What the past can offer the future

Gloom and misery everywhere
Stormy weather, stormy weather…

The clouds have certainly been lowering recently over Manchester’s cooperative quarter, but let’s pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down, and see what insights the past can offer the future.  I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I had received a copy of Building Co-operation, the important new history of the Co-operative Wholesale Society/Co-operative Group which (with, let’s face it, terrible timing) has just been published.  My review of the book is in today’s edition of Co-operative News and is also available on their website here.

How, in 150 years, we got to where we are today: new coop history published

An interesting arrival in today’s post:  an advance copy of Building Co-operation, a major new history of the Co-operative Group and its predecessor body the Co-operative Wholesale Society,  written by three academic historians John F Wilson, Anthony Webster and Rachael Vorberg-Rugh.  The book’s subtitle makes it clear that this is a “business history”, or in other words a survey of the development of the cooperative business model over the 150 years (and, yes, it is exactly 150 years) since the “North of England Co-operative Wholesale Industrial and Provident Society” was first set up by local coop societies as a collective way to supply their stores with the goods they needed.

As the authors themselves put it, “the British co-operative model remains a complicated one, with many overlapping structures”.  At first glance, this book should help put today’s coop scene into its historical context and sort out any confusion.  I’ll offer a proper review in due course.