ABSTRACT
Food issues became less important in the minds of the main body of industrial workers as the dynamic of industrial capitalism became revealed in its cyclical downturns of unemployment and wage cutting and pulses of technological innovation. In this transitional period, however, industrial workers were quite prepared to adopt whatever seemed the most appropriate form of collective action, be it trade unionism, petitioning Parliament, strikes, machine breaking, food riots or even plans for insurrection, to defend either their craft status or their livelihood.
