European Labour Protest 1848 1929

This book, first published in 1981, examines the issues inspiring working-class movements after 1848 in France, Germany and Britain, with some consideration also of Austria, Italy, Spain and Russia. It concentrates on the attitudes of the ordinary working men, rather than the ideologies and the leaders, and considers the many different forms and manifestations of their grievances and means of expression. What emerges is the complexity of the connection between economic circumstances and protest, and the existence of wide divergences of behaviour amongst the European working class.

This volume contains a series of essays which examines various regimes and working classes of such countries as Italy, France, Poland, the USA, the Soviet Union and Great Britain in the early 20th century.

British labour history has been one of the dominating areas of historical research in the last sixty years and this book, written in honour of Professor Chris Wrigley, offers a collection of essays written by leading British labour historians of that subject including Ken Brown, Malcolm Chase and Matthew Worley. It focuses upon trade unionism, the co-operative movement, the rise and fall of the Labour Party, and working-class lives, comparing British labour movements with those in Germany and examining the social and political labour activities of the Lansburys. There is, indeed, some important work connected with the cultural developments of the British labour movement, most obviously in the essay written by Matthew Worley on communism and Punk Rock.

This is the first full-length study in English of the role of Marxist theory in the Spanish Socialist movement prior to the outbreak of Civil War in 1936. In particular, the author stresses the intellectual poverty of this aspect of leftwing politics in Spain. In concentrating on the Partido Socialista Obrero Espafiol (PSOE), the major organised party of the left prior to the Civil War, the study seeks to achieve two main aims: first, to attempt to isolate the political, social and intellectual factors which led to a particularly distorted version of Marxism which became established in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century; and second, to demonstrate how this particular conception of Marxism had a crucial negative impact on the political formulations and fortunes of the PSOE between 1879 and 1936. The central argument of the book is that the significance of Spanish Marxism lay precisely in its poverty, since it was this 'decaffeinated' version of the theory which set the parameters within which the PSOE formulated its strategy for socialism.

This bibliographical guide contains 10,000 references to the economic and social history of 30 European countries during the period 1700-1939. More than 3000 periodicals have been consulted to obtain references, as well as books, edited collections and conference proceedings. The information is listed in categories such as industry, agriculture, finance, migration, labour conditions, urban communities and organizations. Full publication details are included, so that references may be located easily.

Out of the social and economic turmoil of Europe in the 1930s, the Popular Front emerged as the spearhead of the left's bid to stop fascism in its tracks. Fifty years on from the birth of the Popular Front this edited collection assesses the impact of the idea of bourgeois-proletarian alliance on the European left as a whole. It also examines the fate of the Popular Front governments, both in France, which remained nominally 'at peace', and in Spain, where the bitter strife over social and economic reform erupted into open civil war.