The booming coal industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was paramount in the rise of modern south Wales, and the miners played a key role in shaping the region’s economics, politics, and society. This book explores the history of Welsh mining between 1964 and 1985, covering the challenges the miners faced, including the concerted effort to diminish the coal industry under the Wilson government, the growth of miners’ resistance, and the eventual defeat of the epic strike of 1984-5. The first full-length academic study of the miners and their union in the later twentieth century,
The South Wales Miners
will appeal to anyone interested in this significant group of workers within the British labor force.