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 late nineteenth century, nineteenth century, late, nineteenth and/or century:
“I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.”
—James A. Michener (b. 1907)
“Posterity—the forlorn child of nineteenth century optimism—grows ever harder to conceive.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“All my life I believed I knew something. But then one strange day came when I realized that I knew nothing, yes, I knew nothing. And so words became void of meaning ... I have arrived too late at ultimate uncertainty.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“In the nineteenth century ... explanations of who and what women were focused primarily on reproductive events—marriage, children, the empty nest, menopause. You could explain what was happening in a woman’s life, it was believed, if you knew where she was in this reproductive cycle.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“There dwell the children of the dark Night, the dread gods Sleep and Death.”
—Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)