Robert Owen and his Legacy

Description

A radical thinker and humanitarian employer, Owen made a major contribution to nineteenth-century social movements including co-operatives, trade unions and workers' education. He was a pioneer of enlightened approaches to the education of children and an advocate of birth control.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Escocia
• Great Britain
• History
• Scotland
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780708324448
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Robert Owen
and his Legacy
Edited by
Noel Thompson & Chris Williams
University of Wales PressRobert Owen and his Legacy
00 Prelims_ RobertOwen_3_10_2011.indd 1 10/17/2011 4:04:14 PMIn Memory of Nina Fishman (1946–2009)
00 Prelims_ RobertOwen_3_10_2011.indd 2 10/17/2011 4:04:14 PMRobert Owen and his Legacy
Edited by
Noel Tompson and Chris Williams
Cardif
University of Wales Press
2011
00 Prelims_ RobertOwen_3_10_2011.indd 3 10/17/2011 4:04:14 PM© Te Contributors, 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form
(including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and
whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication)
without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copy­
right owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should
be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place,
Cardif CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978­0­7083­2442­4 (hardback)
978­0­7083­2443­1 (paperback)
e­ISBN 978­0­7083­2444­8
Te rights of the Contributors to be identifed as authors of this work have been
asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardif
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
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List of Abbreviations vi
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1Noel Tompson and Chris Williams 1 Robert Owen: Reputations and Burning Issues 13Ian Donnachie2 Robert Owen and Some Later Socialists 33Gregory Claeys
3 Te Great Experiment: New Lanark from Robert Owen to
World Heritage Site 55
Lorna Davidson and Jim Arnold
4 Robert Owen and Education 71
Francis J. O’Hagan
5 Robert Owen and Religion 91
Robert A. Davis
6 Owen and the Owenites: Consumer and Consumption
in the New Moral World 113
Noel Tompson
7 Robert Owen as a British Politician and Parliamentarian 129
Margaret Escott
8 Robert Owen’s Unintended Legacy: Class Confict 155
Ben Maw
9 Robert Owen and ‘Te Greatest Discovery Ever Made By Man’ 175
Geofrey Powell
10 Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Tomas Powell and the Tropical
Emigration Society 197
Malcolm Chase
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Chris Williams
Afterword: Looking Forward: Co ­operative Politics
or Can Owen Still Help? 239
Stephen Yeo
Select Bibliography 259
Index 261
00 Prelims_ RobertOwen_3_10_2011.indd 6 10/17/2011 4:04:14 PMAbbreviations
AACAN Te Association of All Classes of All N ations
BL British Library
CJ Commons’ Journals
CM Caledonian Mercury
GNCTU Grand National Consolidated Trades Union
LJ Lords’ Journals
LRS Leeds Redemption Society
MC Morning Chronicle
MS Morning Star
NAS National Archives of Scotland
NLW National Library of Wales
NMW New Moral World
NS Northern Star
NUWC National Union of the Working Classes
OSPC Owenite Socialism: Pamphlets and Correspondence, ed. Gregory
Claeys (London, 2005), 10 vols
PD Parliamentary Debates
PMG Poor Man’s Guardian
PP Parliamentary Papers
SWRO Selected Works of Robert Owen, ed. Gregory Claeys (London,
1993), 4 vols
TES Tropical Emigration Society
TNA Te National Archives
UCL University College London
00 Prelims_ RobertOwen_3_10_2011.indd 7 10/17/2011 4:04:14 PM00 Prelims_ RobertOwen_3_10_2011.indd 8 10/17/2011 4:04:14 PMThe Contributors
Jim Arnold Formerly Director of the New Lanark Trust
Malcolm Chase Professor of Social History, University of Leeds
Gregory Claeys Professor of the History of Political Tought, Royal
Holloway, University of London
Lorna Davidson Director of the New Lanark Trust
Robert A. Davis Professor of Religious and Cultural Education,
Glasgow University
Ian Donnachie Emeritus Professor in History, Te Open University
Margaret Escott Honorary Research Fellow, Swansea University,
formerly Senior Research Ofcer, History of
Parliament
Ben Maw Tutorial Assistant in History, Swansea University
Francis J. O’Hagan Formerly Lecturer in the Faculty of Education,
Glasgow University
Geofrey Powell Fer in Education, Keele University
and Tutor in Philosophy, Coleg Harlech
Noel Tompson Pro Vice­Chancellor and Professor of History,
Swansea University
Chris Williams Professor of Welsh History and Director of the
Research Institute for Arts and Humanities,
Swansea University
Stephen Yeo Formerly Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford
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Noel Thompson and Chris Williams
Te present volume comes from papers given at a colloquium held to com­
memorate the 150th anniv ersary of the death of Robert Owen at the Uni­
versity of Wales’s Gregynog Hall in August 2008. Gregynog is just six miles
from Newtown, Montgomeryshire, where Owen was born and brought up
and where he died at the Bear’s Head Hotel on 17 November 1858 and was
buried with his parents beside the abandoned church of St Mary. With the
possible exception of New Lanark there could have been few more appro­
priate venues for such a conference, and ambience, papers and personalities
com bined to do justice to the life and work of this remarkable man.
Te colloquium papers illustrate both the complex character of his achieve­
ment, legacy and personality and how he in turn both shaped and refected
the spirit of the age in equally complex ways. New Lanark is the most power­
ful physical legacy of that shaping. Like many in this volume Davidson and
Arnold argue for the centrality of New Lanark to what Owen achieved and
what he communicated to future generations. Tey tell the story of its physical
retrieval from dereliction to the status of a world heritage site in 2001; a trans­
formation that required the same combination of business skills, idealism
and perseverance that Robert Owen himself deployed in his original trans­
formation of the New Lanark community. It is a retrieval of this monument
to Owen’s achievement which also keeps alive, in its rejuvenated and living
community, many of the ideals which Owen himself embraced.
New Lanark, as it was and as it is, reminds us of the potent forces un­
leashed by the revolution in industrial organization and technologies that
drove the rapid industrialization of this period and the genius of Owen in
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Noel Thompson and Chris Williams
harnessing them both for the conventional purpose of proft but also the
concomitant creation of what might be termed a welfare community. For
if proft was a consequence it was not the motive force of what he did.
Similarly if New Lanark, as the world heritage site it has become, now aims
to pay its way in a demanding world, its restoration has been driven by other
ideals, and other imperatives; ideals manifested in New Lanark’s social enter
prise and social housing. Its status as a site of global historical signifcance
has encapsulated and pr eserved for the future the physical embodiment of
what it sought to achieve: a living community where the social takes prece­
dence over the acquisitively individual.
Te inspiration which Owen gave reconfgured the way in which many
viewed the world; what it was and, more importantly, what it might become.
And not only did it inspire many who sought to create a new moral world
at home but also those, like Owen himself, who sought to transplant the
moral values of communitarianism, often with disastrous consequences, to
the New World of the Americas. Chase’s essay focuses on the export of
Owenism to South America through the agency of Tomas Powell (like
Owen a native of Newtown) and the Tropical Emigration Society (TES).
Drawn by prospects of abundance, despair at what could be achieved in the
old immoral world and frustration with the authoritarianism of Owen, the
society looked to Venezuela as a suitable location to realize their aspirations.
Powell had been involved in the early co­operative phase of Owenism and
then went on to play a prominent role in Montgomeryshire Chartism in the
late 1830s. Following a period of imprisonment for his political activities,
he threw his energies into the TES as its founding secretary and editor of its
journal the Morning Star, and shortly after, in 1845, a colony was founded
with a population of around 250.
As Chase makes clear, the disaster which followed was as total as it was
predictable: a hostile climate, lack of resource, virgin forest and an absence
of efective leadership made for death, despair and dissension. Broken by
the experience Powell himself stayed on in Trinidad, dying there in 1862.
Chase’s chapter tells us much about the nature of Owenism and its appeal:
its millenarian nature, the desire for a new world in the physical as well as
the fgurative sense; the failing faith in the capacity to build a New Jerusalem
in a land that seemed neither green nor pleasant and lacking the potential to
be either (particularly for those artisans in declining trades); the importance
it gave to the acquisition of land and, above all, the appeal to many would
be communitarians of the exotic, the other, where with the constraints of
2
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Introduction
the old had been removed and all things became possible, at least in the
imagination. As Chase shows these were the psychological, political and
socio­economic imperatives which fuelled an interest in emigration, and
the possibilities it held out, throughout Owenism’s history.
Less dramatically, but in many ways more constructively there was what
Owen contributed to the social reforms of the period. Marx and Engels
might use the ep