The Night of the Proletarian Families: Child Labor, Compulsory Education, and the Making of the Working Class around 1830 (original) (raw)

Child Labor, Social History, and the Industrial Revolution: A Methodological Inquiry

Child labor during the British Industrial Revolution is a phenomenon that has, at times, been neglected by historians. That’s not to say that little ink has been spilled about industrialization and child labor over the past two centuries; quite the opposite. Industrialism’s role in child labor and its intensification of misery and exploitation of children has been a consistent theme since industrialization itself. This essay centers on two more recent, but pivotal texts in the history of child labor during the Industrial Revolution, namely Clark Nardinelli’s Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (1990) and Jane Humphries’s Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (2010). While each historian had taken an economic approach to the social history of the period, the differences between their approaches, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, are instructive. Interspersed with these two texts on child labor will be E.P. Thompson’s celebrated The Making of the English Working Class (1963), to examine the way historians have went about constructing their social histories of the British Industrial Revolution. We will also touch on the standard of living debate, for this touches on important methodological disputes as well. Finally, this essay will offer a different approach to examining these historical problems, an approach to the social sciences pioneered by economist Ludwig von Mises in his magnum opus on economics, entitled Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949). This approach will not resolve every question of methodology and interpretation advanced by the authors we will be reviewing here, but it will be applied to a few concrete examples to illustrate its usefulness in resolving some of the historical controversy, or at least clarify it.

The Prohibition of Child Labour in Factories Revisited: Towards a Social History of Decommodification in the Early Nineteenth Century

2024

This article examines the removal of children from factories and their integration into the school system in the early nineteenth century, using decommodification as a conceptual framework. The Swiss canton of Aargau serves as a case study - a region where the textile industry flourished and a liberal government came to power after the July Revolution, subsequently enforcing compulsory education. Through a nuanced exploration of diverse sources, the article argues that decommodification was a deeply contentious process marked by conflicts between working-class families, factory owners, the state, and the church. Simultaneously, these conflicts unleashed dynamic forces that coded working-class childhood in terms of age and gender. It is this transformational power that underscores the interpretative potential of decommodification as a constructive process of Vergesellschaftung (sociation). Beyond simply freeing children from labour obligations, the prohibition of factory work reintegrated them intricately into the social fabric of the economy.

When Unpaid Workers Need a Legal Status: Family Workers and Reforms to Labour Rights in Twentieth-Century France

International Review of Social History, 2014

In the second half of the twentieth century small family businesses were still widespread in France. An important reason for this resilience was the share of unpaid work performed by kin in producing for the market. The unpaid work of family members in a range of craft and commercial family businesses – particularly by spouses, sons, and daughters – contributed to both the survival of the businesses and the well-being of the families, as is testified to in numerous sources, albeit statistically undocumented. Although social rights in France are considered to be some of the most advanced in Europe, the French Parliament was extremely slow to define the legal status of these family workers. It was not until 1982 that a law was finally enacted to bestow occupational status on collaborating spouses and to define a procedure optionally to register this unpaid work and to secure social security benefits for those carrying it out. This article focuses on the process that led to a new defin...

Women and labour in the 17 th century: an interrogation of social reproduction theory and political Marxism

2016

Essay submitted for final year examinations for the degree of BA International Relations at the University of Sussex, 2016. This work will analyse the ways in which the concept of labour changed in the 17th century England and France, especially concerning women's labour, while simultaneously providing the background for a discussion on the notions of gender and class as instrumental for a full historical analysis of socio-property relations in these countries.