In the sagas of class conflict long dominant in the study of labour history, few myths have been more enduring than that of the militant miners, the assault troops of the labour army locked into an enduring conflict with the colliery owners, the personifiers of exploitative capitalism. Most people are aware of the great set-piece battles - draws (arguably) in 1912 and 1921, heroic defeat in 1926, triumph on the Heath in 1973, and then the final nemesis in 1984-5 at the hands of Mrs Thatcher and her imperial mercenaries.

Since then, a labour force once numbering more than a million has dwindled to a few thousand, their defeated general languishing, Hereward the Wake-like, in his Barnsley fastness. Now, however, even their consolatory memories are to be denied them as Roy Church and Quentin Outram subject them to rigorous examination, concentrating on the small local disputes characteristic of the industry.

In so doing, they raise questions usually ignored in regional mining histories or studies of major national strikes. Were all collieries and localities equally strike-prone? Why did conflict endure in some places for so long and then suddenly end? How widespread was workforce participation and how real the miners' traditional solidarity? They approach these questions systematically, reviewing existing literature and utilising imaginative combinations of historical and statistical techniques to arrive at some well-substantiated hypotheses. These findings are then tested with reference to a series of matched pairs of collieries and compared with work on France, Germany and the United States.

What emerges represents a significant re-interpretation of industrial conflict in the coal industry. In the years immediately around the first world war, the majority of strikes were confined to single localities; between 19 and 1940, 92 per cent of strikes affected only a single colliery. By the late 1930s the median period of stoppage was one day. Even in South Wales and Scotland, which certainly merited their reputation for militancy before 1939, a considerable proportion of total stoppages occurred in a small number of collieries.

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Nor was participation so comprehensive as is sometimes implied by reference to the miners' communal unity, another notion the authors do much to undermine. Such solidarity was often deliberately constructed for short-term purposes rather than deriving from shared values, communal isolation or any of the other usual explanations. In surveying various explanations of strike-proneness such as geology, colliery size, geography and technology, the authors also emphasise the contribution of management strategies and, rather less fashionably, of individual personalities.

It is difficult in a short review to do justice to this outstanding book. It fundamentally reassesses a major theme in the history of one of Britain's major industries, develops a new model for strike analysis, and, in reasserting the significance of industrial relations, promises to revitalise labour history, which has rather lost its way in recent years. It is a marriage of history and social science of the very highest quality and should command a wide readership.

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Kenneth D. Brown is professor of economic history, Queen's University, Belfast.