1. Allen, V. L., Militant Trade Unionism (London, 1966), p. 27Google Scholar.

2. A reasonably comprehensive survey of the literature on British strikes, which is mostly non-historical, can be found in Hyman, R., Strikes (London, 1972)Google Scholar. An earlier but still very useful treatment is Knowles, K. G. J. C., Strikes: A Study in Industrial Conflict (London, 1932)Google Scholar. Historians have, however, begun to study the strikes of other countries in a serious fashion. See, among others, Shorter, E. and Tilly, C., Strikes in France, 1830-1968 (Cambridge, 1974)Google Scholar; Perrot, M., Les ouvriers en grève, France 1871-1890 (Paris, 1974)Google Scholar; Stearns, P., Lives of Labor (New York, 1975)Google Scholar; and Kaelble, H. and Volkmann, H., “Konjunktur und Streik während des Übergangs zum Organisierten Kapitalismus in Deutschland,” Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, XCV (1972), 513–44Google Scholar. The only comparably sophisticated effort made in England was that by Eric Hobsbawm in his seminal article, “Economic Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800,” in Labouring Men (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), pp. 149–84Google Scholar. To my knowledge, however, no one has seriously taken up and attempted to develop further the perceptive insights and suggestive comments contained in this essay.

3. Many of these are cited in Hyman, Strikes; but see also Eldridge, J. E. T., Industrial Disputes (London, 1968)Google Scholar.

4. Much of the recent literature on strikes, riots, and revolutions is cited in Charles, Louise, and Tilly, Richard, The Rebellious Century (Cambridge, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Thompsen, E. P., “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century,” Past and Present, No. 50 (Feb., 1971), 76–136Google Scholar; and, in addition “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History, VI (1974), 382–405Google Scholar; and “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Structure, Field of Force, Dialectic,” unpublished. See also Rostow, W. W., “Trade Cycles, Harvests, and Politics, 1790-1850,” in British Economy of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1949), pp. 108–25Google Scholar.

6. See the brief presentation of Labrousse's views in his “1848-1830-1789: How Revolutions Are Born,” in Crouzet, F., Chaloner, W. H., and Stern, W. M. (eds.), Essays in European Economic History, 1789-1914 (London, 1969), pp. 1–14Google Scholar; and the discussion in Vilar, P., “Histoire Marxiste, hrtoire en construction. Essai de dialogue avec Althusser,” Annales E. S. C., XXVIII, 1 (Jan.-Feb., 1973), 165–98Google Scholar.

7. Hobsbawm, E. J., “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus, C (1971), 38–39Google Scholar.

8. Knowles, Strikes, contains some information on the early history of strikes. See Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963)Google Scholar for the years 1790-1830; Hobsbawm, , “The Machine Breakers,” in Labouring Men, pp. 7–26Google Scholar, on the collective bargaining aspect of machine-breaking; and Prothero, I., “William Benbow and the Concept of the ‘General Strike’,” Past and Present, No. 63 (May, 1974), 132–71Google Scholar, on strikes between 1830 and the early 1840s. Foster, John, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar includes an account of the 1842 strike in one major textile district. Accounts of the more interesting battles of the 1850s can be found in that curious but informative publication of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, Trades' Societies and Strikes (London, 1860)Google Scholar; see also Fraser, W. H., Trade Unions and Society: The Struggle for Acceptance (London, 1974)Google Scholar. More recently, Charles Tilly has suggested that the years 1828-34 may have “acted as an historical pivot in England in the same way that the revolutions of 1848 did in France and Germany: marking, and perhaps producing, a shift from reactive to proactive, from ‘backward-looking’ to ‘forward looking’ collective action on the part of ordinary people.” See Tilly, C. and Schweitzer, R. A., “Contentious Gatherings in Great Britain, 1828-1834: Provisional Plans for Enumeration and Coding,” Center for Research on Social Organization, Working Paper #163, University of Michigan (Sept., 1977), 3Google Scholar.

9. The econometric work on British strikes includes: Pencavel, J. H., “An Investigation into Industrial Strike Activity in Britain,” Economica, XXXVII (1970), 239–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shorey, J. C., “A Quantitative Analysis of Strike Activity in the United Kingdom,” (Ph.D. thesis, London School of Economics, 1974)Google Scholar, and “Time Series Analysis of Strike Frequency,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, XV (1977), 63–75Google Scholar; and Sapsford, D., “The United Kingdom's Industrial Disputes (1893-1971): A Study in the Economics of Industrial Unrest,” (M. Phil, thesis, University of Leicester, 1973)Google Scholar, and “A Time Series Analysis of U. K. Industrial Disputes,” Industrial Relations, XIV (1975), 242–49Google Scholar. See also Bean, R. and Peel, D. A., “Business Activity, Labour Organisation and Industrial Disputes in the U.S., 1892-1938,” Business History, XVIII (1976), 205–11CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a study that began with crudely economistic assumptions but ended with a stress upon organization.

These studies all show a substantial relationship between some measure of prosperity and strikes, and are easily replicated. Thus, we found a correlation between unemployment rates, a negative indicator of prosperity, and strikes of -.59 over the years 1893-1974, a relationship significant at the .001 level.

10. Specifically, equations designed to predict strikes over long periods of time all display high correlations among residuals, as evidenced by poor Durbin-Watson statistics. This implies that statistically significant factors are being missed, which are probably operative over shorter periods of time. For further discussion, see Cronin, J., “Strikes in Britain, 1888-1974; A Statistical and Historical Analysis,” (Ph.D. thesis, Brandeis University, 1977)Google Scholar, especially chapter 4. For the actual equations, see Cronin, , “Theories of Strikes: Why Can't They Explain the British Experience?” Journal of Social History, XII, 2 (Winter, 1978)Google Scholar, Appendix.

11. The one partial exception to this rule is the post-World War I militancy, which for various reasons was still of a piece with prewar events.

12. In a 1961 article, A. Duffy attempted to call into question the sharpness of the break between the old and the “new unionism,” but as Hobsbawm argues, such work “adds nothing of real interest and serves rather to fudge the problem of discontinuity.” See Duffy, , “New Unionism in Britain, 1889-1890: A Reappraisal,” Economic History Review, XIV (1961), 306–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hobsbawm, , “Economic Fluctuations,” Labouring Men, p. 181Google Scholar.

For the strategic innovations among engineering workers, see Jefferys, J.B., The Story of the Engineers (London, 1946), pp. 98–117Google Scholar; for those among railwaymen, see Alderman, G., “The Railway Companies and the Growth of Trade Unionism in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Historical Journal, XIV (1971), 131–32Google Scholar. Similar shifts in strategic perspective, all in the direction of broader and less exclusive organizing and more on-the-job militancy, affected the miners, who founded the Miners' Federation of Great Britain at this time, and even the traditionalist textile workers' unions, which undertook regional federation and the expansion of their membership to include less skilled and female labor. See Arnot, R. Page, The Miners (London, 1948)Google Scholar; Turner, H. A., Trade Union Growth, Structure and Policy: A Comparative Study of the Cotton Unions (London, 1962)Google Scholar; and Hobsbawm, , “General Labour Unions in Britain, 1889-1914,” in Labouring Men, pp. 211–40Google Scholar, on these developments.

13. On the eight-hours agitation, see Duffy, A. E. P., “The Eight Hours Day Movement in Britain, 1886-1893,” Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies, XXXVI (1968), 203–23, 354–63Google Scholar.

14. See Saville, J., “Trade Unions and Free Labour: The Background of the Taff Vale Decision,” in Briggs, A. and Saville, J. (eds.), Essays in Labour History (London, 1967), pp. 317–50Google Scholar; and Brown, R., “The Temperton v. Russell Case (1893): The Beginning of the Legal Offensive against the Unions,” Bulletin of Economic Research, XXIII (1971), 50–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Again, recent attempts to discover continuity between the history of trade unions before and after the strike wave of 1910-13, like those of Pelling and Phillips, should not be allowed to obscure the critical nature of the period. Perhaps the most balanced recent interpretation is that of Meacham, S., “‘The Sense of an Impending Clash’: English Working Class Unrest before the First World War,” American Historical Review, LXXVII (1972), 1343–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pelling's views are laid out in Pelling, H., Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian England (London, 1968), pp. 147–64Google Scholar; Phillips' can be found in “The Triple Industrial Alliance in 1914,” Economic History Review, XIX (1971), 55–67Google Scholar.

16. Surprisingly, the strike wave of 1919-20 is the least well documented of any considered here. It is consistently overshadowed historiographically by the General Strike, to which it is usually seen as background. The priority, in my opinion, should be reversed. In any case, the major developments in labor organization can be pieced together from several sources, among them Allen, V. L., “The Re-organisation of the Trades Union Congress, 1918-1927,” British Journal of Sociology, XI (1960), 24–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wigham, E., The Power to Manage: A History of the Engineering Employers' Federation (London, 1973), pp. 99–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bullock, A., The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin (London, 1960), I, 188–220Google Scholar; and Cole, G. D. H., Workshop Organisation (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar.

17. See Clegg, H. A. and Adams, R., The Employers' Challenge (Oxford, 1957)Google Scholar; Turner, H. A., The Trend of Strikes (Leeds, 1963)Google Scholar. On the rebirth of shop stewards' organization, see McCarthy, W. E. J. and Parker, S. R., “Shop Stewards and Workshop Relations,” Research Paper #10, Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers' Organisations (London, 1968)Google Scholar. One element in the deepening of workshop organization between 1957-62 was an increase in the number of workers demanding, and winning, the “closed shop,” especially in engineering. See McCarthy, W. E. J., The Closed Shop in Britain (Berkeley, 1964), pp. 114–22Google Scholar and passim.

18. The dramatic breakthroughs in organizing have been documented in two recent articles by Bain, G. S. and Price, R., “Union Growth and Employment Trends in the United Kingdom, 1964-1970,” British Journal of Industrial Relations, X (1972), 366–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Price, and Bain, , “Union Growth Revisited: 1948-1974 in Perspective,” BJIR, XIV (1976), 339–55Google Scholar.

19. Thus, Phelps Brown argues that 1968 witnessed a coming of age of a whole generation of workers with more extensive and egalitarian social expectations. See Brown, Henry Phelps, “A Non-Monetarist View of the Pay Explosion,” Three Banks Review, No. 105 (March, 1975), 3–24Google Scholar.

20. Two minor points must be noted concerning these equations. First, the equations reported here are designed to explain strike fluctuations in all industries except mining and quarrying. The latter are excluded following a convention begun by Turner, H. A. [see The Trend of Strikes (Leeds, 1963)]Google Scholar based on the argument that they represent a special case requiring separate treatment and analysis. In fact, the peculiarity of strike activity among miners dates only from about 1920; before that, it moved in close relation to that in other industries. For consistency, however, we exclude mining data throughout. Second, the years 1888-92 are excluded from the statistical analysis because data used to construct several of the critical variables only became available in 1893.

21. In Equation 2.1, the most important predictors of strikes from 1893 to 1974 were gross domestic product, which is probably serving as a simple index of prosperity, the number of strikers in the preceding year, and time — a trend term. It is difficult to conclude anything substantive from this. Equation 2.2 contains the best predictors for the number of strikers — represented here by a three year moving average of strikers to iron out the effects of one or two large stoppages in a single year — but the extremely low Durbin-Watson statistic indicates serious problems in the serial correlation of residuals, suggesting that important factors are not being captured.

22. One method which could possibly reveal the causal primacy of either strikes or unionization would be to compare the correlations obtained between the two when one or the other is lagged with that obtained normally. In this case, however, lagging either variable did not improve the correlations to any significant degree for any period of time.

23. This result is also consistent with the broad thrust of Shorter and Tilly's work, which treats union organization as the key factor. See Shorter and Tilly, Strikes in France; and also Snyder, D., “Institutional Setting and Industrial Conflict.” American Sociological Reiiew, XL (1975), 259–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for the same perspective more broadly applied.

24. The clearest exposition of Kondratiev's theory is his article, “Die langen Wellen der Konjunktur,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, LVI (1926), 573–609Google Scholar, a shortened version of which appeared as, “The Long Waves of Economic Life,” Review of Economic Statistics, XVII (1935), 105–15Google Scholar.

The precise nature of the rehtionship between Kondratiev waves and different stages of economic growth is still being debated. See Garvey, G., “Kondratieff's Theory of Long Cycles,” Review of Economic Statistics, XXV (1943), 203–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rostow, W. W., “Kondratieff, Schumpeter, and Kuznets: Trend Periods Revisited,” Journal of Economic History, XXXV (1975), 719–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hobsbawm, , “Economic Fluctuations,” Labouring Men, pp. 158, 164, 166, 175Google Scholar; Barraclough, G., “The End of an Era,” New York Review of Books, XXI, No. 11 (June 27, 1974), 14–20Google Scholar; and Mandel, E., Late Capitalism (London, 1975)Google Scholar.

25. Saul's, S. B. recent little pamphlet, The Myth of the Great Depression (London, 1969)Google Scholar argues that workers' real wages actually improved during the years 1873-1896, but the specter of unemployment was real enough. A useful sample of workers' perceptions of the deterioration of their position in these years can be found in the Second Report of the Royal Commission … into the Depression of Trade and Industry. Appendix, Part II, “Appendix D. Answers received from Associations representing the interests of the Working Classes to the questions addressed to them,” British Parliamentary Papers, 1886, XXII (Cd. 4715-I), 3–98Google Scholar.

26. A useful survey of how workers perceived their grievances before the war can be obtained in P. Stearns, Lives of Labor, but it is just a beginning. Interesting points are made also in Hobsbawm, , “Custom, Wages, and Workload,” in Labouring Men, pp. 405–36Google Scholar; and some information is available in Brown, E. H. Phelps, The Growth of British Industrial Relations (London, 1965)Google Scholar. Beyond these rather modest efforts, the history of work and the labor process in late Victorian and Edwardian England remains to be written. Certainly, there is nothing to compare with Samuel's, R. brilliant essay on “The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain,” History Workshop, #3 (Spring, 1977), 6–72Google Scholar, which focuses on an earlier period. There can be little doubt, however, that many of the artisan-based industries described by Samuel experienced the shock of technical change under the market imperative between 1890 and 1914. There was, for example, a veritable revolution in the technology of the engineering industry in the early 1890s, among whose after-effects were the lockouts of 1897 and 1922, both fought essentially over issues of control. The growing availability of cheap electric power, it seems, allowed for changes in many more industries; and the shift toward a consumer/service economy from the 1880s and the rise of retailing probably also forced a wide range of small-scale consumer industries into greater mechanization and rationalization of productive processes as well. But of the impact of this on labor, we have as yet only the scantiest knowledge.

27. The postwar unrest is well chronicled in Mowat, C. L., Britain between the Wars (London, 1955)Google Scholar. Official perceptions can be gleaned from Jones, Tom, Whitehall Diary, 1916-1925, ed. Middlemas, K. (London, 1969)Google Scholar. The extreme volatility of the political climate of the time can be seen in the reports of the Directorate of Intelligence (Home Office), “A Survey of Revolutionary Feeling during the Year 1919,” P. R. O., Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/96, C.P. 462, and “A Survey of Revolutionary Movements in Great Britain in the Year 1920,” P. R. O., CAB 24/118, C.P. 2455.

28. Whether or not one accepts the conclusions of the current revisionist outlook on the 1930s' economy, it is nevertheless clear that depression worked a major transformation upon workers' social and political consciousness. The “hard-faced inter-war decades” served, in the first place, “to alienate a solid core of millions of citizens permanently … from any party which does not promise socialism,” and, more specifically, to produce a firm resolve never willingly to tolerate such levels of unemployment again. On this, see Hobsbawm, , “Trends in the British Labour Movement since 1850,” in Labouring Men, pp. 371–403Google Scholar. See also, Saville, John, “May Day 1937,” in Briggs, A. and Saville, J. (eds.), Essays in Labour History, 1919-1930 (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

29. Thus, the intense controversy over redundancy dates from this period. See, for example, the literature cited in Wedderburn, D., “Redundancy,” in Pym, D. (ed.), Industrial Society (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 65–81Google Scholar. Turner, H. A., Clack, G., and Roberts, G., in Labour Relations in the Motor Industry (London, 1967), p. 128Google Scholar, also note the interaction between recession and strikes in the late 1950s. As they explain, “The reappearance of the trade cycle in the 1950's, bringing with it sharp periods of unemployment and redundancy, seems to have led to heightened insecurity and the return of old fears on the part of car workers, especially from 1956 onwards. And it is precisely from the mid-1950's that the frequency of car workers' strikes began its steep upward slope.”

30. No serious scholarly work of any scale has yet been addressed to these turbulent years, but some interesting suggestions can be found in H. Phelps Brown, “A Non-Monetarist View of the Pay Explosion,” and in Durcan, J. W. and McCarthy, W. E. J., “What is happening to strikes?” New Society (Nov. 2, 1972), 267–69Google Scholar.

31. As Royden Harrison has noted, “The serious student of the Labour Movement knows that internal conflict is as much the law of its development as is the struggle against its enemies.” Harrison, R., Before the Socialists (London, 1965), p. 42Google Scholar.

32. Specifically, it is extremely difficult to conceive of any statistical data capable of being used in annual time series analysis which could capture the impact of successive long waves upon strike activity because of the qualitative differences between one wave and another.

33. Many authors have acknowledged (implicitly or explicitly) the different patterns of protest of pre-industrial casual or artisanal workers and their industrial descendants. Richard Price feels he has located the transition in the years 1850-1870; Hobsbawm argues that many workers learned the ‘rules of the game’ in the last quarter of the 19th century; and Peter Stearns sees workers in most of Europe “maturing” in the two decades before 1914. It is important, however, not to see this transition as a ‘once and for all’ phenomenon, after which behavior patterns are set in a firm, resilient mold. What has been argued here is that the industrial pattern of protest is inherently dynamic, with periods of social peace continually undermined by economic trends which alter both conditions and expectations. See Richard Price, “‘Learning the Rules of the Game’: The Crisis of the mid-Victorian Working Class,” paper presented to the Conference on British Studies, New York, November, 1976; Hobsbawm, , “Custom, Wages, and Work-Load,” Labouring Men, pp. 405–36Google Scholar; and Stearns, Lives of Labor.

34. In France, it appears, the transition may not have taken place until the last quarter of the 19th century. See Perrot, , Les ouvriers en grève, Vol. 1Google Scholar.