Labour United and Divided from the 1830s to the Present ed. by Emmanuelle Avril and Yann Béliard

Conference proceedings do not always make the best publications and at times are only broadly organized by theme. The time that elapses between the original gathering and the finished product can also frustrate conclusions as new perspectives or developments appear. The divisions that have recently dogged the British Labour Party form the raison d’être for this volume even as the collapse of the party’s performance in the December 2019 election in some ways undermines it. In an excellent introduction surveying some two centuries of divisions in the British (though mainly English) labor movement, the editors are at pains to stress the book’s avoidance of teleology while fully embracing its genesis in the debate over Corbynism. In many of the chapters in this volume, particularly those concerned with the Labour Party, there is a recurrent discussion of left-wing challenges to the notion...