Retelling Polanyi’s The Great Transformation
For Presentation at the MIT-Sloan Organizational Studies Group
Marc W. Steinberg
203 Wright Hall
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063 [email protected]
My thanks to Malcolm Chase, Santhi Hejeebu, Lars Mjøset, and Gunnar Olofsson for providing
me with their writings.
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Abstract
In this paper I partly retell Polanyi’s narrative of the industrial revolution found in his
Great Transformation. I discuss how new labor laws consolidated in the 19th century created a
legal structure of coerced contractual labor, that did not fit the ideals of free market economics.
My retelling focuses on how capitalists in some industries relied on legal coercion of their
workers as a means of discipline and labor process control. Through this retelling I demonstrate
that Polanyi was still beholden to neo-classical economics in his historical account, errantly
seeing the rise of a free market in labor with the Poor Law reforms of 1834 when in fact no such
freedom existed. Therefore, he could not provide a fully-fledged institutional analysis of
economic embeddedness that lies at the core of his theory. To realize a fully-developed
institutional analysis I argue that we need to bring class conflict back into the narrative of
institutional change through an analysis of legality and its transformation. I partly map out the
outlines of a revised institutional analysis that places emphasis on the spatial organization of
power, with ‘stateness’ conceptualized as a variable in which political power (and more
especially authority) is scrutinized as historically accreted institutional structures. I also
emphasize the historically specific role of the ‘local state’ in this narrative.
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Retelling The Great Transformation
This paper is part of a larger project that analyzes the ways in which law was embedded
in the workplace in Victorian England. In the research I seek to demonstrate through several
case studies that employers drew upon legal constructions of the employment relationship to
maintain their control over the workplace and the labor supply. There was wide variation in the
degree to which employers in England had recourse to the law, and I argue that through path-
dependent processes some employers in particular regions and industries came to use the law
as part of their routine practices of exercising authority.
In a larger sense part of the argument is for a more robust institutional analysis of the
legal foundations of employment in the Industrial Revolution. Despite the extensive research
that has been conducted over the last four decades which questions the classic origins story of
the Industrial Revolution it still persists as an ur-history of the rise of a modern society and
economy. No less than the doyen of this history, David Landes, wrote in his sweeping account
of Western economic modernism:
Britain, moreover, was not just any nation. This was a precociously modern, industrial
nation. Remember that the salient characteristic of such a society is the ability to
transform itself and adapt to new things and ways, so that the content of ‘modern’ and
‘industrial’ is always changing. One key area of change: the increasing freedom and
security of the people. To this day, ironically, the British term themselves subjects of the
crown, although they have long—longer than anywhere—been citizens. Nothing did
more for enterprise.1
And in reaffirming the classic tale he argues,
When I was a student learned that homo sapiens is an animal species of single origin: all
humans today, of whatever color or size, are descended from a common ancestor, split
off from a larger hominid genus some millions of years ago. The same is true of the
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species industrial society. All examples, however, different, are descended from the
common British predecessor.2
In addition a variety of eminent economics and pundits still draw on part of this origins
story to emphasis the legal foundations of free exchange and the non-interference of the state in
economic transactions. In this part of the tale the English state, while protecting private
property, provided relatively capacious room for all actors to maximize their maximize their
activities in the market, leading to a virtuous cycle of development.3 However, as I discuss
below, this assumption concerning legal freedom for labor is far off the mark, and thus we need
to re-examine the role of the law in England’s economic development.
And this is where the work of Karl Polanyi, especially The Great Transformation, fits into
my project. Many social scientists now look to this narrative of the rise of free-market industrial
capitalism and the reaction against it as a classic counter-template to explain both these
ongoing transformations and the reactions to them.4 The GT is taken as exemplary of Polanyi’s
master concept of institutional embeddedness and of the centrality of politics in the construction
of market systems. However, relatively little scrutiny has been paid to Polanyi’s account of
nineteenth-century British history, even though his story of the ‘double movement’ has become
a metanarrative for contemporary critics of free-market fundamentalism. In some respects this
is a problem of the history of the Industrial Revolution redux, as it rehearses the ways in which
modernization theory was inductively constructed from a different narrative of these events.5
Just as in the latter case, however, Polanyi’s story of the Great Transformation needs to be
reconsidered.
Therefore, in this paper I propose a partial retelling of The Great Transformation. I
return to the development of 19th-century English industrial capitalism and propose a revised
account of role of class conflicts and the legal system in the transformation of market, economy
and society. My aim is to preserve Polanyi’s cogent concern with the role of institutions, but to
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do so with renewed attention to the ways in which class interests and legality were tightly
intertwined in the battles over the construction of a market society. In the end I hope to
provide a narrative that emphasizes the role of legal institutions in the Industrial Revolution, but
in the process asks us to reformulate all of our standard stories.
The Great Transformation, The Rise of the Market Society and the Double Movement
The GT of course is not solely about the rise of market society, but a more sweeping
account of what Polanyi takes to be a set of unprecedented institutional changes that restructed
the international system into the twentieth century. Here however, I concentrate on the first part
of his narrative, the unique historical creation of a market society in England. As Margaret
Somers and others have emphasized, Polanyi finds the underlying impetus for these
transformations not in the rise of modern capitalism, as for Marx, but in industrialization itself.6
More specifically, Polanyi’s obliquely stated causal analysis is a technological determinist
account of societal change that occurs spontaneously with the rise of the factory system.7
Industrial production transformed the functioning of the economy, installing commerce as the
servant of industry where the relationship historically had been the reverse. To meet the
demands of this new master land, labor and money were made subject to market dictates. 8 In
Polanyi’s perspective they were not products of human industry; and thus became “fictitious
commodities.”9 This prolonged process was part of a greater transformation by which social
relations themselves became embedded in the market system, an inversion of the historical
relationship between the two.10
By Polanyi’s account the most difficult part of this transformation was the
commodification of labor, a protracted and sometimes tempestuous process that put the state
and political action at the center of the birthing of a market society. Initially society reacted
against the creation of a free labor market with the state’s construction of the Speenhamland
system. However, as Polanyi himself tersely notes, “In the long run the result was ghastly,” only
furthering pauperism. 11 The state, accepting what political economists regarded as the brute
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facts of nature, instituted sweeping changes in the social welfare system with the New Poor Law
in 1834, abolishing such subsidies, imposing stringent and punitive standards for workhouse
assistance, and in the process created a market society.12 Critically, this involved the
application of free market principles to labor with the state receding from the employment
relationship.
…justice and law, which were embodied in the institutional structure of earlier societies,
had worn thin under the market organization of society. A man’ s property, his revenue
and income, the price of his wares were now ‘just’ only if they were now formed in the
market and as to law, no law really mattered except that which referred to property and
contract. The varied propertied institutions of the past and the substantive laws that
made up the constitution of the ideal polis had now no substance to work upon
(emphasis added).13
Labor was now fully commodified with the first half of the “double movement.”
Polanyi argues that the working class was not sufficiently organized to protect itself from
the deleterious effects of the labor market until the maturation of unions beginning in the
1870s.14 However, what the state had taken away the state could return, and so began the
societal reaction to the laissez-faire system in the second part of the “double movement.” A full-
fledged market society was a utopian project that would have led to economic, social and
cultural devastation. Recognizing this possibility, a variety of collective interests—including
leading politicians, members of the landed elite, working-class leaders and public intellectuals—
spontaneously forced state action to re-embed the market. Factory legislation, public health
and amenities and education reform and a host of other enactments that brought the state back
in were part of a great collectivist countermovement to protect society as a whole. In Polanyi’s
story class interests themselves were too narrow an impetus for the explanation of such long-
term macro-social changes. Moreover, the crisis precipitated by the attempt to institute a
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market society was not primarily economic but cultural, and thus required a societal rather than
a purely sectional countermovement.15
Problems in the Narrative
A striking feature of the reaction to Polanyi’s narrative of the rise of market society in
England is the degree to which critics from a wide array of competing perspectives concur with
his account.16 However, as Sally Randles notes, The Great Transformation precedes Polanyi’s
explicit and elaborated theory of institutional embeddedness, leading to a conceptual
unevenness in the ways in which this concept and the double movement can be read from
Polanyi’s corpus.17 Here I focus on three aspects of the narrative that require amendment, and
which, as I discuss below, augur a revision of both of the concepts of institutional
embeddedness and the double movement. I argue that the problems in Polanyi’s narrative
arise because he does not fully apply his own concept of embeddedness to the history of
industrial relations in England, an underdeveloped causal account of economic and institutional
change and a reductionist concept of the state.
A variety of scholars have debated the degree to which Polanyi offered a comprehensive
theory and analysis of the institutional embeddedness of all economic systems. Some have
claimed that Polanyi was still too beholden to classical economics in his understanding of free
markets and failed to conceptualize economic relations as necessarily embedded in wider social
relations and political processes.18 Others have seen Polanyi as consistently arguing that a free
market economy is never feasible and that all economic activity is embedded.19 There is
wisdom in both perspectives if we argue that while Polanyi’s later theoretical works pressed
forcefully for an encompassing theory of embeddedness, his early account of this process in the
GT was based in an historiography of the industrial revolution predicated on contrary
assumptions. Beholden to an historiography colored by its heritage in of nineteenth-century
economic thought, his narrative proved incapable of the intellectual separation achieved in his
subsequent writings. 20 In the next section in a partial retelling of the story I will provide a
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narrative that emphasizes the embeddedness of economic processes during what Polanyi
highlights as the laissez-faire era, but with the ironic twist that it was much less structured
through free markets than he imagines.
A second set of problems in reading the GT revolve around uncertainties in the
underlying concepts of causality that explain historical changes. In both his historical narrative
and later theoretical essays this manifests itself in the absence of a coherent theory of social
change and the reification of society and the state as actors. Both critics and sympathizers alike
have noted that the initial impetus for change in Polanyi’s GT narrative is an ad hoc explanation
leaning on technological determinism. Polanyi provides no explanation for why contemporary
institutions failed to resolve the dilemmas created by the demands of an increasingly
technologically complex industrialism.21 Rather, the narrative ambiguously suggests an
inevitability of this transformation and focuses on the failed resolution to the problems of
commodifying labor with the Speenhamland system.22
Relatedly, the centrality of a spontaneous ‘societal’ reaction to the rise of the market
economy frequently hypostatizes society and the state at the expense of concrete analyses of
institutional conflict and change.23 Class interests of both workers and landowners are part of
Polanyi’s story, but he conceptualizes them largely as reflexive, non-ideological and pragmatic
responses to the disruptions of the market system, and argues that by themselves they are too
narrow to be primary explanatory factors of the countermovement. Moreover, such interests, in
the end, were not so material as they were moral and cultural, and concerned with integrity and
standing in society. 24 His alternative narrative of change, however, provides no specific
accounts of why and how these reflexive reactions against the perils of market forces are
channeled into coherent actions for institutional (or any other) change, nor how and why the
state (or any other institutions) successfully responded.25 Partly this might have been the result
of his underlying institutional theory, still developing during the time of the GT’s writing, which
focused on integration as opposed to conflict.26 Arguably this focus as well as the formalism of
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Polanyi’s taxonomy that underlies his later substantive economics and his generally high level of
abstraction mitigate against a well-specified theory of institutional change, or an emphasize on
the conflicts and coercion that often are its impetus. As Mark Blyth remarks, “it is perhaps the
openness of Polanyi’s analytic that allows scholars to differ over exactly what the great
transformation actually was, which is no small consideration.”27 Thus Polanyi failed to highlight
the contradictions, tensions and struggles within institutions, and more provide a clear causal
perspective on political conflict and agency that were forces of change in the nineteenth-century
English state.28 In this sense The Great Transformation offers an historical account of concrete
institutional change without a developed perspective on such historical change.
In a lengthier version of this paper I reassess a key aspect of the Polanyi’s story
concerning societal reaction and state intervention in laissez-faire industrialism. Polanyi heralds
the rise of the Factory Acts as an exemplar of this reaction. Yet, extensive recent research on
the operation of the Acts and similar legislation thus throws a key part of Polanyi’s narrative into
doubt. 29 The factory inspectorate was never a large and robust interventionist force, its powers
actually diminished over time even as its scope spread, and it usually pursued relatively minor
penalties.30 Far from being at the vanguard of a societal countermovement, the implementation
of these laws was, as Robert Gray observes, for the 1840s and 1850s, “highly contentious,
marked by an uneven and spasmodic transition from employer resistance to ‘negotiated
compliance’, and by popular agitation which likewise challenged the terms of reference of state
officials.”31 It remained so throughout much of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the far more
important impact of the state during this period was in the ways in which it legally constructed
employment relations generally and unions specifically, and this leads to a very different story
than the one presented in the GT.
Below I offer a part of revamped narrative that addresses some of these concerns. I do
so by returning to class conflict as an important determinant of institutional change, though with
several important provisos. First, I take institutions to be the patterned set of legitimate
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assumptions and the established structures and networks for action, and therefore a critical
arena in which class authority and coercion are enacted and challenged. Polanyi’s central
insight thus remains the touchstone for analysis: social action is institutionally mediated.
Second, and relatedly, class interests, consciousness and the articulation of such collective
understandings are bounded by the institutionally available cultural constructs for making sense
of the social situation. As I have argued elsewhere, class consciousness of position and conflict
has to be analyzed with careful attention to the discursive fields within which it can be
constructed.32 Third, following several of Polanyi’s sympathetic critics, we need to disaggregate
the focus on the centralized and bureaucratized state that is the assumed object of his analysis.
If an institutional analysis focuses on the potential for the exercise of power and challenges to it,
then we need to focus on the particular structures and networks in which these are actualized.33
A Retelling
In response to some of his sympathetic critics who observe that Polanyi did not fully
realize the promise of institutional analysis in the GT, my partial retelling focuses squarely on
the ways in which economic relations were always defined and mediated by the legal system. It
concentrates on the ways in which common and statutory laws, and decisions by judges and
magistrates in inferior and superior courts, played a central role in defining the market for labor.
In a reversal from Polanyi, however, I argue that it was not until the last quarter of the
nineteenth century, well beyond the heyday of laissez-faire liberalism and well into his claimed
societal reaction of the double movement, that labor becomes fully ‘commodified’. Additionally, I
assert that this inversion of Polanyi’s narrative is critical in understanding not just the labor
market, but also the ways in which institutional embeddedness and technological possibilities
interacted in the construction of the social and technical relations of production. Whereas
Polanyi rejects a focus on the production process when he eschews marxist theory, my claim
below is that the full importance and impact of institutional embeddedness can only be
appreciated by a focus on both exchange and production relations. Finally, while Polanyi’s story
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of reaction centers on a spontaneous societal response in the double movement, my narrative
in the large version of this paper more directly focuses on a class struggle that was critical in
refashioning the legal institutions that defined the employment relationship, with the
transformation of labor’s legal status was union inspired and largely led against significant
resistant by some capitalists. Just as importantly, working-class organizations sought to
distance themselves as much as possible from the protective reaches of the state, once they
had established the minimum conditions for their legal integrity, opting for what has become
known as “collective laissez-faire”.
Common and Statutory Laws: Master and Servant, Combination and Conspiracy
In his overview of nineteenth-century British society Richard Price observes, “The British
state was the law, and how the law was applied determined in particular cases whether the
state was strong or weak.”34 In the case of labor control the state provided a surprisingly strong
set of instruments should employers or local officials wish to exercise them. These were not
vestiges of a feudal past, but new enactments often prompted by specific requests of
employers. From the middle of the eighteenth century until at least the last quarter of the
nineteenth they served to define what developed as the labor contract.
In his insightful analysis of the English and American labor law in the nineteenth century
Robert Steinfeld observes that the Industrial Revolution in England heralded the rise of “a form
of ‘coerced’ contractual labor” rather than free labor as we now understand it. 35 He and others
focus on the development of master and servant laws over the latter part of the eighteenth
century and early 1800s. These acts demarcated a new incursion by the state in the regulation
of employment, by broadening its scope and criminalizing misbehavior, neglect, disobedience,
improper performance and absenteeism.36 All, as Douglas Hay notes, contained “significant
new language” in defining the employment relationship and the power of the master over the
servant.37 In 1823 Parliament generalized these powers to include all categories of workers
with the exception of domestic servants and professionals. Under 4 Geo. IV c. 34 any worker
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under an exclusive contract of service could be criminally prosecuted for failure to fulfill a written
contract, disobedience or misconduct, unauthorized absence, or incompetence or
misrepresentation of skill.38 These were crimes of summary jurisdiction, heard before one local
justice, and thus appeals were difficult and rare.39 Penalties included fines, abatement of wages
and up to three months imprisonment with hard labor. Under the legal understanding of the
‘entire’ contract all wages could be forfeited if a judgment for dismissal was rendered against the
worker before the completion of the contract.40 The Act also established civil recourse for
workers who were claimed unpaid wages wage payments or suffered abuse, but the trouble and
potential expense of pursuing a case could be a significant barrier. Fines for abuse or neglect
were generally no more than a few pounds. As I will discuss below, master and servant law
remained the basis for most employment relations until 1875. In my retelling of the GT I will
argue that understanding the implications of master and servant law fundamentally changes the
importance of the New Poor Law.
A second type of law, mentioned briefly by Polanyi, was that bearing on the legality of
labor unions. Polanyi correctly observes that the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800 mark the
heyday of statutory restrictions on unions and that these were repealed in 1824 and 1825 partly
under the banner of liberal political economy. However he overlooks both significant aspects of
the Combination Laws and the larger post-1825 context of the legal institutions in which unions
contended. First, the Combination Laws marked a new era in the legal control of labor and
unions in that they were the first modern general laws governing labor as a whole and the first
laws that criminalized association without also providing for wage regulation to counterbalance
this restriction on freedom.41 Second, the repeal of the Acts in 1824, while concordant with the
growing liberalism of the era, was tightly controlled by a self-styled working-class radical,
Francis Place, and his compatriot in Parliament, Joseph Hume, both enthusiasts of political
economy.42 Parliament gave its assent largely on grounds of political expediency rather than
economic doctrine.43 In fact, many political economists allied with a growing interpretation of
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common law to see any combination by workers as an act of conspiracy and thus criminal by
nature.44 Repeal only legalized association for the purposes of agreement on demands for
wages and hours, the new law added significant new language regarding “molestation” and
“obstruction” that left collective action questionable. Unions themselves, as I detail in the larger
paper, only received state sanctification after a protracted class struggle.45 Thus, the laws of
the epoch, far from establishing the conditions for labor as a fictitious commodity of free
markets, created a much more complicated institutional context for labor relations.
The State and the Courts
It was not just the ‘law on the books’ that was essential in determining labor’s fate, but
the court system through which they were animated. The court system was an arcane structure
with a variety of venues, but for the purposes of this retelling the backbone of the system was
the criminal courts comprising local courts of summary jurisdiction, quarter sessions, assizes
and the King’s/Queen’s Bench.46 The latter superior courts set important legal precedents, but it
was the former local courts that were most central venues for defining the status of workers in
the economy.
While attention to state formation often focuses on the development of centralized
bureaucracies, the nineteenth-century English state was “well integrated with dense networks of
local structures upon which the actual business of government rested.”47 The ‘local state’ was
still the touchstone for state authority in the lives of working people.48 For purposes of
controlling Polanyi’s most troublesome fictitious commodity, labor, the primary site of ‘state’
governance was the local court. Justices of the Peace sitting in local or “petty” sessions had a
long history of being the front line of the English judicial system and the face of the law for most
English people.49 During the nineteenth century these local courts proliferated with the
increasing powers of town governance.50 Borough courts also were dominated increasingly by
industrialists and their allies in commerce, finance and the professions. Over the course of the
nineteenth century local courts were provided with broadened powers of summary jurisdiction
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for criminal offences and many working people viewed them as part of an increasingly
oppressive system of elite control.51 The development of both these components of the legal
system was central to the control of labor by capitalists in many areas of Britain during the Great
Transformation.
A Retelling
As I have noted, Polanyi concentrates on the degradation and dehumanization of labor
through its commodification and therefore focuses on exchange relationships and the market,
much as the classical economics that he rejects. Yet an equally vital if not greater process of
struggle in diverse industries occurred in the workplace, as capitalists and workers engaged in
protracted and principled battles over control and discipline.52 Law was central in a number of
such conflicts. While Polanyi asserts that labor was becoming a ‘fictitious commodity’ within a
market society, master and servant law ensured just the opposite. In fact, the law cast most
employment relations as one of a hierarchical status arrangement of continual service, albeit
one that was contractually bound. As Deakin and Wilkinson note
“there was no general movement from status to contract at the time of industrialization,
nor does the welfare state mark a reversion to pre-modern forms. In the period of
industrialization, contract was complemented by the disciplinary code of master and
servant regime and poor law conceptions of the legal duty to work.53
The free will of liberalism and patriarchal models of inequality were wedded together: workers
were deemed to be free agents to choose employment, but in making this commitment they
bound themselves to the will of their employer.54
By the mid-Victorian period some employers drew on this legal framing of service to
legitimize their control over the workplace, and in so doing specifically deny the precepts of
political economy. The routine reliance on the law developed through path-dependent
processes as industries in specific areas grew. “Master and servant law was carefully designed
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to create labor markets that were less costly, more highly disciplined, less ‘free’ than markets in
which the master’s bargain was not assisted by such terms.”55 First, the law did so by serving
as a reliable disciplinary tool absent other forms of labor control. It could be used “in terrorem,”
as a reliable cudgel for performance or to dampen dissent. 56 Second, and relatedly, the law
provided leverage against the power of skilled workers who could control the production
process. Absent technological or supervisory controls, the threat of prosecution could be a
counterweight to the control skilled workers exercised.57 Third, throughout the epoch master
and servant law was probably also capitalists’ most efficient weapon against strikes since under
the law the termination of contract required advanced notice by either party based either on
customary practices or specific agreement.58
The rise of master and servant law as a means of discipline and control was uneven
both in terms of regions and industries in which it became standard means of constructing the
employment relationship, as I note in the longer version of this paper.59 Statistics available from
Parliamentary records starting in the late 1850s and extending to the mid-1870s (when the law
was finally changed) show substantial numbers of prosecutions in a number of regions in
England, with a general upward trend up through the early 1870s.60 Hay estimates that during
the final years of the laws, when prosecutions peaked, their ratio to all theft prosecutions in
courts that covered property offenses was about 30-40%.61
Because of these laws, the New Poor Law had a potential impact on the employment
relationship that was contrary to Polanyi’s narrative. With the abolition of settlement by hiring
the legal interpretation of exclusive service was broadened from its previous narrow test of
round-the-clock availability. Thus, rather than increasingly labor mobility in a free market, it had
the effect among some groups of workers of binding them more firmly to their employers. 62
Thus, over the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century local courts of summary
jurisdiction became increasingly important venues for the enforcement of labor control and
discipline. Employers in a number of regions and industries drew on the peculiar hybrid of
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service and contract in master and servant law to assert their authority in the absence of other
possible avenues of control, or because of the unique opportunities that the local bench
provided for such action. Initial successes led to more routine reliance over the decades.
These prosecutions affirmed an understanding of employment that was much more
complicated, and in some respects antithetical, to the Polanyi’s story of the transformation of
labor into a “fictitious commodity”, though they demonstrate how local institutions nonetheless
were integral to the ways in which labor was controlled both in the market and in the workplace.
As the inferior courts played an increasingly large role in employment relationships, the
superior courts also interjected their authority in defining the operations of the labor market.
Starting at mid-century, often to the consternation of both unions and Parliament, these courts
articulated decisions that often were hostile to the operations of unions, both in terms of their
legal recognition and their capacity to engage in strikes. In so doing many judges opted for an
interpretation of common law that emphasized a liberal and thus atomistic and individualist
concept of agency.
As I noted above, the Combination Laws Repeal Act of 1825 legalized combinations for
purposes of bargaining over wages and hours, but failed to wholly resolve the boundaries of
conspiracy and also had added significant new language regarding molestation and obstruction.
The government was content to leave this position well enough alone, following the nostrums of
political economy that unions would inevitably fail to break the iron laws of the market and the
wage fund.63 This remained an uneasy status quo until the 1850s when the courts began to
adopt more explicit and expansive interpretations of conspiracy. Collective actions designed to
pressure employers or prospective non-union strikebreakers or to determine the terms of labor
in the workplace other than wages and hours were increasingly defined as criminal acts in
several ways, including under the common law of conspiracy.64 Increasingly, “The courts
proved unwilling to give anything but the most narrow and restrictive interpretations to statutory
measures which had intended to widen the legitimate sphere of union activity.”65 These growing
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legal constrictions on union activity did not lead to a prosecutorial deluge, and many convictions
were subsequently overturned on appeal.66 However, successive court rulings solidified a
particularly tight definition of market freedom, which valorized the rights of individuals and made
more specious the claims of collective actors. This was as much (if not primarily) a particular
conservative appraisal of the legacy of the common law as the ascendance of political
economy.67
By the early 1870s unions faced a Dickensian moment, the best and the worst of times.
On the one hand unions had experienced a decade of rapid and perhaps unparalleled growth,
and they claimed over 1,000,000 members, with the expansion not only of skilled trades such as
engineers, but among miners and other less-skilled bodies as well. Local councils proliferated
and the Trades Union Congress became firmly established.68 On the other hand the legal
efficacy not only of their actions but of their corporate existence were fundamentally in doubt, in
a large part due to court decisions of the previous 20 years.69 Even the passage of the
legislation designed to mitigate some of the impacts of the court rulings on the legality of strikes
was soon revealed not fully to have impeded the courts in finding the means for criminal
convictions.70 Prompted by this legal morass, several trades’ councils and the nascent Trades’
Union Congress Parliamentary Committee spearheaded efforts to fundamentally reform the
laws, as I detail in the longer version of this paper. While they were abetted by several MPs and
some important public intellectuals, the reform of labor law was in the end very much a working-
class led affair. The TUCPC and other union bodies, given their increased political leverage
due to the recent expansion of male suffrage, engaged in a concerted campaign that ultimately
procured new legal foundations for trade unions and the employment relationship.
Toward a Revised Theorizing
In many respects the story I’ve told above concerning the struggles over the
commodification of labor is a mirror image of the one told by Polanyi. In the GT he provides a
history of state disengagement from labor control, whereas I focus on the growing legal
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infrastructure over the same period that could be used for such purposes. Polanyi’s concept of
a double movement is predicated on a ‘spontaneous’ reaction to the process of fictitious
commodification by diverse groups and forces; alternatively, I emphasize a concerted and
strategic class struggle as the dynamo of change. And while Polanyi characterizes the
resolution of the double movement as a process of re-embedding, I argue in the longer version
of this paper that unions and their allies sought to buffer themselves from state power and
sought haven in a market partly of their preferred version of market relations.
My alternative narrative shares aspects of emplotment with stories told by a number of
other social scientists and historians of nineteenth-century British and American labor. Though
the specifics of their stories diverge significantly at points (both from my own emplotment and
one another’s), Kim Voss, William Forbath and Victoria Hattam all make claims that American
labor unions’ continuing battles with and defeats by the courts and inability to insure gains
through representative institutions led to the development of “business unionism”.71 Other
analysts argue such strategies in the face of juridical obstruction are characteristic of Anglo-
American union struggles as opposed to Continental labor histories.72
All of these analyses nonetheless affirm Polanyi’s most fundamental claim, i.e. capitalist
labor relations are necessarily institutionally embedded. The revised narrative I offered above
describes how capitalists in a number of important sectors of British industry relied on legal
institutions to subordinate labor, enforce discipline in the workplace and constrain labor markets,
particularly during the rise of ‘market society’. This analysis confirms what Polanyi’s
sympathetic critics argue, that economic relations are always institutionally embedded and that
we must analyze how legal processes are endogenous to capitalist organization of labor.73
Despite this general affirmation, however, the above analysis diverges from Polanyi’s
narrative of the double movement, and more generally his theory of embeddedness in several
important respects. First, to more fully pursue capitalist development from an institutionalist
perspective requires a different conception of the state. Polanyi’s vague model is an
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understandable product of his times experiences. In confronting the crisis of Fordist capitalism,
the expansion of the welfare state to meet these exigencies in democratic nations that survived
the turbulence and the rise of fascism in those that did not, viewing the state as monolithic,
coherent and centralized made contextual sense.74 If they were not, states on both sides of the
Atlantic (democratic and fascist) at least in many ways aspired to this image. In the
metaphorical phrasing of geographer Peter Taylor, however, this is a concept of the state as a
political ‘container’.75
The infrastructure for a useful conceptual alternative for institutional analysis can be
found in the now venerable ruminations of J. P. Nettl and Phillip Abrams on the idea of the state.
As the latter argued, frequently when we refer to the state it is a shorthand for “politically
organized subjection”, and “Political institutions. . .are the real agencies out of which the idea of
the state is constructed.”76 The alternative, as Nettl suggested, is to analyze stateness as a
variable in which political power (and more especially authority) is scrutinized as historically
accreted institutional structures.77 Coherence, rationalization and centrality are all dimensions
imposed on this collectivity of institutional actors given particular historical exigencies, path
dependent development, and, as Tilly and others have argued, threats from the outside.78
One step toward an alternative analysis of stateness is a multi-scaled conception
institutional infrastructures through which power and authority are transmitted and sedimented,
a multi-dimensional ‘geometry of power’ through which we can map structural configurations in
both place and space.79 Where we look for ‘state’ activity is thus always historical and
relational, depending on the actors involved and the ways in which institutionally-sedimented
power can be exercised. State spaces should be seen as venues for strategic interaction, albeit
ones that generally advantage particular groups, rather than areas for the perfunctory exercise
of power.
In terms of labor control, as Jamie Peck argues, our focus starts with the locally
embedded, since labor power and the production process (even in the age of globalization) are
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still place-bound. 80 Such local institutions, as the “’carriers’ of local economic histories,” are
also most likely to develop along path dependent lines as local power networks of trust,
cooperation, convention are critical in cementing economic stability in particular locales.81 Kevin
Cox usefully distinguishes such local, stabilized spaces of institutionalized power as ‘spaces of
dependence’ on which actors “depend for the realization of essential interests and for which
there are no substitutes elsewhere.”82 Alternatively ‘spaces of engagement’ are sites where
power dynamics are less secure and where actors strategically engage in “building up a much
more elaborate network of connections to other centers of social power.”83 The distinction
highlights how collective actors frequently find they need to move between areas and levels to
transform existing relationships. Cox and others argue that a spatially informed analysis of state
power provides us with a multi-scaled mapping of the ways in which institutionalized power
unevenly sediments in specific places and organizations, both within and between institutions,
and is transmitted between spatial levels. In part this is because local institutions of governance
develop relationally to other institutions, such as structures of local labor subordination and
capital accumulation.84 More specifically a variety of economic and political geographers,
relying on some variation of David Harvey’s concept of ‘spatial fixes’ maintain that that the
landscape of power in capitalist societies is structured by nested hierarchies of institutions.85
Destabilization of institutionalized power at one level motivates capitalists to find a fix through
institutional infrastructures at higher levels. Alternatively, “state-generated opportunities for
mobilization (political opportunity structures) may or may not exist at a particular time at different
scales—national or local. When one scale is relatively closed, social movements may approach
the scale that is more open.”86 Harvey and others maintain that working-class collective action
is generally more readily conducted through local places than through extra-local spaces
because the social lives of workers are grounded in place, but I think that this is an empirical
question, dependent on the structure of institutional networks and capacities at different levels.87
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A fully-fledged analysis of institutional embeddedness does not assume the spatial
organization of state power, but takes it as a question to be investigated. In my retelling I have
offered an example of such possibilities. The narrative focuses on the ways in which capitalists
in the eighteenth century from specific regions and industries sought to transform labor law at
the national level to overcome the power of local artisanal groups, and how these attempts
crystallized into a new more generalized and repressive version of master and servant in the
early nineteenth century. Yet the application of such law was not superintended by the central
government, but devolved back to the ‘local state’, to the magistrates’ and borough courts over
which Westminster had little practical supervision.
Contemporaneously effective control of this local judicial infrastructure in many of the
more urban areas was passing from gentry and clergy to industrialists and sympathetic
professionals. In the process some of these capitalists searching for a means of labor
subordination in growing industries, in which technological and other solutions were not readily
at hand, found the local court a reliable venue, and continued growth was pursued through local
path dependence. Throughout most of the nineteenth century Parliament strengthened the
hand of these local courts by providing them with great summary powers without additional
oversight. In this sense institutional state power was devolved downward to local places,
creating a more disorderly national space of governance. While uneven in its development, the
growth of the local court systems into semi-autonomous nodes of state power created
impediments to national administrative law with the coming of the Factory Acts and other similar
national legislation. During the same period the appellate courts on the national level,
exercising considerable independence from Parliament and a rising bourgeoisie, further
complicated governance with its rulings on unions and conspiracy.
This narrative thus focuses on the embeddedness of economic relations, but does so by
dissecting the geometry of state power as it was structured through a number of distinct
institutions arrayed and connected at differing spatial levels. This is a dynamic story of
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contingencies as actors and state authority move between places and levels, rather than the
Polanyi’s contrapuntal movement between market freedom and state interjection. Yet it remains
true to his fundamental insight, i.e. that these battles were (and are) never merely matters of
markets: the subjugation and commodification of labor are always dependent on complex
processes of embeddedness. To fully understand the complex processes by which these
relations are constructed is to navigate into the interior of this geometry of power, to chart the
infrastructures within and between levels, to see both recursive processes that reproduce it and
contradictions that create the ruptures for change. A comprehensive embeddedness analytic
requires us to go behind assigning causes of conflict and change to reifications such as ‘the
state’, ‘politics’, or ‘economics’ and to examine the structured institutional matrices through
which people and power worked.
Finally, we need to see how the cultural response to the market society effervesces not
from a general ‘societal’ response, but from the fault lines of structural inequalities that traverse
this geometric system. Concomitantly, this requires an alternative perspective on cultural
struggle. The story of change in nineteenth-century Britain is partly one of class struggle,
certainly partially a cultural conflict, but in ways different than Polanyi envisioned. In my larger
paper I offer an example of how class processes—both attempts by capitalists at routinizing
subordination and discipline and working peoples efforts to transformation these conditions—
were at the heart of mid-Victorian institutional change. Local courts were a venue for capitalist
labor control and the national political stage was ultimately the site at which this form of labor
subjugation was altered. Bringing class (and any other process of inequality) back into
institutional analysis offers the analytical tools to explain both endurance and change.
“Polanyi glimpsed at the idea of the always embedded market economy,” observes
Block in some recent reflections on the GT, “but he was not able to give that idea a name or
develop it theoretically because it represented too great a divergence from his initial theoretical
starting point.”88 In his subsequent writings, particularly his collaborative work, Polanyi
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attempted to further his perspective by providing a more extensive taxonomy of institutional
forms and provided wide-ranging case studies to demonstrate them. However, these
investigations never extended this glimpse into a gaze. In my reflections above I have tried to
set out an agenda to move this vision forward. Through my revised narrative and theoretical
amendments on institutional power and the state system, class conflict and cultural conflict I
hope to extend our focus.
1 David S. Landes. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So
Poor. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988): 219.
2 Landes The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: 231.
3 C. Harley Knick. “Substitution for Prerequisites: Endogenous Institutions and Comparative
Economic History,” in Richard Sylla and Gianni Toniolo editors Patterns of European
Industrialization. Edited by. (London: Routlege, 1991): 29; Gordon Tullock. The Rent-
Seeking Society. The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock v. 5, Charles K. Rowley, editor.
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005): 160-70.
4 Elmar Altvater and Birgit Mahnkopf, “The World Market Unbound,” Review of International
Political Economy 4, no. 3 (1997): 448-471; Fred Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing of The
Great Transformation,” Theory and Society, 32 (2003): 275-306; Vicki Birchfield “Contesting
the Hegemony of Market Ideology: Gramsci’s ‘Good Sense’ and Polanyi’s ‘Double
Movement’,” Review of International Political Economy 6, no. 1 (1999): 27-54; Mitchell
Bernard, “Ecology, Political Economy and the Counter-Movement: Karl Polanyi and the
Second Great Transformation,” in Stephen Gill and James H. Mittleman, editors, Innovation
and Transformation in International Studies. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977): 75-89; Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change
in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Vicki Birchfield,
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Vicki. 1999. “Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology: Gramsci’s ‘Good Sense’ and
Polanyi’s ‘Double Movement’,” Review of International Political Economy. 6, no. 1(1999): 27-
54; Michael Burawoy, “Transition without Transformation: Russia's Involuntary Road to
Capitalism,” East European Politics and Societies 15, no. 2 (2001) 269-290; Michele
Cangiani, editor, The Milano papers: Essays in Societal Alternatives (Montréal: Black Rose
Books, 1997); Peadar Kirby, “The World Bank or Polanyi: Markets, Poverty and Social Well-
Being in Latin America,” New Political Economy 7, no. 2 (2002): 199-219; Hannes Lacher,
“The Politics of the Market: Re-reading Karl Polanyi,” Global Society. 13, no. 3 (1999): 313-
26; Marguerite Mendell and Daniel Salée, editors, The Legacy of Karl Polanyi: Market,
State, and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan); Ronaldo
Munck, “Globalization and Democracy: A New ‘Great Transformation’?,” The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 581 (2002):10-21; Beverly J. Silver and
Giovanni Arrighi, “Polanyi's ‘Double Movement’: The Belle Epoques of British and U.S.
Hegemony,” Politics and Society 31, no. 2 (2003): 325-355. See also the special issue of
the International Review of Sociology 13, no. 2 (2003), 13 edited by Ronnie Ramlogan and
Mark Harvey.
5 Rebecca Jean Emigh, “The Great Debates: Transitions to Capitalism” in Julia Adams,
Elizabeth S. Clemens and Ann S. Orloff, editors, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and
Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, 356. Anthony D. Smith The Concept
of Social Change: A Critique of the Functionalist Theory of Social Change (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973): 99. See also Charles Tilly Big Structures, Large
Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage, 1984).
6 Margaret R. Somers, “Karl Polanyi’s Intellectual Legacy”, in Kari Polanyi-Levitt, editor, The
Life and Work of Karl Polanyi (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 156.
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7 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
{hereafter GT} introduction by R. M. MacIver (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 74-5. As he
notes, “On the eve of the greatest industrial revolution in history, no signs and portents were
forthcoming. Capitalism arrived unannounced. No one had forecast the development of a
machine industry; it came as a complete surprise” GT, 89.
8 He observes, “The extension of the market mechanism to the elements of industry—land,
labor, and money—was the inevitable consequence of the introduction of the factory system
in a commercial society. The elements of industry had to be for sale. This was
synonymous with the demand for a market system…As the development of the factory
system had been organized as part of a process of buying and selling, therefore land, labor
and money had to be transformed into commodities, as actually they were not produced for
sale on the market” GT, 75; As his student George Dalton similarly argues, “The industrial
revolution was also an institutional revolution: a condition for the profitable use of expensive,
long-lasting machinery was that entrepreneurs be assured of uninterrupted supplies of labor
and resource inputs to work the machines as well as internal and external markets to
effectively demand the outputs of the machines. Laissez-faire capitalism was created in
response to the needs of machine technology”, Dalton, “Primitive, Archaic, and Modern
Economies: Karl Polanyi’s Contribution to Economic Anthropology and Comparative
Economy,” in June Helm, Paul Bohannan and Marshall Sahlins, editors, Essays in
Economic Anthropology: Dedicated to the Memory of Karl Polanyi. Proceedings of the 1965
Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Association (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1965), 8.
9 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 72; Karl Polanyi, “The Economy as an Instituted Process,” in
George Dalton, editor, Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 148. Several scholars have noted parallels between
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Polanyi’s concept and Marx on commodity fetishism and alienation, the latter of which was
just becoming known during the period of the writing of the GT with the publication of the
1844 manuscripts.
10 Polanyi, Great Transformation, 75. As Polanyi noted elsewhere, “Man’s economy is, as a
rule, submerged in his social relations.”, Karl Polanyi “Our Obsolete Market Mentality,” in
Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies, 65; Karl Polanyi, “Anthropology and Economic
Theory,” in Morton H. Fried, editor, Readings in Anthropology: v. 2. Readings in Cultural
Anthropology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1959), 162.
11 Polanyi, GT: 80.
12 Polanyi, GT: 83 ; Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, “Beyond the Economistic Fallacy:
The Holistic Social Science of Karl Polanyi,” in Theda Skocpol, editor, Vision and Method in
Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 56-57.
13 Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man edited by Harry W. Pearson (New York: Academic
Press, 1977), 16. And as he notes in the GT, “To separate labor from other activities of life
and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence
and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic
one…. Such a scheme of destruction was best served by the application of the principle of
freedom of contract,” Polanyi, GT, 163.
14 Polanyi, GT, 82, 166.
15 Polanyi describes this in general terms as a kind of existential crisis:
…a social calamity is primarily a cultural not an economic phenomenon that can be
measured by income figures or population statistics…. Not economic exploitation, as
often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then the
cause of degradation. The economic process may, naturally, supply the vehicle of
destruction, and almost invariably economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the
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immediate cause of his undoing is not for that reason economic; it lies in the lethal injury
to the institutions in which his social existence in embodied. The result is a loss of self-
respect and standards, whether the unit is a people or a class, whether the process
springs from so-called ‘culture conflict or from a change in the position of a class within
the confines of society. Polanyi, GT, 157.
16 For example, Douglass North, readily observes, “The stubborn fact of the matter is that
Polanyi was correct in his major contention that the nineteenth century was a unique era in
which markets played a more important role than in any other time in history” North,
“Markets and Other Allocation Systems in History: The Challenge of Karl Polanyi,” Journal of
European Economic History. 6, no. 3 (1977): 706. For important exceptions see Santhi
Hejeebu and Deirdre McCloskey, “The Reproving of Karl Polanyi,” Critical Review 13, no.s
3-4 (1999): 285-314 and Sandra Halperin, War and Social Change in Modern Europe: The
Great Transformation Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and
“Dynamics of Conflict and System Change: The Great Transformation Revisited,” European
Journal of International Relations 10, no. 2 (2004): 263–306. The former, while applauded
Polanyi’s general concept of embeddedness, argue that he systematically misreads the
importance of market mechanisms in pre-nineteenth century economies, noting that price
and other institutional mechanisms exist in differing configurations throughout history.
Halperin, in a more wide-ranging critique, maintains that Polanyi is blind to the class bases
of economic change in conflict in nineteenth-century Europe, particularly the ways in which
ruling and economic elites benefited from industrial and commercial expansion, the impact
of major inter-state conflicts on the development of European economies and polities, and
the extent to which states acted in the interests of the dominant landed and industrial
classes.
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17 Sally Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda in Economic Sociology,” International
Review of Sociology 13, no. 2 (2003): 414. Randles argues however that during this time
period Polanyi develops a more encompassing understanding of embeddedness, since by
the 1950s he no longer sees a fully self-regulating society as ontologically possible.
Randles, ““Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 420. Trent Schroyer concurs by noting that
the GT, “is a very dense historical description of the actual emergence and consequent
social and political responses to the rise of market society in England” “Karl Polanyi’s Post-
Marxist Critical Theory,” in Marguerite Mendell and Daniel Salée, editors, The Legacy of Karl
Polanyi: Market, State and Society at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: St.
Martin’s), 76. Fred Block, conversely, maintains that Polanyi always saw market society as
an unreachable utopian ideal of political economists. Block, Block, “Karl Polanyi and the
Writing,” 297-300; “Introduction,” in Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political
and Economic Origins of Our Time Introduction by Fred Block (Boston: Beacon Press,
2001), xxiv.
18 Sally Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 420; Bernard Barber, “All Economies
are ‘Embedded’: The Career of a Concept, and Beyond,” Social Research. 6, no. 2 (1995):
400; Mark Blyth, Great Transformations, 4; Hannes Lacher, “The Politics of the Market”,
320, 326; John Lie, “Embedding Polanyi’s Market,” Sociological Perspectives 34, no.
2(1991): 319; Lars Mjøset, “Regulation and the Institutionalist Tradition,” Lars Mjøset and
Jan Bohlin Introdukson Til Reguleringskolen (Aalborg: Nordisk Sommeruniversitet,
Arbejdspaprier. nr. 21), 23.
19 Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing,” 276; Fred Block, “Political Choice and the Multiple
‘Logics’ of Capital,” in Sharon Zukin and Paul DiMaggio, editors, Structures of Capital: The
Social Organization of the Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 296-
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97. For similar views see also Greta Krippner, “The Elusive Market: Embeddedness and the
Paradigm of Economic Sociology,” Theory and Society. 30, no. 6 (2001): 781; Mark
Granovetter in Gretta Krippner, Mark Granovetter, Fred Block, Nicole Biggart, Tom Beamish,
Youtien Hsing, Gillian Hart, Giovanni Arrighi, Margie Mendell, John Hall, Michael Burawoy,
Steve Vogel and Sean O’Riain, “Polanyi Symposium: A Conversation on Embeddedness,”
Socio-Economic Review. 2, no. 1 (2004): 117.
20 Ellen Meiksins Wood sheds light on this issue when she notes,
The main outlines of Polanyi’s historical narrative, then, are in some respects not entirely
different from the old commercialization model: the expansion of markets goes hand in
hand with technological progress to produce modern industrial capitalism. And although
the process culminates in England, it is a general European process. For that matter, it
appears that the process that led from commercialization to industrialization to ‘market
society’ may after all have been a more or less natural development in an increasingly
commercialized world, a development completed only in Europe simply because certain
non-economic obstacles did not here block its path.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), 25.
21 As Bernard observes, “. . .precisely because agency is ascribed to an autonomously
evolving technology. . . change cannot be understood in terms of the social forces deploying
technological innovation and the power relations, institutions and ideologies that shape the
context in which they emerge.”, Bernard, “Ecology, Political Economy and the Counter-
Movement,” 81-2. See also Vicki Birchfield “Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology,”
38; Michael Hechter, “Karl Polanyi’s Social Theory: A Critique,” Politics and Society. 10, no.
4 (1981): 423; Lars Mjøset, “Regulation and the Institutionalist Tradition,” 22-23; Allen M.
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Sievers, Has Capitalism Collapsed? A Critique of Karl Polanyi’s New Economics (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1949), 50; Wood, The Origins of Capitalism, 23.
22 As Block and Somers have recently noted Polanyi, following the standard narrative
constructed by political economists of the period, misreads the importance and effects of
this wage supplementation, Fred Block and Margaret Somers, “In the Shadow of
Speenhamland: Social Policy and the Old Poor Law,” Politics and Society. 31, no. 2 (2003):
283-323.
23 As Halperin observes, “Particularly problematic are his treatment of society as an organic
and sociologically undifferentiated whole, and his conception of the state as a neutral
mechanism for aggregating interests.”, Halperin, “Dynamics of Conflict and System
Change,” 291. See also Hechter, “Karl Polanyi’s Social Theory,” 420.
24 In eviewing his thesis on the rise of anti-liberal interventionism he contends, “Briefly, not
single groups or classes were the source of the so-called collectivist movement, though the
outcome was decisively influenced by the character of class interests involved. Ultimately,
what made things happen were the interests of society as a whole, though their defense fell
primarily to one section of the population in preference of another. It appears reasonable to
group our account of the protective movement not around class interests but around the
social substances imperiled by the market (emphasis added), ”Polanyi, GT, 162-3. See also
149, 152-3.
25 As Block and Somers suggest, within Polanyi’s tale of action and reaction a neo-Hegelian
state operates in the interests of society as a whole; one which whether instituting the
dictates of laissez-faire liberalism or in responding to the collectivist countermovement
grows in centrality and power throughout the epoch,”Block and Somers, “Beyond the
Economistic Fallacy,” 68.
26 In the context of creating a theory of substantive economies and institutions Polanyi noted,
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A study of how empirical economies are instituted should start from the way in which the
economy acquires unity and stability, that is the interdependence and recurrence of
[149] its parts. This is achieved through a combination of a very few patterns which may
be called forms of integration. Since they occur side by side on different levels and in
different sectors of the economy it may often be impossible to select one of them as
dominant so that they could be employed for a classification of empirical economies as a
whole. “The Economy as an Instituted Process,” 148; see also “Anthropology and
Economic Theory,” 168.
North, “Markets and Other Allocation Systems in History,” 715; Gunnar Olofsson,
“Embeddedness and Integration,” Pp. 38-60 in Ian Gough and Gunnar Olofsson Capitalism and
Social Cohesion: Essays in Exclusion and Integration (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 38,
44-45; Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 413; Sievers, Has Capitalism
Collapsed?, 215.
27 Mark Blyth, “The Great Transformation in Understanding Polanyi: Reply to Hejeebu and
McCloskey,” Critical Review. 16, no. 1( 2004):120.
28 As Randles summarizes the problem,
There does not appear to be, within Polanyi’s framework an explicit mechanism for
institutional change, since competitive struggle and innovation do not (paradoxically
given our interest both in Polanyi, and in the study of innovation and competition) feature
in the Polanyian frame at all. What we might need to add, using Polanyi as an essential
start point, is a mechanism for subsequent tensions and struggles which potentially or in
actuality produce a re-instituting of whatever arena of substantive study we are
interested in. Further, our developed analysis would need to explicitly provide for this re-
instituting to occur at a range of temporal-spatial scales, more than likely bringing groups
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of vested interest into competitive confrontation with each other (or alternatively mutual
accommodation, of each other. Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian Agenda,” 423.
See also Halperin, “Dynamics of Conflict and System Change,” 264, 272; Birchfield
“Contesting the Hegemony of Market Ideology,” 38; Bernard, “Ecology, Political
Economy and the Counter-Movement,” 80, 82; Maurice Godelier, The Mental and the
Material: Thought, Economy and Society translated by Martin Thom (London: Verso,
1986), 200.
29 P. W. J. Bartrip, “British Government Inspection, 1832-1875: Some Observations,” The
Historical Journal 25, no.3 (1982): 626; P. W. J. Bartrip, “British Government Inspection,
1832-1875,” 613-16; P. W. J. Bartrip, “State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain:
Fact or Fiction,” The Journal of British Studies. 23, no. 1(1983): 70-72, 81; P. W. J. Bartrip
and P. T. Fenn, “The Administration of Safety: The Enforcement Policy of the Early Factory
Inspectorate, 1844-1864,” Public Administration. 58, no. 1 (1980): 206, 209: Richard
Rodger, “Mid-Victorian Employers’ Attitudes,” Social History. 11, no. 1 (1986): 79, n. 12
30 Stewart Field, “Without the Law? Professor Arthurs and the Early Factory Inspectorate,”
Journal of Law and Society. 17, no. 4 (1990): 448. See also Bartrip and Fenn, “The
Administration of Safety,” 96; Bartrip and Fenn, “The Administration of Safety,” 96; P. W. J.
Bartip and P. T. Fenn, “The Evolution of Regulatory Style in the Nineteenth Century British
Factory Inspectorate,” Journal of Law and Society, 10, no. 2 (1983): 210. Any fine over £4
was subject to appeal to superior court, providing a strong disincentive to the inspectors to
exact strong punishment, Field, “Without the Law?,” 452; P. W. J. Bartrip and P. T. Fenn,
“The Evolution of Regulatory Style in the Nineteenth Century Factory Inspectorate,” Journal
of Law and Society 10, no. 2 (1983): 207; W. G. Carson, “The Institutionalization of
Ambiguity: Early British Factory Acts,” in Gilbert Geis and Ezra Stotland, editors, White
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Collar Crime: Theory and Research (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1980), 163, 167; and “The
Conventionalization of Early Factory Crime,” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 7,
no. 1 (1979): 51-3.
31 Robert Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830-1860 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 163.
32 "'A Way of Struggle': Reformations and Affirmations of E. P. Thompson's Class Analysis in
Light of Postmodern Theories of Language," British Journal of Sociology. 48, no 3 (1997):
471-92; Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action and Discourse in Early
Nineteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
33 Olofsson, “Embeddedness and Integration,” 53-9; Randles, “Issues for a Neo-Polanyian
Agenda,” 423. See also Martin Hess, “'Spatial' Relationships? Towards a
Reconceptualization of Embeddedness,” Progress in Human Geography 28, no. 2, (2004):
165-86.
34 Richard Price, British Society, 1660-1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 124.
35 Robert J. Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9, 234.
36 John V. Orth, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721-1906.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 108-110. See also Douglas Hay, “England, 1562-
1875,” in Douglas Hay and Paul Craven, editors, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in
Britain and the Empire, 1562-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005),
82-84; Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization,
Employment and Legal Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61-3; Brian
Napier, "The Contract of Service: The Concept and its Application," (D. Phil., University of
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Cambridge, 1975), 83-6; Daphne Simon, "Master and Servant," in John Saville, editor,
Democracy and the Labour Movement (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954) 160-200. For
full texts of all the acts see Charles J. B. Hertslet, The Law Relating to Master and Servant…
(London: John Crockford, 1850), 28-90.
37 Douglas Hay, “England, 1562-1875,” 83. See also Douglas Hay, "Patronage, Paternalism,
and Welfare: Masters, Workers, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England,"
International Labor and Working-Class History 53 (1998): 29. Deakin and Wilkinson also
note that “the master-servant model was a product of industrialization . . . the master and
servant legislation was not an attempt to maintain in place a pre-industrial model of
household employment,” The Law of the Labour Market, 62.
38 Douglas Hay, “Master and Servant in England: Using the Law in the Eighteenth and
Nineteenth Centuries,” in Willibald Steinmetz, editor, Private Law and Social Inequality in the
Industrial Age: Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 228; Simon, "Master and Servant," 61-2; Hertslet,
The Law Relating to Master and Servant …, .
39 Overturning a conviction often hinged on a writ of certiorari that challenged the language
used in the indictment. See Christopher Frank, “’He Might Almost As Well Be Without Trial’:
Trade Unions and the 1823 Master and Servant Act—the Warrington Cases, 1846-47,”
Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 14 (2002): 3-43
40 Hay, “Master and Servant in England,” 228. An 1867 modification of the Act required two
justices for conviction, imprisonment only for “aggravated circumstances” (though this was
up to the justices to define), the capacity of the accused worker to testify in his own defense
and damage payments to the employer in addition to the previous penalties, James Edward
Davis, The Master and Servant Act, 1867. (London: Butterworth, 1868).
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41 They were also the first to provide for summary jurisdiction, foregoing jury trials. John V.
Orth, “The British Trade Union Acts of 1825 and 1825: Dicey and the Relation Between Law
and Opinion,” Anglo-American Law Review. 5, no. 2 (1976), 134-5; John V. Orth, “The
English Combination Laws Reconsidered,” in Francis Snyder and Douglas Hays editors,
Labour, Law and Crime: An Historical Perspective (London: Tavistock, 1987) 136, 141.
42 Iorwerth Prothero Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and
His Times (London: Methuen, 1979), 172-82; John V. Orth, “The English Combination Laws
Reconsidered,”.
43 William D. Grampp, “The Economists and the Combination Laws,” Quarterly Journal of
Economics 93, no. 4 (1979): 505-6, 515.
44 As the eminent economist Nassau Senior advised the Home Office in 1831 in a report they
commissioned,
All meetings or agreements whatever for the purpose of affecting the wages or hours of
work of persons not present at the meeting, or parties to the agreement, are
conspiracies. So are all agreements for controlling a master in the management of his
business, in the persons whom he shall employ, or the machinery which he shall use.
So of course are all agreements not to work in company with any given person, or to
persuade other persons to leave their employment, or not to engage themselves. In fact
there is scarcely an act performed by any workman as a member of a trades’ union,
which is not an act of conspiracy and a misdemeanour.
Nassau Senior, Historical and Philosophical Essays, v. 2 (London: Longman, Roberts &
Green, 1865), 132.
45 Summing up the status of worker organization an action after 1825 Mark Curthoys observes,
“For nearly a half century after the repeal of the Combination Acts the liberty to combine
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continued to be restricted—in theory, if not much in practice. Governments and courts
admitted the impolicy of an outright ban on combination. But they were unwilling to
recognize unions or to remove the penalties for strikes, or threat of strikes, in all instances:
to do so would be to sanction conditions placed upon the sale of labour which might be
deemed ‘arbitrary’, ‘tyrannical’, or ‘foolish’. Such conditions were improper encroachments
upon the prerogatives of the masters, and were contrary to the broader policy that markets
should operate free from obstruction, “ Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian
Britain: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004),
235.
46 For an overview of the court system see A. H. Manchester, A Modern Legal History of
England and Wales, 1750-1950 (London: Butterworths, 1980), 160-70. Claims for wages by
workers were civil actions and therefore could be heard by Courts of Requests which were
transformed into the County Courts in 1846. It is not clear how often workers pursued
redress in the civil courts, but it was probably less than in local petty sessions given that
they frequently required additional travel to reach and the judges hearing such cases were
less prone to accept arguments concerning local customs. Fees were also higher compared
to petty sessions, Douglas Hay, “England, 1562-1875,” 105; Steinmetz, “Was There De-
Juridification,” 294, 306.
47 Price, British Society, 126, 183. As Derek Sayer argues, “Such locally developed, yet
centrally regulated, institutions of governance were arguably very much better suited to the
needs of a developing capitalism than either a more bureaucratized, or a more bourgeois-
democratic, polity might have been.”, “A Notable Administration: English State Formation
and the Rise of Capitalism,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (1992): 1407.
48 Anne Digby, “The Local State”, in E. T. J. Collins, editor, The Agrarian History of England
and Wales. v. 8, 1850-1914, Pt. 2 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1425-1464. For the important of
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the local government in economic transformation see Pat Hudson, “The Regional
Perspective,” in Pat Hudson, editor, Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial
Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5-38.
49 For the earlier history see Norma Landau. Property qualifications for county magistrates
were £100, Carolyn A. Conley, The Unwritten Law: Criminal Justice in Victorian Kent
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 17.
50 William Holdsworth, A History of English Law v. 13 (London: Methuen, 1964), 94, 235-36;
Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure Of Politics in Victorian
Cities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), 18, 150. The property qualification for a
borough magistrate was a hefty £1,000, Conley, The Unwritten Law, 17. On stipendiaries
see Stanley French, “The Early History of the Stipendiary Magistrates—I” Criminal Law
Review 12 (1965): 213-21, “ “The Further History of Stipendiary Magistrates,” Criminal Law
Review 14 (1967): 224-230, “The Early History of the Stipendiary Magistrates—II” Criminal
Law Review 12 (1965): 281-91,” “The Further History of Stipendiary Magistrates,” Criminal
Law Review 14 (1967): 269-277; Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750-1900
(London: Longman, 1987), 159; Holdsworth, A History, v. 13, 94.
51 Clive Emsley, Crime and Society, 160-61.
52 Clive Behagg, Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge,
1990); James Jaffe, The Struggle for Market Power: Industrial Relations in the British Coal
Industry, 1800-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Joyce, “Work”;
William Lazonick Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990); Sidney Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (London:
Arnold, 1965); Richard Price, "The Labour Process and History," Social History 8 (1984): 57-
75; John Rule, "The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture." in Patrick Joyce, editor,
The Historical Meaning of Work (88), 99-118; Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, "Historical
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Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century
Industrialization." Past & Present 108 (1985):133-174; Samuel, “Workshop of the World”;
Jonathan Zeitlin “Between Flexibility and Mass Production: Strategic Ambiguity and
Selective Adaptation in the British Engineering Industry, 1830-1914,” in Charles F. Sabel
and Jonathan Zeitlin, editors, Worlds of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in
Western Industrialization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 241-72.
53 The Law of the Labour Market, 37.
54 As Frank describes the relationship, “…the relationship of employment was not perceived as
one based on a contractual understanding between equal parties that conferred mutually
binding obligations and rights, but rather was one of status and subordination.”, Christopher
Frank, “’He Might Almost As Well Be Without Trial’: Trade Unions and the 1823 Master and
Servant Act—the Warrington Cases, 1846-47,” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 14
(2002): 28. A writer in the workers’ paper The Bee-Hive complained, “. . .an engagement of
service is looked on not as a contract between two parties, but as a subjection of inferior to
superior. And the breach of contract is treated as a ‘revolt,’ a kind of public offence,” The
Beehive, no. 592, Feb. 15, 1873, 1. See also Hay, “England,” 133; Steinfeld, Coercion,
Contract, and Free Labor, 52.
55 Hay and Craven, “Introduction,” 32.
56 See the evidence of the solicitor for the solicitor to the Mining Association of Great Britain,
PP 1874 [c. 1094] XXIV, 155. Deakin and Wilkinson maintain that,
the significance of the master and servant legislation lay in providing employers with a
mechanism for imposing discipline on workers who otherwise had only a loose
organizational connection to the firm, and who would often be in a position to take
advantage of labour shortages to push up wages. . . .The historical evidence suggests
that the disciplinary mechanism of the Acts was widely used as instruments of economic
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regulation during a period when modern managerial techniques had yet to develop, and
when shifts in the business cycle could lead to considerable fluctuations in the
bargaining power of employers and workers.
The Law of the Labour Market, 70-71; see also Hay, “England, 107; Christopher Frank, “’Let But
One of Them Come Before Me, and I’ll Commit Him’: Trade Unions, Magistrates, and the Law in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Staffordshire,” Journal of British Studies. 44, no. 1 (2005): 87; Steinfeld,
Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, 50; Report from the Select Committee on Master and
Servant, 1866, XIII (499), 60, 67.
57 Curthoys, Governments, Labour, and the Law, 185; Hay, “England,” 101. I explore this in
my analysis of the pottery industry, Marc W. Steinberg, “Capitalist Development, the Labor
Process and the Law: The Case of the Victorian English Pottery Industry, American Journal
of Sociology. 109, no. 2, (2003): 445-95. See also the comments of stipendiary magistrate
James E. Davis, First Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Working of
the Master and Servant Act, 1867, and The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 34 & 35 Vict.
Cap. 32. 1874 [c. 1094] XXIV, 141.
58 The “miners’ lawyer” W. P. Roberts, who successfully contested many cases, testified that
miners’ unions imposed fines on their members if they struck before the end of their
contracts to insure that the strike would not become embroiled in prosecutions, PP 1866,
XIII (499), 90. See also Malcolm Chase, “’This Tremendous Conflict Now Raging Between
Capital and Labour’: Workers’ Organisations on Teeside in the Mid-Victorian Period,” The
Bulletin of the Cleveland and Teeside Local History Society 60 (1991): 21, 24-25;
Christopher Frank, “The Defeat of the 1844 Master and Servants Bill,” in Douglas Hay and
Paul Craven, editors, Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562-
1955. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 408, 416; Douglas Hay,
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“Master and Servant in England: Using the Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries,” in Willibald Steinmetz, editor, Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial
Age: Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 251-52; Otto Kahn-Freund, "Blackstone's Neglected Child:
The Contract of Employment," Law Quarterly Review 93 (1977): 526; David Philips, "The
Black Country Magistracy 1835-60," Midland History 3, no. 3 (1976): 180; Simon, “Master
and Servant,” 171; Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor, 65; D. C. Woods, "Crime
and Society in the Black Country 1860-1900," (D. Phil, University of Aston, 1979), 332; PP
1866, XIII (499), 40.
59 The most notorious area was the Black Country in the Midlands. Frank, “’He Might Almost
As Well Be Without Trial’,” 17; Hay, “Master and Servant in England,” 231, 234, 255, 258;
Philips, "The Black Country Magistracy, 182; Simon, “Master and Servant,” 191-94;
Steinberg, “Capitalist Development” and “Unfree Labor Recruitment and Retention in
Capitalist Development: The Rise of the Victorian English Fishing Industry,” “Regular
Session. Historical Sociology: Violence, Repression and Transformation,” Annual meeting of
the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA, August 17, 2004; Woods, "Crime
and Society," 320-21, 328; PP 1866, XIII (499), 17, 34, 48, 59-60, 77; PP 1874 [1094] XXIV,
139.
60 These can be found in annual Parliamentary returns for convicts for offenses subject to
summary jurisdiction, Police—Criminal Proceedings—Prisons. Judicial Statistics. Returns.
61 He also calculates that in the late 1850s this ratio was almost 90% in some mining districts
in Staffordshire, Hay “England,” 108.
62 Simon and Wilkinson say that this was particularly the case for certain groups of skilled
workers, The Law of the Labour Market, 65.
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63 As Orth remarks, “This was, of course, the perennial dream of laissez-faire ideologues: that
a ‘general disease’ did not require a general remedy because it would—indeed, ‘must’—
‘cure itself’”, Combination and Conspiracy, 70.
64 1851 when Justice William Erle (the future head of the Royal Commission on Labour Laws
and hardly a friend of labor) ruled in two cases on the issue of conspiracy to molest and
obstruct. Charges were brought against both the local union and the leaders of the National
Association of United Trades in lieu of their efforts to dissuade both the employer and the
scab laborers he sought as replacements from continuing production. Erle’s instructions to
the jury, upheld by the Queen’s Bench, was that any effort on the part of any parties to
influence anyone other than their fellow members amounted to a conspiracy against the
employer. The cases were Regina v. Duffield and Regina v. Rowlands. In response
Parliament again legalized peaceful picketing with the Molestation of Workmen Act of 1859,
though this did not solve the larger problem of conspiracy. See John V. Orth “English Law
and Striking Workmen: The Molestation of Workmen Act, 1859,” The Journal of Legal
History 2, no. 3 (1981) 238-57; Curthoys, Governments, Labour, and the Law, 35-44. For
Erle’s view on conspiracy see “Memorandum on the Law Relating to Trade Unions,” Royal
Commission: Eleventh and Final Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Inquire
into the Organization and Rules of Trades Unions and Other Associations. XXXI [4123.],
1868-69, v. 1; Robert S. Wright, a sympathetic lawyer who helped draft much of the reform
legislation of the mid-1870s noted that before 1800 law books did not mention criminal
conspiracy of workers at all, The Law of Criminal Conspiracies and Agreements
(Philadelphia: Blackstone Publishing, 1887), 43.
65 Deakin and Wilkinson The Law of the Labour Market, 205-06; Michael J. Klarman, “The
Judges Versus the Unions: The Development of British Labor Law, 1867-1913," Virginia
Law Review, 75, no. 8 (1989): 1561.
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66 Curthoys notes that between 1853 and 1866 he has located only ten indictments of strikers
for conspiracy, for example, Governments, Labour, and the Law, 33.
67 Governments, Labour, and the Law, 38. Otto Kahn-Freund, “Legal System” in Allan
Flanders and H. A. Clegg, editors, The System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain: Its
History, Law and Institutions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), 50. See also Curthoys,
Governments, Labour, and the Law, 85.
68 The early 1870s marked a high point for union membership in part because of a robust
economy was to decline precipitously from the middle of the decade and take the fortunes
of many unions with it. H. A. Clegg, Alan Fox and A. F. Thompson, A History of British
Trade Unions Since 1889, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 1-43; W. Hamish
Fraser, Trade Unions and Society: The Struggle for Acceptance, 1850-1880 (Totowa, NJ:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 16-28; Henry Pelling A History of British Trade Unionism
(London: Macmillan, 1963) 70-77.
69 In 1867 in Hornsby v. Close the Queen’s Bench ruled that unions could not register under
the Friendly Societies Act as authorized by Parliament in 1855 because one of their
underlying goals was restraint of trade, and this threw the legality of unions in general into
question, Orth, Combination and Conspiracy, 102-3. See also Lawrence Goldman, Science,
Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857-1886
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 202; Ron Harris, “Government and the
Economy, 1688-1850,” in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, editors, The Cambridge
Economic History of Modern Britain. Volume 1: Industrialisation, 1700-1860 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 210; R. Y. Hedges and Allan Winterbottom, The Legal
History of Trade Unionism (London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1930), 41-44; Klarman, "The
Judges versus the Unions,” 1491, 1561; Michael Lobban, “Strikers and the Law, 1825-51,”
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in Peter Birks, editor, The Life of the Law: Proceedings of the Tenth British Legal History
Conference (London: The Hambledon Press, 1993), 229-31.
70 The legislation was the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1871. Curthoys, Governments,
Labour, and the Law, 142-65. For a union leader’s recollections see George Howell, Labour
Legislation, Labour Movements and Labour Leaders (London: T. Fisher, Unwin, 1905), v. 1,
182-92.
71 Kim Voss, The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class
Formation in the Nineteenth Century. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); William E.
Forbath, “Courts, Constitutions, and Labor Politics in England and America: A Study in
Constitutive Power,” Law and Social Inquiry 16, no. 1 (1991): 1-34’ and Law and the
Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1991); Victoria C. Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business
Unionism in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). See also
Catherine Fisk, "Still 'Learning Something of Legislation'; The Judiciary and the History of
Labor Law," Law and Social Inquiry, 19, no. 1 (1994): 151-86; Joel Rogers, “Divide and
Conquer: Further ‘Reflections on the Distinctive Character of American Labor Laws”
Wisconsin Law Review 1990, no. 1 (1990): 1-147; Christopher Tomlins, The State and the
Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), "Subordination, Authority, Law: subjects in
Labor History," International Review of Social History 47 ("Subordination, Authority, Law:
subjects in Labor History," International Review of Social History. 47: 56-90): 56-90 and
"How Who Rides Whom. Recent 'New' Histories of American Labour Law and What They
May Signify," Social History. 20, no. 1 (1995): 1-21.
72 Willibald Steinmetz, “Introduction: Towards a Comparative History of Legal Cultures, 1750-
1950,” in Willibald Steinmetz, editor, Private Law and Social Inequality in the Industrial Age:
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Comparing Legal Cultures in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 1-41; Fisk, "Still 'Learning Something of Legislation'”, 178;
Forbath, “Courts, Constitutions, and Labor Politics”.
73 See above n. 18; Bruce G. Carruthers, “Historical Sociology and the Economy: Actors,
Networks and Context” in Julia Adams, Elizabeth S. Clemens and Ann S. Orloff, editors,
Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005), 345; Laura Edelman and Robin Stryker, “A Sociological Approach to Law and the
Economy,” in Neil J. Smelser and Richard Swedberg, editors, The Handbook of Economic
Sociology 2nd ed. (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2005), 532.
74 For a discussion of the imprint of Fordism on social science see George Steinmetz, “The
Epistemological Unconscious of U.S. Sociology and the Transition to Post-Fordism: The
Case of Historical Sociology,” in Julia Adams, Elizabeth S. Clemens and Ann S. Orloff,
editors, Remaking Modernity: Politics, History and Sociology (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005, 109-57
75 Peter Taylor, “Places, Spaces and Macy’s: Place-Space Tensions in the Political Geography
of Modernities” Progress In Human Geography 23, no. 1 (1999): 14.
76 Philips Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State” Journal of Historical Sociology
1, no. 1 (1988 [1977]): 63, 75.
77 J.P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable” World Politics 20, no. 4 (1968): 562-63.
While Nettl and Abrams focus on the state to a considerable extent as an ideological and
cultural project I offer here a more materially-grounded analysis.
78 Charles Tilly Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1990 (Oxford: Blackwell,
1990). As Neil Brenner maintains, following Jessop, “organizational coherence, operational
cohesion, and functional unity of the state are never structurally pregiven, but can be
established only through the deployment of historically specific political changes”, Neil
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Brenner, New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 89.
79 As Brenner argues, “. . .state space in the integral sense refers to the territory-, place-, and
scale-specific ways in which state institutions are mobilized to regulate social relations and
to influence their locational geographies” Brenner, New State Spaces, 78. Similarly, Robin
Stryker argues that a comprehensive institutional analysis must investigate the ways in
which actors are enmeshed in institutional fields at multiple levels, determining possibilities
for dissonance, choice and innovation, Robin Stryker, “Mind the Gap: Institutional Analysis
and Socioeconomics,” Socio-Economic Review 1: 345. See also Erik Swyngedouw,
“Excluding the Other: The Production of Scale and Scaled Politics” in Roger Lee and Jane
Willis, editors, Geographies of Economies (London: Arnold, 1997), 167-76.
80 Jamie Peck, “Places of Work” in Eric Sheppard and Trevor J. Barnes, editors, A Companion
to Economic Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 144.
81 Ron Martin, 2003, “Institutional Approaches to Economic Geography” in Eric Sheppard and
Trevor J. Barnes, editors, A Companion to Economic Geography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
80, 84
82 Kevin Cox, “Spaces of Dependence, Spaces of Engagement and the Politics of Scale, or:
Looking for Local Politics” Political Geography 17, no. 1 (1998): 2.
83 Cox, “Spaces of Dependence,” 16.
84 For a discussion of the uneven spatial development of institutional labor control see Jamie
Peck Work-Place (New York: Guilford, 1993), 100-13
85 Brenner, New State Spaces, 10; Neil Brenner, “Between Fixity and Motion: Accumulation,
Territorial Organization and the Historical Geography of Spatial Scales,” Environment and
Planning D: Space and Society 16, no. 5 (1998): 463; Swyngedouw, “Excluding the Other,”
170; Jamie Gough, “Changing Scale as Changing Class Relations: Variety and
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Contradiction in the Politics of Scale” Political Geography 23 (2004): 185-211; David Harvey
The Limits to Capital (Chicago: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1982).
86 Sallie A. Marston “The Social Construction of Scale” Progress in Human Geography 24, no.
2 (2000): 224; Cox, “Spaces of Dependence,” 17; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly provide a
similar concept of a ‘scale shift’ mechanism in their theorizing on contentious politics, Doug
McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 331-40.
87 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 236.
88 Block, “Karl Polanyi and the Writing,” 276.