Labour History Review
Datos de la Revista
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editorial | Liverpool University Press (GB) |
| ISSN | 0961-5652 / 1745-8188 |
| Scopus | 5700162205 |
| OpenAlex | S66037779 |
| MAG | 66037779 |
| Sitio web | https://api.elsevier.com/content/serial/title/issn/0961-5652 |
| Total de publicaciones | 666 |
| Periodo de cobertura | 1960 - 2026 |
| País | GB |
| Idioma | EN |
| Indexación | Indexada en Scopus |
| Citada por | 416 |
| Factor de impacto | 0.083 |
| SJR | 0.11 (Q3) |
| SNIP | 0.203 |
| CiteScore | 0.1 |
| Índice h | 7 |
| Índice i10 | 4 |
| Media de citas en 2 años | 0.1 |
| Participación femenina en la autoría | 25.0% |
This journal focuses on labour history, a subfield of social and cultural history. Social and cultural history is a cognate humanities discipline with regular anthropological intersection
History · Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management · Social Sciences (miscellaneous) · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Australian History and Society · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Critical Realism in Sociology · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Diverse Specialized Academic Research · Earthquake and Disaster Impact Studies
‘Many Tears Were Shed’
In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, workplace occupation belonged to the standard repertoire of workers’ and trade union activism in the Netherlands. Between 1972 and 2000, 177 of them can be identified. In this article, I focus on the role of emotions in the motives and behaviour of the occupiers, as reported in digitized newspapers. I will argue that these emotions were closely related to the moral economy of the occupiers and ex…
Out of the Shadow of Bevin and Mann
In the fifteen years before the British General Strike of 1926, the idea of a general strike had become familiar in labour movement circles. The connection between these earlier uses of the concept and the solidarity action of 1926 have not been closely scrutinized. One result of this is that the different possible options for a solidarity stoppage have not sufficiently registered; ‘the’ general strike as it actually happened immediately became i…
Class, Community, and the Labour Unrest in Rural Scotland
In 1912, amidst wider currents of industrial unrest throughout the country, a meeting in the Aberdeenshire market town of Turriff resulted in the formation of the Scottish Farm Servants Union. Due to a range of factors, agricultural unions were notoriously difficult to organize, with numerous earlier efforts ending in failure. Yet this was not the case with the new union, which would grow into an influential element of the Scottish labour movemen…
Obituary. Paddy Maguire (1950–2025)
Beyond Mourning
This article examines the survival strategies employed by the widows of railway workers in Argentina during the early twentieth century. Rather than portraying these women as passive recipients of assistance from trade unions or railway companies, this study highlights their active agency in securing financial support. Through petitions, legal claims, and persistent negotiations, widows sought compensation, pensions, or employment opportunities t…
Widespread Disbelief in the Immediate Danger of War’
The coming of the Soviet war scare in 1927 obliged all communist parties to spring to the defence of the world’s first socialist state. Kick-started by Britain’s severance of diplomatic relations in May, clear emphasis was placed from the very beginning on the role the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) would play in combating a supposed British-led invasion of Soviet Russia. This article argues that the CPGB exhibited a distinctly sluggish …
The Chartist Revolution
Britain’s Labour Party and the Anti-Colonial Labour Movement in Fiji (1945–1970)
The Labour Party in Britain achieved its first ever absolute parliamentary majority in the 1945 general election, at the tail end of the Second World War. Historically a socialist and internationalist party founded with the aim of providing parliamentary representation to trade unionists and the working class, Labour formed its first ever majority government in 1945 with a promise to accompany Britain’s colonies toward higher living standards, so…
The Spectre of Communism
This paper examines how the empire’s hysteria against militant trade unionism and its anti-colonial essence lay at the root of the colonial state’s proliferation of surveillance apparatus in late colonial Bengal. It primarily focuses on how the state censored, proscribed, and surveilled the literary output of trade unionists and other working-class propaganda materials to establish that it was a systematic effort to curb indigenous anti-colonial …
Anti-Imperialism and the Global Left
This essay introduces the key themes of the special issue Anti-Imperialism and the Global Left: New Appraisals , edited by Lorenzo Costaguta, Justine Cousin, Camille Fauroux, and Thomas van Gaalen. The authors review existing scholarship on left-wing anti-imperialism and detail the interventions of the five articles published in the issue. Arguing that left-wing anti-imperialism is a fruitful lens to pursue the decolonization of the history of th…
The Sentier Strike in Paris (1980)
In the 1970s, young activists of the Turkish revolutionary left found themselves in France as refugees, students, or workers. Amongst them, members of Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way), galvanized by the intensity of the struggles in Turkey, decided to do their bit by organizing migrant workers from Turkey. So they organized the struggle of undocumented garment workers in Paris in 1980. At the end of a mobilization involving hunger strike, occupat…
Conditional Universalism
This article examines how Corsican nationalism reshaped trade union practice through the Sindicatu di i Travagliadori Corsi (Corsican Workers’ Union, STC), founded in 1984 after local activists broke with mainstream French confederations. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories, it traces the STC’s evolving stance toward immigration and non-Corsican workers during the turbulent 1980s. The union initially pursued an openly ethnic agenda – ‘…
Selling Solidarity
Centring Dutch leftist expressions of solidarity with two anti-colonial revolts – the 1926 Indonesian revolt and an attempted 1929 Curaçaoan revolution – this article examines how leftists in the European metropole sold solidarity with anti-colonialism across different political arenas and organizational levels. Relating their efforts specifically to the communist–social-democratic divisions that shaped various leftist political arenas in the per…
Domestic Service and the Labour Movement in Franco-Era Spain
The 1960s and 1970s in Spain were a period of intense social mobilization against Franco’s dictatorship. The clandestine and democratic labour movement was the main political agent behind efforts to improve working conditions and to achieve a political transition towards democracy in Spain. However, within this context, domestic workers were alien to this process. The Francoist dictatorship did not consider domestic service to be a form of employ…
A Rebel with a Cause
Eric Heffer, who rose to the top of the Labour Party’s left-wing hierarchy in the 1970s and 1980s, spent much of his early political career in the Communist Party of Great Britain and, after being expelled in 1948, in the Socialist Workers’ Federation, an anti-Communist Party Marxist organization. Heffer relinquished his Marxism in the late 1950s but continued to support the hard-left section of the Labour Party and the Trotskyist Militant organi…
The Workers’ Stately Home
Although there are relatively large bodies of interrelated literature concerning trade unions, industrial politics, workers’ education and leisure in post-war Britain, little has been written about the importance of Wortley Hall (also known as ‘The Workers’ Stately Home’ or ‘Labour’s Home’) as a popular educational and holiday centre for the British labour movement and organized working-class. Drawing on previously unpublished archival and oral-h…
The Limits to Solidarity
During the first years of the post-war Labour government (1945–8), three groups of foreign workers were incorporated into the labour force: prisoners of war (POWs), Polish soldiers who had fought with the British, and European volunteer workers (EVWs). This article examines the responses of the trade union movement to these three groups of workers through salient examples that are indicative of wider attitudes within the trade union movement. The…
Professor John Samuel Shepherd (5 May 1942–20 November 2024)
Workforce Disability and the 1949 ‘Ineffectives’ Strike in London Docks
In April 1949 the employment of thirty-two registered dock workers in London was terminated because they were regarded as ‘ineffective’, incapable physically of performing the job. Their redundancies were briefly resisted through strike action. This ended when the Labour government threatened to prosecute strike leaders. The episode highlighted the social construction of disability in workplaces, often seen as a pronounced feature of labour marke…
Round Table
The election of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party on 5 July 2024 after fourteen years of Conservative (mis)rule may represent an important turning point in British political history. At any rate, this was how the new Prime Minister represented his party’s ‘landslide’ victory. Starmer made two short speeches that day, the first to supporters outside London’s Tate Modern art gallery, the second to the wider public outside 10 Downing Street. Similar i…
Exorcizing Dysfunctional Myths
On 23 August 1931, the second Labour government split over the decision to cut unemployment benefits. The next day, a National Government, led by Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, but largely supported by Conservative and Liberal MPs, was appointed to ‘save sterling’ – only to decide to leave the gold standard on 21 September 1931. These events generated two narratives within and outside the Labour Party, the first highlighting Labour’s betrayal of…
Not an Industrial Matter
This article examines the British trade union movement’s relationship with Zionism in the period from the Arab Revolt to the Six Day War. It argues that despite an appearance of fraternalism between the British and Zionist labour movements, this relationship was, in fact, governed more by indifference and political expediency on behalf of British trade unions and unionists than by any genuine ideological solidarity or conviction. It shows the Tra…
The Most Consistent of Them All’
This article examines William Sharman Crawford’s participation in mid-nineteenth-century popular radicalism in England. Despite his unusual background as a wealthy Irish landlord and his limitations as a politician, Sharman Crawford emerged as an important figure in Chartism, especially during the early 1840s when he served as MP for Rochdale. His support from across Chartism resulted from his principled positions, particularly on suffrage, that …
Patriotic Internationalists and Free Immigration
As highlighted in the recent controversies over European immigrants and the refugee ‘crisis’ that culminated in Brexit, Labour’s struggle in balancing its internationalist principles with policy administration has been a constant theme in the party’s immigration and refugee policy. This article situates the Labour Party’s discussion on the 1919 Aliens Act in the context of post-war internationalism, and contends that the change in focus from pre-…
In Defence of Steel
Alfred Edwards, MP for Middlesbrough East from 1935 to 1950, has been subject to only cursory academic attention during the lifetime of the 1945–51 Labour governments. Consequently, this article provides the first detailed study of Edwards’s parliamentary career. It is argued that Edwards was a significant national figure due to both his expulsion from the Labour Party in 1948 and the campaign he subsequently waged against Labour’s policy of stee…
Dangerous Work, Hard Men and Broken Bodies
In this article we use oral testimony to explore the nature of masculinities in the Clydeside heavy industries in the period c. 1930 to the 1970s, examining how working in such tough and hazardous occupations as coal mining, the iron and steel works and shipbuilding nurtured and reinforced masculine identities, especially that of the Glaswegian ‘hard man’. We also investigate the impact such work had upon male workers bodies, commenting upon the …
The Reality and Myth of New Zealand Egalitarianism
The growing alarm in New Zealand over the development of a visible 'underclass' is underpinned by a wider concern in the face of the country's dramatic relative decline in the postwar period.In the generation after 1945, New Zealand was said to have 'full employment', the third highest standard of living in the world and an enviable record in the area of free education to university level.According to a popular selfimage, and a central plank of N…
A 'Failed Experiment'? Public Ownership and the Narratives of Post-War Britain
Public ownership was a key part of Labour politics and British economic Organisation for much of the twentieth century, but may now be regarded as a historical episode, rather than a feature of contemporary life. How is this episode to be evaluated by historians? One route is to incorporate it in the dominant 'decline' narrative, and refer to public ownership as a 'failed experiment'. This paper argues against such an approach, suggesting that th…
Female-headed households in early industrial Britain
Unemployed Workers, 'Enforced Leisure' and Education for 'The Right Use of Leisure' in Britain in the 1930s
This article examines the views of those who regarded the unemployment of the 1930s not solely as a disaster, but as a liberating new form of leisure for workers, provided that they could make the 'right use' of this leisure. This was an urgent challenge for more and more workers would soon be faced by 'a vast surplus of leisure time' made possible by technological change. The solution was to use the voluntary adult education movement to guide wo…
Histories of the British Communist Party
The British Communist Party continues to attract the attention of historians who have produced divergent assessments of its politics, organization, personnel and activities. This article critically reviews the literature: the concentration is on detailed studies which have appeared since the 1980s. It scrutinizes the apologetic literature produced by party historians prior to, and in response to, the critical studies which appeared from the late …
Public History Review Essay Cadbury World
A Quarrel of Limited Concern to the People of this Country’
This article explores different examples of British trade union solidarity with Chile; moments of internationalist action which have been very little researched. It uses these moments to examine the British labour movement in the 1970s and argues that national politics was central to this contested internationalist activity. The article draws out the identification with Chilean workers felt by a certain layer of the British labour movement in thi…
The Northern Rambler
This article analyses the nature and development of a grassroots popular culture of countryside appreciation, based on rural walking and access to unenclosed land, in northern England, covering the period between the emergence of footpath preservation societies in the 1820s and the controversies over access to Kinder Scout in the1930s. It has particular reference to Lancashire and the ‘Dark Peak’ in north Derbyshire, where activities of this sort…
The Late Birth of Transnational Labour Cooperation
Multinational companies (MNC) are today one of the most important challenges for the trade union movement. Against this backdrop, and given that the growth of MNC has been a long-term historical process, it is rather surprising how little efforts labour historians have devoted to the topic — despite the existence of a relevant and rich sociological and industrial relations literature. The article aims to contribute to fill this gap with a case st…
The Coolies Will Elbow us out of the Country
There is an extensive literature on the experiences of Indians and Africans in colonial Natal, but almost none of it focuses on the relationships between them. This article explores one element of this relationship, namely the ways in which Africans reacted to Indian indentured workers. It looks briefly at the conditions of indenture, and dwells at greater length on Indians' experiences as small agricultural producers after their contracts of ind…
David Beckham as a Historical Moment in the Representation of Masculinity
There can be no doubt that David Beckham is a public figure of intense media interest in contemporary Britain. This paper is the first stage in a project which aims to explore the circuit of representation and reception of Beckham in current culture. I use a grounded theory approach to generate and categorise the ways in which representations are constructed. The empirical focus is on the discourses around Beckham which are apparent in magazines …
The Smallest Party in History’? New Labour in Historical Perspective
Historians, commentators and political scientists have divided over whether New Labour marks a definitive break with the pre-1994 Labour Party, or instead represents ‘traditional values in a modern setting’. Steven Fielding has recently offered a systematic and apparently persuasive exposition of the latter argument. In his view, the Labour Party, under Tony Blair’s leadership, has been faithful to its past. This article challenges this interpret…
A Chartist Singularity? Mobilizing to Promote Democratic Petitions in Britain and France, 1838-1848
Attention has certainly been paid to the international dimension of the Chartist movement in the form of consideration of links that were established between some Chartists and continental exiles in Britain, but recent developments in the historiography of Chartism have suggested a number of new perspectives. It is time to reappraise the singularities of the movement in relation to its continental counterparts. Were the Chartists alone in mobiliz…
Transnational Labour in the Age of Globalization
Challenge, Crisis, and Renewal? Themes in the Labour History of Britain, 1960-2010
This article provides an overview of some of the main characteristics and developments in the labour history of Britain from the foundation of the Society for the Study of Labour History in 1960 to 2010. The article maintains that the labour history surveyed has been predominantly pragmatic, eclectic and empirical in character and that it has played an important part in key debates, such as those revolving around history from below, institutional…
Songs for the Millions
Songs and singing, and music making more generally, are a neglected aspect of the social culture of Chartism. Many of the Chartist musings that have been treated as poetry by scholars were, in fact, lyrics for songs with identifiable melodies which drew on a rich aural tradition in popular culture. Chartist rituals almost invariably involved music as well as speech; the ranks of the movement were filled with musicians. The music they made, in its…
Revisiting the Rochdale Pioneers
The 'Rochdale Pioneers' are generally regarded as the originators of modern co-operation through their combination of ethical trading with the dividend on purchases. There are other contenders for this label, but the Toad Lane premises of the 'Pioneers' has become a centre for global co-operative pilgrimage, and the Pioneers have acquired their own foundation myths. This article revisits the origins of the Rochdale Pioneers, offering a critical a…
The First-and-a-half International
American labour historians have long considered the Order of the Knights of Labor to be one of the most important labour organizations of the late nineteenth century. Yet they have tended to view the Knights as an exclusively American, and perhaps also a Canadian, order. This article argues that the Knights of Labor must be considered as an international and not merely North American institution. This also has implications for the history of inte…
Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party
The Means Test and the Unemployed in south Wales and the north-east of England, 1931–1939
In November 1931, a household means test was introduced as a requirement for unemployment benefit for those unemployed who had received twenty-six weeks' insurance payments. The test was the most controversial piece of unemployment legislation introduced in the interwar period and it provoked a massive outcry. While many of the larger marches against the Means Test have been explored, there has been little attempt to analyse the wider response to…
Industrial Relations, Historical Contingencies and Political Economy
Historical literature on labour and industrial relations is broadly silent on theoretical questions; and management and industrial relations literature tends to overlook historical contingency. This article brings these different literatures into closer alignment, examining the concept of pluralism in industrial relations, indicating that the embeddedness of non-pluralist values among employers shaped the erosion of pluralist realities — joint in…
Forging the Faithful
The International Lenin in School in Moscow trained British Communists for leadership positions from 1926 to 1937. This article relates the school and its programmes to their context, the development of Stalinism in Russia and the Russification of the Third International and its affiliates. It explores the organization and regime of the school, its purposes, pedagogy and curriculum. It provides for the first time a detailed listing of British stu…
Second thoughts on revolutionary syndicalism
Defending the Right to Work
In January 1983 the US-owned multinational Timex, a prominent employer in Dundee since 1946, announced it would cease production of mechanical wristwatches in the city. Substantial redundancies would accompany closure of the Milton of Craigie production unit where 2,000 mainly male skilled engineers and toolmakers were employed. About 2,000 mainly female assembly-line workers would be retained at another factory in the city, at Camperdown, as Tim…
Soviet Bibliography
Library Sources in Labour History
R. H. Tawney
Notes and Queries
Bibliography of Labour History
Some Further Additions to the Bibliographies of Labour History
Research on the History of the Labour Movement in Austria
Manuscript Sources of British Labour History in the United States
The Saddleworth Union 1827-30
Henry George and the British Labour Movement
The Second Labour Government
The Working Class Movement in Scotland
Cartoon
Documents
Library Sources for Labour History
Japanese Archives Relating to British Labour History (I)
Bibliography of Labour History Mid-1962 to Mid-1963
Notes and Queries
Two Aspects of Guild Socialism - Penty and Hobson, and the Building Guilds
Birth Control and the British Working-Class Movement
Japanese Archives (2) - Eleanor Marx
Labour Conditions During the Industrial Revolution
Material on Labour History in British Libraries (6)
The International and the British Labour Movement Summary
Survey of Literature on the First International Since 1945