As an undergraduate in the late 1970s, I became fascinated by the story behind the histories of the times I was studying. What of the people affected? How did they feel and react? Theirs was an untold story, because history is written by the winners and capital always won over labour – or so it seemed. I remember being chided for trying to bring a class-based analysis to bear on some aspect of mercantile trade in Medieval London. Little did I know then, as I pored over the work of Eric Hobsbawm, Asa Briggs, EP Thompson and John Saville, that I was witness to a new movement of labour historians telling “history from below”. I thought they were just tapping into new ways of telling the story of our past. It was the most exciting part of my three-year academic incarceration and in no small way fashioned much of the way I saw and continue to see the world.
What was so exciting was the way the struggles of organised labour were described and analysed. It was eye-opening to follow the arguments about what it meant in class terms. Class was the essence of labour history to me at the time.
Frankly, I’ve not seen much over the years to change that view. Through class, labour and Marxist perspectives, the labour historians I read described the story behind the standard versions of history.
Histories of Labour, a symposium of essays on how labour history has developed across the world since the founding of the Society for the Study of Labour History 50 years ago, charts the progress and methodology of labour historians. It is introduced by Hobsbawm, who remains, the doyen of labour historians.
This collection draws on the experiences of historians in Britain, Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, India and Japan. It details the influence they had in creating labour history as an academic discipline in its own right. It is heavy going. Academics, who often have a good story to tell, have a tendency to use obscure language to the point where a thesaurus is required to fully understand what they’re saying. But perseverance does pay dividends.
Perhaps, as Hobsbawm says, the growth of labour history, especially in this country, became a means for a changing world to find a “way forward in left politics”. Maybe its growth coincided with a more socially aware society in which the growth of the working class found its expression in trade unionism and the development of the Labour Party as well as popular culture. The “kitchen sink” gritty realism of the post-war generation of playwrights, novelists and film-makers found its academic stablemate. Generations of students since have been the richer for it.
