ABSTRACT

Revisionist interpretations of the industrial revolution carry interesting implications for the understanding of trade unions. The emphasis upon continuity rather than discontinuity across the threshold of industrialization reinforces the case for treating 'pre-industrial' workers' associational life seriously as part of the history of trade unionism. The evolution of trade societies also has to be considered against the background of changes in the rewards to labour. Urbanization was the dynamic that carried Britain, and in particular England, into forms of society and economic activity hitherto unknown. Restrictive aspects of continuing guild control of the labour market were often ameliorated by ancillary journeymen's clubs. Apprenticeship was more than an education: it made men of boys and it was intended to define status as surely as did the possession of land elsewhere on the social scale. Tramping and box clubs closely bound early trade societies to the public house.