Edward Spencer Beesly was born in the village of Feckenham, Worcestershire in 1831. His father was an evangelical minister, a man of severe moral standards. He imposed upon his son an onerous system of academic and religious discipline, and in 1849 dispatched him to Wadham College, Oxford, which was at that time the stronghold of the evangelical party in the University.

This paper examines the character and significance of embezzlement in the woollen industry of the West of England in the years from c. 1750 to 1840 in the light of the recent debate which sees the period as witnessing major developments in the eradication of perquisites and in the formulation of the wage. It examines the dimensions of embezzlement, its correlation with economic fluctuations and its importance for the economy of both the clothier and the embezzling worker. It shows that tighter legislative sanctions failed to check the illicit trade in embezzled wool, which by the early nineteenth century constituted a well-organised black market, and it considers the effect of this trade in “slinge” upon economic and social relations in the industry.

Prior to the introduction of equal wages for Aboriginal Australians in 1968, it was not unusual for Aboriginal workers in the Northern Territory to be paid in kind: in basic food, clothing, and tobacco. Some workers received a few shillings a week, but even this wage could be withheld completely or placed in a trust fund. In keeping with a supposedly humanitarian protectionist ethos, clothing was encouraged as a substitute for cash wages. But in practice employers rarely equated clothing with wages. Within the exploitative colonial context of Northern Territory few employers believed that any form of payment was owed to Aboriginal workers. This paper explores the perspectives of pastoralists, employers of domestic servants, and the army, considering how clothing primarily catered for the employers' needs. Aboriginal workers and indeed most government officials had the expectation that Aboriginal people would be given clothes as a form of remuneration but in practice this was rarely the case.

Since at least the eighteenth century, free labour in “the West” has been contrasted with serf labour in Russia and “eastern Europe”. This paper intends to call that view into question and to show that serfdom was never officially institutionalized in Russia, and that the regulations usually invoked to justify that opinion were actually intended not to “bind” the peasantry but to identify noble estate owners, as distinct from nobles in state service or the “bourgeoisie”. However, it is a matter not only of legal definitions. This paper studies how the tsarist administration, nobles, and peasants themselves made use of courts of law in order to contest ownership titles and, on that basis, the obligations and legal status of peasants and workers. Great changes had occurred in their legal status before the official abolition of serfdom in 1861, in outcomes that were rather similar to those which had been recently achieved in the “second serfdom” in Prussia, Lithuania, and Poland. In turn, that means that such labour contracts and institutions were not the opposites of “free labour” contracts and institutions, which placed many more constraints on workers than is usually acknowledged. To prove the point, we compare tsarist regulations with the Master and Servants Acts and indenture in Britain and its Empire and with French regulations on labour, domesticity, and day labourers.

In 1999 the South African government passed the Municipal Structures Act which established the Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Council and merged the East Rand towns of Alberton, Germiston, Brakpan, Benoni, Kempton Park, Springs, and Nigel under a common municipal authority. The new demarcation created a unified administrative structure for this region of approximately 2.5 million people living east of Johannesburg. It gave formal expression to long-standing processes of socioeconomic development that have defined the East Rand as a highly specific geographical entity. Between the 1950s and the 1970s the East Rand mapped itself on to South Africa's economic terrain as its industrial “workshop”, as manufacturing replaced mining as the major contributor to GDP. The administrative unification of the East Rand has taken place, however, at a moment when established patterns of economic and social integration based on manufacturing are undermined by the impact of restructuring encouraged by domestic and global forces.

This article uses the only surviving working diary of an English female Poor Law guardian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore two interrelated bodies of historiography. First, it engages with an historiography of the New Poor Law which has by and large seen the late nineteenth century as a period of atrophication. Second, it engages with a literature on female Poor Law guardians which has on balance questioned their achievements and seen such women as subject to all sorts of conflict and discrimination. The article argues that both perspectives may be questioned where we focus on local Poor Law policies and local women. Using the example of Bolton, in England, it is argued that the boards of Poor Law unions were riven by fracture lines more important than gender. Within this context, women of relatively high social status were able to manipulate the Poor Law agenda to make substantial changes to the policy and fabric of the late Victorian Poor Law. Rather than conflict, we often see a warm appreciation of the pioneering work of female Poor Law guardians.

Recent studies of industrial conflict during the First World War have challenged earlier interpretations of working-class politics in Britain. The debate has focussed on the events in west Scotland during the years when the legend of “Red Clydeside” was made. It is now commonplace to emphasise the limited progress of revolutionary politics and the presence of a powerful craft sectionalism in the industrial workforce. This essay discusses the recent research on workplace unrest, popular politics and the wartime state. Although the “new revisionism” provides an important corrective to earlier scholarship, there remain important questions which require a serious reappraisal of the forces behind the different forms of collective action which took place and their implications for the politics of socialism. It is argued that the struggles of skilled workers made an important contribution to the growth of Labour politics on the Clyde.

The last two decades in India have seen the decline of traditional factory industries and a growing process of informalization and casualization of labour. The crisis of industries like textiles and steel has meant a virtual decimation of a working class in old industrial centres. This paper will look at the phenomenon of de-industrialization and its implications for a labouring population whose lives were intimately connected with industrial work.

The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was the largest American labour organization of the nineteenth century. But while scholars have charted its history in North America they have largely failed to explore the Order's history elsewhere, even though the organization also boasted members in Europe, Australasia, and Africa. This article is designed as part of a wider “transnationalization” of American labour history, and analyses the reasons that drove the Order's leaders towards their international growth. The leaders of the Knights of Labor sent organizers around the world not only because of their attachment to the idea of Universal Brotherhood, but also as a way to limit immigration to the United States. This synthesis of seemingly incompatible ideas reflected their desire to “Americanize” the rest of the world, by protecting living standards at home, raising them elsewhere to American standards, and exporting American-style republican institutions abroad.

This article addresses two separate but interlinked questions relating to India in Mughal times (sixteenth to early eighteenth century). First, the terms on which labour was rendered, taking perfect market conditions as standard; and, second, the perceptions of labour held by the higher classes and the labourers themselves. As to forms of labour, one may well describe conditions as those of an imperfect market. Slave labour was restricted largely to domestic service. Rural wage rates were depressed owing to the caste system and the “village community” mechanism. In the city, the monopoly of resources by the ruling class necessarily depressed wages through the market mechanism itself. While theories of hierarchy were dominant, there are indications sometimes of a tolerant attitude towards manual labour and the labouring poor among the dominant classes. What seems most striking is the defiant assertion of their status in relation to God and society made on behalf of peasants and workers in northern India in certain religious cults in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Just over ten years ago the future of labour history in Britain seemed assured. A self-confident, burgeoning field, it lay at the centre of the most innovative contributions to British historiography in the post-war era, and could claim as its own some of the most impressive historians of the time. Since the founding of the Society for the Study of Labour History in 1960, the field had moved from the periphery of historical concerns to occupy a central position in the spectrum of history writing.

There are few legends relating to the history of the Labour Movement which have enjoyed the influence and popularity of the story of how British workmen responded to the American Civil War. Their supposed unanimity in opposition to the Slave Power and their resistance to every ruling class project for intervention on its behalf were thought to be a serviceable example and inspiration, not only by the stalwarts of the International and the Reform League, but by the organisers of the anti-war campaigns of 1878 and after. Even today a writer on „Peaceful Co-existence” finds it an instructive example of the power of the working class in international relations.

The topic of this paper might at first glance appear to lack interest. In fact, however, it is for many reasons of real significance. The men who brought about the set of achievements, to be discussed, and its migration, respectively, played roles on the stages of history, science, and business; and a whole bundle of social and economic problems was solved by a concatenation of measures. Last but not least, we can study here almost step by step a case of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century institutional migration.

The “transnational turn” is one of the most discussed topics in historiography, yet it has inspired more theoretical tension than empirically saturated studies. This article combines both aspects by examining the transnational network formation of one of the most important social movements in late imperial Russia, the Jewish Labour Bund. It furthermore introduces into historiography one of the most fruitful theories in recent social sciences, “actor-network theory”. This opens the view on the steady recreation of a social movement and reveals how closely the history of the Bund in eastern Europe was interwoven with large socialist organizations in the New World. Based on a large number of sources, this contribution to migration and movement history captures the creation and the limits of global socialist networks. As a result, it shows that globalization did not only create economic or political networks but that it impacted the everyday lives of authors and journalists as well as those of tailors and shoemakers.

The work of E.P. Thompson has had an enormous impact on the writing of history in South Africa since the 1970s. This article traces the rise of this historiographical trend, focusing especially on the History Workshop at Wits University (Johannesburg). It outlines how a South African version of Thompsonian historical practice was theorized, and sketches some of the ways in which Thompson’s ideas were utilized by South African historians. The article shows how the History Workshop attempted to popularize their research, and examines the political projects behind these activities. Finally, the article suggests that although the influence of Thompson-style South African social historians has declined, their work has had a lasting impact on the country’s literary culture, well beyond the academy.

The Iberian rediscovery of the mid-Atlantic islands in the late Middle Ages was accompanied by all kinds of utopian projections. However, within a hundred years, both human and animal populations were made extinct, and the rich forest cover was rapidly depleted for cash-cropping industries, primarily sugar. Historians view the migration of the international sugar industry from the mid-Atlantic islands to Brazil as an example of expanding economies of scale, but contemporary accounts indicate what now might be called widespread ecocide as a major contributing factor. This essay looks at the environmental ramifications of the sugar industry as well as other cultures, and assesses whether it is indeed appropriate to speak of ecocide in the context of the mid-Atlantic islands in the early modern period.

On 26 June 1740 the “very beautiful and sumptuous” Town Court or Guildhall of Newcastle upon Tyne was systematically wrecked by a crowd of angry townspeople, keelmen and local ironworkers, who smashed the woodwork and windows, tore the paintings, and ransacked the archives and treasury. Contemporary observers were stunned by this unprecedented orgy of destruction, because the campaign of intermittent and fairly orderly protests against the high price of grain which had preceded the 26th had not prepared them for the scale and ferocity of the assault on the corporation's most ostentatious monument to its wealth and authority. The outbreak of popular violence confirmed some people's suspicions that “respectable” grievances served only as a pretext for the mob's brutish desire to loot and plunder: to others it vindicated the traditional argument that it was not only unjust but also unwise “to provoke the necessitous, in times of scarcity, into extremities, that must involve themselves, and all the neighbourhood in ruin”.

How did the abolition of slavery influence the relations between urban centres and rural areas? How did “new” French citizens experience access to the urban environment? Based on the archives of the correctional courts, this article focuses on how race and citizenship determined the accessibility of French colonial urban spaces and institutions after 1848. The abolition of slavery in the French Antilles on 27 April 1848 led to a modification of the legal and judicial systems: the changing legal status of former slaves gave them new opportunities to move around the colonies, at least on paper. In theory, after 1848, everyone should have had freedom of social and spatial mobility and access to the urban centres and their institutions; what happened in practice, however, still needs to be researched. This article shows that the abolition exacerbated two dynamics already at play since the beginning of the nineteenth century: the control of the population and the attraction of the urban environment for the elite. The plantation system in the mid-nineteenth century was suffering both economically and politically: the newly acquired freedom and possible migration of former slaves to the towns (Saint-Pierre and Fort-de-France in Martinique, Pointe-à-Pitre and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe) threatened to destabilize the system of private justice as well as the economic apparatus. To counteract these legal changes, vagrancy laws were implemented to restrict citizens’ mobility while, at the same time, the white elite's discourse on urban spaces changed from them being seen as a hotbed for revolutionary ideas to representing a safe environment to which access needed to be restricted.

This introduction highlights the main subjects and research questions addressed in the articles making up this Special Issue on the labour histories of transport in the Global South. Although historiographical interest in the history of transport labour is growing, scientific knowledge on the subject is still very limited. This is especially true for histories from outside Europe and North America. Important topics and research problems covered here are: (1) transport labour as facilitating the exchange and mobility of goods but also of peoples and ideas – as such transport constitutes a noteworthy element of social history; (2) transport labour as a factor of production which is relevant for industrial and agrarian societies, as well as for market-driven and socialist economies; (3) the extent to which the processes of globalization, imperial expansion, and the emergence of global capitalism owe a debt to transport labour of the global south and its micro-histories.

Using a comparative methodology, this essay examines how and why longshore workers in both the San Francisco Bay area and Durban demonstrate a robust sense of working-class internationalism and solidarity. Longshore workers are more inclined than most to see their immediate, local struggles in larger, even global, contexts. Literally for decades, workers in both ports used their power to advocate for racial justice at home and in solidarity with social movements globally. While such notions might seem outdated in the twenty-first century, as unions have been on the decline for some decades, longshore workers grounded their ideals in the reality that they still occupied a central position in global trade. Hence, they combined their leftist and anti-racist ideological beliefs with a pragmatic understanding of their central role in the global economy. While not the norm, these longshore workers’ attitudes and actions demand attention, as they challenge the notion that workers in recent decades are powerless to shape their world.