Bibliographical Essay

The sources listed below were used to understand the political and socioeconomic events and sentiments that drove the emergence of the nineteenth century ideologies of Liberalism and Socialism, as well as what those ideologies hoped to effect. The primary sources found in Western Societies: A Documentary History. Volume II and Sources of the West: Readings in Western Civilization. Volume 2: From 1600 to the Present revealed the various ways labor and the lives of workers changed due to technological innovations that introduced machines to textile production, the first industry to undergo rapid mechanization. Radcliffe and Observations… on the Loss of Woollen Spinning recounted the great changes in living conditions and family life that occurred as a result of the implementation of machines in the spinning industry. “The Leeds Woollen Workers’ Petition (1786)” appealed to “those who have the power to prevent the use of those machines” to do so on the grounds of humanity, which would become a theme in the ideology of Socialism. The alternative opinion on the effects of machines was exemplified by the reply to the workers, “The Letter from the Cloth Merchants of Leeds (1791),” which demonstrated the commitment to machine production as well as an optimism that with new technologies further advantages for all were in store. Guest directly commented on how the steam engine and the steam loom that followed transformed the textile industry for the better, also expounding the view that technology assured progress. The sources in “Labor Old and New: The Impact of the Industrial Revolution” once again demonstrated the magnitude of the shift from pre-industrial labor to factory labor in lives of workers, as well as the physical backlash against machines by the workers and the poor working conditions of factory labor. These sentiments were worked into the feedback loops to in that Liberalism grew out of industrial production and supported its growth and that Socialism worked against the liberal ideals.

These sources also helped place the contributions of political movements in the emergence of these ideologies. As shown in the feedback loops, revolutions in France and the Americas contributed to atmosphere of political uncertainty, even for elites that supported the initial periods of these revolutions. On one hand, revolutionary sentiments such as those explained in Adams’ The Rights of Colonists inspired certain aspects of liberalism. On the other hand, the revolution in Haiti and the radical period of the French Revolution, with the defense of terror evinced by Robespierre’s Report on the Principles of Political Morality, threatened to perhaps undermine the political and economic gains achieved by the bourgeois by revolution and industrialization. The chapter from Kasson's Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America 1776-1900 discussed the interaction between technology and the formation of Republican ideology, which had close ties to the ideology of Liberalism, and discussed the tension between new freedoms brought about by technology and political revolution and the desire to preserve those freedoms against further radical change. The conditions and events portrayed by these sources provided a backdrop to understanding the motives and claims in Smiles’ Self-Help and Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, which reflected the overall spirits of nineteenth century Liberalism and Socialism, respectively. The work by Smiles promoted the idea industrialized production would be a pathway to prosperity for any person with the motivation and character to utilize it, demonstrating how Liberalism praised the effects of technology in a way that sought to insulate industrial production from criticism of the poor conditions it enforced on the working classes. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Marx’s claims in The Communist Manifesto demonstrated the backlash against these capitalist modes of production and the class relationships they fostered, evincing the proposal of scientific socialism for systems that assured political, econonomic, and social equality. “Introduction to 19th-Century Socialism” provided me with information about the labor movements Socialism fostered and why they did not amount to Marx's "proletarian revolution." Other sources not explicitly mentioned here but seen below were used for general information about the industrial revolution, the French revolution, and the of values of Liberalism and Socialism. Overall, all of these sources informed my attempt to map the complex and interrelated economic, social, and political factors leading to and emerging from nineteenth century Liberalism and Socialism.

Åberg, Martin. “Liberalism and Revivalism. A Comparative Case Study of Liberal Ideology, Individualism, and Revivalism in Schlewswig-Holstein and Vârmland, CA. 1860-1920,” Scandinavian Journal of History 38, no. 2 (2013):154–79.

Adams, Samuel. "The Rights of Colonists: The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772." Hanover Historical Texts Project, Hanover College. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/adamss.html.

“The French Revolution: The Radical Stage, 1792-1794,” The History Guide: Lectures on Modern European Intellectual History, Steven Kreis, updated on March 10, 2017, http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/lecture13a.html.

"From Observations...on the Loss of Woollen Spinning (c. 1794)." In Western Societies: A Documentary History. Volume II, edited by Brian Tierney and Joan W. Scott, Second Edition, 144-146. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000.

Guest, Richard. "Compendious History of the Cotton-Manufacture (1823)." In Western Societies: A Documentary History. Volume II, edited by Brian Tierney and Joan W. Scott, Second Edition, 149-153. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000.

“Industrial Revolution,” International World History Project, History World International, updated in 1992, http://history-world.org/Industrial%20Intro.htm.

“Introduction to 19th-Century Socialism,” The Website of Prof. Paul Brians, Washington State University, https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/10/12/introduction-to-19th-century-socialism/.

“John Locke’s theories put into practice,” J.P .Sommerville, https://faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/Default.htm.

"Labor Old and New: The Impact of the Industrial Revolution." In Discovering the Western Past: A Look at the Evidence. Volume II: Since 1500, edited by Merry E. Wiesner, Julius R. Ruff, and William Bruce Wheeler, Sixth Edition, 138-173. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

"The Leeds Woollen Workers' Petition (1786)." In Western Societies: A Documentary History. Volume II, edited by Brian Tierney and Joan W. Scott, Second Edition, 147-148. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000.

"Letter from the Cloth Merchants of Leeds (1791)." In Western Societies: A Documentary History. Volume II, edited by Brian Tierney and Joan W. Scott, Second Edition, 148-149. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000.

Marx, Karl. “The Communist Manifesto.” In Modern Europe: Sources and Perspectives from History, edited by John C. Swanson and Michael S. Melancon, 72-88. New York: Longman, 2003.

Radcliffe, William. "From Origin of the New System of Manufacture, Commonly Called Power Loom Weaving (1828)." In Western Societies: A Documentary History. Volume II, edited by Brian Tierney and Joan W. Scott, Second Edition, 141-144. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2000.

Robespierre, Maximilien. “Report on the Principles of Political Morality.” In The Making of the West, Combined Volume: Peoples and Cultures, Volume 1, edited by Lynn Hunt et al., 124–27. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012.

Smiles, Samuel. "Self-Help (1859)." In Sources of the West: Readings in Western Civilization. Volume 2: From 1600 to the Present, edited Mark A. Kishlansky, Eighth Edition, 136-139. Boston: Pearson, 2012.