Andy Croll - Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies

TOWARDS A COMPARATIVE
HISTORY OF COALFIELD SOCIETIES

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2005 The contributors

Stefan Berger, Andy Croll and Norman LaPorte have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Towards a comparative history of coalfield societies.
(Studies in labour history)
1. Coal miners Social conditions 20th century Cross-cultural studies 2. Coal
miners Social conditions 19th century Cross-cultural studies 3. Coal mines and
mining History 20th century Cross-cultural studies 4. Coal mines and mining
History 19th century Cross-cultural studies
I. Berger, Stefan, 1964- II. Croll, Andy, 1948- III. LaPorte, Norman
331.7622334

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Towards a comparative history of coalfield societies/edited by Stefan Berger, Andy
Croll, Norman LaPorte.
p. cm. (Studies in labour history)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7546-3777-8 (alk. paper)
1. Coal miners Cross-cultural studies. 2. Coal miners Labor unions. I. Berger,
Stefan. II. Croll, Andy, 1948- III. LaPorte, Norman. IV. Series: Studies in labour
history (Ashgate (Firm))

HD8039.M615T69 2005
331.7622334dc22

2004012653

ISBN: 9780754637776 (hbk)
ISBN 9781138266414 (pbk)

Typeset by Tradespools, Frome, Somerset

General Editor's Preface

List of Figures

List of Tables

Labour history has often been a fertile area of history. Since the Second World War its best practioners such as E.P. Thompson and E.J. Hobsbawm, both Presidents of the British Society for the Study of Labour History have written works which have provoked fruitful and wide-ranging debates and further research, and which have influenced not only social history but history generally. These historians, and many others, have helped to widen labour history beyond the study of organised labour to labour generally, sometimes to industrial relations in particular, and most frequently to society and culture in national and comparative dimensions.

The assumptions and ideologies underpining much of the older labour history have been challenged by feminist and later by postmodernist and anti-Marxist thinking. These challanges have often led to thoughtful reappraisals, perhaps intellectual equivalents of coming to terms with a new post-Cold War political landscape.

By the end of the twentieth century, labour history had emerged reinvigorated and positive from much introspection and external criticism. Very few would wish to confine its scope to the study of organised labour. Yet, equally, few would wish now to write the existence and influence of organised labour out of nations histories, any more than they would wish to ignore working-class lives and focus only on the upper echelons.

This series of books provides reassessments of broad themes of labour history as well as some more detailed studies arising from recent research. Most books are single-authored but there are also volumes of essays centred on important themes or periods, some arising from major conferences organised by the Society for the Study of Labour History. The series also includes studies of labour organisations, including international ones, as many of these are much in need of a modern reassessment.

Chris Wrigley

British Society for the Study of Labour History

University of Nottingham

Much is familiar about the history of miners, their unions and their industrial struggles. In Britain many of the major debates on working-class and labour history involved discussion of the coal industry. A regional approach is often more appropriate.

If, as I have argued elsewhere, it is inappropriate to speak of a general crisis of labour history, the subject has been characterized by some serious rethinking of approaches.

Class, by contrast, has been carrying much less weight as a blanket explanatory factor for the development of organizations such as trade unions and political parties. Gone are the straightforward assumptions that social conditions produce class positions which inevitably result in the formation of strong labour movements. Instead it is now widely accepted that the latter constantly had to construct and reconstruct notions of class unity and solidarity, and they were, as Leighton James points out in his comparison of the Ruhr and South Wales, successful to very different degrees. Most trade unionism was, as Peter Alexander confirms for the Transvaal, defensive in character. The idea of miners as the avant-garde of the class-conscious and Marxist/socialist proletariat has been in need of reassessment for some time now, and Dick Geary provides us with a superb dismantling of the myth of the radical miner.

If the more recent emphasis in labour history generally and in coalfield history specifically has been on the local, on gender, ethnicity and the discursive construction of class, the growth of comparative and transnational approaches to labour history has also been among the more noticeable innovations for the subject.

Tenfelde has repeatedly reflected on the need for comparative approaches to shed further light on the many similarities but also the significant differences of coalfield histories: the history of the miners community is better suited for international comparison than any other branch of the industrial working class. This volume sets out to contribute towards the further comparativization of coalfield histories. It originates in a joint conference of the British Labour History Society and the Welsh People's History Society at the University of Glamorgan in 2002, which received further generous support from the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society and the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Glamorgan. The editors and organizers of the conference would like to record their thanks to all of these institutions. The location of the University of Glamorgan in the heart of the former coalfield of South Wales and its origins as the School of Mining in the early twentieth century made it an appropriate location for such a conference. We would like to dedicate this volume to Klaus Tenfelde who has been such an inspiration to comparative coalfield historians worldwide and was good enough to accept our invitation to participate in the conference from which this volume derives.