The British general strike of 1926 in its global and temporal contexts

Historians routinely put the 1926 British General Strike into a British historical context stretching back to the First World War and before. More rarely historians look forward to the consequences of the Strike and to how it has been remembered. This article puts the British Strike into an international context and considers its consequences and the memory of it into the twenty-first century. To do this it examines two databases: the Global Nonviolent Action Database of events and the Times Digital Archive of newspaper reports. Data from these sources enables us to show that the Strike occurred very late in the post-war era and to ask if it was also the last General Strike to occur in the UK as has been widely assumed. We draw attention to the numerous large-scale one-day stoppages in Britain in the late 1960s early 1970s and their echoes in the twenty-first century, and to the General Strike by the Ulster Workers’ Council in 1974. We conclude that while it was indeed very late the 1926 General Strike was by no means the last.