Patrons, Radicals, and the Struggle for Control

Abstract

When John Beveridge testified before an 1825 parliamentary committee on the act outlawing trade unions, he echoed working people’s understanding of what was happening to customary forms of economic activity. Beveridge, clerk of a seamen’s benefit society in the northeast of England, argued that unemployed sailors ‘must stand on shore; our labour is our merchandise.’1 Without work they would starve because people had become commodities selling their labour power in the marketplace. Beveridge and his mates were participating in a struggle between advocates of wage labour in a free market economy and those who defended customary rights to collective organisation and a place for the state in setting wage levels. Beveridge and his fellow workers sought to revive earlier traditions of reciprocity in which mutual interests generally guided relations between masters and men. Influenced by the changing labour relations environment, the Seamen’s Loyal Standard Association embraced a mixture of moral and market-driven attitudes toward economic exchange.