Protest Movements

The early decades of industrialisation coincided with the spread of new political ideas pioneered by the French Revolution ( - ). The movements for ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ showed the possibilities of collective mass action, both in creating democratic institutions like the French parliamentary assemblies of the 1790s, and in checking the worst hardships of war by controlling the prices of necessities like bread. In England, political protest against the harsh working conditions in factories kept increasing, and the working population agitated to be given the right to vote. The government reacted by repression and by new laws that denied people the right to protest.

England had been at war with France for a long time – from to . Trade between England and Europe was disrupted, factories were forced to shut down, unemployment grew and the price of essential items of food, like bread and meat, soared to heights beyond the level of average wages. Parliament in passed two Combination Acts which made it illegal to ‘incite the people by speech or writing to hatred or contempt of the King, Constitution or Government’; and banned unauthorised public meetings of over persons. Protest, nonetheless, continued against ‘Old Corruption’.

This term was used for privileges linked to the monarchy and Parliament. Members of Parliament – landowners, manufacturers and professionals – were opposed to giving the working population the right to vote. They supported the Corn Laws, which prevented the import of cheaper food until prices in Britain had risen to a certain level. As workers flooded towns and factories, they expressed their anger and frustration in numerous forms of protest.

There were bread or ACTIVITY Discuss the effects of early industrialisation on British towns and villages, and compare these with similar situations in India. food riots throughout the country from the 1790s onwards. Bread was the staple item in the diet of the poor and its price governed their standard of living. Stocks of bread were seized and sold at a price that was affordable and morally correct rather than at the high prices charged by profit-hungry traders.

Such riots were particularly frequent in the worst year of the war, , but they continued until the 1840s. Another cause of hardship was the process known as ‘enclosure’ – by which, from the 1770s, hundreds of small farms had been merged into the larger ones of powerful landlords. Poor rural families affected by this had sought industrial work. But the introduction of machines in the cotton industry threw thousands of handloom weavers out of work and into poverty, since their labour was too slow to compete with machines.

From the 1790s, these weavers began to demand a legal minimum wage, which was refused by Parliament. When they went on strike, they were dispersed by force. In desperation, in Lancashire, cotton weavers destroyed the powerlooms which they believed had destroyed their livelihood. There was also resistance to the introduction of machines in the woollen knitting industry in Nottingham; protests also took place in Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

In Yorkshire, shearing-frames were destroyed by croppers, who had traditionally sheared sheep by hand. In the riots of , farm labourers found their jobs threatened by the new threshing machines that separated the grain from the husk. The rioters smashed these machines. Nine of them were hanged and were sent to Australia as convicts (see Theme ).

The movement known as Luddism ( - ), led by the charismatic General Ned Ludd, exemplified another type of protest. Luddism was not merely a backward-looking assault on machines. Its participants demanded a minimum wage, control over the labour of women and children, work for those who had lost their jobs because of the coming of machinery, and the right to form trade unions so that they could legally present these demands. During the early years of industrialisation, the working population possessed neither the vote nor legal methods to express their anger at the drastic manner in which their lives had been overturned.

In August , , people gathered peacefully at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester to claim democratic rights – of political organisation, of public meetings, and of the freedom of the press. They were suppressed brutally in what became known as the Peterloo* Massacre and the rights they demanded were denied by the Six Acts, passed by Parliament the same year. These extended the restrictions on political activity introduced in the two Combination Acts of . But there were some gains.

After Peterloo, the need to make the House of Commons more representative was recognised by liberal political groups, and the Combination Acts were repealed in - . *This name was made up to rhyme with ‘Waterloo’; the French army had been defeated at Waterloo in .