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Economy, Social Relations, and Social Policy in Britain, 1750-1914

The books under review in this essay possess no obvious thematic unity. They include a conventional narrative account of the Chartist "insurrection" of 1839, a sophisticated econometric analysis of economic growth during the industrial revolution, an equally sophisticated examination of the structure of rural society in the late eighteenth century, case studies in the labor aristocracy, a history of rural trade unionism, local studies of the operation of the urban poor law, and a psychocultural study of the shared concerns of workers and feminists over the issue of vivisection. But although these books possess no unity of theme, they do share some common characteristics. All are revisionist to one degree or another and suggest the difficulties of capturing historical reality through broad models of social structural change. The essays on the labor aristocracy, for example, confirm that it was not a unitary, unfragmented social formation but rather was changeable and uncertain in its composition. Similarly, Crafts's demonstration that industrialization was a protracted process rather than a cleavage undermines the assumptions on which much of the historiography of the nineteenth century is based. "Structures," though-whether they be social (Snell), economic (Crafts), industrial (Harrison and Zeitlin), organizational (Howkins and Rose), or of belief (Lansbury)-are a common concem of most of these books. But structures are not treated as something autonomous or apart from human actions or agencies. Snell's and Rose's treatments of the poor law, for example, firmly emphasize how structural change itself is less the result of some autonomous and inevitable