A01=Martin Crawford
Author_Martin Crawford
Category=JBFH
Category=KCZ
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Chartism
emigration
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
industrial states
labouring communities
mechanisation
migration
Owenism
potters
Potters Emigration Society
Potters' Examiner
Pottersville
Staffordshire
trade unions
Victorian Britain
William Evans
Wisconsin
Product details
- ISBN 9781526194916
- Weight: 386g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 20 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Manchester University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Land and labour provides the first full-length history of the Potters’ Emigration Society, the controversial trade union scheme designed to solve the problems of surplus labour by changing workers into farmers on land acquired in frontier Wisconsin. The book is based on intensive research into British and American newspapers, passenger lists, census, manuscript, and genealogical sources. After tracing the scheme’s industrial origins and founding in the Potteries, it examines the migration and settlement process, expansion to other trades and areas, and finally the circumstances that led to its demise in 1851. Despite the Society’s failure, the history offers unique insight into working-class dreams of landed independence in the American West and into the complex and contingent character of nineteenth-century emigration.
Martin Crawford is Emeritus Professor of Anglo-American History at Keele University
