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Suggestions and Debates

The Future of British Labour History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Richard Price
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Just over ten years ago the future of labour history in Britain seemed assured. A self-confident, burgeoning field, it lay at the centre of the most innovative contributions to British historiography in the post-war era, and could claim as its own some of the most impressive historians of the time. Since the founding of the Society for the Study of Labour History in 1960, the field had moved from the periphery of historical concerns to occupy a central position in the spectrum of history writing.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , August 1991 , pp. 249 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1991

References

1 See the reports in Labour History Review, 55 (Winter, 1990), 3, pp. 5–16.Google Scholar

2 For a critical survey of this literature see Kirk, Neville, “In Defence of Class. A Critique of Recent Revisionist Writing Upon the Nineteenth Century English Working Class”, International Review of Social History, XXXII (1987), pp. 2–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar But it is interesting that discussion on this crisis is virtually non-existent. Nor is such a crisis limited to Britain; for a similar situation in the United States see Arnesen, Eric, “Crusades Against Crisis. A View from the United States on the ‘Rank and file’ Critique and other Catalogues of Labour History's Alleged Ills”, International Review of Social History, XXXV (1990), pp. 106–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Cannadine, David, “British History: Past, Present and Future?”, Past and Present, 116 (1987), pp. 169–191CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the replies by Cross, P. R., Lamont, William, and Evans, Neil in Past and Present, 119 (1988), pp. 171–203.Google Scholar

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5 Reprinted in Hobsbawm, Eric, Politics for a Rational Left (London, 1989).Google Scholar

6 The literature on this is very extensive. Hobsbawm's, Eric original statement “The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth Century Britain”, in Labouring Men (London, 1964)Google Scholar has recently been restated and refined in his Workers: Worlds of Labor (New York, 1984)Google Scholar, chs 12, 13. For a very good overview see Grey, Robert, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth Century Britain c. 1850–1914 (London, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Other important pieces include Royden Harrison and Zeitlin, Jonathan, Divisions of Labour. Skilled Workers and Technological Change in Nineteenth Century Britain (Brighton, 1985)Google Scholar; Matsumura, Takao, The Labour Aristocracy Revisited. The Victorian Flint Glass Makers 1850–1880 (Manchester, 1983)Google Scholar; Moorhouse, H. F., “The Marxist Theory of the Labour Aristocracy”, Social History, 3 (01, 1978), pp. 61–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reid, Alastair, “Politics and Economics in the formation of the British working class: A response to H. F. Moorhouse”, Social History, 3 (10, 1978), pp. 347–362CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Valverde, Marianna, “‘Giving the female a domestic turn’: the social, legal and moral regulation of women's work in British cotton mills 1820–1850”, Journal of Social History, 21 (Summer, 1988), pp. 619–634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See the essays by McKibbin, Ross, “Why was there no Marxism in Britain?”, “Working-class Gambling in Britain, 1880–1939”, and “Work and Hobbies in Britain, 1880–1950”, in Ideologies of Class. Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 1–41, 101–138Google Scholar; Joyce, Patrick, Work, Society and Politics. The Culture of the Factory in Late Victorian England (Brighton, 1980).Google Scholar

8 Thus, McKibbin's very interesting piece “Why was there no Marxism in Britain?” in The Ideologies of Class, rested on the premise that the absence of Marxism was the problem to be exlained, and found a large part of the answer in the way the socio economic base created a fractured working class.

9 Jones, Gareth Stedman, Outcast London. A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, p.v, and Languages of Labour, Studies in English Working class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 21.Google Scholar

10 Jones, , Languages of Labour, p. 8.Google Scholar

11 Jones, , Languages of Labour, p. 22Google Scholar and see the essay “Why is the Labour Party in Mess?”

12 Laybourn, Keith and Reynolds, Jack, Liberalism and the Rise of Labour 1890–1918 (London, 1984)Google Scholar; Clark, David, Coine Valley: Radicalism to Socialism. The Portrait of a Northern Constituency in the Formative years of the Labour Party 1890–1910 (London, 1981).Google Scholar

13 See, for example, Savage, Michael, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics. The Labour Movement in Preston 1880–1940 (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar, and Cronin, James, “Politics, Class Structure and the Enduring Weakness of British Social Democracy”, Journal of Social History, 16 (1983), pp. 123–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Although William Reddy has tried for France, see The Rise of Market Culture. The Textile Trade and French Society, 1750–1900 (Cambridge, 1984).Google Scholar

15 For an introduction to this rapidly burgeoning area of scholarly discourse, see Harlan, David, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature”, American Historical Review, 94 (08, 1989), pp. 581–609CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Appleby, Joyce, “One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving Towards the Linguistic; A Response to David Harlan”, American Historical Review, 94 (12, 1989), pp. 1320–1332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Jones, “Rethinking Chartism”, in Languages of Class, though it must be said that much of the picture of Chartism so drawn is quite familiar from other analyses. For an effective critique of Jones' use and conception of language see Foster, John, “The Declassing of Language”, New Left Review, 150 (03/04, 1985), pp. 29–46.Google ScholarGray, Robert, “The languages of factory reform in Britain, 1830–1860”, in Joyce, Patrick (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 143–179.Google Scholar

17 For this see Zeitlin, Jonathan, “From Labour History to the History of Industrial Relations”, Economic History Review, second series, XL (1987), pp. 159–184.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a fuller critique see Price, Richard, “‘What's in a Name?’ Workplace History and ‘Rank and Filism’”, International Review of Social History, XXXIV (1989), pp. 62–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Price, Richard, Labour in British Society (London, 1986), pp. 158–169Google Scholar for the emergence of the hegemony of labourism. Lowe, Rodney, Adjusting to Democracy. The Ministry of Labour in British Politics 1916–1939 (Oxford, 1986).Google Scholar

18 Phillips, Gordon and Whiteside, Noel, Casual Labour, the Unemployment Questioning the Port Transport Industry 1880–1970 (Oxford, 1985).Google Scholar

19 Two representative examples of what seem to me to be the best kind of women's history in this respect are John, Angela V. (ed.), Unequal Opportunities. Women's Employment in England 1800–1918 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Lewis, Jane (ed.), Labour and Love. Women's Experience of Home and Family 1850–1940 (Oxford, 1986).Google Scholar

20 See, for example, Sugarman, David, Legality, Ideology and The State (London, 1983).Google Scholar

21 Breuilly, John, “Comparative Labour History”, Labour History Review, 55 (1990), pp. 6–9Google Scholar; also by Breuilly, , “Artisan Economy, Artisan Politics, Artisan Ideology: The Artisan Contribution to the Early Nineteenth Century Labour Movement”, in Emsley, Clive and Walvin, James (eds), Artisans, Peasants and Proletarians 1760–1860 (London, 1985), pp. 187–225Google Scholar; Cross, Gary, A Quest for Time. The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940 (Berkeley, 1989).Google Scholar See also, Lenger, Friedrich, “Beyond Exceptionalism: Notes on the artisanal phase of the labour movement in France, England, Germany and the United States”, International Review of Social History, XXXVI (1990), pp. 1–23Google Scholar; Eisenberg, Christiane, “The Comparative View in Labour History: Old and New Interpretations of the English and German Labour Movements Before 1914”, International Review of Social History, 34 (1989), pp. 403–432CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide (eds), Working Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986).Google Scholar

22 See Price, , Labour in British Society, pp. 208–247.Google Scholar