  In fact, she died that year without, apparently, giving birth at all.  Although some of her prophecies were published in her lifetime, others were sealed in a box, with instructions that it should be opened in the presence of 24 Bishops of the Church of England at a time of national crisis.  Joanna Southcott

16. The movement did not end with Southcott's death in 1814. Her followers, referred to as Southcottians, are said to have numbered over 100,000, but declined greatly by the end of the nineteenth century. In 1844 a lady named Ann Essam left large sums of money for "printing, publishing and propagation of the sacred writings of Joanna Southcott".The will was disputed in 1861 by her niece on grounds including that the writings were blasphemous.

17. Subject: The response of English workers 1780-1830 How did English workers come to think of themselves as a class? The importance of political movements in this process Impact: One of the most influential history books of the 20th century Encouraged study of working people Its approach was used later to study slaves and other subaltern groups. Many historians tried to write « The making of the US working class »

18. Context Thompson had left the British Communist party in 1956, but remained very much a left political activist. Thompson was something of an outsider to academic history and did not really follow its rules. British Marxist historians were at a high point, Thompson’s contribution has contemporary echoes: class consciousness was not for him something only of the past,

19. The strengths of the book (according to Geoff Eley) 1. A grand oppositional narrative of over 800 pages. Eloquent attack on official British history 2. An anti-reductionist manifesto. He attacked over-deterministic forms of Marxism. For Thompson class was dynamic: everything could not be reduced to economics. Class was a relation and a process. Agency had to be constructed. 3. Destroyed the official consensus of « the triumphant gradual conquest of parliamentary supremacy». Against the polite and complacent view, Thompson wanted to insist that democratic advance came only through sharp social struggle and uprising, government repression etc. He wanted to recount in detail the resistanc e of the little people.

20. More strengths of the book 4. He reclaimed for the Left some important historical movements : for example, the Romantic critique of capitalism 5. Thompson put culture at the centre of his story, at a time when cultural history was not yet dominant. In his book we read not only about the workplace, but also about popular customs, housing, nutrition, crime, magic, childhood, leisure, drink, song, death and sexuality. (At this time Cultural Studies is being born in Birmingham). Thompson should not be called only social history. 6. He made the understanding of politics much wider (in the same way as Hobsbawm’s and Rudé’s books of this time),

21. E J Hobsbawm 1917-2012 1959: Primitive Rebels 1969: Captain Swing 1983: The Invention of Tradition 1991: Nations and Nationalism since 1780 1959

22. George Rudé 1910-1993 1964: The Crowd in History. A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. 1978 Protest and Punishment: Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788-1868,

23. No book is exempt fromcriticism • Limits of the book mostcommonlymentioned • Does the concentration on artisans leave out important information about unskilledlabourers or industrialfactoryworkers? Were artisans sotypical, withtheirapprenticeships, secret craft unions and so on. • He stops hisaccount in the 1830s, at the verybeginning of the appearance of largerfactories and the industrialworking class. • Is the place of women in thishistorysufficient? Did the verymuch male-dominatedcircles of historians of the 1960s militatetowards an underestimation of the role of women in history ? Genderstudiesdid not exist in the 1960s

24. An Everyday life of the English Working Class: Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century Why « everyday » ? Why « self » ? …an anti-heroic version ?

25. 4. A « deafening silence » concerning not only the multinational nature of the British state, but also the imperial role of Britain in the late eighteenth century world.

26. 1787 the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade 1807 Abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire 1823 The anti-slavery society 1833 Abolition of slavery in the British Empire – compensation paid to slave owners.

28. 1816 Barbados : Bussa’s rebellion 1831 Jamaica : Sam Sharpe’s revolt Statue of Bussa