John H. M. Laslett

The Demise of Exceptionalism? Comparative Labour History in Light of Anglo-American Comparison

DESPITE THEORETICAL INADEQUACIES and an occasional tendency to disregard the wood for the trees, this two-volume comparative study of the British and American labour movements across a two-hundred year period is an historic achievement of which the author has every reason to feel proud. In recent years increasing dissatisfaction with purely domestic labour history, coupled with the growing sophistication of discrete cross cultural studies by scholars as varied as Friedrich Lenger (artisans on the continent and the U.S.), Jeffrey Haydu (skilled metal workers in Britain and America), and Bruno Ramirez (French-Canadian and Italian migrants in Quebec) have accelerated calls on both sides of the Atlantic for more comparative work, despite its acknowledged difficulties. In England, this new trend was confirmed in discussions held at the spring 1990 conference of the Society for the Study of Labour History at Birkbeck College, London. In the USA,