‘The serious history of British trade unionism’ started with Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1894, wrote Eric Hobsbawm some forty years ago. He continued: ‘If we leave aside the herculean attempts … of its founders and G. D. H. Cole, its progress for the first fifty years was disappointing’. Yet in the twenty years preceding Hobsbawm’s 1964 essay there was a ‘sharp’ increase in ‘output’, mainly of single-union histories – so much so that a new synthesis was possible.

Dave Lyddon, Centre for Industrial Relations

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