Unemployment In Britain Between The Wars

Drawing on a range of contemporary evidence, Stephen Constantine studies the nature and causes of unemployment in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes the failure of successive inter-war governments to make a constructive response.

Drawing on a range of contemporary evidence, Stephen Constantine studies the nature and causes of unemployment in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes the failure of successive inter-war governments to make a constructive response.

This 1990 book is a comprehensive study of government reactions to the interwar unemployment problem. Drawing upon an extensive range of primary and secondary sources, it analyses official ameliorative policy towards unemployment and contemporary reactions to such intervention.

Despite a substantial body of literature on the severe unemployment crisis in interwar Britain, our understanding of its distributional impacts remains limited. Using newly-digitized government data, this paper analyzes the gender, industrial, and regional composition of unemployment from 1923-1936. I find that the unemployment rate was higher for men in a strongly gender-segmented labor market, that unemployment was widespread across industries and not just a product of the declining staple industries, and that regional unemployment differentials cannot be primarily attributed to regions' varying industrial compositions. These results offer a deeper and more disaggregated view of this mass unemployment episode.

First published in 1987. This volume explores the inter-war unemployment problem and the development of economic and social policy in relation to that problem. Contemporary policies and levels of unemployment can only be compared with the inter-war period and in recent years economists and other commentators have increasingly turned their attention to the 1930s. This book is written by a group of expert historians and policy analysts who have been in the forefront of recent research. In particular, new insights into economic policy which have come from the release of cabinet and departmental papers at The Public Record Office are revealed. Recent economic theory is also taken into account and the findings question established views on many grounds. New economic lessons from the 1930s are suggested and some astonishing similarities to the 1980s and demonstrated. This work will be essential reading for students of modern British history and economic and social history as well as economic policy and government and politics.

A new edition of the leading textbook on the economic history of Britain since industrialization. Combining the expertise of more than thirty leading historians and economists, Volume 2 tracks the development of the British economy from late nineteenth-century global dominance to its early twenty-first century position as a mid-sized player in an integrated European economy. Each chapter provides a clear guide to the major controversies in the field and students are shown how to connect historical evidence with economic theory and how to apply quantitative methods. The chapters re-examine issues of Britain's relative economic growth and decline over the 'long' twentieth century, setting the British experience within an international context, and benchmark its performance against that of its European and global competitors. Suggestions for further reading are also provided in each chapter, to help students engage thoroughly with the topics being discussed.