Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian Britain The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s

After the repeal of the Combination Acts in the 1820s collective labour enjoyed limited freedoms. When this regime collapsed under judicial challenge, governments were obliged to devise a new legal framework for trade unions and strikes, enacted between 1871 and 1876. Drawing extensively upon previously unused governmental sources, this study affords many wider insights into the nature and inner workings of the mid-Victorian state, tracing the impact upon policy-makers of contemporary assaults upon classical political economy, and of the historicized critiques of labour law developed by Liberal writers. As contending views of ‘free trade’ and ‘free labour’ came into collision, an official view was formed which favoured allowing an unrestricted freedom to combine and sought to withraw the criminal law from peaceful industrial relations.