Studies of indigenous workers’ resistance focus largely on rural workers. In contrast, this article examines indigenous workers’ dissent in an industrialized and largely urbanized setting – that of Māori meat processing workers in Aotearoa New Zealand. I argue that far from being passive victims of colonization and capitalism, Māori meatworkers played an often vital role in the generally extensive informal and formal labour unrest that occurred in the meat industry during the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. However, Māori meatworkers’ resistance and solidarity was not universal, but instead varied significantly, both spatially and temporally. The dissent and solidarity that occurred were often a product of the multi-ethnic informal work groups that existed in many slaughterhouses. These workplace-whānau, in which Māori played a pivotal role, functioned similar to extended family networks on the killing floor. Workplace-whānau represented a significant intertwining of indigeneity and class. Nevertheless, as they were often based on masculine bonds, they frequently excluded female workers (including Māori women).

The struggle by women workers has largely been overlooked in the historiography of trade unions in South Africa during apartheid. This article analyses the strategies of the National Union of Textile Workers (NUTW) to end wage discrimination against women as part of the struggle against poverty wages in the South African textile industry during the last years of apartheid, c.1980 to 1987. The first South African equal pay legislation came into force in 1981, covering the minimum wages of just a small number of the workforce; it was not until 1984 that legislation set minimum wages for all workers. Before the legal reform, new domestic and foreign political opportunities helped the NUTW to create new mobilization structures and offered possibilities to connect levels of scale and make local action visible at home and abroad. Global framing of wage equality combined with a translocal repertoire was used in the cases of multinational companies to make relevant connections between levels of scale (international, transnational, national, and local) to add to the visibility of the violations. After the reform of labour legislation in South Africa, the union made reference to domestic legislation, but translocal activism remained important in bringing foreign companies to the local negotiating table. Drawing on these cases, the NUTW developed a national strategy to make wage setting more transparent across the entire industry, adding to the visibility of all forms of wage discrimination.

The controversy around Bruce Gilley's article “The Case for Colonialism” has drawn global attention to a stream of revisionist claims and visions on the history of colonialism that has emerged in academia and in the media in recent years. Authors such as Nigel Biggar in the UK, Niall Ferguson in the USA, and Pieter Emmer in the Netherlands, have all published similarly revisionist claims about colonialism, arguing that postcolonial guilt and political correctness blind the majority of their colleagues to the positive side of the colonial project. Their argument chimes with wider societal trends, transforming the revisionist defenders of empire into heroes of a reinvigorated nationalist right within and beyond academia. The public influence attained by these approaches to colonialism requires historians to expose the deep methodological flaws, misreading of historical facts, and misrepresentations of prior scholarship that characterize the writings of this emerging revisionist trend. It is for this reason that the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History (IRSH) has decided to devote its first ever Virtual Special Issue to labour history's case against colonialism. This article, also an introduction to the Virtual Special Issue, sifts through the logical implications of the claims made by Gilley and like-minded scholars, providing both a contextualization and a rebuttal of their arguments. After assessing the long absence of colonial labour relations from the field of interest of labour historians and the pages of the IRSH itself, this article shows the centrality of a critique of colonialism to labour history's global turn in the 1990s. Using a selection of articles on colonial labour history from the IRSH's own archive, the article not only reconstructs “labour history's case against colonialism”, but also shows why labour history's critical insights into the nature of colonialism should be deepened and extended, not discarded.

Global history seems to be the history for our times. Huge syntheses such as the seven-volume Cambridge World History or the six-volume A History of the World suggest the field has come to fruition. Robert Moore, in his contribution to the book under review, The Prospect of Global History, is quite confident in this respect: if there is a single reason for “the rise of world history”, it is “the collapse of every alternative paradigm” (pp. 84–85). As early as 2012, the journal Itinerario published an interview with David Armitage with the title “Are We All Global Historians Now?” That may have been provocative but Armitage obliged by claiming “the hegemony of national historiography is over”.

Peer Vries's eloquent review essay “The Prospects of Global History: Personal Reflections of an Old Believer” sees the chance to review The Prospect of Global History as an opportunity to champion Global History as a discipline and voice his concerns regarding what, in his view, have become possible abuses or deviancies in the practice of the discipline. His long-standing status as one of the founding fathers of the discipline and of its consecrated Journal of Global History places him in a position of undisputable authority as an old believer, while his far-reaching knowledge of current debates in Global and World History and his poignant views, reflected in the review essay, are trademarks of his work.

The British educated classes have long worried and fantasized about working-class religious belief and unbelief. Anglican churchmen feared Methodist “enthusiasm” in the eighteenth century, radicalism in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and urban, industrial irreligion after the 1851 Religious Census on churchgoing. In a mirror image of these old anxieties, most labour historians have wished away Christianity in the twentieth century. The long-standing shared socialist teleology of Marxists and Fabians leads to the modern, socialist labour movement. In this Marxian take on secularization theory, a new, more cohesive proletariat or singular “working class” forms, with an anti-capitalist, “socialist” consciousness reflected in the political, trade union, and co-operative institutions of the “labour movement”. Suddenly, economic, social, and political history find a single, unified subject. At the level of belief, socialism displaces those old Victorian pretenders for working-class hearts and minds: conservatism, liberalism, and Christianity. Sometime between 1914 and 1918, the Christian religion disappears from ordinary lives, as in Selina Todd's recent, The People, where popular religious faith is barely worth talking about.