Accidents of personal biography are perhaps not the most sensible way by which to select topics for historical research, yet it was a fortuitous move from Cardiff to Durham which created an initial curiosity about the character of the coalfields in the two areas. No one could miss the difference of landscape between, on the one hand, the linear communities stretching along the deep and narrow South Wales valleys, amidst soaring mountains and spoil heaps and, on the other hand, the sprinkling of nucleated pit villages within the drab, undulating topography of County Durham. The belief that a comparison of these areas might be a topic of more than purely personal interest arose from two considerations.

It is a well-established fact that foreign immigrants and visitors played a major role in the emergence of American anarchism. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European-born artisans and peasants – Germans and Czechs, Italians and Spaniards, Russians and Jews – constituted the mass base of the movement, while its intellectual leadership included well-known speakers and writers from diverse countries, who came either as permanent settlers or on extended lecture tours.

War, it has been asserted, stimulates the development of public welfare. Increased physical and social mobility, fostered by wartime conditions, exposes social inequalities and injustices, gives rise to demands for redress and thereby encourages government to introduce social reforms. This argument implies that, in order to maintain national solidarity in the face of a common enemy, central government becomes more sensitive to external political demands and thereby more – rather than less – responsive to democratic pressure. Certainly, during the First World War, it is possible to see increased state involvement in a number of initiatives designed to effect social improvement. This article examines one of them. It aims to analyse the role of central government in stimulating the development of private industrial welfare in Britain during this period. However, as will be shown below, the growth of industrial welfare – especially in the latter part of the war – was not designed to further industrial democracy. Rather,the form it took implicitly placed new constraints on the right of organised labour to demand improvements in working conditions. Although outwardly the industrial welfare movement sponsored by government seemed to win benefits for the working man, the use of scientific method to legitimate these improvements did not imply an increase in the power of organised labour to determine working conditions.

On 26 June 1740 the “very beautiful and sumptuous” Town Court or Guildhall of Newcastle upon Tyne was systematically wrecked by a crowd of angry townspeople, keelmen and local ironworkers, who smashed the woodwork and windows, tore the paintings, and ransacked the archives and treasury. Contemporary observers were stunned by this unprecedented orgy of destruction, because the campaign of intermittent and fairly orderly protests against the high price of grain which had preceded the 26th had not prepared them for the scale and ferocity of the assault on the corporation's most ostentatious monument to its wealth and authority. The outbreak of popular violence confirmed some people's suspicions that “respectable” grievances served only as a pretext for the mob's brutish desire to loot and plunder: to others it vindicated the traditional argument that it was not only unjust but also unwise “to provoke the necessitous, in times of scarcity, into extremities, that must involve themselves, and all the neighbourhood in ruin”.

In 1852, when the medical discoverer of alcoholism, Magnus Huss, was being honoured by the Académie française, a spokesman for the Académie wrote that “France has many drunkards, but happily, no alcoholics.” Sixty years later, on the eve of World War I, if one is to believe the reports of parliamentary commissions, economists, hygienists and social reformers, France had few drunks but a plethora of alcoholics, from the Breton peasant who fed calvados to his children to the worker of Paris and the Midi who had abandoned wine, that “natural and hygienic drink”, for the evils of mass-produced industrial alcohol, especially absinthe. By 1914, alcoholism was considered one of the three grands fléaux, or great plagues, that had struck France in the late nineteenth century, and it was blamed for all the ills of society, from a rising rate of criminality, suicide and mental illness to depopulation, revolutionary worker movements and even feminism. Alcoholism was, therefore, not just an individual misfortune, but a national tragedy. It had become, in the words of Clemenceau, “the whole social problem” and as such required the mobilized forces of the country to conquer it.

Dem Namen Joseph Weydemeyer (geb. am 2. Februar 1818 in Münster/Westfalen, gest. am 20. August 1866 in St Louis im Staat Missouri, USA) gebührt ein Platz in der Frühgeschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung am Vorabend, während und nach der Revolution von 1848–49, aber auch in der Frühgeschichte der amerikanischen Arbeiterbewegung ab 1852, in der Geschichte der Antisklavereibewegung und der Republikanischen Partei. Zwar hatte der Sohn eines Regierungskalkulators in Münster die militärische Laufbahn eingeschlagen, kam jedoch als Artillerieleutnant in Minden und später in Köln mit Junghegelianern und Sozialisten, namentlich im Kreis der Mitarbeiter der Rheinischen Zeitung 1842–43 in Berührung, quittierte Anfang 1845 den Militärdienst und beteiligte sich als Schriftsteller und Redakteur bei der Trier'schen Zeitung und dem Westfälischen Dampfboot an der Agitation sozialer und sozialistischer Anschauungen. Anfang 1846 weilte er etwa zwei Monate bei Karl Marx in Brüssel. Nach Ausbruch der Revolution von 1848–49 entsandte ihn der Arbeiterverein in Hamm/Westfalen im Juni zum ersten Demokratenkongreß in Frankfurt a.M. Vom Juli 1848 an bis Anfang Dezember 1850 leistete Weydemeyer zusammen mit seinem Schwager Otto Lüning als Redakteur der Neuen Deutschen Zeitung, die zunächst in Darmstadt, dann in Frankfurt a.M. erschien und sich wie die Neue Rheinische Zeitung „Organ der Demokratie” nannte, einen bedeutenden Beitrag im Kampf für eine demokratische Umwälzung in Deutschland. Gleichzeitig war er an führender Stelle im Frankfurter Arbeiterverein und im Bund der Kommunisten tätig. Um den Verfolgungen zu entgehen, sah er sich Ende 1851 genötigt, mit seiner Familie über die Schweiz und Frankreich nach den USA zu emigrieren.

On a superficial inspection, miners' unionism in the Forest of Dean between 1871 and 1886 does not appear to have been atypical of miners' unionism in general in Britain in that period: neither in the fluctuations in its strength nor in its policies. Like the unions in most other coal districts, that in Dean flourished in the economic boom of the early 1870's, fell into weakness after 1875 and then revived in the early 1880's. In each of those phases the policies of the Dean miners were much like those of other miners. They demanded increases in wages, resisted reductions in wages, insisted upon the installation of weighing machines at pit bank, and sought to have winding hours reduced. Demands for the introduction of a sliding scale, to govern the movement of hewing rates in relation to coal prices, and for the establishment of conciliation and arbitration machinery, were common to many miners' unions at both local and national level. With those demands went the common rhetoric of the identity of interests of capital and labour. All this is the familiar content of that moderate, cautious, market-conscious approach to dealings with the masters which dominated miners' organisations for most of the second half of the century.

Despite the attention paid by economic and labour historians to mid-Victorian trade unionism, the development, organization and objectives of the employers' counter-organizations have been neglected. Research on this subject has tended to concentrate on the post-1880 period and has to a great extent overlooked the origins of the employers' offensive tactics. The two major lines of attack which were to be adopted by employers in the 'eighties were already taking shape in the mid century. Employers' industrial organizations had been formed to counter unionism, while employers' pressure groups attempted to resist what employers described as “grand-motherly” governmental interference. The aim of this article will be to conduct a preliminary investigation of the origins and strategy of employers' organizations, and to evaluate their impact in the industrial and legal fields.

“Never have I seen such a display of selfishness, frigidity to every human sentiment, such ready and happy self-delusion”, wrote Lord Ashley of the opposition to his coal-mines bill in the House of Lords. Historians have tended to confirm Ashley's judgement, and agreed that the motives of the Northern coal-owners in opposing the bill were inspired by simple self-interest, a desire to preserve their right to dispose of their pits, and the men, women and children in them, as they saw fit. It would, of course, be naive to suggest that the Northern coal-owners were not self-interested, but it is perhaps worth analysing the nature of that self-interest, which was not, as the simple and usual dismissal of it would suggest, merely an assertion of proprietorial rights.

The search for the origins of government intervention in the nation's economic life has long interested historians of Victorian Britain. Indeed, in recent years it has given rise to an extended and enthusiastic controversy. This debate is so well known and has been so often summarised that it is only necessary to observe here that the core of the argument has been about whether government growth was generated more by ideology (Benthamism) or force of circumstances (Professor MacDonagh's “intolerable situation”). There is, however, consensus on several other points, namely, that the mid nineteenth century was not the “golden age” of laissez-faire that Dicey supposed and that government inspection was crucially important as the agency of state intervention.