Since the publication of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974, an increasing number of social historians have turned their attention towards the workplace as a major site of class struggle. In particular, social historians have focussed on the unequal struggle between employers and craft-workers to determine patterns of work organisation and the balance of power in the labour market. However, despite the growth of interest in the historical relationship between the division of labour, trade unionism and business strategy, no academic work has yet considered the development of apprenticeship in the post-1914 period.

Despite the proliferation of studies concerned with the unemployment problem and the mechanics of welfare provision between the world wars, most historians have focused either on the difficulties facing manual workers or on the role of state services in the provision of benefits. This emphasis is not surprising given the persistence of a high level of manual unemployment in this period, which led in turn to an unprecedented demand for maintenance and a huge increase in public expenditure on unemployment relief. However, the emphasis upon manual workers has led to an unfortunate neglect of other sections of the labour-force, while the concern with the evolution of state services has diverted attention from the continuing importance of voluntary agencies in the field of welfare provision.

Most standard histories of Britain between the wars refer to the development of holidays with pay, albeit briefly. It is widely acknowledged that by the end of the 1930's the majority of the British working population benefited from a paid holiday. The crucial initiative, so it is claimed, was the Holidays with Pay Act of 1938, which gave Parliamentary approval to the principle of payment of wages during holidays. Clearly the growth of paid holidays is seen as yet another instance of a more affluent Britain, an integral element of the growth of leisure. However, there has been very little detailed discussion of the paid-holiday-policy option and the precise reasons for the formulation and implementation of that policy. This neglect is rather surprising given the popular support for this “fringe benefit”, which was perceived as providing a certain degree of financial security during the annual break from the rigours of work. It is true that there has been more specialised treatment, but even this is of a general nature, with little reference to the industrial and political struggle for holidays with pay.

More or less by definition, civil war refers to an armed conflict between citizens of the same country. However, the two outstanding European examples of this century, the civil wars in Spain and Russia, were in fact complicated by foreign intervention. Indeed, in the case of Spain, intervention by foreign powers proved decisive.

It is not too much to say that over the last twenty years the history of working-class housing in the nineteenth century has been transformed. Many older historians, of course, took it for granted that the quality of houses built to meet the needs of the fast-growing urban population was uniformly bad, a testimony to the avarice of builders and landlords alike. Beliefs of this kind owed much to Engels, and to the Hammonds writing earlier this century about the life of the town labourter. One of the first suggestions that these views were really an over-simplified description of housing conditions came from Professor Ashworth in the 1950's, who pointed out that it was quite wrong to suppose that all nineteenth-century towns developed on the same lines, a kind of Coketown endlessly repeated. While not denying that there was a great deal of poor-quality building, more recently historians have made it clear that newer town housing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not necessarily worse than housing built earlier on, or worse than rural housing built at the same time; that new building varied in construction and amenities in the same town, and from town to town; that the skilled working classes were likely to live in better-quality housing than the unskilled; and that the segregation of working-class housing from middle-class housing, and of the better-off working classes from the labouring classes, again varied from town to town.