Transplanting and rooting workers in London and Brussels: a comparative history.

Abstract

Teeming, chaotic, and congested cities troubled reform-minded British and Belgian observers at the end of the nineteenth century. Reformers in the first two industrialized nations of Europe recognized that they faced a common crisis. Industrial production required a concentrated labor force, but the everincreasing number of workers and their families who huddled in blind alleys and rookeries threatened urban order. The tumbledown tenements and malodorous hovels, hidden from light and the gaze of passers-by, frightened the middle class. There epidemics and debauchery were spawned, and criminal conspiracies and rebellions bred. The British and the Belgians watched each other as they struggled to control the working class sheltered in their troubled cities. Reformers on both sides of the Channel shared dreams of a respectable working class residing outside a reconfigured urban space. The Belgians and the British alike adopted residential dispersion as the solution to their shared crisis of urban overcrowding. Toiling masses by day, Belgian and British workers and their families would be separated each night in individual cottages spread through the countryside. Neither the Belgian nor the British reformers expected these residential patterns to develop or to stay in place on their own. Despite the entrenched liberal, laissez-faire convictions that checked the growth of government in nineteenthcentury Belgium as well as Britain, the reformers introduced strategies of government intervention. The Belgians planned to root the laborers in their an-