Law, crime and labor in the worsted industry of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1750-1850

This dissertation investigates the relationship between the law and workplace social relationships in the worsted industry of the West Riding of Yorkshire from 1750 to 1850. By the late 18th century a relatively small number of wealthy capitalists established Yorkshire as the national center of the worsted industry. Organizing production in the putting-out system with an advanced division of labor, these masters took no active part in the manufacturing process. Rather, they remained entirely dependent upon countless spinners and weavers who carried out their unsupervised labor in spatially dispersed homes and workshops. For such manufacturers, active in competitive international markets, the imperative of controlling costs and insuring a regular supply of high quality wares assumed critical importance. As a consequence of this necessity the West Riding emerged as a major site where employers attempted to regulate the social relations of the workplace through the application of penal labor law.;After gaining statutory authority in 1777 for their manufacturer's association, known as the Worsted Committee, the Yorkshire worsted masters began the operation of a body of industrial police called worsted inspectors. The law invested the inspectors with broad powers to regulate almost every aspect of workplace conduct and to prosecute those workers suspected of engaging in proscribed practices. Workers could be prosecuted, for example, for the neglect of work or damaging their work. In particular, however, the inspectors were charged with detecting the unauthorized appropriation by workers of production materials, a practice sanctioned by custom as a traditional workplace perquisite, but defined in the law as the crime of industrial embezzlement.;Initially, the inspectors aimed their efforts at the workplace appropriations of spinners, securing hundreds of such embezzlement convictions each year. However, with the successful mechanization of spinning between 1790 and 1810, the inspectors refocused their policing efforts on the remaining production sectors that were organized in the putting-out system, wool-combing and weaving. Thereafter, until approximately 1850, the inspectors continued to play a significant role in the worsted industry, imposing statutory control of the labor process and new property relations in the workplace. As the ultimate source of an employer's power and authority, the institutionalization of policing introduced a fundamentally coercive element to production relationships in the era of liberal capitalism.