Opening the 21st anniversary of the ILP in Bradford in April 1914, J. H. Palin, one of Bradford's most prominent trade unionists, remarked: “Of ordinary historical association, Bradford has none. In Domesday Book, it is described as a waste, and the subsequent periods of capitalist exploitation have done little to improve it. […] The History of Bradford will be very largely the history of the ILP.”1 Palin's remark – unjust as it is, perhaps, to a distinguished list of Victorian philanthropists – stands as testimony to the authority and influence which the labour movement in Bradford had acquired by that date. It also provides a clue to the origins of that authority and influence, for it demonstrates the importance which he and other Bradford trade unionists attached to their association with the independent labour movement. Whatever the reactions of trade unionists in the rest of the country, in Bradford, trade unionists were vital to its success. Indeed, strong trade-union support proved to be an essential corollary of effective independent working-class political action.

Historians are in general agreement that French socialism experienced a major reorientation at the end of the 1880's and the beginning of the 1890's. In 1888 the French socialist movement consisted of several diminutive and poorly organized factions, which could not claim, either singly or collectively, a significant national following despite nearly a decade of organizing and propagandizing. Yet by 1893 socialists were able to elect some forty deputies to the Chamber of Deputies, and in the previous year scored numerous victories in municipal elections. Electorally impotent in the 1880's, socialists became a serious force in national political life with the victories of 1893. Nearly simultaneously, the stalemate among rival factions was broken as schism in the ranks of both Possibilists and Blanquists permitted the Guesdists to emerge as the dominant organization. Finally, these years were marked by the appearance of a pragmatic, reformist socialism most clearly evident in the new moderation of the Guesdists and the rise of the Independent Socialists.

With the imprisonment of many activists throughout the year, the rejection of the first National Petition in July, the dissolution of the Convention in September, and the catastrophe of the ill-fated Newport Rising in November, early Chartism ended in failure in the second half of 1839. One of the most common reasons given in the literature for the failure has been the lack of internal cohesion in the movement, usually illustrated by reference to the political conflicts between physical- and moral-force groups. Despite the analytical inadequacy of such generic terms it is indisputable that Chartism was deficient in natural unity. It was a coalition of many different radical associations and personalities with a multiplicity of varied experiences, traditions and beliefs. As a consequence, the early Chartist movement only made progress by adopting certain symbols of unification: the National Petition and Rent, and a commitment to a National Convention. These symbols then became specific goals of Chartism. However, little consideration has previously been given to asking whether Chartism was an efficient instrument in itself for achieving these objectives, or if the organization of the Convention undermined the political credibility of the movement. This article attempts to illustrate Chartism's need for organization and leadership from the Convention, and suggests that inefficient organization was an important cause of the relative failure to achieve its immediate objectives, and for the progressive abdication of leadership by the Convention.

Was there a secret revolutionary movement in England during the early Industrial Revolution and, if there was such a movement, must we accept that its existence would be “unprovable”? Should we agree with a recent writer that no conclusions can be reached on such questions, the existing historical sources being so ambiguous as to allow the historian to impress his own prejudices on them?. We believe that a rigorous study of the historical evidence of a revolutionary tradition in one region can offer an insight into this important area of English social history. The purpose of this essay will be to set the revolutionary aspect of Sheffield's political history against a brief outline of the town's economic development.

Any anthropology that calls itself Marxist must have as its starting point the intermediation of labor between human society and nature. The labor is abstract labor; as concrete labor it is work. The society in question is not society in general or the human community in abstracto, but a particular, historical society, whether primitive or civilized. The question that is posed thereby is twofold: first, it is the problem of the place in nature of the human kind, or the problem of location; second, it is the historical problem of the transition of humanity from the natural to the cultural order. Nature has its history, as does the human society, but the unit that we take for the observation of natural history is far wider than the unit of observation of human history. In the former case it is the biological species whose history is taken up; in the case of human history it is the communal life of the village, and the social life of the tribe, city or nation. The time period of natural history is geological time, which is one or more orders of magnitude greater than the time periods of ethnography and historiography.