considers their attitudes, culture and mentalities. He contends that the working-class made their own culture against which goes against historical materialism in which production is seen as a prerequisite to mould the workers. Thompson in some respects is a special type of cultural Marxist. Most would equate his emphasis on ‘experience’ for culturalist tendencies. However, he is not entirely a ‘culturalist’ in the sense that he favours cultural over other types of explanations. Sewell compellingly argues that he is an ‘experimentalist,’ as he writes a narrative that seeks to privilege the ‘concrete historical agents over that of the theoretically self-conscious analyst’.

Rudé, in Captain Swing, analysed how traditional values and ideas issue in provoking popular responses such as machine breaking. This is a theme adopted and adapted from E.P. Thompson’s exposition of a ‘moral economy’ for the English crowd. Thompson utilises archival research in order recover the experiences of the working-class. He digresses from high culture, focus on popular culture, by looking at the Luddites, he also includes an economic alongside the focus on popular culture. Language and mentalités evolve and acquire different meanings as history progresses. He empirically embellishes productive relations in The Making, which can be seen in chapters six and ten, with his focus of Luddism and chapter 14 contains details of the economic life and productive relations of the labourers. Similarly, Captain Swing, takes a quantitative approach, page 358 includes a ‘table of incidents,’ with an arrangement of the Swing events that occurred from February 1830 to October 1831. Oodles of data is consigned to the last 60 pages of appendices showing the spread of the chaos which ensued

As Thompson’s primary focus regarding the new culture of the period, gender blindness does not come as a complete shock, given that women were largely omitted from the political culture lain during industrialisation. But accepting and reproducing the sexual inequalities, ties in with the Marxist inclinations. Clark emphasises how the working-class formation must to understood as a process of gender formation. When analysing gender relations prevalent in ‘pre-industrial’ work places, Clark provides a valuable insight into the differing cultures between the artisan trades of the ‘Luddite cropper’ and the textile working ‘handloom weavers’, who Thompson in contrast lumps together. Clark posits that were two primary forms of gender relationships where women were inferior to men. Firstly, in London and the artisan trades, there was a strong fraternal c