This survey of the personnel of the highest bodies of the Comintern is meant to be a tool for researchers and historians studying the history of the international labour movement, especially of the Communist International.

The origins of the British Labour Party are many and complex. They have formed the subject of innumerable works of historical scholarship and of journalism, for it is possible to tell the story equally forcefully in terms either of political theory or of personalities. But no matter how much weight may be given to the role of political ideas, and no matter how much importance one may attach to the appearance of the “right” men and women at the “rightrd; time, the crucial part played by the trade-union movement cannot be denied. It was the growing support derived from the trade unions which breathed life into the Labour Representation Committee after 1900, and this in spite of strongly-entrenched hostility from within the trade unions to socialism and all its works. The stages by which the unions became reconciled to, and then enthusiastic supporters of, the Labour Party are well known. Self-interest, not socialism, prompted the unions to support separate labour representation in Parliament. Until January 1901 only 29 per cent of those unions affiliated to the Trades Union Congress had decided to back the Labour Representation Committee. In the space of two years that proportion rose to over 56 per cent.

The failure of the ILP to convince a Labour opposition, and then a Labour government after 1929, to abandon its view that banking and politics were quite separate fields of activity is well-known. Politicians were not bankers: it was as simple as that. Ramsay MacDonald, though not averse to political programmes as such, was certainly suspicious of “unauthorised” programmes. In a veiled but unmistakable reference to ILP policy statements, he told the 1927 Labour Party conference that

“authorised programmes might have a certain number of inconveniences, but unauthorised programmes had many more inconveniences, and he was not at all sure that during the last twelve months or two years the Labour Party had not suffered more from unauthorised programmes and statements than it had suffered from the issue of well-considered and well-thought-out documents and pronouncements.”

Philip Snowden was much more explicit. Unlike Sir Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, Snowden did recognise a causal relationship between changes in the availability of credit and changes in the levels of production and employment, but thought that this was a relationship which politicians should not interfere with. Control of credit held within it the possibility of inflation. “It might be highly dangerous”, Snowden warned the 1928 Labour Party conference, “in the hands of a Government that wanted to use this means in order to serve some purpose, or to gain popular support.” One might achieve temporary benefits, such as the reduction of unemployment from one and a quarter million to a quarter of a million in nine months, but there would be a terrible price to pay later – all the more terrible because unspecified.

During the summer of 1880, John Swinton, the American journalist and social reformer, made a forty-day tour of France and England. The most memorable event of the tour was the interview he had with Karl Marx during his visit to England, at the seashore resort of Ramsgate. Swinton was tremendously impressed by Marx and, in an account of the interview which he published in the New York Sun of September 6, 1880, he referred to him as “one of the most remarkable men of the day”. One passage from Swinton's article, in particular, clearly illustrates the profound impact Marx had on him.

During the last week in July 1893, the largest industrial dispute Britain had hitherto experienced was initiated when over 300,000 miners in the Federated District stopped work. The Yorkshire miners played an important part in the lockout which was the first major trial of strength which the Miners' Federation of Great Britain had to face. The significant role of Yorkshire's pitmen in the dispute was not surprising since the colliers of the West Riding had taken a leading part in the formation of the MFGB only four years earlier, and the Yorkshire Miners' Association formed the cornerstone of the new organization. The stoppage occasioned extremely little violence, except in the West Riding, where a series of turbulent incidents plunged many of the mining districts into a state of anarchy and mob rule. The climactic event occurred at Featherstone when two miners were shot dead by the army. It is the aim of this article to examine the civil disorders which resulted from the lockout in Yorkshire, and to present an analysis of the Featherstone “Massacre” together with an assessment of the way in which the authorities handled the disturbances.

In the decade before World War I, revolutionary syndicalists and reformist socialists clashed repeatedly in the Italian labor movement. The reformist socialists, who maintained a hegemony throughout this period, advocated cooperation and compromises with the bourgeoisie and the government, supported by the Socialist Party in Parliament, to secure socio-economic benefits for the workers. The revolutionary syndicalists, who began to present an alternative to this strategy in 1905, favored direct action by workers through the unions to seize advantages from the bourgeoisie and reinforce the class consciousness of the proletariat. They asserted that the strike was the most effective means to win socio-economic reforms and bring about changes in politics. At the same time, they believed that it attracted converts and strengthened the union movement. The revolutionary syndicalists also argued that striking workers acquired initiative and combativeness, sentiments of unity and solidarity, and developed a heroic ethos of duty, dedication and sacrifice. The challenge of a strike, on the other hand, restored energy to the bourgeoisie: it transformed the property owners into aggressive, worthy opponents of the proletariat. As illusions of collaboration disappeared in the heat of battle, the revolutionary syndicaUsts predicted that the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would become more intense and intransigent.

The purpose of this article is to make a contribution to the scientific – that is to say, the analytical and explanatory – historiography of workers' trade unions in individual industries. The question to which an answer is sought is, “What factors determine the success of a trade union of the workers in a particular branch of industry ?” A trade union of workers is here defined as a sales cartel for labour power. By the success of such a trade union is meant its recognition by the employers concerned as an agent selling the labour power of the workers it represents; the recognition becomes a fact when wages and other conditions of employment are determined in the framework of a national Collectieve Arbeids-Overeenkomst (CAO) – a collective labour agreement, in which the trade union is a party in a formal contract.

The most dramatic agitations and triumphs of the “new” unionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, together with its reversals and defeats by an organised employers' counter–offensive, occurred on the waterfront at British ports. The reasons for the revival and unsteady continuance of trades unionism in the ports at this period have been well detailed, but serious analysis of the origins and growth of countervailing employer interest groupings in labour matters, at a time when shipowners felt compelled to meet organisation with organisation, has been altogether more sparse. The initial strategy of many employers was to set their face against unions “to get back to what they believed to have been the golden age of British labour”, with freedom for men to work on their own terms without union interference or, if not openly attacking unions, at least refusing to acknowledge their existence and come to terms with them as bargaining agents. Conflict was endemic in the British shipping industry at this time, and employment relations were regulated unilaterally either by the employers or, in some cases where they were sufficiently strongly organised, by the unions. Yet, by the First World War employers had granted “recognition” and arrived at an accommodation with the unions over certain clearly defined areas of interest, with the result that henceforth industrial relations in the ports would be conducted via bilateral and joint regulation on a much more orderly and stable basis.

The first edition of the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser was published on November 18th, 1837, with Feargus O'Connor as proprietor, Joshua Hobson as printer and publisher, and the Rev. William Hill as editor. Its price was 4½d. Together with the platform the Northern Star provided the essential medium of national communication and organization for the Chartist movement. The Star was the most important agency for the integration and transformation of disparate local radical agitation and organization into the national Chartist movement. Throughout the Chartist period the Star gave local working-class protest a national focus. It brought national perspective to the localities and gave local radicalism national coverage.

During the past two or three decades economic and social historians have displayed a sustained interest in the pre-conditions of the Industrial Revolution in England, and among the many explanations of this remarkable break-through into modern industrialization the role of labour (including population) has been accorded a prominent place. Yet although questions about wages, labour supply, productivity, poverty, and poor relief have been staple ingredients in the economic and social historian's diet ever since his discipline began to take shape in the late nineteenth century, there are still serious gaps in our knowledge of the size, composition, quality and living standards of the English labour force in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some of these gaps may eventually be filled, at least partially, by detailed empirical studies of local and regional demographic, economic and social conditions. But even the most sanguine researcher must admit that there will continue to be deficiencies of data and unanswerable questions, so the need for interpretative, even speculative, studies will remain. The present paper falls within this latter category, for it is mainly concerned with the relationships between ideas, policies and conditions affecting the English labouring poor in the period under examination. It combines a review of the present state of knowledge of these matters with some speculative observations about causal connections and the possibilities of future research.

Von den verschiedenen Auslandsorganisationen sozialdemokratischer deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker im neunzehnten Jahrhundert sind die drei Kopenhagener, der Deutsche social-demokratische Arbeiterverein (1875–77), die Deutsche Lesegesellschaft (1887–91) und der Deutsche Arbeiterverein Vorwärts (1894–1914) bislang von der historischen Forschung unbeachtet geblieben. Dies erscheint unberechtigt, denn, mag es auch zutreffen, dass die drei Vereine zu den weniger bedeutenden Auslandsorganisationen deutscher Sozialdemokraten gehörten, für die dänische Arbeiterbewegung war der älteste der drei Vereine von grosser Bedeutung. In der Mitte der siebziger Jahre des vorigen Jahrhunderts war er nicht nur das einzige Bindeglied der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung zwar weniger zur organisierten deutschen Sozialdemokratie als zur Ideenwelt deutscher Arbeiter und Handwerker, sondern zeitweilig auch das einzige Milieu innerhalb der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung, in dem theoretische Fragen diskutiert wurden. Die Aufgabe, diesen Verein darzustellen, erschien deshalb lohnend; dabei erwies es sich als notwendig, ihn in die Geschichte der dänischen Arbeiterbewegung, in die er voll integriert war, einzubetten.

The modern history of British deep-sea fishing begins with the railway expansion of the mid-nineteenth century. Rapid transport and the increasing use of ice as a preservative made it possible for fresh sea fish to enter the diets of the inhabitants of inland towns. Fresh sea fish was regarded as almost a luxury food before the railway age, yet by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, it had become a major protein source for the working classes of the industrial towns, and the fried-fish shop had become a working-class institution. The sea-fishing industry underwent a vast market-induced expansion. The census of 1841 enumerated only 24,000 males as being employed in fishing. By 1881 there were 58,000. If the inland consumer ever gave thought to the fishermen who supplied his table, he probably conjured up a picture of a weather-beaten village fisherman going daily to the fishing grounds to return in the evening to his waiting wife and children, bringing the silver harvest of the sea. While he had been at sea his family had busied themselves baiting lines, making and mending nets, and, in the case of the fish wives, performing their traditional function of selling the catch. Such a picture may have been broadly true of the fishing villages of Scotland, Cornwall, Northumberland or the South coast, but a feature of the second half of the nineteenth century was the creation of a new kind of fisherman who crewed the sailing trawlers of the North Sea. The expansion of the market has coincided with the discovery of the rich beds of the North Sea, and to such an extent did the North Sea trawling ports come to dominate the fishing industry that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, Hull and Grimsby were together receiving as much fish as all the remaining ports of England and Wales put together. Those who toiled on the grey North Sea were known as the “smacksmen”, and it is the extreme nature of their occupation which is the subject of this study.

Charles Hall's importance has been recognized by a number of scholars. He has been described by C. R. Fay as “the first of the early socialists”, and by Mark Blaug as “the first socialist critic of the industrial revolution”. According to Max Beer he provided “the first interpretation of the voice of rising Labour”, and Anton Menger regarded him as “the first socialist who saw in rent and interest unjust appropriations of the return of labour, and who explicitly claimed for the worker the undiminished product of his industry”.2 Menger, in his book The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (first published in German in 1886), devoted three or four pages to Hall and drew attention to his early formulation of the theory of surplus value. Since then there have been several discussions of Hall's work, but almost without exception they have been quite brief: perhaps the most notable are those provided by H. S. Foxwell in his introduction to the English translation of Menger, and by Beer in his History of British Socialism H. L. Beales, who also wrote a few pages about him in his book The Early English Socialists, lamented some twenty years ago that Hall (in common with several other pioneers of socialism and democracy in Britain) had not yet found a biographer. In fact it seems unlikely, owing to the paucity of material, that a biography will ever be possible. But it is nonetheless surprising that Hall has received so little individual attention; and the author of a recent summary of his ideas (again in the context of a general history of socialism) could describe him as “ce précurseur quelque peu oublie”. It appears that an essay may usefully be written drawing together what is known about him and attempting a fuller examination of his writings than has been provided hitherto.

Über Briefe Luxemburgs im Internationalen Institut für Sozialge-schichte teilt Nettl mit: “Der größte Teil der Briefsammlung im IISG ist jetzt veröffentlicht […]. Einige unveröffentlichte Briefe befinden sich noch in verschiedenen Sammlungen des IISG, zum Beispiel im Guesde-Nachlaß.”

Außer den dort ausdrücklich erwähnten Veröffentlichungen Blumen-bergs seien hier auch jene älteren Editionen genannt, zu denen sich die Vorlagen heute ganz oder teilweise im Besitz des Instituts befinden: neben den beiden von Luise Kautsky zusammengestellten Briefsamm-lungen sind dies Luxemburgs Briefe an P. B. Aksel'rod und diejenigen an H. Roland Holst. Einzelne, diese Veröffentlichung ergänzede Stücke, die Briefe an Guesde und einige Neuerwerbungen werden hier zusammengefaß und damit die noch unveröffentlichten Briefe Luxemburgs in den Beständen des IISG vorgelegt.