Introduction

When considering the industrial revolution in Europe and the labour movements to which it gave rise, it is customary to think in Anglo-European, or more precisely Anglo-French terms. Britain was master of the first industrial revolution based on coal and cotton, so tradition has it, while French thinkers such as Proudhon, Saint-Simon, and Louis Blanc provided the intellectual analysis upon which the first rational critiques of the new industrialism were built. Yet an equally suggestive – if less orthodox – way of approaching the history of the labour movement, at least in the English-speaking world, can be obtained through an Anglo-American rather than through an Anglo-European form of analysis. This is partly for reasons to do with similarities in language, customs, and law. Anglo-American traditions with regard to the legality of strikes, picketing, and other trade-union practices, which differed markedly between Great Britain and the French Napoleonic Code on which most continental labour law was based, were similar on both sides of the Atlantic.

This approach is also plausible because, although quite different in other regions, the process of American industrialization as it occurred between 1815 and 1840 in New England, in the Ohio valley and to some extent in the mid-Atlantic states, was quite similar to that which had taken place in Lancashire, in Yorkshire and the English Midlands not many years before. As a result, it has been argued by one scholar that the growth and character of the American labour movement can best be seen as developing along similar lines to those adopted in Great Britain, save that major advances in the American movement followed along approximately one generation behind the British.