Late Nineteenth Century
Throughout the nineteenth century, the worker's existence remained largely miserable, nasty, brutish and short. As Industrial Britannia was extending its Empire, its corporations and its businesses were responsible for half the world's production across a third of the globe's land, a quarter of its population, and ruling its waves. Joint Stock Companies, building railways, canals and factories, manufacturing household goods, connecting telegraphs, distributing coal, formed the backbone of this dominant laissez faire model of commerce. Around the start of the 20th century, in Mogul Steamship Co Ltd v McGregor, Gow & Co, the House of Lords emphasised that businesses should be free to organise into trade associations in the same way that employees organised into unions. The consciousness of working people that they should have a role in the economy mirrored the development toward political participation.
- Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845)
- Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (1864) and the move from status to contract
- Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867)
- Workmen's Compensation Act 1897
- Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb, History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897)
Read more about this topic: History Of Labour Law In The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the words nineteenth century, late and/or nineteenth:
“Posterity—the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism—grows ever harder to conceive.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“If a liberal policy towards the late Rebels is adopted, the ultra Republicans are opposed to it; if the colored people are honored, the extremists of the other wing cry out against it. I suspect I am right in both cases.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“We have now traced the history of women from Paradise to the nineteenth century and have heard nothing through the long roll of the ages but the clank of their fetters.”
—Jane, Lady Wilde (1821–1896)