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Book Review
| Neville Kirk, Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914, Merlin Press, London, 2003. pp. x + 230. £14.95 paper.
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| Comrades and Cousins is, as the author says, 'a wideranging and experimental work of comparative history which has something new and interesting to say to the specialist and general reader alike'. In it, Neville Kirk examines the similarities, differences and cross-fertilisation of ideas and politics between the labour movements in Britain, the USA, Australia and South Africa and, along the way, makes a compelling case for greater exploration of the benefits of comparative history. |
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Between introduction and conclusion are three substantial essays that traverse the major themes preoccupying labour politics in the period under review — class divisions and race-based antipathy within a context of nation-building and imperial expansion. In Chapter One, Kirk argues that the case for American labour movement exceptionalism is an exaggerated one and that, despite the US union movement's ultimate decision to lobby rather than party-form, as did the British labour movement, the critiques of capitalism that emanated from union circles in both countries was remarkably similar. Some may question the heavy emphasis on the life and work of Samuel Gompers in this chapter, but the evidence garnered is fascinating and makes a substantial contribution to the 'fleshing out' of this complex and often contradictory character. |
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Chapter Two is perhaps the section of the book that will elicit most comment from readers of Labour History, for it engages with the notion of Australia as a 'workingman's paradise'. There is an uneasy tension running throughout this chapter because the evidence is never sufficiently differentiated between the two questions that are debated — whether Australia was perceived to be a paradise for workers or whether it was a paradise or not. Indeed, in the conclusion to this essay, these separate issues are addressed interchangeably. I have no trouble accepting that Australia enjoyed a paradisiacal reputation, although I don't see that Kirk's 'witnesses from below' had any less rose-coloured glasses than the more widely-known Métin. A first-time visitor to Broken Hill in 1908, Keir Hardie might well wax lyrical about spacious, well-lit streets and 'handsome shops'; a more circumspect account must surely acknowledge the desperately high rates of accident, death and disease from the mining industry, the parlous state of the water supply and the crowded, unsanitary and, at times, unbearably hot, boarding houses in which many miners lived and died. The question of whether living standards were better in Australia than Britain is a fascinating question, but not one that can be answered by a range of visitor impressions and comparisons. I recommend a study by R. Erikson and J.H. Goldthorpe which concluded that, despite the vision of Australia as a 'young' land of equal opportunity being an integral part of the national culture, actual rates and patterns of mobility did not differ widely from the industrial European societies that they studied (The Constant Flux: a Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992). Still, as Kirk points out, much more work needs to be done in this area and this essay raises a number of crucial issues that can be used as springboards by later researchers. |
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In the final chapter of Comrades and Cousins, Kirk shows that he has kept the best until last. This essay throws down the gauntlet to historians of race and demands a reinterpretation of labour movement responses to racist ideology in a period of heightened colonial expansion and imperial subjugation, one that includes the anti-racist and solidaristic tendencies as well. Gone is the 'capitalist understood' aspect of the previous chapters, replaced by a compelling account of attempts by employer interests, still being played out as Kirk points out, to assert 'race loyalty' over class consciousness. Here the White Australia policy is usefully portrayed as an object of class reconciliation and, more generally, 'frenzies of jingoism, nationalism and race hatred' are exposed as employer projects — 'consciously, cynically and hypocritically' mounted to 'realise their "true" goals of higher profits and returns on investment, reduced costs and new "spheres of influence" with respect to economics, politics and the spread of "civilisation"'. Moreover, in contrast to those who argue that ruling class racism merely reflected the labour movement's rejection of 'coloured competition', Kirk demonstrates that labour movement leaders were actually mistaken in adopting racial strategies against class antagonisms and that racial division, so devastating to non-white workers, also served up the white working class on a platter to their employers. If the other chapters suggest a range of fruitful areas for further research, this essay is one that no historian of race can afford to ignore. |
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While those with expertise in particular, more narrow areas might quibble with this or that aspect of Comrades and Cousins, this is almost inevitable with a book of such broad ambitions. Nevertheless, it is highly enjoyable and informative read and I suspect that much valuable scholarship will be inspired by its approach. |
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| University of New South Wales |
SARAH GREGSON | |
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