This investigation into the strike activity of British coalminers attempts to explain the causes of strikes, the regional and inter-colliery differences in strike propensity, and the relation between strikes and social solidarity in the history of colliery communities. It has been inspired by the seminal research carried out by Knowles, Cronin, Shorter and Tilly, and Stearns, which combined quantitative methodologies with more traditional qualitative approaches in a search for generalizations rather than descriptive narrative accounts of strikes. Their ambitious research agendas have included attempts to chart and analyse the strike histories of a wide range of industries in several countries, to elucidate a dynamic of strikes generally, and to place strikes within the socio-political context of a ‘modernization’ process. The perspectives offered have been sectoral and comparative, inter-industrial and national, and to some extent international, in scope.

While we have adopted a similarly rigorous approach to our research which is both historical and firmly rooted in concepts and methodologies drawn from the social sciences, our study focuses on a single industry and on the experience of the employers, managers and workers in the localities and the collieries within one polity, albeit one comprising a trinity of national cultures. That it does so does not mean that our research is less ambitious or that it lacks the capacity to offer generalizations of comparable interest to those offered by scholars who have chosen wider fields to investigate. Even an attempt to analyse strike behaviour in a single industry, however, reveals the difficulty of drawing generalizations.