Sébastien Rioux, The Social Cost of Cheap Food: Labour and the Political Economy of Food Distribution in Britain, 1830–1914

摘要

The book is a significant addition to the historiography of the British coal industry. However, it has limitations. Behind the sophisticated reading of sources and the deep understanding of the politics of specific coalfields there remains a tendency to view ‘direct action’ advocates and militants as victims of a trade union bureaucracy prone to stifling alternatives to what is described as the politics of Labourism. Moreover, the text suggests that the direct actionists were themselves “hamstrung by their parochialism.” (319) Such value judgements often mask complexity, nuance, and agency. This is one of many problems with the kind of counterfactual history that is advocated in the introduction and with particular narratives that have bedevilled Marxist perspectives on labour history throughout the twentieth century. As the author notes, giants of coal mining trade unionism such as Arthur Cook, Arthur Horner and Nye Bevan made compromises “in the name of pragmatism which as younger men they had scorned.” (313) One can only wonder what these men would have thought on the evening of 12 December 2019, when former mining seats such as Bolsover, Leigh, and Wrexham elected Conservative Members of Parliament.