Why read Captain Swing?

Book cover of Captain Swing

Book description

For generation upon generation, the English farm labourer lived a life of poverty and degradation. Centuries came and went, but the lives of the rural poor remained essentially unaltered. With the onset of the industrial revolution, however, new forces came into play, which were to lead to profound change across…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Captain Swing as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Toke S. Aidt

Author

I love Captain Swing because it showed me just how much historical detective work can reveal about protest, riots, and revolutionary threat.

Not because of its strongly Marxist framing—which it certainly has—or because of its classical `Hobsbawmian’ style, but because Hobsbawm and Rudé undertook an extraordinary effort to locate and document thousands of disturbances across England during the Swing riots of 1830–31, Britain’s largest rural uprising. I am fascinated by the way they used this evidence to reconstruct what happened and why.

I still remember accidentally stumbling across the book on a dusty library shelf five stories underground and discovering…

From Toke's list on The best books about why rulers give up power and democratize.