Conducts research and collects data on the global history of labour, workers, and labour relations

Browse website

Sailor's Friend
The plight of the ordinary seaman commanded much attention from the British public in the mid-1870s. Some 20 percent of the nation's seamen died at sea, and in some passages of the coal trade, the... [Item of the Day]
March of the Blanketeers
Protest marches of the unemployed are generally associated with the 1920s and 1930s. An early forerunner is the March of the Blanketeers on 10 March 1817. Several thousand unemployed or underemployed... [Item of the Day]
Peasant's Uprising
The English peasant's uprising of 1381 began in response to a tax levy, but was not only about money. It involved the right to move freely as well: the peasants also demanded that each labourer may... [Item of the Day]
Jamaican Immigrants
On 22 June 1947, the SS Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, UK, with some 500 adventurist Jamaican immigrants on board. Most of them were skilled or semi-skilled craftsmen and found work within weeks... [Item of the Day]
Poorly Clothed
'I am very bad in my bed Cloths which you know is very bad this weather and... I have no Shoes to Come in I assure you with all the indeavours of my wife we are very poorly off both in bed and... [Item of the Day]
Starving Strikers
By the late nineteenth century, the hungry increasingly found themselves constructed as objects of compassion. In an IRSH research article (56, 2011) Andy Croll argues that there were real limits to... [Item of the Day]
Slave Ship "Zong"
In the days following 29 November 1781, the crew of the British slave ship "Zong" massacred around 130 enslaved Africans by throwing them into the sea to drown. The slave-trading syndicate had taken... [Item of the Day]
Little Moscow in Wales
Miners from South Wales marched to London to draw atttention to 'the chronic destitution affecting unemployed and employed miners arising out of the failure of private enterprise in the mining... [Item of the Day]
Labour Songs
God Save the Queen was one of twenty songs sung by the workers who had come to listen to the English labour leader Tom Mann on 14 January 1898. Tom Mann (1856-1941) had established the Independent... [Item of the Day]
K9 Work
The method was copied from the Belgian milkman with his dog cart. According to the news magazine, dogs were an integral part of modern warfare. The German Army included 6,000 German shepherds. The... [Item of the Day]

Pages