The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson

Misery and political reaction were only by-products of a “take-off” into sustained economic growth. The classical view which looked with dismay upon the Industrial Revolution as an upheaval that scattered its social debris all over England was replaced by a supposedly empirical circumspection. Evidence to support this interpretation was supplied by Sir John Clapham, T.S.

Indeed, the altruism of the capitalist was responsible for palpable advances in the standard of life for everyone. Friedrich Hayek, for example, argued that capitalists had applied their earnings on a large scale to provide means of production for workers who could not otherwise have produced their own sustenance. In 1954, however, a group of economic theorists and historians of a Whig-like persuasion published a series of studies, Capitalism and the Historians, to prove that all this was largely fiction Their intent was to correct the exaggerations they found in the earlier historians and to demonstrate that capitalism even in its early traumatic days had improved the condition of the laboring classes. And Toynbee also forcefully reminded us that industrialism can produce wealth without producing well-being. Cole's mountainous compilation of facts revealed that severe deprivations in material existence were the common lot of more than half of all England in those days. Thus, the Hammonds, doyens of English economic historians, taught that the Industrial Revolution brought confusion to the settled ways of free-born Englishmen that we are still seeking to compose, power that we are still seeking to subdue. Cole, and the elder Toynbee had vividly depicted the havoc wrought by a burgeoning middle class determined to forge its destiny out of coal, cotton, and the machine. Earlier historians such as Engels, the Hammonds, the Webbs, G.D.H. To a generation reared on classical economic history, it was something of a shock to be told a few years ago that the agony of the Industrial Revolution was a myth.

The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson