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First published in 1975, this book is part of the prestigious Cambridge Commonwealth Series. The General Editor of this series was the legendary historian, Eric T. Stokes. This seminal work on the British labour movement was greeted with great enthusiasm and it gained rave reviews from scholars and readers all over the world. For years it has been treated as the best reference to study and teach British labour politics. It continues to inspire later research. A revival of interest in the study of labour in the wake of globalization has necessitated a reprint. The renowned historian C.A. Bayly, has written a lengthy foreword for the new edition. Prof. Sumit Sarkar says about the book, 'It remains a very major work in its area and ... has not been superseded by any later work'. This book examines the attitudes and politics of the British labour movement towards the British Empire and the Commonwealth in the twentieth century. Its focus is not the British working class as such but rather the decision-making and policy-framing institutions of the labour movement, such as the Labour Party, the Trades Union Congress, and their various affiliated organizations. It is decidedly a history of the colonial policy of the British labour movement and not simply of Labour governments. Though the book was written in the seventies, when labour and class-relations were judged from the point of view of classical Marxism and Leninism, the author challenged such orthodoxies about class in Britain. He argued that class- consciousness takes different forms and the working class can also be divided against itself. Today, when orthodox academic Marxism has been replaced by a more rounded theory incorporating the relationship between ideology and class domination and other post-modernist perspectives, this book has acquired a new relevance. The author had used a variety of sources from private papers to public documents, from unpublished sources to oral testimonies in the intensive research that went into the writing of the book.
The Second World War was a watershed moment in foreign policy for the Labour Party in Britain. Before the war, British socialists had held that nationalism was becoming obsolete and that humanity was steadily evolving towards the ideal of a single world government. The collapse of the League of Nations destroyed this optimistic vision, compelling Labour to undertake a fundamental review of its entire approach to foreign affairs during a period of unprecedented global crisis. This book traces the controversy that ensued, as the British democratic left set about the task of defining the principles of a radically new international system for the postwar world. The schemes proposed by Labour policymakers during these years encompassed a wide variety of political institutions aiming at the restraint or supersession of the sovereign nation-state. What they shared in common, however, was a reconceptualization of British identity, in which the hyper-patriotism of the wartime period blended with the left's traditional internationalism. This new 'muscular' internationalism was to have a major impact upon the evolution of entities as diverse as the United Nations Organizations, the British Commonwealth and the accelerating campaign in favor of European unity after Labour assumed the reins of government in 1945. Breaking with the traditional accounts that place Cold War tensions at the centre of the Attlee government's activities in the immediate postwar years, R.M. Douglas's book provides an entirely new framework for reassessing British foreign policy and left-wing concepts of national identity during the most turbulent moment of Britain's modern history. This book will be essential reading for all students and researchers of British foreign policy, the Labour Party and international relations.
With Foreword by Tony Benn. This edited collection explores the British labour movement's relationship with imperialism in the period 1800–1982 through nine inter-connected articles. Labour historians have tended to neglect the labour movement's interaction with imperialism, preferring to concentrate on industrial relations, internal factionalism, the Labour Party-trade union alliance, and economic policymaking. In order to redress the balance, this book takes a broad chronological overview of the subject and engages with key themes, ranging from trade union interaction with empire, and the influence of popular imperial culture, to post-war colonial development, and responses to post-colonialism. Taking stock both of the labour movement in a broader context and of new approaches to the history of British imperialism, the collection combines the work of leading authorities on labour history with recent scholarly research. By blending this combination of economic, social, political and cultural analyses, it makes a substantial contribution to the debates surrounding the legacy of imperialism and the evolution of the British labour movement. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, teachers and students of modern British political, social, economic and cultural history. It will also appeal to Labour Party members and labour movement activists.
First published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book draws on a mass of documentary material to provide a major reinterpretation of British labour's response to the Spanish Civil War. It challenges the view that the labour leadership ' betrayed' the Spanish Republic, and that this polarised the movement along `left' versus 'right' lines. Instead, it argues that the overriding concern of the major leaders was to defend labour's institutional interests against the political destabilisation caused by the conflict, rather than to defend Spanish democracy. Although the main advocates of this position were trade union leaders associated with the labour right such as Walter Citrine and Ernest Bevin, the book argues that their dominance reflected the centrality of the trade unions to labour movement decision-making rather than the abuse of union power to achieve political goals.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This is the first comprehensive study of the political ideology and history of the Labour Party's world-view and foreign policy. It argues that the development of Labour's foreign policy perspective should be seen not as the development of a socialist foreign policy but as an application of the ideas of liberal internationalism. The first volume outlines and assesses the early development and evolution of Labour's world-view. It then follows the course of the Labour party's foreign policy during a tumultuous period on the international stage, including the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the build up to and violent reality of the Second World War, and the start of the Cold War. This highly readable book provides an excellent analysis of Labour's foreign policy during the period in which Labour experienced power for the first time.
The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners it more or less defined Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. It also had a great impact on Britain herself: for example, on her economy, security, population, and eating habits. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. Indeed, this has now become the conventional wisdom: that Britain was steeped in imperialism domestically, which affected (or infected) almost everything Britons thought, felt, and did. This is the first book to examine this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. Bernard Porter, a leading imperial historian, argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. Many Britons could hardly have been aware of it for most of the nineteenth century and only a small number was in any way committed to it. Between these extremes opinions differed widely over what was even meant by the empire. This depended largely on class, and even when people were aware of the empire, it had no appreciable impact on their thinking about anything else. Indeed, the influence far more often went the other way, with perceptions of the empire being affected (or distorted) by more powerful domestic discourses. Although Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was never a genuine imperial society. As well as showing how this was possible, Porter also discusses the implications of this attitude for Britain and her empire, and for the relationship between culture and imperialism more generally, bringing his study up to date by including the case of the present-day USA.
Presenting a new approach towards the social history of working classes in the imperial context, this book looks at the formation of working classes in Scotland and Bengal. It analyses the trajectory of labour market formation, labour supervision, cultures of labour and class formation between two regional economies – one in an imperial country and the other in a colonial one. The book examines the everyday lives of the jute workers of the imperial nexus, and the impact of the ‘Dundee School’ of Scottish mechanics, engineers and managers who ran the Calcutta jute industry. It goes on to challenge existing theories of imperialism, class formation and class struggle – particularly those that underline the exceptional nature of the Indian experience of industrialization - and demonstrates how and why Empire was able to provide an opportunity to test and perfect ways of controlling the lower classes of Dundee. These historical debates have a continued relevance as we observe the impact of globalization and rapid industrialization in the so-called developing world and the accompanying changes in many areas of the developed world marked by de-industrialization. The book is of use to scholars of imperial history, labour history, British history and South Asian history.