Workers of Their Own Emancipation has had a long gestation. It began as doctoral research in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was put aside while John Sanders engaged in the necessary task of earning a living. But when Covid supplied enforced leisure, Sanders was able to return to his project, albeit in a limited way, as were all scholars at the time, because of the difficulty of physically visiting archives. Just as the first era of radical protest was the product of a communications revolution, so too this monumental history is a tribute to the expanding possibilities of online research. The original thesis has been revised and extended to incorporate the immense volume of research that has been published in the intervening decades. In this sense, Workers of Their Own Emancipation comprises both a foundation text and a coping stone of the history of popular radicalism during the critical decade between the Reform Bill crisis and the emergence of Chartism. It supplies an invaluable body of evidence about a decade of increasingly organized protest, which will form a point of departure for further biographical and institutional studies in other regions and different periods. At the same time, it constitutes a judicious and authoritative summation of the research programme that was ignited by the publication of The Making of the English Working Class in 1963.

As the slightly awkward title indicates, the focus of this study is on the individuals who formed and led the protest organizations in the period. Arguably, all histories of early popular radicalism are by definition studies of leadership. In the absence of opinion polls or contemporary external analysis, most of what is known about the movements leading up to Chartism comes from the words and actions of local, regional, or national leaders. They made the speeches reported in the increasingly busy local press, they produced the pamphlets and manifestos, they wrote the occasional autobiographies. In this sense, Sanders’ 500-page local study is simply adding detail upon detail about a well-studied area, mostly derived from exhaustive reading of newspapers and Home Office papers. He has constructed an intricate landscape of suffering and protest (which, given its geographical specificity, would have benefitted from some maps) that was crisscrossed by cohorts of men over a decade of more or less organized protest.

By explicitly focusing on the leadership, Sanders wants to make three related points. The first and most important is the growing self-sufficiency of popular protest as it evolved through a series of campaigns and organizations. From the outset, it was driven by a sense of betrayal by both national political leaders and more local middle-class sympathizers. What appeared at one stage to be a cross-sectoral campaign against Old Corruption concluded in the exclusion of the working class in the 1832 Reform Bill. Despite occasional statements of sympathy, local industrialists did nothing to help their employees through cyclical depressions and mostly opposed factory reform. Above all, the New Poor Law, which Sanders shows generated fierce local as well as national hostility, confirmed that the post-Reform State had no understanding of how the economy of the poor worked. Protest needed spokesmen, organizers, fundraisers, polemical journalists, and, by the late 1830s, the workers of the West Riding neither wanted nor needed to find such individuals amongst their social and economic superiors.

The sharply declining deference was also driven by an increasing sense of self-sufficiency. Agency required agents, and these are the focus of Sanders’ research. Functional literacy was spreading rapidly through the West Riding towns and townships. At least a minority of local populations could read and contribute to the burgeoning newspapers, could draft manifestos, and could undertake the unsung but essential task of running organizations over time. In the compact industrializing communities, they were easily recognized and came to exercise hard-won authority. Given a cause, men immediately emerged who knew how to chair meetings, keep basic accounts, communicate with related organizations, and engage with the local press. It is essential to Sanders’ thesis that these men [and in this account women barely feature] no longer looked to their educated betters to do the things that education was for – receiving and communicating ideas, processing information, building bureaucracies, keeping records, and binding disparate individuals together.

Sanders’ third ambition is to better understand what these leaders did and who they were. He identifies three levels of participation in the protest movements: an outer ring who peopled the meetings in rented rooms or, from time to time, vast outdoor gatherings; staunch adherents who were the hardcore supporters, attending meetings, voting for policies or representatives; and the true activists, varying in their commitment to finding spare evenings alongside their work to becoming de facto professional organizers. Amongst the activists there were those known only to their local communities, those who exercised a regional role, and a small number who became national figures. However detailed the West Riding analysis becomes, there is still a role for Feargus O’Connor, and for the locally based but nationally influential Northern Star.

An attempt is made to identify the skill sets that were required for leadership, and how these were exercised. Character mattered more than formal attainments. These were individuals with a strong personality, a recognized presence and charisma, who were capable of gaining and retaining the trust of their peers. Inevitably, there were those who dropped away after intense periods of activity, but Sanders takes the view that these were largely representative, resilient, embedded members of their communities, with only a few succumbing to drink and other failings, despite the levels of effort and sacrifice that was required of them. There were some movements, such as friendly societies, mutual improvement societies, co-operatives, and, as has long been argued, Methodist classes, which provided on-the-job training, equipping individuals with capacities and confidence, enabling them to emerge as local leaders.

The emphasis on leadership across the decade underpins Sanders’ framing argument that the sequence of protest movements from the late 1820s to the late 1830s was fundamentally connected, despite their varying and, at times, conflicting ideologies and programmes of action. Detailed treatment is given to the rich sequence of activities, including trade unions, co-operative societies, friendly societies, mutual improvement societies, the temperance movement, millenarian religions, the early factory movement, the anti-Poor Law Campaign, and finally – and massively – the Chartist Movement. The lengthy chapters on these movements are fully alert to the variations in their tactics and programmes. It was a time of exploration of the possibilities of activity, and experimentation in forms of protest. Some failed altogether, others evolved into permanent structures that embodied protests against the emerging capitalist order through the nineteenth century and beyond.

The point is not to merge these vibrant protests into a single movement. Nor to criticize the integrity and independence of the leaders who kept on cropping up in activities that, in themselves, can be treated by historians as distinct forms of protest with their own ideological and organizational identities. The era represented a combination of experiment, ambition, and sheer visceral anger against the betrayal of the labouring classes by the emerging political and economic order. The issue of leadership, when treated with this level of immersive scholarship, makes it easier to understand both the range of activities and their common features.

It was a short, angry, but intensely fertile period of activity. At the end of the study, Sanders addresses the ancient topic of physical versus moral force and its contribution to the failure of Chartism. He has little time for this abstract polarity, stressing that the leaders of the movements up to and including Chartism knew full well that their moral outrage and organizational autonomy carried the risk of sliding into outright physical violence, as it very nearly did at the height of the Anti-Poor Law movement. They require not the censure of historians, but an understanding of just what it was like to take on the structures of armed power in these fraught years.

The basic argument of Workers of Their Own Emancipation takes us back to E.P. Thompson’s founding text. The northern textile regions were the engine of change in this period, and the multiple forms of protest reflected and entrenched a powerful sense of agency amongst the population that was exposed to the early phase of the Industrial Revolution. While the book concludes with a moment of defeat, the rejection of the first Charter, it encompasses the growth of a sense of separateness and injustice that was to inform the labour movement in the succeeding decades. “Supported by a mass-circulation newspaper”, writes Sanders, “and underpinned by a dense network of local leaders, the newly coined Chartist movement built on the common experiences and voiced the grievances of an increasingly class-conscious body of workers” (p. 483). The decade under review was, in terms of relations between the state, capitalism, and the workers, a hinge in history and Sanders’ study does full justice to its complexity and resonance.