Scabs and Traitors: Taboo, Violence and Punishment in Labour Disputes in Britain, 1760–1871 by Thomas Lineham (review)

Thomas Lineham wants both to describe and defend, or at least make skeptics understand, the role of worker violence (a protean word) in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century labor disputes. He exploits primary sources like union publications and much secondary writing, framed by sociological theory. He is writing against a long tradition of labor historiography that either wholly ignored, deplored, minimized, or attributed to the “primitive” state of collective bargaining the rough justice dealt to scabs and to traitors, who broke solemn promises to their mates and crossed picket lines. The book moves from an analysis of verbal violence, through the ritualized humiliation of “rough music,” including stang-riding, tarring, half-drowning, stripping naked in public (often by women), and parading men with their coats reversed to signify turncoats. Finally, stone-throwing, savage beatings, threats with firearms, and the destruction of strikebreakers’ houses and household goods are tied to lost strikes and the tactics of the Irish Whiteboys.

Lineham emphasizes the rationality, or, at least, predictability, of such means, given the state’s unremitting hostility to the moral and constitutional demands of the labor movement for fair treatment. Trade union violence was not a relic of a barbaric past, as Fabian moralists claimed. It was a rational and considered response to a remorseless ruling class and the exploitive market outcomes it created and protected. He says little, however, about the contribution to violence of troops and the new police in suppressing protests, the ultimate recourse of employers and the state. The coverage is wide, over a long period: the index has entries for sixty-nine strikes, lockouts, and other conflicts between 1756 and 1870, many of which are cited repeatedly in the development of the argument.

The interpretation places these acts within an account of informal, popular, or folk law, borrowing E. P. Thompson’s much-used idea of a moral economy at odds with state enforcement of classical political economy’s imaginary “free” market, as well as his and others’ work on rough music and charivari. The book also explores the imagery used in union publications, oaths, and rituals to demonize scabs and traitors. Some denunciations had biblical resonances, others compared scabs and traitors to rats, wolves, thieves, slaves, scabbed sheep, “modern Cains,” serfs, black sheep, and, of course, blacklegs.

A few questions come to mind while reading this engaging and revealing book, with respect to the law and some of the sources used. In making his case, Lineham understandably underscores how hostile the state’s law was to labor organization. In the main, he repeats the long historiographical emphasis on “combination” acts that criminalized strike organization. More recent work has emphasized how seldom these laws were used, compared to twenty-seven statutes punishing breach of contract, what was called “master and servant” law. As Gravenor Henson pointed out in 1823,

Very few prosecutions have been made to effect under the Combination Acts, but hundreds have been made under this law, and the labourer or workman can never be free, unless this law is modified. The Combination Act is nothing: it is the law which regards the finishing of work which masters employ to harass and keep down the wages of their workpeople; unless this is modified nothing is done, and by repealing the Combination Acts you leave the workman in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred in the same state you found him— at the mercy of his master.

(Gravenor Henson and George White, A Few Remarks on the State of the Laws . . . for Regulating Masters and Work-People . . . [London, 1823], 51)

Recent research shows that estimate to be entirely accurate. We know that five to ten thousand workers a year, many of them strikers leaving unfinished work, were still being imprisoned under master and servant statutes for breach of contract in England and Wales in the nineteenth century, while the Combination Acts were almost...