High unemployment has been one of the most disturbing features of the
economy of the 1980s. For a precedent, one must look to the interwar
period and in particular to the Great Depression of the 1930s. It
follows that recent years have been marked by a resurgence of interest
amongst academics in interwar unemployment. The debate has been
contentious. There is nothing like the analysis of a period which
recorded rates of un- employment approaching 25 per cent to highlight
the differences between competing schools of thought on the operation of
labour markets. Along with historians, economists whose objective is to
better understand the causes, character and consequences of contemporary
unemployment and sociologists seeking to understand contemporary
society's perceptions and responses to joblessness have devoted
increasing attention to this his- torical episode. Like many issues in
economic history, this one can be approached in a variety of ways using
different theoretical approaches, tools of analysis and levels of
disaggregation. Much of the recent literature on the func- tioning of
labour markets in the Depression has been macroeconomic in nature and
has been limited to individual countries. Debates from the period itself
have been revived and new questions stimulated by modern research have
been opened. Many such studies have been narrowly fo- cused and have
failed to take into account the array of historical evidence collected
and analj. sed by contemporaries or reconstructed and re-inter- preted
by historians.
