Heroes or Villains

By the early nineteenth century, the Enclosure Acts had deprived rural workers of the use of common land. This, together with the industrialization of the nation, resulted in workers migrating to already overcrowded and unhealthy cities. The situation of the urban masses bore some superficial similarity to the situation of the free peasantry of Rome (at least in Plutarch’s popular version of the agrarian crisis) pushed off their small plots of land and into the city. With signs of a new militancy and the rise of reform movements in response to industrialization and urbanization, some commentators drew parallels with Roman Republican history. This chapter charts the way the struggle for social, economic, and political reform was partly conducted via engagement with the ancient world. It focuses particularly on the alignments that appeared in the press between the Republican reformers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, and modern reformers as the Gracchi became emblematic of working-class struggles.

Agrarian reform · Agrarian society · Agriculture · Archaeology · Development economics · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Industrialisation · Land reform · Parallels · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Urbanization · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Law