Unemployment In Britain Between The Wars

Drawing on a range of contemporary evidence, Stephen Constantine studies the nature and causes of unemployment in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes the failure of successive inter-war governments to make a constructive response.

Drawing on a range of contemporary evidence, Stephen Constantine studies the nature and causes of unemployment in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes the failure of successive inter-war governments to make a constructive response.

This 1990 book is a comprehensive study of government reactions to the interwar unemployment problem. Drawing upon an extensive range of primary and secondary sources, it analyses official ameliorative policy towards unemployment and contemporary reactions to such intervention.

After the devastation of the Great War, thinkers in Great Britain engaged in a process of agonized reappraisal of the moral and political directions the country was to take. This book accounts for the contribution of Christian thinkers, emphasizing the ethical socialism to which they were heir, particularly the Christian tradition of social commentary and political action from the nineteenth century. This was, broadly speaking, the Christian socialism championed by F.D. Maurice and others, carried into the twentieth century by men like Charles Gore and famously embodied in William Temple. Christian Social Thought in Great Britain Between the Wars pays special attention to the League of the Kingdom of God and the Christendom Group in the Church of England; and it argues that, given the confusion and anxiety of the age, Christian theorists for the most part neither rose above nor sunk beneath its standards of discourse.

High unemployment has been one of the most disturbing features of the economy of the 1980s. For a precedent, one must look to the interwar period and in particular to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It follows that recent years have been marked by a resurgence of interest amongst academics in interwar unemployment. The debate has been contentious. There is nothing like the analysis of a period which recorded rates of un employment approaching 25 per cent to highlight the differences between competing schools of thought on the operation of labour markets. Along with historians, economists whose objective is to better understand the causes, character and consequences of contemporary unemployment and sociologists seeking to understand contemporary society's perceptions and responses to joblessness have devoted increasing attention to this his torical episode. Like many issues in economic history, this one can be approached in a variety of ways using different theoretical approaches, tools of analysis and levels of disaggregation. Much of the recent literature on the func tioning of labour markets in the Depression has been macroeconomic in nature and has been limited to individual countries. Debates from the period itself have been revived and new questions stimulated by modem research have been opened. Many such studies have been narrowly fo cused and have failed to take into account the array of historical evidence collected and anal~sed by contemporaries or reconstructed and re- inter preted by historians.

First published in 1987. This volume explores the inter-war unemployment problem and the development of economic and social policy in relation to that problem. Contemporary policies and levels of unemployment can only be compared with the inter-war period and in recent years economists and other commentators have increasingly turned their attention to the 1930s. This book is written by a group of expert historians and policy analysts who have been in the forefront of recent research. In particular, new insights into economic policy which have come from the release of cabinet and departmental papers at The Public Record Office are revealed. Recent economic theory is also taken into account and the findings question established views on many grounds. New economic lessons from the 1930s are suggested and some astonishing similarities to the 1980s and demonstrated. This work will be essential reading for students of modern British history and economic and social history as well as economic policy and government and politics.