Evolution and Activities of the British Labor Party (1893-1931): A Historiography

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the historiography of the British Labour Party in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The author tries to systematize an array of scientific literature on this theme based on the problem-chronological approach. The works were divided into four main groups: 1) the works of theorists and the Labour movement activists, 2) the studies devoted to the general history of the formation and activities of the Labour Party of this period, 3) the works devoted to the history of the relationship between church organizations and British Labour Party 4) Ukrainian researches in the field of British Labour history. The author proposes to outline 3 chronological periods in the scientific study of the history of the British Labour Party when a great amount of works has appeared. As we can see, the first period was 1930-1940’s, when the vast amount of the works of prominent leaders and active members of the Labour movement and the Labour Party were published. The second period, as we can outline, was in the 1950’s – the beginning of the 1960’s when the Labour Party lost its positions in the political sphere of Great Britain. And the third period is nowadays when in the early 2000’s Labour Party’s 100th anniversary was celebrated and besides it, the Party achieved the greatest success - it won parliamentary election three times in a row (1997, 2001 and 2005). The author concluded that the history of the British labor movement of the second half of the 19th – the first third of the 20th centuries and the theme of the party struggle for the electorate among the workers still needed to be reconsidered and re-evaluated. Although there are many works devoted to the British Labour Party history, the reasons for its strengthening, the factors of its rapid growth at the beginning of the 20th century, the causes and consequences of the crisis of 1931, etc. still remain debatable. Therefore, it is not a quiet time to talk about the completeness of the research topic. The author also noted that despite the number of historical researches of modern Ukrainian scholars, Ukrainian British studies still lack investigations with the analysis of the organizational structure of the British Labour party and its leadership.

Keywords

• british labour party
• historiography
• political narrative
• british studies
• great britain