It is a well-established fact that foreign immigrants and visitors played a major role in the emergence of American anarchism. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, European-born artisans and peasants – Germans and Czechs, Italians and Spaniards, Russians and Jews – constituted the mass base of the movement, while its intellectual leadership included well-known speakers and writers from diverse countries, who came either as permanent settlers or on extended lecture tours.

In 1852, when the medical discoverer of alcoholism, Magnus Huss, was being honoured by the Académie française, a spokesman for the Académie wrote that “France has many drunkards, but happily, no alcoholics.” Sixty years later, on the eve of World War I, if one is to believe the reports of parliamentary commissions, economists, hygienists and social reformers, France had few drunks but a plethora of alcoholics, from the Breton peasant who fed calvados to his children to the worker of Paris and the Midi who had abandoned wine, that “natural and hygienic drink”, for the evils of mass-produced industrial alcohol, especially absinthe. By 1914, alcoholism was considered one of the three grands fléaux, or great plagues, that had struck France in the late nineteenth century, and it was blamed for all the ills of society, from a rising rate of criminality, suicide and mental illness to depopulation, revolutionary worker movements and even feminism. Alcoholism was, therefore, not just an individual misfortune, but a national tragedy. It had become, in the words of Clemenceau, “the whole social problem” and as such required the mobilized forces of the country to conquer it.

On a superficial inspection, miners' unionism in the Forest of Dean between 1871 and 1886 does not appear to have been atypical of miners' unionism in general in Britain in that period: neither in the fluctuations in its strength nor in its policies. Like the unions in most other coal districts, that in Dean flourished in the economic boom of the early 1870's, fell into weakness after 1875 and then revived in the early 1880's. In each of those phases the policies of the Dean miners were much like those of other miners. They demanded increases in wages, resisted reductions in wages, insisted upon the installation of weighing machines at pit bank, and sought to have winding hours reduced. Demands for the introduction of a sliding scale, to govern the movement of hewing rates in relation to coal prices, and for the establishment of conciliation and arbitration machinery, were common to many miners' unions at both local and national level. With those demands went the common rhetoric of the identity of interests of capital and labour. All this is the familiar content of that moderate, cautious, market-conscious approach to dealings with the masters which dominated miners' organisations for most of the second half of the century.

The search for the origins of government intervention in the nation's economic life has long interested historians of Victorian Britain. Indeed, in recent years it has given rise to an extended and enthusiastic controversy. This debate is so well known and has been so often summarised that it is only necessary to observe here that the core of the argument has been about whether government growth was generated more by ideology (Benthamism) or force of circumstances (Professor MacDonagh's “intolerable situation”). There is, however, consensus on several other points, namely, that the mid nineteenth century was not the “golden age” of laissez-faire that Dicey supposed and that government inspection was crucially important as the agency of state intervention.