Since the publication of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974, an increasing number of social historians have turned their attention towards the workplace as a major site of class struggle. In particular, social historians have focussed on the unequal struggle between employers and craft-workers to determine patterns of work organisation and the balance of power in the labour market. However, despite the growth of interest in the historical relationship between the division of labour, trade unionism and business strategy, no academic work has yet considered the development of apprenticeship in the post-1914 period.

In Recasting Bourgeois Europe, his study of the responses of the major States of Western Europe to the conditions created by the First World War, Charles Maier makes only, according to his standards, passing reference to Great Britain. Initially this must appear quite reasonable, for if one compares the post-war situation of Britain with that of most of Continental Europe it must seem that Britain escaped, or at least experienced with a greatly reduced intensity, the disorder which beset other nations. It might therefore be assumed that the efforts of the British political elite to adjust to the post-war world are less worthy of attention than those of their Continental counterparts.

On November 4, 1919, six weeks into the Great Steel Strike, the citizens of Lackawanna, New York, elected John H. Gibbons as their Mayor. Gibbons' victory was a major upset. He defeated John Toomey, the incumbent who had the support of the steel firm after which this quintessential company town was named, by forging a loosely knit coalition of native and Eastern European immigrant workers during the height of the xenophobia of the ongoing Red Scare. Gibbons' election came at a time when the Socialist Party was in decline and the various levels of American government enthusiastically used their repressive mechanisms to crush the country's “un-American” Left.

By introducing an economic cycle of a new sort in Europe the Great Depression of 1873–96 encouraged the alignment of iron and textile industrialists’ interests with those of the great growers and livestock raisers. The French version, perhaps best labelled the alliance of cotton and wheat, is the concern here, for since profits and sales for both agriculture and industry traced parallel curves, for the first time in French history, representatives of these interests could unite and press the new republican leadership for common relief against depression and intensifying foreign competition. They were also impelled to unite in the face of the growing militancy of the new working class emerging in the provinces. Their spokesmen of the Association de l'Industrie Française and the associated Société des Agriculteurs addressed themselves to the new incarnation of the social question by offering protective tariffs – and protected jobs and pay checks – to workers striking more frequently and organizing more solidly than ever before. Their slogan was “the protection of national labor”. Having no reforms to offer, the Opportunist republicans and their ex-monarchist allies offered the emergent industrial working class safe incomes and economic nationalism.

Despite the proliferation of studies concerned with the unemployment problem and the mechanics of welfare provision between the world wars, most historians have focused either on the difficulties facing manual workers or on the role of state services in the provision of benefits. This emphasis is not surprising given the persistence of a high level of manual unemployment in this period, which led in turn to an unprecedented demand for maintenance and a huge increase in public expenditure on unemployment relief. However, the emphasis upon manual workers has led to an unfortunate neglect of other sections of the labour-force, while the concern with the evolution of state services has diverted attention from the continuing importance of voluntary agencies in the field of welfare provision.

The 1820's constituted a watershed in United States life. By the end of that decade, about ten years after the last of the English Luddite risings had been suppressed, industrialism secured its decisive American victory; by the end of the 1830's all of its cardinal features were definitively present. The many overt threats to the coherence of emerging industrial capitalism, the ensemble of forms of resistance to its hegemony, were blunted at this time and forced into the current of that participation so vital to modern domination. In terms of technology, work, politics, sexuality, culture, and the whole fabric of ordinary life, the struggles of an earlier, relative autonomy, which threatened both old and new forms of authority, fell short, and a dialectic of domestication, so familiar to us today, broke through. The reactions engendered in the face of the new dynamic in this epoch of its arrival seem, by the way, to offer some implicit parallels to present trends as technological civilization likely enters its terminal crisis: the answers of progress, now anything but new or promising, encounter a renewed legitimation challenge that can be informed, even inspired, by understanding the past.

The theory of a secret revolutionary tradition, closely woven into the fabric of early working-class activity and surfacing at particular moments of crisis, continues to fascinate historians. In their attempts to assess its validity much recent effort has been directed at the ten years following the introduction of the infamous Two Acts in December 1795. There has been intensive study of the secret societies in the metropolis and their counterparts in the West Riding of Yorkshire and of their relationship to the Irish rebels. Yet whilst it si now generally recognised that radicalism did not simply evaporate in the oppressive aftermath of the “gagging acts”, its nature and significance continue to provoke disagreement. This paper is a contribution to this debate and an attempt to help stitch together a convincing account of plebeian protest in a region which, despite its prominent position in the radical history of this period, has received little systematic attention.

Most standard histories of Britain between the wars refer to the development of holidays with pay, albeit briefly. It is widely acknowledged that by the end of the 1930's the majority of the British working population benefited from a paid holiday. The crucial initiative, so it is claimed, was the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938, which gave Parliamentary approval to the principle of payment of wages during holidays. Clearly the growth of paid holidays is seen as yet another instance of a more affluent Britain, an integral element of the growth of leisure. However, there has been very little detailed discussion of the paid-holiday-policy option and the precise reasons for the formulation and implementation of that policy. This neglect is rather surprising given the popular support for this “fringe benefit”, which was perceived as providing a certain degree of financial security during the annual break from the rigours of work. It is true that there has been more specialised treatment, but even this is of a general nature, with little reference to the industrial and political struggle for holidays with pay.

The publication of Harry Braverman's seminal study – Labor and Monopoiy Capital (1974) – marked a turning-point for labour and social historians. Since then they have increasingly concerned themselves with the nature of the labour process in industrial capitalism. Central to this concern has been the debate on de-skilling and the destruction of craft control over the labour process and its subordination to the needs of capital. Braverman has been heavily criticised for the one-sidedness and simplicity of his account of this development. Among the weaknesses identified in Labor and Monopoly Capital is the omission of any mention of class struggle, or worker resistance to technical change; the failure to grasp how de-skilling can be mediated and, therefore, modified through labour, market and product particularisms; the lack of a detailed analysis of the transformation of formal to real subordination (in the Marxist sense) of labour to capital – the process seems to occur automatically; and, the failure to realise how formally skilled workers can continue to occupy a privileged position in the workforce through either the mechanism of custom, or by their strategic placing in the production process, or both.

More or less by definition, civil war refers to an armed conflict between citizens of the same country. However, the two outstanding European examples of this century, the civil wars in Spain and Russia, were in fact complicated by foreign intervention. Indeed, in the case of Spain, intervention by foreign powers proved decisive.

The declaration of intent forming the title of this article – united to support but not combined to injure– succinctly illustrates a dilemma that confronted trade unions in Britain in the early nineteenth century, and that has since re-surfaced periodically. Successful trade unionism necessarily requires collective action, whether of an overt form, as during an industrial dispute, or implicitly, as in the enforcement of a closed shop. Not infrequently, though, the claims of solidarity and collective interest run counter to the rights of individuals: of employers, fellow workers and third parties. The intervention of the law provides an added twist to the potential conflict between the individual and the group. While the individual has traditionally enjoyed generous legal protection so that he can conduct his lawful business unhindered, the recognition of collective rights has been hesitant and qualified. The Conspiracy and Protection of Property Act of 1875 and the Trades Disputes Act of 1906 effectively legalized peaceful picketing, but the relationship of criminal law and trade unions remained uneasy despite the rarity of prosecutions for offences such as conspiracy. Nevertheless, during the century and a half since 1825 there has been a progressive tendency – at least until the 1980's – for the contradiction between collective and individual interest to assume a relatively muted and non-violent form. The emergence of institutionalized industrial conflict was a logical consequence of British trade unions achieving a position of respectability in the established order.

It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years the history of working-class housing in the nineteenth century has been transformed. Many older historians, of course, took it for granted that the quality of houses built to meet the needs of the fast-growing urban population was uniformly bad, a testimony to the avarice of builders and landlords alike. Beliefs of this kind owed much to Engels, and to the Hammonds writing earlier this century about the life of the town labourter. One of the first suggestions that these views were really an over-simplified description of housing conditions came from Professor Ashworth in the 1950's, who pointed out that it was quite wrong to suppose that all nineteenth-century towns developed on the same lines, a kind of Coketown endlessly repeated. While not denying that there was a great deal of poor-quality building, more recently historians have made it clear that newer town housing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not necessarily worse than housing built earlier on, or worse than rural housing built at the same time; that new building varied in construction and amenities in the same town, and from town to town; that the skilled working classes were likely to live in better-quality housing than the unskilled; and that the segregation of working-class housing from middle-class housing, and of the better-off working classes from the labouring classes, again varied from town to town.