The Making of the English Working Class

by E.P. Thompson

We can now see something of the truly catastrophic nature of the Industrial Revolution; as well as some of the reasons why the English working class took form in these years. The people were subjected simultaneously to an intensification of two intolerable forms of relationship: those of economic exploitation and of political oppression. Relations between employer and labourer were becoming both harsher and less personal; and while it is true that this increased the potential freedom of the worker, since the hired farm servant or the journeyman in domestic industry was (in Toynbee’s words) “halted half-way between the position of the serf and the position of the citizen”, this “freedom” meant that he felt his unfreedom more. But at each point where he sought to resist exploitation, he was met by the forces of employer or State, and commonly of both.