Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England

✍ Scribed by Marc W. Steinberg

Publisher: Cornell University Press
Year: 2018
Tongue: English
Leaves: 306
Category: Library

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis

A key component of social life, discourse mediates the processes of class formation and social conflict. Drawing on dialogic theory and building on the work of E. P. Thompson, Marc W. Steinberg argues for the importance of incorporating discursive analysis into the historical reconstruction of class experience. Amending models of collective action, he offers new insights on how discourse shapes the dynamics of popular protest. To support his thesis, he presents studies of two English trade groups in the 1820s: cotton spinners from Lancashire factory towns and London silk weavers.For each case, Steinberg closely examines the labor process, industrial organization, social life, community politics, discursive struggles, and collective actions. By describing how workers shared experiences of exploitation and oppression in their daily lives, he shows how discourses of contention were products of struggle and how they framed possibilities for collective action. Embracing work in literary theory, sociocultural psychology, and cultural studies, Fighting Words claims a middle ground between postmodern and materialist analyses.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Tables
Preface
Abbreviations
PRELIMINARIES
Introduction: Theoretical and Historiographical Considerations
1. Patterns of English Labor Contention in the Early Nineteenth Century
2. A Tale of Two Areas
SPITALFIELDS
3. The Silk Trade: Memory, Market, and Means of Production
4. Local Political Culture: From Reciprocity to Hegemony
5. The Repeal of the Spitalfields Acts
6. Post-Repeal Collective Actions: Battling the Hydra of Degradation
ASHTON-STALYBRIDGE
7. King Cotton: Markets, Mills, and Mechanics
8. Class Structure, Class Cultures, and Social Lives
9. Local Political Culture: The Stranglehold of Wealth
10. The Vitriol of Conflict
11. Class War: The Spinners' Strikes of 1830 —1831
12. Class Formation, Collective Action, and the Role of Discourse
Appendix 1. Spitalfields weavers' collective actions, c. 1825-1831
Appendix 2. Ashton and Stalybridge spinners' collective actions, April 1830–January 1831
References
Index

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