'The freedom of election' : the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire and the growth of radicalism in Sheffield 1784-1792

In the early 1790s, societies were formed in towns and cities across Britain with the
aim of persuading the government to institute a wide-ranging and radical programme
of political reform. Whilst political reform organisations were in themselves not new,
these societies differed from their predecessors because they were, in the main,
organised by and for men who contemporary society did not consider to be part of the
political process: small tradesmen, artisans, journeymen, and labourers. Arguably the
most radical and certainly one of the most popular of these new societies was the
Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information.
Historians have long sought to explain this surge of popular interest in political
reform. They have pointed to the influence of earlier reform movements, the war with
the American colonists, the campaigns to secure the repeal of the Test and
Corporation Acts and to the influence, most importantly, of the French Revolution and the popular debates that it inspired. But none of the existing historical scholarship
adequately explains why radicalism emerged with such vigour in Sheffield, a town
not previously noted for political activism. This thesis will attempt to fill this gap in
our historical knowledge by looking at what was happening in the town in the seven
years immediately preceding the formation of the S.S.C.I., years during which its
principal industry, the manufacture of cutlery, was riven by a bitter and acrimonious
dispute. It will show how under the influence of both external events and of radical
and articulate leaders this dispute, which emanated from traditional economic
grievances, became increasingly politicised and how, in the process, the working men
of Sheffield came to believe that the only way to solve these economic grievances was
through radical political reform.