English Radical Movements: A Reaction Against Industrial Revolution

ENGLISH RADICAL MOVEMENTS: A reaction against industrialization

During the late 18th century and the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution began to transform the social, economic and technological system. All this changes lead to the birth of The English Radical Movements. The first expressions were the Luddites and the Captain swing riots, which were furious and impulsive reactions against the industrialisation itself. With time and experience, these working classes learnt from their mistakes and claimed their rights in a more civilised way, for instance, the Trade Unions and the Chartists.

In the first decade of 1800’s, the merchant class was looking for ways to reduce the costs of the industry due to a war a with Napoleon. What they

In a sense, they were already organised as they were the ideologists of this new system. However, these changes came from nowhere to the rest of the society. They went from working on the field to being enclosed in factories, with very bad work conditions. This affected in the way their days were organised, and it even created new socials classes that did not exist before. In all, it was a huge change in the psyche of people. The first expressions (Luddism and Captain Swing riots) were more aggressive, impulsive and even primitives not against technology, but this new system. However, they both failed at gaining their objectives, due to lack of organization and consciousness of the new role they had to accept. Before industrialization, work classes did not necessarily have a better position in society, but a least they knew what role they played, with Industrial Revolution, everything changes, it disrupts the whole system and they had to reassert their positions from scratch. They wanted to protect themselves into the new social-economical system, and the only way to do it was to become aware of their new role in this new society and use their strengths to claim for their rights. Later and more sophisticated movements, as Trade Unions or Chartism, achieved their claims because they identified themselves as workers, they fought together for their rights at a national level and the parliament could not ignore all these claims. This tendency started with movements like these and later continued to the 20th century ideologies that irrupted the world (Communism, Marxism and