The historian who studies the history of the Comintern has to rely mainly on printed sources. For this purpose the published minutes and reports of the seven Congresses of the Comintern (1919–35) and the thirteen plenary sessions of its Executive Committee (1922–33) are of particular interest.

Edmund Dene Morel was born in Paris in 1873, the son of a French civil servant father and an English mother. Modestly educated in England, he emerged at age thirty from the obscurity of a clerkship in a Liverpool commercial firm to launch a journalistic crusade against the murderous exploitation of blacks on the rubber plantations of the Congo Free State. Largely as a result of this effort he became critical of what he considered the deviousness of the British Foreign Office, and by 1911 he was questioning the extent of the commitment to France in the Entente Cordiale. He was pro-German only in the sense that he opposed the prevalent anti-German hysteria and believed that an Anglo-German confrontation would be catastrophic for both countries. Morel was one of a number of free-trade, anti-imperialist, foreign- and imperial-affairs specialists associated with the pre-war Liberal Party; J. A. Hobson, H. N. Brailsford and E. G. Browne were others. But it was the war which made him the butt of nationalist fury and the victim of government prosecution for his advocacy of a negotiated peace and for his infuriating insistence that Germany's share of the blame for the war's origin was much less than that of Tsarist Russia or even of Britain's Liberal government.

In this century British socialism has rarely engaged in serious internal debate about the fundamental concepts of its political vocabulary. In this respect, as in others, British socialism has been true to the wider traditions of British political life. There has, of course, been much vigorous controversy on policy and programme, but also a remarkable absence of genuine doctrinal debate, certainly as compared with continental socialisms. A major exception to this, however, is to be found in the decade which has the First World War at its centre. Indeed, this may be regarded as the most creative period in British socialist thought in the twentieth century (notwithstanding the superficially more turbulent 1930's); and it is a period which ends, interestingly, in the early 1920's, when Labour becomes securely established in the world of parliamentary politics.

The engineers' lock-out of 1852 is just one of those historical events which, while receiving extensive coverage and being long pondered over, remain to this day a bone of contention. In terms of scale and in the sophistication of the tactics employed, it “was the first of a new class of strikes or lock-outs”. It aroused more sustained interest than any previous industrial dispute. It stimulated “a discussion of the strike by the press, so comprehensive and exhaustive that a reproduction of the newspaper articles would fill volumes”. At this time, the only other trade unions of any appreciable size were still less than half the strength of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Some earlier combinations had been larger, but they had been formed solely in relation to specific strikes and, as such, were ephemeral in character. The mass movements of 1830–34 generally rested upon the precarious financial foundations of irregular levies. The Webbs concluded that a “trade society which […] could count on a regular income of £500 a week was without precedent.”

While much has been heard in recent times of the evils attaching to “the principles of 1834”, other important aspects of the New Poor Law have been seriously neglected. The laws of settlement and removal were unjust and inhumane, and the system of parochial rating was anomalous, uneven and, indeed, thoroughly iniquitous. One of the main features of the Poor Law Amendment Act had been the grouping of the parishes of England and Wales into unions of parishes. Those of a medium-sized town usually constituted one union, while in the countryside the typical union tended to comprise all the parishes within a radius of up to about ten miles of a country town, its centre. Under the Act, the administration of the Poor Law was based on the union and not, as heretofore, on the parish; yet the latter remained the financial unit, each parish being chargeable for its own Poor Law expenditure. This uneven arrangement prevented the effective operation of the Act, and, as will be shown, had unhappy consequences. Attempts at reform in these matters were strenuously opposed in Parliament between 1845 and 1865, and only in the latter year was the Union Chargeability Act passed.