E-Books →England's Great Transformation Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution

England's Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution by Marc W. Steinberg
English | April 4, 2016 | ISBN: 022632981X, 022632995X | True EPUB | 256 pages | 1 MB
With England's Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi's landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line.