The Politics of Identity and Civil Society in Britain and Germany: Miners in the Ruhr and South Wales 1890-1926

Abstract

In this interesting study, Leighton S. James seeks to explore what conditions fostered effective collective agency among coal miners from the 1890s to the mid-1920s. He does so by means of a comparative study of the labour movements in the mining regions of south Wales and the Ruhr in response to his main question: why did the Welsh miners achieve higher levels of organizational unity and recognition from employers than the miners of the Ruhr during this period? The answer, according to James, has to do with the more synchronous lifeworld of Welsh miners, the greater fluidity of Welsh civil society and the more flexible or inclusive identities constructed in the discourses of Welsh labour organizations in comparison with their counterparts in the Ruhr. Despite similar work patterns in the two regions, miners in south Wales more often than not lived in small pit villages dominated by miners, were nearly all religiously non-conformist (Methodist), and after 1890 successfully incorporated the burgeoning numbers of new English-speaking migrants. These factors produced a local context of shared assumptions, porous identities and a fluid civil society, and thus the basis for the formation of a region-wide trade union, the South Wales Miners’ Federation (SWMF), which reported an impressive 153,813 members out of a total of 233,134 miners in the region by 1913, and was able to secure higher wages and employer recognition. According to James, the success of the SWMF was predicated on its decentralized structure and flexible ideological orientation, which initially combined an emphasis on collaboration between employees and employers, a vague Christian-social desire to improve the lot of miners, and a Welsh identity, although this gradually evolved into a more English-friendly, confrontational and class-based strategy after the strike of 1898. This transformation found its parallel in the sphere of party politics: the regionally dominant Liberal Party gradually accommodated the class-oriented languages of Labour leaders and helped to turn south Wales into a centre of prewar ‘Lib-Lab’ sympathies after 1900. This flexibility and the homogenization of identities in south Wales carried over into the First World War, when the SWMF refused to give up the right to strike and secured new wage gains, and on into the immediate postwar period, when the south Wales Labour movement embraced an overtly working-class identity, began pushing for nationalization of the mines and supported Labour, the newly hegemonic party in the region.