For generation upon generation, the English farm labourer lived a life of poverty and degradation. Centuries came and went, but the lives of the rural poor remained essentially unaltered. With the onset of the industrial revolution, however, new forces came into play, which were to lead to profound change across society, including the world of the poor farm labourer and yeoman farmer. As capitalism penetrated ever deeper into the countryside, tension reached breaking point. From 1830 onwards, rural England was shaken by a series of uprisings known as the "Swing". There were riots across the counties of southern and eastern England, machinery was wrecked, and farm buildings set alight. Captain Swing is the history of these uprisings, the people who made them and what subsequently became of them. It is the history of the rural poor of England and of lives without trace. And, in charting the rise and fall of the "Swing" uprisings, it is also a compelling account of the triumph of rural capitalism in the early nineteenth century. First published in 1969, Captain Swing has long been regarded as a classic work of English history.
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Classic social history of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 by two great Marxist historians.
About the Author
E.J. Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria in 1917 and educated in Vienna, Berlin, London and Cambridge. A Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with honourary degrees from universities in several countries, he taught until retirement at Birkbeck College, London, and then at the new school for social research in New York. All his books have been translated into several languages. George Rude was a distinguished historian and renowned expert on 18th-century history. In retirement he lived in Sussex until his death in 1992.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
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The Napoleonic War brought high prices for the arable farmer and full employment to the labourer. With peace came the collapse of farm income; the parish could not meet its financial obligations to the unemployed. Groups of desperate labourers burned ricks and broke threshing machines. Though there was no coalescing of rioting bands there was fear of a general uprising.
This book is of interest to those who wish to learn something of a time when the country came close to revolution; a social history of eastern and southern counties that lead to the collapse of the Poor Law. It is written by two foremost historians.
This book is of interest to those who wish to learn something of a time when the country came close to revolution; a social history of eastern and southern counties that lead to the collapse of the Poor Law. It is written by two foremost historians.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful
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Format:Paperback
This book is unashamedly Marxist. In the introduction the authors explain that one of the reasons that their book is more incisive than previous books is that they are 'more keenly aware...of the interaction between the social-economic base and the ideology of various social strata'. Their faith in Marxist economic determinism and the base-superstructure model (classically formulated in Engels' book Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) may be somewhat misplaced, but the book is nonetheless important.
The task they set themselves - 'of reconstructing the mental world of an anonymous and undocumented body of people in order to understand their movements, themselves only sketchily documented' - is a difficult one. However, these two titans of social history rise to the challenge and produce a penetrating study of this episode in the 'English farm-labourers' long and doomed struggle against poverty and degradation'. Worth reading, or re-reading if you came across it in the '70s! A real classic.
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