New Books in Nineteenth-Century British Studies

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Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain Author(s) Jamie L Bronstein Publisher Stanford University Press Publication Year 2008 ISBN 9780804700085 Link Amazon.com Abstract Caught in the Machinery draws on social, cultural, and legal history to bring to life the dangers facing working people in Great Britain between 1800 and the first British Employer's Liability Act of 1880. Autobiographies, songs, and broadsides provide a window onto the cultural meanings of workplace accidents and contrast those meanings with the views of humanitarian onlookers and the Victorian press. The book is uniquely attentive to the broader Anglo-American context; in the nineteenth century, Great Britain and the United States shared a common-law regime that was singularly unfriendly to workers, but each country eventually developed workers' compensation in response to very different sets of pressures. Table of Contents Introduction: Not Your Typical Day at the Office 1. The Perils of the Workplace 2. The Options for Injured Workers 3. The Cultural Meanings of Workplace Accidents 4. The Paradox of Free Labor 5. Industrial Accidents and State Power Epilogue: The Anglo-American Aftermath

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