Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian Britain: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s
After the repeal of the Combination Acts in the 1820s, collective labour enjoyed limited freedoms. When that regime collapsed under judicial challenge during the 1860s, governments were obliged to devise a new legal frameworks for trade unions and strikes. This study traces how, in adjudicating between opposing conceptions of 'free trade' and 'free labour', official opinion came to favour an unrestricted freedom to combine, and sought to withdraw the criminal law from industrial relations. It...
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This book explains why governments decided to make trade unions legal, and protect strikers from the criminal law. Drawing on previously unused source material, Curthoys brings to light some of the workings of the nineteenth-century state.
1After the Combination Acts152'Under sufferance' : unions outside the law, 1825-1866453Union funds, free labour, and the franchise654Reconciling unions and the law895Trade unions legalized1176The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 18711427The gas stokers' case and the freedom to strike1668Reforming labour law, 1873-18741899'The workmen's victory?208Conclusion : combination and the liberal state235
