Rural areas have generally been ignored in recent studies of the General Strike of 3–12 May 1926 on the implicit assumption that its impact in such areas would be negligible. To see if this assumption is correct this article examines the course of the strike in Devon and reaction to it. The likelihood of militant action in Devon in part depended upon the structure of the occupied population. In 1921 16 per cent of the occupied population of Devon County and the County Boroughs was in agriculture, and this rises to 25 per cent if we take the administrative county alone. In Exeter 49 per cent of the occupied population was in commerce, the professions, public administration, defence and personal service; in Plymouth the percentage for this group was 52 per cent. Consequently even the industrial areas were likely to be relatively weakly organised. Once out of the County Boroughs the industrial population, apart from a concentration of railwaymen at Newton Abbot, was so scattered as to make organisation and co-ordination difficult. There was no tradition of militancy in the county.

British coal miners immigrated to the United States in increasing numbers during the Civil War decade. Their movement from the collieries gathered momentum in the early war years and reached its peak in 1869. In 1862, almost all of the immigrants entering the United States who listed their occupation as “miner” were from Britain. As shown in the table, such men accounted for more than 73% of all immigrant miners in each of the following years of the decade for which data are available, with the exception of 1864. In 1870, the 57,214 British immigrant miners listed in the United States Census represented more than 60% of all foreign-born miners (94,719) in the country. The movement from Britain had already slowed when news of the American economic depression that began in 1873 reached the collieries in Britain, where an extraordinary demand for iron in the early 1870's had hiked coal miners' wages far above normal levels. However, when employment in the American coalfields was readily available in the 1860's and early 1870's, the risk involved in spending hard-won savings on the journey, which cost approximately £5 and took ten days by steamer, appeared reasonable. In comparison with other wage earners coal miners in Britain were relatively well-paid. They could, therefore, accumulate the cost of the trans-Atlantic passage during “good-times” at home.

Maurice Milne's article restricts its discussion of press treatment of industrial disputes in this period to an analysis of coverage of three strikes in three Newcastle upon Tyne papers. He passes from this review to the following conclusion:

The facile assumption that radical political beliefs would predispose their holder to espouse the cause of organised labour will not stand up to close scrutiny, at least where one important industrial region and its newspapers are concerned.

For most of the present century economic and social historians have intermittently debated the question of the standard of living during the first phase of the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1830. As both the “pessimists” and the “optimists” acknowledge, too much emphasis can easily be placed on wage levels and the more easily measured aspects of the question, to the neglect of the quality of life and its non-quantifiable aspects. Insufficient explicit attention has also been paid to the divergent experience of different occupations and different districts of the country.

The history of Irish republicanism has always suffered from an excessive concentration on its later phases. But much light can be thrown on its essential characteristics by a closer examination of its origins. A full understanding of such a contradictory movement would require an investigation of the mutations in public consciousness during the last three centuries. But most historians agree in tracing its origins to the United Irish Society of the 1790's, when the attitudes and conditions which were to dictate the future course of republicanism and loyalism were crystallised. In the light of recent events in Ireland interest in the United Irishmen has revived. However, even recent research has failed to explain satisfactorily the swift transformation of the United Irishmen's secular republicanism by the traditional fears and aspirations of the Catholic population. Nor has anyone attempted to answer the very basic question of how large sections of a non-political and essentially loyal peasantry could in the short period of the 1790's have acquired many of the fundamental traits of later separatist movements. Already by the turn of the century popular oral culture, latterly dominated by themes taken from Gaelic mythology, speaks instead of dead rebel heroes, of the English oppressor and the Protestant enemy. This new anti-English flavour in popular culture is particularly significant; English rule in Ireland had not been seriously questioned since the twelfth century, and the failure of the Bruce invasion in the fourteenth century was an indication of general Irish indifference to the nature of central government, provided life's daily routine remained undisturbed. This attitude characterised Irish thinking for the next four centuries, and like peasant communities elsewhere, the Irish remained essentially apolitical and parochial in outlook. They were scarcely the material from which a movement of national liberation could be fashioned.