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John Garrard, Mark Curthoys. Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian Britain: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. viii, 284. $99.00, The American Historical Review, Volume 110, Issue 5, December 2005, Pages 1596–1597, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.110.5.1596-a
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This book's central focus is the mid-Victorian “official mind,” or at least its dominant liberal version: the mental frameworks particularly of government ministers, their expert civil servants, and, to a lesser extent, members of Royal Commissions and other inquiries. Mark Curthoys explores how they sought to adapt labor law and its underpinning economic theory to the growing strength, organization, and developing bargaining activities (particularly strikes) of trade unionism, eventually giving unions freedoms unparalleled in Europe. He also examines the “ideas and pressures” causing them to do so.
Although the book climaxes with the labor legislation of the 1870s—the Trade Union and Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1871, and the Employers and Workmen and the Conspiracy and Protection of Property Acts of 1875—this is set within an extended and carefully analyzed account of developing opinion and legislation in the decades after the repeal of the Anti-Combination Laws in 1824–1825. The tone is determinedly analytic and detached, but the book has two, perhaps three, unsensational heroes: Henry Thring and Godfrey Lushington, successive expert legal advisers at the Home Office, and, more surprisingly, Robert Lowe, Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer and Home Secretary 1873–1874. Having long been hostile to unions and having fiercely opposed working-class enfranchisement in 1866–1867, after 1873 Lowe actively sought to prevent those now politically included from becoming dangerously alienated by what they increasingly perceived as the one-sided interpretation of justice so far as their unions were concerned. It was Lowe who devised the “final” settlement that the Conservatives enacted in 1875. Thring, Lushington, and Lowe were the strongest influences inside government not just on labor law developments after 1867 but also on the changes in political-economic theory that underpinned and intellectually legitimized those developments.
