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“The Great End of All Government…”: Working People's Construction of Citizenship Claims in Early Nineteenth-Century England and the Matter of Class*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Marc W. Steinberg
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In the heat of the battle for parliamentary reform William Cobbett preached to the working people of England in his inimitable blustery dictums. “[I]f you labour honestly,” he counselled, “you have a right to have, in exchange for your labour, a sufficiency out of the produce of the earth, to maintain yourself and your family as well; and, if you are unable to labour, or if you cannot obtain labour, you have a right to maintenance out of the produce of the land […]”. For honest working men this was part of the legacy of constitutional Britain, which bequeathed to them not only sustenance but, “The greatest right […] of every man, the right of rights, […] the right of having a share in the making of the laws, to which the good of the whole makes it his duty to submit”. Nonetheless, he warned, such rights could not legitimately negate the toiling lot that was the laborer's fate: “Remember that poverty is decreed by the very nature of man […]. It is necessary to the existence of mankind, that a very large proportion of every people should live by manual labour […]”.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 40 , supplement S3: Citizenship, Identity and Social History , December 1995 , pp. 19 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1995

References

1 Two Penny Trash, 9 March 1831, p. 204.

2 Ibid. 1 November 1831, pp. 104, 109.

3 Marshall, indeed, recognized Cobbett as a key actor in the realization of civil rights, see Marshall, T. H., Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York, 1965), p. 81Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 101.

5 Ibid., p. 95.

6 Ibid., pp. 87–88, 91, 97.

7 J. M. Barbalet suggests that there is a much more complex and ambiguous relationship between social citizenship and class inequality in Marshall's work than is frequently recognized. He also notes Marshall considered industrial rights to be a fourth and secondary bundle of collective rights connected to trade unionism which workers could not pursue individually. Barbalet rightly observes that industrial rights are as fully universal and central to the construction of a citizenship status for working people as any other of the three types. He maintains that such claims are distinct from civil rights, which are essentially individualist and not collectivist in nature. However, I believe that the construction of such a fourth category of workers' rights claims can be seen as connected with the other three types of citizenship through the historical prism I sketch below. Such a fourth category for collective labor only makes sense in lieu of a history in which civil rights were first depicted through Lockean and political economy discourses. In these discourses the individuated, legally-free and propertied male was the reference point for the origination of claims. See Barbalet, J. M., Citizenship: Rights, Struggle and Class Inequality (Minneapolis, 1988), pp. 24–27Google Scholar. As Giddens argues, “economic” and “political” citizenship had to be separated in a process of state transformation. See Giddens, Anthony, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 173–174CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As I discuss below, recent work by feminists, including Ursula Vogel and Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, analyzes how the liberal social-contract model of public sphere relationships partly derived from political economy also served to sever women from the category of citizen. See Ursula Vogel, “Is Citizenship Gender-Specific”, in Vogel, Ursula (ed.), The Frontiers of Citizenship (New York, 1991), pp. 58–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Fraser, Nancy and Gordon, Linda, “Civil Citizenship Against Social Citizenship? On the Ideology of Contract-Versus-Charity”, in Steenbergen, Bert van (ed.), The Condition of Citizenship (London, 1994), pp. 90–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “ A People and a Class: Industrial Workers and the Social Order in Nineteenth-Century England”, in Bush, M. L. (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (London, 1992), pp. 199–217Google Scholar; Colley, Linda, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750–1830”, Past and Present, 113 (1986), pp. 97–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992); Somers, Margaret, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation”, Social Science History, 16 (1992), pp. 591–630CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy”, American Sociological Review, 58 (1993), pp. 587–620, and “Rights, Relationality, and Membership: Rethinking the Making and Meaning of Citizenship”, Law and Social Inquiry(1994), pp. 63–112; Vernon, James, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993)Google Scholar and “Who's Afraid of the Linguistic Turn?: The Politics of Social History and Its Discontents”, Social History, 19 (1994), pp. 81–87. Further, recent sympathetic critics conclude that Marshall is both too Anglocentric and evolutionary. See Giddens, Profiles and Critiques, pp. 171–172 and Mann, Michael, “Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship”, Sociology, 21 (1987), pp. 33–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his monograph on citizenship and capitalism Bryan S. Turner seeks to extend the analysis of the growth of rights to non-class conflicts such as those of ethnicity and gender. Though a direct dialogue with Marshall, his argument is most centrally geared to contemporary issues, see Turner, Bryan S., Citizenship and Capitalism (London, 1988)Google Scholar. Rogers Brubaker in his discussion of citizenship, territoriality and social closure also focuses on the non-class dynamics of citizenship with a particular emphasis on ethnicity, see Brubaker, Rogers, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1992)Google Scholar. Both Giddens and Mann add a geo-political dimension to which I will return in a different context. Barbalet presents perhaps the most careful and reflective critique of Marshall, though he does not take it as a central task of his monograph to foreground class and institutional processes not discussed by Marshall: see Barbalet, Citizenship.

9 Somers, “Law, Community, and Political Culture”, p. 597, and “Rights, Relationality, and Membership”, p. 73.

10 Ibid., pp. 81, 96, and Somers, “Law, Community, and Political Culture”, p. 607.

11 Ibid., p. 611.

12 Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity”, p. 612.

13 Somers, “Law, Community, and Political Culture”, p. 611, and see also “Rights, Relationality, and Membership”, p. 75.

14 Both Joyce and Vernon begrudgingly admit that production-centered languages existed. Joyce finds popular languages of labor emphasizing reciprocal rights and duties of trade membership, the respectability derived from independence and domestic life, and the moral limits of the market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, these languages do not qualify as signaling class consciousness because they did not focus on exploitation in production, nor did they disparage employers or capitalism as fundamentally evil. He also discerns a limited maturation of class consciousness in the language of late nineteenth-century workplace relations: see Joyce, Visions, pp. 57–58, 90–92, 94, 99, 100, 108–109, 336. Vernon asserts more confidently that class is a political construct that “could only ever be comprehended through language”: see Vernon, “Who's Afraid of the Linguistic Turn?”, p. 89. He maintains that the use of oppositional languages by working people is an insufficient marker of a class language and that popular political economy and cooperative and Smithian socialisms were lesser languages in the construction of shared identities: see Vernon, Politics and the People, pp. 297, 309–311, 330.

15 Joyce, Visions, pp. 8, 16–17, and see also Joyce, “A People and a Gass”, p. 202.

16 Joyce, Visions, p. 30, and see also Joyce, “A People and a Class”, p. 203.

17 Vernon, Politics and the People, p. 208, and see also pp. 328, 334–335.

18 Ibid., pp. 311–313, 316, 324–326, 331, 334–335, and “Who's Afraid of the Linguistic Turn?”, pp. 92–93.

19 Ibid., pp. 249, 312–315.

20 Colley, Britons, p. 362, and see pp. 339–340.

21 Colley, “Whose Nation?”, pp. 105–109.

22 Ibid., p. 100, and see Britons, pp. 280, 312, 337–342.

23 Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action”, pp. 607–609, “Law, Community, and Political Culture”, p. 595, and “Rights, Relationality, and Membership”, p. 71.

24 Elsewhere I analyze this as dialogic process of class conflict. Steinberg, Marc W., “The Dialogue of Struggle: The Contest Over Ideological Boundaries in the Case of London Silk Weavers in the Nineteenth Century”, Social Science History, 18 (1994), pp. 504–542CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “‘The Labour of the Country is the Wealth of the Country […]’: Class Identity, Consciousness and the Role of Discourse in the Making of the English Working Class”, International Labor and Working-Class History (forthcoming, 1996). Dialogic analysis emphasizes that subordinate groups primarily contest ruling definitions and depictions of the world through a piecemeal and contingent process of appropriating the language of power-holders for their own advantage.

25 Epstein, James, “The Constitutional Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-Century England”, Journal of Social History, 23 (1990), p. 568CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also “Rethinking the Categories of Working-Class History”, LabourlLe Travail, 18 (1986), p. 201.

26 Finn, Margot, “‘A Vent Which Has Conveyed Our Principles’: English Radical Patriotism in the Aftermath of 1848”, Journal of Modem History, 64 (1992), pp. 637–659CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993). See also Giddens, Profiles and Critiques, pp. 179–180 and Mann, “Ruling Class Strategies”, pp. 340–341.

27 In addition to these towns other significant centers for both silk throwing and the production of both broad cloth and narrow goods included Colchester, Congleton, Leek, Norwalk, Norwich, and Paisley. Additionally, the hosiery industry of the Midlands was another major producer of silk goods, though framework knitting was more detached as a trade from other forms of production. See Hertz, Gerald B., “The English Silk Industry in the Eighteenth Century”, English Historical Review, 24 (1909), pp. 710–727CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Porter, George R., A Treatise on the Origin, Progressive Improvement, and Present State of the Silk Manufacture (London, 1831)Google Scholar; and Warner, Frank, The Silk Industry in the United Kingdom: Its Origin and Development (London, 1921)Google Scholar.

28 Unlike the other centers, production in Macclesfield was often organized in weaving sheds appended to the throwing mills which had spurred the cloth trade: see Davies, C. S., A History of Macclesfield (Manchester, 1961), p. 133Google Scholar.

29 For an analysis of women's employment in silk mills see Lown, Judy, Women and Industrialization: Gender at Work in Nineteenth-Century England (Minneapolis, 1990)Google Scholar. The male weavers of Spitalfields had tried to prevent women from entering the trade in the 1790s, but ultimately the tug of the domestic budget overcame male exclusion. In 1811 parliament passed an act extending wage protection to women. By the 1820s girls were regularly apprenticed outside their own families. One Spitalfields weaver, thoroughly disgruntled with women at the loom, estimated that female labor comprised one-third of his trade. Except for the relatively rare cases in which a widow sought to scratch out a living as a weaver the male head of the household bargained with the manufacturer for piece rates on behalf of his dependents. See Parliamentary Papers [hereafter PP] (Commons) 1835 [572] VII, pp. 10–11; PP (Commons) 1818 [211] IX, pp. 44, 148; PP (Lords), 1823 [57] CLVI, pp. 5, 56, 62, 102, 126–128; W.M. Jordan, “The Silk Industry in London, 1760–1830, with Special Reference to the Conditions of the Wage-Earners and the Policy of the Spitalfields Acts” (M.Litt., University of London, 1931), p. 12; Pinchbeck, Ivy, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1780–1850 (London, 1969), pp. 168, 176–177Google Scholar; Trades' Newspaper, 23 October 1825, 23 February 1828.

30 PP (Commons) 1832 [678] XIX, pp. 153, 210, 741, 811, 834, 936–937; PP (Commons) 1833 [690] VI, pp. 295–296; PP (Lords) 1823 [57] CLVI, pp. 5, 186; Hansard's Parliamentary Debates [hereafter Hansard's], New Series, 10 (1824), c. 1312; ibid., 14 (1826), c. 757, Hansard's Third Series, 10 (1832), c. 1030; An Account of the Proceedings of the Committees of the Journeymen Silk Weavers of Spitalfields; in the Legal Defence of the Acts of Parliament, Granted to their Trade […] (London, 1823), p. 59; Davies, Maccles-field, p. 133; Porter, A Treatise on the Origin, p. 80; Searby, Peter, “Paternalism, Disturbance and Parliamentary Reform: Society and Politics in Coventry, 1819–32”, International Review of Social History, 22 (1977), pp. 198–225, 200, 206CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Relief of the Poor in Coventry, 1830–1863”, The Historical Journal, 20 (1977), p. 346; Warner, The Silk Industry, p. 152.

31 PP (Commons) 1834 [36] XXXV, App. 2, B. 2, Pt. 1, pp. 83ff.; PP (Commons) 1817 [642] VI, p. 31; Tower Hamlets Library, Local History Collection, London, Christ Church ' Spitalfields Vestry Minute Books, 1828–1831; McCann, Phillip “Popular Education, Socialization, and Social Control: Spitalfields 1812–1824”, in McCann, Phillip (ed.), Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1977), p. 3Google Scholar; Sidney, and Webb, Beatrice, English Local Government From the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Parish and the County (London, 1906), pp. 79–90Google Scholar; Trades' Free Press, 22 January 1826, p. 435; 29 January 1826, p. 455; 3 June 1827, p. 373; 14 February 1829.

32 Prest, John, The Industrial Revolution in Coventry (Oxford, 1960), p. 52Google Scholar.

33 British Library, London, Francis Place Collection of Pamphlets and Newspaper Clippings [hereafter Place Coll.], Set 16, v. 2, “Silk”, f. 6; Prest, Coventry, pp. 28, 53, 55, 59, 69; Searby, Peter, “‘Lists of Prices’ in the Coventry Silk Industry, 1800–1860”, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 27 (1973)Google Scholar, and “Paternalism, Disturbance and Parliamentary Reform”, pp. 207–209, and “The Relief of the Poor”, p. 347.

34 Davies, Macclesfield, pp. 133, 189; Warner, The Silk Industry, pp. 133–134; PP (Lords) 1823 [57] CLVI, p. 55; Place Coll., Set 16, v. 2, “Silk”, ff. 36, 44, 48.

35 PP (Commons) 1832 [678] XDC, pp. 203, 408; PP (Commons) 1833 [690] VI, p. 306; Bythell, Duncan, The Handloom Weavers (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 260–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Hertz, “The English Silk Industry”, p. 727; Hansard's, New Series, 5 (1826), c. 736 737.

37 Bland, A.E., Brown, P.A. and Tawney, R.H. (eds), English Economic History: Select Documents (New York, 1919), pp. 547–551Google Scholar; Clapham, J. H., “The Spitalfields Acts 1773–1824”, Economic Journal, 26 (1916)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Plummer, Alfred, The London Weavers' Company 1600–1970 (London, 1972), pp. 328–329Google Scholar; PP (Commons) 1818 [211] DC, p. 190; PP (Lords) 1823 (57) CLVI; Letters, Taken from Various Newspapers, Tending to Injure the Journeymen Silk Weavers of Spitalfields, with and Attack against the Acts of Parliament, Regulating the Prices of Their Work […] (London, 1818); Gordon, Barry, Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism 1824–1830 (London, 1979), p. 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansard's, New Series, 9 (1823), c. 146–149. See also An Account, for a partial history of the weavers' defense.

38 For the Tories and political economy see Dean, Mitchell, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London, 1991)Google Scholar; Gordon, Economic Doctrine'; Hilton, Boyd, Com, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar, and The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988). A.C. Howe argues that the City merchants largely stayed aloof from the debates over protection debates during the 1820s despite the famous address to the Commons in 1820 in support of free trade: see Howe, A.C., “Free Trade and the City of London, c. 1820–1870”, History, 251 (1992), pp. 391–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While this may be true, the advocacy of the large silk manufacturers is quite clear. William Hale, an old manufacturer and friend of the weavers, told a Lords committee on the trade that the fancy goods manufacturers believed “that the Disposition of the Government is with us, and that the Eyes of the Country are open to the better principles of Political Economy […]”, PP (Lords) 1823 [57] CLVI, p. 28.

39 Hansard's, New Series, 9 (1823), c. 148–149.

40 For the classic analysis of possessive individualism see Macpherson, C.B., The Political Tlieory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar. For a discussion of doux commerce see Hirschman, Albert O., “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble?”, Journal of Economic Literature, 20 (1982), pp. 1464–1466Google Scholar.

41 Observations on the Ruinous Effects of the Spitalfields Acts to the Silk Manufacture of London: to Which is Added a Reply to Mr. Hole's Appeal to the Public in Defence of the Act (London, 1822), p. 66.

42 Corrigan, Phillip and Sayer, Derek, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 1985), pp. 116–119, 133, 149–150Google Scholar. Corrigan and Sayer's emphasis on the process of cultural individuation echoes the classic statement by Karl Polanyi noted many decades ago on the rise of the liberal creed. Nancy Fraser more recently parallels their observations on gender and state-making when she argues that the development of social welfare policies contains a highly masculine tint on concept of social citizenship. See Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1944), p. 163Google Scholar and Fraser, Nancy, Unruly Practices: Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis, 1989), pp. 151–152Google Scholar.

43 British Public Record Office, Kew Gardens [hereafter PRO] Home Office Papers [hereafter H.O.] 44/18, W. Merry to Wellington, 8 May 1829; see also Place Coll., Set 16, v. 2, “Silk”, f. 32.

44 PRO H.O. 40/24, 10 August 1829, Whatton to Peel, ff. 110–111: Hansard's, New Series, 10 (1826), c. 756–757, 21 (1829), c. 748–749, 864; Hansard's, Third Series, 10 (1832), c. 923–924; PP (Commons) 1832 [678] XIX, pp. 62, 66, 341, 387–389, 476, 479, 732; PP (Commons) 1834 [556] X, pp. 4, 324; PP (Commons) 1834 [44] XXIX, App. A, Pt. m, pp. 107a, 109a; Prout, John, Practical View of the Silk Trade (Macclesfield, 1829), p. 23Google Scholar.

45 See Tilly, Charles, “Britain Creates the Social Movement”, in Cronin, James and Schneer, Jonathan (eds), Social Conflict and Political Order in Modern Britain (New Brunswick, 1982), p. 25Google Scholar.

46 See Belchem, John, “Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform”, Social History, 6 (1981), pp. 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Orator Hunt”: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford, 1985); Behagg, Clive, Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1990)Google Scholar; and Parssinen, T.M., “Association, Convention, and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848”, English Historical Review, 88 (1973), pp. 504–533CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 For accounts of the repeal of the statues see Deny, T.K., “The Repeal of the Apprentice-ship Clauses of the Statute of Apprentices”, Economic History Review, Second Series, 3 (1931), pp. 67–87Google Scholar; Prothero, Iowerth, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (London, 1979)Google Scholar; and Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966)Google Scholar.

48 Trades' Newspaper, 23 February 1828, p. 246.

49 For Gast's view and the resolutions of the General Association see Trades' Newspaper, 16 April 1826, pp. 635–636, 11 February 1827, pp. 242–243 and 25 February 1827, p. 259. On 6 June alone the Commons was presented with a dozen petitions from around the country for a wage regulation bill: see Journal of the House of Commons, 82 (1823), p. 523. On e of the most vocal advocates was William Longson, who served as member of the Stockport silk weavers trade committee. Longson conducted a protracted debate with Francis Place in the pages of the Bolton Chronicle during the petition drives (Place Coll., Set 16, v. 1, ff. 13, 24, 183, 278, v. 2, “Cotton”, ff. 5, 13, 17, 24, 34, 46).

50 Thompson, The Making, p. 295.

51 Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1990), p. 19Google Scholar.

52 Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995), esp. ch. 8Google Scholar.

53 Ibid., p. 159.

54 Clark also suggests that libertine ultra-radicalism of the London underground was highly misogynist in its discourse, and precluded women from participation and dampened a more gender inclusive understanding of the people, though this was ultimately displaced by the chivalrous ideal. See ibid., pp. 153, 174.

55 Vogel, “Is Citizenship Gender-Specific?”, pp. 62, 71–75, and Fraser and Gordon, “Civil Citizenship Against Social Citizenship?”, pp. 95–99. For the marginal positioning of women in liberal moral theory see Smith, Ruth and Valenze, Deborah H., “Mutuality and Marginality: Liberal Moral Theory and Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-Century England”, Signs, 13 (1988), pp. 277–298CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 142. See also Pateman, Carloe, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988)Google Scholar.

57 See Valenze, Deborah, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford, 1995), pp. 129–130, 138–139Google Scholar. Diane Willen's work on women and poor relief in early modern England demonstrates that this was at variance with earlier conceptions of women's capacity to act as independent members of the public sphere. In an analysis of the role of women in dispensing relief in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London and Norwich she shows that women were presumed to have competence to care for the poor, were trusted to engage in transactions for their support and were remunerated (albeit poorly) for their efforts. Willen argues that this participation was founded on an understanding of the private and public spheres that provided a bridge between the two for women. See Willen, Diane, “Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Case of the Urban Working Poor”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 19 (1988), pp. 559–575CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 For discussions of the development of distinctive working-class discourses, particularly in relation to political economy, see Claeys, Gregory, Machinery, Money, and the Millennium: From Moral Economy, to Socialism, 1815–1850 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar, and Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British. Socialism (Cambridge, 1989); Horne, Thomas A., Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605–1834 (Chapel Hill, 1990)Google Scholar; Prothero, Artisans and Politics; Randall, Adrian, “New Languages or Old? Labour, Capital, and Discourse in the Industrial Revolution”, Social History, 14 (1990), pp. 195–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smail, John, “New Languages for Labour and Capital: The Transformation of Discourse in the Early Years of the Industrial Revolution”, Social History, 12 (1987), pp. 49–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “New Languages? Yes Indeed: A Reply to Adrian Randall”, Social History, 16 (1991), pp. 217–222; Thompson, N.W., The People's Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816–34 (Cambridge, 1984)Google Scholar, and The Market and Its Critics: Socialist Political Economy in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1988). For works that uphold class interpretations of radicalism in lieu of the new revisionism see Ashcraft, Richard, “Liberal Political Theory and Working-Class Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century England”, Political Theory, 21 (1993), pp. 249–272CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Belchem, John, Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience, 1750–1900 (Portland, OR, 1990)Google Scholar; Epstein, James, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England: 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar; Kirk, Neville, “In Defense of Class. A Critique of Recent Revisionist Writing Upon The Nineteenth-Century English Working Class”, International Review of Social History, 32 (1987), pp. 2–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Steinberg, “The Labour of the Country”.

59 For the constitutional idiom see Epstein, Radical Expression; Thompson, The Making; and Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Pristine Culture of Capitalism (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

60 British Library, Add. MSS 27805, Powell, John, A Letter Addressed to Weavers, Shop-keepers, and Publicans, on the Great Value of the Principle of the Spitalfields Acts: In Opposition to the Absurd and Mischievous Doctrines of the Advocates for their Repeal (London, 1824), pp. 2–3Google Scholar.

61 Powell, A Letter, p. 5.

62 For Rule's discussion of the property of skill see Rule, John, “The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture”, in Joyce, Patrick (ed.), The Historical Meaning of Work (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 99–118Google Scholar. For the link between labor as property and constitution see James Epstein, “The Constitutional Idiom”, p. 565.

63 For the use of Locke see Report Adopted at a General Meeting of the Journeymen Broad Silk Weavers, […] to take into their Consideration the Necessity of Petitioning the Legislature for a Wage Protection Bill […] To which is Appended, The Petition (London, 1828), pp. 12–14.

64 ibid., p. 14.

65 ibid., p. 7, emphasis in the original.

66 Trades' Newspaper, 9 July 1826, p. 829.

67 ibid., 26 April 1828, p. 315.

68 Place Coll., Set 16, v. 1, f. 13.

69 Report, p. 35.

70 PP (Commons) 1832 [678] XIX, p. 734.

71 As Clark argues military prowess had long been linked to citizenship claims. See Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 143, 163.

72 PP (Lords) 1823 [57] CLVI, p. 30.

73 An Account, p. 45. For other statements linking patriotic duties with rights see 'also ibid., pp. 28–29 and Place Coll., Set 16, v. 2, “Silk”, f. 66 for an October 1826 address.

74 Trades' Newspaper, 9 July 1826, p. 828.

73 Ibid., 15 April 1827, p. 313.

76 Voice of the People, 29 January 1831.

77 See Cunningham, Hugh, “The Language of Patriotism, 1750–1914”, History Workshop, 12 (1981), pp. 8–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though he disagrees with some of Cunningham's analysis Miles Taylor, in his analysis of the changing image of John Bull, comes to conclusions which similarly support my argument. He maintains that, “[…] in order to understand the transformation of patriotism we need to analyze those political arguments or contexts of which patriotism was a component part, rather than focus our attention on the historical origins of those phenomena – such as race and nationalism – with which patriotism has become inextricably associated in the twentieth century”. See Taylor, Miles, “John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c. 1712–1929”. Past and Present, 134 (1992), p. 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the silk weavers patriotism was not an unconditional devotion to King and state, but predicated on the protection that power provided the poor.

78 See Hobsbawm, Nations, p. 25. Barbalet perceptively observes that “Another important although frequently ignored factor in any account of the expansion of national citizenship is the condition of the international order”: Barbalet, Citizenship, p. 35. He emphasizes that the international as a realm of threat to national rulers usually serves as a trigger for repression, though it can lead to an inclusive reformism and the extension of rights.

79 See for example Huskisson's, speech during a debate on renewing protection in 1826, Hansard's, New Series, 14 (1826), c. 763–808Google Scholar.

80 Free trade advocates in the silk trade debates often confidently asserted that British capital, if unfettered in the world market, would triumph over its competitors. Typical is the sentiment of Charles Grant, vice-president of the Board of Trade, who declared in an 1826 Commons debate that “The superior capital of this country would sure to be victorious, under circumstances equally advantageous”, Hansard's, New Series, 14 (1826), c. 845. That this was a developing bourgeois nationalism can be seen in the glossing of the tension between the inherent superiority of the British and the supposed blindness of markets to national origin.

81 Trades' Newspaper, 2 April 1826. See also Pymlot, J., Strictures on the Wisdom and Policy of the Present Measures Relative to the Importation of Silk (Macclesfield, 1826), p. 7Google Scholar.

82 Trades' Newspaper, 12 February 1826, p. 486, emphasis in the original. In a recent essay Jurgen Habermas argues that inclusive citizenship claims defined by nationalism stand in tension with the liberal social-contract ontology of the citizen as external to the state: see Jurgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity”, in van Steenbergen, The Condition of Citizenship, pp. 25–26. While this contradiction may predominate in the annals of theoretical political debate, the case of the weavers' claims-making suggests that the relationship between nationalist and social-contract discourses is more historically mutable and based in contemporary social conflicts.

83 See Rose, Sonya O.,“‘Gender at Work’: Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism”, History Workshop, 21 (1986), pp. 113–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992), and “Gender and Labour History: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy”, in van der Linden, Marcel (ed.), The End of Labour History? (International Review of Social History, 38 (1993), Supplement), pp. 145–162Google Scholar; Clark, Anna, “The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, an d Class in the 1830s and 1840s”, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), pp. 62–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Struggle for the Breeches; Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1983)Google Scholar. For additional work on masculinity and factory work see Freifeld, Mary, “Technological Change and the Self-Acting Mule: a Study of Skill and the Sexual Division of Labour”, Social History, 11 (1986), pp. 319–343CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morgan, Carol E., “Women, Work and Consciousness in the Mid-nineteenth-century English Cotton Industry”, Social History, 17 (1992), pp. 23–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Valverde, Marianna, “‘Giving the Female a Domestic Turn’: The Social, Legal an d Moral Regulation of Women's Work in British Cotton Mills, 1820–150”, Journal of Social History, 21 (1988), pp. 619–634CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For material on the Factory Acts see Gray, Robert, “Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs in the North of England, 1830–1860”, Gender and History, 5 (1993), pp. 56–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and on skill and masculinity see McClelland, Keith, “Some Thoughts on Masculinity and the ‘Representative Artisan’ in Britain, 1850–1915”, Gender and History, 1 (1989), pp. 164–177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

84 See Clapham, “The Spitalfields Acts”, p. 462.

85 Clark, “The Rhetoric”, p. 83. As Barbara Taylor and Dorothy Thompson argue, this discourse of domesticity was not simply passively accepted by working-class women, but was actively negotiated to find avenues of participation among increasingly narrowed options: see Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 80–81, 112, and Thompson, Dorothy, “Women, Work and Politics in Nineteenth-Century England: The Problem of Authority”, in Rendall, Jane (ed.), Equal or Different: Women's Politics 1800–1914 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 64–65Google ScholarPubMed. Deborah Valenze analyzes how the emergent discourse of middle-class domesticity opened working-class life to the prognostications of middle-class moralists and reformers: see Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 141–154.

86 Trades' Newspaper, 9 July 1826, pp. 828–829. For similar statements of the breadwinner role see Trades' Free Press, 2 July 1826 and 13 May 1827: Weekly Free Press, 3 May 1828. The Spitalfields weavers used this. middle-class model of patriarchal authority in the household to contend that inadequate wages would lead to the moral collapse of the nation, see Report Adopted at a General Meeting, pp. 9–11.

87 Place Coll., Set 16, v. 2, “Silk”, f. 153.

88 Arthur Armitage, “The Spitalfields Weaver” (n.d.), Tower Hamlets Library, Local History Collection, L.P. 1644 680.2 (n.d.), p. 265.

90 Place Coll., Set. 16, v. 2, “Silk”, f. 18.