J.P.D. Dunbabin's Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain has long been a standard text for those trying to get their heads around the period and understand the dynamics of the struggles and their links to economic policies. I picked it up recently to read in preparation for a talk about Joseph Arch and I was impressed by several of the essays. The book is at its best in covering the struggles around trade unionism. While the book is authored by Dunbabin, two of the chapters are written by other authors, both giants in the field of rural history - Pamela Horn and A.J.Peacock. Peacock's essay on Vilage Radicalism in East Anglia is obviously focused, but there is a wealth of analysis of the Swing and other incenidary attacks localy. Pamela Horn's article on Oxfordshire and the agricultural trade union movement is superb. Her use of minute books from union branches and the details of the often angry fights between unions themselves, do not obscure a brilliant tale of deep rooted and brave trade union activism. She convincingly argues that the "Oxfordshire farm worker... was better off financially than he had been in the 1860s" as a result of trade unionism. It's an important, if contested argument, so Horn's conclusion:
it may be argued that the rise in wages which occurred in the 1870s would have come anyway as agriculture was prosperous and the demand for labour buoyant at a time when employment in urban industry was at a high level. But it must be remembered that such prosperity had existed before without the labourers deriving any great benefit from it. Union agitation pinpointed the need for some redistribution of agricultural income in favour of the farm worker.
It should also be noted that Horn's article includes a map of trade union branches in Oxfordshire which is remarkable in showing the scale of the movement.
The rest of the book belongs to Dunbabin and there is a real breadth here. Some of these are wider in their coverage, a general introduction to the nineteenth century and a chapter on tenant rights in general. Some of the other chapters are more niche - those on the tithe wars in Wales and the Crofters War in Scotland may appeal more to students of the topics rather than the general reader, though Dunbabin has a nack for putting interesting and illuminating anecdotes within the general analysis.
Dunbabin's conclusion though is interesting. Noting the disturbances in Wales and Scotland and the fact that local authorities there were unable to deal with the discontent, he makes the interesting point:
In ninetenth century Britain unrest sometimes passed beyond the control of the local establishments but never beyond that of central Government. So where concessions were made from weakness (as was the forced return of 10 per cent to Welsh tithe-payers), they wer emost likely to be the work of local men. Similarly the central Government did not frame its policies with a view to the avoidance of rural unrest. But such avoidance was one of the factors behing the southern English tendnency in the half-century after Waterloo, to spread work rather than to maximise productivity.
The authorities tended to react to events - dropping threshing machines after Captain Swing, or introducing farmers associations in response to strikes - rather than trying to prevent discontent - to their detriment. Dunbabin's general conclusions are also interesting. He notes the long drawn out struggle to get Parliament to agree a Land Act that would offer some form of justice. This was finally given a nail in the coffin by World War One, with Lloyd George failing to push it though. What might have happened had it "got under way" would "have provided an interesting bridge between the ideas and aspirations... [in the book] and the conditions of the new century."
That did not happen, but Dunbabin's book is a very useful, if a little dry in places, introduction to the swirl of struggle and ideology around rural communities and agriculture in this most fascinating of transitionary centuries.
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