Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 44.1 (2001) 119-120

Book Review

Early Trade Unionism:
Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour

Contrary to recent pronouncements of its demise, labour history has re-established itself. Revitalised through positive but critical engagement with the linguistic turn and other historiographical fashions, it now lays claim to space between social and cultural history. Imbued with regained confidence, this latest addition to the Studies in Labour History series promoted by the British Society for the Study of Labour History, revisits the once hallowed foundation of both labour history and the labour movement, early trade unionism. In a stridently revisionist manner, Malcolm Chase dismisses the narrow institutional perspectives, teleological narratives, and reductionist rigidities of the old guard. Trade unionism is seen here not as a discrete (or privileged) "compartment" but as point of entry to the complexity and contingency of workers' collective attitudes and actions.

Perhaps the most impressive feature of the new approach is the broad chronological sweep, no longer restricted to some dramatic take-off into industrialization, modernization, and workers' organization. Chase begins with a major reassessment of change and continuity (most notably in mentality, attitudes, and allegiance--the concept of the trade as a moral community) spanning the centuries from the medieval guilds to the emergence of the trade union movement (terminology not deployed until the 1820s). Trade union activity, broadly defined, increased in the 1780s and 1790s, but collective action continued to take diverse forms within a (Tillyesque) repertoire or continuum of activities in which negotiation by riot often remained one of the most effective options. Thenceforth, throughout the "heroic" (or Thompsonian) period, trade unionism was eclectic and holistic, best understood within the wide cultural, political, and economic processes of combined and uneven development which brought trades and localities together in defiant defence of the property of labour. Once the Chartist challenge collapsed, the collectivist impulse took a variety of associational forms, tenuously held together by the National Association of United Trades for the Protection of Labour (NAUT) and its four objectives: mutual assistance, protection, and solidarity for the [End Page 119] trades; monitoring labour issues in Parliament; provision of arbitration and conciliation in industrial disputes; and, alas soon abandoned, producer cooperation and land settlement (the potential alternative political economy of organized labour). As an original bridge into mid-Victorian industrial relations, Chase's study concludes with a long- overdue reassessment of the NAUT, rescuing it in the best Thompsonian tradition from the condescension of posterity. However, the close attention accorded to the NAUT sits at odds with the cursory survey or neglect of some earlier organizations. Furthermore, it serves to underline the need both for a full-length study of its first president, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, aristocratic dandy and parliamentary champion of organized labour, and for equivalent investigation of the development of employers' organizations.

Throughout the central period of Chase's study, trade unionism in its various forms was concerned above all to defend (male) property in skill. Just as membership in the medieval guild conferred a status above the itinerant and indigent, so the early trade societies of the late-eighteenth century had similar aspirations to "respectability," seeking to police and defend the line that separated the skilled from the swelling ranks of the unskilled. The essential (and often expensive) badge of skill, a completed apprenticeship was regarded as a form of property which conferred a right to participate in and regulate the trade. Throughout the period under consideration (even in the pro-active fervour of general unionism between 1829 and 1834) the central issue at the workplace was one of control, not of ownership. Like agrarian radicals, the heroes of Chase's previous research, skilled labour--the status to which all workers aspired--drew upon a lively popular concept of communally regulated use-rights. The construction of notions of skill, however, was increasingly bound up with the definition of masculinity, the ideal of the...