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 Complex Networks
Principles, Methods and Applications

Networks constitute the backbone of complex systems, from the human brain to computer
communications, transport infrastructures to online social systems, metabolic reactions
to financial markets. Characterising their structure improves our understanding of the
physical, biological, economic and social phenomena that shape our world.
Rigorous and thorough, this textbook presents a detailed overview of the new theory
and methods of network science. Covering algorithms for graph exploration, node ranking
and network generation, among the others, the book allows students to experiment with
network models and real-world data sets, providing them with a deep understanding of the
basics of network theory and its practical applications. Systems of growing complexity are
examined in detail, challenging students to increase their level of skill. An engaging pre-
sentation of the important principles of network science makes this the perfect reference for
researchers and undergraduate and graduate students in physics, mathematics, engineering,
biology, neuroscience and social sciences.

Vito Latora is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Chair of Complex Systems at Queen
Mary University of London. Noted for his research in statistical physics and in complex
networks, his current interests include time-varying and multiplex networks, and their
applications to socio-economic systems and to the human brain.
Vincenzo Nicosia is Lecturer in Networks and Data Analysis at the School of Mathematical
Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. His research spans several aspects of net-
work structure and dynamics, and his recent interests include multi-layer networks and
their applications to big data modelling.
Giovanni Russo is Professor of Numerical Analysis in the Department of Mathematics and
Computer Science at the University of Catania, Italy, focusing on numerical methods
for partial differential equations, with particular application to hyperbolic and kinetic
problems.
 Complex Networks
Principles, Methods and Applications

VITO LATOR A
Queen Mary University of London

VINCENZO NICOSIA
Queen Mary University of London

GIOVANNI RUSSO
University of Catania, Italy
 University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA
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Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107103184
DOI: 10.1017/9781316216002
© Vito Latora, Vincenzo Nicosia and Giovanni Russo 2017
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2017
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Latora, Vito, author. | Nicosia, Vincenzo, author. | Russo, Giovanni, author.
Title: Complex networks : principles, methods and applications / Vito Latora,
Queen Mary University of London, Vincenzo Nicosia, Queen Mary University
of London, Giovanni Russo, Università degli Studi di Catania, Italy.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University
Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026029 | ISBN 9781107103184 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Network analysis (Planning)
Classification: LCC T57.85 .L36 2017 | DDC 003/.72–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026029
ISBN 978-1-107-10318-4 Hardback
Additional resources for this publication at www.cambridge.org/9781107103184.
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
To Giusi, Francesca and Alessandra
 Contents

Preface page xi
Introduction xii
The Backbone of a Complex System xii
Complex Networks Are All Around Us xiv
Why Study Complex Networks? xv
Overview of the Book xvii
Acknowledgements xx

1 Graphs and Graph Theory 1

1.1 What Is a Graph? 1
1.2 Directed, Weighted and Bipartite Graphs 9
1.3 Basic Definitions 13
1.4 Trees 17
1.5 Graph Theory and the Bridges of Königsberg 19
1.6 How to Represent a Graph 23
1.7 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 28
Problems 28

2 Centrality Measures 31
2.1 The Importance of Being Central 31
2.2 Connected Graphs and Irreducible Matrices 34
2.3 Degree and Eigenvector Centrality 39
2.4 Measures Based on Shortest Paths 47
2.5 Movie Actors 56
2.6 Group Centrality 62
2.7 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 64
Problems 65

3 Random Graphs 69
3.1 Erdős and Rényi (ER) Models 69
3.2 Degree Distribution 76
3.3 Trees, Cycles and Complete Subgraphs 79
3.4 Giant Connected Component 84
3.5 Scientific Collaboration Networks 90
3.6 Characteristic Path Length 94
vii
viii Contents

3.7 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 103

Problems 104

4 Small-World Networks 107

4.1 Six Degrees of Separation 107
4.2 The Brain of a Worm 112
4.3 Clustering Coefficient 116
4.4 The Watts–Strogatz (WS) Model 127
4.5 Variations to the Theme 135
4.6 Navigating Small-World Networks 144
4.7 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 148
Problems 148

5 Generalised Random Graphs 151

5.1 The World Wide Web 151
5.2 Power-Law Degree Distributions 161
5.3 The Configuration Model 171
5.4 Random Graphs with Arbitrary Degree Distribution 178
5.5 Scale-Free Random Graphs 184
5.6 Probability Generating Functions 188
5.7 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 202
Problems 204

6 Models of Growing Graphs 206

6.1 Citation Networks and the Linear Preferential Attachment 206
6.2 The Barabási–Albert (BA) Model 215
6.3 The Importance of Being Preferential and Linear 224
6.4 Variations to the Theme 230
6.5 Can Latecomers Make It? The Fitness Model 241
6.6 Optimisation Models 248
6.7 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 252
Problems 253

7 Degree Correlations 257

7.1 The Internet and Other Correlated Networks 257
7.2 Dealing with Correlated Networks 262
7.3 Assortative and Disassortative Networks 268
7.4 Newman’s Correlation Coefficient 275
7.5 Models of Networks with Degree–Degree Correlations 285
7.6 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 290
Problems 291

8 Cycles and Motifs 294

8.1 Counting Cycles 294
8.2 Cycles in Scale-Free Networks 303
8.3 Spatial Networks of Urban Streets 307
ix Contents

8.4 Transcription Regulation Networks 316

8.5 Motif Analysis 324
8.6 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 329
Problems 330

9 Community Structure 332

9.1 Zachary’s Karate Club 332
9.2 The Spectral Bisection Method 336
9.3 Hierarchical Clustering 342
9.4 The Girvan–Newman Method 349
9.5 Computer Generated Benchmarks 354
9.6 The Modularity 357
9.7 A Local Method 365
9.8 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 369
Problems 371

10 Weighted Networks 374

10.1 Tuning the Interactions 374
10.2 Basic Measures 381
10.3 Motifs and Communities 387
10.4 Growing Weighted Networks 393
10.5 Networks of Stocks in a Financial Market 401
10.6 What We Have Learned and Further Readings 407
Problems 408

Appendices 410
A.1 Problems, Algorithms and Time Complexity 410
A.2 A Simple Introduction to Computational Complexity 420
A.3 Elementary Data Structures 425
A.4 Basic Operations with Sparse Matrices 440
A.5 Eigenvalue and Eigenvector Computation 444
A.6 Computation of Shortest Paths 452
A.7 Computation of Node Betweenness 462
A.8 Component Analysis 467
A.9 Random Sampling 474
A.10 Erdős and Rényi Random Graph Models 485
A.11 The Watts–Strogatz Small-World Model 489
A.12 The Configuration Model 492
A.13 Growing Unweighted Graphs 499
A.14 Random Graphs with Degree–Degree Correlations 506
A.15 Johnson’s Algorithm to Enumerate Cycles 508
A.16 Motifs Analysis 511
A.17 Girvan–Newman Algorithm 515
A.18 Greedy Modularity Optimisation 519
A.19 Label Propagation 524
x Contents

A.20 Kruskal’s Algorithm for Minimum Spanning Tree 528

A.21 Models for Weighted Networks 531
List of Programs 533

References 535
Author Index 550
Index 552
 Preface

Social systems, the human brain, the Internet and the World Wide Web are all examples
of complex networks, i.e. systems composed of a large number of units interconnected
through highly non-trivial patterns of interactions. This book is an introduction to the beau-
tiful and multidisciplinary world of complex networks. The readers of the book will be
exposed to the fundamental principles, methods and applications of a novel discipline: net-
work science. They will learn how to characterise the architecture of a network and model
its growth, and will uncover the principles common to networks from different fields.
The book covers a large variety of topics including elements of graph theory, social
networks and centrality measures, random graphs, small-world and scale-free networks,
models of growing graphs and degree–degree correlations, as well as more advanced topics
such as motif analysis, community structure and weighted networks. Each chapter presents
its main ideas together with the related mathematical definitions, models and algorithms,
and makes extensive use of network data sets to explore these ideas.
The book contains several practical applications that range from determining the role of
an individual in a social network or the importance of a player in a football team, to iden-
tifying the sub-areas of a nervous systems or understanding correlations between stocks in
a financial market.
Thanks to its colloquial style, the extensive use of examples and the accompanying soft-
ware tools and network data sets, this book is the ideal university-level textbook for a
first module on complex networks. It can also be used as a comprehensive reference for
researchers in mathematics, physics, engineering, biology and social sciences, or as a his-
torical introduction to the main findings of one of the most active interdisciplinary research
fields of the moment.
This book is fundamentally on the structure of complex networks, and we hope it will
be followed soon by a second book on the different types of dynamical processes that can
take place over a complex network.
Vito Latora
Vincenzo Nicosia
Giovanni Russo

xi
 Introduction

The Backbone of a Complex System

Imagine you are invited to a party; you observe what happens in the room when the other
guests arrive. They start to talk in small groups, usually of two people, then the groups grow
in size, they split, merge again, change shape. Some of the people move from one group
to another. Some of them know each other already, while others are introduced by mutual
friends at the party. Suppose you are also able to track all of the guests and their movements
in space; their head and body gestures, the content of their discussions. Each person is
different from the others. Some are more lively and act as the centre of the social gathering:
they tell good stories, attract the attention of the others and lead the group conversation.
Other individuals are more shy: they stay in smaller groups and prefer to listen to the
others. It is also interesting to notice how different genders and ages vary between groups.
For instance, there may be groups which are mostly male, others which are mostly female,
and groups with a similar proportion of both men and women. The topic of each discussion
might even depend on the group composition. Then, when food and beverages arrive, the
people move towards the main table. They organise into more or less regular queues, so
that the shape of the newly formed groups is different. The individuals rearrange again into
new groups sitting at the various tables. Old friends, but also those who have just met at
the party, will tend to sit at the same tables. Then, discussions will start again during the
dinner, on the same topics as before, or on some new topics. After dinner, when the music
begins, we again observe a change in the shape and size of the groups, with the formation
of couples and the emergence of collective motion as everybody starts to dance.
The social system we have just considered is a typical example of what is known today
as a complex system [16, 44]. The study of complex systems is a new science, and so a
commonly accepted formal definition of a complex system is still missing. We can roughly
say that a complex system is a system made by a large number of single units (individuals,
components or agents) interacting in such a way that the behaviour of the system is not
a simple combination of the behaviours of the single units. In particular, some collective
behaviours emerge without the need for any central control. This is exactly what we have
observed by monitoring the evolution of our party with the formation of social groups, and
the emergence of discussions on some particular topics. This kind of behaviour is what we
find in human societies at various levels, where the interactions of many individuals give
rise to the emergence of civilisation, urban forms, cultures and economies. Analogously,
animal societies such as, for instance, ant colonies, accomplish a variety of different tasks,

xii
xiii Introduction

from nest maintenance to the organisation of food search, without the need for any central
control.
Let us consider another example of a complex system, certainly the most representative
and beautiful one: the human brain. With around 102 billion neurons, each connected by
synapses to several thousand other neurons, this is the most complicated organ in our body.
Neurons are cells which process and transmit information through electrochemical signals.
Although neurons are of different types and shapes, the “integrate-and-fire” mechanism
at the core of their dynamics is relatively simple. Each neuron receives synaptic signals,
which can be either excitatory or inhibitory, from other neurons. These signals are then
integrated and, provided the combined excitation received is larger than a certain threshold,
the neuron fires. This firing generates an electric signal, called an action potential, which
propagates through synapses to other neurons. Notwithstanding the extreme simplicity of
the interactions, the brain self-organises collective behaviours which are difficult to pre-
dict from our knowledge of the dynamics of its individual elements. From an avalanche of
simple integrate-and-fire interactions, the neurons of the brain are capable of organising a
large variety of wonderful emerging behaviours. For instance, sensory neurons coordinate
the response of the body to touch, light, sounds and other external stimuli. Motor neurons
are in charge of the body’s movement by controlling the contraction or relaxation of the
muscles. Neurons of the prefrontal cortex are responsible for reasoning and abstract think-
ing, while neurons of the limbic system are involved in processing social and emotional
information.
Over the years, the main focus of scientific research has been on the characteristics of the
individual components of a complex system and to understand the details of their interac-
tions. We can now say that we have learnt a lot about the different types of nerve cells and
the ways they communicate with each other through electrochemical signals. Analogously,
we know how the individuals of a social group communicate through both spoken and body
language, and the basic rules through which they learn from one another and form or match
their opinions. We also understand the basic mechanisms of interactions in social animals;
we know that, for example, ants produce chemicals, known as pheromones, through which
they communicate, organise their work and mark the location of food. However, there is
another very important, and in no way trivial, aspect of complex systems which has been
explored less. This has to do with the structure of the interactions among the units of a
complex system: which unit is connected to which others. For instance, if we look at the
connections between the neurons in the brain and construct a similar network whose nodes
are neurons and the links are the synapses which connect them, we find that such a net-
work has some special mathematical properties which are fundamental for the functioning
of the brain. For instance, it is always possible to move from one node to any other in a
small number of steps, and, particularly if the two nodes belong to the same brain area,
there are many alternative paths between them. Analogously, if we take snapshots of who
is talking to whom at our hypothetical party, we immediately see that the architecture of
the obtained networks, whose nodes represent individuals and links stand for interactions,
plays a crucial role in both the propagation of information and the emergence of collective
behaviours. Some sub-structures of a network propagate information faster than others;
this means that nodes occupying strategic positions will have better access to the resources
xiv Introduction

of the system. In practice, what also matters in a complex system, and it matters a lot, is
the backbone of the system, or, in other words, the architecture of the network of interac-
tions. It is precisely on these complex networks, i.e. on the networks of the various complex
systems that populate our world, that we will be focusing in this book.

Complex Networks Are All Around Us

Networks permeate all aspects of our life and constitute the backbone of our modern world.
To understand this, think for a moment about what you might do in a typical day. When
you get up early in the morning and turn on the light in your bedroom, you are connected
to the electrical power grid, a network whose nodes are either power stations or users,
while links are copper cables which transport electric current. Then you meet the people of
your family. They are part of your social network whose nodes are people and links stand
for kinship, friendship or acquaintance. When you take a shower and cook your breakfast
you are respectively using a water distribution network, whose nodes are water stations,
reservoirs, pumping stations and homes, and links are pipes, and a gas distribution network.
If you go to work by car you are moving in the street network of your city, whose nodes
are intersections and links are streets. If you take the underground then you make use of a
transportation network, whose nodes are the stations and links are route segments.
When you arrive at your office you turn on your laptop, whose internal circuits form a
complicated microscopic network of logic gates, and connect it to the Internet, a worldwide
network of computers and routers linked by physical or logical connections. Then you
check your emails, which belong to an email communication network, whose nodes are
people and links indicate email exchanges among them. When you meet a colleague, you
and your colleague form part of a collaboration network, in which an edge exists between
two persons if they have collaborated on the same project or coauthored a paper. Your
colleagues tell you that your last paper has got its first hundred citations. Have you ever
thought of the fact that your papers belong to a citation network, where the nodes represent
papers, and links are citations?
At lunchtime you read the news on the website of your preferred newspaper: in doing
this you access the World Wide Web, a huge global information network whose nodes are
webpages and edges are clickable hyperlinks between pages. You will almost surely then
check your Facebook account, a typical example of an online social network, then maybe
have a look at the daily trending topics on Twitter, an information network whose nodes
are people and links are the “following” relations.
Your working day proceeds quietly, as usual. Around 4:00pm you receive a phone call
from your friend John, and you immediately think about the phone call network, where
two individuals are connected by a link if they have exchanged a phone call. John invites
you and your family for a weekend at his cottage near the lake. Lakes are home to a
variety of fishes, insects and animals which are part of a food web network, whose links
indicate predation among different species. And while John tells you about the beauty of
his cottage, an image of a mountain lake gradually forms in your mind, and you can see a
xv Introduction

white waterfall cascading down a cliff, and a stream flowing quietly through a green valley.
There is no need to say that “lake”, “waterfall”, “white”, “stream”, “cliff”, “valley” and
“green” form a network of words associations, in which a link exists between two words
if these words are often associated with each other in our minds. Before leaving the office,
you book a flight to go to Prague for a conference. Obviously, also the air transportation
system is a network, whose nodes are airports and links are airline routes.
When you drive back home you feel a bit tired and you think of the various networks
in our body, from the network of blood vessels which transports blood to our organs to the
intricate set of relationships among genes and proteins which allow the perfect functioning
of the cells of our body. Examples of these genetic networks are the transcription regula-
tion networks in which the nodes are genes and links represent transcription regulation of
a gene by the transcription factor produced by another gene, protein interaction networks
whose nodes are protein and there is a link between two proteins if they bind together to
perform complex cellular functions, and metabolic networks where nodes are chemicals,
and links represent chemical reactions.
During dinner you hear on the news that the total export for your country has decreased
by 2.3% this year; the system of commercial relationships among countries can be seen
as a network, in which links indicate import/export activities. Then you watch a movie on
your sofa: you can construct an actor collaboration network where nodes represent movie
actors and links are formed if two actors have appeared in the same movie. Exhausted, you
go to bed and fall asleep while images of networks of all kinds still twist and dance in your
mind, which is, after all, the marvellous combination of the activity of billions of neurons
and trillions of synapses in your brain network. Yet another network.

Why Study Complex Networks?

In the late 1990s two research papers radically changed our view on complex systems,
moving the attention of the scientific community to the study of the architecture of a com-
plex system and creating an entire new research field known today as network science. The
first paper, authored by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz, was published in the journal
Nature in 1998 and was about small-world networks [311]. The second one, on scale-free
networks, appeared one year later in Science and was authored by Albert-László Barabási
and Réka Albert [19]. The two papers provided clear indications, from different angles,
that:

• the networks of real-world complex systems have non-trivial structures and are very
different from lattices or random graphs, which were instead the standard networks
commonly used in all the current models of a complex system.
• some structural properties are universal, i.e. are common to networks as diverse as those
of biological, social and man-made systems.
• the structure of the network plays a major role in the dynamics of a complex system and
characterises both the emergence and the properties of its collective behaviours.
xvi Introduction

Table 1 A list of the real-world complex networks that will be studied in this book. For each network, we
report the chapter of the book where the corresponding data set will be introduced and analysed.
Complex networks Nodes Links Chapter
Elisa’s kindergarten Children Friendships 1
Actor collaboration networks Movie actors Co-acting in a film 2
Co-authorship networks Scientists Co-authoring a paper 3
Citation networks Scientific papers Citations 6
Zachary’s karate club Club members Friendships 9
C. elegans neural network Neurons Synapses 4
Transcription regulation networks Genes Transcription regulation 8
World Wide Web Web pages Hyperlinks 5
Internet Routers Optical fibre cables 7
Urban street networks Street crossings Streets 8
Air transport network Airports Flights 10
Financial markets Stocks Time correlations 10

Both works were motivated by the empirical analysis of real-world systems. Four net-
works were introduced and studied in these two papers. Namely, the neural system of
a few-millimetres-long worm known as the C. elegans, a social network describing how
actors collaborate in movies, and two man-made networks: the US electrical power grid and
a sample of the World Wide Web. During the last decade, new technologies and increasing
computing power have made new data available and stimulated the exploration of several
other complex networks from the real world. A long series of papers has followed, with
the analysis of new and ever larger networks, and the introduction of novel measures and
models to characterise and reproduce the structure of these real-world systems. Table 1
shows only a small sample of the networks that have appeared in the literature, namely
those that will be explicitly studied in this book, together with the chapter where they
will be considered. Notice that the table includes different types of networks. Namely,
five networks representing three different types of social interactions (namely friendships,
collaborations and citations), two biological systems (respectively a neural and a gene net-
work) and five man-made networks (from transportation and communication systems to a
network of correlations among financial stocks).
The ubiquitousness of networks in nature, technology and society has been the principal
motivation behind the systematic quantitative study of their structure, their formation and
their evolution. And this is also the main reason why a student of any scientific discipline
should be interested in complex networks. In fact, if we want to master the interconnected
world we live in, we need to understand the structure of the networks around us. We have
to learn the basic principles governing the architecture of networks from different fields,
and study how to model their growth.
It is also important to mention the high interdisciplinarity of network science. Today,
research on complex networks involves scientists with expertise in areas such as mathe-
matics, physics, computer science, biology, neuroscience and social science, often working
 xvii Introduction

10000 800
WS
8000 BA
600

# citations
6000

# papers
400
4000

2000 200

0
1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015
year year
t
Fig. 1 Left panel: number of citations received over the years by the 1998 Watts and Strogatz (WS) article on small-world
networks and by the 1999 Barabási and Albert (BA) article on scale-free networks. Right panel: number of papers on
complex networks that appeared each year in the public preprint archive arXiv.org.

side by side. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the generality of the results obtained,
and the wide variety of possible applications, network science is considered today a
necessary ingredient in the background of any modern scientist.
Finally, it is not difficult to understand that complex networks have become one of the
hottest research fields in science. This is confirmed by the attention and the huge number
of citations received by Watts and Strogatz, and by Barabási and Albert, in the papers
mentioned above. The temporal profiles reported in the left panel of Figure 1 show the
exponential increase in the number of citations of these two papers since their publication.
The two papers have today about 10,000 citations each and, as already mentioned, have
opened a new research field stimulating interest for complex networks in the scientific
community and triggering an avalanche of scientific publications on related topics. The
right panel of Figure 1 reports the number of papers published each year after 1998 on the
well-known public preprint archive arXiv.org with the term “complex networks” in their
title or abstract. Notice that this number has gone up by a factor of 10 in the last ten years,
with almost a thousand papers on the topic published in the archive in the year 2013. The
explosion of interest in complex networks is not limited to the scientific community, but
has become a cultural phenomenon with the publications of various popular science books
on the subject.

Overview of the Book

This book is mainly intended as a textbook for an introductory course on complex networks
for students in physics, mathematics, engineering and computer science, and for the more
mathematically oriented students in biology and social sciences. The main purpose of the
book is to expose the readers to the fundamental ideas of network science, and to provide
them with the basic tools necessary to start exploring the world of complex networks. We
also hope that the book will be able to transmit to the reader our passion for this stimulating
new interdisciplinary subject.
xviii Introduction

The standard tools to study complex networks are a mixture of mathematical and com-
putational methods. They require some basic knowledge of graph theory, probability,
differential equations, data structures and algorithms, which will be introduced in this
book from scratch and in a friendly way. Also, network theory has found many interest-
ing applications in several different fields, including social sciences, biology, neuroscience
and technology. In the book we have therefore included a large variety of examples to
emphasise the power of network science. This book is essentially on the structure of com-
plex networks, since we have decided that the detailed treatment of the different types of
dynamical processes that can take place over a complex network should be left to another
book, which will follow this one.
The book is organised into ten chapters. The first six chapters (Chapters 1–6) form the
core of the book. They introduce the main concepts of network science and the basic
measures and models used to characterise and reproduce the structure of various com-
plex networks. The remaining four chapters (Chapters 7–10) cover more advanced topics
that could be skipped by a lecturer who wants to teach a short course based on the book.
In Chapter 1 we introduce some basic definitions from graph theory, setting up the lan-
guage we will need for the remainder of the book. The aim of the chapter is to show
that complex network theory is deeply grounded in a much older mathematical discipline,
namely graph theory.
In Chapter 2 we focus on the concept of centrality, along with some of the related mea-
sures originally introduced in the context of social network analysis, which are today used
extensively in the identification of the key components of any complex system, not only
of social networks. We will see some of the measures at work, using them to quantify the
centrality of movie actors in the actor collaboration network.
Chapter 3 is where we first discuss network models. In this chapter we introduce the
classical random graph models proposed by Erdős and Rényi (ER) in the late 1950s, in
which the edges are randomly distributed among the nodes with a uniform probability.
This allows us to analytically derive some important properties such as, for instance, the
number and order of graph components in a random graph, and to use ER models as term
of comparison to investigate scientific collaboration networks. We will also show that the
average distance between two nodes in ER random graphs increases only logarithmically
with the number of nodes.
In Chapter 4 we see that in real-world systems, such as the neural network of the C. ele-
gans or the movie actor collaboration network, the neighbours of a randomly chosen node
are directly linked to each other much more frequently than would occur in a purely ran-
dom network, giving rise to the presence of many triangles. In order to quantify this, we
introduce the so-called clustering coefficient. We then discuss the Watts and Strogatz (WS)
small-world model to construct networks with both a small average distance between nodes
and a high clustering coefficient.
In Chapter 5 the focus is on how the degree k is distributed among the nodes of a network.
We start by considering the graph of the World Wide Web and by showing that it is a
scale-free network, i.e. it has a power–law degree distribution pk ∼ k−γ with an exponent
γ ∈ [2, 3]. This is a property shared by many other networks, while neither ER random
graphs nor the WS model can reproduce such a feature. Hence, we introduce the so-called
xix Introduction

configuration model which generalises ER random graph models to incorporate arbitrary

degree distributions.
In Chapter 6 we show that real networks are not static, but grow over time with the
addition of new nodes and links. We illustrate this by studying the basic mechanisms of
growth in citation networks. We then consider whether it is possible to produce scale-free
degree distributions by modelling the dynamical evolution of the network. For this purpose
we introduce the Barabási–Albert model, in which newly arriving nodes select and link
existing nodes with a probability linearly proportional to their degree. We also consider
some extensions and modifications of this model.
In the last four chapters we cover more advanced topics on the structure of complex
networks.
Chapter 7 is about networks with degree–degree correlations, i.e. networks such that the
probability that an edge departing from a node of degree k arrives at a node of degree k′
is a function both of k′ and of k. Degree–degree correlations are indeed present in real-
world networks, such as the Internet, and can be either positive (assortative) or negative
(disassortative). In the first case, networks with small degree preferentially link to other
low-degree nodes, while in the second case they link preferentially to high-degree ones. In
this chapter we will learn how to take degree–degree correlations into account, and how to
model correlated networks.
In Chapter 8 we deal with the cycles and other small subgraphs known as motifs which
occur in most networks more frequently than they would in random graphs. We consider
two applications: firstly we count the number of short cycles in urban street networks of
different cities from all over the world; secondly we will perform a motif analysis of the
transcription network of the bacterium E. coli.
Chapter 9 is about network mesoscale structures known as community structures. Com-
munities are groups of nodes that are more tightly connected to each other than to other
nodes. In this chapter we will discuss various methods to find meaningful divisions of
the nodes of a network into communities. As a benchmark we will use a real network, the
Zachary’s karate club, where communities are known a priori, and also models to construct
networks with a tunable presence of communities.
In Chapter 10 we deal with weighted networks, where each link carries a numerical value
quantifying the intensity of the connection. We will introduce the basic measures used to
characterise and classify weighted networks, and we will discuss some of the models of
weighted networks that reproduce empirically observed topology–weight correlations. We
will study in detail two weighted networks, namely the US air transport network and a
network of financial stocks.
Finally, the book’s Appendix contains a detailed description of all the main graph algo-
rithms discussed in the various chapters of the book, from those to find shortest paths,
components or community structures in a graph, to those to generate random graphs or
scale-free networks. All the algorithms are presented in a C-like pseudocode format which
allows us to understand their basic structure without the unnecessary complication of a
programming language.
The organisation of this textbook is another reason why it is different from all the other
existing books on networks. We have in fact avoided the widely adopted separation of
xx Introduction

the material in theory and applications, or the division of the book into separate chap-
ters respectively dealing with empirical studies of real-world networks, network measures,
models, processes and computer algorithms. Each chapter in our book discusses, at the
same time, real-world networks, measures, models and algorithms while, as said before,
we have left the study of processes on networks to an entire book, which will follow this
one. Each chapter of this book presents a new idea or network property: it introduces a
network data set, proposes a set of mathematical quantities to investigate such a network,
describes a series of network models to reproduce the observed properties, and also points
to the related algorithms. In this way, the presentation follows the same path of the current
research in the field, and we hope that it will result in a more logical and more entertaining
text. Although the main focus of this book is on the mathematical modelling of complex
networks, we also wanted the reader to have direct access to both the most famous data
sets of real-world networks and to the numerical algorithms to compute network proper-
ties and to construct networks. For this reason, the data sets of all the real-world networks
listed in Table 1 are introduced and illustrated in special DATA SET Boxes, usually one
for each chapter of the book, and can be downloaded from the book’s webpage at www.
complex-networks.net. On the same webpage the reader can also find an implemen-
tation in the C language of the graph algorithms illustrated in the Appendix (in C-like
pseudocode format). We are sure that the student will enjoy experimenting directly on real-
world networks, and will benefit from the possibility of reproducing all of the numerical
results presented throughout the book.
The style of the book is informal and the ideas are illustrated with examples and appli-
cations drawn from the recent research literature and from different disciplines. Of course,
the problem with such examples is that no-one can simultaneously be an expert in social
sciences, biology and computer science, so in each of these cases we will set up the relative
background from scratch. We hope that it will be instructive, and also fun, to see the con-
nections between different fields. Finally, all the mathematics is thoroughly explained, and
we have decided never to hide the details, difficulties and sometimes also the incoherences
of a science still in its infancy.

Acknowledgements

Writing this book has been a long process which started almost ten years ago. The book has
grown from the notes of various university courses, first taught at the Physics Department
of the University of Catania and at the Scuola Superiore di Catania in Italy, and more
recently to the students of the Masters in “Network Science” at Queen Mary University of
London.
The book would not have been the same without the interactions with the students we
have met at the different stages of the writing process, and their scientific curiosity. Special
thanks go to Alessio Cardillo, Roberta Sinatra, Salvatore Scellato and the other students
and alumni of Scuola Superiore, Salvatore Assenza, Leonardo Bellocchi, Filippo Caruso,
Paolo Crucitti, Manlio De Domenico, Beniamino Guerra, Ivano Lodato, Sandro Meloni,
xxi Introduction

Andrea Santoro and Federico Spada, and to the students of the Masters in “Network
Science”.
We acknowledge the great support of the members of the Laboratory of Complex
Systems at Scuola Superiore di Catania, Giuseppe Angilella, Vincenza Barresi, Arturo
Buscarino, Daniele Condorelli, Luigi Fortuna, Mattia Frasca, Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes and
Giovanni Piccitto; of our colleagues in the Complex Systems and Networks research
group at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Queen Mary University of London,
David Arrowsmith, Oscar Bandtlow, Christian Beck, Ginestra Bianconi, Leon Danon,
Lucas Lacasa, Rosemary Harris, Wolfram Just; and of the PhD students Federico Bat-
tiston, Moreno Bonaventura, Massimo Cavallaro, Valerio Ciotti, Iacopo Iacovacci, Iacopo
Iacopini, Daniele Petrone and Oliver Williams.
We are greatly indebted to our colleagues Elsa Arcaute, Alex Arenas, Domenico
Asprone, Tomaso Aste, Fabio Babiloni, Franco Bagnoli, Andrea Baronchelli, Marc
Barthélemy, Mike Batty, Armando Bazzani, Stefano Boccaletti, Marián Boguñá, Ed
Bullmore, Guido Caldarelli, Domenico Cantone, Gastone Castellani, Mario Chavez, Vit-
toria Colizza, Regino Criado, Fabrizio De Vico Fallani, Marina Diakonova, Albert Dí
az-Guilera, Tiziana Di Matteo, Ernesto Estrada, Tim Evans, Alfredo Ferro, Alessan-
dro Fiasconaro, Alessandro Flammini, Santo Fortunato, Andrea Giansanti, Georg von
Graevenitz, Paolo Grigolini, Peter Grindrod, Des Higham, Giulia Iori, Henrik Jensen,
Renaud Lambiotte, Pietro Lió, Vittorio Loreto, Paolo de Los Rios, Fabrizio Lillo, Carmelo
Maccarrone, Athen Ma, Sabato Manfredi, Massimo Marchiori, Cecilia Mascolo, Rosario
Mantegna, Andrea Migliano, Raúl Mondragón, Yamir Moreno, Mirco Musolesi, Giuseppe
Nicosia, Pietro Panzarasa, Nicola Perra, Alessandro Pluchino, Giuseppe Politi, Sergio
Porta, Mason Porter, Giovanni Petri, Gaetano Quattrocchi, Daniele Quercia, Filippo Radic-
chi, Andrea Rapisarda, Daniel Remondini, Alberto Robledo, Miguel Romance, Vittorio
Rosato, Martin Rosvall, Maxi San Miguel, Corrado Santoro, M. Ángeles Serrano, Simone
Severini, Emanuele Strano, Michael Szell, Bosiljka Tadić, Constantino Tsallis, Stefan
Thurner, Hugo Touchette, Petra Vértes, Lucio Vinicius for the many stimulating discus-
sions and for their useful comments. We thank in particular Olle Persson, Luciano Da
Fontoura Costa, Vittoria Colizza, and Rosario Mantegna for having provided us with their
network data sets.
We acknowledge the European Commission project LASAGNE (multi-LAyer SpA-
tiotemporal Generalized NEtworks), Grant 318132 (STREP), the EPSRC project GALE,
Grant EP/K020633/1, and INFN FB11/TO61, which have supported and made possible
our work at the various stages of this project.
Finally, we thank our families for their never-ending support and encouragement.
Life is all mind, heart and relations
Salvatore Latora
Philosopher
1 Graphs and Graph Theory

Graphs are the mathematical objects used to represent networks, and graph theory is the
branch of mathematics that deals with the study of graphs. Graph theory has a long his-
tory. The notion of the graph was introduced for the first time in 1763 by Euler, to settle
a famous unsolved problem of his time: the so-called Königsberg bridge problem. It is no
coincidence that the first paper on graph theory arose from the need to solve a problem from
the real world. Also subsequent work in graph theory by Kirchhoff and Cayley had its root
in the physical world. For instance, Kirchhoff’s investigations into electric circuits led to
his development of a set of basic concepts and theorems concerning trees in graphs. Nowa-
days, graph theory is a well-established discipline which is commonly used in areas as
diverse as computer science, sociology and biology. To give some examples, graph theory
helps us to schedule airplane routing and has solved problems such as finding the max-
imum flow per unit time from a source to a sink in a network of pipes, or colouring the
regions of a map using the minimum number of different colours so that no neighbouring
regions are coloured the same way. In this chapter we introduce the basic definitions, set-
ting up the language we will need in the rest of the book. We also present the first data set
of a real network in this book, namely Elisa’s kindergarten network. The two final sections
are devoted to, respectively, the proof of the Euler theorem and the description of a graph
as an array of numbers.

1.1 What Is a Graph?

The natural framework for the exact mathematical treatment of a complex network is a
branch of discrete mathematics known as graph theory [48, 47, 313, 150, 272, 144]. Dis-
crete mathematics, also called finite mathematics, is the study of mathematical structures
that are fundamentally discrete, i.e. made up of distinct parts, not supporting or requiring
the notion of continuity. Most of the objects studied in discrete mathematics are count-
able sets, such as integers and finite graphs. Discrete mathematics has become popular in
recent decades because of its applications to computer science. In fact, concepts and nota-
tions from discrete mathematics are often useful to study or describe objects or problems
in computer algorithms and programming languages. The concept of the graph is better
introduced by the two following examples.
1
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whole Trade Union world for the great organising power and
generalship shown by the leaders of the new movement, and by the
cessation of the personal abuse and recrimination which had hitherto
marred the controversy. At the Dundee Congress of 1889, as we
have seen, Henry Broadhurst, and his colleagues on the
Parliamentary Committee, had triumphed all along the line. Within a
year the situation had entirely changed. The Stonemasons,
Broadhurst’s own society, had decided, by a vote of the members, to
support an Eight Hours Bill, and Broadhurst, under these
circumstances, had perforce to refuse to act as their representative.
The Executive Council of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers
chose Burns and Mann as two out of their five delegates, impressing
upon them all a recommendation to vote for the legal limitation of
the hours of labour. Both the old-established societies of Carpenters
gave a similar mandate. The Miners’ Federation this time led the
attack on the old Front Bench, and the resolution in favour of a
general Eight Hours Bill was carried, after a heated debate, by 193
to 155. Broadhurst resigned his position as Secretary of the
Parliamentary Committee on the ground of ill-health. George
Shipton, the secretary of the London Trades Council, publicly
declared his conversion to the legal regulation of the hours of labour.
The Liverpool Congress was as decisive a victory for the Socialists as
that of Dundee had been for the Parliamentary Committee. The
delegates passed in all sixty resolutions. “Out of these sixty
resolutions,” said John Burns, “forty-five were nothing more or less
than direct appeals to the State and Municipalities of this country to
do for the workman what Trade Unionism, ‘Old’ and ‘New,’ has
proved itself incapable of doing. Forty-five out of the sixty
resolutions were asking for State or Municipal interference on behalf
of the weak against the strong. ‘Old’ Trade Unionists, from
Lancashire, Northumberland, and Birmingham, asked for as many of
these resolutions as the delegates from London; but it is a
remarkable and significant fact that 19 out of 20 delegates were in
favour of the ‘New’ Trades Union ideas of State interferences in all
things except reduction of hours, and even on this we secured a
majority that certainly entitles us Socialists to be jubilant at our
success.” [564]
But whilst the new faith was being adopted by the rank and file of
Trade Unionists the character of the Socialist propaganda had been
undergoing an equal transformation. The foremost representative of
the Collectivist views had hitherto been the Social-Democratic
Federation, of which Burns and Mann were active members. Under
the dominant influence of Mr. H. M. Hyndman, this association
adopted the economic basis and political organisation of State
Socialism. Yet we find, along with these modern views, a distinct
recrudescence of the characteristic projects of the revolutionary
Owenism of 1833-34. The student of the volumes of Justice between
1884 and 1889 will be struck by the unconscious resemblance of
many of the ideas and much of the phraseology of its contributors,
to those of the Poor Man’s Guardian and the Pioneer of 1834. We do
not here allude to the revival, in 1885, of the old demand for an
Eight Hours Bill, a measure regarded on both occasions as a “mere
palliative.” Nor need we refer to the constant assumption, made alike
by Robert Owen and the Social-Democratic lecturers, that the
acceptance of the Labour-value theory would enable the difficulty of
the “unemployed” to be solved by organising the mutual exchange
of their unmarketable products. But both in Justice and the Pioneer
we see the same disbelief in separate action by particular Trade
Unions, in contrast to an organisation including “every trade, skilled
and unskilled, of every nationality under the sun.”[565]“The real
emancipation of labour,” says the official manifesto of the Social-
Democratic Federation to the Trade Unions of Great Britain in
September 1884, “can only be effected by the solemn banding
together of millions of human beings in a federation as wide as the
civilised world.”[566]“The day has gone by,” we read in 1887, “for the
efforts of isolated trades.... Nothing is to be gained for the workers
as a class without the complete organisation of labourers of all
grades, skilled and unskilled.... We appeal therefore earnestly to the
skilled artisans of all trades, Unionists and non-Unionists alike, to
make common cause with their unskilled brethren, and with us
Social-Democrats, so that the workers may themselves take hold of
the means of production, and organise a Co-operative
Commonwealth for themselves and their children.”[567] And if the
“scientific Socialists” of 1885 were logically pledged to the
administration of industry by the officials of the community at large,
none the less do we see constantly cropping up, especially among
the working-class members, Owen’s diametrically opposite proposal
that the workers must “own their own factories and decide by vote
who their managers and foremen shall be.”[568] Above all we see the
same faith in the near and inevitable advent of a sudden revolution,
when “it will only need a compact minority to take advantage of
some opportune accident that will surely come, to overthrow the
present system, and once and for all lift the toilers from the present
social degradation.”[569] “Noble Robert Owen,” says Mr. Hyndman in
1885, “seventy years ago perceived ‘the utter impossibility of
succeeding in permanently improving the condition of our population
by any half-measures.’ We see the same truth if possible yet more
clearly now. But the revolution which in his day was unprepared is
now ripe and ready.... Nothing short of a revolution which shall place
the producers of wealth in control of their own country can possibly
change matters for the better.... Will it be peaceful? We hope it may.
That does not depend upon us. But, peaceful or violent, the great
social revolution of the nineteenth century is at hand, and if fighting
should be necessary the workers may at least remember the
profound historical truth that ‘Force is the midwife of progress
delivering the old society pregnant with the new,’ and reflect that
they are striving for the final overthrow of a tyranny more degrading
than the worst chattel slavery of ancient times.”[570]“Let our mission
be,” he writes in 1887, “to help to band together the workers of the
world for the great class struggle against their exploiters. No better
date could be chosen for the establishment of such international
action on a sound basis than the year 1889, which the classes look
forward to with trembling and the masses with hope. I advocate no
hasty outbreak, no premature and violent attempt on the part of the
people to realise the full Social-Democratic programme. But I do say
that from this time onwards we, as the Social-Democratic Labour
Party of Great Britain, should make every effort to bear our part in
the celebration by the international proletariat of the First Centenary
of the great French Revolution, and thus to prepare for a complete
International Social Revolution before the end of the century.” [571]
The year 1889, instead of ushering in a “complete International
Social Revolution” by a universal compact of the workers, turned the
current of Socialist propaganda from revolutionary to constitutional
channels. The advent of political Democracy had put out of date the
project of “a combined assault by workers of every trade and grade
against the murderous monopoly of the minority.”[572] For a
moment, at the very crisis of the dockers’ struggle, the idea of a
“General Strike” flickers up, only to be quickly abandoned as
impracticable. When the problems of administration had actually to
be faced by the new leaders the specially Owenite characteristics of
the Socialist propaganda were quietly dropped. In January 1889
John Burns was elected a member of the London County Council,
and quickly found himself organising the beginnings of a
bureaucratic municipal Collectivism, as far removed from Owen’s
“national companies” as from the conceptions of the Manchester
School. Tom Mann, as president of the Dockers’ Union, could not
help discovering how impracticable it was to set to work his
unemployed members, accustomed only to general labour, in the
production for mutual exchange of the bread and clothing of which
they were in need. And whether working in municipal committees, or
at the head office of a great Union, both Burns and Mann had
perforce to realise the impossibility of bringing about any sudden or
simultaneous change in the social or industrial organisation of the
whole community, or even of one town or trade.
Under these circumstances it is perhaps not surprising that Burns
and Mann left the Social Democratic Federation, and found
themselves hotly denounced by their old comrades.[573] With the
defection of the New Unionists, revolutionary Socialism ceased to
grow; and the rival propaganda of constitutional action became the
characteristic feature of the British Socialist Movement. Far from
abusing or deprecating Trade Unionism or Co-operation, the
constitutional Collectivists urged it as a primary duty upon every
working-class Socialist to become a member of his Trade Union, to
belong to the local Co-operative Society, and generally to take as
active a part as possible in all organisations. Instead of denouncing
partial reforms as mischievous attempts to defeat “the Social
Revolution,” the New Unionist leaders appealed to their followers to
put their own representatives on Town Councils, and generally to
use their electoral influence to bring about, in a regular and
constitutional manner, the particular changes they had at heart.
Instead of circulating calumnies against the personal character of
Trade Union leaders, they flooded the Trade Union world with
Socialist literature, dealing not so much in rhetorical appeals or
Utopian aspirations as in economic expositions of the actual
grievances of industrial life. The vague resolutions of the Trades
Union Congresses were worked out in practical detail, or even
embodied in draft bills which the local member of Parliament might
be invited to introduce, or driven to support.
The new policy, adopted as it was by such prominent Socialists as
Burns, Mann, and Tillett, and Mrs. Besant, appeared, from 1889
onward, increasingly justified by its success. The Collectivist victories
on the London School Board and County Council, the steady growth
of municipal activity, and the increasing influence exercised by
working-men members of representative bodies, went far to
persuade both Socialists and Trade Unionists that the only
practicable means of securing for the community the ownership and
control of the means of production lay in a wide extension of that
national and municipal organisation of public services towards which
Parliament and the Town Councils had already taken the first steps.
In those industries in which neither national nor municipal
administration was yet possible, the Socialists demanded such a
regulation of the conditions of employment as would ensure to every
worker a minimum Standard of Life. The extension of the Factory
Acts and the more thorough administration of the Sanitary Law
accordingly received a new impulse. In another direction the drastic
taxation of Rent and Interest, pressed for by Land Nationalisers and
Socialists alike, was justified as leading eventually to the collective
absorption of all unearned incomes. In short, from 1889 onward, the
chief efforts of the British Socialist Movement have been directed,
not to bringing about any sudden, complete, or simultaneous
revolution, but to impregnating all the existing forces of society with
Collectivist ideals and Collectivist principles. [574]
With the advent of the “New Unionism” of 1889-90 we close this
chapter. We shall see, in subsequent chapters to what extent, and in
what way, the Trade Union Movement was permanently affected by
the new movement. But we append at this point a brief account of
what seem to us, first, the ephemeral features and, secondly, the
more durable results of an impulse which did not wholly spend its
force for a whole decade.
If we were to believe some of the more enthusiastic apostles of the
“New Unionism,” we should imagine that the aggressive trade
society of unskilled labourers, unencumbered with friendly benefits,
was an unprecedented departure in the history of labour
organisation. Those who have followed our history thus far will know
better than to entertain such an illusion, itself an old characteristic of
Trade Unionist revivals. The purely trade society is as old as Trade
Unionism itself. Throughout the whole history of the movement we
find two types of societies co-existing. At special crises in the annals
of Trade Unionism we see one or other of these types taking the
lead, and becoming the “New Unionism” of that particular period.
Both trade society and friendly society with trade objects were
common in the eighteenth century. Legal persecution of trade
combination brought to the front the Union cloaked in the guise of a
benefit club; and it was mainly for organisations of this type that
Place and Hume won the emancipation of 1824-1825. In 1833-34 we
find Place deploring as a mischievous innovation the growth of the
new “Trades Unions” without friendly benefits. Twenty years later we
see the leadership reverting to the “new model” of an elaborate
trade friendly society which, for a whole generation, was vehemently
denounced by employers as a fraud on the provident workman. The
“New Unionism” of 1852, described by so friendly a critic as
Professor Beesly as a novel departure, became, in its turn, the “Old
Unionism” of 1889, when the more progressive spirits again plumed
themselves on eliminating from their brand-new organisations the
enervating influences of friendly benefits.
A closer examination of the facts shows that this almost rhythmical
alternation of type has been only apparent. The impartial student
will notice that whilst the purely trade society has been persistently
adhered to by certain important industries, such as the Coal-miners
and the Cotton-spinners, other trades, like the Engineers and the
Ironfounders, have remained equally constant to the trade friendly
society; whilst others, again, such as the Compositors and the
Carpenters, have passed backwards and forwards from one model to
the other. But besides this adaptation of type to the circumstances of
particular industries, we see also a preference for the purely trade
society on no higher ground than its cheapness. The high
contributions and levies paid by the Cotton-spinners to their
essentially trade society are as far beyond the means of the
Agricultural Labourer or the Docker as the weekly premiums for
superannuation, sick, and other benefits charged to the
Amalgamated Engineer. When, as in 1833-34, 1872, and 1889, a
wave of enthusiasm sweeps the unskilled labourers into the Trade
Union ranks, it is obviously necessary to form, at any rate in the first
instance, organisations which make no greater tax upon their
miserable earnings than a penny or twopence per week. The
apparent rhythm of alternations between the two types of
organisation is due, therefore, not to any general abandonment of
one for the other, but to the accidental prominence, in certain crises
of Trade Union history, of the Unions belonging to particular trades
or classes of wage-earners. When, for instance, the cotton-spinners,
the builders, and the unskilled labourers of 1834 loomed large to
Francis Place as a revolutionary force, the purely trade society
appeared to him to be the source of all that was evil in Trade
Unionism. When, in 1848-52, the iron trades were conspiring against
piecework and overtime, it was especially the illicit combination of
trade and friendly society which attracted the attention of the public,
and called forth the denunciations of the capitalist class. And when
in 1889 the dockers were stopping the trade of London, and the
coal-miners and cotton-spinners were pressing upon both political
parties their demands for legislative interference, we see George
Howell voicing the opposition to exclusively trade societies as
dangerously militant bodies. [575]
If the purely trade society is no new thing, still less is the extension
of Trade Unionism to the unskilled labourer an unprecedented
innovation. The enthusiasm which, in 1872, enrolled a hundred
thousand agricultural labourers in a few months, produced also
numerous small societies of town labourers, some of which survived
for years before absorption into larger organisations. The London
and Counties Labour League, established as the Kent and Sussex
Agricultural and General Labourers’ Union in 1872, has maintained
its existence down to the present day. The expansion of 1852 led to
the formation in Glasgow of a Labourers’ Society, which is reputed to
have enrolled thousands of members. But it is with the enthusiasm
of 1833-34 that the movement of 1889-90 has in this respect the
greatest analogy. The almost instantaneous conversion to Trade
Unionism after the dock strike of tens of thousands of the unskilled
labourers of the towns recalls, indeed, nothing so much as the rapid
enrolment of recruits among the poorest wage-earners by the
emissaries of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.
But however strongly the outward features of the wave of 1889-90
may remind the student of those of 1833-34, the characteristics
peculiar to the new movement significantly measure the extent of
the advance, both in social theory and social methods, made by the
wage-earners in the two intervening generations. Time and
experience alone will show how far the empirical Socialism of the
Trade Unionist of 1889, with its eclectic opportunism, its preference
for municipal collectivism, its cautious adaptation of existing social
structure, and its modest aspirations to a gradually increasing
participation of the workmen in control, may safely be pronounced
superior in practicability to the revolutionary and universal
Communism of Robert Owen. In truth, the radical distinction
between 1833-34 and 1889-90 is not a matter of the particular social
theories which inspired the outbursts. To the great majority of the
Trade Unionists the theories of the leaders at either date did but
embody a vague aspiration after a more equitable social order. The
practical difference—the difference reflected in the character and
temper of the men attracted to the two movements, and of the
attitude of the public towards them—is the difference of method and
immediate action. Robert Owen, as we have seen, despised and
rejected political action, and strove to form a new voluntary
organisation which should supersede, almost instantaneously and in
some unexplained way, the whole industrial, political, and social
administration of the country. In this disdain of all existing
organisations, and the suddenness of the complete “social
revolution” which it contemplated, the Owenism of 1833-34 found,
as we have seen, an echo in much of the Socialist propaganda of
1884-89. The leaders of the New Unionists, on the contrary, sought
to bring into the ranks of existing organisations—the Trade Union,
the Municipality, or the State—great masses of unorganised workers
who had hitherto been either absolutely outside the pale, or inert
elements within it. They aimed, not at superseding existing social
structures, but at capturing them all in the interests of the wage-
earners. Above all, they sought to teach the great masses of
undisciplined workers how to apply their newly acquired political
power so as to obtain, in a perfectly constitutional manner, whatever
changes in legislation or administration they desired.
The difference in method between the “New Unionism” of 1833-34
and that of 1889-90 may, we think, be ascribed in the main to the
difference between the circumstances under which the movements
arose. To Robert Owen, whose path was blocked on the political line
by the disfranchisement of five out of six of the adult male
population, open voting under intimidation, corrupt close
corporations in the towns and a Whig oligarchy at the centre, the
idea of relying on the constitutional instrument of the polling-booth
must have appeared no less chimerical than his own programme
appears to-day. The New Unionists of 1889-90, on the other hand,
found ready for their use an extensive and all-embracing Democratic
social structure, which it was impossible to destroy, and would have
been foolish to attempt to ignore. The efforts of two generations of
Radical Individualists and “Old Trade Unionists” had placed the
legislative power and civil administration of the country in the hands
of a hierarchy of popularly elected representative bodies. The great
engine of taxation was, for instance, now under the control of the
wage-earning voters instead of that of the land-owning class. The
Home Secretary and the factory inspector, the relieving-officer and
the borough surveyor, could be employed to carry out the behests of
the workers instead of those of the capitalists. And thus it came
about that the methods advocated by the New Unionists of 1889-94
resemble, not those of the Owenites of 1833-34, but much more the
practical arts of political warfare so successfully pursued by the
Junta of 1867-75.
We shall see the change which had come over the English working-
class movement in the course of sixty years if we compare the
leaders of the two movements which we have been contrasting. To
Owen himself we may allow the privilege of his genius, which did not
prevent him from being an extravagantly bad captain for a working-
class movement. But in his leading disciples ignorance of industrial
conditions, contemptuous indifference to facts and figures, and
incapacity to measure, even in the smallest actions, the relation
between the means and the end, stand in as marked contrast to the
sober judgment of men like John Burns as they did to the cautious
shrewdness of Allan and Applegarth. It would indeed be easy to find
many traits of personal likeness between Burns and Mann on the
one hand, and Allan and Applegarth on the other. High personal
character, scrupulous integrity, dignity or charm of manner, marked
all four alike, and the resemblance of character is heightened by a
noticeable resemblance in the nature of their activity. The day’s work
of Tom Mann at the head office of the Dockers’ Union from 1889 to
1892, and that of John Burns in the London County Council and the
lobby of the House of Commons from 1892 to 1906, were close
reproductions of Allan’s activity at the general office of his Engineers,
and Applegarth’s assiduous attendance to Parliamentary Committees
and Royal Commissions. In short, the ways and means of the leaders
of the “New Unionism” remind the student, not of the mystic rites
and skeleton mummery of the Owenite movement, but rather of the
restless energy and political ingenuity of the Junta or the Trades
Union Congress Parliamentary Committee in those early days when
the old Trade Unionists were fighting for legislative reforms with a
faith which was as wise as it was fervent and sincere.
Some of the secondary characteristics of the New Unionism of 1889
promptly faded away. The revulsion of feeling against the
combination of friendly benefits with Trade Union purposes quickly
disappeared, though the difficulty of levying high contributions upon
ill-paid workers prevented the complete adoption of the contrary
policy.[576] The expansion of trade which began in 1889 proved to
be but of brief duration, and with the returning contraction of 1892
many of the advantages gained by the wage-earners were lost.
Under the influence of this check the unskilled labourers once more
largely fell away from the Trade Union ranks. But just as 1873-74 left
behind it a far more permanent structure than 1833-34, so 1889-90
added even more than 1873-74. The older Unions retained a large
part, at any rate, of the two hundred thousand members added to
their ranks between 1887 and 1891. But this numerical accession
was of less importance than what may, without exaggeration, be
termed the spiritual rebirth of organisations which were showing
signs of decrepitude. The selfish spirit of exclusiveness which often
marked the relatively well-paid engineer, carpenter, or boilermaker of
1880-85, gave place to a more generous recognition of the essential
solidarity of the wage-earning class. For example, the whole
constitution of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers was, in 1892,
revised for the express purpose of opening the ranks of this most
aristocratic of Unions to practically all the mechanics in the
innumerable branches of the engineering trade. Special facilities,
moreover, were offered by this and the other great societies to old
men and artisans earning wages insufficient to pay for costly friendly
benefits. Nor was this all. The plumber vied with the engineer, the
carpenter with the shipwright, in helping to form Unions among the
labourers who work with or under them. And the struggling Unions
of women workers, which had originally some difficulty in gaining
admittance to Trades Councils and the Trade Union Congress,
gratefully acknowledged a complete change in the attitude of their
male fellow-workers. Not only was every assistance now given to the
formation of special Unions among women workers, but women
were, in some cases, even welcomed as members by Unions of
skilled artisans. A similar widening of sympathies and strengthening
of bonds of fellowship was shown in the very general establishment
of local joint committees of rival societies in the same trade, as well
as of larger federations. Robert Knight’s failures to form a federal
council representing the different Unions concerned in shipbuilding
were retrieved in 1891 by his successful establishment of the
Federation of the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades, which
maintained a permanent existence. The increased sense of solidarity
among all sections of wage-earners, moreover, led to a greatly
increased cordiality in international relations. The Coal-miners, the
Glass Bottle Makers, and the Textile Operatives established more or
less formal federations with their fellow-workers on the Continent of
Europe. At the frequent international Congresses of these trades, as
well as at the Socialist Congress of the workers of all countries, the
representatives of the British Trade Unions largely laid aside that
insular conceit which led the Parliamentary Committee of 1884 to
declare that, owing to his superiority, the British Trade Unionist
derived no benefit from international relations. All this indicates a
widening of the mental horizon, a genuine elevation of the Trade
Union Movement.

FOOTNOTES:
[511]See the History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W.
J. Davis, of which two volumes have been issued by the
Parliamentary Committee (1910 and 1916). William John Davis,
one of the most successful Trade Union administrators, was born
in 1848, at Birmingham. In 1872, when the National Society of
Amalgamated Brassworkers was established in a trade hitherto
entirely unorganised, he became General Secretary, a post which,
except for one short interval, he has ever since retained. Within
six months he obtained from the employers the 15 per cent
increase which they had refused to the unorganised men, and
established branches throughout the kingdom; and presently he
completed the difficult and laborious task of constructing a list of
prices for all brasswork, for which he obtained the employers’
recognition. He was elected to the Birmingham School Board in
1876, and to the Town Council in 1880. In 1883 he accepted
appointment as Factory Inspector, but six years later returned to
his former post at the urgent request of the workmen, whose
Union had in his absence sunk almost to nothing, a condition
from which he was able quickly to restore it to far more than its
highest previous strength; and to take on, in addition, the
secretaryship of the Amalgamated Metal Wire and Tube Makers’
Society. He was made a J.P. in 1906. Since 1881 he has been
elected twenty-six times to the Parliamentary Committee of the
Trades Union Congress. He is the author, in addition to the History
of the British Trades Union Congress, of The Token Coinage of
Warwickshire and Nineteenth-Century Token Coinage(The Life
Story of W. J. Davis, by W. B. Dalley, 1914).
[512]In 1878, for instance, the Parliamentary Committee resolved
that Congress ought not to interfere either between the English
and Scottish Tailors’ Societies or between the Boilermakers and
the Platers’ Helpers.
[513]The Congress, from 1871, annually elected a Parliamentary
Committee of ten members and a secretary. The members of the
Committee were always chosen from the officials of the more
important Unions, with a strong tendency to re-elect the same
men year after year. Between 1875 and 1889 the composition of
the Committee was, in fact, scarcely changed, except through
death or the promotion of members to Government
appointments. George Potter was secretary from 1869-71;
George Odger in that year; and George Howell, afterwards M.P.,
from 1872-75. Henry Broadhurst was for fourteen years annually
re-elected secretary without a contest, temporarily ceding the
post, whilst Under Secretary of State for the Home Department in
1886, to George Shipton. He was succeeded by Charles Fenwick,
M.P., from 1890-93; then followed S. Woods, M.P., from 1894-
1904; W. C. Steadman, M.P., from 1905-10; and the Right
Honourable C. W. Bowerman, M.P., from 1911 onwards.
[514]Odger died in 1877, Guile in 1883, and Coulson (who had
retired many years before) in 1893.
[515]To the counsels of Frederic Harrison, E. S. Beesly, H.
Crompton, and A. J. Mundella was, from 1873, frequently added
that of Mr. (afterwards Justice) R. S. Wright, who rendered
invaluable service as a draughtsman. Henry Crompton supplied us
with the following account of the subsequent separation between
the Positivists and the Trade Union leaders:
“In the year 1881 the connection of the Parliamentary Committee
with the Positivists was modified. There was not the same
occasion for their services as there had been. After 1883, in
which year Mr. F. Harrison and Mr. H. Crompton attended the
Congress by invitation, the connection ceased altogether, though
there was no breach of friendly relations. Till 1881 there had
been entire agreement between them both as to policy and
means of action. The policy of the Positivists had been to secure
complete legal independence for workmen and their legitimate
combinations; to make them more respected and more conscious
of their own work; to lift them to a higher moral level; that they
should become citizens ready and desirous to perform all the
duties of citizenship. The means employed was to consolidate and
organise the power of the Trades Societies, through the
institutions of the annual Congress and its Parliamentary
Committee; to use this power, as occasion served, for the general
welfare as well as for trade interests. That the measures adopted
or proposed by the Congress should be thoroughly discussed in
the branches, and delegates well posted in the principal
questions. To express it shortly—organisation of collective labour
and political education of individual workmen.
“The condition of this effective force was that, while it was being
used in furtherance of political action, it should be kept quite
clear and independent of political parties. The divergence came
with the advent of the Gladstonians to office. The Liberal
Government began a policy of coercion in Ireland. Combination
was to be put down by the very same mechanism which had
been invented to repress labour combinations—by the law of
conspiracy. The very ruling of Baron Bramwell as to the Tailors’
strike was employed to concoct a law to convict Mr. Parnell and
his coadjutors. As a result law was laid down by the Irish judges
as to political combinations, which is binding in England, and has
still to be resisted or abolished. The Positivists endeavoured to
the utmost of their ability to rouse the working classes to a sense
of the danger of these proceedings, and to offer an
uncompromising resistance to the suspension of the Habeas
Corpus Act. The Parliamentary Committee would have none of it.
They no doubt believed that the interests of their clients would be
best served by a narrower policy, by seeking the help and favour
of the eminent statesmen in office. Instead of a compact,
powerful force, holding the balance between the parties and the
key of the situation, dictating its terms, they preferred to be the
tag end of a party. In the end they did not get much, but the
Congress was successfully captured and muzzled by the
Gladstonian Government.”
[516]Report of Trades Union Congress, Dublin, 1880, p. 15.
[517]The working of the Trade Union Act of 1871 revealed some
technical defects in the law, which were remedied by an
amending Act in 1876 (39 and 40 Vic. c. 22). Rules for the
execution of the Employers and Workmen Act were framed by the
Lord Chancellor in the same year.
[518]This defence of “common employment,” which practically
deprived the workman in large undertakings of any remedy in
case of accidents arising through negligence in the works, was
first recognised in the case of Priestly v. Fowler in 1837 (3
Meeson and Welby). Not until 1868 did the House of Lords, as the
final Court of Appeal, extend it to Scotland. The growth of
colossal industrial undertakings, in which thousands of workmen
were, technically, “in common employment,” made the occasional
harshness of the law still more invidious.
[519]Act 43 and 44 Vic. c. 52 (1880).
[520]The annual Parliamentary returns for the next fifteen years
showed that between three and four hundred cases came into
court every year, the amount of compensation actually awarded
reaching between £7000 and £8000. But a large number of cases
were compromised, or settled without litigation. Meanwhile the
relative number of accidents diminished. Whereas in 1877 one
railway employee in 95 was more or less injured, in 1889 the
proportion was only one in 195. Whereas between 1873 and 1880
one coal-miner in 446 met his death annually, between 1881 and
1890 the proportion was only one in 519; although there was
apparently less improvement, if any, as regards non-fatal
accidents in the mine.
[521]By “contracting out” was meant an arrangement between
employer and employed by which the latter relinquish the rights
conferred upon them by the Act, and often also their rights under
the Common Law. The Act was silent on the subject; but the
judges decided, to the great surprise and dismay of the Trade
Union leaders, that contracting out was permissible (see Griffiths
v. Earl of Dudley, 9, Queen’s Bench Division, 35). The usual form
of “contracting out” was the establishment of a workman’s
insurance fund to which the workmen were compelled to
subscribe, and to which the employer also contributed. Among
the coal-miners, those of Lancashire, Somerset, and some
collieries in Wales generally contracted out. The employees of the
London and North-Western, and London and Brighton Railway
Companies also contracted out. In one or two large undertakings
in other industries a similar course was followed. But in the vast
majority of cases employers did not resort to this expedient.
Particulars are given in the Report and Evidence of the Select
Committee on Employers’ Liability, 1866; the publications of the
Royal Commission on Labour, 1891-94; and Miners’ Thrift and
Employers’ Liability, by G. L. Campbell (Wigan, 1891); and our
Industrial Democracy.
In 1893-94 a further amending Bill passed the House of
Commons which swept away the doctrine of common
employment, and placed the workman with regard to
compensation on the same footing as any other person. A clause
making void any agreement by which the workman forewent his
right of action, or “contracted out,” was rejected by the House of
Lords, and the Bill was thereupon abandoned. The question was
settled in 1896 by the passage, under the Unionist Government,
of the Workmen’s Compensation Act, giving compensation in all
cases, irrespective of the employers’ default.
[522]The legal advisers of the Junta realised that the triumph of
1875, though it resulted in a distinct strengthening of the Trade
Union position, was mainly a moral victory. Though Trade Unions
were made legal, the law of conspiracy was only partially
reformed, whilst that relating to political combinations, unlawful
assemblies, sedition, etc., remained, as it still remains,
untouched. Expert lawyers knew in how many ways prejudiced
tribunals might at any time make the law oppressive. The legal
friends of Trade Unionism desired, therefore, to utilise the period
of political quiet in simplifying the criminal law, and in removing
as much of the obsolete matter as was possible. And though
State Trials recommenced in Ireland in 1881, and criminal
prosecutions of Trade Unionists continued in England down to
1891, the interval had been well spent in clearing away some of
the grosser evils.
[523]In the proposed reform of the Jury laws, for instance, the
Parliamentary Committee for several years did not venture to ask
explicitly for that payment of jurymen which alone would enable
working men to serve, and contented themselves with suggesting
a lowering of the qualification for juryman. In 1876, indeed, John
Burnett, then a prominent member of the Committee, strongly
opposed the Payment of Jurymen on the ground that it might
create a class of professional jurors (Trades Union Congress
Report, 1876, p. 14).
[524]See, for instance, the report of the 1876 Congress, p. 30;
that of the 1882 Congress, p. 37; that of the 1883 Congress, p.
41; and History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J.
Davis, vol. i., 1910.
[525]In this connection may be mentioned the extensive agitation
promoted by Samuel Plimsoll for further legislation to prevent the
loss of life at sea. At the 1873 Trades Union Congress Plimsoll
distributed copies of his book, Our Merchant Seamen, and
enlisted, during the next three years, practically the whole
political force of the Trade Union Movement in support of his
Merchant Shipping Acts Amendment Bill. The “Plimsoll and
Seamen’s Fund Committee,” of which George Howell became
secretary, received large financial help from the Unions, the South
Yorkshire Miners’ Association voting, in 1873, a levy of a shilling
per member, and contributing over £1000. The Parliamentary
Committee gave Plimsoll’s Bill a place in their programme for the
General Election of 1874, and this Trade Union support
contributed largely to Plimsoll’s success in passing a temporary
Act in 1875, and permanent legislation in 1876, against the
combined efforts of a strong Conservative Government and the
shipowners on both sides of the House. (See Labour Legislation,
Labour Movements, and Labour Leaders, by G. Howell, 1902.)
[526]Congress Reports, 1882 and 1883.
[527]Parliamentary Committee’s Report, September 17, 1877.
[528]That extending to factory scales and measures the
provisions of the Weights and Measures Act relating to inspection,
etc.
[529]The appointment was first offered to Broadhurst, who
elected to continue his work as Secretary of the Parliamentary
Committee, and who suggested Prior (Henry Broadhurst, the
Story of his Life, by himself, 1901).
[530]Ibid. p. 136.
[531]It may be mentioned that the Trades Union Congress, which
at first had welcomed addresses from the middle and upper class
friends of Trade Unionism, was, between 1881 and 1883,
gradually restricted to Trade Unionists. At the Nottingham
Congress in 1883, where Frederic Harrison read a paper on the
“History of Trade Unionism,” and Henry Crompton one on the
“Codification of the Law,” when Frederic Harrison proposed to
take part in the discussion on the Land Question, he was not
permitted to do so; and this rule has since been rigidly adhered
to. At the Aberdeen Congress of 1884 Lord Rosebery was allowed
to deliver an address on the “Federalism of the Trades Union
Congress,” but this was the last time that any one has been
invited to read a paper.
[532]Times leader on the Congress of Belfast, September 11,
1893, which deplores the remarkable “subservience to Mr. John
Burns and his friends” manifested by the Congress—a
subservience marked by the election of Mr. Burns for the
Parliamentary Committee at the head of the poll, and by the
adoption of a programme which included the nationalisation of
the land and other means of production and distribution.
[533]The following description of the rise of the “New Unionism”
of 1889 is based on minutes and reports of Trade Union
organisations, the files of Justice, the Labour Elector, the Trade
Unionist, the Cotton Factory Times, the Workman’s Times, and
other working-class journals. The documentary evidence has
been elucidated and supplemented by the reminiscences of most
of the principal actors in the movement, and by the personal
recollections of the authors themselves, one of whom, as a
member of the Fabian Society, observed the transformation from
the Socialist side, whilst the other, as a disciple of Herbert
Spencer and a colleague of Charles Booth, was investigating the
contemporary changes from an Individualist standpoint.
[534]See Mr. H. M. Hyndman’s England for All, 1881.
[535]Report of the International Trades Union Congress at Paris,
1886, by Adolphe Smith, 1886.
[536]Flint Glass Makers’ Magazine, November 1884.
[537]Report of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, 1885.
[538]The results of twenty years of patient labour by Charles
Booth and his assistants are embodied in the magnificent work,
Labour and Life of the People(London, 1st edition, 2 vols., 1889-
91; 2nd edition, 4 vols., 1893), reissued in greatly enlarged form
as Life and Labour in London, 18 vols.; Pauperism and the
Endowment of Old Age(London, 1893); The Aged Poor (1894);
Old Age and the Aged Poor(1899); Industrial Unrest and Trades
Union Policy(1913). In Charles Booth: a Memoir(1918) Mrs. Booth
has given a personal biography (1840-1914) of a tireless
investigator who, merely by the instrument of social diagnosis,
got accomplished reforms of a magnitude that seemed at first
wholly impracticable.
[539]The funds of the Stonemasons had been completely
exhausted by the great strike of 1878. In January 1879 the
Society determined, on a proposition submitted by the Central
Executive, to close all pending disputes (including a general strike
at Sheffield against a heavy reduction without due notice); and
between that date and March 1885, though many of the branches
struggled manfully, and in some cases successfully, against
repeated reductions of wages, increases of hours, or
infringements of the local bye-laws, no strike whatever was
supported from the Society’s funds. The case of the Stonemasons
is typical of the other great trade friendly societies.
[540]What a Compulsory Eight Hours Working Day means to the
Workers, by Tom Mann (1886), 16 pp.
[541]Mr. Tom Mann, one of the outstanding figures in the New
Unionist Movement, was born at Foleshill, Warwickshire, in 1856,
and apprenticed in an engineering shop at Birmingham, whence
he came to London in 1878, and joined the Amalgamated Society
of Engineers. Eagerly pursuing his self-education, he became
acquainted first with the Co-operative Movement, and then with
the writings of Henry George. In 1884 he visited the United
States, where he worked for six months. On his return he joined
the Battersea Branch of the Social Democratic Federation, and
quickly became one of its leading speakers. His experience of the
evils of overtime made the Eight Hours Day a prominent feature
in his lectures, and in 1886 he published his views in the
pamphlet, What a Compulsory Eight Hours Working Day means to
the Workers(1886, 16 pp.), of which several editions have been
printed. In the same year he left his trade in order to devote
himself to the provincial propaganda of the Social Democratic
Federation, spending over two years incessantly lecturing, first
about Tyneside, and then in Lancashire. Returning to London
early in 1889, he assisted in establishing the Gas-workers’ Union
and in organising the great dock strike, on the termination of
which he was elected President of the Dockers’ Union. For three
years he applied himself to building up this organisation, deciding
to resign in 1892, when he became a candidate for the General
Secretaryship of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. After an
exciting contest, during which he addressed meetings of the
members in all the great engineering centres, he failed of success
only by 951 votes on a poll of 35,992. In the meantime he had
been appointed, in 1891, a member of the Royal Commission on
Labour, to which he submitted a striking scheme for consolidating
the whole dock business of the port of London, by cutting a new
channel for the Thames across the Isle of Dogs. On the
establishment in 1893 of the London Reform Union he was
appointed its secretary, a post which he relinquished in 1894 on
being elected secretary of the Independent Labour Party. This he
presently relinquished to emigrate to New Zealand; and there and
in Australia he threw himself energetically into Trade Union
agitation. Returning to England in 1911, he became a fervent
advocate of Syndicalism; and then became an organiser for
various General Labour Unions. In 1919 he was elected General
Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, after an
exhaustive ballot of its great membership.
[542]Article in Justice, September 3, 1887.
[543]Mr. John Burns, in many respects the most striking
personality in the Labour Movement, was born at Battersea in
1859, and was apprenticed to a local engineering firm. Already
during his apprenticeship he made his voice heard in public, in
1877 being actually arrested for persistently speaking on Clapham
Common, and in 1878 braving the “Jingo” mob at a Hyde Park
demonstration. As soon as he was out of his time (1879) he
joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, and became an
advocate of shorter hours of labour. An engagement as engineer
on the Niger, West Africa, during 1880-81, gave him leisure to
read, which he utilised by mastering Adam Smith and J. S. Mill.
Returning to London, he worked side by side with Victor
Delahaye, an ex-Communard, who was afterwards one of the
French representatives at the Berlin Labour Conference, 1891,
and with whom he had many talks on the advancement of labour.
In 1883 he joined the Social Democratic Federation, and at once
became its leading working-class member, championing its cause,
for instance, in an impressive speech at the Industrial
Remuneration Conference in 1885. In the same year he was
elected by his district of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers as
its representative at the quinquennial delegate meeting of the
Society, where he found himself the youngest member. At the
General Election of 1885 he stood as Socialist candidate for West
Nottingham, receiving 598 votes. For the next two years he
became known as the leader of the London “unemployed”
agitation. His prosecution for sedition in 1886 (with three other
prominent members of the Social Democratic Federation) aroused
considerable interest, and on his acquittal his speech for the
defence, The Man with the Red Flag, had a large sale in pamphlet
form (1886; 16 pp.). At the prohibited demonstration at Trafalgar
Square on “Bloody Sunday” (November 13, 1887), in conjunction
with Mr. Cunninghame Graham, M.P., he broke through the police
line, for which they were both sentenced to six weeks’
imprisonment. In January 1889 he was elected for Battersea to
the new London County Council, on which he became one of the
most useful and influential members. His magnificent work in the
dock strike and in organising the unskilled labourers is described
in the text. At the General Election of 1892 he was chosen, by a
large majority, M.P. for Battersea, and at the Trades Union
Congress in 1893 he received the largest number of votes for the
Parliamentary Committee, of which he accordingly became
Chairman. In 1906 he was appointed President of the Local
Government Board in Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman’s Government,
with a seat in the Cabinet—thus becoming the first working-man
Cabinet Minister—a post which he held until August 1914, when
he resigned on the outbreak of war. He retained his seat in
Parliament until 1918, when he retired.
[544]Address to Trade Unionists in Justice, January 24, 1885.
[545]Weiler was the delegate of the Alliance Cabinetmakers’
Society, and came from London. The Congress Report gives the
following account of his paper: “After reviewing the position of
the working classes under the present system, and comparing it
with the state of things eighty years ago, he contended that the
best means of bettering their position was to reduce the hours of
toil. The result of this would be, first, to give every worker a
better chance of employment, and thus lessen that sort of
competition which was caused by hunger and want; secondly, it
would give them time and opportunity for rest and amusement,
and that cultivation of their minds which would enable them to
prepare themselves for the time when the present system of
production would collapse, and the time of this collapse was not
so distant as some supposed.” The paper was received with much
applause, and Weiler received the thanks of Congress. No
resolution was passed.
[546]History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J. Davis,
vol. i. p. 133.
[547]The Return moved for by George Howell regarding the
Woolwich and Enfield engineering works showed that, during
1884 and 1885, more than half the artisans worked overtime, the
average per week for each man varying from 9.4 hours in some
shops to 17.8 in others.
[548]11,966 of its members voted for an Eight Hours Day, and of
these 9209 declared in favour of the enforcement of the eight
hours limit by law. The total votes given for an Eight Hours Law
was 17,267; against it, 3819.
[549]The votes in favour of an Eight Hours Day were 39,656;
against it, 67,390, of which 56,541 were cast on behalf of the
Cotton-spinners and Weavers. In favour of an Eight Hours Law,
28,511; against it, 12,283. The votes of the different trades, and
a summary of the Congress proceedings on this subject, are given
in The Eight Hours Day, by Sidney Webb and Harold Cox, 1891;
see also History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J.
Davis, vol. ii. pp. 7-8.
[550]The clause was moved by S. Williamson, Liberal Member for
Kilmarnock, and seconded by J. H. C. Hozier, Conservative
Member for South Lanarkshire. It received no support from the
“Labour Members,” and was rejected by 159 to 104. See the Eight
Hours Day, by Webb and Cox, 1891, p. 23.
[551]The “National Conferences” of the miners are a feature
peculiar to the industry. Besides the periodical gatherings of the
separate federations, the miners, since 1863, have had frequent
conferences of delegates from all the organised districts in the
kingdom. These conferences were, until 1889, held under the
auspices of the National Union; subsequently they were
summoned by the Miners’ Federation. The meetings, from which
reporters are now excluded, are consultative only, and their
decisions are not authoritative until adopted by the separate
organisations. See Die Ordnung des Arbeitsverhältnisses in den
Kohlengruben von Northumberland und Durham, by Dr. Emil
Auerbach (Leipzig, 1890, 268 pp.).
[552]The “Fair Trade” attack had arisen in the following manner.
At the Bristol Congress in 1878, certain delegates, who were
strongly suspected of being the paid agents of the organisation
then agitating for the abolition of the foreign bounties on sugar,
attempted to force this question upon the Congress, and made a
serious disturbance. These delegates afterwards became the paid
representatives of the “Fair Trade League,” an association
avowedly composed of landlords and capitalists with the object of
securing a reimposition of import duties. The Front Bench
steadfastly refused to allow the Congress to be used for
promotion of this object, and were exposed in return to what the
Congress in 1882 declared to be “a cowardly, false, and
slanderous attack, ... an attempt at moral assassination.” Instead
of fighting the question of Free Trade versus Protection, the
emissaries of the Fair Trade League developed an elaborate
system of personal defamation, directed against Broadhurst,
Howell, Shipton, and other leaders. For instance, Broadhurst’s
administration of the Gas Stokers’ Relief Fund in 1872 was made
the pretext for vague insinuations of malversation which were
scattered broadcast through the Trade Union world. At the
Congress of 1881 the “Fair Trade” delegates were expelled, on it
being proved that their expenses were not paid by the Trade
Union organisations which they nominally represented. A renewed
attack on the Congress of 1882 ended in the triumphant victory
of the Parliamentary Committee, the complete exoneration of
Broadhurst and his colleagues, and the final discomfiture of the
“Fair Trade” delegates. See Henry Broadhurst: the Story of his
Life, by himself, 1901; History of the British Trades Union
Congress, by W. J. Davis, vol. i., 1910.
[553]Report to Congress of 1884. This is another instance of the
abandonment of the more generous views of Applegarth and
Odger.
[554]Mr. Drummond, who resigned his secretaryship in 1892, was
in the following year appointed to the staff of the Labour
Department of the Board of Trade, from which he retired in 1918.
[555]See its Circular of June 1886.
[556]Some isolated protests against the employment of non-
Unionists are of earlier date. Thus, the minutes of the
Birmingham Trades Council show that, on July 3, 1880, at the
instance of a painters’ delegate, it passed a resolution protesting
against the employment of “non-Union and incompetent men” by
the local hospital. And in the same month the Wolverhampton
Trades Council had successfully protested against the
employment of non-Unionist printers upon a new Liberal
newspaper about to be established.
[557]The chief medium for the attack was the Labour Elector, a
penny weekly journal published, from September 1888 to April
1890, by Mr. H. H. Champion, an ex-officer of the Royal Artillery,
who (prosecuted in 1886, as we have seen, with H. M. Hyndman,
J. Burns, and Williams, for sedition) had at one time been a
leading member of the Social Democratic Federation, from which
he was excluded on a difference of policy. He afterwards
emigrated to Melbourne, where he still (1920) resides.
[558]Henry Broadhurst: the Story of his Life, by himself, 1901,
pp. 218-24; History of the British Trades Union Congress, by W. J.
Davis, vol. i., 1910.
[559]The men employed by two of the gas companies in London,
and most of those engaged by provincial municipalities, have
retained this boon. But in December 1889 the South Metropolitan
Gas Company insisted, after a serious strike, on a return to the
twelve hours’ shift. A scheme of profit-sharing was used to break
up their men’s Union and induce them to accept individual
engagements inconsistent with Collective Bargaining. This
example (which is not unique) confirmed the Trade Unions in
their objection to schemes of “Profit-sharing” or “Co-partnership.”
[560]This strike had the good fortune to find contemporary
historians who were themselves concerned in all the phases of
the struggle. The Story of the Dockers’ Strike, by Mr. (afterwards
Sir) Hubert Llewellyn Smith and Vaughan Nash (1890, 190 pp.),
gives not only a detailed chronicle of the highly dramatic
proceedings, but also a useful description of the organisation of
the London Docks.
[561]This movement was much assisted by the “Red Van”
campaigns of the English Land Restoration League, 1891-94,
which coupled Land Nationalisation propaganda with the
formation of local unions of the labourers in the Southern and
Midland Counties of England. In the agricultural depression of
1894-95, when staffs were further reduced and wages again
lowered, nearly all these new Unions sank to next to nothing, or
entirely dissolved. Most information as to them is to be gained
from The Church Reformer for 1891-95; History of the English
Agricultural Labourer, by W. Hasbach, 1907; and Ernest Selley’s
Village Trade Unions of Two Centuries, 1919.
[562]Short-lived and turbulent combinations among seamen have
existed at various periods for the past hundred years, notably
between 1810 and 1825, on the north-east coast, where many
sailors’ benefit clubs were also established. In 1851, again, a
widespread national organisation of seamen is said to have
existed, having twenty-five branches between Peterhead and
London, and numbering 30,000 members. This appears to have
been a loose federation of practically autonomous port Unions,
which for some years kept up a vigorous agitation against
obnoxious clauses in the Merchant Shipping Acts of 1851-54, and
fought the sailors’ grievances in the law courts. In 1879 the
existing North of England Sailors and Sea-going Firemen’s
Friendly Association was established, but failed to maintain itself
outside Sunderland. In 1887 its most vigorous member, J.
Havelock Wilson, convinced that nothing but a national
organisation would be effective, started the National
Amalgamated Sailors and Firemen’s Union, which his able and
pertinacious “lobbying” made, for some years, an effective
Parliamentary force.
[563]Address to members in First Half-Yearly Report (London,
1889). The spirit of the uprising is well given in The New Trade
Unionism, by Tom Mann and Ben Tillett, 1890; on which George
Shipton was moved to write A Reply to Messrs. Tom Mann and
Ben Tillett’s Pamphlet entitled “The New Trade Unionism,” 1890.
[564]Speech delivered by John Burns on the Liverpool Congress,
September 21, 1890(1890, 32 pp.).
[565]Justice, November 7, 1885.
[566]Printed in Justice, September 6, 1884.
[567]“The Decay of Trade Unions,” by H. M. Hyndman, Justice,
June 18, 1887.
[568]“The Trade Union Congress,” by John Burns, Justice,
September 12, 1885.
[569]Justice, July 11, 1885.
[570]Justice, July 18, 1885. The identity of purpose and methods
between the two movements is indeed elsewhere directly
asserted; see “Socialism in ’34,” ibid., April 19, 1884, and the
extracts from the Owenite journals in the issue for July 25, 1885.
[571]Ibid., August 6, 1887.
[572]Justice, July 25, 1885.
[573]From 1889 onwards the columns of Justice abound in abuse
and denunciation of the leaders of the New Unionism. We may
cite, not so much because it summarises this denunciation and
abuse, but because of the details of the movement that it
incidentally gives, The Rise and Progress of a Right Honourable,
by Joseph Burgess (1911).
[574]In this development some share is to be attributed to the
work of the Fabian Society, which, established in 1883, began in
1887 to exercise a growing influence on working-class opinion.
The publication, in 1889, of Fabian Essays in Socialism, the
circulation between 1887 and 1893 of three-quarters of a million
copies of its series of “Fabian tracts,” and the delivery of several
thousand lectures a year in London and other industrial centres,
contributed largely to substitute a practical and constitutional
policy of Collectivist reform for the earlier revolutionary
propaganda. Tom Mann, Ben Tillett, and other Trade Union
leaders were, from 1889 onwards, among the members of the
parent Fabian Society, whilst the ninety independent local Fabian
Societies in the provincial centres usually included many of the
delegates to the local Trades Councils. Some account of the
Society and its work will be found in Zum socialen Frieden, by Dr.
von Schulze Gaevernitz (Leipzig, 1891, 2 vols.); in Englische
Socialreformer, by Dr. M. Grunwald (Leipzig, 1897); in La Société
Fabienne, by Edouard Pfeiffer (Paris, 1911); in Geschichte des
Socialismus in England, by M. Beer (Stuttgart, 1913), republished
in different English form as History of British Socialism(vol. i.,
1918; vol. ii., 1920); in Socialism, a Critical Analysis, by O. D.
Skelton, 1911; and in Political Thought in England from Herbert
Spencer to the Present Day, by Ernest Barker, 1915. A superficial
survey of the development of opinion is given in Socialism in
England, by Sidney Webb (1st edition, 1889; 2nd edition, 1893).
See History of the Fabian Society, by Edward R. Pease (1915).
[575]Trade Unionism Old and New, 1891, passim.
[576]Thus the Dock, Wharf, and Riverside Labourers’ Union soon
gave Funeral Benefit—usually the first to be added; whilst many
of the branches started their own sick funds. Some of the
branches of the National Union of Gas-workers and General
Labourers promptly added local benefit funds, and the addition of
Accident Benefit by the whole society was presently adopted.
 CHAPTER VIII
THE TRADE UNION WORLD
[1890-1894]
When we were engaged, between 1890 and 1894, in investigating
the history and organisation of all the several Unions, no complete
statistics as to the extent of the membership were in existence. We
accordingly sought to obtain, not only an analysis of the Trade Union
world as it then was, but also a complete census of Trade Unionism
from one end of the kingdom to the other. We retain this analysis
practically as it stood in the first edition of the book in 1894, as a
record of the position as it then was—in subsequent chapters tracing
the principal changes and developments of the last thirty years.
To deal first with the aggregate membership, we were convinced in
1894 that, although a certain number of small local societies might
have escaped our notice, we had included every Union then existing
which had as many as 1000 members, as well as many falling below
that figure. From these researches we estimated that the total Trade
Union membership in the United Kingdom at the end of 1892
certainly exceeded 1,500,000 and probably did not reach 1,600,000.
Our estimate was presently confirmed. Working upon the data thus
supplied, the Labour Department of the Board of Trade extended its
investigations, and now records a Trade Union membership for 1892
of 1,502,358.[577] The Trade Unionists of 1892 numbered, therefore,
about 4 per cent of the Census population.
But to gauge the strength of the Trade Union world of 1892 we had
to compare the number of Trade Unionists, not with the total
population, but with that portion of it which might conceivably be
included within its boundaries. Thus at the outset we had to ignore
the propertied classes, the professions, the employers and the brain-
workers of every kind, and confine our attention exclusively to the
wage-earners engaged in manual work. Even of the working-class so
defined we could exclude the children and the youths under twenty-
one, who are not usually eligible for Trade Union membership. The
women present a greater difficulty to the statistician. The adult
female wage-earners engaged in manual labour in 1891 were
estimated to number between two and three millions, of which only
about 100,000 were even nominally within the Trade Union ranks. To
what extent the men’s Trade Unionism was weakened by its failure
to enrol the women workers was a matter of dispute. From the
industrial point of view the answer depends on complicated
economic considerations, such as the extent to which women
compete with men in particular industries, or women’s trades with
those in which men are employed. Owing to the exclusion of women
from the Parliamentary franchise until 1918 their absence from the
Trade Union world detracted little from its political force. We have
dealt elsewhere[578] with the relation of women workers to the
Trade Union organisation. Meanwhile we omit the women as well as
the young persons under twenty-one from our estimate of the place
occupied by Trade Unionism in working-class life.
We know of no exact statistics as to the total numbers of the
manual-working class. The figures collected by Leone Levi, and
those of Sir Robert Giffen, together with the inferences to be drawn
from the census and from Charles Booth’s works, led us to the
conclusion—at best only hypothetical—that of the nine millions of
men over twenty-one years of age in 1891, about seven millions
belonged to the manual-working class. Out of every hundred of the
population of all ages we could roughly estimate that about eighteen
are in this sense working men adults. Accepting for the moment this
hypothetical estimate, we arrived at the conclusion that the Trade
Unionists numbered at this date about 20 per cent of the adult male
manual-working class, or, roughly, one man in five.
But this revised percentage is itself misleading. If the million and a
half Trade Unionists were evenly distributed among all occupations
and through all districts, a movement which comprised only 20 per
cent of working men would be of slight economic or industrial
importance, and of no great weight in the political world. What gave
the Trade Union Movement its significance even thirty years ago and
transformed these million and a half units into an organised world of
their own, was the massing of Trade Unionists in certain industries
and districts in such a way as to form a powerful majority of the
working-class world. The Trade Unionists were aggregated in the
thriving industrial districts of the North of England. The seven
counties of England north of the Humber and the Dee contained at
least 726,000 members of trade societies, or almost half of the total
for the United Kingdom. At a considerable distance from these
followed the industrial Midlands, where the seven counties of
Leicester, Derby, Notts, Warwick, Gloucester, Northampton, and
Stafford included a total Trade Union membership of at least
210,000, whilst South Wales, including Monmouthshire, counted
another 89,000 members of trade societies. The vast agglomeration
of the London district, in which we must reckon Middlesex, the
subsidiary boroughs of West Ham, Croydon, Richmond, and
Kingston, as well as Bromley in Kent, yielded not more than 194,000
Trade Unionists.
These four districts, comprising nearly 21,000,000 inhabitants, or
rather more than two-thirds of the population of England and Wales,
possessed in 1892 twelve-thirteenths of its Trade Unionists. The total
Trade Union membership in the remainder of the country, with its
8,000,000 of population, did not exceed 105,000, largely labourers.
The only county in England in which in 1892 we found no trace of
Trade Union organisation was Rutland, which did not, at this date,
contain a single branch of any Union whatsoever. But
Huntingdonshire, Herefordshire, and Dorsetshire, containing
together over 350,000 inhabitants, included, according to our
estimate, only about 710 Trade Unionists between them. Scotland,
with four millions of population, had 147,000 Trade Unionists, nearly
all aggregated in the narrow industrial belt between the Clyde and
the Forth, two-thirds of the total, indeed, belonging to Glasgow and
the neighbouring industrial centres. Ireland, with three-quarters of a