This paper reviews the historiography of the British coal industry from the early nineteenth century to the twenty-first. It was written to introduce the three economy volumes of the documentary collection edited by John Benson Coal in Victorian Britain (6 vols., Pickering and Chatto, London,...

On the 7 September troops confronted a crowd at Ackton Hall Colliery at Featherstone, near Pontefract, in the West Riding of Yorkshire during a prolonged attempt to resist a lock-out designed to enforce a cut in wages. At about 9.15 p.m. the magistrate, Bernard Hartley, ordered the troops to...