Causes and combinations in the long nineteenth century

Chapter 4 develops, through a historical illustration, the arguments concerning motivation presented in chapter 3. It makes a distinction between causes—movements made up of adherents motivated (disjointly) by others’ gains—and combinations—movements made up of constituents motivated (conjointly) by their own gains. This distinction is applied to three British historical cases from the long nineteenth century, to explain why—and with what consequences—the place of adherents differed between the metropolitan antislavery movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Chartists of the mid-nineteenth century, and movements of and for the poor (“neighboring” and “charity”) in the Victorian slums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.