Towards a Comparative History of Coalfield Societies

Andy Croll, Stefan Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351878531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Few areas of labour history have received as much attention as the coal industry, with miners often finding themselves at the centre of studies on working-class political and industrial history. Yet whilst much has been written about the struggles of miners and their unions in particular countries, their national confrontations and political organization, much less work has been done on the regional communities and how they related both to the national and international picture. The central theme of this volume is to transcend such over-arching national models and to focus instead on local coal mining societies which can then be compared and contrasted to similar communities elsewhere. In so doing the book is able to tackle a number of familiar labour history themes in a more nuanced way, exploring issues of political activism and class relationships from the perspectives of gender, ethnicity, race and specific localized cultural traditions. As the chapters in this volume illustrate, such an approach can offer rich and often surprising conclusions, in many cases challenging the accepted notion of miners as the vanguard of militant working-class political activism. Adopting a regional approach that compares coalfield communities from five continents, this volume reflects coalfield experiences on a truly global scale. By looking at what made communities unique as well as what they shared in common, a much fuller understanding of the workplace, neighbourhood, family, identity and political organization is possible. Underlining the strong connections between politics, community and identity, this work emphasizes the challenges and opportunities available to labour historians, pushing forward the boundaries of the discipline in new and exciting ways.

CHAPTER ONE
So Many Cases but So Little Comparison:
Problems of Comparing Mineworkers

Andrew Taylor

A common sentiment is that miners are the same all over the world, a sentiment often articulated by miners themselves. How do we know? It is ironic that a group of workers often identified as at the forefront of working-class organization and politics in so many national contexts have generated so few comparative studies. It is this paradox I wish to explore in this chapter.

Why are there so few comparative studies of mineworkers? Part of the answer is the national focus of research and methodologies which produce ‘thick’ description. There is little commitment to comparative analysis as a primary specialization amongst students of mineworkers and mining.¹ A more important explanation is that mining communities have created a particularly opulent store of material which permits academics to penetrate mining's complexities at a range of levels. The richness of this legacy encourages a focus on the specific and the micro ‘and the form in which the concern for comparative analysis comes out is in the obsession with the uniqueness of each nation's labor history’.²

Might the lack of comparative analysis be due to the lack of a comparative framework? Again, this is not quite accurate. For example, it is now de rigueur for any mining scholar to include a critique of the Kerr and Siegel isolated mass hypothesis.³ Mining is one of the few areas in the study of the working class which generated a comparative framework that was employed in various contexts.⁴ The theoretical models are sociological in origin and methodological in inspiration and are well represented by Bulmer's 1975 article.⁵ They have provided scholars with a common set of perceptions and images which have often been used to emphasize, not similarities in the mineworker's experiences, but differences. Criticism of existing comparative frameworks has been used to undermine and weaken comparison. Cronin comments on labour history's ‘curious ambivalence’ towards comparison, noting that, ‘In method and style, labor historians tend toward the unique and the local, if not the microscopic; in interpretation and conceptualization, however, they routinely work with models that are highly general and at least implicitly comparative.’⁶ This applies forcibly to mining historiography.

The ‘new’ labour history of the 1960s and 1970s moved the focus away from the study of organizations towards the examination of the day-to-day ‘experiences’ of the working class. More recent work has drawn on the cultural and linguistic turns. Both developments have served to emphasize further complexity, uniqueness and the importance of meanings. Such complexity is frequently seen as the enemy of comparison. Contemporary methodology is dominated by the requirement that the mineworker's organizations and experiences be grounded in the locality, coupled with a determination to emphasize exceptions to any generalization. Neither are objectionable in themselves as long as any attempt to compare experiences and behaviour is not greeted with the cry, ‘Ah, but it's different in Borsetshire.’ Difference should not be used as a triumphalist trump card. It will be different in Borsetshire, an important comparative statement, but is that sufficient reason for not trying to make general statements about mineworkers? Mineworkers are commonly studied with respect to reference points such as the workplace, the union and community, all of which provide the basis for comparative studies. Methodology has increased in sophistication but, as a recent collection of essays noted, ‘these developments have located mining unionism more sensitively within the distinctiveness of individual coalfields and local communities. The dominant sense is of diversity – of experience and of response – and also of the contingent’.⁷

Examining politics through the lens of diversity would seem to militate against any comparison. However one of the best known studies of mining politics, Gregory's study of the politics of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain between 1906 and 1914, is comparative. He showed how regional diversity was crucial in explaining the timing and nature of the mineworkers’ affiliation to the Labour Party.⁸ Campbell et al. are correct to caution that ‘generalization is hazardous’, but this should be seen as a warning, not a prohibition. Sensitivity to complexity and the fine grain of everyday life encourages the avoidance of structural reductionism but the emphasis on the local and regional has been used to support the view that fragmentation and a lack of solidarity was ‘normal’ in working-class politics.⁹ Studies of mining in a wide variety of contexts showed that solidarity can be constructed.

‘Archetypal Proletarians’ Reconsidered

The ‘archetypal proletarian’ was perhaps the first comparative framework available to students of mining. This historiographical tradition has been subject to challenge by labour historians.

Laslett's 1974 paper was an ‘exploratory and analytic’ study of the differences in the political behaviour of British and US coal miners focusing on the former's abandoning of the Liberals and the latter's continued involvement with the two-party system. He focused on the miners for the usual reasons: ‘large numbers, their strong tradition of political activism, and their special ability to influence the course of labour politics because of their concentration in specific, relatively autonomous, geographical areas’.¹⁰ Laslett intended to undertake four regional case studies in the UK and the USA, analysed via seven variables: geology (accessibility and character of the coal), the market (export, import, stable, unstable), the work system (longwall, degree of independence at the coalface), the employers (small companies, large combines), the ethnic/religious character of the workforce, the degree of unionization (their political character, types of leaders) and opportunities for advancement. A comparative agenda was central:

it was important to try and systematize areas chosen for comparison both to lend greater precision to judgements about the sources of radicalization in both countries, and ascertain how far these sources derived from the nature of the coalmining industry and how far they came from the differences in the broader context of American and English society as such.¹¹

The discussion of Laslett's paper focused on local peculiarities and exceptionalism. Methodologically, the paper is suspicious – but not dismissive – of the Kerr and Siegel hypothesis and addresses this by using a framework which integrates workplace and community to explain similarities and differences.

The most significant assault on the ‘archetypal proletarian’ thesis came with Harrison's 1978 collection, Independent Collier.¹² Harrison's explicit intention was to challenge the miner as the quintessential proletarian because it had become ‘impossible to think of him [sic] outside the context of a relatively large-scale enterprise and a highly socialized process’. This is why many of the essays in the volume examined proto-industrial situations.¹³ For most mineworkers in most contexts over the past two centuries, the absence of large-scale enterprise and a highly socialized production process was the dominant (but not exclusive) experience. Harrison's volume, located in nineteenth-century Britain, presented mineworkers as occupying a complex class position.¹⁴ The emphasis was on the complexity and diversity of the mineworkers’ experience; militancy sat easily alongside moderation, and conflict alongside cooperation. This dualism is a characteristic feature of mining unionism wherever it is found. Harrison made a powerful (and ignored) case for the comparative study of mineworkers.¹⁵

Independent Collier attacked the use of models in general (and the isolated mass in particular) as a means of understanding mineworkers. Many of the most influential studies of the past twenty years have focused on variety of experience and differentiation, challenging the image of the mineworkers as the ‘archetypal proletarians’.¹⁶ Yet the authors’ common motivation is to discover the bases of collective action and solidarity. An emphasis on differentiation and fragmentation highlights the variability of mineworkers’ experience and Independent Collier emphasized the choices open to mineworkers and the factors which influenced those choices ‘born of the conviction that we need more historical, micro-comparative, studies of coal-mining communities if we are ever to return, with profit, to histories of coal-mining trade unionism’.¹⁷

The work of Church and Outram flows from this. Clearly influenced by Independent Collier, Strikes and Solidarity is methodologically complex – a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods – and is an ambitious attempt to advance the study of mineworkers to a more sophisticated level. Central is a desire ‘to offer generalizations of comparable interest to those offered by scholars who have chosen wider fields to investigate’. The methodology is ‘both historical and firmly rooted in concepts and methodologies drawn from the social sciences’ and it ‘throws light on some of those issues which hitherto historians have assumed or implied were not susceptible to generalization because they were beyond quantitative analysis’.¹⁸ But, as Cronin has noted, ‘even the most sophisticated approaches to comparative labor history have yet to provide a model for how actually to conduct effective comparison’.¹⁹ Can other disciplines which have striven to develop a comparative method help?

Has Comparative Politics Anything to Offer?

Comparison is the political scientist's laboratory and they aspire to use comparison to verify or falsify whether a generalization holds.²⁰ Excessive optimism is characteristic of many comparativists and ‘Most comparative political scientists could be said to behave very much like magpies. These birds are famous for amassing collections of shiny objects. These have no real use and have little or no connection with each other, but they please the magpie.’²¹

Comparative politics is based on trade-offs. Complexity and the variety of cause and effect limits means the compar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Studies in Labour History General Editor's Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 So Many Cases but So Little Comparison: Problems of Comparing Mineworkers
• 2 Two Faces of King Coal: the Impact of Historiographical Traditions on Comparative History in the Ruhr and South Wales
• 3 The Myth of the Radical Miner
• 4 Cameras in the Coalfields: Photographs as Evidence for Comparative Coalfield History
• 5 A Mining Film without a Disaster is like a Western without a Shoot-out: Representations of Coal Mining Communities in Feature Films
• 6 Modernity or ‘Slaves of the Lamp’? Independence and Control in Two State Coal Mining Communities in Victoria, Australia
• 7 A Comparison between the Richmond Coal Basin and Pennsylvania's Anthracite Fields: Slave Labour, Free Labour and the Political Economy
• 8 Nigerian Coal Miners, Protest and Gender, 1914–49: the Iva Valley Mining Community
• 9 Everyone Black? Ethnic, Class and Gender Identities at Street Level in a Belgian Mining Town, 1930–50
• 10 Outsiders: Trade Union Responses to Polish and Italian Coal Miners in Two British Coalfields, 1945–54
• 11 The Struggle for Polish Autonomy and the Question of Integration in the Ruhr and Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1880–1914
• 12 Networking among Welsh Coal Miners in Nineteenth-century America
• 13 Gender and Ethnicity in Japan's Chikuho Coalfield
• 14 Coal Mining, Foreign Workers and Mine Safety: Steps towards European Integration, 1946–85
• 15 A Moral Economy, an Isolated Mass and Paternalized Migrants: Transvaal Colliery Strikes, 1925–49
• 16 Trade Union Development in the Ruhr and South Wales, 1890–1914
• 17 Coalfield Leaders, Trade Unionism and Communist Politics: Exploring Arthur Horner and Abe Moffat
• Index