About New Rochdale Press

Conventional wisdom to the contrary, there is no shortage of literature in the field of Co-operative Studies. Much has been written; more is being written. The main problem is that people who are interested in the movement and in the development of co-operatives cannot readily find (hopefully buy—at fair prices) what researchers, co-op leaders and people outside the movement write.

Thus, BCICS has created its own press, called The New Rochdale Press. Its title was chosen, of course, as a form of tribute to the way in which the Rochdale Pioneers, generally people of very limited formal education, understood the importance of communicating through the modern media of their times. For them, that meant working with others to publish journals, most particularly The Co-operative News, a gold mine for anyone interested in the early history of the co-operative movement in the United Kingdom and elsewhere as well. It meant encouraging the publication of books, most notably on local societies, many of them written by George Holyoake. It meant helping to unleash what became the Women’s Guilds, many of which were engaged in research and publications; in fact, they undertook some of the very best research of the times into the nature of women’s lives in industrial Britain. Devoting two per cent of their gross income to “education” meant that they made an abiding contribution to the storehouse of the movement through the development of libraries and the publication of information, as well as training materials.

We cannot aspire to do what the Rochdale Pioneers, their associates and their descendants (for a few generations at least) did. Yet our efforts must be seen within the context of the Co-operative Learning Centre and our online efforts to work with others in the development of accessible resources on the co-operative movement. Such linkages are “new” and that partly explains the name we have chosen.

“New” is also appropriate because we hope the Press will help provide in “hard copy” research into areas not well covered within the readily available corpus of co-operative studies. We hope to publish results in a wide range of traditional disciplines and not just the relatively few that are currently easily available in the literature of the co-operative movement. We intend to “take some chances” by publishing the writings of new researchers. We hope to bridge the unfortunate divide between practitioners and theorists. The “In” tray is full . . . but we can always add another tray and should aspire to do so, as long as we have the resources to publish the best that is available to us.