Manchester has historically influenced political and social thinking in Britain and been a hotbed for new, radical thinking, particularly during the Industrial Revolution.

The city was a centre for the women's suffrage, Co-operative, Communist, Chartist, and Anti-Corn Law movements. Friedrich Engels largely based The Condition of the Working Class in England on his observations of Manchester.

In 1842, 22-year-old Engels was sent by his parents to Manchester, Britain, to work for the Ermen and Engels' Victoria Mill in Weaste which made sewing threads. Engels' father thought that working at the Manchester firm might make Engels reconsider the opinions he had developed at the time. On his way to Manchester, Engels visited the office of the Rheinische Zeitung and met Karl Marx for the first time – they were not impressed by each other. Marx mistakenly thought that Engels was still associated with the Berliner Young Hegelians, with whom he (Marx) had just broken.

In Manchester, Engels met Mary Burns, a fierce young working woman with radical opinions, with whom he began a relationship that lasted until her death in 1862. The two never married, as both were against the institution of marriage, which Engels saw as unnatural and unjust. Burns guided Engels through Manchester and Salford, showing him the worst districts for his research. While in Manchester, Engels wrote his first economic work. This article was called "Outline of a Critique of Political Economy" and was written between October and November 1843. Engels sent the article to Paris, where Marx published it in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which Marx was now publishing in Paris. Engels also wrote a three part series of articles called "The Condition of England" in January, February and March 1844.

While observing the slums of Manchester in close detail, Engels took notes of the horrors he observed, notably child labour, the despoiled environment and overworked and impoverished labourers. and sent back a series of articles to Marx, first for publication in the Rheinische Zeitungand then for publication in Deutsch–Franzosische Jahrbucher, chronicling the conditions amongst the working class in Manchester. These he would later collect and publish in his influential first book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. The book was written between September 1844 and March 1845 and was printed in German in 1845. In the book, Engels gave way to his views on the "grim future of capitalism and the industrial age", and described in detail, street after street, the total squalor in which the working people were living. The book was published in English in 1887.

While writing it, Engels continued his involvement with radical journalism and politics. He frequented some areas also frequented by some members of the English labour and Chartist movements, whom he met, and wrote for several journals, including The Northern Star, Robert Owen's New Moral World and the Democratic Review newspaper. Engel's experiences in Manchester had a profound effect on his political philosophy, he viewed capitalism as an unnecessary evil and soon wrote The Communist Manifesto.

In 1819, Lancashire was represented by two members of parliament (MPs). Voting was restricted to the adult male owners of freehold land valued at 40 shillings or more – the equivalent of about £80 as of 2008 – and votes could only be cast at the county town of Lancaster, by a public spoken declaration at the hustings. Constituency boundaries were out of date, and the so-called "rotten boroughs" had a hugely disproportionate influence on the membership of the Parliament of the United Kingdom compared to the size of their populations: Old Sarum in Wiltshire, with one voter, elected two MPs, as did Dunwich in Suffolk, which by the early 19th century had almost completely disappeared into the sea. The major urban centres of Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Blackburn, Rochdale, Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham and Stockport, with a combined population of almost one million, were represented by either the two county MPs for Lancashire, or the two for Cheshire in the case of Stockport. By comparison, more than half of all MPs were elected by a total of just 154 voters. These inequalities in political representation led to calls for reform.

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, a brief boom in textile manufacture was followed by periods of economic depression, particularly among textile weavers and spinners. Weavers who could have expected to earn 15 shillings for a six-day week in 1803, saw their wages cut to 5 shillings or even 4s 6d by 1818. The industrialists, who were cutting wages without offering relief, blamed market forces generated by the aftershocks of the Napoleonic Wars. Exacerbating matters were the Corn Laws, the first of which was passed in 1815, imposing a tariff on foreign grain in an effort to protect English grain producers. The cost of food rose as people were forced to buy the more expensive and lower quality British grain, and periods of famine and chronic unemployment ensued, increasing the desire for political reform both in Lancashire and in the country at large.