As to be expected, several monographs on the British coal industry have appeared around the time of the 40th anniversary of the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike. These add to an already voluminous body of literature relating to an industry and communities whose allure to historians, social scientists, artists, documentary makers, and political commentators has barely abated, either throughout the period of deep coal mining or since the last coalmine closed in 2015. Building on his own extensive historical scholarship, Arnold’s offering—The British Miner in the Age of De-Industrialization—takes a different approach to the “myth-busting” agenda characteristic of recent histories, instead focusing directly on the myth-making and sociocultural imaginaries of miners and the coal industry from 1967 to 1997.

The British miner has been ascribed with myriad contested meanings particularized toward certain political and social aims. Understandably, then, some see it as their mission to provide “the truth” about the mining past, especially considering how emotive and personal the topic is to many of those researching the fractious end of coalmining. Rather than seeking to dispel or correct symbolic productions of miners, Arnold engages with the much more complex and, I would argue, important task of disentangling “the relationship between broader ideas and self-images,” setting out to examine the “interaction between social imaginaries and miners’ subjectivities in a period of accelerated socio-economic change” (3).

Arnold rigorously traces the fluctuating production of the miner as a symbolic and embodied figure in political and cultural discourses, drawing on analysis of an extensive and diverse range of sources spanning government statistics, union records, political biographies, cultural material, and sociological texts. The “miner” shifts through Arnold’s chronological narrative from that of valorized, exoticized, and fetishized “archetypal proletarian” and member of the labor aristocracy and vanguard of working-class militancy to, simultaneously, disdained and feared, as threat to both progress and the nation … as the “enemy within.” Charting these productions into the 1990s and the coal industry’s terminal decline, the “bifurcated image of the miner as hero and villain,” as Arnold puts it, “gave way to conceptualization of the miner as victim” (236). Subsequently, and into the recent past, “the miner came to embody the plight of the industrial worker in a de-industrializing world” (238).

Through focusing on how the figure of the miner was evoked and invoked in wider imaginaries, and critiquing the purposes these elicitations served, Arnold contributes to our wider understandings of British society in a time of transition with its attendant contesting ideas of identity and direction. In particular, looking closely through a conjunctural lens at the experience of coal in the period 1967–1981 works to “destabilize” dominant conceptualizations of deindustrialization as being a linear, uninterrupted process from the 1960s, albeit with periods of acceleration and deceleration. Based on manpower statistics, earnings, and policy analysis, as well as how miners and their union, The National Union of Mineworkers, interpreted their position in the political economy, Arnold argues that the coal industry was not coterminous with manufacturing as industrial employment. The coal industry, rather, experienced more cyclical processes of adjustment where shifts to domestic markets, namely electricity generation, had labor market effects in terms of increasing or stabilizing employment and symbolic and social effects whereby the industry and miners were imbued with value and importance. The miners and the NUM were instrumental in both bringing about this revaluation and, crucially, embodying it in their collective and individual identities and image as workers and citizens.

I wonder if the self-image of the miner in everyday, maybe ambivalent or mundane, life could not be drawn into the analyses more throughout the text. Arnold understandably confines description to the available archival material and largely veers away from the traditions of Oral History in such studies that have elicited pertinent material. Regardless, most of the data generated by “ordinary” miners is by Trade Union officials, which partially undermines the analyses of the interaction between miners’ subjectivities and wider symbolic productions. Relatedly, there is little space for nuanced discussion of other intersecting identifications and subjectivities beyond that of worker and place, for example, how conceptions of masculinity filtered into and out of self-images of miner identity.

An indication of why these framings are peripheralized is provided in the conclusion where Arnold states that the study “has tried to remain wary of the dangers of presentism” (285) he locates in current trends in Labor History that seek to approach the past through the debates of the present, especially those that emphasize the intersectionality of class experience in the context of far-right mobilization of masculinized “white working-class” imaginaries. However, theorizing how multiple subjectivities contributed to miners’ self-image could be done in such a way as to actually emphasize the “otherness of the past” (286).

More developed theorization could also work to enrich the effectiveness of Arnold’s theoretical apparatus. Specifically, Arnold’s consideration of the “structures of feeling” within and surrounding the mining industry are somewhat limited to identifying prevailing political affective conditions. I propose that a more sustained theorization of how “structures of feeling” surfaced through interwoven identities and socialities and how these may have prompted miners into taking certain action, or not (a central tenet of Williams’ theory) would further destabilize our understandings of the temporalities and imaginaries of miners and de-industrialization more widely.

These critiques emerge from my reading as a social scientist, and partially from epistemologies of which Arnold perhaps pre-emptively rejects or, at least, is skeptical of. Notwithstanding them, Arnold provides a deeply empirical, nuanced, and authoritatively rendered account of the miners’ role in Britain’s contemporary history that will satisfy those inclined toward historical research that fastidiously attempts to stay true to the source material, synthesizing original analyses of a substantial amount of evidence from varied sources into a highly readable and engaging account.