John Sanders, <i>Workers of Their Own Emancipation. Working-Class Leadership and Organisation in the West Riding Textile District, 1829–1839</i> . Breviary Stuff, London 2024. 554 pp. Ill. £25.00.

Workers of Their Own Emancipation has had a long gestation.It began as doctoral research in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was put aside while John Sanders engaged in the necessary task of earning a living.But when Covid supplied enforced leisure, Sanders was able to return to his project, albeit in a limited way, as were all scholars at the time, because of the difficulty of physically visiting archives.Just as the first era of radical protest was the product of a communications revolution, so too this monumental history is a tribute to the expanding possibilities of online research.The original thesis has been revised and extended to incorporate the immense volume of research that has been published in the intervening decades.In this sense, Workers of Their Own Emancipation comprises both a foundation text and a coping stone of the history of popular radicalism during the critical decade between the Reform Bill crisis and the emergence of Chartism.It supplies an invaluable body of evidence about a decade of increasingly organized protest, which will form a point of departure for further biographical and institutional studies in other regions and different periods.At the same time, it constitutes a judicious and authoritative summation of the research programme that was ignited by the publication of The Making of the English Working Class in 1963.As the slightly awkward title indicates, the focus of this study is on the individuals who formed and led the protest organizations in the period.Arguably, all histories of early popular radicalism are by definition studies of leadership.In the absence of opinion polls or contemporary external analysis, most of what is known about the movements leading up to Chartism comes from the words and actions of local, regional, or national leaders.They made the speeches reported in the increasingly busy local press, they produced the pamphlets and manifestos, they wrote the occasional autobiographies.In this sense, Sanders' 500-page local study is simply adding detail upon detail about a well-studied area, mostly derived from exhaustive reading of newspapers and Home Office papers.He has constructed an intricate landscape of suffering and protest (which, given its geographical specificity, would have benefitted from some maps) that was crisscrossed by cohorts of men over a decade of more or less organized protest.By explicitly focusing on the leadership, Sanders wants to make three related points.The first and most important is the growing self-sufficiency of popular protest as it evolved through a series of campaigns and organizations.From the outset, it was driven by a sense of betrayal by both national political leaders and more local middle-class sympathizers.What appeared at one stage to be a cross-sectoral campaign against Old