ABSTRACT
The rise of industrial capitalism in Britain, with all its crises and difficulties, is reflected, with an exaggerated effect, in the growth of the miners’ Trade Union movement. The progress of the mining industry has naturally been the progress of capitalist society. The pariah was bound to mining; for generations afterwards the miner was regarded as a pariah. The development of factory production, based on steam, and the application of steam to all forms of locomotion, gave a new stimulus to the development of mining. The establishment of the mining industry in Britain was associated with a brutality and disregard for human life usually associated with the slavery of the nineteenth century Congo. Explosions were regarded as the normal and inevitable consequence of mining. There in the narrow valleys, in the comparatively isolated mining communities, are spun those ties which bind the miners to their organisation to which they give almost a blind unquestioning loyalty.
