After fulfilling the position since 1987, Marcel van der Linden stepped down as executive editor of the International Review of Social History in July 2007. Over the past two decades the Review has developed into one of the leading journals in the field of international, and increasingly global, social history. For anyone who has kept track of the journal in this period, the contribution Marcel van der Linden has made to the journal's development will be clear. He remains involved with the Review in a different role. From February 2008 onward, he will be the permanent Chair of the journal's Editorial Committee, and as such will continue to be engaged in the development of the journal.

This paper examines the consumer movement in Malaysia, especially the Consumers' Association of Penang and the Federation of Malaysian Consumer Associations. It traces their history from the late 1960s, through a period of rapid social and economic change associated with the New Economic Policy of the 1970s and 1980s. Partly because of the absence of other NGOs in Malaysia (due to government clampdowns on civil society), consumer groups were able to take a prominent position and to develop socio-political campaigns on behalf of the poor and the disadvantaged. This proved an inspiration to consumer organizing globally, especially in the developed world, but it is not clear that consumerism as a social movement can be sustained. Since the mid-1980s, other NGOs have emerged, eclipsing the influence of consumerism, and promoting a human rights agenda which has overtaken the politics of consumption as the dominant oppositional rhetoric of non-governmental groups.

Analyses of anarchism emphasizing cyclical patterns of advances and retreats inadequately explain how anarchism sustained itself over time. They foster a picture of powerlessness before repression and cyclical reappearances as if by spontaneous germination, thus lending themselves to interpretations, such as Hobsbawm's millenarianism, that identify discontinuity, spontaneism, and lack of organization as features of anarchism, and ultimately supporting charges of ineffectiveness and irrationalism. A narrow framework of analysis of national scope is responsible for such explanatory inadequacy. This article illustrates the transnational dimension of Italian anarchism, by analysing its presence in the United States and worldwide, with special emphasis on the anarchist press. A transnational analysis reveals new forms of integration, continuity, and organization, based on the mobility of militants, resources, and ideas across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. In times of repression, seeming entrances and exits of anarchism on the Italian stage often corresponded to shifts of initiative across the Italian border. Transnationalism was a built-in characteristic that supported insurrectionary tactics by enhancing the opaqueness of their preparation. Together, insurrectionism, organizational opaqueness, and transnationalism help providing an alternative to the advance-and-retreat pattern of explanation.

The role of professions in the development of advanced industrial societies has long been recognized – for example, by Harold Perkin. However, the focus has been on the higher professions. Other professions have usually been dealt with as imperfect variants, with Etzioni, typically, referring to nurses, schoolteachers, and social workers as “semi-professions”. However, by conceptualizing such professions as social formations in their own right, as ladders of social mobility, and in terms of their permanent social and professional insecurity, it is possible to create a different picture both of their internal dynamics and broader influence. Members of such groups fostered types of social and political activity that became a recognisable feature of developed societies. Moreover, an appreciation of the distinctive ideational and professional contribution of insecure professions can offer a perspective on a number of the major concerns of social historians. The argument is illustrated by reference to the development of such professions mainly in England and Scotland.

Few men have shaken the world like Karl Marx. His death, almost unnoticed, was followed by echoes of fame in such a short period of time that few comparisons could be found in history. His name was soon on the lips of the workers of Detroit and Chicago, as on those of the first Indian socialists in Calcutta. His image formed the background of the congress of the Bolsheviks in Moscow after the revolution. His thought inspired the programmes and statutes of all the political and union organizations of the workers' movement, from Europe to Shanghai.