E.P. Thompson
1924–1993
Thompson was a British social historian who spent his career recovering what industrialization had buried: the texture of working-class life before the factory, the moral frameworks pre-industrial communities used to evaluate markets, and the active resistance those communities mounted when markets violated their terms. His work is useful here because it documents something easily forgotten — that the assumptions of modern economics are not natural features of human life but impositions with a specific history, and that there were people who rejected them and said why.
The Making of the English Working Class
Thompson’s 1963 masterwork is a history of how the English working class came into being between 1780 and 1832. The conventional account sees class as an economic category — workers share an economic position, therefore they constitute a class. Thompson’s account is different: class is something people make through experience, culture, and struggle. It’s not a structure you inhabit passively; it’s a relationship you enter actively.
What this means for the historical record: the political activities, the religious formations, the folk customs and songs and community institutions of working people in this period are not decoration around the real economic story. They are the story, because they are how people made sense of and responded to the transformations being imposed on them.
The book also documented how much was lost. Pre-industrial artisan culture had its own rhythms, skills, and dignities. The factory system didn’t just change where people worked; it reorganized time, destroyed crafts, broke apart communities, and replaced a web of social obligations with the single relation of wages. Thompson didn’t idealize the pre-industrial period — poverty and subordination were real — but he insisted that something was being taken away, not just something being given.
The Moral Economy of the Crowd
Thompson’s 1971 essay “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” is where the moral-economy concept took its modern form. He was analyzing bread riots — the recurring phenomenon of 18th-century English crowds seizing food being transported to market or exported, selling it at what they considered a fair price, and returning the proceeds to the merchants.
The standard economic analysis treats this as irrational: the crowds were interrupting market mechanisms that would eventually, through the price signal, produce more bread. Thompson’s argument: the crowds weren’t being irrational; they were operating from a different economic framework. The pre-capitalist community had a moral economy — a set of expectations about how food markets should work, rooted in notions of customary right and community obligation. The new market system violated those expectations. The riots were a form of enforcement.
This has large implications. It suggests that markets don’t emerge naturally from human nature but are imposed through specific political choices that override prior arrangements. The resistance those impositions generated was articulate and principled, not just desperate and inchoate. People knew what was being taken from them.
Customs in Common
Thompson’s later work, collected in Customs in Common (1991), extended the moral economy argument to a broader analysis of customary rights — the traditional practices through which English rural communities had secured access to common resources: gleaning after harvest, gathering wood, grazing common land.
These customary rights were not legal rights in the formal sense; they were practices maintained by community expectation and enforced by community action. The enclosure movement systematically eliminated them, not through argument that they were wrong but through law that made them irrelevant. The commons was taken not because the case for taking it was made, but because those doing the taking had the power to make it happen.
This connects Thompson to Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance, but from the historical rather than the analytical direction. Ostrom studied commons that had survived; Thompson documented what was destroyed and how.
Key Works
- The Making of the English Working Class (1963)
- “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (1971) — Past and Present
- Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975)
- Customs in Common (1991)
- Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (1993)
Connections
- moral-economy — the concept he named and defined
- commons — customary rights as proto-commons governance
- dignity-of-labor — the artisan culture industrialization destroyed
- Peter Kropotkin — parallel recovery of mutual aid traditions
- Elinor Ostrom — analytical partner on commons governance
- Karl Polanyi — parallel argument in The Great Transformation about markets disembedded from society
The working class didn’t just happen; it was made, and in the making it expressed things worth remembering.