Thomas Paine publishes Rights of Man, attacking monarchy and aristocracy and inspiring English Jacobins to challenge the constitutional order.

The London Corresponding Society opens with a rule of unlimited membership, welcoming working men regardless of property.

French revolutionaries execute their king and declare war on Britain, triggering England's full counter-revolutionary crackdown on Jacobins.

The English government arrests LCS founder Thomas Hardy and his associates on charges of high treason.

Thomas Hardy is acquitted of treason, and popular enthusiasm for the LCS surges to its highest point.

The government passes the Two Acts, making anti-government speech treasonous and banning public gatherings of more than fifty people.

Parliament passes the Combination Acts, effectively outlawing organized trade unions across England.

Nottingham framework-knitters launch the first Luddite disturbances, smashing industrial frames across the region.

The English government deploys twelve thousand troops to the three counties experiencing Luddite violence.

Jeremiah Brandreth leads insurrectionaries from Pentridge on a march toward Nottingham and London before troops intercept and arrest them.

Tens of thousands of men, women, and children gather peacefully at St. Peter's Fields in Manchester to demand the right of public assembly.

Manchester Yeomanry cavalry charges into the St. Peter's Fields crowd, killing eleven people and wounding hundreds more.

The government passes the Six Acts following Peterloo, imposing warrantless home searches and a new stamp tax on publications.

Parliament repeals the Combination Acts, opening the path to legal trade union organization for the first time.

The Reform Act is passed, marking the historical moment at which Thompson declares the English working class has been fully made.

Thomas Paine's Rights of Man ignited English Jacobinism and terrified the ruling class into launching a counter-revolution that would last for decades. The London Corresponding Society gave the nascent working class its first truly democratic organization, but the government arrested its leaders and crushed public dissent through sweeping legislation. Industrial capitalism compounded political repression by destroying artisan independence and organizing workers' exploitation through the factory system. The Luddite uprisings of 1811–1812 fused political and industrial grievances into something approaching revolutionary insurrection, met by the deployment of twelve thousand troops. The Peterloo massacre and its repressive aftermath radicalized working-class consciousness irreversibly, and the Cato Street Conspiracy marked the final eruption of conspiratorial Radicalism before the class settled into constitutional agitation. By the time the Reform Act was passed, the English working class had fully made itself as a distinct force with distinct interests.

The headline events driving the making of the English working class.

Edmund Burke publishes Reflections on the Revolution in France, dismissing the poor as the 'swinish multitude' and defending hereditary privilege.

Naval mutinies break out across England's fleet, revealing that Jacobin ideas have penetrated into the military.

The Irish Rebellion is violently suppressed by English forces, with casualties numbering in the tens of thousands.

Irish-born conspirator Edmund Despard is arrested, convicted of high treason, and publicly executed.

Parliament makes frame-breaking a capital offense in direct response to the first wave of Luddite disturbances.

Yorkshire croppers launch a second wave of Luddite attacks, targeting mills that use shearing frames to displace skilled workers.

Luddites make an unsuccessful assault on a mill at Rawfolds, and a mill owner is subsequently murdered.

Prime Minister Spencer Perceval is assassinated in Parliament, and news of his death is met with celebration in some working-class communities.

Major John Cartwright establishes the Hampden Clubs, which quickly spread into England's industrial North as centers of Radical organizing.

The Spa Fields riots in London give the government a fresh pretext to suspend Habeas Corpus and scatter the Radical movement again.

Government spy William Oliver infiltrates Radical networks in Nottingham and the West Riding, assuring local leaders that sympathetic rebels await them in London.

Arthur Thistlewood and a group of London Radicals hatch the Cato Street Conspiracy, planning to assassinate the entire Cabinet.

Thistlewood and his Cato Street co-conspirators are arrested before executing their plot and are subsequently hanged.

Robert Owen's communitarian experiments at New Lanark inspire working-class cooperative societies and Equitable Labour Exchanges in London and Birmingham.

An agricultural revolt sweeps rural England as laborers destroy threshing machines and rise against landlord enclosures.

Edmund Burke's contemptuous dismissal of the poor and the subsequent spread of Jacobin ideas into the navy and Ireland showed how wide and how threatening the democratic ferment had become by the late 1790s. The execution of Edmund Despard and the passage of the Combination Acts demonstrated the ruling class's determination to crush both political and industrial resistance by any means necessary. Luddism spread from Nottingham to Yorkshire and Lancashire in 1811–1812, producing attacks on mills, the assassination of a prime minister, and an extraordinary show of community solidarity in the face of military occupation. After the war, the Hampden Clubs tried to organize Radicalism nationally, but government spies and the Spa Fields riots gave authorities a pretext to scatter the movement again. The Cato Street Conspiracy marked the violent endpoint of conspiratorial Radicalism, after which the working class rebuilt itself through cooperative experiments and rural revolt. By 1830, the agricultural rising and Robert Owen's communitarian movement together showed that a class-conscious working population stretched from city factories to country fields.

The supporting events that shaped working-class formation across the full period.

Thompson declares his intention to rescue working people from 'the enormous condescension of posterity' shown by later historians.

John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is identified as a foundational text shaping English working-class consciousness against government and aristocratic power.

A major London demonstration draws tens of thousands to protest counter-revolutionary repression, marking English Jacobinism's peak moment.

English Jacobins are driven underground by the Two Acts, where their suppressed energy transforms into secretive insurrectionary networks.

The rural enclosure movement transfers common land into private hands, reducing agricultural laborers to a condition of permanent dependency.

The destruction of task-oriented artisan work rhythms by clock-bound factory discipline is revealed as industrialization's deepest cost to the laborer.

Methodism is exposed as serving industrial capitalism by instilling submission, sanctifying labor, suppressing joy, and making workers fear divine punishment.

William Cobbett converts from Toryism to Radicalism and turns his Political Register against Old Corruption, giving the working class a defining polemical voice.

The Westminster Committee secures two reliably Radical seats in Parliament, demonstrating working-class political capacity within constitutional limits.

Government repeal of centuries-old apprenticeship laws exposes artisan trades to unlimited competition from unskilled workers, accelerating industrial exploitation.

Surviving Nottingham committee letters reveal that framework-knitters knew and despised Adam Smith's economic philosophy used to justify their exploitation.

The public revelation of spy William Oliver's role in instigating the Pentridge Rising shocks England and discredits the government's counter-revolutionary methods.

Richard Carlile defies government censorship in The Republican and endures years of imprisonment, galvanizing the broader fight for press freedom.

Artisan newspapers including John Gast's Trades Newspaper and John Wade's Gorgon establish a distinct working-class literary and political culture in the 1820s.

Thompson concludes that working-class cooperative institutions and communitarian experiments of the 1820s prove the English working class has fully made itself.

Thompson opens his study by declaring his intent to rescue working people from the condescension of scholars who reduce their lives to statistics, framing the book as a challenge to prevailing academic orthodoxy. The English dissenting tradition, rooted in texts like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, gave the nascent working class a language for resisting state power long before Paine arrived. Counter-revolutionary repression drove Jacobinism underground, where it fused with industrial grievances to produce a secretive illegal tradition that secretly sustained working-class aspirations through the darkest years. The exposure of Methodism as a tool of capitalist discipline and the revelation of spy William Oliver's role in fomenting the Pentridge Rising were the two most damning indictments of the ruling class's methods. Richard Carlile's defiance of censorship and William Cobbett's polemical attacks on Old Corruption gave the working class both the vocabulary and the press it needed to articulate its interests. By the 1820s, artisan publications, cooperative experiments, and trade union agitation together constituted a fully formed working-class culture that no reform act could either create or destroy.

The key discoveries, decisions, and shifts that define working-class consciousness.