Reflections on Recent Labour Historiography

Abstract

A rather odd editorial in History Workshop 12 may serve as a beginning to this selective account of historical and political writing on the contemporary labour movement in Britain. The editorial's main complaint is that in trying to assess the evolution of the Labour Party in the past sixty or seventy years "..there is so little work to build on, whether as history, theory or politics... Little attention is paid to either of the major transformations which have taken place within the Labour Party and the trade union movement in various epochs and crises...". There is some truth in these generalisations, although the editorial as a whole suggests an ignorance both of the ways in which the historiography of any subject develops, and of what has actually been achieved in published or unpublished work. It must be realised that it is only just over twenty years ago that there began the remarkable expansion of labour-movement studies, but that even today there are still many gaps of a chronological/institutional kind. Institutional history has an old fashioned sound for many young historians, but the point needs to be made that while the elementary ordering of fact through time is only the beginning of the historian's responsibility, such foundations are required for any intellectual enterprise in the historical field; and that, to quote the most obvious example, straightforward monographs on the history of many trade unions are urgently needed.