ABSTRACT
The work of Clarkson has suggested that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as high a proportion as two thirds of the urban and rural population were wage dependent and that by 1750 there existed a labour market in England so highly developed as to distinguish it from other European countries. To emphasise the increasing commoditisation of labour is not of course to suggest that in nineteenth century Britain the writ of the market ran unchallenged. The safety-net of self-subsistence had, by the early nineteenth century been largely removed so that complete destitution was the sole alternative to the successful transmutation of labour power into wages. Structural change, too, played a crucial role in accelerating the commoditisation of labour, with the growing relative importance of manufacturing industry. For the labouring-classes, therefore, and for those socialist and anti-capitalist writers who sought to defend their interests and effect a fundamental transformation of society, the market was the central fact of economic life.
