Labor history is a sub-discipline of social history which specializes on the history of the working classes and the labor movement. Labor historians may concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors besides class but chiefly focus on urban or industrial societies which distinguishes it from rural history.
Labor history developed in tandem with the growth of a self-conscious working-class political movement in many Western countries in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Whilst early labor historians were drawn to protest movements such as Luddism and Chartism, the focus of labor history was often on institutions: chiefly the labor unions and political parties. Exponents of this institutional approach included Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The work of the Webbs, and other pioneers of the discipline, was marked by optimism about the capacity of the labor movement to effect fundamental social change and a tendency to see its development as a process of steady, inevitable and unstoppable progress.
As two contemporary labor historians have noted, early work in the field was "designed to service and celebrate the Labor movement."[1]
In the 1950s to 1970s, labor history was redefined and expanded in focus by a number of historians, amongst whom the most prominent and influential figures were E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm. The motivation came from current left-wing politics in Britain and the United States and reached red-hot intensity. Kenneth O. Morgan, a more traditional liberal historian, explains the dynamic:
the ferocity of argument owed more to current politics, the unions' winter of discontent [in 1979], and rise of a hard-left militant tendency within the world of academic history as well as within the Labour Party. The new history was often strongly Marxist, which fed through the work of brilliant evangelists like Raphael Samuel into the New Left Review, a famous journal like Past and Present, the Society of Labour History and the work of a large number of younger scholars engaged in the field. Non-scholars like Tony Benn joined in. The new influence of Marxism upon Labour studies came to affect the study of history as a whole.[2]
Morgan sees benefits:
In many ways, this was highly beneficial: it encouraged the study of the dynamics of social history rather than a narrow formal institutional view of labor and the history of the Labour Party; it sought to place the experience of working people within a wider technical and ideological context; it encouraged a more adventurous range of sources, 'history from below' so-called, and rescued them from what Thompson memorably called the 'condescension of posterity'; it brought the idea of class centre-stage in the treatment of working-class history, where I had always felt it belonged; it shed new light on the poor and dispossessed for whom the source materials were far more scrappy than those for the bourgeoisie, and made original use of popular evidence like oral history, not much used before.[3]
Morgan tells of the downside as well:
But the Marxist – or sometimes Trotskyist – emphasis in Labour studies was too often doctrinaire and intolerant of non-Marxist dissent–it was also too often plain wrong, distorting the evidence within a narrow doctrinaire framework. I felt it incumbent upon me to help rescue it. But this was not always fun. I recall addressing a history meeting in Cardiff... when, for the only time in my life, I was subjected to an incoherent series of attacks of a highly personal kind, playing the man not the ball, focusing on my accent, my being at Oxford and the supposedly reactionary tendencies of my empiricist colleagues.[4]
Thompson and Hobsbawm were Marxists who were critical of the existing labor movement in Britain. They were concerned to approach history "from below" and to explore the agency and activity of working people at the workplace, in protest movements and in social and cultural activities. Thompson's seminal study The Making of the English Working Class[5] was particularly influential in setting a new agenda for labor historians and locating the importance of the study of labor for social history in general. Also in the 1950s and 1960s, historians began to give serious attention to groups who had previously been largely neglected, such as women and non-caucasian ethnic groups. Some historians situated their studies of gender and race within a class analysis: for example, C. L. R. James, a Marxist who wrote about the struggles of blacks in the Haitian Revolution. Others questioned whether class was a more important social category than gender or race and pointed to racism, patriarchy and other examples of division and oppression within the working class.
Labor history remains centered on two fundamental sets of interest: institutional histories of workers' organizations, and the "history from below" approach of the Marxist historians.
Despite the influence of the Marxists, many labor historians rejected the revolutionary implications implicit in the work of Thompson, Hobsbawm et al. In the 1980s, the importance of class itself, as an historical social relationship and explanatory concept, began to be widely challenged. Some notable labor historians turned from Marxism to embrace a postmodernist approach, emphasizing the importance of language and questioning whether classes could be so considered if they did not use a "language of class". Other historians emphasized the weaknesses and moderation of the historic labor movement, arguing that social development had been characterized more by accommodation, acceptance of the social order and cross-class collaboration than by conflict and dramatic change.
Labor history in the United States is primarily based in history departments, with occasional representation inside labor unions. The scholarship deals with the institutional history of labor unions and the social history of workers. In recent years there's been special attention to historically marginal groups, especially blacks, women, Hispanics and Asians.[6] The Study Group on International Labor and Working-Class History was established: 1971 and has a membership of 1000. It publishes International Labor and Working-Class History.[7] H-LABOR is a daily email-based discussion group formed in 1993 that reaches over a thousand scholars and advanced students.[8] the Labor and Working-Class History Association formed in 1988 and publishes Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.
Kirk (2010) surveys labor historiography in Britain since the formation of the Society for the Study of Labour History in 1960. He reports that labor history has been mostly pragmatic, eclectic and empirical; it has played an important role in historiographical debates, such as those revolving around history from below, institutionalism versus the social history of labor, class, populism, gender, language, postmodernism and the turn to politics. Kirk rejects suggestions that the field is declining, and stresses its innovation, modification and renewal. Kirk also detects a move into conservative insularity and academicism. He recommends a more extensive and critical engagement with the kinds of comparative, transnational and global concerns increasingly popular among labor historians elsewhere, and calls for a revival of public and political interest in the topics.[14] Meanwhile, Navickas, (2011) examines recent scholarship including the histories of collective action, environment and human ecology, and gender issues, with a focus on work by James Epstein, Malcolm Chase, and Peter Jones.[15]
Outside the Marxist orbit, social historians paid a good deal of attention to labor history as well.[16]
Addison notes that in Britain by the 1990s, labor history was, "in sharp decline", because:
there was no longer much interest in history of the white, male working-class. Instead the 'cultural turn' encouraged historians to explore wartime constructions of gender, race, citizenship and national identity.[17]
Others
For most of its history China had a limited industrial sector, but the Treaty of Shimonoseki brought the growth of factories and a new working class in the country.[18]
↑ John Rogers Commons, Myself (1934), his autobiography.
↑ David Brody, "The old labor history and the new: In search of an American working class." Labor History(1979) 20#1 pp: 111-126.
↑ Melvyn Dubofsky (b. 1934), Hard Work: The Making of Labor History (2000) excerpt
↑ David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (1980) excerpt
↑ Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-21. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997; and Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike that Changed America. Oxford University Press, 2011.
↑ Neville Kirk, "Challenge, Crisis, and Renewal? Themes in the Labour History of Britain, 1960–2010," Labour History Review, Aug 2010, Vol. 75 Issue 2, pp 162-180
↑ Katrina Navickas, "What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain," Social History, May 2011, Vol. 36 Issue 2, pp 192-204
↑ John McIlroy, "Asa Briggs and the Emergence of Labour History in Post-War Britain." Labour History Review 77.2 (2012): 211-242.
↑ Paul Addison and Harriet Jones, eds. A Companion to Contemporary Britain: 1939-2000 (2005) p. 4
Allen, Joan, Alan Campbell, Eric Hobsbawm and John McIlroy. Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives (2010)
Arnesen, Eric. Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working-Class History (3 Vol 2006)
Kirk, Neville. "Challenge, Crisis, and Renewal? Themes in the Labour History of Britain, 1960–2010," Labour History Review, Aug 2010, Vol. 75 Issue 2, pp 162–180
Linden, Marcel van der. Transnational Labour History: Explorations (2003)
McIlroy, John. "Asa Briggs and the Emergence of Labour History in Post-War Britain." Labour History Review 77.2 (2012): 211–242.
Mapes, Kathleen, and Randi Storch. "The Making and Remaking of a Labor Historian: Interview with James R. Barrett." Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas. 13.2 (2016): 63–79.
Navickas, Katrina. "What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain," Social History, May 2011, Vol. 36 Issue 2, pp 192–204.
Pearson, Chad. "Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies Part 1." History Compass 15.12 (2017): e12433. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12433
Pearson, Chad. "Twentieth century US labor history: Pedagogy, politics, and controversies Part 2." History Compass 16.8 (2018): e12479. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12479
Price, Richard. "Histories of Labour and Labour History," Labour History Review, Dec 2010, Vol. 75 Issue 3, pp 263–270, on Britain
Robert, Jean-Louis, Antoine Prost and Chris Wrigley, eds. The Emergence of European Trade Unionism (2004)
Heerma van Voss, Lex, and Marcel van der Linden, eds. Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labor History (Berghahn Books, 2002)
Walkowitz, Daniel J., and Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, eds. Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays on the Working-Class Experience, 1756-2009 (2010)
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Labor history.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods. Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.
Social history, often called "history from below", is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians. Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, with some arguing that its origins lie over a century earlier.
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According to Marxist feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in which they contend much of women's labor is uncompensated. Marxist feminists extend traditional Marxist analysis by applying it to unpaid domestic labor and sex relations.
Socialist feminism rose in the 1960s and 1970s as an offshoot of the feminist movement and New Left that focuses upon the interconnectivity of the patriarchy and capitalism. However, the ways in which women's private, domestic, and public roles in society has been conceptualized, or thought about, can be traced back to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and William Thompson's utopian socialist work in the 1800s. Ideas about overcoming the patriarchy by coming together in female groups to talk about personal problems stem from Carol Hanisch. This was done in an essay in 1969 which later coined the term 'the personal is political.' This was also the time that second wave feminism started to surface which is really when socialist feminism kicked off. Socialist feminists argue that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.
Sheila Rowbotham is an English socialist feminist theorist and historian. She is the author of many notable books in the field of women's studies, including Hidden from History (1973), Beyond the Fragments (1979), A Century of Women (1997) and Threads Through Time (1999), as well as the 2021 memoir Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s. She has lived in Bristol since 2010.
Past & Present is a British historical academic journal, which has been a leading force in the development of social history. Founded in 1952, the journal is published four times a year by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Past and Present Society, a British historical membership association and registered charity. The society also publishes a book series, and sponsors occasional conferences and appoints postdoctoral fellows.
The International Lenin School (ILS) was an official training school operated in Moscow, Soviet Union, by the Communist International from May 1926 to 1938. It was resumed after the Second World War and run by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; it continued until the end of the Soviet Union. The ILS taught both academic courses and practical underground political techniques with a view to developing a core disciplined and reliable communist political cadres for assignment in communist parties around the world.
Kenneth Owen Morgan, Baron Morgan, is a Welsh historian and author, known especially for his writings on modern British history and politics and on Welsh history. He is a regular reviewer and broadcaster on radio and television. He has been an influential intellectual resource in the Labour Party.
John Saville was a Greek-British Marxist historian, long associated with University of Hull. He was an influential writer on British labour history in the second half of the twentieth century, and also known for his multi-volume work, the Dictionary of Labour Biography, edited in collaboration with others.
Dona Ruth Anne Torr was a British Marxist historian, and a major influence on the famous Communist Party Historians Group. Aside from her translations of many Marxist classics into English, she is perhaps best known for her unfinished biography of the important labour activist, Tom Mann, Tom Mann and his Times.
The Plebs' League was a British educational and political organisation which originated around a Marxist way of thinking in 1908 and was active until 1926.
John Fletcher Clews Harrison, usually cited as J. F. C. Harrison, was a British academic who was Professor of History at the University of Sussex and author of books on history, particularly relating to Victorian Britain.
Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that originates in the works of 19th century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism analyzes and critiques the development of class society and especially of capitalism as well as the role of class struggles in systemic, economic, social and political change. It frames capitalism through a paradigm of exploitation and analyzes class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development – materialist in the sense that the politics and ideas of an epoch are determined by the way in which material production is carried on.
Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" and the "short 20th century", and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.
Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is best known for his historical work on the radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular The Making of the English Working Class (1963).
The Communist Party Historians' Group (CPHG) was a subdivision of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) that formed a highly influential cluster of British Marxist historians. The Historians' Group developed social history, which was popularised in the 1960s with "history from below" approach described by E. P. Thompson. During the heyday of the Historians' Group, from 1946 until 1956, notable members included Thompson, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Raphael Samuel, as well as non-academics like A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce. The Historians' Group arose at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s under the encouragement of the economist Maurice Dobb.
The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was the largest communist organisation in Britain and was founded in 1920 through a merger of several smaller Marxist groups. Many miners joined the CPGB in the 1926 general strike. In 1930, the CPGB founded the Daily Worker. In 1936, members of the party were present at the Battle of Cable Street, helping organise resistance against the British Union of Fascists. In the Spanish Civil War, the CPGB worked with the USSR to create the British Battalion of the International Brigades, which party activist Bill Alexander commanded.
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided societies that struggle against each other, and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Marxist historians follow the tenets of the development of class-divided societies, especially modern capitalist ones.
Lise Vogel is a feminist sociologist and art historian from the United States. An influential Marxist-feminist theoretician, she is recognised for being one of the main founders of the Social Reproduction Theory. She also participated in the civil rights and the women's liberation movements in organisations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi and Bread & Roses in Boston. In her earlier career as an art historian, she was one of the first to try to develop a feminist perspective on Art History.
Far-left politics in the United Kingdom have existed since at least the 1840s, with the formation of various organisations following ideologies such as Marxism, revolutionary socialism, communism, anarchism and syndicalism.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
