England's Great Transformation

Download or read book England's Great Transformation written by Marc W. Steinberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-04-04 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution - largely revising the thesis of Karl Polanyi's landmark 'The Great Transformation'. The conventional wisdom has been that in the 19th century, England quickly moved toward a modern labour market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labour contracts, centred on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.