Captain Swing :: essays research papers

Hobsbawm, E. J. and raw, George (1975) Captain Swing. New York, NY W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 384 pp.Captain Swing is an sweet collaboration between E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude that depicts the social history of the English verdant rent-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 usual public comes from J. L. And Barbara Hammonds The Village Laborer published in 1911. They read this an exceedingly valuable educate, but state that the Hammonds oversimplified events in order to take them. They placed too much emphasis on enclosure, oversimplified both the reputation and prevalence of the Speenham refine 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 hope 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 just ab extinct awe-inspiring episode in the English farm-labourers long and doomed struggle against destitution and degradation.In the nineteenth century, England had no peasantry to speak of in the sense that different nations did. Where families who owned or occupied their own weensy plot of land and cultivated it themselves, apart from work on their lords farms, farmed most of Europe, Englands peasants were agricultural wage-laborers. As such, both tithes and taxes hit them hard. Lords and farmers were also against tithes and taxes and tolerated or even welcomed some outcry against them. Most county leaders in 1830 agree with the laborers, but the government in London did not.Further, enclosure eliminated the common lands whose single-valued function had helped the very poor to live. As a result, the relationship between farmers and laborers changed to a purely market relationship be tween employer and proletarian. At the same time, work once done by annual servants was given over to wage labor. Farmers were driven by income rather than social concerns and it was cheaper to pay a small wage for all positions and let laborers pay their own living out of it than to provide them room and board, however minimal.The laborers were not revolutionary, however. They did not wish to plagiarise the traditional social order. They merely demanded the restoration of their meager rights within it.