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.

“A true businessman does not waste time writing reflections about business.” Fortunately Auguste Detoeuf disregarded his own self-mocking advice. Throughout his life this thoughtful industrialist articulated the debates and dilemmas of an entire generation of businessmen, especially of other enlightened corporation managers who, like himself, were faced with the problems of industrial modernization and labor relations. The business milieu generally, preoccupied with its own affairs and not inclined to reveal them, provides but few glimpses into the minds and sensibilities which compose it. Detoeuf broke the silence; moreover, his shrewd analyses, unique moral perspective, and wide experience made him a remarkable historical witness to a time of troubles and fundamental change. He provided a rich record of the passage of French employers from the vogue of Americanization in the 1920's, through the crise de conscience provoked by the depression, the Popular Front, and Nazi aggression, up to the new resolve of the Liberation era.

Opening the 21st anniversary of the ILP in Bradford in April 1914, J. H. Palin, one of Bradford's most prominent trade unionists, remarked: “Of ordinary historical association, Bradford has none. In Domesday Book, it is described as a waste, and the subsequent periods of capitalist exploitation have done little to improve it. […] The History of Bradford will be very largely the history of the ILP.”1 Palin's remark – unjust as it is, perhaps, to a distinguished list of Victorian philanthropists – stands as testimony to the authority and influence which the labour movement in Bradford had acquired by that date. It also provides a clue to the origins of that authority and influence, for it demonstrates the importance which he and other Bradford trade unionists attached to their association with the independent labour movement. Whatever the reactions of trade unionists in the rest of the country, in Bradford, trade unionists were vital to its success. Indeed, strong trade-union support proved to be an essential corollary of effective independent working-class political action.

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.

Historians are in general agreement that French socialism experienced a major reorientation at the end of the 1880's and the beginning of the 1890's. In 1888 the French socialist movement consisted of several diminutive and poorly organized factions, which could not claim, either singly or collectively, a significant national following despite nearly a decade of organizing and propagandizing. Yet by 1893 socialists were able to elect some forty deputies to the Chamber of Deputies, and in the previous year scored numerous victories in municipal elections. Electorally impotent in the 1880's, socialists became a serious force in national political life with the victories of 1893. Nearly simultaneously, the stalemate among rival factions was broken as schism in the ranks of both Possibilists and Blanquists permitted the Guesdists to emerge as the dominant organization. Finally, these years were marked by the appearance of a pragmatic, reformist socialism most clearly evident in the new moderation of the Guesdists and the rise of the Independent Socialists.

E. P. Thompson expressed succinctly the prevailing orthodoxy about the origins of the Independent Labour Party when he wrote, in his homage to Tom Maguire, that “the ILP grew from bottom up”. From what little evidence has been available, it has been argued that the ILP was essentially a provincial party, which was created from the fusion of local political groups concentrated mainly on an axis lying across the North of England. An early report from the General Secretary of the party described Lancashire and Yorkshire as the strongholds of the movement, and subsequent historical accounts have supported this view.

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

With the imprisonment of many activists throughout the year, the rejection of the first National Petition in July, the dissolution of the Convention in September, and the catastrophe of the ill-fated Newport Rising in November, early Chartism ended in failure in the second half of 1839. One of the most common reasons given in the literature for the failure has been the lack of internal cohesion in the movement, usually illustrated by reference to the political conflicts between physical- and moral-force groups. Despite the analytical inadequacy of such generic terms it is indisputable that Chartism was deficient in natural unity. It was a coalition of many different radical associations and personalities with a multiplicity of varied experiences, traditions and beliefs. As a consequence, the early Chartist movement only made progress by adopting certain symbols of unification: the National Petition and Rent, and a commitment to a National Convention. These symbols then became specific goals of Chartism. However, little consideration has previously been given to asking whether Chartism was an efficient instrument in itself for achieving these objectives, or if the organization of the Convention undermined the political credibility of the movement. This article attempts to illustrate Chartism's need for organization and leadership from the Convention, and suggests that inefficient organization was an important cause of the relative failure to achieve its immediate objectives, and for the progressive abdication of leadership by the Convention.

Was there a secret revolutionary movement in England during the early Industrial Revolution and, if there was such a movement, must we accept that its existence would be “unprovable”? Should we agree with a recent writer that no conclusions can be reached on such questions, the existing historical sources being so ambiguous as to allow the historian to impress his own prejudices on them?. We believe that a rigorous study of the historical evidence of a revolutionary tradition in one region can offer an insight into this important area of English social history. The purpose of this essay will be to set the revolutionary aspect of Sheffield's political history against a brief outline of the town's economic development.

Matters of labour organisation and control are clearly related to the progress of mechanisation. Economic growth results from increases in productivity brought about by management's combination of trained men and “skillful” machines in productive work. In isolation neither management, labour, nor capital can in themselves achieve sustained growth in the output of goods and services; the efficient co-ordination of a trained and disciplined workforce with equipment designed to perform specific activities is always required. In a period of changing technology such as the nineteenth century, however, the proper co-ordination may be difficult to achieve because the introduction of workers with new talents or machines which can perform multiple functions is apt to disturb existing work routines, upset prevailing cost relationships, and force management to reorganise entire sections of the productive process. This is particularly true if the various functions performed by new types of machinery have hitherto been assigned to more than one man or group of men.

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.”

The science of anthropology has traditionally studied the relations of the human kind to nature and the relations within society, the original animal condition of the human being, the preservation and overcoming thereof, the establishment of human culture, and its material, mental or artistic expression. Anthropology is founded on the presupposition of the variety of human societies and cultures, the differences between them, and the varieties in the developments and relations of each. It is an academic discipline above all, and has no internal commitment to practical undertakings. At best it has nurtured liberal spirits who embraced the “party of humanity”, and who have defended the concept of the whole against any expression of innate superiority of one group over another. It is an abstract social science which has only now separated itself from a spurious natural-science view of humanity, and this latter has given birth to a monster, the biology of racism, the reduction of cultural differences to natural or innate differences, and the assignment of these to a scale of higher or lower races. This academic anthropology did not strangle its offspring until long after it had done its harm.

Any anthropology that calls itself Marxist must have as its starting point the intermediation of labor between human society and nature. The labor is abstract labor; as concrete labor it is work. The society in question is not society in general or the human community in abstracto, but a particular, historical society, whether primitive or civilized. The question that is posed thereby is twofold: first, it is the problem of the place in nature of the human kind, or the problem of location; second, it is the historical problem of the transition of humanity from the natural to the cultural order. Nature has its history, as does the human society, but the unit that we take for the observation of natural history is far wider than the unit of observation of human history. In the former case it is the biological species whose history is taken up; in the case of human history it is the communal life of the village, and the social life of the tribe, city or nation. The time period of natural history is geological time, which is one or more orders of magnitude greater than the time periods of ethnography and historiography.

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