Review

Textbooks, Readers, and References

When the reviewer was an undergraduate long ago, the typical anthology of historical documents was a massive tome, replete with long extracts from primary sources, printed in double columns and with the most perfunctory editorial introductions. Happily, academics and their publishers have learned something about students' attention spans and boredom quotients, and today provide them with more engaging, reader-friendly compilations. The editor of this reader has absorbed this lesson and compiled an exemplary reader on twentieth-century British history. Laybourn's anthology is, however, misleadingly titled, as it ends in 1979 with the beginning of the Thatcher era. A forthcoming volume in the same Tauris History Readers series, also edited by Laybourn, will carry on from Margaret Thatcher to Tony Blair. This reviewer would have preferred a slightly longer single reader, analyzing and synthesizing Britain's twentieth century in its entirety, but this one has many merits outweighing the chronological drawback.	1
Keith Laybourn is a well-known and prolific author and editor of histories of British trade unionism, socialism, and the Labour party. His known partisanship on the political left has not diminished his objectivity in compiling this reader. Indeed, he seems to have taken special pains to ensure that conservative and moderate views are both well represented and sympathetically explained. Laybourn's method is to present nine major issues in British history from 1906 to 1979, each introduced by a long interpretive essay by himself, followed by shorter, opposing viewpoints of other historians, and ending with a few apt illustrative extracts from primary documents. In his introductions, Laybourn calls attention to what he calls "sub-debates" within each issue. For example, within the general issue of why the Liberal party declined and Labour rose during the early twentieth century, three sub-debates concern the nature and impact of the New Liberal ideology, the effect on party support of the expanded 1918 franchise, and the importance of local politics in the fall or rise of the competing parties. Discussing the sub-debates separately facilitates understanding of the larger issue.	2
Besides the Liberal/Labour question, Laybourn's eight other major themes are voluntarism versus state control between 1906 and 1914, World War I's political and social impact, the origins and treatment of interwar poverty, causes and effects of the 1926 General Strike, the relationship between international and domestic fascism and the British government's appeasement policy, World War II as an agent of change, the strength of bipartisan commitment to the welfare state between 1945 and 1979, and the nature of industrial decline – the "British disease" – after World War II. Laybourn and the distinguished historians he mobilizes for the debates and sub-debates effectively present the major contending hypotheses in each of them. Two themes, the General Strike and post-World War II industrial decline, are perhaps least productively developed. The strike's historical significance is rather overblown considering its bungled performance and indecisive ending. Its contribution to trade union and Labour party mythology, probably more meaningful than the event itself, is – curiously – not emphasized. Discussion of the final theme, the "British disease," seems rather perfunctory, possibly cut short by space limitations. Laybourn acknowledges that two postmodern icons – race and gender – are treated only peripherally in this book, but offers to make up for this deficiency in his subsequent reader on Britain after 1979. Except for the appeasement era of the late 1930s, foreign policy – the editor concedes – is also given short shrift.	3
Keith Laybourn himself, by his own admission, supplies almost half the words in this book. His introductions are of high quality as historiographical surveys, and very readable, but their length forces him to abridge or paraphrase the extracts from other historians' works intended to contribute to the various debates. In a second edition, Laybourn and the publishers might consider compressing the introductions and expanding at least some of the interpretive extracts. The paperbound version of this stimulating reader is an economical accompaniment to a good narrative textbook in upper division courses, as well as a useful handbook for graduate students taking comprehensives – and for instructors. The nine thematic chapters, averaging about twenty-five pages, fit conveniently into a university semester or quarter, in the former case leaving a few weeks for exams or other assignments. The books' usefulness is enhanced by a good index, chapter endnotes highlighting previous research into each issue, and a short but well-chosen bibliography of major secondary sources – mostly published since 1980 – for the various themes. A list of abbreviations enables readers to quickly identify parties, trade unions, and government bodies.	4
University of Prince Edward Island   D.M. Cregier

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