The Scottish miners, 1874-1939 - Alan Campbell

The Scottish miners, under leaders such as Keir Hardie, Robert Smillie and John Maclean, were in the vanguard of establishing the modern British labour movement. Yet this volume does not chart any unproblematic forward march of labour nor postulate a homogeneous political radicalism. For union activists traversed an unusually wide-ranging political spectrum, from Orange-based Conservatism, through Labourism and the Independent Labour Party to a significant body of support for syndicalism and later Communism. Within the context of the preliminary, detailed examination of the economy, social structures and cultural traditions of the Scots coalfields in its companion volume, this book goes on to develop the social history of trade union and political institutions. It analyses the internal dynamics of the miners unions by reference to three competing approaches to trade unionism and politics - the independent collier, bureacratic reformism and the militant miner - and employs the neglected concept of generation to explain their emergence and support.