The Wisdom of Conventional Wisdom

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Abstract

British labor historians carry in their heads and into their research a very heavy historiographical burden—a set of major questions which have dominated the field for a long time and a related set of model answers and analyses. These questions and proposed solutions were put forth in the first instance by social and political theorists, ranging from Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century to Lenin, the Webbs, and more recent theorists like Neil Smelser in the twentieth century. A generation of brilliant social historians, including Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson, Royden Harrison, and others put them in more usable and historiographically acceptable form. And there is also the tradition—not so highly esteemed but nevertheless pervasive in its influence— of writing the institutional history of the unions and political groups that working people or socialists seeking to represent them built with so much pain and effort. All of this prior work makes it very difficult for younger historians to develop approaches uniquely their own. The five books under review here all illustrate this difficulty in one way or another. At the same time they also show that old questions and familiar models can still be useful and can still generate interesting information and insights. Take, for instance, Takao Matsumura's book on the flint glass makers. It would be difficult to argue that the flint glass makers—who numbered only a couple of thousand in the mid-nineteenth century—were themselves either so significant or so typical that a study of their work and social lives could change our understanding of labor in the mid-Victorian period a great deal. Nevertheless, Matsumura's study of a clearly definable group of skilled workers, located primarily around Stourbridge in the West Midlands, demonstrates with considerable local detail many of the arguments made more broadly concerning the labor aristocracy. He shows, for example, the enormous importance of the glass makers' control of the labor market to their broader effort to construct or preserve their "labor aristocratic" status, and he simultaneously illustrates the sectional character of their efforts and the exclusivity of the glass makers vis-a-vis the glass cutters. Matsumura also says helpful things about the flint glass makers in the community and their patterns of residence and intermarriage. No path-breaking book, this nonetheless solid piece of work proves the power of the older arguments.