Captain Swing
Captain Swing is an enjoyable collaboration between E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude that depicts the social history of the English agricultural wage-laborers' uprising of 1830. According to Hobsbawm and Rude, historiography of the laborers' rising of 1830 is negligible. Most of what is known by the general public comes from J. L. And Barbara Hammond's The Village Laborer published in 1911. They consider this an exceedingly valuable work, but state that the Hammonds oversimplified events in order to dramatize them. They placed too much emphasis on enclosure, oversimplified both the nature and prevalence of the "Speenhamland System" of poor relief, and neglected the range and scope of the uprising. Hobsbawm and Rude do not claim to present any new data, and believe that the Hammonds will still be read for enjoyment, but believe that by asking different questions, they can shed new light on the social history of the movement. Therefore, this book tries to "describe and analyze the most impressive episode in the English farm-labourers' long and doomed struggle against poverty and degradation." In the nineteenth century, England had no peasantry to speak of in the sense that other nations did. Where families who owned or occ
The defeat of the 1830 rising did not end the laborers' efforts, however. While some might claim that the failure of the revolt plunged the laboring class into dumb acquiescence, Hobsbawm and Rude argue that it woke the farmers and nobility to the inner strength of their hitherto silent workers. The laborers were not revolutionary, however. They did not wish to overturn the traditional social order. They merely demanded the restoration of their meager rights within it. Unfortunately, they only had five forms of protest or self-defense available to them. They occasionally protested against wage cuts or demanded higher wages, grasped ever tighter to parish poor relief, resorted to crimes such as stealing food or poaching game, performed acts of terrorism such as incendiarism, and destroyed the machines which created or intensified unemployment. Threshing machines took away the standard winter labor, creating high unemployment at the worst time of year and generating an almost universal hatred of them among laborers. Of these, the most ambitious was the destruction of threshing machines, but poaching was most indicative of increasing social tensions in the villages. Theoretically, political devices such as petitions and delegations were available tools as well, but agricultural wage-laborers had neither political rig
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Approximate Word count = 898
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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