ABSTRACT
The Webbs were the founders of British Labour Historiography. Until their publications of the 1890s British labour history had been left to foreign observers or else to chroniclers, sometimes quite astute, of specific moments, movements or institutions. David Goodway supported this view and pointed to the differences between the manuscript of the History of Trade Unionism and the final version. The importance for the Webbs of the intellectual and social developments of the 1880s and 1890s received considerable attention. The influence on the Webbs of Comte and Spencer, the relationship between their approach and the general shift in interest from economics to sociology in the late Victorian period were all mentioned. The portrait of the miners as a group of insufficiently integrated' workers, who felt completely lost, seems to be a superficial one. Jonathan Zeitlin argued that the unionisation of the car industry in Britain and especially in the USA required state support.
