Capital flows, itinerant laborers, and time

A revision of Thompson's thesis of time and work discipline

Bibliographic Data

ID4356271
AuthorsKevin Birth (0000-0001-7119-4373, Department of Anthropology, Queens College, CUNY University, Flushing, NY, USA, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume31
Issue3
Pages392-414
Publication date2022-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTime & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0961-463X • E-ISSN: 1461-7463
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0961463x221083185
OpenAlexW4224243945
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited41

E. P. Thompson's classic article "Time and Work-Discipline in Industrial Capitalism," gives an incomplete picture of the transition to the time consciousness in industrial capitalism. This is for two reasons. First, by not understanding time logics of pre-industrial societies and viewing such logics as "irregular," Thompson was unable to understand how wages were paid, and workers disciplined in a culture that used seasonally variable temporal hours in pre-industrial England. Second, with regard to industrialism, Thompson did not recognize the effects on labor of credit and a huge capital influx from the sugar trade on the emergence of manufacturing in England in the 18th century. By documenting the issues of changing ways of relating time to wage, seasonality, place, and finance, this paper argues that the increased year-round availability of capital combined with the alienation of workers from the seasonality of time in specific locations drove the shift from daywork to clock-measured wages during the Industrial Revolution, and that the adoption of clock time was a response to confusion over how day wages could be made uniform over different latitudes and during different times of year

Capital (architecture · Industrial Revolution · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Political Economy and Marxism