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Captain Swing is an enjoyable collaboration between E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude that depicts the social history of the English agricultural wage-laborers’ uprising of 1830. According to Hobsbawm and Rude, historiography of the laborers’ rising of 1830 is negligible. Most of what is known by the general public comes from J. L. And Barbara Hammond’s The Village Laborer published in 1911. They consider this an exceedingly valuable work, but state that the Hammonds oversimplified events in …

…produce an eminently readable work which looks at the rebellion from a social, rather than purely economic, point of view. I enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it to anyone who desires and in-depth description of the social causes of a rebellion by men who many believed did not have it in them to rebel. Bibliography Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rude, George (1975) Captain Swing. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 384 pp.