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Book Review
| Nolan, M (ed.), Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand, Canterbury University Press, Christchurch, 2005. pp. 318. NZ $37.95 paper.
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| This edited volume focuses on the tumultuous industrial events that took place in New Zealand immediately prior to World War I. The collection is based on papers that were originally presented at a Trade Union History Project seminar held in Wellington in 2003 and provides another example of the important contribution that this project has made to New Zealand social and labour history. |
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An edited volume of the events of 1913 (and in some places early 1914) is very timely. As Melanie Nolan notes in her introduction, the 1913 Great Strike has received less attention that the events of 1890 and 1951. This is particularly significant because of the central role attributed to the events of 1913 in interpretations of New Zealand history. Central amongst these is Erik Olssen's argument that the defeat of 1913 lay the groundwork for the formation of the New Zealand Labour Party in 1916 and the social democratic agenda of the 1935 first Labour government (The Red Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation of Labour 1908–1914, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1988). In this regard many of the contributions to this volume offer the opportunity to reflect on Olssen's argument first outlined almost 30 years ago. |
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The volume is structured as follows. It opens with a very useful chronology of events by Peter Franks, which clearly illustrates the complexity and multi-faceted nature of the industrial and political conflict of the time. In the editorial introduction, Melanie Nolan not only reviews the role attributed to the events of 1913 in the New Zealand historiography but also provides an overview of contemporary international views of New Zealand as a social laboratory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. To my mind the explicit attempt to place the 1913 strike in an international context, although not entirely successful, is one of the most significant aspects of this collection. |
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The great set piece of this collection, and presumably the seminar, are the contributions by two of New Zealand's most well respected historians – Erik Olssen and Miles Fairburn. Olssen's chapter uses the experience of two socialists from Auckland, Tom Barker and Michael Joseph Savage (who was to become the first Labour Prime Minister), travelling to Wellington during the dispute as an opportunity to restate many of the central themes of the argument he outlined in Red Feds. Fairburn, who has long railed against class-based interpretations of New Zealand history, uses the opportunity to attack two central planks of 'left wing' interpretations of the strike – first, that the Massey government and employers were intent on smashing the unions well before the strike started and second that it was the inherent radicalism of the rank and file unionists, as opposed to their leaders, that sparked the events of 1913. While I disagree with much of what Fairburn has to say, here and elsewhere, there are two lessons that I think his analysis offers. First, his analysis points to the need for historians to adopt a more sophisticated view of agency and second, he highlights some of the potential problems of post-Thompsonian labour history, highlighted elsewhere by Johnathan Zeitlin's attack on 'rank-and-filism'. |
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