ABSTRACT
In the past five chapters we have covered many important sectors of British working-class history—the history of strikes and the development of trade-unionism; the rise of factory agitation and the pattern of factory legislation; the excesses of early co-operation and the emergence of co-operative stores; the occurrence of violence and pleas for assistance, and so on. Furthermore, we have related these and other phenomena to one major explanatory principle, namely that the family economy of several classes of labour was undergoing a process of structural differentiation.
