Peter Linebaugh

Laboring People in Eighteenth-Century England

These three books are important contributions to 18th century English social and labor history. They conveniently summarize a large amount of material, and each in its own way provides something of an interpretation of the period. Let us discuss each in turn. The single greatest strength of Dobsons study is that it has chronicled to an extent not done before the record of disturbances and disputes between employees and employers in 18th century England. Against those older historians such as the Hammonds, the Webbs, and G.D.H. Cole as well as the more recent tendency which stresses the harmony of paternalist relations between the social classes, Dob sons chronical is a useful corrective. It should be enlightening to all of those who regard the wage struggle as belonging only to the period of factory production. Dobson is a numerologist. His chronicle is most succinctly presented in the Appendix which lists all the labor disputes that hes discovered between 1717 and 1800. The list is a summary of his reading of the London press available in the Burney collection of the British Library. The list should not be taken to be compre hensive, suggestive though it is, because Dobson does not tell us how he read the press (what newspapers? what periods? how systematically?) nor if he searched many of the provincial newspapers such as Berrows Worcester Journal, The Sher borne Mercury, or Jackson*s Oxford Journal, all of which often contained news of strikes not mentioned in the London press. Exhaustive quantifiers may moan about this and then go and add to his list. Perhaps they will add to it significantly. Let us hope that they do. Meanwhile, some of his findings may be mentioned. In tables interfoliated with his text he analyzes the disputes by occupation, by twenty-year periods, by the primary issue at dispute, and by region. A table of

The Essential E.P. Thompson, edited by Dorothy Thompson. New Press: New York, 2001. x + 498 pp.

For Aristotle identifying the essence of something was a step to its classification, and thus the genre to which it belonged. For Leibniz every individual thing had an essence, and thus it established specific difference. Who was the essential E.P. Thompson, one of a kind or a type? The vogue in America was to speak of the British Marxist historians, or English social history as a genre.