Pollard notes that “there were few areas of the country in which modern
industries, particularly the textiles, if carried on in large buildings,
were not associated with prisons, workhouses, and orphanages. This
connection is usually underrated, particularly by those historians who
assume that the new works recruited free labour only.” So widespread does
he find this and other systems of coercion that he concludes that “the
modern industrial proletariat was introduced to its role not so much by
attraction or monetary reward, but by compulsion, force and fear (45-46).
Legal compulsions and a paralegal structure of punishment within factories
were often enlarged into an entire social system covering whole townships
(46).
In this method of total economic, spiritual, moral, and physical domination,
buttressed by the legal and police constraints of a servile administration
of justice in a segregated industrial area, we see the forerunner of the
company town familiar in the United States in the recent past as one of
the most widely used systems of total control before the rise of industrial
unionism (46).