Reading Workers’ Minds in the Age of Steam | WIP Seminar with Padraic Scanlan

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In this presentation, I offer some early arguments from a new research project on the history of work in Britain and the British empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. I focus on one aspect of my work so far: the relationship between the prevailing theory of human cognition in early Victorian era and the emergence of factory labour, and of a wider ‘factory system.’ The book I am working on is tentatively titled Steam, and I am trying to capture the intensity and strangeness of an era when steam engines seemed to offer limitless power and energy that could be applied both to machinery and to nearly every other sphere of social life. Moral philosophers who subscribed to the dominant theory of cognition in Europe, associationism, began to imagine human thought as a kind of factory, a ‘train of associations’ that could be guided by controlling “those intimate, and perhaps indissoluble complexities of thought and passion, that are begun in infancy.” New kinds of work, in other words, seemed to promise new ways of structuring the minds of workers. The widespread use of child labour in the era of the industrial revolution is infamous. Children were desirable workers not only because they could be paid lower wages, but because their minds, within an associationist framework, were considered more malleable. These ideas about the uniquely plastic character of children’s minds were formed in the context of a much larger global ethnographic project of cataloguing the ‘savage’ peoples of the non-industrial world, British pedagogical experts developed new, and factory-like, model schools. The idea of a ‘free-labour child’ – a worker who was both a symbol of freedom and of pliability and obedience, was made in intimate contact with the mind sciences, and with imperial and colonial anthropology.

Padraic Scanlan is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources, cross-appointed to the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies. He is also a Research Associate at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St. Michael's College. His research focuses on the history of labour, enslaved and free, in Britain and the British empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and he is currently in the early stages of research on a new project on the transformation of the line between ‘home’ and ‘work’ in the industrial era. 

Our CIRHR Work-In-Progress Seminar series allows members of our community to discuss early-stage research. Future guest speakers include:

• March 26, Laura Lam, CIRHR PhD Student
• April 2, Alicia Eads, Assistant Professor