This book sheds new light on the human cost of industrialisation by examining the lives and experiences of those disabled in an industry that was vital to Britain's economic growth. If disability has been largely absent from conventional histories of industrialisation, the Industrial Revolution has assumed great significance in disability studies. The book examines the economic and welfare responses to disease, injury and impairment among coal workers. It discusses experiences of disability within the context of social relations and the industrial politics of coalfield communities. The book provides the context for those that follow by providing an overview of the conditions of work in British coalmining between 1780 and 1880. It turns its attention to the principal causes of disablement in the nineteenth-century coal industry and the medical responses to them. The book then extends the discussion of responses to disability by examining the welfare provisions for miners with long-term restrictive health conditions. It also examines how miners and their families negotiated a 'mixed economy' of welfare, comprising family and community support, the Poor Law, and voluntary self-help as well as employer paternalism. The book shifts attention away from medicine and welfare towards the ways in which disability affected social relations within coalfield communities. Finally, it explores the place of disability in industrial politics and how fluctuating industrial relations affected the experiences of disabled people in the coalfields.
should not exaggerate the impact of these changes. Coalmining remained an industry receptive to the re-employment of men after serious injury well into the twentieth century, despite the downturn in the sector’s economic fortunes between the First and Second World Wars.7 The development of industrial society is also important to the history of medical and welfare responses to disablement. The dangers of mine work meant that British coalminers were among the first occupational groups to receive dedicated medical care, first via surgeons funded through colliery ‘sick
and their implications for conceptions and experiences of disability. It sheds light 4 DISABILITY IN THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION on the various community, political, medical and welfare responses to workers’ disability in the century before the 1880 Employers’ Liability Act – a landmark, if flawed, legislative intervention that enshrined in law employer responsibility for workplace accidents that could have been prevented.11 The book therefore charts a shift from ad hoc responses to disability to the first signs of a more formal recognition of the needs of