Labour History and the Labour Movement in Britain, and: Thomas Burt, Miners' MP, 1837-1922: The Great Conciliator (review)

Labour History and the Labour Movement in Britain, by Sidney Pollard; pp. vi + 313. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1999, £57.50, $105.95.

Thomas Burt, Miners' MP, 1837-1922: The Great Conciliator, by Lowell J. Satre; pp. vii + 200. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999, £50.00, $75.00.

As is generally known, British labor history has changed dramatically since it emerged as a separate field of inquiry about a century ago. Usually regarded as the founding text, Sidney and Beatrice Webb's History of Trade Unionism (1894) focused on the evolution of established institutions and had a thinly disguised political goal, to justify their belief in the "inevitability of gradualness." G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate's The Common People, 1746-1938 (1938) added a social and economic dimension to the study of institutional and political change. They looked at living standards, changes in wages, diet, housing; in general, they vastly expanded the idea of labor history to include the experience of the working class itself. But their overall aim remained the same as the Webbs', to present a success story, in which the end, the emergence of a powerful Labour party and trade union movement, was foreshadowed in the beginning.

In the past half century, however, the focus of much labor history has changed and the whole scope of the field expanded. Under the influence of Marxist ideas, a number of labor historians have called into question the triumphant story told by the Webbs and Cole and Postgate, instead criticizing the Labour party's reformism and seeking to explain why it did not take a more revolutionary path. Most famously, Eric Hobsbawm attributed this development to the influence of a "labor aristocracy," a notion that then came under extensive examination. Influenced by Edward Thompson's seminal Making of the English Working Class (1963), labor historians paid much more respectful attention to forgotten individuals and movements, pointing to lost paths and emphasizing the contingent nature of the evolution of the British labor movement. Thompson's [Begin Page 625] Making also brought issues of working-class formation and class consciousness to the forefront of the inquiry. Such concerns have remained, even though recently the very notion of class as a useful analytic concept has been called into question, by Patrick Joyce, for example. Whatever its shortcomings--Thompson's limited attention to issues of gender, for example, has been noted by Joan Scott, Anna Clark, and Barbara Taylor, among others--Thompson's work, coinciding as it did with the widespread romanticism of everything that we now call the 1960s, helped make labor history a cutting edge of historical inquiry and among the most popular of fields for new students.

In the last two decades, labor history has also incorporated questions and insights from a number of other fields of historical inquiry. Historians of women and gender have expanded its concerns and changed its understanding of the past. Concerns with labor process, in part inspired by Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1974), have led to a plethora of studies of the workplace and labor control. In turn, studies of the working class have been complemented by a re-examination of the Labour party, its rise, fall, and recent resurrection under Tony Blair.

Much of this changing nature of labor history is reflected in Sidney Pollard's Labour History and the Labour Movement in Britain. A distinguished labor and economic historian, Pollard died in November 1998 just after he had finished this collection of his writings. They include analyses of working-class living standards, examinations of working-class struggles to control the work place, presentations of alternative paths in the history of the labor movement, and critical examinations of the evolution of the trade union movement. Ranging in date from 1954 to 1993, the...