Colliers Across the Sea

by John H. M. Laslett

2000 · University of Illinois Press

This masterful study charts both the common ground and the telling differences in development between two widely separated coal mining communities: one in Lanarkshire, in the Clyde valley of southwest Scotland, the other in northern Illinois, which became a prime destination for Lanarkshire colliers seeking a better life in the New World in the years following the Civil War. Challenging the prevailing exceptionalist paradigm of labor history, Laslett provides a thorough explanation of the American and Scottish miners' divergent approaches to collectivist solutions. He traces the progressive heightening of militancy and the rise of industrial unionism on both sides of the Atlantic as the coal mines became increasingly mechanized and as the interests of miners and mine-owners divided along class lines. Drawing on a profound knowledge of both communities, Laslett demonstrates that, with the exception of electoral politics, the process of class formation in Lanarkshire and northern Illinois was very much the same.

The Anatomy of Scottish Capital

by John Scott, Michael Hughes

2021 · Routledge

Originally published in 1980, this book gives a concrete description of the development of Scottish companies and Scottish capital through the 20th Century, based on empirical study. The study begins with the major companies of 1904-5 and examines their history and subsequent development. The top companies in a number of periods are also examined and the study concludes with an investigation of the major companies of 1973-4 and their response to the (then) recent oil developments. The book uses both detailed company histories and broad historical interpretations as sources drawing the data together into chronologically ordered sections. Its focus is on the companies and people which make up the system of Scottish capital, seen as a relatively distinct system with its own characteristics and its own pattern of development within the British system.