2 - Political economy, the labour movement and the minimum wage, 1880–1914

Summary

In 1974 Peter Clarke published a celebrated paper on the progressive movement in England. The article began with the modest proposal that ‘American historiography can … suggest valuable lines of analysis which have not been fully applied to Britain’. In particular, it was claimed, the study of American progressivism disclosed the need to pay due attention to the role of ideas in the history of social reform. In characteristically mischievous fashion, the author noted that ‘it would not, perhaps, be fair’ to say ‘that in England we purposely write history with the ideas left out’. The paper proceeded to address this lacuna through an examination of how British progressives defined their relationship with organised labour through their ideas. As such, it enunciated a developing interest in the place of ideas in political history; more specifically, it expressed a deep and enduring engagement with the politics of economics and the relationship between social democrats and the labour movement.

This chapter shares these concerns. It focuses upon a political question that raised large economic issues and sparked a complex debate amongst progressives and the labour movement. It draws too upon the Anglo-American comparison highlighted by Clarke's paper. As historians have increasingly recognised, transatlantic traffic played a significant role in the development of ideas about social policy in the pre-1914 period. In the case of the minimum wage, as Hart and Skocpol have noted, links between British and American reformers were manifold.