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Jamie L. Bronstein, Caught in the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain.

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Jamie L. Bronstein, Caughtin the Machinery: Workplace Accidents and Injured Workers in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008)

IN THIS SHORT but ambitious book Jamie Bronstein explores multiple facets of workers' experience of workplace injuries in nineteenth-century England, including their access to compensation through both legal and non-legal means, the cultural meaning of accidents, the relation between work injury and the ideal of free labour, and the politics of legislated protection and employer liability. In addition, she compares the English experience with that of American workers, focusing on differences that she roots both in the timing of industrial development and the greater role that the discourse of free labour played in shaping regulatory developments in the United States. As is to be expected in any book with such broad ambitions, Bronstein succeeds better in some areas than others.

The first chapter provides a general overview of the hazards associated with the industrial revolution, focusing on the dangerous conditions workers faced on the railways and in coal mines and textile factories. While it is impossible to prove that industrialization quantitatively increased the level of risk to which workers were exposed or the incidence of work injuries, drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources Bronstein confirms the conclusion that other studies have reached: "the [nineteenth-century] workplace posed large and predictable dangers to its inhabitants." (8) Moreover, she also finds that there was little thought given to questions of worker safety in the design of production. (17)

The financial implications of work-related injuries and deaths were substantial for surviving workers and dependent family members, especially in an era when compensation was anything but automatic. Bronstein's exploration of this aspect of workers' experience makes a major contribution by going beyond the question of legal liability and delving into the other options potentially available to disabled workers and their families....

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