This image is the cover for the book Making of the English Working Class

Making of the English Working Class

A history of the common people and the Industrial Revolution: “A true masterpiece” and one of the Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the twentieth century (Tribune).

During the formative years of the Industrial Revolution, English workers and artisans claimed a place in society that would shape the following centuries. But the capitalist elite did not form the working class—the workers shaped their own creations, developing a shared identity in the process. Despite their lack of power and the indignity forced upon them by the upper classes, the working class emerged as England’s greatest cultural and political force. Crucial to contemporary trends in all aspects of society, at the turn of the nineteenth century, these workers united into the class that we recognize all across the Western world today.

E. P. Thompson’s magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class defined early twentieth-century English social and economic history, leading many to consider him Britain’s greatest postwar historian. Its publication in 1963 was highly controversial in academia, but the work has become a seminal text on the history of the working class. It remains incredibly relevant to the social and economic issues of current times, with the Guardian saying upon the book’s fiftieth anniversary that it “continues to delight and inspire new readers.”

E. P. Thompson

E. P. Thompson (1924–1993) was a British historian, writer, socialist, and peace campaigner. He is most famous for his work on the British radical movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, as well as influential biographies of William Morris and William Blake. An ardent left-wing socialist critic of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79 and a historian in the Marxist tradition, Thompson was an active figure in ending the Cold War.
 

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