J L Hammond, a working history

An excellent post from Michael Langford (michaellangforddotorg). I have come across this somewhere before, I think through Tom Hodgkinson’s Idler essays. Anyway, another important, but nearly lost, part of our history and how we surrender so willingly to authority.

VLtitle

michaellangforddotorg

J L Hammond and Barbara Hammond are two of the greatest historians you’ve probably never heard of.  In the early years of the twentieth century, they were commissioned by the British Labor Research Department to investigate the social and economic impacts of enclosure, displacement, and attempts to organize labor (combinations), up to the Reform Bill of 1832

Practically, their work discusses the effects of enclosure, the systematic disruption of  English village life by taking of common land by the aristocracy.  Enabled in large part by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, enclosure became an instrument of massive land theft by the titled classes, legitimized by Parliament.  Through the penal laws and the practice of transportation, plantations in the American colonies were provided with cheap labor.


The Concentration of Power, the controversial first chapter of The Village Labourer, was only printed in the first edition of the book.

“…differs from…

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