ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the efforts by those workers favouring a collective approach to struggle to overcome what they felt to be one of the principal obstacles to collective action, the uncooperative worker. It considers the implication for the wages and livelihoods of Britain's labouring classes arising from the shift from a relatively regulated pre-industrial economy to the more de-regulated industrialised market economy of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. The book looks at the various efforts of unionised workmen to shore up their defensive structures and networks against potential acts of disloyalty or betrayal in this era of rapid and unsettling economic change. It addresses the issue of those workers who refused to obey the initial call to arms once battle had been joined with the adversary, or who broke ranks and fled the field of battle once hostilities had got underway.
