ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the growth of cities in nineteenth-century Britain, and its impact on contemporary observers. It considers the ways in which non-Marxist historians have studied aspects of this growth, particularly state intervention in the urban, and use this to establish a distinction between different forms of relation between theory and empirical data in history. The chapter presents the two approaches to the analysis of urban politics – British Marxist social history and French Marxist urban sociology. It also considers the labour policy of the Borough of West Ham in east London during the period 1886 to 1914, and the political conflicts around this policy area, which includes policy relating to unemployment and municipal employment. The chapter argues that in many ways policy on municipal labour and unemployment was central to the concerns of the Labour Group in West Ham, and of British working-class politics in general at this time.
