One of the success stories of twentieth century historiography, Labour History has reputedly been on a downward trajectory for the past 25 years, mirroring the oft-commented demise of organised labour in 'old' industrial societies such as the UK and Germany. However, despite a great number of academic obituaries, labour history as a field of research is actually thriving.
Various recent theoretical approaches and conceptual 'turns' have reinvigorated historians' interest in work and working people. Established themes of labour history are frequently covered in studies which do not sport the discipline's label and whose authors would not brand themselves labour historians.
While the plurality of approaches and subjects greatly enhances labour history's intellectual appeal and reintegrates the field into larger historiographical debates, the discipline is losing both material and institutional coherence. As a result, traditional, yet essential research on trade union organisation, biographies, etc.
Three decades later the sense of crisis has assumed the shape of a protracted obituary. Rarely has a discipline been buried so often and with such vigour as has labour history. The number of books and articles announcing the end of labour, the waning days of labour history or indeed both, is legion. So are labour historians the belated winners in a game of 'deindustrialisation' in which the precarious and the unemployed, the dwindling trade unions and diminished, hapless social democrats easily outnumber the few significant shareholders and their eponymous values?
The number of articles, monographs, and edited volumes whose titles sound like funeral marches would suggest that this is the case โ at first sight. When the Society for the Study of Labour History , in , inquired if there was "a future for labour history", the answers were rather uniformly in the affirmative.
