Abstract
This volume containing eleven chapters was first published on the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH) in Britain, and subsequently printed in India. In addition to these chapters, and an introduction by the three editors, it includes an insightful preface by E.J. Hobsbawm, a founding member of the SSLH.
The first chapter discusses the history of the SSLH from its first meeting at Birkbeck College on 6 May 1960, till the present. Subsequent chapters discuss the development of labour history in Britain, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, Germany, India and Japan. The concluding chapter maps future possibilities for labour history. Though each chapter is an independent article, the thematic continuity allows for a thorough comparison between varying ‘histories’ of labour history, and comprehension of its concerns.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the considerably greater space (over one-third of the book) given to discussing British labour history, potentially a point of critique of the book, is the fact that this is a commemorative volume for the British SSLH. Yet it does not try to establish British labour history as normative. It is undeniable that British labour historians, including SSLH founders, like E.P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel or Hobsbawm, wrote definitive works, which inspired labour historians in different parts of the world—as varied as the US, Germany and India among others.
One of the significant shifts that took place in labour history—from the ‘old’ to ‘new’ kind of labour history writing, came around 1960 and was closely associated with the SSLH, though it was also seen in different countries. While ‘old’ labour history tended to be concerned with conventional institutional history of trade unions, political parties on the left, etc., the ‘new’ represented a wider contextualised social history of labour and the working class. For the pioneers of the ‘new’ labour history, like the SSLH founders, their engagement with labour history could be ‘fully understood’ only as ‘an attempt to find a way forward in left politics through historical reflection’. 1 However, as ‘new’ labour history gained academic acceptability by the 1970s, and was written from within universities, its connection with labour declined, though to different degrees in different regions.
Histories of Labour reveals striking commonalities in the methods by which ‘new’ labour history has been propagated world-wide—through the establishment of labour history ‘societies’, journals and labour history conferences, in which workers and unions participated along with academics. However, historical differences between countries meant that labour and labour history also developed distinctly. In Britain, ‘new’ labour history saw several shifts over time. The period 1960–80 was characterised as a ‘golden age’ of labour history, 2 which was followed by a crisis, due largely, as John McIlroy writes, to the impact of Thatcher’s conservative policies and not to any internal intellectual crisis or the collapse of the Soviet bloc. In Ireland, Germany and Japan histories of labour came to be intertwined in different ways with nation-building. In Ireland, Emmet O’Connor and Conor McCabe write how the view that the working class was at the vanguard of the incomplete national struggle and its opposite view, determined the direction of labour history. Labour history there is closely linked to the Labour Party and there are few full-time labour historians in the universities. Klaus Tenfelde observes that though German labour history was divided between the Communist eastern part (GDR) and the western part where Social Democrats held sway, in both parts class formation and working life formed the basis of German society and identity. The recent rise of a migrant workforce challenged this and more precarious kinds of labouring identities have now emerged. Takao Matsumura, John McIlroy and Alan Campbell write that in Japan the working class formation coincided with modernisation of the economy in an established capitalist world, and Japan’s growth as an imperialist power. When trade unions were eventually formed, workers were urged to focus their loyalty on the economic interests of the company. Labour history began to be written only gradually and was rare even in the 1970s. In both Germany and Japan, recent trends in labour history include a turn towards everyday history of labour and people, women’s history, etc.
Formal labour history in the US, Elizabeth Faue writes, began around 1880, and focussed on unionised workers. Faue cites labour historian Herbert Gutman, who showed how the disruption and renewal of the American working class, with each wave of immigrants from agrarian economies, made for more disrupted working class formation than in Britain in the nineteenth century. Brian Palmer discusses how labour history in Canada was always very significant because of a strong social democratic presence in the polity. In the US, Canada and in Australia (discussed by Greg Patmore), the impact of histories of gender and race have meant that the ‘interlocking hierarchies’ of class, ethnicity, race and gender are being sought to be articulated and studied by labour historians.
Labour history in India, as Rana P. Behal, Chitra Joshi and Prabhu P. Mohapatra write, was strongly influenced by Thompson and in the 1970s, historians like Dipesh Chakrabarti raised the issue of caste, community ties that persisted and shaped workers’ identities, as much as economic factors, though he was later critiqued for reifying culture. Discussions around ‘traditional’ forms of ‘unfree’ labour, indenture, contract, etc., as new forms of labour bondage, ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ labour have also marked Indian labour history.
The last chapter in Histories of Labour, by Marcel van der Linden discusses possibilities for the future of labour history at a time when the labour movement is at the lowest ebb, facing dire prospects. He critiques the persistent, deep-seated Euro-centrism that has hitherto marked labour history, and the ‘methodological nationalism’ of labour historians, including E.P. Thompson, who have restricted their studies to national boundaries. These problems could be undermined, by the spread in recent decades, of labour history outside the North Atlantic, especially to the global ‘south’—Latin America, India, South Africa, etc., and new networks of communication that have emerged between labour historians across regions. Emphasising global interconnections between workers’ experiences and actions—trans-continental labour processes and operation of capital, trans-cultural modes of migrant workers’ lives, trans-national waves of collective action by workers, etc.—he calls for a global labour history in which old and new labour history would be integrated within a new perspective. This approach requires a broadening of core concepts of labour history to include historical realities outside the North Atlantic region—a broader notion of ‘working class’, to include various subordinate labouring groups and understanding different modes of ‘collective refusal to work’ adopted by them, for instance.
The contributors have been, by and large, labour historians themselves, and the rich documentation and narrative they have produced is extremely valuable. The Indian edition is very welcome. However, while this important book could become essential reading for all interested in labour history, its somewhat narrow focus and style might mean that it could remain restricted to this specialised group, and not gain the wider readership the contents deserve. The organisation of chapters along national boundaries suggests that ‘methodological nationalism’ perhaps affected the editors as well. Discussion on labour history in South Africa and Latin America, countries of the global south where labour history thrives is also unfortunately missing. Nonetheless this book fills an important gap in the historiography of labour by reflecting on the development of labour history itself, its definitions and self-articulation. At a historical moment when the challenges before labour are grave, and the need for engaging with labour history singularly important, Histories of Labour could enable established and aspiring labour historians to understand their inheritance, and inspire them to undertake research and write nuanced histories of labour. This in turn could help, in a small way, to find resources of hope for the future.