Introduction

Robert Owen was born on 14 May 1771 in Newtown, Wales, the youngest but one of seven children. He is also associated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto, which disparaged his philosophies as an idealistic, “utopian” forerunner to their own, “scientific” socialism. Though Owen believed that industrialisation and the advent of the factory system held tremendous economic promise, he also feared that they had widened social divisions – between employer and worker, town and country, men and women – thus posing an unprecedented threat on the nation’s peace and long-term prosperity. Owenism was officially launched in May 1831, when the First Co-operative Congress brought together the delegates from 250 co-operative societies who publicly declared their support for Owen’s social system. By 1840, the Owenite movement had a total of fifty branches, located mostly in traditional centres of working-class political activity like London, Birmingham, the North of England and Glasgow, as well as one outpost in New York.