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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
This paper reflects on aspects of industrial and political history in Birmingham from the 1830s to the 1930s. Its object is to consider the strategies adopted by capital and labour in response to the challenges posed by successive phases of capitalist industrialization, urbanization and bureau-cratization. A convenient way to begin is by responding critically to the approach exemplified by the work of Richard Price and Clive Behagg. Although there are differences of emphasis, Price and Behagg have both explored workshop-based craft traditions, paternalistic labour management strategies and the complex links between them. They pay attention to the broader matrix of forces surrounding industry, including the impact of political movements. However, their main concern is the implementation of specific profit-seeking strategies in the sphere of production and the responses of key social actors, especially artisans and large employers, whose interests are advanced or harmed by these strategies. The master process, implicitly at least, is capitalist industrialization as shaped by the dynamics of domestic and international competition.
1 Especially Behagg, C., Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (London, 1990)Google Scholar and Price, R., Labour in British Society. An Interpretative History (London, 1986).Google Scholar
2 Behagg and Price have drawn substantially on each other's work. See Behagg, , Politics and Production, 14, 23, 70, 91Google Scholar and Price, , Labour, ix, 230, 237, 246, 249, 250, 253, 254.Google Scholar
3 Price considers the impact of bureaucratization of industrial management, especially after 1880. However, I want to pay more attention to the significance of this process outside this sphere, for example in education and local government.
4 Some of the examples from Birmingham cited in this paper are discussed at greater length in Smith, D., ‘Capital, labour and the civic gospel: industry and politics in Birmingham 1830–1914’, in McKinlay, A. (ed.), Factory, Family and Community (Leicester, 1992).Google Scholar
5 Price cites, among others, Samuel, R., ‘The workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop Journal, 3 (1977).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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9 Ibid., 126.
10 Ibid., chapter five.
11 Labour in British Society actually takes the analysis up to 1980.
12 Labour stability was achieved in some cases (e.g. cotton spinning) by reproducing the family division of labour within the factory. Ibid., 79.
13 Ibid., 72–7, 82–6.
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15 By contrast, Sheffield was more like the first case.
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17 At least three possibilities may be envisaged: attempts to assert masculinity at work as a compensation for the undermining of patriarchy at home (early nineteenth-century Birmingham?); attempts to assert patriarchy at home as a compensation for the undermining of adult male craft solidarities at work (late nineteenth-century Birmingham?); or mutual reinforcement between established patriarchy in the household and unchallenged craft solidarity at work (early nineteenth-century Sheffield?).
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26 Behagg notes the rivalry between a radical element in the upper middle class which flirted with petit-bourgeois support and a Tory interest ‘with a far greater following and organizational framework than they have ever been really credited with in the past’ (Politics and Production, 186). He does not develop the point. For an earlier discussion of the Tory interest in Birmingham during and after the 1830s, including its links with educational and religious establishments, see Smith, , Conflict and Compromise, 92–103, 173–85.Google Scholar
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35 During the 1880s and 1890s, when collectivist programmes began to be a significant burden on the rates, the individualism of Liberal small traders reasserted itself, not least on the city council. Jones, L.J., ‘Public pursuit of private profit? Liberal businessmen and municipal politics in Birmingham, 1865–1900’, Business History, 25 (1983), 3, 240–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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51 On Austin, see Church, R., Herbert Austin. The British Motor Car Industry to 1941 (London, 1979).Google Scholar