History and Origin of the Co-operative Movement

Why the Movement Began

The modern co-operative movement was born out of the hardship caused by the Industrial Revolution in Europe during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As factories replaced small workshops, ordinary workers and artisans faced very low wages, long hours, poor working conditions, and high prices for the goods they needed. Middlemen and shopkeepers often exploited them by charging high prices and selling adulterated goods on credit at heavy interest. Out of this suffering grew the idea that ordinary people could protect themselves by joining together and running their own economic organisations.

Early Thinkers

Several reformers prepared the ground for the movement. Robert Owen, a British industrialist and social reformer, is often called the 'father of the co-operative movement' — he improved conditions for his own workers and argued that people could live and work together in co-operative communities based on mutual help rather than competition. Charles Fourier in France put forward similar ideas of co-operative living. In Germany, Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch organised the first urban co-operative credit societies for artisans and small traders, while Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen organised rural co-operative credit societies for poor farmers — his model of small, local, village-based credit co-operatives later strongly influenced rural credit co-operatives around the world, including in India.

The Rochdale Pioneers (1844) — the Real Beginning

The practical, successful beginning of the modern co-operative movement is universally traced to the town of Rochdale in England in the year 1844. A group of 28 poor weavers and workers, hard hit by low wages and high prices, pooled a small sum of money — a little at a time — and on 21 December 1844 opened their own co-operative store on Toad Lane, selling a few basic items such as flour, sugar, butter, and oatmeal at honest weights and fair prices. They called themselves the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, and history remembers them as the Rochdale Pioneers. …