to the issue he has raised at the outset, we must ask ourselves a number of questions. The first is this. Has Thompson demonstrated that the English working class made itself as much as it was made—not in a false, scientistic sense, but in terms of plausible balance of evidence? Few of the professional historians who have reviewed The Making of the English Working Class have tarried over this issue, although it looms over the whole book: no doubt it has generally appeared too ‘meta-historical’ for them. But is it incapable of empirical control or arbitration? To ask this is to realize that The Making of the English Working Class does not, contrary to appearances, give us the means by which we could settle the question. For if the claim for co-determination of agency and necessity was to be substantiated, we would need to have at a minimum a conjoint exploration of the objective assemblage and transformation of a labour-force by the Industrial Revolution, and of the subjective germination of a class culture in response to it. That alone could furnish the initial—not conclusive—elements for a judgement of their relative historical weight. The former, however, is essentially missing from The Making of the English Working Class. The second part of the book, where one would expect to find it, in fact concentrates largely on the immediate experience of the producers rather than on the mode of production itself. The advent of industrial capitalism in England is a dreadful backcloth to the book rather than a direct object of analysis in its own right. The result is a disconcerting lack of objective coordinates as the narrative of class formation unfolds.47 It comes as something of a shock to realize, at the end of 900 pages, that one has never learnt such an elementary fact as the approximate size of the English working class, or its proportion within the population as a whole, at any date in the history of its ‘making’.
A lacuna like this cannot be dismissed by mere disdainful reference to ‘the endless stupidities of quantitative measurement of classes’, if only because Thompson does provide one or two numerical estimates of specific occupational categories himself.48 More generally, what the omission symbolizes is the absence from The Making of the English Working Class of any real treatment of the whole historical process whereby heterogeneous groups of artisans, small holders, agricultural labourers, domestic workers and casual poor were gradually assembled, distributed and reduced to the condition of labour subsumed to capital, first in the formal dependence of the wage-contract, ultimately in the real dependence of integration into mechanized means of production. The jagged temporal rhythms and breaks, and the uneven spatial distributions and displacements, of capital accumulation between 1790 and 1830 inevitably marked the composition and character of the nascent English proletariat. Yet they find no place in this account of its formation. Towards the end of the book, Thompson remarks that: ‘the British working class of 1832’ was ‘perhaps a unique formation’, because ‘the slow, piecemeal accretions of capital accumulation had meant that the preliminaries to the Industrial Revolution stretched backwards for hundreds of years. From Tudor times onwards this artisan culture had grown more complex with each phase of technical and social change. Delaney, Dekker and Nashe: Winstanley and Lilburne: Bunyan and Defoe—all had at times addressed themselves to it. Enriched by the experiences of the 17th century, carrying through the 18th century the intellectual and libertarian traditions we have described, forming their own traditions of mutuality in the friendly society and trades club, these men did not pass, in one generation, from the peasantry to the new industrial town. They suffered the experience of the Industrial Revolution as articulate, free-born Englishmen … This was, perhaps, the most distinguished popular culture England has known’.49 Exceptionally, here, the objective pattern of capital accumulation is formally accorded an original primacy of determination. But the secular scale on which it is evoked—back to Tudor times—allows the brief period under study to appear in the guise of a codicil. The real centre of gravity of the passage is the survival and continuity of so many popular values and traditions of resistance—of which the slow tempo of capitalist development in England is little more than the enabling condition. Yet the speed and extent of industrialization should surely be woven into the very texture of any materialist study of a working class. If it is not taken as ‘external’ to the making of the Russian or Italian proletariat—as any glance at the labour history of Petrograd or Turin suffices to remind us—why should it be to the English proletariat? Thompson rightly emphasizes that ‘factory hands, so far from being the “eldest children of the industrial revolution”, were late arrivals’50 in England, and that out-workers anticipated many of their ideas and forms of organization. But does this justify a survey of the making of the English working class which omits any direct account of them altogether? Cotton, iron and coal together form virtually the sum of the first phase of industrialization in Britain: yet the direct labour-force of not one of them is treated in The Making of the English Working Class.51 In the absence of any objective framework laying down the overall pattern of capital accumulation in these years, there is little way of assessing the relative importance of one area of subjective experience within the English working class against another. Proportions are wanting. Selectivity of focus is combined with sweep of conclusion, typically with such passion and skill that the former can easily be forgotten by the reader.
Nor is it only a question of the weighting of different groups of producers within the developing process of the Industrial Revolution. The inter-relations are obviously of even greater importance. Thompson devotes a number of very perceptive pages to the different popular cultures of London and of the North, what he calls the dialectic of ‘intellect and enthusiasm’, commenting that ‘each tradition seems enfeebled without the complement of the other’.52 This division, which extends down to the SDF and the ILP and beyond, has surely been a key trait of the English labour movement. But it is not adequately anchored in The Making of the English Working Class, for all its consequences as the narrative develops, because there is no spatial map of British capitalism that would reveal its measure of importance. In effect, the cold economic fact that London remained throughout the 19th century largely a rentier, commercial and bureaucratic capital, dominated by court and city-closer in some ways to Vienna or Madrid than to Paris, Berlin or Saint Petersburg—was to be a major obstacle to the emergence of a politically aggressive labour movement in England. A capital without heavy industry helped to separate a factory proletariat from an instinct for power. Once artisan radicalism broke down, with the decline of the skilled trades on which it was based, the inherent weaknesses of the division between metropolitan and provincial traditions, founded on such separate types of accumulation, became evident.53 The growing influence of Benthamism in the work of Place and his associates after 1815, described by Thompson, foreshadowed much later developments. It might be said that London ended by bureaucratizing Northern moderation into a municipal-national system, in the age of Morrison.
The peculiar complexion of the world’s largest city in the epoch of the Industrial Revolution was, of course, intimately related not only to its court and parliamentary establishments, but also and above all to its imperial functions. Here too, however, it is difficult to feel that Thompson gives the kind of attention and weight to the objective coordinates of his subject that the title of his work leads one to expect. This is perhaps most obvious at the political level itself, where there is little sustained acknowledgement of the international dimensions of English working-class history. In the first part of his study, Thompson emphasizes that despite the ideological strength of the complex of beliefs summed up in the notion of the ‘Free-Born Englishman’, radical demands remained imprisoned within the terms of an imaginary constitutionalism down to the 1790s. The decisive break, which shifted the parameters of radical politics, came with the publication of Paine’s Rights of Man, which for the first time rejected the constitutional monarchy and attacked the Bill of Rights. He also notes the unremarkable tenor of Paine’s own life and thought as a customs official in England, down to the early 1770s, and the sudden change precipitated by his emigration to America. Likewise, the circumstance that The Rights of Man was written in response to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution is of course registered. But nowhere does the combined shock of the American and French Revolutions, of which Paine’s work is the direct political product in England, find any space in The Making of the English Working Class commensurate with its real historical importance. The fact is that the whole ideological universe of the West was transformed by these two great upheavals. The pattern of their
