Caught in the Machinery

Jamie L. Bronstein is Associate Professor of History at New Mexico State University. She is the author of Land Reform and Working-ClassExperience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (Stanford, 1999)

"Caught in the Machinery combines legal analysis and social detail to present the consequences of workplace accidents in a fresh context. Jamie Bronstein's excellent scholarship sheds new light on the Victorian origins of the welfare state."—Richard Cosgrove, University of Arizona "Now, in a well-documented and organized monograph, Jamie L. Bronstein joins the small number of historians who have engaged with workplace death and injury during the peak period of industrialization in nineteenth-century Britain Bronstein has written a valuable and assiduously documented monograph that ranges far and wide in a field requiring microscopic attention to social and economic detail, regional and sectoral diversity, and extreme legislative and legal complexity." —H-Net "Bronstein's examination of the paths to compensation and the cultural meanings of workplace accidents provides new insights into nineteenth-century Anglo-American workers' experience of the physical toll imposed on workers' bodies during the rise of industrial capitalism."—Eric Tucker, York University

• Contents Acknowledgme ntsix Introduction: Not Your Typical Day at the Office1 1The Perils of the Workplace0 2The Options for Injured Workers00 3The Cultural Meanings of Workplace Accidents00 4The Paradox of Free Labor000 5Industrial Accidents and State Power000 Epilogue: The Anglo-American Aftermath000 Notes000 Index000