Mobilizing Coal for War: The Rise and Decline of English Socialism

Ellis Goldberg

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2566110

journal article Jan 01, 2015

Mobilizing Coal for War: The Rise and Decline of English Socialism

Ellis Goldberg

SSRN Electronic Journal · Elsevier BV

View at Publisher Save 10.2139/ssrn.2566110

Topics

No keywords indexed for this article. Browse by subject →

References

42

[1]

Everett Lubin

[2]

"Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in mid-Victorian Britain" History Workshop 10.1093/hwj/3.1.6

[3]

See Carroll Coal Mine Labor in Europe (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1905) 442 which computes wage expenditures varying from about 53 percent to nearly 84 percent of the pithead price

[4]

"Different sectors have different mixes of factors; lifting oil is far more capital intensive than coal mining was in Britain before World War I but contemporary open cast coal mining in the US and Australia is, for example, also very capital intensive. Leaving aggregate statistics aside, it is remarkable to note that when Denaby Main Colliery in Yorkshire was finally closed in 1968, the seam was still being "worked with pick and shovel -'hand got into tubs'. No conveyor belt, coal-cutting machine, or shot-firing was employed in the coal-getting process" Studies in the Yorkshire coal Industry (1976)

[5]

Greasley The Market for South Wales coal

[6]

Clegg 10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u45227

[7]

Was Williams 10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.278445

[8]

Williams Particularly in Yorkshire, and in the North-East of Durham and Northumberland, the cottages in mining villages were single-storey, consisting of only two rooms, and, despite the availability of open land, were often built in closely-packed courts or long terraces which gave a strangely urban quality to these isolated communities (1986)

[9]

"Besides the work of Andrew Gordon on the absence of community in the workplace in early modern Japanese metal working industries a recent study of the inception of mining reinforces it. In 1876 at the first modern Japanese coal mine "tyro miners refused to work in gangs in the English fashion because they distrusted one another. This lack of mutuality made it difficult to introduce approved European practice" The need for firms to create trust within the workforce is not sufficiently dealt with in contemporary labor studies although it becomes apparent in comparative perspective

[10]

M J See "the effect of a common set of persisting social relations, shared over a lifetime by men working in the same industry and in the same collieries, is a very powerful one" Class, Culture and Community: Clifford Slaughter Coal Is Our Life (1956)

[11]

") 640-654. See also Butler and Stokes on "the tendency of local areas to become homogenous in their political opinions" with special reference to patterns within localities dominated by mining and tourism" American Political Science Review (1966)

[12]

Jevons 10.2307/1905621

[13]

Tanner "200); the problem, however, is not whether they lacked sophistication but whether they had a accurate perception of what it would take to reproduce their own communities. Before the Great War nationalization was not necessary but after the war it became increasingly so. Many of the coalfields did not exhibit the isolation characteristic of the Welsh valleys but they did often show high rates of persistence, endogamous marriage, and the consequent creation of kinship networks. See Dennis Warwick and Gary Littlejohn Coal, Capital and Culture (London: Routledge, 1992) for an analysis of West Yorkshire communities using original census data to reach the subsidiary conclusion "However, we look at the processes and institutions such as households, kinship, marriage and social classes" The allusion to Seymour Martin Lipset's Political Man (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1963) is worth touching on. The mining communities, especially in South Wales, were isolated, strongly homogenous, and often autonomous (see Lipset

[14]

One real problem with the factor approach to the study of workers is that it makes it difficult to comprehend their stubborn localization well into the late twentieth century in ways that a sectoral-geographic approach makes comprehensible. See "The Formation of British Working Class Culture

[15]

Pelling 10.1163/9789047405702_033

[16]

"The Miners had been represented in parliament since 1874 and there were sixteen miners in the House of Commons in 1906. In addition there were many other seats where the miners constituted a substantial part of the electorate, entitling them to an attentive hearing from the local Member (usually a Liberal) and in some instances a considerable influence within the Liberal organization" See Ian Clegg, A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889

[17]

See Robert The Dukeries Transformed (1983) 10.1086/ahr/89.5.1330

[18]

Pelling 10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.21814

[19]

Clegg 10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.u207601

[20]

John Singleton "The Conservatives and Nationalisation" The Political Economy of Nationalisation (1995) 10.1017/cbo9780511721076.003

[21]

Jevons

[22]

Duncan Tanner "The decline of the coalmining industries did ultimately have precisely this effect on the party. See also, for example, Chris Williams" The Labour Party and electoral politics in the coalfields (1910)

[23]

Singleton 10.3390/publications4030028

[24]

Singleton Aneurin Bevin 10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.013.31872

[25]

L E Young "Proposals for Stabilization of the Bituminous Coal Industry" Carnegie Institute of Technology Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Bituminous Coal (1932)

[26]

See Archibald Regulating an Industry: The Rhenish Westphalian Coal Industry (1932)

[27]

S H F See "and 62. Table 8 on p. 63 provides an indication of turnover rates which in non-company owned housing was often on the order of 50 percent annually. See also Stanley Suval p. 210-211 for indications that residential turnover in the highly industrial districts of Dortmund" Workers in Imperial Germany (1900)

[28]

"designed to allow economic interests to be represented; in addition the socialists would have done even better with the plurality system than the proportional representation system with which they were ideologically aligned" German electoral districts reflected existing administrative (county) divisions and were not, as in the 1885 reapportionment (1985)

[29]

Greasley

[30]

J M Winter The Great War

[31]

Winter The Great War

[32]

Greasley 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198766780.003.0004

[33]

"59 What to do about coal became an important issue to which many governments turned their attention; in 1922, pursuant to an act of Congress, President Harding appointed the United States Coal Commission to investigate the industry and recommend solutions for the "troubled industry" What the Coal Commission Found (1925)

[34]

The increase in manufacturing capacity around the world, but especially in the United States, also decreased effective demand

[35]

J Harry See The Coal Mining Industry, An International Study in Planning (1939)

[36]

Hunt Or in the words of Jevons, 15 years earlier "Far more serious for the coal industry than the loss of the British Navy as a consumer would be an extensive general adoption of mineral oil as a power producer for all purposes. This, however, is a very unlikely contingency, for

[37]

Jones while one factor in the reduction of the British cost level was the employment of machinery and an improvement in organization, the main factor was a substantial reduction in wages and an extension of the working day

[38]

See T Boyns "The were sharp limits on how many of Britain's coal mines could have been made competitive because the capital costs of reorganizing the physical layout underground, increasing mechanization, and changing administrative practices were formidable. See W.R. Garside and J.L Greaves "Rationalisation and Britain's Industrial Malaise: the Interwar Years Revisited" Rationalisation in the Inter-war Period: The Case of the South Wales Steam Coal Industry (1987)

[39]

See Tim Rooth "The Political Economy of Protectionism in Britain" The Journal of European Economic History (1992)

[40]

Rooth notes Labour MP's were becoming more distant from free trade as early as 1925 when the Stinnes syndicate opened an office in Glasgow to promote the sale of Ruhr coal

[41]

Oil has 40 percent more energy in the same weight of material, has no ash and can be far more easily stored and monitored in burning than coal. In addition because it is liquid it can be moved by pumps and gravity thus eliminating stokers

[42]

Greasley 49

Metrics

1

Citations

42

References

Details

Published: Jan 01, 2015

Authors

E

Ellis Goldberg

Cite This Article

Ellis Goldberg (2015). Mobilizing Coal for War: The Rise and Decline of English Socialism. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2566110

Mobilizing Coal for War: The Rise and Decline of English Socialism

You May Also Like