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Resistance from the Margins: The Yorkshire Worsted Spinners, Policing, and the Transformation of Work in the Early Industrial Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2006

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Abstract

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This article takes as its subject the handspinners of Yorkshire's eighteenth-century worsted industry. When not ignored altogether, historians have presented handspinners as invariably weak and passive. While manufacturers exploited the industry's women workers, spinners were neither submissive nor compliant. Their history, in part, was one of resistance. Spinners' everyday resistance took its most important form in the unauthorized practice of supplementing money wages with yarn and wool from the production process. The scale and extent of such pilfering led manufacturers to one of the more remarkable initiatives in eighteenth-century industrial relations: the establishment of an industrial police force to detect and prosecute embezzlement. Policing would play a major role in the industry. Ultimately, however, its limitations helped to prompt manufacturers to pursue organizational and technological innovations to bring greater order to the spinning sector. Thus spinners' prosaic resistance had the unforeseen consequence of contributing to the demise of their occupation.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis

Footnotes

I would like to express my gratitude to Subho Basu for his helpful readings of an earlier draft of this article. I owe special thanks to Anthony Crubaugh for his perceptive criticism and comradely support. In addition to clarifying and refining the argument, Katherine McCarthy helped in countless ways. My greatest debt is to Richard Price