Although there is some truth in the comment made by Canon Barnett, rector of St Jude's, Whitechapel, and founder of Toynbee Hall, that the issue in 1909 of the Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws “may mark the beginning of a new epoch in our social life”, the precise reasons for the appointment of the Commission on December 4th, 1905, are not yet known. The Conservative government, which made the appointment almost on the eve of its defeat, had been in power for ten years, first under the prime ministership of Lord Salisbury and then, until his resignation in December 1905, of A. J. Balfour. During that time the cost of the Poor Law had risen steadily, and yet, until the end of 1904, either through social myopia or a preoccupation with the greater drama of events abroad, the government displayed little interest in the problem of the Poor Law or, indeed, in any of the wider questions of social reform.

A number of Bronterre O'Brien's disciples were the leading lights of London clubs that provided the silent majority to the Social Democratic Federation (S.D.F.). Even after the O'Brienites came to accept the need for collective ownership of the means of production, their political strategy remained that of O'Brien. An understanding of the role played by the O'Brienites helps to explain various problems in the history of the S.D.F. such as why most members remained with Hyndman rather than follow Morris into the Socialist League and why the S.D.F. adopted an ambiguous attitude to trade unions and to palliatives.

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.

Recent historiography attempts increasingly to move beyond Eurocentrism. In the field of migration, Adam McKeown's article is a fine example of an attempt to put global migration in a non-Eurocentric perspective. Perhaps its most acute insight is in putting the paradigmatic European migration flows to the Americas in the nineteenth century at par with the mainly intra Asian (south/south-east Asian and north-east Asian) migration flows. McKeown's main target of attack is the unabashed “Euro-centrism” (or rather the “North Atlantic centrism”) of much of the migration literature on the so called age of mass migration. Eurocentrism appears, at least in the way that McKeown presents it, as a set of three interrelated propositions.

Über den Beitrag des Marxismus zur Erforschung der Geschichte ist bereits so viel geschrieben, daß die Literatur zu diesem Thema kaurn noch überschaubar ist; auf den Beitrag der Geschichtswissenschaft zur Erforschung des Marxismus, d.h. primär der Ansichten von Marx, wird kaum je eingegangen — was nicht so erstaunlich scheint. Daß der Marxismus nicht nur eine Theorie der Geschichte, sondern ebenso selbst ein historisches Phänomen ist; daß die Geschichtswissenschaft den Sinn der Marxschen Ansichten durch die Erforschung der Genese zu erhellen sucht; daß sie sich dabei nicht nur, aber in erster Linie auf Marx' eigene — sei es von ihm publizierte, sei es hinterlassene — Texte stützt; daß sie, soweit möglich, von den originalen Texten, d.h. dem von Marx selbst beschriebenen Papier — um diesen handfest-stofflichen Aspekt der originalen Texte einmal zu betonen — auszugehen hat: all das bedarf kaum der Erwähnung. Erwahnung. Dasselbe gilt wohl hinsichtlich der Regeln, gemäß denen bei der Auswertung der Texte vorzugehen ist. Die Geschichtswissenschaft hat die betreffenden Verfahren vor Marx, unabhängig von ihm ausgebildet; sie bedient sich ihrer generell. Daß es jedoch, was die Erforschung des Marxismus angeht, dennoch — hundert Jahre nach dem Tod von Marx — nicht überflüssig ist, besonders auf sie hinzuweisen, zeigt der Fall der Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 (fortan: Manuskripte), die bekanntlich in der Diskussion der letzten fünfzig Jahre eine nicht geringe Rolle gespielt haben.

There are three good reasons at the present time to try to arrive at an historical model to explain the development of anti-Jewish stereotyping and prejudice, and in this way, provided it is worked out at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, at an historical model of racism.

The first reason is that both the Netherlands and its neighbours are increasingly faced with racism and that for a good line of action it is necessary to collect all kinds of knowledge. Moreover, it is desirable that historians prove willing to co-operate by making their particular contribution to this collection of knowledge. The second reason is that in contemporary thinking about history a tendency seems to have made itself felt that considers the narrative element of history as the only true activity of the historian, so that a hypothetical-deductive, one might say Popperian, approach to the past seems to be wrong. Although I do not want to enter into a methodological discussion, which I am glad to leave to my friend P. H. H. Vries, who has very capably formulated a point of view that I subscribe to, my intention is to show the usefulness of an abstract, partially mathematical, model in this article. By the way, in the framework of an article it is impossible to present an extensive test of the predictions of the model by means of source material. It can only be hinted at. This article is not non-narrative because I want it to be non-narrative, but because of lack of space. A full exposition would need a book. I shall only present in summary what I hope is the logical argument that lies at the basis of the model.

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.

This article explores the discursive and practical entanglements of women’s work and sex trafficking, in Britain and internationally, in the early twentieth century. It examines discussions about trafficking and women’s work during a period that was instrumental in codifying modern, international conceptions of ‘trafficking’ and argues that porous and faulty borders were drawn between sex work, women’s licit work, and their sexual exploitation and their exploitation as workers. These borders were at their thinnest in discussions about two very important sectors of female-dominated migrant labour: domestic and care work, and work in the entertainment industry. The anti-trafficking movement, the international labour movement, and the makers of national laws and policies, attempted to separate sexual labour from other forms of labour. In doing so, they wilfully ignored or suppressed moments when they obviously intersected, and downplayed the role of other exploited and badly-paid licit work that sustained the global economy. But these attempts were rarely successful: despite the careful navigations of international and British officials, work continued to find its way back into discussions of sex trafficking, and sex trafficking remained entangled with the realities of women’s work.

This article explores the experiences of white workers on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia during World War II. Much of the existing literature on the region focuses on African labour, yet the boom that began in the copper-mining industry also attracted thousands of mobile, transient European workers. These workers were part of a primarily English-speaking labour diaspora with a global reach that linked mining centres around the world. The experience of this workforce generated seemingly contradictory trends of labour militancy, political radicalism, and racial exclusivity. A focus on two significant events during this period will seek to examine how these trends shaped events on the Copperbelt: the 1940 wildcat strikes and the 1942 arrest and deportation of white mineworkers’ union leaders. These events shed light on the international world of European labour and illustrate how the Copperbelt was linked to other mining centres around the world.

This article is a study of the Owenite community established in Co. Clare, Ireland from November 1831 to November 1833. It examines the role of economic crisis in Ireland in stimulating interest in Owenite solutions. It analyses the differing motivations of the various actors (landowner, Owenite reformer, the peasantry) in joining the venture. It examines the sources of the community's stability – economic, sociological, and cultural. It argues that the community was destroyed by the contradictory roles of its founder, Vandeleur, who was both owner and President. In the process a detailed description of the community is provided, covering matters such as institutional arrangements, the division of labour, wages and benefits, gender relationships, and religion.

The gradual acceptance by politically influential people of the belief that deliberate control of town growth was both feasible and fruitful is a theme in the history of town planning which has many aspects. The transformation of nineteenth century cities by means of street improvement was one of these; and Mr. David Pinkney has recently made a mature assessment of the range of motives underlying the sweeping changes wrought in the configuration of Parisian streets under the Second Empire. By contrast with Paris under the prefecture of Baron Haussmann, the transformation of London was tentative, not to say hesitating, and not undertaken for all the same reasons. In Paris, Mr. Pinkney has shown that political and strategic aims were mixed with desires for aesthetic and social amelioration. “In London”, Napoleon III is reported as saying, “they are concerned only with giving the best possible satisfaction to the needs of traffic.” But were they? It is the purpose of this brief note to comment on the validity of this assertion, and in doing so to illustrate an early approach to matters of urban improvement which are still at the heart of some contemporary town-planning problems.

Phyllis Moen and Elaine Wethington were absolutely right when they called family strategies “the intuitively appealing metaphor for family response to structural barriers”. This appeal probably explains the avalanche of studies on the subject since the 1970s and especially since the 1980s. The last contribution, to my knowledge, is a collection of articles edited by Laurence Fontaine and Jurgen Schlumbohm in 2000. I will not even try to outline the vast historiography. This paper focuses on another problem. It is an attempt to show that concepts built on appealing metaphors lose much of their appeal in empirical research for the simple reason that their application tends to be more complicated than expected. In the following pages an example of such an experience is presented. Within the virtual walls of the Dutch National Research Institute for Economic and Social History, the N.W. Posthumus Institute, we have been struggling with family strategies since 1994. Now that we are about to publish the third volume on the subject, it is time to evaluate what we have accomplished.

In September 1896, the city of Bombay witnessed the beginning of a long-drawn-out epidemic crisis, with the outbreak of bubonic plague. This article investigates one particular dimension of this crisis – its effects upon the city's cotton textile mills, and its profound, though temporary, alteration of the relations between employers and workers. It argues that the structure of industrial relations in the textile mills in the second half of the nineteenth century rested upon the retention of wage arrears by mill managements, which forced workers into permanent debt, and bound them to the mill and their employers. The demographic and industrial crisis ushered in during the plague years, the article shows, cracked open this structure of industrial control, and workers were able to sustain a new, fleeting system of industrial “regulation from below”, based on the daily payment of wages. Through a study of the tensions in textile mills in 1897, situated within the broader context of a crisis of urban labour relations, the article shows the ways in which industrial relations were both deconstructed and reconstituted in a new form.

From the twelfth and certainly from the thirteenth century onwards, a social group of artisans with their own political and economic aspirations can be clearly delineated in Netherlandish towns. Bound through common skilled work, they made up a distinctive group with a self-image and a developing political vision and economic programme. Their “guild ideology” is increasingly clearly expressed in the sources they produced from the fourteenth century onwards as a self-confident group in urban society. Labour, certainly when organized within guild structures, was the cornerstone of community life, cultural experiences, and practical ethics. Even though there were socioeconomic differences among guildsmen and many geographical and chronological variations in the degree of political power they wielded, the ideal of artisan ideology in the late medieval Low Countries was one of a community of brotherly love and charity centred on the value of skilled labour.

This article discusses four areas of research essential for a measured evaluation of Italian syndicalism before the fascist dictatorship. The first section presents a synoptic historical account. The second section critically summarizes the literature on the sociology of Italian syndicalism. The third section disentangles the ideological influences upon Italian syndicalism. The fourth evaluates the uniqueness or otherwise of Italian syndicalism within prefascist industrial relations. The conclusion explains the marginalization of Italian syndicalism after 1918 using international comparisons. This article provides a detailed critical bibliography of the literature on Italian syndicalism published since the 1960s.

In Mughal India, accounts were kept by individuals and institutions for purposes of reference and planning. Accountancy required a set of objectives and techniques for collecting, organizing, and presenting information so that it could then be put to use. It also fostered learning. Subsisting on formal or informal training, professional accountants equipped themselves with linguistic and mathematical skills, the art of notation, mnemonic devices, and the ability to translate loosely defined units into precise terms and numbers. Accountants were an important component of the state apparatus, village administration, and elite household management. In the seventeenth century manuals were produced in Persian by private individuals for the guidance of persons seeking to acquire proficiency in accountancy (siyaq) and clerical work. No study has been made so far of the manuals themselves nor of the people who compiled or used them. This introductory essay examines the manuals (generally titled Dasturu-l Amal) and the information they contain about the system of accountancy as well as about the professional ethics and norms of ideal behaviour of the secretarial class.

Despite the attention paid by economic and labour historians to mid-Victorian trade unionism, the development, organization and objectives of the employers' counter-organizations have been neglected. Research on this subject has tended to concentrate on the post-1880 period and has to a great extent overlooked the origins of the employers' offensive tactics. The two major lines of attack which were to be adopted by employers in the 'eighties were already taking shape in the mid century. Employers' industrial organizations had been formed to counter unionism, while employers' pressure groups attempted to resist what employers described as “grand-motherly” governmental interference. The aim of this article will be to conduct a preliminary investigation of the origins and strategy of employers' organizations, and to evaluate their impact in the industrial and legal fields.

Several eminent Conservatives, including Winston Churchill, believed that wartime schemes of education in the Armed Forces caused servicemen to vote Labour at the Election of 1945. For instance, R. A. Butler wrote: “The Forces' vote in particular had been virtually won over by the left-wing influence of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs.” So frequently was this view stated that ABCA became a scapegoat for Tory defeat.

The contemporary North Atlantic world has been marked by a waning enthusiasm for and salience of the study of workers. Yet the current ebb “in the traditional capitalist ‘core’ countries” (not to mention eastern Europe), Marcel van der Linden recently suggested, is far from being a “crisis” in the field of labor history as such. Rather, it is best understood as “only a regional phenomenon” since in much of “the so-called Third World, especially in the countries of the industrializing semi-periphery, interest in the history of labor and proletarian protest is growing steadily”. Citing encouraging recent developments in labor history in Asia, he noted how the field has grown in parallel with “the stormy conquest of economic sectors by the world market [which] has led to a rapid expansion of the number of waged workers, and the emergence of new radical trade unions”. Van der Linden's description fits well the study of labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the field first gained visibility in the early to mid-1980s and has now won recognition as an established specialization among scholars of many disciplines. After surveying the Latin American boom and its political context, this article offers a Brazilian/North Atlantic example in order to illustrate the intellectual gains, for students of both areas, that come with the transcendence of geographical parochialism.

This article follows the administrative usage of the term “labour” and its political effects in the period from roughly 1918–1924 in Madras Presidency, India. In this short period, I will argue, fundamental tensions in the ability of the concept to refer coherently to its object came violently to the surface. The prevailing tension in both governmental discourse and in the sphere of political representation concerned the extent to which either caste status or economic class were to be understood as the primary determinant of the meaning of labour. At the nub of this conflict lay the contested status of the descendants of hereditarily unfree labourers who supplied the bulk of the Presidency's labour requirements and were referred to in this period as Adi-Dravidas. Should they be construed as ritually disadvantaged caste subjects who also happened to labour, or as paradigmatic labourers who were also subjected to caste discrimination? Adi-Dravidas provoked both the anxiety of the elite political classes who wished to incorporate them into larger nationalist projects, as well as the reformist zeal of the colonial state, throwing the category “labour” into crisis. By navigating the use to which “labour” was put by caste elites, state officials, and Adi-Dravidas themselves, I will reflect on the coherence of caste and class as analytic concepts for political and social struggles of the kind I am describing.