Matt Perry – författare

Prisoners of Want examines the experience of the unemployed and their protests in France in the interwar years. Little has been written on the experience of unemployment in France despite the wealth of material - social and medical investigations, government reports, novels, memoirs and newspapers - that can be used to reconstruct the representation and reality of the experience. Assessing the impact of unemployed protest upon the authorities (in terms of policy and the longer term development of the welfare state) this book places the role of the unemployed in the wider context of European social movements in the 1930s, as well as considering the significance of unemployed protests upon the French collective memory. The part played by the French Communist Party in the creation and leadership of the movements of the unemployed, and the range of activities these movements undertook, is also explored. From self-help to protests, hunger marches, demonstrations, relief work, school strikes, town hall occupations and riots; all were strategies that the unemployed utilised to draw attention to their plight. Crucial to explaining the characteristics of these movements is an understanding of the dynamics of protest and how different tactics were selected during their development, particularly the extent to which tactical shifts were related to the nature of the response of the authorities. By exploring these under-researched facets of political life, a much fuller understanding of French society during the turbulent interwar years is offered.

Unearthing new evidence to provide a richer understanding of her life, this study delves beyond the familiar image of Ellen Wilkinson on the Jarrow Crusade. From a humble background, she ascended to the rank of minister in the 1945 Labour government. Yet she was much more than a conventional Labour politician. She wrote journalism, political theory and novels. She was both a socialist and a feminist; at times, she described herself as a revolutionary. She experienced Soviet Russia, the Indian civil disobedience campaign, the Spanish Civil War and the Third Reich. This study deploys transnational and social movement theory perspectives to grapple with the complex itinerary of her ideas. Interest in Wilkinson remains strong among academic and non-academic audiences alike. This is in part because her principal concerns – working-class representation, the status of women, capitalist crisis, war, anti-fascism – remain central to contentious politics today.

Unearthing new evidence to provide a richer understanding of her life, this study, now available in paperback, delves beyond the familiar image of Ellen Wilkinson on the Jarrow Crusade. From a humble background, she ascended to the rank of minister in the 1945 Labour government. Yet she was much more than a conventional Labour politician. She wrote journalism, political theory and novels. She was both a socialist and a feminist; at times, she described herself as a revolutionary. She experienced Soviet Russia, the Indian civil disobedience campaign, the Spanish Civil War and the Third Reich. This study deploys transnational and social movement theory perspectives to grapple with the complex itinerary of her ideas. Interest in Wilkinson remains strong among academic and non-academic audiences alike. This is in part because her principal concerns – working-class representation, the status of women, capitalist crisis, war, anti-fascism – remain central to contentious politics today.

Between the world wars, unemployment spread throughout the industrialised world like a disease. In Bread and Work, Matt Perry places this global unemployment crisis in its proper international context. Focusing on Britain, Europe and the United States, he compares and contrasts popular attitudes and the government response toward unemployment.Looking beyond statistics and economic cycles, Perry investigates the human impact of unemployment. He uncovers the experience of being jobless from the perspective of those who lived through it, their employers and their communities. He uses oral history, memoirs, literary accounts, and newspaper articles to reveal the reality of unemployment.Perry argues that the scale of the crisis has been minimised by historians who have tended to emphasise that prolonged unemployment was the problem of the distressed fringe. Finally, Perry argues that the lessons of the 1930s have direct relevance today since the structural problems of industrial capitalism remain inherent.

Prisoners of Want examines the experience of the unemployed and their protests in France in the interwar years. Little has been written on the experience of unemployment in France despite the wealth of material - social and medical investigations, government reports, novels, memoirs and newspapers - that can be used to reconstruct the representation and reality of the experience. Assessing the impact of unemployed protest upon the authorities (in terms of policy and the longer term development of the welfare state) this book places the role of the unemployed in the wider context of European social movements in the 1930s, as well as considering the significance of unemployed protests upon the French collective memory. The part played by the French Communist Party in the creation and leadership of the movements of the unemployed, and the range of activities these movements undertook, is also explored. From self-help to protests, hunger marches, demonstrations, relief work, school strikes, town hall occupations and riots; all were strategies that the unemployed utilised to draw attention to their plight. Crucial to explaining the characteristics of these movements is an understanding of the dynamics of protest and how different tactics were selected during their development, particularly the extent to which tactical shifts were related to the nature of the response of the authorities. By exploring these under-researched facets of political life, a much fuller understanding of French society during the turbulent interwar years is offered.

Jarrow is best known as the town that gave its name to the Jarrow March of 1936. In November 1935 Jarrow chose Ellen Wilkinson as its Labour MP. A month later in a speech in parliament she challenged the government to address mass unemployment in the shipyards: `skilled fitters, men who have built destroyers and battleships and the finest passenger ships ... The years go on and nothing is done ... this is a desperately urgent matter… ’The Town That Was Murdered is her well-researched survey of Jarrow: local and labour history, the impact of poverty, the hateful misery of state relief, the history of shipbuilding, and the combined power of city and bank finance and shipbuilding magnates – in the UK and abroad – who drove local firms into bankruptcy and destroyed jobs. The book helped the drive for a Welfare State, and the Labour government of 1945. It is a historical document, but as finance looks to relocate investments, it still resonates today.

This book explores the eight-month wave of mutinies that struck the French infantry and navy in 1919. Based on official records and the testimony of dozens of participants, it is the first study to try to understand the world of the mutineers. Examining their words for the traces of sensory perceptions, emotions and thought processes, it reveals that the conventional understanding of the mutinies as the result of simple war-weariness and low morale is inadequate. In fact, an emotional gulf separated officers and the ranks, who simply did not speak the same language. The revolt entailed emotional sequences ending in a deep ambivalence and sense of despair or regret. Taking this into account, the book considers how mutineer memories persisted after the events in the face of official censorship, repression and the French Communist Party’s co-option of the mutiny.

This book explores the eight-month wave of mutinies that struck the French infantry and navy in 1919. Based on official records and the testimony of dozens of participants, it is the first study to try to understand the world of the mutineers. Examining their words for the traces of sensory perceptions, emotions and thought processes, it reveals that the conventional understanding of the mutinies as the result of simple war-weariness and low morale is inadequate. In fact, an emotional gulf separated officers and the ranks, who simply did not speak the same language. The revolt entailed emotional sequences ending in a deep ambivalence and sense of despair or regret. Taking this into account, the book considers how mutineer memories persisted after the events in the face of official censorship, repression and the French Communist Party’s co-option of the mutiny.

This book scrutinizes the events of 1919 from below: the global underside of the Wilsonian moment. During 1919 the Great Powers redrew the map of the world with the Treaties of Paris and established the League of Nations intending to prevent future war. Yet what is often missed is that 1919 was a complex threshold between war and peace contested on a global scale. This process began prior to war’s end with mutinies, labour and consumer unrest, colonial revolt but reached a high point in 1919. Most obviously, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 continued into 1919 which signalled a decisive year for the Bolshevik regime. While the leaders of the Great Powers famously drew up new states in their Parisian hotel rooms, state formation also had a popular dynamic. The Irish Republic was declared. Afghanistan gained independence. Labour unrest was widespread. This year witnessed the emergence of anti-colonial insurgency and movements across Europe’s colonies; in metropolitan centres of Empire, race riots took place in the UK and during the ‘red summer’ in the US, anti-colonial movements, as well as an important moment of political enfranchisement for women but their expulsion from the wartime labour force. 1919 has many legacies: the first Arab spring, with the awakening of nationalism in the Wilsonian and Bolshevik context; the moment (as a consequence of Jallianwala Bagh) that Britain definitively lost its moral claim to India; the definitive announcement of Black presence in the UK; the great reversal of women’s participation in the skilled occupations; the first Fascist movement was founded.

This book scrutinizes the events of 1919 from below: the global underside of the Wilsonian moment. During 1919 the Great Powers redrew the map of the world with the Treaties of Paris and established the League of Nations intending to prevent future war. Yet what is often missed is that 1919 was a complex threshold between war and peace contested on a global scale. This process began prior to war’s end with mutinies, labour and consumer unrest, colonial revolt but reached a high point in 1919. Most obviously, the Russian Revolutions of 1917 continued into 1919 which signalled a decisive year for the Bolshevik regime. While the leaders of the Great Powers famously drew up new states in their Parisian hotel rooms, state formation also had a popular dynamic. The Irish Republic was declared. Afghanistan gained independence. Labour unrest was widespread. This year witnessed the emergence of anti-colonial insurgency and movements across Europe’s colonies; in metropolitan centres of Empire, race riots took place in the UK and during the ‘red summer’ in the US, anti-colonial movements, as well as an important moment of political enfranchisement for women but their expulsion from the wartime labour force. 1919 has many legacies: the first Arab spring, with the awakening of nationalism in the Wilsonian and Bolshevik context; the moment (as a consequence of Jallianwala Bagh) that Britain definitively lost its moral claim to India; the definitive announcement of Black presence in the UK; the great reversal of women’s participation in the skilled occupations; the first Fascist movement was founded.