ABSTRACT
When peasants and cottage labourers were forced out of the fields and their homes to work in mines, factories and, later, offices the process was often brutal. Work in these new workplaces took on new forms, as the owners strove for predictability, order and control over both the quantity and quality of labour. Their need to secure the adaptation of workers from the rhythms of agricultural and domestic work to the discipline of factory production resulted in management regimes in which fines, beatings, sackings, and all forms of harassment and abuse were the daily experience of the majority. For most peoples this is a recent phenomenon: ‘with the exception of Britain, peasants and farmers remained a massive part of the occupied population even in industrialized countries until well into the twentieth century’ (Hobsbawm, 1994, p. 289).
