With the release of the Cabinet Papers for the Lloyd George post-war coahtion government and the opening of the Lloyd George papers in the Beaverbrook Library, the basis for a reinterpretation of the man and his era was made possible. And, indeed, several studies have been published already, most notably, by Americans. The thrust of these new works is to make a more sympathetic character of Lloyd George. Thus, Susan Armitage tells us, had he only not been so busy at peace conferences, Lloyd George would have seen to it that the labor disputes of the post-war years were less disruptive, that the grievances of the trade unions were given due consideration, and that more of the promises of the post-war Reconstruction Committee were realized. In the latter, she follows the lead of Paul Johnson, who was one of the first to plow the murky waters of the Public Records Office's offerings. Pointing a heavily accusing finger at Austen Chamberlain and the Treasury for withholding their blessing on “homes fit for heroes” and other Reconstruction plans, Johnson asks whether “an honest effprt” might have “headed off the militant strike activity” that denied Lloyd George's reconstruction plans the means of success. Thus Lloyd George appears as the victim of circumstances beyond his control – a paragon of pragmatic rationality who is opposed by reactionary Cabinet Ministers and bedevilled by stubborn trade-union leaders who refuse to understand why the promised paradise is not forthcoming.

The appeal issued by the St Petersburg Soviet on December 1, 1905, and known as the Financial Manifesto, served as a pretext for the Witte Government to liquidate the Soviet and to start a counterattack which, in a short time, completed the defeat of the first Russian revolution. The Manifesto represents a unique attempt to further the objectives of revolutionaries by undermining the monetary system, but it did not inaugurate a new strategy for revolutionaries in Russia, nor has it influenced revolutionary movement elsewhere. The originality of the Manifesto lies in its advocacy of a set of actions designed to bring about the downfall of Tsarism by exerting pressure on the gold base of the monetary system and by undermining government credit, rather than through withholding of tax payments. Refusal to pay taxes has been a widely used political weapon, at least since the American Revolution. It found its place in the program of the British Chartist movement, one of the first political movements rooted essentially in the working class.

The lock-out and strike in the British engineering industry, which took place between July 1897 and January 1898, was one of the most bitter and protracted labour disputes of the 1890s. As “the first major national strike or lock-out in British history”,1 a dispute set against the turbulent background of “new unionism” and socialist influences within the 91,500-strong Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and fought over the issues of working hours, the rights of employers in their own “shops” and the vexed question of the introduction of technical improvements into the industry, the conflict had great political and economic significance.2

For the historian of modern European society the problem of the extent and nature of unemployment at any particular time and in any particular place is a challenging and even frustrating one. It is clearly an important question to ask and yet, except for very recent times, it is almost impossible to answer satisfactorily. Where there are data they are incomplete and their reliability doubtful. This is true even of such a society as Victorian Britain, which might be thought to have a considerable amount of useful material. The early Victorian social investigators in Britain seldom dealt with the problem of unemployment, preferring to focus on educational, sanitary, and similar elements of working-class living standards. Admittedly, from the middle of the nineteenth century continuous series of unemployment figures become increasingly available relating to particular trades and from these aggregate figures have been calculated.1 But the defects of these returns, made by various trade unions and based upon the numbers receiving unemployment benefit, have been recognized almost from the time that they began to appear. As for official labour statistics in general, those for the period before 1886 have recently been described as “deficient, chaotic, and unmanageable”.2 The unemployment statistics improved little after 1886. They continued to be derived from the same sources as before, though a much greater number of unions made returns. But the very nature of the returns means that they were biassed towards the unionised workers in industries like heavy engineering.

The implantation of a modern police in the industrial districts of Northern England resulted from a new consensus among the propertied classes that it was necessary to create a professional, bureaucratically organized lever of urban discipline and permanently introduce it into the heart of working-class communities. The coming of the new police represented a significant extension into hitherto geographically peripheral areas of both the moral and political authority of the state. This was to be accomplished by the creation of a powerful and quite modern device – a bureaucracy of official morality. By 1840 it came to be “an axiom in police that you guard St. James by watching St. Giles”. This was a novel attitude. Eighteenth-century governments and the upper classes in general were surely apprehensive of the movements of the lower orders, but did not consider it either useful or necessary to watch St Giles all the time. One could learn what one needed to know about what was on the collective mind of St Giles when it rioted; one might even use or manipulate its riots in useful ways as the reform movement of 1830–32 did with great success. Previous to the nineteenth century urban disorder was not necessarily perceived as subversive of the social order. “Provided that the ruler did his duty, the populace was prepared to defend him with enthusiasm. But if he did not, it rioted until he did. This mechanism was perfectly understood by both sides, and caused no political problems beyond a little occasional destruction of property […]. Since the riots were not directed against the social system, public order could remain surprisingly lax by modern standards.”

Georges Lefebvre concluded his Preface to the 1957 edition of Buonarroti's famous history of Babeuf's conspiracy with a sort of challenge to historians, saying that the final word on it still remains to be said. Whether Lefebvre's summons to further research on the subject has been a cause of new studies cannot be answered. All that can be said is that historians have continued to lift the veil on some hitherto obscure aspects of this conspiracy. Evidence of this trend was produced at the International Colloquium of Stockholm on August 21, 1960, to commemorate Babeuf's birthday.1 What appeared to be comparatively new was the emphasis on the impact of Babouvism outside of France. This was shown in three papers, two on Germany and one on the Austrian Tyrol. The two on Germany2 dwell on the reporting of the movement in the German press. We are told that alongside the generally turgid and hostile accounts there were analyses of Babouvist ideas in Minerva, the review of Hamburg, drawn from Le Tribun du peuple and the dossiers of the Babouvist trial. This review ran as many as ten articles on Babeuf and Drouet, who was boosted into prominence because of his official standing. The third paper3 suggests the probability of Babouvist infiltration among the insurgent Tirolese peasants early in the nineteenth century. It has also been shown elsewhere that Babeuf's organization served as a model, both in structure and methods, for the Italian underground, Società dei Raggi, that reached out from Piedmont to Romagna with the object of uniting the peninsula.4

In September 1928, the members of the Waterside Workers Federation went on strike, paralysing South Australia's main harbour, Port Adelaide. Their places were taken by men who volunteered to load and unload the ships. When the strike collapsed the Stevedoring Company responsible for hiring workers for the waterfront continued to employ the men whose volunteer labour had broken the strike, in preference to members of the Waterside Workers Federation. Preferential treatment of “volunteers” continued and, as the Depression worsened and unemployment increased, this meant that Union members were less and less likely to get work on the waterfront. Such economic pressure, when combined with an instinctive hatred of the strikebreakers, produced continual clashes between the Unionists and the “volunteers”.