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Transformations of Labour and The London Hanged: A reply to Paul Carter

Transformations of Labour and The London Hanged: A reply to Paul Carter Transformations of Labour and The London Hanged: A reply to Paul Carter LEONARD SCHWARZ I am grateful to Paul Carter for giving me the opportunity to expand my all too brief comments on The London Hanged. 1 I entirely agree with him the book's importance. What I wish to discuss are two of its principal themes: the elimination of perquisites and the resultan t creation of a working population that depended overwhelmingly on a money wage. The pervasiveness of perquisites - traditional rights - for all classes in eighteenth-century England is well established. So is the growth of a wage- earning population. The relationship between the two is a complex matter largely because so little evidence has survived. Perquisites only emerge when the perpetra- tors are prosecuted - in other words when the perquisite is under attack. During the earlier years of the eighteenth century there were not many such attacks; by the last decade or two there were many. Does this mean, as Linebaugh suggests, that the law (and particularly the death penalty) were being used in a systematic and forceful manner to force the capital's wage earners into an entire dependence upon the money wage? Maybe there http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present Taylor & Francis

Transformations of Labour and The London Hanged: A reply to Paul Carter

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References (2)

Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 1998 Maney Publishing
ISSN
1749-6322
eISSN
0305-8034
DOI
10.1179/ldn.1998.23.1.63
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Transformations of Labour and The London Hanged: A reply to Paul Carter LEONARD SCHWARZ I am grateful to Paul Carter for giving me the opportunity to expand my all too brief comments on The London Hanged. 1 I entirely agree with him the book's importance. What I wish to discuss are two of its principal themes: the elimination of perquisites and the resultan t creation of a working population that depended overwhelmingly on a money wage. The pervasiveness of perquisites - traditional rights - for all classes in eighteenth-century England is well established. So is the growth of a wage- earning population. The relationship between the two is a complex matter largely because so little evidence has survived. Perquisites only emerge when the perpetra- tors are prosecuted - in other words when the perquisite is under attack. During the earlier years of the eighteenth century there were not many such attacks; by the last decade or two there were many. Does this mean, as Linebaugh suggests, that the law (and particularly the death penalty) were being used in a systematic and forceful manner to force the capital's wage earners into an entire dependence upon the money wage? Maybe there

Journal

The London Journal: A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present – Taylor & Francis

Published: May 1, 1998

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