Unemployment in the Interwar Period: A Multiple Problem

The principal aim of this paper is to emphasise the need for historians to re-examine the specific nature and causes of interwar unemployment. For a variety of reasons we can no longer continue to accept the assumption that Keynes and Beveridge had the final say on the subject, and it is necessary to face up to the fact that unemployment is virtually impossible to define in realistic statistical terms. Above all it is important to realise the serious limitations of National Insurance data which