Introduction of the Women's Reservation Bill was stalled in Lok Sabha on Monday amid unprecedented scenes of snatching of papers from the Speaker and the law minister and the virtual coming to blows of members […]. As the shell shocked minister stood rooted to the spot, the member tore the papers with relish and flung them in the air provoking members from the treasury benches to storm the well. By this time, the well of the Lok Sabha looked like a veritable battle field with members from both sides preparing for a scuffle as the Speaker adjourned the House for the day.

This article examines the evolving significance of formal marriage and of partner selection in nineteenth-century Santiago do Iguape Brazil. Across social divides, racial and class endogamy were the norm for marriage partners, but consensual unions were far more likely to unite couples of different races. The information about enslaved couples was more sporadic, but I found that most slaves married partners who shared their country of origin, and that there was a higher slave-marriage rate on larger plantations. My research suggests that free and enslaved people constantly violated the borders separating them within a stratified plantation society, but that formal marriage retained a special significance and was reserved for unions between social equals.

“The organization and the establishment of democracy in Christendom”, de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “is the great political problem of the time.” Nowhere was the problem more urgent than in England, whose industrial towns were soon to be torn by intense class conflict. Yet England resolved the tensions of the 1830's and 1840's, and went on to build a tough and supple political democracy in a massively undemocratic society.

This 1999 Supplement of the International Review of Social History focuses on complicating central concepts in the understanding of economic and social history: class, gender, race and ethnicity. In concentrating on industrial workers, their politics, and institutions, labor and working-class history had tended to ignore gender, race, and ethnicity as discursive and material forces. It discussed the woman or black or immigrant worker as a subset of worker, assumed to be male, white, and of the dominant national or ethnic group. Only during recent years have historians began to ask how gender, race, and ethnicity as categories of analysis change narratives of class formation and working-class experience. This question has become particularly salient as the European Union and the United States seek to grapple with the human consequences of colonial and imperialist legacies both within and beyond national boundaries in an increasingly global economy.

This case study provides an example of how people from two fundamentally different cultures (one rural, indigenous, Kichua-speaking and peasant, and the other urban, white, Spanish-speaking and professional) overcame their differences to struggle together to fight social injustices. Rather than relating to each other on a seemingly unequal basis, the activists recognized their common interests in fighting against the imposition of an international capitalist system on Ecuador's agrarian economy. Emerging out of that context, activists framed collective interests, identities, ideas, and demands as they worked together to realize common goals. Their actions challenge commonly held assumptions that leftist activists did not understand indigenous struggles, or that indigenous peoples remained distant from the goals of leftist political parties. Rather, it points to how the two struggles became intimately intertwined. In the process, it complicates traditional understandings of the role of “popular intellectuals”, and how they interact with other activists, the dominant culture, and the state.

Seit seiner Entstehung hatte sich der vor allem aus dem linken Flügel der Vorkriegssozialdemokratie hervorgegangene deutsche Kommunismus scharf von der SPD distanziert, deren „Ersatz-Marxismus”, wie Rosa Luxemburg auf dem Gründungsparteitag der KPD am 31. Dezember 1918 meinte, die sozialistische Bewegung „zu einem Dahinsiechen im Rahmen und auf dem Boden der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft verurteilte, ohne jedes ernste Bestreben, die Gesellschaft zu erschüttern und aus den Fugen zu bringen”. Trotz all ihrer Differenzen in wichtigen Fragen waren sich Lenin und Luxemburg einig in ihrem Haß gegen die „Sozialverräter”, wie Lenin die Sozialdemokraten verächtlich nannte. Und Rosa Luxemburg sagte von ihnen und den deutschen Gewerkschaftsführern, sie seien die „infamsten und größten Halunken, die in der Welt gelebt haben”; ihre „sogenannte sozialistische Regierung” sei in Wirklichkeit eine „Regierung der bürgerlichen Konterrevolution”. Die Frontstellung gegen die Sozialdemokratie bestimmte also bereits die Politik der jungen KPD und der im März 1919 gegründeten Kommunistischen Internationale, ehe am 23. März 1919 auf der Piazza San Sepolcro in Mailand von dem ehemaligen Sozialisten Mussolini die „Fasci di Combattimento” ins Leben gerufen wurden und Hitler im September desselben Jahres in die winzige „Deutsche Arbeiterpartei” eintrat, die einige Monate später den Namen „NSDAP” erhielt. Der Kampf gegen diese beiden politischen Gruppierungen, die Sozialdemokratie und den „Faschismus”, bestimmte in der Periode der Weimarer Republik in nicht geringem Maße die Politik der KPD. Wir wollen die Entwicklung des kommunistischen Verhältnisses zur Sozialdemokratie sowie vor allem die Geschichte des Begriffs „Sozialfaschismus” in Deutschland in einem kurzen Überblick betrachten.

By combining archival research with the oral testimony of ex-industrial chaplains – and others with direct experience of industrial mission – this article explores a neglected dimension of religious outreach, and attempts to provide a nuanced interpretation of the interrelationship between de-industrialization and secularization in post-1960 Britain. By 1965, over 100 industrial chaplains operated throughout industrial Scotland across a range of industries. Functioning at the cutting edge of the Kirk’s efforts to halt what was clearly identified as a slide in faith, the chaplains were also perfectly placed to bear witness to Scotland’s traumatic and painful process of de-industrialization. Historians agree that the correlation between falling church attendances and religious belief is problematic, and this case study presents clear evidence that “discursive Christianity” remained significant in Scotland well into the 1980s. However, this research also highlights that institutional religion was far from passive in the face of secularization, and that the very presence of chaplains in the workplaces helped bolster the credibility of religion in a secularizing society.

This article investigates the entangled histories of radicals in Detroit and Turin who challenged capitalism in ways that departed from “orthodox” Marxism. Starting from the 1950s, small but influential groups of labour radicals, such as Correspondence in Detroit and Quaderni Rossi in Turin, circulated ideas that questioned the Fordist system in a drastic way. These radicals saw the car factories as laboratories for a possible “autonomist” working-class activity that could take over industrial production and overhaul the societal system. They criticized the usefulness of the unions and urged workers to develop their own forms of collective organization. These links were rekindled during the intense working-class mobilization of the late 1960s, when younger radicals would also engage in a dialogue across national boundaries that influenced each other's interpretation of the local context. These transnational connections, well-known to contemporaries but ignored by historians, show how American events and debates were influenced by, and impinged on, distant countries, and how local activists imagined their political identity as encompassing struggles occurring elsewhere.

This paper deals with the making of vagrancy in the context of early state welfare policy. Vagrancy is neither understood as an anachronism nor as deviance or marginality. Rather, it raises central questions concerning social policy and the history of labour. Starting from the problems of definition in the context of contemporary transnational debates, I will then focus on the practical implementation of distinctions in Austria from the late nineteenth century to the Anschluss in 1938. Different practices of varying efficacy will be accounted for, starting with the first attempts to formalize unemployment emerging in the late nineteenth century, when, based on a new understanding of unemployment as an effect of the labour market, new forms of supporting and regulating those wayfarers in search of employment were established. Such practices also aimed at outlawing vagrancy, with consistent penalties under the law. In addition, vagrancy will be discussed with respect to changing political regimes. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, the paper analyses crime statistics and crime records, and last but not least, the perspective of those who were “on the tramp”.

As English urban society overhauled its systems of policing, poor relief and labour discipline in the early nineteenth century, one form of interaction between classes to become problematical was the act of giving to beggars. While economic ideology endorsed a more calculating approach to the relief of distress, social and religious ideology preached the necessity of expanded personal concern for the distressed. Among the commercial and professional middle classes a variety of volunteer activists attempted a solution to this dilemma by professionalizing relations between giver and receiver, thus anticipating the methods of later Victorian “charity organization” by a full half-century.

Strike activity is clearly the least studied aspect of the history of labor movements, yet it may be the most revealing index of the situation and outlook of actual workers. Moreover strike activity has an important history of its own, related to but not described by the history of organized labor. Strikes have evolved. Various groups of workers developed an ability to mount new kinds of strikes at different times. In order to grasp this evolution we need some clear means of measurement. What follows is an effort to suggest some criteria, many of them obvious enough. The essay results from an ongoing study of workers in France, Belgium, Germany and Britain in the two decades before World War I. But while examples are chosen primarily from this area and period, the effort is meant to be quite open-ended. There is no need to expect uniform patterns of strike activity in a given stage of industrialization; but there is every reason to hope that sufficiently general standards of measurement can be developed to measure key differences and to specify problems that require deeper study in terms of fundamental causation.

I regard the work of the past 20 years and of some years to come as the work ofclearing the underbrush, so that we may build a more useful framework for socialscience.

Immanuel Wallerstein (1996)

In September 1976, the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies,Historical Systems, and Civilizations opened its doors at the State Universityof New York - Binghamton. The new institution made a flying start. Afterthree months it presented its “Proposed Research Programs” in a substantialbooklet. In the summer of 1977, the first issue of its journal, Review, cameout. That same year, a section on the “Political Economy of World-Systems”(PEWS), inspired by the Braudel Center, was established within theAmerican Sociological Association. The PEWS section has held annualconferences and published their proceedings ever since. Since 1979, theCenter, together with the Maison des sciences de l'homme of Paris, hassponsored a book series called “Studies in Modern Capitalism”, published byCambridge University Press.

This article attempts to introduce readers to the impressive and influential historical and contemporary literature on South African labour. A literature with some earlier antecedents effectively applied classic sociological and historical themes to the specific conditions of South African political and economic development. Research on the phase of politicized and militant white worker action ties up with research into the international pre-World War I labour movement. The strength of this literature reflected the insurgent labour movement linked to political struggle against apartheid before 1990. After this review, the second half of the paper tries to consider and contextualize the challenging post-apartheid labour situation together with its political aspects. With the successful conclusion of the anti-apartheid struggle, students of the labour movement, as well as of South African society, have become more aware of the distance between establishing a liberal democracy and actually changing society itself in a direction leading towards less inequality and an improved life for those at the bottom of society, or even the broad mass of the population. As recent literature reveals, the development of post-apartheid South Africa has been a differential and problematic experience for labour.

Increased demand for lead on both domestic and international markets spurred on technological and organizational innovation in Derbyshire's lead mining industry. Population expanded due to immigration into the mining areas, and problems of poverty and proletarianization were created as the traditional small producers were marginalized by new capitalized mineworkings owned by aristocrats, merchants and gentlemen. Social conflict intensified over the ownership of mining rights; in particular, this dispute revolved around popular and élite notions of property and legality. This conflict engendered new forms of popular resistance and provides evidence of a language of class in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century saw the marginalization of the independent free miner, but memories of lost liberties conditioned the class consciousness of Derbyshire's new working class at the end of the century.

Precarious labour has been on the rise globally since the 1970s and 1980s. Changing labour relations in the cleaning industry are an example of these developments. From the 1970s onwards, outsourcing changed the position of industrial cleaners fundamentally: subcontracting companies were able to reduce labour costs by recruiting mainly women and immigrants with a weak position in the labour market. For trade unions, it was hard to find a way to counteract this tendency and to organize these workers until the Justice for Janitors (J4J) campaigns, set up by the US-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from the late 1980s, showed that an adequate trade union response was possible. From the mid-2000s, the SEIU launched a strategy to form international coalitions outside the US. It met a favourable response in several countries. In the Netherlands, a campaign modelled on the J4J repertoire proved extraordinarily successful. In this article, transnational trade unionism in the cleaning industry based on the J4J model will be analysed with a special focus on the Dutch case. How were local labour markets and trade union actions related to the transnational connections apparent in the rise of multinational cleaning companies, the immigrant workforce, and the role of the SEIU in promoting international cooperation between unions?

In 1900, a special type of unemployment insurance was set up in Belgium: the so-called “Ghent system”, which had some influence on the development of unemployment insurance in many European countries. This particular system was characterized by the important role played by the trade-union unemployment societies. The public authorities (in Belgium, from 1920 onwards, the central government next to the towns and provinces) encouraged the affiliation of the labourers to these societies by granting different sorts of financial support to the unemployed society members and to the societies themselves. During the crisis of the 1930s, this led to an important growth of Belgian trade-union membership. On the other hand, the quantitative growth of the labour movement due to this particular organization of unemployment insurance, led to many negative sideeffects for the trade unions (administrative chaos, financial problems, loss of combativity). Moreover, the employers' organizations strongly opposed this system of unemployment insurance, because they thought it reinforced the labour movement's power in society (strengthening of union membership, influence on wage formation, obstruction of deflation policy). This article examines the heated debates waged in the labour movement itself and between this actor, the employers' organizations and the government, to solve the many important problems posed by this type of social insurance. The Belgian pre-Second World War debate concerning unemployment insurance was of great importance for the shaping of the Welfare State in Belgium, which took its present-day form in 1944.

“A true businessman does not waste time writing reflections about business.” Fortunately Auguste Detoeuf disregarded his own self-mocking advice. Throughout his life this thoughtful industrialist articulated the debates and dilemmas of an entire generation of businessmen, especially of other enlightened corporation managers who, like himself, were faced with the problems of industrial modernization and labor relations. The business milieu generally, preoccupied with its own affairs and not inclined to reveal them, provides but few glimpses into the minds and sensibilities which compose it. Detoeuf broke the silence; moreover, his shrewd analyses, unique moral perspective, and wide experience made him a remarkable historical witness to a time of troubles and fundamental change. He provided a rich record of the passage of French employers from the vogue of Americanization in the 1920's, through the crise de conscience provoked by the depression, the Popular Front, and Nazi aggression, up to the new resolve of the Liberation era.

This paper focuses on the theme of religious conflict within the working class in inter-war Scotland. It pays particular attention to the Protestant working class of the industrial lowlands and to the role of the exclusively Protestant secret society of Irish origin, the Orange Order. It attempts to explain why the inter-war period saw an upsurge in membership of sectarian organisations like the Orange Order and their activities; and at the same time was notable for a broadening of Labour Party support among the working class which transcended religious divisions. It argues that sectarian and class loyalties often went together and in some ways reinforced each other. The Orange Order leadership's Conservative politics is stressed but it is contended that the Order's appeal to the working class was to a large extent based on issues such as education and mixed marriages and perceived Irish Catholic immigration, issues which did not break down neatly into party political terms. It is argued that the Orange Order's social role was of great significance in this period of economic austerity and mass unemployment.

In his book Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution Thorstein Veblen argued that the relative lateness of the advent of German industrialization permitted her to avoid “the penalty of taking the lead”. She could borrow on a massive scale from the accumulated knowledge and technology of already industrialized societies. While this judgment may hold true on the purely technological level, it is not true that German society made the transition from the basically agrarian-commercial society of the mid-nineteenth century to the predominantly industrial society of the twentieth century without penalties. In recent years specialists on the developing nations have directed our attention to the dislocation, hardships, and complexity which the processes of industrialisation, urbanization, and modernization are introducing into traditional societies. In our scholarly concern for the problems of development in the non-Western world, we have, until quite recently, tended to forget that large segments of the populations of European societies had to be “dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century”, to use Adlai Stevenson's telling phrase. In the case of Germany around 1900 only part of the nation was brought into the new era while another sizeable portion of the population, to Germany's later misfortune, was aided by the Imperial Establishment in its efforts to build a protective wall around itself to keep out the new machine age. I shall argue that the strongest part of that wall was erected in the years between 1894 and 1902, between the fall of Caprivi and the passage of the protective tariff of 1902. In these years German society endured an economic and intellectual crisis which extended beyond merely the selfish attempts of the East Elbian Junkers to maintain their economic and political position. Peasant proprietors were deeply involved. Artisans were affected. And even the leading theoreticians of the Social Democratic party stood confused before the crisis.