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The harsh dependence suffered by West Indian slaves offered a powerful metaphor, wage slavery, with which to attack the British industrialism of the nineteenth century. The rich rhetorical possibilities of the comparison to chattel slavery appealed to a wide range of critics of the new industrialism. But beneath all the emotion, there emerged a serious effort to develop an economics of wage slavery. This initiative came not from liberals or socialists, but rather from Tory radicals who contrasted the coercive and degrading discipline of both the plantation and the factory with the restrained use of power in the idealized patriarchal economy.
Early critiques of industrial capitalism, and especially the work of Ricardian socialists, have received considerable scholarly attention in recent years.l But this renewed interest in the roots of economic heterodoxy has largely overlooked the wage-slavery concept. Admittedly, the metaphor smacks of journalistic, if not literary, flamboyance. And the writers who attacked wage slavery generally avoided the formal, abstract style of political economy and aimed their writing at a broad popular audience.2 Finally, the concerned traditionalism of the Tory radicals has left only modest echoes in the political and economic theories of the twentieth century.3
Under the circumstances historians of economic thought have shown scant interest in the wage-slavery metaphor. While understandable, this oversight has left us with little appreciation of the serious economic content of the Tory-radical wage-slavery thesis. At a time when the nature of industrial capitalism was still in considerable doubt, the Tory radicals presented an original and incisive analysis of the direct use of power in economic relations.
Virtually all of the radical Tories who seriously discussed wage slavery built their analyses on the discrepancy between a picture of markets as neutral arbiters among petty commodity producers and the harsh realities of the direct exercise of power-through both discipline and force-that characterized the emerging factories. Instead of enforcing what Philip Wicksteed later called "non-tuism"-namely, market relations at a distance-the new factories built their profits on a very direct and frightening immediacy in the lives of their workers.
According to the Tory radicals, factories did not simply leave their laborers poor. Far worse, the factory system took over the workers' time, micromanaged their activity, disciplined them for infractions, and destroyed the order...