The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels

While conditions were a bit worse among workers in agriculture and especially mining, the circumstance of those who worked in factories, such as those owned by Engels' wealthy bourgeois father, were unthinkably deplorable. Engels, on occasion, actually worked side by side with those who labored in the cotton mills, and he visited them in their homes and wherever else they might gather, including churches, taverns, and rooming houses. Textile manufacturing, especially cotton, was then the backbone of Great Britain's industrial might. Ironically, Engels wrote his book while working at his father's Manchester cotton mills from 1842 to 1844. One way to read Friedrich Engels' classic The Condition of the Working Class in England is to take it as an exercise in finding out just how low the natural price can fall before the working class is threatened with extinction. It is a quantity that varies within narrow limits from person to person and place to place, but whatever its specific value, those who fall below the natural price do not survive. It refers to the minimum needed by wage laborers to survive and reproduce. The natural price of labor is a concept used by 19th Century political economists as different as David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Photo by Rob Ward (Flickr: HayFestivalA-011.jpg), via Wikimedia Commons. In 2003 he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900 'for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of twentieth-century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent.'īio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. He was President of Birkbeck, University of London from 2002 until his death. In 1998 he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family, then obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge before serving in the Second World War. Hobsbawm was born in Egypt but spent his childhood mostly in Vienna and Berlin. His best-known works include his trilogy about what he called the 'long 19th century' (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914), The Age of Extremes on the short 20th century, and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of 'invented traditions'. Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm CH FRSL FBA (/ˈhɒbz.bɔːm/ 9 June 1917 – 1 October 2012) was a British Marxist historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism, and nationalism.

The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels