Description: Despite extensive scholarship on the social and cultural history of industrial England there is little work that explores how new forms of capitalist production were understood and normalised. Capital and Labour in Victorian England explores how accounts of industrial society evolved in the 19th century and how they inspired reform movements designed to accommodate the conflicts and contradictions that were a feature of industrial capitalism. It traces the rise of capitalist utopianism in the mid-century, and how such visions fell apart in the face of industrial unrest, organised labour, and more aggressive forms of capitalism. By the end of the century capital and labour were seen as inevitably separate, distinct and opposed - a development that sharpened class politics and shaped the way the first accounts of industrialisation were written.
Brief description: Donna Loftus is Senior Lecturer in History at The Open University, UK.