"The roots of the Chartist movement in Great Britain were partly political and partly economic." Critically examine.

Answer:

Chartism, which agitated between 1838 and 1848 for the People's Charter, was at once a demand for political rights and a protest against the economic distress of the industrial working class. Both roots are clearly visible in its origins and its fortunes.

The political roots

• The Reform Act of 1832 enfranchised the middle class but excluded workers entirely.
• The People's Charter of 1838 demanded universal male suffrage and the secret ballot.
• It also sought equal constituencies, payment of MPs, abolition of the property qualification and annual parliaments.
• Workers concluded that only political power could secure economic remedy.

The economic roots

• The depression of the late 1830s brought unemployment and falling wages.
• The New Poor Law of 1834 and its workhouses were bitterly resented.
• Handloom weavers were being displaced by power machinery.
• Support rose and fell with the trade cycle, peaking in years of distress.
• Chartism has been called a knife-and-fork question by its own contemporaries.

Assessment

• Its three petitions were rejected, and the movement collapsed after 1848.
• Division between moral force under Lovett and physical force under O'Connor weakened it.
• Five of its six demands were nonetheless enacted within the following century.

Its significance

• It was the first independent political movement of the working class.
• It gave workers organisational experience and a sense of common interest.
• Marx and Engels observed it closely as a model of proletarian politics.
• Only annual parliaments, of the six demands, was never adopted.

The statement is thus well-founded. As historians of British labour observe, Chartism drew its programme from radical political tradition and its mass following from industrial hardship, and it was the coincidence of the two that made it the first genuinely national working-class movement in history.