Industrial Politics and the 1926 Mining Lockout

Book excerpt: The seven-month British national mining lockout of 1926 was one of the most important European industrial disputes of the twentieth century. It not only came to symbolize the defeat of the labor movement in the interwar years, but it also cast a long shadow over industrial relations in the mining industry and epitomized the predicament of British miners in the early decades of the century. Industrial Politics draws on new methodological perspectives that have emerged in recent labor studies in order to comprehensively survey this event at the national, local, and regional levels, and makes a significant contribution to the social and political history of the industrial working class.