Working in Greece and Turkey: a comparative labour history from empires to nation-states, 1840–1940

Abstract

ment extracted surpluses from the Mineworkers’ Pension Scheme, limited compensation payments for injury, and denied public inquiries into miscarriages of justice, such as the orchestrated police attack on miners at Orgreave in June 1984. The sense of hopelessness that pervaded the coalfields in the 1990s and early 2000s signalled seismic political shifts. Both Prime Minister Tony Blair and architect of New Labour policy Peter Mandelson held parliamentary seats in north-east England, which in 2019 were won by the Conservatives. The book explains in substantial detail that the decline of the Labour vote in former English coalfields was not a recent phenomenon. The Conservative vote was deeper in localities that had witnessed mine closures in the 1960s, and weaker, but still substantial, in those that retained mines into the 1990s. One lacuna here that is in need of further research is the role of English nationalism in fuelling support for the Conservatives. In the 1931 general election, the Labour vote in Durham fragmented, but in South Wales it held firm (26). Similar electoral outcomes were evident in local council elections in 2021. It would appear that labour culture retained some resonance as part of a broader Welsh identity, whereas in former coal communities in County Durham, the North East and the Midlands it has been fundamentally disconnected from a post-Brexit Englishness. The book is a major contribution to the historiography of the British coal industry, and the culture it produced. It should be required reading for historians of twentiethcentury Britain, but perhaps most importantly for those who are committed to reconnecting the Labour Party to the post-industrial working class. As the Brexit vote and the 2019 general election revealed, the ‘kings of the underworld’ were not quite banished to the realms of the history books, and the shadow of the mine continued to have a dramatic impact on British politics.