In Durban, South Africa, stevedoring workers were the most physically powerful workers of all, and were known as onyathi in Zulu, or buffalo, which aptly described the physical and collective nature of their work. Throughout the century, the stevedoring industry was especially labour-intensive, necessitating teams of workers. As in most industries in South Africa, African workers built and maintained the docks. These buffalo developed the linkage that made Durban a thriving city and sustained the apartheid economy. Yet today the buffalo are all but gone, replaced by onboard warehouses known as containers. Machines have replaced the men once so integral to the survival of the city.

The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the labour movement and unemployment insurance (UI). Following a brief overview of the evolution of the approach of labour movements towards UI, the focus shifts to an analysis of a case study of the Israeli labour movement. The study traces the development of the approach of this movement towards UI during the pre-state period and following the establishment of Israel. It indicates that, while the policy adopted by the Israeli labour movement in the pre-state period was similar to that of other labour movements, the motivation differed in that the goals of the Israeli movement were primarily nationalist. In the post-independence period, the labour movement objected to the adoption of UI and prevented the introduction of this programme for two decades. The reasons for this are linked to the values and perceptions of the labour movement leadership and the legacies of policies adopted during the pre-state period.

The prestige of the landlord class, which had stood so high in the long period of prosperity of the mid-Victorian years, fell to its lowest point in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. From the early 1880's landowners were attacked by politicians and land reformers in Parliament, in the Press and in a welter of literature on various aspects of the land question. At the same time there was a revival in the membership and activities of land organisations many of which had been started in the land agitation of the early 1870's only to go down before the onset of the Great Depression. The main cause of the widespread feelings of hostility towards landowners was economic: the instability of trade and employment and the effects of falling profit margins on the outlook and standards of expenditure of businessmen. The conflict of economic interests between landlords, businessmen and workers was expressed in the language of class war. Radicals of the Liberal Party took advantage of the increased support given to them by the business and professional classes to renew their campaign against the landowning aristocracy. They carped at the wealth of landowners and pointed to the burden of rents and royalties which lay on the enterprise of farmers and mineowners. They contrasted the relatively fixed incomes of landowners with the falling rate of return on industrial investments. Turning away from moderate reforms designed to improve the transfer and development of estates, they pronounced that the chief burden on the land was not the law but the landlord himself.

This essay discusses the relationship between Brazilian labour laws and the labour arrangements entered into by former slaves (libertos – freed persons) in Brazil during the nineteenth century. It discusses firstly how the definition of “contract” was important in guiding the labour laws on Brazilian national and immigrant workers, as well as on former slaves. By analysing a sample of labour contracts entered into by freed persons and recorded in the archives of notaries in the southern Brazilian city of Desterro (now Florianópolis) between the 1840s and 1887, this essay discusses too the conflicted meanings of “freedom of labour” to freed persons and their employers. It attempts further to show how efforts to deal with precariousness were central to the strategies of freed persons and the negotiations underlying those contracts. Finally, this essay aims to understand the possible reasons for the disappearance of the contracts from notarial records after the end of slavery.

On 31 December 1870, the Swiss philosopher, Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881), petitioned the municipal authorities of Geneva on behalf of his neighbours and himself. They lived in a street called the Rue des Belles Filles (“beautiful girls' street”) and wanted to have the name of their street changed because it alluded to prostitutes. This is just one among a multitude of historical facts that have come down to us because humble (or not so humble) suppliants put them on paper in the form of a petition, and the authorities to which these petitions were addressed took care to preserve them. Writing petitions was a common human experience. “Everybody is free to write petitions and have a drink of water”, as a traditional German saying would have it. However, as opposed to drinking water, writing petitions is an act which produces historical sources, many of which have survived. The aim of this volume is to give an overview of their importance as sources for social history.

This essay was written with the thought in mind that there is need for more clarification in the terminology used to describe certain socialist philosophies of the nineteenth century. It seems clear that the terms ‘democratic socialism” or “social democracy” have lost much of the meaning they might have had in the past. “Democratic” as an adjective or “democracy” as a noun, have been so abused that today they may convey the idea of either a civil libertarian kind of government or a form of totalitarianism. Indeed, the words made for confusion in the nineteenth century when Jacobins, Babouvians, Blanquists, even Bonapartists, claimed each to be true representatives of the general will, and either executed or would have executed those representing opposing wills. Nonviolent were P.-J.-B. Buchez and Louis Blanc, each of whom claimed to be a democratic socialist. Yet in 1848 they opposed each other with intense vehemence. There is need then, for definition and delineation.

While scholarly discussions of citizenship, social movements and racial identity-formation have generally remained distinct, these social institutions and processes are intimately connected. Official policies of exclusion from citizenship according to race have drawn boundaries solidifying subordinated racial identity, which then forms the basis for collective action in response to shifting state policies. Forms of domination are thus two-edged; exclusion of officially specified groups has the unintended consequence of defining, legitimating and provoking group identity and mobilization, forging struggles for inclusion between state agents and emerging political actors. This dynamic has generally been overlooked by those theorists of social movements, who have focused on relative deprivation, resource mobilization and responses to political opportunities, without explaining the related process of identity formation.

The twentieth century was “short”, running only from 1914 to 1990/1991. Even so, it will doubtless enter history as an unprecedented era of dictatorships. The question of how these totalitarian regimes functioned in practice, how and to what extent they were able to realize their power aspirations, has until now been answered empirically at most highly selectively. Extensive comparative research efforts will be required over the coming decades. The police as the key organization in the state monopoly of power is particularly important in this context, since like no other institution it operates at the interface of state and society. Using the example of the Gestapo's activities in the Third Reich, this article analyses collaboration structures between these two spheres, which made possible (either on a voluntary or coercive basis) a penetration of social contexts and hence police action even in shielded areas. It is my thesis that such exchange processes through unsolicited denunciation and informers with double identities will also have been decisive outside Germany in the tracking of dissident behaviour and the detection of conspiratorial practices.

Between 1957 and 1984, Belgian consumers were represented by two comparative testing organizations: Test-Achats and the Union Féminine pour l’Information et la Défense du Consommateur. These two consumer organizations were fundamentally dissimilar in terms of their staff, their audience, and their ideological framing of consumer interests. Only the “politically independent” Test-Achats joined the International Organization of Consumer Unions (IOCU), even though it was initially smaller and weaker than the Union Féminine, the social-democratic alternative for consumers. A comparative analysis of Belgian organized consumerism reveals how, after 1957, the consumer interest was gradually reframed to fit a hegemonic definition. A private and commercial model of consumer representation was actively promoted over and against a public model through a complex transatlantic dialogue. Moreover, I argue that the international connections – or lack thereof – of the two organizations are essential to explain their success (or failure). The diffusion of organized consumerism during the 1950s and 1960s was financially and ideologically connected with the Keynesian-Fordist regulatory framework. The attack on embedded liberalism in the late 1970s thus posed serious challenges. Mapping the choices and trajectories of Belgian consumer activists in an international context helps us to understand these challenges better.

Trade unionism has always involved the settlement of industrial disputes by negotiations between workers' representatives and employers. On occasions in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries demands made by workers or employers were granted without question by the other side; at other times the demands were rejected out of hand and this was acquiesced in by the other side. In between these extremes lay a number of possible outcomes. Demands were sometimes conceded after strikes or lockouts or they were moderated and then accepted. The precise outcome depended upon the state of the labour market, and hence the degree of labour organization, and the cost position of the employers. These factors not only varied over time but differed in their intensity between industries and firms at any one point of time. The extreme situations occurred at high and low levels of employment. In the competition for labour, which a high level of employment implies, employers readily gave way to collective demands but as commodity markets deteriorated and the volume of production declined, they at first resisted claims which would have increased labour costs and then deliberately set out to cut wages, lengthen hours and intensify work. Workers commonly resisted initial attempts to reduce labour costs so that a spate of strikes and lockouts ensued. At the onset of the depression in 1819 and at the first suggestion of wage reductions the Lancashire miners, the North Staffordshire potters and the Nottingham framework knitters all responded by striking. The Glasgow cotton spinners resisted wage cuts in 1837 as did the London building workers and miners and textile workers in the midlands and north in 1841 and the typographical workers in 1846. Frequently, however, these disputes resulted in compromise settlements which were superseded by other compromises as trade conditions got worse.

Autobiographies and diaries have furnished many historians, including those who otherwise eschew qualitative data, with an apposite quote with which to launch their papers. Other historians select extracts from such sources to add colour to arguments advanced initially from the analysis of parish registers or court records. As a major source in their own right, diaries, autobiographies and letters provide the historian with valuable insights into the motivations, conscious or unconscious, of the authors. Such sources are less forthcoming on the perspectives and motivations of other persons whose activities feature in the written record as their motivations have to be teased out from the distorted and necessarily partial account of the author. Nor is it always easy to distinguish exceptional events in the life of a diarist from those which might have been experienced by persons of equivalent status or even more widely. The temptation is to overgeneralize on the basis of limited evidence.

Steven King in “Chance Encounters? Paths to Household Formation in Early Modern England”, has chosen to be particularly ambitious, selecting a limited number of diaries and autobiographies to challenge the applicability of the widely held association between the accumulation of economic resources and age at marriage and the claim that couples in deciding to marry assessed the state of their current resources and their future prospects. From this base Dr King launches a further set of hypotheses concerning the involvement of parents in the choice of their child's marriage partner, changes over time in the density and quality of contacts between kin and with neighbours, and the significance of these factors for the decline in the mean age at marriage in England over the course of the eighteenth century.

Placing Thomas Edison at the beginning of a history on electric power transmission hardly needs justification. Thomas Edison's abundant supply of pictures of himself as an inventive genius – and America's pressing demand for a myth of an ingenious inventor – combined to bestow a “Eureka” moment upon Edison's pioneering Pearl Street (New York) Station electric lighting network. But the history of the laborious computations that took place at Menlo Park and the division-of-computing labor of which Edison took advantage suggests a different view of inventive genius. The story of the computational pyramid formed by the labors of Francis R. Upton, Charles L. Clarke, and Samuel D. Mott (1879–1880) can be reconstructed from the existing literature. In his reminiscences from Menlo Park, Edison's employee, Francis Jehl, detailed how Edison thought of constructing a miniaturized network to be used as a computer of the actual network. Knowing that constructing, maintaining, and using the miniature network required a considerable amount of skilled labor, Edison decided to hire an employee for it, Dr Herman Claudius. Edison enthusiastically welcomed Claudius to perform a type of computing work “requiring nerve and super abundance of patience and knowledge”. Jehl remembered that the labor of constructing a miniature network of conductors, “all in proportion, to show Mr Edison what he would have to install in New York City in connection with the Pearl Street Station” was “gigantic”. Following the pattern of the Pearl Street Station electric lighting network, several similar networks were built in the early 1880s. In response, Edison's labor pyramid was enlarged by giving Claudius an assistant, Hermann Lemp, who performed the monotonous task of constructing the new miniature networks, which Edison needed for computation. Inconvenient as it might be for those who assume that technological change is the product of inventive genius, electrification was, from the beginning, laboriously computed; it was not, like Athena, a deity that leapt from a godly head.

In a sub-field of Marxism, A.G. Frank and E. Laclau debated the intricate details of Frank's critique of the “dualist thesis”. That thesis argued that capitalism failed to overcome feudalism in its colonial adventure; Frank argued that to posit the duality between capital and feudal forms does violence to the structural integration of feudal forms into the logic of capital. Frank's critique, however, remained wedded to a level of abstraction which was unable to reveal the full implications of his suggestions. In this essay, I attempt to show that the logic of capital during colonial rule produced a municipal sanitation regime which relied upon the control over the labor of manual sweepers mediated through jobbers, overseers and contractors. Far from being the embodiment of “tradition”, the sweepers since colonial India bear on their bodies the marks of capital. This essay reveals those marks as well as demonstrating the integral relation between the logic of capital and barbaric colonial rule.

Social historians study social, political, demographic and economic phenomena which take place in geographical space, yet “space” rarely enters historical discourse explicitly as an analytic construct. Given the recent interest among social historians in “localizing” social processes, it is unfortunate that almost all of our efforts have gone toward recognizing the significance of time, to the relative neglect of space. For example, social historians typically assume that events occurring at a given point in time are affected by earlier events. In contrast, it is less widely recognized that events occurring in one location are also affected by similar events in other areas, especially those nearby. In the rare instances in which geographical space has been central, such as in Susan Watkins' treatment of western European fertility decline during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or in the evidence of the diffusion of democracy in post-war Europe that is emerging from the “Spatial and Temporal Diffusion of Democracy” project at the University of Colorado — Boulder, the payoff has been substantial. Such innovative approaches to historical theorizing give reason to believe that thinking of events in the past as parts of a process moving through time and across space will become more commonplace. If so, then social historians will need an effective and accessible method to account for the spatial distributions of their study phenomena.

This article applies a systems approach to the analysis of multiple circuits of labor migration that emerged in the Algarve, southern Portugal, from the late eighteenth century to the mid 1900s, and their connections. Over time Algarvian migrants participated in three main systems of migration: internal migration and migration to southern Spain and Gibraltar, transatlantic migration to the Americas and Africa – especially to Argentina – and migration to northern Europe. Rather than an abrupt break with a sedentary past, the article shows how the beginnings of transatlantic migration at the turn of the century were the result of modification and adaptation of existing strategies of labor migration.

Interest in the history of consumer cooperation has grown in recent years, but the transnational dimensions of the movement, including the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), remain under-researched. This paper examines the debates about the meanings of cooperation during the period 1918–1939, focusing on the Nordic countries as a case study within the ICA. The paper considers how cooperators drew on the legacy of the Rochdale Pioneers as the basis for a programmatic statement for the ICA, before turning to explore the implications of this for the ordinary members who shopped in the cooperative stores. Examination of these debates within the cooperative movement can, it is argued, illuminate our understandings of both the transnational politics of consumption, and the ambitions, limits, and practices of internationalism during the interwar years. Lastly, some attention is given to the role of cooperation in the emergence of a distinctive Nordic region.

Seit der vollständigen Veröffentlichung der Marxschen Frühschriften ist es gesichertes Ergebnis der Forschung, daΒ der philosophische Ansatz des jungen Marx fundamental von dem verschieden ist, was der späte Engels im weltanschaulichen System des “Anti-DÜhring” (1877/78) als Marxismus formuliert hat. Iring Fetscher hat diesen Gegensatz vorläufig abschlieΒend dargelegt. Chronologisch differenziert wurde dieses Bild durch Hermann Bollnow, der gezeigt hat, daΒ sich Engels, der bei der “Deutschen Ideologic” (1845) zur völligen Identität der Auffassung mit Marx gelangt war, bereits in seinen “Grundsätzen des Kommunismus” (1847) in Richtung auf den “Anti-Dühring” von Marx entfernt hat – wenn auch erst in einem MaΒe, daΒ nur die feinsten interpretatorischen Mittel dem auf die Spur kommen können. Alfred Schmidt hat dann nachgewiesen, daβ der Kritik der politischen ökonomie des mittleren und späten Marx ein nicht-ontologischer Materialismus zugrundeliegt, während Engels' “Naturdialektik” zwar um die Gefahr der Ontologie weiΒ, jedoch nur unzureichend gegen sie gesichert ist und in den entscheidenden Aussagen in einen metaphysischen Materialismus abgleitet. Die DifFerenz zwischen Marx und Engels ist also bisher in den prinzipiell-philosophischen Fragen untersucht worden. Wir wollen an Hand der Auseinandersetzung, die Marx und Engels mit Darwin geführt haben, die DifFerenz auf einem anderen Felde darstellen und dabei zu zeigen versuchen, wie sich die unterschiedlichen philosophischen Ansätze auf ein Randproblem – und um das handelt es sich hier natürlich – ausgewirkt haben. Die bisherige Literatur über die Beziehung von Marx und Engels zu Darwin, auch in anderer Hinsicht ungenügend, ist nicht bis zu dem Punkt vorgedrungen, an dem eine Differenz zwischen Marx und Engels sichtbar wird.

The organization of production by employers was not indifferent to gender. Labour markets were sexually differentiated, since women and men were considered to be distinct labour forces distinguished by virtue of the differing roles they were supposed to play. The male role was that of the bread-winner, and the fact that this often reflected the reality of the situation should not obscure the point that it was a social construction. Women, on the other hand, were considered as mostly occupied with unpaid domestic work, regardless of whether they were also engaged in work for the market. Bread-winning patterns have been widely debated, particularly with respect to whether the male breadwinner system appeared as a result of industrialization or existed previously as a consequence of a universal system of patriarchy. In parallel with a more cyclical conception of industrialization, recent studies on breadwinner patterns do not support theories based on capitalism or patriarchy but rather support a more historical approach based on the importance of other exogenous factors such as the regional economy, the local labour market and the customs and associations acting upon it, employers' choices or the legal and institutional framework. The following paper is a case study related to working-class women, the cigarreras, who were the main wage earners in the family. It relates to an industry (tobacco) which operated under a monopoly system, and to a particular region (southern Spain), which was fairly underdeveloped in terms of industry. This paper examines from a micro-perspective the universality of patriarchal breadwinner patterns, the discontinuity of the industrialization process, and the importance of other exogenous factors in explaining patterns of bread-winning. It asks whether changing exogenous factors during the industrialization process make it possible for a female breadwinner and male house-husband model to arise.

For the nationalist regimes of the inter-war Middle East, Riza Shah's Iran, Mustafa Kemal's Turkey and Hashemite Iraq, the construction of a strong national army based on universal military service was an essential element of state-building and nation-formation. Yet although conscription was ardently advocated by the nationalist intelligentsia, wherever it was actually imposed it aroused intense resentment. Nonetheless, although enforced conscription was almost universally unpopular, mass, collective and organized resistance was comparatively rare. In Iran such resistance occurred in three waves in the late 1920s. Uniquely in the Middle East, opposition in Iran was most sustained not in the rural areas but in the towns, in Isfahan and Shiraz in 1927 and in Tabriz in 1928, where it was led by the guilds and the ulama, although violent opposition was also manifested by the tribes in 1929. Riza Shah was irrevocably committed to conscription, which was a central pillar of his programme of modernization and secularization, and although prepared to temporize, was ultimately determined to crush collective resistance. By 1930 he had largely succeeded in so doing. The subsequent implementation of the policy was aided by a deliberate decision to defuse popular anger by tolerating, even encouraging, individual strategies of avoidance, in particular by allowing the manipulation of the exemptions system through bribery. As the 1930s progressed, conscription became established as an indelible feature of the new Iran.

Of the numerous front organizations spawned by the Communist International, none became more widely known or more active than International Red Aid (IRA). Created in 1922, IRA served the Comintern for over twenty years until it was dissolved with its parent in 1943. At its peak (1932–1933) this front attained a membership of over fourteen million, scattered over seventy-three national sections. It claimed to have provided relief and aid for thousands of Communist and non-partisan revolutionaries who were subjected to the persecutions of “bourgeois class justice” and “white terror”. From its presses poured a steady stream of propaganda in a dozen languages – handbills, leaflets, pamphlets, books, and periodicals. The Red Aid leadership initiated and conducted protest demonstrations and campaigns on behalf of the most celebrated causes of the 1920's and 1930's: Sacco and Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boys, Tom Mooney, the Reichstag Fire Trial, Ernst Thälmann, Antonio Gramsci, and the Spanish Civil War.