I would argue, though, that the conditions under which “free” labor children “chose” factory labor reflected pressures similar in kind (if more indirect and in lesser degree) to those faced by those subject to the poor laws. The important question is, why the parents “chose” to send their children to the factories, why they needed the extra income, and why they found the factory alternative attractive. The answer lies, I think, in several centuries of prior history: the enclosure of the open fields, the nullification of copyhold and other traditional land tenure rights, and Parliamentary Enclosure of commons. You can throw in, for good measure, the restrictions on economic freedom entailed in the Combination Laws (enforcement of the Combination Laws was completely ungoverned by common law standards of due process) and various police state provisions in force from ca. 1790 to 1820. The entire working class of Britain, as described by the Hammonds, amounted to a population under military occupation.

I agree that this is not a judgement on free markets, because (as Sheldon points out) no free market existed in this period. It is, however, very much a judgment on the actual industrial capitalists of the time, who benefited in collusion with poor law authorities exactly the same way that southern planters benefited in collusion with slavers.

But all these things also give the lie to what Lord Curzon says: that this is somehow an indictment of “naked free-market capitalism.” Capitalism, as an actual historical system, has at best allowed markets to operate within the interstices of a structure of privilege dominated by landed elites and state-subsidized and -protected capital, to the extent that the latter find markets convenient. I think analysts like Immanuel Wallerstein are correct in emphasizing the continuities of historic capitalism with feudalism, and the extent to which a portion of the feudal ruling classes negotiated the transition from one system to another (reinventing themselves first as mercantilists and landed oligarchs and then as finance capitalists).

The goal of free market libertarians, as described by thinkers like Thomas Hodgskin and the American individualist anarchists, should be to eliminate the remaining feudal framework of privilege, artificial property rights, and artificial scarcity.

This sentence contains a contradiction. If the state colluded with owners to drive down wages and criminalize unions (which I have no trouble believing), then there was no free-market or liberalism, which precludes the evils he claims existed.

The selectivity and bias of this pseudo-scholarship is breathtaking – but sadly all too typical of the defenders of a very peculiar and almost exclusively American definition of “Freedom”.

With no schools and no welfare system and a state that colluded with the owners to drive down wages and criminalise Trade Unionism, conditions in Britain under naked free-market capitalism were dire.

Only when the left-wing reformers inside and outside Parliament and increased labour agitation and the fear of revolution forced through laws to provide some modest protection to workers did conditions begin to change

This kind of propaganda is not only simple minded, it is a contemptible affront to generations of genuine social and economic historians who have tried to tell the truth about the lives our forefathers had to endure.

Such shabby nonsense illustrates just how rotten is the state of social, economic and historical scholarship in the USA, and I too will twitter and facebook it to make that very point.

Carl seems to think that the choice was between children working in the factories, or children staying and home and enjoying a nice, happy, middle-class life. That is the false choice that critics of capitalism like to present, but it is not true. Not that critics of capitalism ever have been honest.

Great piece; quite interesting.

Posted link at Facebook with a summary lead. And will twitter.

Best,

Steve Farrell