Tom Linehan here reaffirms his reputation as one of Britains foremost historians. Scabs and Traitors takes us deep into the formative class struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, uncovering the treatment afforded to those who resisted the call to collective action. An important book: wonderfully researched and engagingly written.
Professor Matthew Worley, University of Reading
This beautifully written and deeply researched monograph casts an empathetic and judicious eye over an all too often hidden aspect of modern labour history, the conflict between collectively-bound and individual workers. It is a compelling and fascinating history from a historian at the height of his powers that deserves a wide readership.
Professor Ian Thatcher, Ulster University
This volume brilliantly exposes the nature of class struggle in an industrialising British society over the course of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. Linehan reveals the ways working class communities sought to protect themselves from the perpetual threat of employers using non-union labour to undermine their livelihoods, and by extension, their families and communities. This is compulsive reading and a major addition to our understanding of the history of British trade unionism.
Dr Peter Wilkin, Brunel University
SCABS AND TRAITORS
In its broadest sense, this book is concerned with the attempt by workers in Britain during the period 17601871 to engage in collective action in circumstances of conflict with their employers during a time when the nation and many of its traditional economic structures and customary modes of working were undergoing rapid and unsettling change. More specifically, the book principally focuses on the attempt by those workers favouring a collective approach to struggle to overcome what they felt to be one of the main obstacles to collective action, the uncooperative worker. At times during these decades, the sanctions directed by collectively inclined workmen at those workers deemed to have engaged in acts contrary to the interests of the trade and customary codes of behaviour in the context of strikes and other instances of friction in the workplace were severe and uncompromising. Stern and unforgiving, too, was the struggle between the collectively inclined worker and the uncooperative worker in a more general sense, a contest that occasionally took a violent and bloody form. In exploring the fractious and hostile relationship between these two conflicting parties, this book draws on concepts and insights from a range of scholarly disciplines in an effort to shift the perception and study of this relationship beyond many of the conventional paradigms and explanatory frameworks associated with mainstream trade union studies.
Thomas Linehan is Lecturer in History, Brunel University. He is the co-editor(with John Roberts) of the Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics book series. His previous publications include Modernism and British Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan (2012), Communism in Britain, 192039: From the Cradle to the Grave. Manchester University Press (2007), British Fascism 191839: Parties, Ideology and Culture. Manchester University Press (2000), East London for Mosley: The British Union of Fascists in East London and South-West Essex 193340. Routledge (1996).
ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN RADICAL HISTORY AND POLITICS
Series editors: Thomas Linehan, Brunel University, and John Roberts, Brunel University
The series Routledge Studies in Radical History and Politics has two areas of interest. Firstly, this series aims to publish books which focus on the history of movements of the radical left. Movement of the radical left is here interpreted in its broadest sense as encompassing those past movements for radical change which operated in the mainstream political arena as with political parties, and past movements for change which operated more outside the mainstream as with millenarian movements, anarchist groups, utopian socialist communities, and trade unions. Secondly, this series aims to publish books which focus on more contemporary expressions of radical left-wing politics. Recent years have been witness to the emergence of a multitude of new radical movements adept at getting their voices in the public sphere. From those participating in the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, community unionism, social media forums, independent media outlets, local voluntary organisations campaigning for progressive change, and so on, it seems to be the case that innovative networks of radicalism are being constructed in civil society that operate in different public forms.
The series very much welcomes titles with a British focus, but is not limited to any particular national context or region. The series will encourage scholars who contribute to this series to draw on perspectives and insights from other disciplines.
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit http://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Radical-History-and-Politics/book-series/RSRHP
Titles include:
Challenging Austerity
Radical Left and Social Movements in the South of Europe
Edited by Beltrn Roca, Emma Martn-Daz and Ibn Daz-Parra
Contemporary Trotskyism
Parties, Sects and Social Movements in Britain
John Kelly
Scabs and Traitors
Taboo, Violence and Punishment in Labour Disputes in Britain, 17601871
Thomas Linehan
SCABS AND TRAITORS
Taboo, Violence and Punishment in Labour Disputes in Britain, 17601871
Thomas Linehan
First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Thomas Linehan
The right of Thomas Linehan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Linehan, Thomas P., author.
Title: Scabs and traitors : taboo, violence and punishment in labour disputes in Britain, 1760-1871 / Thomas Linehan.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge radical history and politics series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058563| ISBN 9781138926523 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138186057 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315680538 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Labor disputes--Great Britain--History--18th century. | Labor disputes--Great Britain--History--19th century. | Labor movement--Great Britain--History 18th century. | Labor movement--Great Britain--History 19th century.
