Reflections on TORCH Labour Network Conference on History and Labour Politics

Reflections on TORCH Labour Network Conference on History and Labour Politics 

By Sam Miller (Jesus College)

This week saw the latest TORCH Labour Network event take place, on Monday 9th November, in Balliol College, Oxford. The conference invited participants to reflect on the tradition of labour history writing in an Anglophone context and its connections to political formations: perhaps most pertinently, trade unions, political parties, and places of adult education.  

Balliol was an apposite location for such a discussion. As Dr Matt Myers noted in his opening remarks, the college is closely associated with the origins of workers’ education in Britain, particularly through the influence of Arthur L. Smith. G. D. H. Cole—the Fabian, Guild Socialist, and historian of the labour movement—became involved with labour politics while studying at Balliol. Cole and R. H. Tawney also connect Balliol’s history with the history of adult and extra-mural education through the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol from 1965 until 1978, belonged to the British Communist Party (CP)’s celebrated postwar Historians Group and his time as head of an Oxford college coincided with his writing of Marxian history.  

Many of the day’s papers reflected the enduring influence of Hill and his fellow postwar British Marxist historians—even as they sought more precisely to contextualise, even complicate, that inheritance for those of us interested in writing labour history in the 2020s. Madeleine Davis (QMUL) presented debates amongst a small group on the radical Marxist corner of the ‘New Left’. Davis elucidated how Marxist feminists such as Sally Alexander, Ros Delmar, and Jean McCrindle contested the categories they inherited from labour movement history writing. Davis’ contribution situated precisely how women’s experiences within political organising shaped historiographical developments. Hill’s biographer, Mike Braddick (Harris Manchester, Oxford) situated the development of Hill’s own Marxism within a wider crisis of the post-First World War liberal bourgeoisie. Kevin Morgan (University of Manchester) challenged us to rethink the origins of the journal Past & Present. Though a co-production of Historians Group members such as Eric Hobsbawm and John Saville, Morgan shifted the emphasis onto figures such as the editor John Morris, whom Morgan argued was the ‘key figure’ in the journal’s earliest days, yet ‘unsung’ and barely remembered. Morgan argued that we need to pay more attention to the ancient historians who were so important to the vibrancy of mid-twentieth-century Marxian historical scholarship, but who have since been eclipsed by Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1973) and E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (1963).  

The recent efflorescence of publications on Anglophone historians of the labour movement has not only encompassed works on the CP’s best-remembered figures, such as Braddick’s 2025 intellectual biography of Hill or Emile Chabal’s Age of Hobsbawm (2026). Earlier this year, Mary Davis published the first-ever study of Dona Torr, tellingly subtitled Historical Materialism and the Communist Historians. James Crossley (Wolfson, Cambridge) spoke about the intellectual trajectory of the CP historian A. L. Morton, the subject of Crossley’s biography, also published in 2025, the first of this key Historians’ Group figure. Indeed, as Crossley noted on Monday, the Historians’ Group was first formed in large part through Torr’s initiative to produce a revised edition of Morton’s People’s History of England, published on the eve of the Second World War. Crossley’s paper recovered the richness of Morton’s influences (the novelist Jack London led him to William Morris and then to Marx; yet, he was also profoundly influenced by the poetry of A. E. Housman and T. S. Eliot) and the evolution of his thought. Notably, reading his fellow-historian Iris Morley led Morton to revise his views of millenarianism and utopianism, the subject, after earlier dismissal, of some of his later and most suggestive history-writing.  

The ongoing revision of a landmark work of labour history, and of one’s historical opinion, and the depth and breadth of a historical imagination, were also themes in Rachel Douglas’s (University of Glasgow) paper, which opened the conference on ‘Making Marxist Theatre from Below.’ Douglas discussed the Trinidadian historian of the Haitian Revolution, C. L. R. James and the stage adaptations of his history, The Black Jacobins, which was first performed in 1936 with the labour activist and baritone Paul Robeson as the revolutionary Toussaint L’ouverture. Douglas addressed us at Balliol before leaving for London to take part in discussions around the first staged performance of this play on a London stage in 90 years. If this revival testifies to the vitality of James’s historical imagination, this is an enduring motif in Black Jacobins’ performance history. Douglas explained, for example, that Yvonne Brewster, Mona Hammond, Carmen Munroe, and Inigo Espejel founded the all-Black Talawa Theatre Company in 1986 initially as a vehicle for staging Black Jacobins: a text, and a history, felt to be pertinent to anti-colonial and anti-racist politics of the mid-1980s. As Douglas noted, there is something electrifying about theatre’s relationship to history where long-ago ‘deeds’ are performed ‘in present tense’ ‘liveness’ ‘by flesh-and-blood actors.’  

The potential ‘liveness’ and ‘flesh-and-blood’ quality of labour history were illuminated from different angles by two contributions, one centring on, one departing from, the historian and convenor of the History Workshop, Raphael Samuel. Phil Henshaw (independent) revealed how, when Samuel had taught him at Ruskin College, he had encouraged Henshaw to, in turn, ask his own parents to write about their lives. Recording the working-class ordinariness of those lives was the point. This personal anecdote and debt of gratitude contrasted movingly Geoff Andrews (Open University)’s reflection that the ‘historical imagination’ of Raphael Samuel was ‘unlimited.’ For Samuel, Andrews argued, “history” described an ‘activity, not a profession’, and History Workshop—a form of history writing ‘that appealed to working class trade unionist activists’—was about ‘contesting how knowledge is produced.’ Henshaw offered an example in action through an engaging biography of Gravener Henson (1785-1852), leader of the Nottingham framework knitters. Henshaw characterised Henson convincingly as a ‘fighter’ for his ‘class’, one who resisted the solutions his contemporaries, celebrated by one or other later tradition of labour movement historian, such as Chartists or Owenites, posed. Henson was himself a labour historian, of the framework knitters. Henshaw’s paper was therefore a powerful and pointed reminder of labour history emerging from a context of production, of labour.  

The solutions, in terms of political organising, and indeed labour history-writing, Henson reached in the nineteenth century are a reminder that labour history is not merely an automatic, mechanical response to conditions of class struggle. It is, indeed, a site where we might find agency in the past. As Marc Mulholland (St Catherine’s, Oxford) noted in a set of pointed challenges to three papers which had centred in various ways on the CP Historians Group, that certain intellectual traditions and assumptions continued to impede efforts by Hill, E P Thompson, and others to synthesise their Marxist commitments to the working class with their residual and abiding commitments to a (socialist?) humanism.  

Responding to the final session, explicitly on ‘History and Politics’, Freya Willis (St John’s, Oxford), noted that it was of abiding importance to think about how organisation might take place ‘within and against’ traditions and modes of struggle from which one has been excluded. She noted the pertinence of Myers’ Halted March of the European Left, and the bitter irony for sympathetic labour historians that the emergence of the women’s liberation movement coincided with an uptick of in some ways traditional labour militancy in the early 1970s.  

Willis’ observations picked up more broadly on a discussion of ‘networks and exchanges’. These two abstract nouns can assume an ambiguous, elusive quality. Tom Buchanan (Oxford Lifelong Learning) vividly particularised them through a series of telling case studies of the networks which helped to sustain Harold Wilson over three decades at the apex of British politics. These relationships built at a boys’ grammar school, at Jesus College, Oxford, through work at the Board of Trade, amongst British industrialists, or with civil society, were, Buchanan argued, an indispensable resource for this protean politician. One wonders about the implications for current and future Labour Party cadres forged in a historically particular mode of formation often without strong links to what remains of the organised labour movement. 

Buchanan and Andrews have spent their lives as historians teaching in adult education, which in England has owed much to the organised labour movement and trade unions in particular. Katrina Navickas (Worcester, Oxford) underscored the challenging, even existential, moment facing adult education today. This was in counterpoint to how E P Thompson’s ‘geography’—he wrote, thought, and taught, in and around the West Riding of Yorkshire, where ‘the scars of class struggle’ were ‘visible in the landscape’—shaped the writing of The Making of the English Working Class. Navickas reminded us that 2026 has been by some measures the worst year for redundancies in the humanities in higher education in the UK, against a broader backdrop where adult education of the sort in which Thompson et al worked reduced to a handful of pockets. Navickas’ paper nevertheless tackled head on the question of the future of ‘History and Labour Politics.’ She reminded us that, as earlier waves of retrenchment and consolidation in higher education closed sociology departments, sociologists influenced by Thompson, such as Doreen Massey and David Featherstone, had relocated to geography. Nacivkas suggested that an awareness of moral ecologies as much as moral economies informed the writing which carried forward a Thompsonian project into the twenty-first century, singling out for Ewan Gibbs’ recent study of The Unmaking of the British Working Class.  

This conference on ‘History and Labour Politics’ marked a chance to reflect on not only the tradition of politically committed Anglophone labour history writing but on the work of the TORCH Labour Network itself. It was particularly encouraging that many Master’s, and some undergraduate, students from Oxford were in attendance, creating space for an exchange between generations, and suggesting the death of social history has been greatly exaggerated. (Navickas in particular pushed back strongly and with good reason on this suggestion.) For future and early careers historians, the conference was a reminder that labour history writing, even that which emerged from the CP Historians Group, is a richer and more eclectic body of work than the output of a handful of brilliant historians. The work by an earlier generation of Communist ancient historians and Past and Present, to which Kevin Morgan drew our attention, notably challenges the emphasis on national histories and periodisation which to some extent characterised writing by Hill and Thompson. There were reminders also of a national but non-Communist historical tradition that in some cases preceded the postwar Historians group: of Annie Besant, of Margaret (as well as G. D. H.) Cole, of Barbara Hammond, and of Beatrice Webb (to take four examples offered by Mulholland).