Marc Steinberg's England's Great Transformation: Law, Labor, and the Industrial Revolution focuses on the Master and Servant Act of 1823, examining how it was used in three towns and using this history to modify important historical theories. Steinberg begins and ends the book with the theoretical discussions and elaborates its case studies in the middle. Steinberg is strongly influenced by both Marx and Polanyi, though he modifies the theories of both. While “Industrial Revolution” appears in the subtitle, Steinberg focuses mainly on the decade 1864–74, which is later than the period typically assigned to the (First) Industrial Revolution.

The theoretical basis of the book is Marxism. However, Steinberg goes beyond Marx, combining Marx's historical materialism with historical institutionalism. He does this by arguing for the materiality of law. Steinberg argues that law was path dependent and had its own inertia (30–31). The materiality of law also implies that if the law had been different, economic outcomes would have been different.

As noted above, the book is also strongly influenced by Karl Polanyi; the title is a reference to Polanyi's The Great Transformation (1944), and in chapter 7, Steinberg offers a “retelling” of Polanyi's history. Steinberg agrees with Polanyi that labor relations are “institutionally embedded” (159) but disagrees that the first half of the nineteenth century saw a movement toward laissez-faire. As evidence, Steinberg points to the Master and Servant Act, which employers used to control workers at a time when Polanyi saw the rise of laissez faire. Steinberg argues that labor was not fully “commodified” until the last quarter of the nineteenth century (146).

In the middle section of the book, Steinberg provides a history of the use of the Master and Servant Act in three towns (Hanley, Hull, and Redditch) during the decade before the repeal of the law (1864–74). Steinberg focuses on these three towns because their court records from this period survive. While the choice of towns was determined by the survival of records, it does lead Steinberg to examine industries that are less commonly studied. Hanley was in the pottery district, and most of the prosecutions in Hull were from the fishing industry. In Redditch, both agriculture and needle making had substantial numbers of prosecutions.

Steinberg explains how the Master and Servant Act gave employers power over their workers. Workers could be prosecuted if they left their work before the end of their contract period, which was usually a year. Thus, the law limited the workers' bargaining power and ability to strike. Employers were also more likely to win their cases than workers; employers prevailed in about two-thirds of the legal actions.

Steinberg provides suggestive data on the number of prosecutions under the Act. Master and Servant prosecutions were not used in all industries, but were common in some. In Hull, the majority of cases were in the fishing industry, which employed only three percent of the workforce (79). This implies that prosecutions were common in fishing but not in other industries, perhaps because working conditions in the fishing industry were poor, and trawlers found it difficult to retain their crews. In all three towns, prosecutions under the Master and Servant Act were less common than prosecutions for drunkenness or assault, but were more common than prosecutions for theft or poor law violations.

While 90 percent of the defendants were male, Steinberg does examine the role of gender in Redditch. In 1866, a girl was prosecuted for leaving her employment as a needle maker even though her mother testified that the employer “shamefully ill-used a sister of the defendant's” (126). One farm servant escaped prosecution for leaving work because she was married and her husband had not agreed to the contract (131).

While the theoretical section emphasizes unions as important players, unions are largely absent from the case studies. The examples of prosecutions involve defendants who broke their employment contracts for reasons other than strikes. However, the examples do explain why unions opposed the law.

In sum, Steinberg's book serves as a reminder of something obvious but sometimes forgotten: namely, that Victorian laws influenced the relative power of workers. In particular, the Master and Servant Act was used against workers in the years before its repeal in 1875. In contrast to Polanyi, Steinberg suggests that employers were gaining power during the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of “the growing legal infrastructure of the local state” (158). However, I am not convinced that workers were in general losing power during this period. Steinberg examines the period 1864–74, but since he does not address earlier periods (or other relevant laws) he does not provide compelling evidence of a broad increase in employer power. One could also argue that the workers were gaining power during the nineteenth century. Unions became legal, apprenticeship declined, and wages rose. (Steinberg admits that unions became legal, but argues that they still found it difficult to strike.) Moreover, compared to other countries, England at this time was a relatively high-wage economy. No one doubts that workers' conditions were often difficult in the nineteenth century, but this study makes claims too large to sustain with its limited, though valuable, evidence.