ABSTRACT
In the mid- and late 1760s England was afflicted with a rash of industrial disputes and disorders, unprecedented in their severity, which alarmed the authorities, central and local, and focused the worried attention of contemporary observers and writers on the position of labour in their society and on the condition and rights of the working poor. The important exception of coalmining, virtually all the industries into which Britain's spectacular economic progress was to be most closely keyed in the first two generations after 1783 were already registering clearly on the barometer of urban growth in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. During the first decades of George III's reign there was already an emphatic tendency for the smaller workshops to become bigger and the rural elements smaller. Sir Robert Walpole, in fact, has often been unjustly criticised by historians for taking a hard line on wage demands when his policy was perfectly in step with accepted contemporary wisdom.
