ABSTRACT
Discussing journeymen’s associations ‘before the unions’, Rina Lis and Hugo Soly argued against a purely symbolic interpretation of collective actions by pre-industrial artisans in defence of custom and honour, supposedly in contrast to industrial action by nineteenth-century trade unions. Journeymen often formed associations that operated like trade unions and were able to develop repertoires and negotiating techniques aimed at controlling labour supply and regulating the labour market. One of the more salient examples is the cloth shearers, who were in the forefront of industrial action in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries everywhere in western Europe. In this chapter, I first give an overview of their transnational connections and actions in several European countries. Then I focus on the proto-industrial textile region between Aachen and Liège and on the way the territorial fragmentation of these borderlands impacted upon the agitation of the shearers over the control of their labour market in the eighteenth century. My conclusion is that the cloth shearers exhibited a specific variety of ‘manufactural unionism’, associated with the period of manufacture between independent artisans and the factory age.
